Booknotes

Professor CAROL REARDON (Author, "Pickett's Charge in History & Memory"): Oh, I've probably been thinking about Pickett's Charge since my first trip to Gettysburg in 1963. I didn't start thinking about it in an academic sense until about 1978.

Prof. REARDON: I was a Civil War buff from about the age of 10. S--the 8--8--1963 was the centennial year of the battle. Everybody wanted to go to Gettysburg that year and I was one of the many who w--who went.

Prof. REARDON: My father is a retired Army officer, my next-door neighbors were Civil War buffs. I always liked history. It all came together when I was in about third grade.

Prof. REARDON: I have pictures of everything I saw, even today. I took my little camera with me, took pictures of absolutely everything, including some of the road signs. Gettysburg made a--a huge impression on me during that first trip. Took three rolls of film, still have the pictures. But nothing had a greater impact on me than the field of Pickett's Charge.

Prof. REARDON: Pickett's Charge was the last great Confederate attack on the third day of the three-day battle at Gettysburg. Gettysburg took place in the middle of the Civil War, July of 1863. A lot of people call it the turning point of the Civil War. And here w--the one single action that seemed to sum it all up, the one that brought the battle to a decisive end a--and it--and made it a Union victory was Pickett's Charge.

Prof. REARDON: George Pickett was a Virginian, a graduate of West Point, graduated last in his class, not a mental giant by any stretch of the imagination but, generally speaking, a--a good soldier. His men adored him. He had a background in the Mexican War, fought Indians out West. And now, in 1863, he commands a division of three brigades of Virginia infantry and Robert E. Lee's Confederate army.

Prof. REARDON: He's in his late 30s. He's--he--his--he's probably thinking about two things on July the 3rd. One, of course, is the great thing that's ahead of him. He has to take his division into battle. And the other thing--and this is important in the long run--he's v--a man who's very much in love. He has a young fiancee back in Richmond who's waiting for him, Sally, and he likes to write her a lot of letters, or at least Sally would have us believe that. And on July 3rd, 1863, he's looking out for his mission and his men, and he's trying to write Sally a letter about what he thinks is--happens to--what--what's li--what lies ahead for him and his men.

Prof. REARDON: Th--the picture in the book is taken in, I believe, her 30s. But at the time of the battle, she's--she's, by tradition, a teen-ager. We're not sure if we believe she was a teen-ager, but she--she wants us to believe she was.

Prof. REARDON: Well, many of those letters that--that George Pickett allegedly wrote to Sally were published in a book about 50 years after the battle. They're wonderfully Victorian in nature, sentimental, sappy in some cases, a little disconcerting to historians because they include information that it's hard to believe that George Pickett would have known on July 3rd, 1863. Pretty much historians have written them off as post-war fabrications. But that was a recognized literary form in its own right at the time and so we probably shouldn't be too--too hard on Sally for passing this off as George's letters. They were certainly George's sentiments, I--I suspect...

Prof. REARDON: ...and definitely Sally's.

Prof. REARDON: Right now I'm associate professor of history at Penn State University.

Prof. REARDON: I teach the American military history course. I teach naval history. I teach Vietnam history. I teach all kinds of--of military history. Ironically enough, I'm not the Civil War historian.

Prof. REARDON: This is the second book that--my second monograph. I've been a co-author or a co-editor on several others.

Prof. REARDON: Gettysburg is in south-central Pennsylvania. It's a small town. In 1863, there were only 2,400 residents. It's a farming community, very quiet town, hadn't seen--had seen the passage of armies before but, by and large, the rhythms of their lives had not been disrupted very much by this war. They were very strongly Union, at least many of them were. Th--there was a small minority who actually seemed to have some Southern sympathies. Th--there were a number of former slaves or free blacks who were living in the--in the area, but it was your fairly typical small southern Pennsylvania town.

Prof. REARDON: If you're looking at the entire war, people's attention would've been looking at three different places. One would've been along the south Atlantic coast, around Charleston, South Carolina, where a Union naval flotilla was closing in on Charleston, at Ft. Sumter, certainly a target that the Union certainly wanted to possess, given the symbolic significance of Ft. Sumter in starting the war.

A second place where the--where there would've been a l--an--an awful lot of attention focused would've been along the Mississippi, Vicksburg, Mississippi. The Union navy and army controlled almost all of the great waterway except for Vicksburg. Vicksburg was still holding out. The capture of Vicksburg right at this point invested by Ulysses S. Grant's army would put the entire river in Union hands and cut the Confederacy in two.

The third focus of attention during the summer of 1863 was here in south-central Pennsylvania. Robert E. Lee's army f--the army of northern Virginia, has been victorious at--at a battle called Chancellorsville in May of 1863. They're taking advantage of their victory to march north into Pennsylvania. We're not sure entirely why Lee decides to move north at this time. He will say in his report afterwards that he wants to give Virginia farmers a breather and allow them to have one harvest season un--undisrupted by the marching of armies across their farms and to perhaps relieve pressure on Richmond from some Union forces in that area. But he's marching north and the Union army is marching after them in pursuit.

