“If We Are Striking for Pennsylvania, Vol. 2” by Scott Mingus and Eric Wittenburg

Volume 1 of “If We Are Striking for Pennsylvania” covered June 3 – 21, 1863, when Robert E. Lee’s armies implemented the Confederate decision to invade the North. Volume 2, picks up with the period June 22-30, 1863, as Lee’s army and that of Major General George Meade moved into the positions that would eventually become the Battle of Gettysburg. Co-authors Scott Mingus and Eric Wittenburg continue the masterful job they did with the first volume, placing the reader right in the thick of events and happenings. 

Because Lee’s army was now on official northern soil, there is considerably more information provided about the civilian response. Rumors had been circulating for days; many Pennsylvanians believed Lee was aimed for the state capital of Harrisburg. Many people fled, including free blacks, who knew the confederates would send them south to slavery. But many had no choice but to stay, hoping for the best. Surprisingly, some areas even welcomed the invading Confederates.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

In Memoriam: Meg Groeling – Chris Mackowski at Emerging Civil War. And her most popular post, War Chicken, was about the pet of Robert E. Lee.

 

2023 Haiku Competition – Society of Classical Poets.

“If We Are Striking for Pennsylvania: Vol. 1” by Scott Mingus & Eric Wittenberg

When you get the compressed view of history in school – too much to cover and not enough time – you tend to think events like battles just happened. Two armies showed up and fought. But as Scott Mingus and Eric Wittenbergdemonstrate in If We Are Striking for Pennsylvania: The Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac March to Gettysburg, battles like Gettysburg have lead-ups, clashes and conflicts, and after-events.  

In other words, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia didn’t just show up in Gettysburg and fight George Meade’s Army of the Potomac. In the month leading up to the battle, Lee’s army moved in three substantive routes toward Pennsylvania. The approval to take the war into the North was given by the Confederate government in late May, and Lee wasted no time. By June 1, his army began to move.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

A History Lesson About Gettysburg, and More

I’ve been reading some of the books in the battle series published by Emerging Civil War. So far, I’ve read about Shiloh (1862), Gettysburg (1863), and the Battle of the Wilderness (1864). It was while reading this third one that the author mentioned something as almost an offhand comment that threw me – and upended something I believed for 50 years. 

The book was Hell Itself: The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5-7, 1864 by Chris Mackowski, but the comment was about Gettysburg. At the time of the battle in 1863, he said, “No one recognized Gettysburg as anything other than a setback, and certainly no one looked at it as the ‘High Water Mark of the Confederacy.’”

 

How it gained that reputation was due to a marketing-savvy photographer, lithographer, and Gettysburg historian named John Badger Bachelder, who was a tireless promoter of the Gettysburg Battlefield and worked to promote the site as a tourist destination.

 

In other words, the whole idea of Gettysburg as the turning point in the Civil War came from a promoter for the battlefield, decades after the battle was fought.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Painting: Battle of Gettysburg by Thure de Thulstrap.

"Soldier's Heart" by Michele McKnight Baker

Webster Henderson and Junior Thompson are two young boys growing up as next-door neighbors and best friends in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, shortly before and during the Civil War. Webster is white; Junior is black. Webster comes from a prosperous family; Junior’s father has always been free, but his mother grew up in slavery, and they are steadily working their way into the middle class. The Civil War begins, and everything for these two boys and their families will change.

The story begins at a church service shortly after the war has ended. Webster’s uncle, grievously wounded during the war, walks into the church and exposes his wound. He has also donned a Confederate uniform. Churchgoers don’t know which act is worse – the exposure of the wound or the uniform. 

It would be superficially easy to describe Soldier’s Heart by Michele McKnight Baker as a coming-of-age story. It is that, but it’s also much more: the story of two families who are more intertwined than they know, who experience the challenges, deprivations, and destruction of war, and who have to find ways to come to terms with what they learn and what they experience. Told through both current narrative and flashbacks, the story is a journey through American history – very personal American history.

Carlisle as the setting is important as a critical factor in the story. It was briefly occupied and shelled by Confederate forces during the invasion of the North that ended at Gettysburg. What the novel describes as “soldier’s heart” is what we would today call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Michele McKnight Baker

Baker is the author of a previously published novel, Sandpaper Sisters. She received a Ph.D. degree in anthropology research and organizational studies, is a former journalist, and leads her own marketing and strategic planning company. She is also the director of Advancement for the Salvation Army in York, Pennsylvania. 

Soldier’s Heart is a moving coming-of-age story, a love story, a love-unrequired story, a story of war, and a story of two families coming to understand and love each other. 

Top illustration: A drawing of the shelling of Carlisle by the Confederate army just prior to the Battle of Gettysburg.