Book Review: Barksdale's Charge

Barksdale's Charge: The True High Tide of the Confederacyby Phillip Thomas TuckerCasemate, 2013 That darn General Pickett; his doomed, foolish, suicidal charge on day three of the Battle of Gettysburg gets all the glory, gets immortalized by historians and amateur Civil War buffs alike as the "High Tide of the Confederacy."This, in the opinion of Phillip Thomas Tucker, author of Barksdale's Charge, is "one of the great inequities of American history." Tucker attributes this grievous wrong to the aggressive advocacy of the "Virginia School" of historians who glorify that state's leaders, troops and accomplishments to the neglect of the gallantry and martial prowess of Mississippians, and to the preference of Northern historians to focus on "the clear triumph over Pickett's men rather than the moment when their line was barely hanging by a thread" in the face of a charge by General William Barksdale's Mississippi Brigade on day two of the epic battle.That the author has a bone to pick doesn't diminish the force of his argument. With military precision and meticulous research he sets out to prove his case, that the pivotal hours at Gettysburg came on day two, during the Mississippians' charge that very nearly succeeded in cresting Cemetery Ridge and splitting the Union line in two, which could have turned the battle... and the war in the South's favor.General Barksdale was a "respected Mississippi Congressman who had ensured that Mississippi was the second Southern state to secede from the Union, [a man who] interacted with his boys with an easy familiarity... [who] endeared himself to his men of all origins, ranks, and classes." A "resilient, hard-nosed fighter and resourceful battlefield commander," his youth was shaped by "the drudgery of farm life," which he escaped by a determined effort to get an education. A successful attorney, he quickly volunteered to fight in the Mexican War, wherein he won great renown as a leader often "seen coatless, with a big sword, at the very front when fighting was promised."His Mississippi troops benefitted by his insistence on "perfection in drill and discipline" and had earned a reputation "for ferocity, combat prowess, and lethality on the battlefield" long before July 2d, 1863 in the verdant countryside of Pennsylvania. Many Southern leaders thought that a "complete victory" at Gettysburg "would have given [them] Washington and Baltimore, if not Philadelphia and would have established the independence of the Confederacy."The opportunity to nearly achieve this goal came when a Northern politician turned general, Daniel Sickles, entirely on his own initiative, impulsively ordered his troops off Cemetery Ridge to what would become the killing ground known as the Peach Orchard, creating "an over-extended, vulnerable salient, without support from either side."The reader is best advised to let the details wash over him, as the narrative abounds with paragraphs such as this:

Besides the massed array of Third Corps artillery, among the heaviest concentration of guns in the Peach Orchard sector were field pieces of the 1st Volunteer Light Artillery, consisting of the 5th and 9th Massachusetts Batteries, 15th New York Light Artillery and batteries C and F, Pennsylvania Light Artillery of the First Volunteer Brigade, Reserve Artillery. Meanwhile, the 3d Maine Volunteer Infantry of Ward's Second Brigade held a position on the southern front of the Peach Orchard, just south of where the Wheatfield Road intersected the Emmitsburg Road.

While hailing the bravery and often the chivalry of combatants on both sides of the conflict, the author does not glorify war:

Hiding the carnage and horrors from the eyes of survivors, drifting layers of smoke shrouded the ever-increasing number of bodies of dead and wounded Mississippi boys, who began to stack up like cordwood before a hard winter" and "The position of these batteries showed broken carriages, caissons and wheels, while scores of slain horses and men lay across each other in mangled and ghastly heaps.

Ultimately, the ferocious charge of Barksdale's Mississippians failed, according to Tucker, because of the shortcomings in leadership, by the General Robert E. Lee and his right hand man, Lt. General James Longstreet, Virginians both. Pickett's 4,500 fresh troops, inexplicably sent to the slaughter the following day on an ill-advised charge across open fields, would have made all the difference, he contends, if thrown into action behind and in support of the Mississippians. Longstreet, however, had "mentally disengaged from the offensive effort, unlike Barksdale and his men who were going for broke. Tragically, hundreds of Mississippi Brigade soldiers had already been cut down in part because of the lack of unity in tactical thinking between the offensive-minded Lee and the defensive-minded Longstreet... "When General Barksdale finally fell in battle, so near the crest of Cemetery Ridge, it was "as if his death itself had somehow symbolized Southern defeat at Gettysburg and heralded the Confederacy's own demise," Tucker writes. "The great opportunity to win it all would never come again for either the Army of Northern Virginia or the Confederacy, after Lee and his generals had their worst day... against the odds, and despite the handicaps and obstacles to success set in place by their own leadership," Barksdale and his men "had come tantalizingly close to achieving decisive results."At times, the reader is almost rooting for the boys from Mississippi, before recalling the ignoble cause for which they fought. This is a tribute to the earnestness of the writing and the ability of the author to capture the personal stories, complexities and humanity of both the leading and minor players and the thousands of swirling dramas that followed, when the armies of the North and South collided near the small town of Gettysburg.