It's a--it's a hard thing for the North to deal with a major Confederate army on Northern soil, Confederate army on free soil, e--especially so close to Washington, the capital, is a very bothersome thing. Gettysburg is going to attract a lot of attention, because if you look at it on a map, it looks like the hub of a wheel. Eleven roads come into Gettysburg from all directions, and it's almost a natural concentration point for any armies marching anywhere in that area. Nobody planned to fight at Gettysburg, but Gettysburg was almost a magnet that drew the two armies together.

Prof. REARDON: From here in Washington to Gettysburg, a little over two hours.

Prof. REARDON: From Philadelphia, it's about three hours. From Pittsburgh, it's about three and a half hours.

Prof. REARDON: Oh, absolutely. I don't--I think every American should go to Gettysburg. It should just--just be part of your education as an American. Much of the battlefield still exists i--in--in very--in--in very good shape. The battle was a three-day battle. The town has only grown to about a little over 8,000 today, so it hasn't seen the great sprawl of an awful lot of other communities. The battlefield is still there. There's a wonderful visitors center with an absolutely incredible assortment of--of Civil War relics and--and weaponry and uniforms. And for somebody who knows very little about the Civil War or for somebody who's an expert, there is something there to see.

My favorite part of the whole place, of course, is the battlefield itself because it's not just important to us today, but it was incredibly important to the veterans who fought there. There are several thousand monuments at Gettysburg, many of which were put up by the veterans themselves, marking the individual units that fought there. They marked the battle lines. You can follow the ebb and flow of large parts of the battle just by watching to see where the monuments are. They're very elaborate. There's also a number of state memorials. And, of course, there is the compelling draw that is the National Cemetery, where Abraham Lincoln would come a few months later after the battle and--and deliver his Gettysburg Address.

Prof. REARDON: November 19th, 1863.

Prof. REARDON: Mm-hmm.

Prof. REARDON: Right in the middle. The war had started in April of 1861. This is a little over two years. The war still has almost two years to run.

Prof. REARDON: Oh, there have been a number of books written about Pickett's Charge before. Probably the most popular one up till now was one that came out in the late 1950s called "Pickett's Charge: A History of--A Microhistory of the Last Great Confederate Assault at Gettysburg," by a m--a--a journalist named George Stewart.

Prof. REARDON: Well, I did a lot of things differently in here. I was--in fact, one of the reasons why I wrote this book was because I was very taken with one of George Stewart's comments. He said--and I'm paraphrasing a little bit here--`If we grant, as most Americans would, that the Civil War is the most dramatic moment in our history and that Gettysburg is the turning point of that war, then it would seem to me that Pickett's Charge on the third day of Gettysburg is the--the turning point of the turning point of the most dramatic moment of the Civil War.' In other words, the most dramatic moment of American history comes down to Pickett's Charge, it's the pivotal moment in American history. And that struck me as just an absolutely stunning comment, and it's one of those little bits--little sound bites that sticks in your memory eve--no--no matter how long it's been since you've read the book.

Prof. REARDON: Not really. One of the reasons why I started writing this book is, as I got to know the soldiers who actually fought the battle and as I got more intimately familiar with the battlefield itself, I began to realize something slightly different: that our first stop has to be with the soldiers who fought there tha--themselves. They didn't see a turning point, they didn't see the climax of American history; they saw just another battle. If you read their diaries or their letters right after the battle that say, `I've been in the hardest fight I've ever been in. Glad I'm alive to tell you about it,' end of story, they're not talking about turning points or great new horizons for the American republic or anything of th--of that sort at all, certainly no high-water mark of the rebellion. For them, this is just another battle.

And if you take a look at Pickett's Charge, the attack that becomes known as Pickett's Charge, strictly as an exercise in military tactics, it's really very ordinary in Civil War terms. That same ground that Pickett charges across on July 3rd was also charged across on July 2nd, but that attack has no special name. And we don't look at the Georgians and the Floridians and the Alabamians who crossed that ground the day before with any special reverence or awe, but we do when we look at the attack the very next day over the very same ground.

Prof. REARDON: And that intrigued me.

Prof. REARDON: Well, I first read the Stewart quote in the 1960s. I didn't really start thinking about it in this term until I was really in graduate school in the 196--late 1970s.

Prof. REARDON: University of South Carolina.

Prof. REARDON: I was specializing in Civil War, the period of the Civil War and military history--writ large, not--not just the four years of--of one war but all wars. And it--it really intrigued me that I was looking at two different things. There was this--this image of something called Pickett's Charge that was much larger than life. But if you looked at the thoughts of the men who actually f--fought in it, they didn't see it as something incredibly exceptional and I would--needed to try to reconcile those two.

