I picked The Most Glorious Fourth: Vicksburg and Gettysburg, July 4, 1863, by Duane Schultz, off of a shelf at a used book store willfully, as I was searching for something more to read about Gettysburg. We had plans shortly to visit the Gettysburg Battlefield on its sesquicentennial year, on our way down to North Carolina for my son’s graduation. As a Civil War history buff for some years, I am no stranger to the significance of the battle, but since my interests in the Civil War era lie more firmly anchored to its political and social ramifications for United States history, rather than its military dimension, I had not previously studied the battle itself in any depth. To address that, I most recently read Stephen Sears’ Gettysburg, hailed by many as the best one-volume treatment of the clash, which is virtually encyclopedic in its coverage of the battle, its principal combatants and its indelible contribution as a “great event” in the progress of the war. As I am less than enthusiastic about military history, the Sears book was nonetheless magnificent, albeit far more comprehensive in its coverage than I sought, even on the eve of visiting the battlefield. Still, I wanted more: I was looking to augment Sears and the Ken Burns documentary and the Gary Gallagher Teaching Company CD’s and Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote and a lifetime of previous study of the Civil War to get a bit more details of human interest and to probe more carefully the socio-political hemisphere of history that most incites my passion. I also wanted to “get” Gettysburg fully in context with the year 1863 and how that year a hundred and fifty years ago came to clearly mark what was to follow not only for what remained of the Civil War, but for the subsequent history of the United States of America. Since the Schultz book also included the pivotal contemporaneous taking of Vicksburg by Grant, I thought this volume might do the trick.
I didn’t realize until later that I had read Schultz before: his book The Dahlgren Affair was a well-written exploration of a little known alleged but unproved Union plot to assassinate Jefferson Davis which had some consequence for both sides ever after. I enjoyed that book, which seemed to bode well for this one. In The Most Glorious Fourth, Schultz interweaves the story of Gettysburg and Vicksburg – which each culminated in Union success in time for the Fourth of July 1863 -- a logical approach surprisingly eschewed by most historical treatments. The lesser known Vicksburg campaign in the west was actually a far more consequential Union victory than Gettysburg in the east for the eventual defeat of the South, for it divided the Confederacy in two and essentially doomed their war effort. Gettysburg had consequence, as well, of course, in that it permanently derailed Lee’s efforts to invade the North again and resulted in a decisive Union victory after a string of military disasters at Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Still, Lee’s army got away from Meade and lived to fight on; Grant took Vicksburg and the Mississippi was lost to the Confederates forever after.
Schultz alternates chapters between the two theaters of war, but almost from the start it is a bit awkward. Gettysburg is a relatively rapid march of two huge armies paralleling one another who come to converge at a sleepy farming town in Pennsylvania and over a three day period fight the largest battle ever conducted in North America using military tactics that include a mile wide infantry attack against impossible odds that was never to be repeated again in American history. Vicksburg, in contrast, was the climax of a long campaign in the west by Grant to control the Mississippi that wound up in a very long siege. As such, there is a kind of dissonance when the narratives are juxtaposed. One is a tale of civilian hardships that include living in caves and consuming their pets while they brace for the inevitable loss to the besiegers, while the other is a more fluid narrative along a timeline of a series of events that are dramatically punctuated by remarkable action episodes.
Schultz does a fine job of resurrecting the human drama from the graveyard of military minutiae in both campaigns, and I much enjoyed the way he tells the story of ordinary people on both sides – soldiers and civilians – a surprising number of whom had longstanding friendships and other relationships that pre-dated the war, and this is clearly the strength of the work. Still, most of the book is devoted to Gettysburg, and he seems to be struggling at times to fill in the pages to balance the two theaters. This again points to the inherent weakness in the structure of the narrative to which I alluded earlier: one story moves at a rapid pace, while the other hardly has movement at all. Schultz could perhaps have addressed this flaw by filling out the larger context of what Vicksburg represented in the west for the Southern war strategy, but he only sketches this in, rather than fully fleshing it out on the socio-political sphere as might have provided him with the material that seemed to be wanting for the Vicksburg segment.
Other critics have taken Schultz to task for his historical inaccuracies in this book, and while I lack the scholarly expertise to appropriately address this on every level, it does seem that multiple factual errors would tend to discredit any historian. On the one hand, and in his defense, the Civil War is often clouded by myth and ideology, even among scholars, so it is no surprise when anecdotal reports with little foundation in fact manage to creep into more popular treatments; this occurs in spots even in the highly regarded Ken Burns The Civil War production. Here Schultz repeats the persistent legend that the Battle of Gettysburg began over shoes, which springs to life in Shelby Foote’s chronicle and elsewhere, which both my Battlefield Guide at Gettysburg debunks as well as other more scholarly sources. More egregiously perhaps, however, is Schultz’s biographical sketch of General George Pickett’s relationship with his wife Sallie, which echoes the myth that the two met when she was four years old and that they maintained a courtship from a distance for many years until their marriage when she was a very young teenager. It turns out that Sallie, who was actually much older than that, falsified her birth date and manufactured that story after the war as she promoted Pickett, a heroic figure in her eyes only. While a remarkably creepy and perhaps irresistible literary fable, solid research by a serious historian should have excised such tripe from the manuscript before it went to print.
Finally, I don’t usually urge authors to make their works longer, but I would have liked to see Schultz flesh out his theme with greater vigor. If in fact The Most Glorious Fourth is about how the twin victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg altered the war and US history – with which I concur – then I would like him to have added at least one fat chapter devoted to exploring that with some depth. Still, for all of its numerous flaws, I enjoyed reading the Schultz book. He is a capable writer who certainly holds the reader’s attention, and he succeeds admirably in animating the various characters so that we – the descendants of these long dead Americans who defined to some degree the world we were born into – can almost feel them walking among us. ( )