Book Review: Retreat from Gettysburg

About six months ago, my father loaned me his copy of Retreat from Gettysburg. He had recently read it, and knew that I had recently read Stephen Sears' excellent account of the battle, and we traded - I loaned him Sears and he loaned me Brown. And then a whole long time passed, during which I read other stuff, and during a good chunk of which I wasn't reading books about the Civil War. But knowing that I was going to be visiting him in mid-March, it seemed like the ideal moment to read through the book and then return it to him.

Book Review
Brown, Kent Masterson. Retreat From Gettysburg: Lee, Logistics and the Pennsylvania Campaign. University of North Carolina Press. 2011. 552p. Photographs, bibliography, maps, index. ISBN: 9780807872093.

The general perception of the Gettysburg Campaign when viewed from modern times is one of colossal failure - the "high water" mark of the Confederacy, the turning point after which it became inevitable that the South would lose the war. The usual narrative is that Confederate general Robert E. Lee decided to make a grand gesture and last-ditch effort to secure foreign recognition by invading the North and wrecking havoc, and that only bungling by Union leader George Gordon Meade in the week after the battle prevented the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia from being completely decimated. Brown (attorney of law) challenges this conventional interpretation on all counts, arguing instead that the Pennsylvania campaign was a massive raiding trip, and that despite the loss of the battle, the provisions secured during the incursion into Pennsylvania and Maryland were essential to the war effort, and without them the Confederate war machine would have ground to a halt due to a lack of food and other necessary commodities. Furthermore, Brown argues that Meade's inability to prevent the Confederate retreat across the Potomac was not so much as a result of his failings as a general but instead were caused by the masterful way that Lee organized and executed the withdrawal of his forces. To demonstrate this case, Brown examines returns from foraging missions, quartermasters records, medical information, and many other sources frequently ignored during the relating of the events surrounding a battle. He makes the case very effectively, and the reader is left with a much deeper understanding of both the successes and failures of the Campaign from the Southern point of view.

Unfortunately, the book did have a weakness. Often, as a reader, it was easy to get lost in a forest of details - returns on bushels of corn and sheaves of hay broken down on a regiment-by-regiment level, detailed descriptions of the location and number of wounded and wagons needed at every field hospital, detailed lists of exactly which injured men were where, to name a few. Amidst all this information and the dozens of mentioned letter-writers and diary-keepers, keeping track of the overall narrative and maintaining an understanding of which elements and figures were significant and which weren't was very challenging. This bewildering specificity unfortunately made it difficult to maintain interest in a book that, in other respects, was a fascinating investigation of the often over-looked aspects of just goes in to executing a tactical retreat.

Rating: 3 out of 5.