Prof. REARDON: The charge itself--well, there's actually two charges th--and that--that's part of the problem. There is this charge that becomes known as Pickett's Charge. Whenever we talk about Pickett's Charge, what most people think about is the charge of General George Pickett's division, his three brigades of Virginians, and, in fact, that's--that is a part of the--of the--of the charge. They will advance from the Con--main Confederate battle line on Seminary Ridge across a--a rolling--a--a rolling valley. I--it's not a wide open plain, nice and flat, like a lot of people think. It's--it's very rolling. It provides a great deal of cover and concealment, a lot more than might be readily apparent unless you walk across it yourself, but almost a--a mile walk across the open field toward the Union line on a low ridge called Cemetery Ridge.

Prof. REARDON: Oh, certainly. That is your--your basic tactical map of the July 3rd charge.

Prof. REARDON: You have the Emmitsburg Road al--a road flanked by two very stout fences on either side that goes across the middle of the--of the battlefield. The Confederate troops are on the left-hand side.

Prof. REARDON: Over here.

Prof. REARDON: They're going to advance across the--the fields and across that road.

Prof. REARDON: The stone wall is near your Union line on the right-hand side.

Prof. REARDON: No, you wanna go across the road to the your--to your right. Keep going...

Prof. REARDON: Mm-hmm.

Prof. REARDON: Right there, right--right i--right about where your h--where your finger is right now.

Prof. REARDON: Try t--trying to do it backwards is not easy. That's where the Union line is. That's where the famous stone wall is. That's where the famous angle in the clump of trees is. And from over on Seminary Ridge, Robert E. Lee is able to look out and see that clump of trees and can see the basic outline of the Union center, and say, `That's--that's your target.' General Pickett's men, who get most of the attention and th--and a book title and everything else, get an awful lot of the attention here, but they were not the only troops who made this charge that day, and that would help to create the controversies that would follow. There were more troops involved under the command of General J. Johnston Pettegrew of North Carolina and General Isaac Trimball, a Marylander who was commanding two North Carolina brigades that day.

Prof. REARDON: Mm-hmm.

Prof. REARDON: General Pettegrew is a North Carolinian who was mostly known throughout the army for his tremendous intellect. He was not a West Pointer, but he had gone to the University of North Carolina and he--he was i--he was literally one of these citizen soldiers who rose to th--through the ranks by his own ability. He was a brigade commander when this bag--when this battle began on the first day, and his men had fought very hard on the very first day of battle. His division commander, his immediate superior, was wounded, and now here on July 3rd, General Pettegrew is in his second day as a division commander. He--th--he--he--he doesn't know really what a division commander is entirely supposed to be doing. His brigade commanders don't always know who he is. That creates a certain amount of--o--of, well, certain opportunities for conflict for command and control--as soldiers would call it today, command and control problems.

But General Pettegrew is certainly a very dedicated soldier and will try to do the best he can. It's supporting Pettegrew's four brigades. And his four brigades are from North Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and a--and a small group of Virginians. They are not all Virginians, like Pickett's men. Backing up Pettegrew's men are two brigades of North Carolinians detached from a--another division and put under the temporary command of General Isaac Trimball. Trimball had marched north without a--an official command and General Lee put him in charge of these two brigades. So there are those who insist on calling this charge the Pickett/Pettegrew/Trimball assault, making sure that everybody gets a certain amount of the glory or the blame, depending on your point of view. So there's really three people involved and not just Pickett.

Prof. REARDON: We don't know. We don't know how many went in, so we don't--it's really very difficult to figure out how many died, but usual estimates will say somewhere around 60 percent casualties. But it's very difficult to--to talk numbers in this case. General Pettegrew's men and General Trimball's men had all fought on July 1st, and many regiments didn't keep casualties that broke down the list by day. So we don't know how many of, say, the 7th North Carolina's casualties were--were lost on July 1st and how many were on July 3rd. We...

Prof. REARDON: Well, that would've been just a rumor. Lee's total army in--in Pennsylvania would've been about 75,000. If he lost 60,000, that would've been a horrible defeat indeed. He...

Prof. REARDON: The Union forces were led by General George Gordon Meade, a Pennsylvanian who had only commanded the army of the Potomac, the Northern army, for less than a week. His...

Prof. REARDON: I really don't know if it is or not, but it would be entirely appropriate.

Prof. REARDON: About 95,000.

Prof. REARDON: Pickett's Charge? Well, by tradition, it begins at 1:00 in the afternoon with an artillery bombardment. We say `by tradition' because one of the few people who wrote down a--a--a note about when the bombardment began looked at his watch and it said 1:00. But we have f--a few other people who apparently looked at their watch and said 2:00, 3:00, 2:30, 2:45. Watches were not mass-produced at that time and what you had was history given to us by a whole lot of individual watchmakers and their individual skills.

Prof. REARDON: So we usually say 1:00.

Prof. REARDON: Well, that's a--that's a woodcut and that would've appeared a--a l--a little bit more than a month after the battle. That would've been a little bit later than 1:00. We--we do have this artillery bombardment that lasts anywhere from, depending on who you read, 20 minutes to four hours. I guess it depended on where you were standing at the time--if you were enduring it, four hours. After the artillery bombardment ended, the infantry would move forward. When the infantry moves forward, from the time they leave the shelter of Seminary Ridge, fight their battle on Cemetery Ridge, are defeated and return. The whole attack, fight and repulse takes about one hour.

Prof. REARDON: And that one hour certainly has made a lot of history.

Prof. REARDON: Well, I learned to mistrust many of my sources. O--one of the things that I began to be more sensitive to is the fact that historians are fanatics about finding sources--soldiers' letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, things like that. But we're not always--we're--we're not always sure about how we should be using them as historical sources. Most of us who write about the Civil War ha--are not combat veterans, have never seen it, have only talked to people about it, and that's about as close as we're ever going to be. And until we know a little bit more about what a soldier thinks when he's in combat, what he sees, what he feels, what's important to him, which is usually survival, we're not always sure how to treat our sources.

What we like to do is find neat quotes and we like to try to find--we like to try to impose some sense of order on what one of the soldiers called a bunch of disconnected threads. What we like to do is take--i--is to weave a whole cloth from disconnected threads of different soldiers' memories and call it the history of the battle. Maybe we got it right, but maybe we got it wrong, too, because mostly what we're seeing is one person's view of what he saw, probably, within maybe 10 feet around him.

Prof. REARDON: South Carolina.

Prof. REARDON: Mm-hmm.

Prof. REARDON: Well, I put it aside for a while, went on and finished my doctoral degree and...

Prof. REARDON: A--at the University of Kentucky. Worked with Charles P. Roland, one of the most eminent Civil War historians w--o--of our time and I started up at Penn State University in 1991. We have a Civil War conference every year at one of our branch campuses, and the first year I was at Penn State the subject for that year was going to be--for the Civil War conference that year was going to be July 3rd at Gettysburg. My department chairman came up to me and said, `Do you know anything about July 3rd at Gettysburg?' I kind of shook my head and said, `Well, yeah, I probably know a little bit--a little something about it,' and that's what got--got me started on all this. I put together a paper for the--for the presentation. It was received well enough that I was pretty much told that if this wasn't my next book, I was really making a bad mistake. I accepted the compliment and put it aside again, but there was something about it that got to me this time probably because I knew--I'd s--I'd read a whole lot more history--read a whole lot more military history, read a lot more combat history since the first time I started studying this. And I thought maybe now I did have something to stay--to say about this.

Prof. REARDON: Well, it--the North Carolina Press has a fantastic reputation for publishing Civil War history. I--actually, I didn't have to sell it at all. They started reading it, they--I like to think they recognized a good compelling story when they saw it, and they--they signed on.

Prof. REARDON: Well, what I like to think I'm doing here is a couple of things. First of all, I hope I'm issuing a warning to almost all of us who write Civil War his--Civil War history or military history, especially combat history, that we have to be a whole lot more careful in the way we write it. We have to be a whole lot more sensitive to the way we use our sources, and that's what I try to bring out first, that we're not dealing with a bunch of soldiers who are telling the story of what happened. Mostly what they're doing is telling the story of `what happened to me,' and what happened to me may not be the s--same thing as what happened to the soldier 100 feet down the line from you.

It's--it's a lot more difficult than it looks. We're trying very hard to impor--impose order on--on what is chaos. Combat is chaos. And I'm not sure we--we do it very well just yet. So I'm hoping not to come up with answers but maybe just to--may--maybe just to provide a wake-up call to a lot of us who write this kind of history that we probably need to be a little bit more careful.

Prof. REARDON: Mm-hmm.

Prof. REARDON: Sure.

Prof. REARDON: Oh, th--the memories aren't always good, but there is value in the memories as long as you recognize them as such. You don't discard what you're hearing just because it--you know it doesn't jive with the historical record. A lot of times what they're telling you is not--is--is, again, not what happened but `what happened to me and here's what I think is important,' especially as time goes by. It's really interesting to see what sticks deepest in memory. And oftentimes, those are those peak experiences that will pop through and really frame stories like Pickett's Charge. So...

Prof. REARDON: Well, that--that's one thing I hope to do. A second thing I hope to do would--was--would be to sensitize all students of history, whether you're in the academic world or--or just a--a l--a person who loves to read history i--is--is to pay attention to how history is written, pay attention to who is writing a story--Do they have an agenda?--the--the basic things that you would teach in a historical methods course, such things as bias and objectivity. Try to point out that their--our perception of the past is framed by two forces, not one. We like to think our--of ourselves as objective historians and that we seek the truth and that we can be unemotional and unbiased and--and really try to uncover some basic fundamental truisms. And we hope we do, but we also take a look at the past and--and view it through another lens called memory, and memory's far more selective and self-serving and self-interested and sanitizing sometimes, especially when you're dealing with war. And--and that will sometimes shape what--what it is you write about. It certainly does for these soldiers.

Prof. REARDON: I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Prof. REARDON: Got my undergraduate degree at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. I was a biology major.

Prof. REARDON: Absolutely.

Prof. REARDON: I was the General Harold K. Johnson visiting professor of military history at the US Army War College for the academic year '93-'94. One of my jobs and easily my favorite job while I was there was to serve as the seminar historian for one of the 19 seminars in the class that year. The--the d--the dedication is for the--the--the 16 members of my seminar and the--the sel--and--and the facul--the rest of the faculty team that year. They were a most fascinating group of individuals. I--I learned far more from them than I ever even remotely taught them. I hope I made a few of them appreciate history. I've even nicknamed one of them Mr. History just because he was the least historically minded when we got in there. But I've actually taken his--his office--hi--his--his current--the--the--the people in his current assignment--I've taken them out to Gettysburg and to Chancellorsville on--on Civil War battlefield tours. F--so for somebody who came in not even particularly interested in history, I--I like to think I had a little bit of an impact on him.

Prof. REARDON: The Army War College sends all of its seminars on a Gettysburg staff ride, a battlefield tour--it's--it's a family thing--on a weekend in September every year. The seminar historian gets to lead the trip, and so I got to lead this group. And one of the last things we did--I mean, Pickett's Charge is the climax of the battle, so it's one of our last stops. One of the things that we did was simply--I--I simply lined them up in a two-rank line, Civil War style, shoulder to shoulder, and I led them over the wall. I offered one of our infantryman the--the chance to lead the charge. I mean, they always talk about the infantry leader's motto being, `Follow me.' But they insisted that I t--take that honor, so I did, and it was great fun. But it was a special moment with special friends, and I was delighted to be able to dedicate this book to them.

Prof. REARDON: Oh, it's a very long wall. The wall was a boundary marker then and it's a--it--it--it extends several hundred--several hundred yards north-south, where the--most of this fighting in Pickett's Charge would took--t--would take place. It's a wall that will angle back to the east, deeper into the Union position for about 75 or 80 yards, and then it angles back north again. So you have a wall that--that angles--that makes an angle. It was used by the Union soldiers as a defensive position. It was strengthened by using fence rails and other loose rocks that were around. The rock wall had great significance then and--and it would for--for generations to come. It got to the point where you could not have a Gettysburg reunion without having Northerners and Southerners extending hands across that rock wall and--and shaking hands, the ultimate sign of reunion. They could've shaken hands anywhere on that battlefield, but invariably, th--some of the most touching photographs of--of national reunions at Gettysburg are hands shaken across that stone wall.

Prof. REARDON: One of those great rumors, one of those tantalizing little disconnected threads that happens to be hanging out there. I can't say with any authority whether or not Pickett had a--a drinking problem. It was a rumor. In this case, it was one that was going to be used against him, but it's an interesting kind of a story. George Pickett was held up as a hero by his men and by much of the South for quite some time, until the early 1890s, when a s--a little article would appear in the Richmond newspaper that said, `Almost anybody who was at Gettysburg has heard this story and it's always been an underground rumor, but I'm gonna bring it out into the open right now. George Pickett was not in the front lines with his men at Gettysburg and he wasn't even on the field.'

And the story went on about how several of Pickett's staff officers were behind the lines drinking whiskey at the so-called `whiskey wagon.' And the officer who turned th--who--who turn--who basically made this public was one of Pickett's own men, Kirkwood Odie, a major in 1863, who would rise to the rank of colonel, who had been wounded early in the charge. He went back, he--to to have his wound dressed. What he ended up finding out was that they didn't have any chloroform to take care of the pain. He was told to go over and get a cup of whiskey. And when he did, he found Pickett's officers there, or so he said.

Prof. REARDON: In this picture, he's just a graduate of--of--of VMI. He's probably maybe 20 years old. He--he will make his accusations much later. But this was the best extant photograph we could find of the young man, the man who ac...

Prof. REARDON: ...the--the soldier who accused Pickett of being drunk.

Prof. REARDON: Only suggestions. There would be other officers who would say that Pickett liked to--Pickett liked to carry himself like a gentleman, and that meant eating and drinking like a gentleman. But what does that mean? We're not quite sure. I--I think one of the most intriguing things is that right after the Battle of Gettysburg, Kirkwood Odie would find himself being court-martialed. And one of the charges on which he was court-martialed was--court--on--on which he was court-martialed was drunkenness on duty. Was it retaliation 30 years later? Was that perhaps part of the issue? We don't know. This is one of those issues that is just suggested. I've seen it hidden in a few footnotes--innuendo, that sort of thing.

Prof. REARDON: But interesting stuff.

Prof. REARDON: I've been a lot of different places. One of the things I discovered is that Pickett's Charge takes on a bit of a chameleon-like aspect depending on where you are, who you're talking to, who wants to tell you their version of it and why they want to tell you.

The most commonly heard story of Pickett's Charge, the one that probably most of our viewers have in mind right now, is basically the Virginia version, the--the version that calls this attack Pickett's Charge that thinks about General Armistead crossing the wall and General Garnett and General Kemper. For those who've watched the movie, "Gettysburg," you're thinking about Pickett's Charge through the eyes of Virginians, an--and that's one story.

And, of course, if you go to places like the Virginia Historical Society or the Virginia State Library, the Museum of the Confederacy, they're going to have an awful lot of sources written by Virginians who are gonna tell you that story. But if you go into places like North Carolina, the story is very different. They resent the fact that Virginia got the great bulk of the attention and, in fact, that the North Carolinians got blamed for the Virginians' defeat.

If you go to Tennessee or Mississippi or Alabama or Florida, other states that had troops involved in the attack one way or another, they have their own little versions. Of course, every version pretty much ends the same way--`Our guys got farthest to the front than anybody else'--but every story is different. But they're all talking about the same attack. Interesting.

Prof. REARDON: Well, I went to North Carolina's state archives. I got some interesting things out of South Carolina's state archives--or, South Carolinian Library, and they didn't have troops involved in the charge. Different places in Georgia and Mississippi and Alabama. A lot of these things you don't--you can find in almost any good research library because Confederate veterans love to write. And they published an awful lot of their recollections about the charge in such publications as Confederate Veteran magazine--started publication in the late 1890s and published well into the 20th century.

It--it's been reprinted recently for the Civil War market currently. And it's just a--a--a treasure trove of all kinds of stories. They weren't--some of the stories were invariably pointed to as `evidence that this man was there.' And then you'd read the story and, if you're a historian, you look at it and shake your head and say, `Wait a minute. This doesn't even fit.' But somebody wanted you to believe that he was there and it was important to them. And Confederate Veteran published it as if it were a historical document in itself.

Prof. REARDON: I could not possibly count.

Prof. REARDON: Infinity plus one.

Prof. REARDON: A lot. Part of--part of the research, when you're talking about places I went, Gettysburg is one of the places. I used the battlefield as one of my most important research tools. The physical evidence is still there. It's not been built up very much. What I tried to do was to stand in the regimental position of every unit that I talk about and ask myself basic questions. What can I see from here? And, more importantly, what can't I see from here? If a soldier is talking about something that happened on the other end of the line but you're standing there and you realize you--that he c--could not have seen it, that makes you far more skeptical about the authority with which he is writing.

Prof. REARDON: Absolutely.

Prof. REARDON: We are beginning to make a distinction between history and memory. Sometimes we call memory `heritage' now. We start talking about those things that we consider worthy of commemoration and worthy of remembrance. When I'm in one of my more cynical moods, I get upset with the commercialization of heritage and values and--and things like that. And I'm alw--I always marvel when I walk through the different shops around Gettysburg at the kind of products that are being offered to the publ--public that have no connection to the Civil War or to Gettysburg or to anything else but have `Pickett's Charge' stamped on them somehow just because, somehow, this is supposed to make that shot glass for your bourbon somehow something very special.

The ball-point pen I find just absolutely intriguing. It became a joke among my--some of my friends and myself. I--it's a fantastic little thing. It's a ball-point pen with a little tube of liquid in the upper part of the barrel. And you can just tilt that pen and three little Confederate soldiers are gonna charge down that barrel toward a stone wall with three stout Union defenders behind it. And here come those three Confederates. Now sometimes they get hung up about halfway over, and if you're a Union partisan and you own that pen, you rather like that result. Sometimes they go right to the wall like some of General Pettegrew's men did, and if you're a North Carolinian, you rather like that result. Sometimes they go right smashing through the Union line and all the Virginians would say, `The lost cause lives,' because it's pretty much the story they've grown up with of Pickett's Charge.

But s--something like a ball-point pen or--or the different TV shirts--almost every Confederate general has a T-shirt, down to brigade commanders. General Garnett, General Armistead have T-shirts commemorating their action in Pickett's Charge.

Prof. REARDON: Mm-hmm.

Prof. REARDON: A--a Picket's Charge tree. A--a n--a nursery made seedlings, made cuttings, of--of a tree from the battlefield and is marketing them as Pickett's Charge tree. So if you want--if you're ecologically aware and you want to commemorate Pickett's Charge, you can plant a Pickett's Charge tree in your back yard for, I think, about $35.

Prof. REARDON: Oh, yeah. This was offered to the public within the last few year--years. I think it's kind of interesting, since Robert E. Lee was known not to be a drinker. But there's this wonderful tankard with scenes of either Cavalryman Jeb Stuart on one side and General Pickett leading his charge on the other side. And that might be one of the time--I believe in the advertising copy that they misspelled General Pickett's name. So...

Prof. REARDON: Mm-hmm.

Prof. REARDON: Mm-hmm.

Prof. REARDON: Oh, absolutely.

Prof. REARDON: The planning for the 1913 reunion was--was so complete, the U...

Prof. REARDON: The 50th--the US Army took over the planning for this. They basically sat down and figured out what's the average age of the veterans coming back. They basically consulted insurance companies to find out how many of these men were likely to die, and among the tons of kitchen equipment and food and blankets and cots, they also brought 50 coffins with 'em. Ended up they only had to use nine of them, but part of the requisition of required equipment for the encampment during the 50-year anniversary was 50 coffins.

Prof. REARDON: Earlier, before the golden anniversary. Many of the early reunions were paid for by the veterans themselves or by local public subscriptions sometimes to help them out. It was really only about the time of the 50th anniversary that the federal government and the state governments would step in in a big way and underwrite the cost of some of these veterans coming to the battlefield.

Prof. REARDON: This is an 1885 shot that includes a--a number of senior Union officers. Many of these soldiers who--these veterans you see depicted here are survivors of the Union army's 2d Corps. It was the Union army 2d Corps under General Hancock, who were the defenders at that stone wall. And some--it's kind of surprising. You always hear about Pickett's Charge but you never hear about Hancock's defense.

Prof. REARDON: General Hancock was the--was a Pennsylvanian and a West Pointer and a future presidential candidate in th--in the 1880s. But on this day, July 3rd, 1863, General Hancock was the commander of the 2d Corps, and it would be two of his divisions under Generals Gibbon and Hayes who would be the primary troops involved in the repulse of Pickett's Charge.

Prof. REARDON: Well, I think it's kind of interesting that Pick--one of the reasons I suspect Pickett's Charge remains in memory is because Pickett's men were among the first, as a group of former Confederate soldiers, to embrace the cause of national reunion. In 1887, the 24th anniversary, Pickett's men and the Philadelphia brigade, the m--the Pennsylvanians who actually held the stone wall at the angle where the Confederates broke though, would have a reunion at Gettysburg. There had been other reunions on Civil War battles before, but, oftentimes, they included just any veterans who wanted to show up, not just those who fought on that specific battle--battlefield. Other times, there had been reunions where only one side came or the other side came.

But, here, there was gonna be a reunion at Gettysburg, and it was a reunion that was primarily limited to the Confederates and the Union troops who fought at the--a specific site against each other. And this was hailed by some to be a remarkable display of the end of sectional ill will and the beginnings of working together for a common future. Those who thought that this was a great idea played this up big. The Philadelphia newspapers, New York newspapers, something--even a few of the newspapers in the South, embraced this as a very positive sign; several hundred Pennsylvanians, several hundred Virginians, all get together and talk about--you know, `The war is over. Let's look to the future. Let's bury our hostilities and--and just really work together for the--for the common good of the entire country.'

There were some critics of this, and especially, you would see it in the veterans newspapers, North and South. There were some Union veterans who w--got very upset at some of the things that happened at these first reunions. One of the common themes of the Pickett-Philadelphia reunion was to sti--simply stand up and say, `God alone knows which side was right.' And the Union response from some of the critics would say, `We don't want any of this "God knows who is right" bosh to mess up any future reunions. We won, you lost. Deal with it,' basically was the message. So Pickett's men didn't speak for all and the Philadelphians didn't speak for all Northerners and Southerners, but if you're looking for Civil War veterans on--on the cutting edge of reunionism, Pickett's men are very much out there.

Prof. REARDON: After July 3rd...

Prof. REARDON: In--in the war. Well, July 4th, Vicksburg--and we talked earlier about the importance of Vicksburg--Vicksburg surrenders. The Mississippi River is open. Ulysses S. Grant be--is very much a household name. In just a few months, Grant will be called east--about nine months later, Grant will be called east. He will take on Robert E. Lee. Thus, we get the great Lee-Grant connection that most--most of us think about when we think about the Civil War. Not much will happen down around Charleston just yet, but the focal point will really be here in Pennsylvania, because something really incredible has happened.

Up until July of 1863, almost every time Robert E. Lee has taken his army into battle, he has won, and sometimes won very decisively.

Prof. REARDON: Fredricksberg, Chancellorsville. He doesn't really win at Antietam, but he's still on the battlefield when the battle is over. Second Manassas, he cleared the Union army right off the field. The Seven Days Battles outside of Richmond, he for--forced back an army bigger than his own. The army had got--the Union army had gotten within five miles of Richmond, and Lee pushed them back. He'd been remarkably successful in--in a little over a--a year in command of the--of the army of northern Virginia. His soldiers were accustomed to winning. But here after July 3rd, 1863, they had to deal with a very unaccustomed feeling, one of defeat.

Prof. REARDON: Well...

Prof. REARDON: We're still debating that. We in the historical community are still debating that. We've been sensitized to believe that it's the turning point of the war, that Appomattox was a given after Gettysburg.

Prof. REARDON: Appomattox is almost two years in the future. And that should have raised some questions long ago, in my mind. We're beginning to realize that, at least in the minds of the soldiers, the Confederate soldiers who marched away, they were befuddled by this defeat. They certainly felt deeply the pe--the personal loss of so many friends in--in Pickett's division and--and in other Confederate units. There was an awful lot of finger pointing going on trying to figure out why the Confederates lost. This was unusual. They--they didn't know how to deal with it. And, of course, it's sort--almost a natural reaction to look for scapegoats to--to blame somebody for it. And part of that will help shape the history of Pickett's Charge, because wh--when the Richmond newspapers want to t--talk about this great charge, they're gonna write about how well General Pickett's Virginians did, but why don't they completely succeed?

Well, they don't completely succeed because the other troops in the charge, those from North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, d--failed in their duty. That's perhaps one of the reasons why we don't read about them, because the Richmond press refused to write about them; blame them and dismiss them and don't write about them. And later on, when we're going back and trying to find historical sources, we can find a lot about Virginians, but all we can find about the other people in the charge are--is that somehow, they made a mi--that they made mistakes, that they failed, that the whole defeat belongs to them.

Prof. REARDON: This is a f--a painting that was done by an artist based in Gettysburg by the name of Dale Galen. This is a--an artistic rendering of Pickett rally--rallying his troops just before the char--the charge will step off. This is part o--an element of Kemper's brigade, I believe, that he is rallying. One of the officers waving a sword in the front is Colonel Waller T. Patton, a kinsman of General Patton of World War II fame. Colonel Patton will be killed in this--will be mortally wounded in this charge.

Prof. REARDON: Well, there apparently is at least one kinsman still alive. There is--you know, the Pickett family is still around today. And something kind of interesting is going to happen in th--the not-too-distant future, or so I've been--been told. George Pickett is buried in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond. He's buried near a place called Gettysburg Hill. In the years--a few years after Gettysburg--a few years after Gettysburg, the women of the South will raise funds to have the Southern dead removed from Gettysburg from the trench graves in which they were buried and have them brought back to--to cemeteries in Richmond, in Raleigh, in Charleston, in Savannah. The--those who were brought back from the field of Pickett's Charge were--were mostly reburied on Gettysburg Hill in Hollywood Cemetery.

Prof. REARDON: Same cemetery.

Prof. REARDON: Mm-hmm. Same cemetery.

Prof. REARDON: Yep. A few years after the--the Gettysburg dead were brought back to Richmond, George Pickett died. He died in 1875, 12 years after the charge. He was buried in Hollywood Cemetery. His wife, who had been his fiancee during the battle--they married shortly afterwards--Lasalle Corbral Pickett, Sally Pickett, would be General Pickett's greatest fan for as long as she lived. She'd write stories about him in all kinds of popular magazines. She would write a serialized version: The story of General George Pickett. And it would appear in a very unusual place.

Back in 1913, the golden anniversary o--of the Battle of Gettysburg, Sally Pickett would write her serialized reminiscences for Cosmopolitan magazine. S--when Sally Pickett died, she was buried in a mausoleum that is currently in--in bad repair. And there is an effort on to claim her remains and have her reburied in Hollywood Cemetery with--with her husband. There is an effort to...

Prof. REARDON: I--I'm not sure where she's buried right now, but the--there is an effort on to reunite them in death and reunite them here in Hollywood Cemetery. It's part of an ongoing effort to also refurbish the statue that is over General Pickett's grave. It's--it's a gra--a--a marker--it's a marker that was paid for by subscription, money that was raised by Pickett's men about 25 years after the battle. It was a--a wonderful ceremony to--to dedicate it, and it was the one I believe you referred to earlier. It was dedicated in a joint ceremony that included a whole lot of Pickett survivors and a v--a visiting contingent of s--of Pennsylvanians from the Philadelphia brigade who had been defending that stone wall on July 3rd, 1863.

Prof. REARDON: I've--I've discovered that most people want to begin and end most of the discussion with: Was Pickett's Charge smart or not? They tend to still want to take a look at it in terms of a--of a decision that Lee or Longstreet may or may not have made.

Prof. REARDON: 1913.

Prof. REARDON: Well, these came from the official--sort of the official program--the official report after the--the ceremonies were over.

Prof. REARDON: The obvious--the--this is the--one of those obvious shake hands across the stone wall photographs. You could not have...

Prof. REARDON: These w--these were survivors. The ones in--in the lighter coats are Confederate veterans, the darker--men in the dark coats are Union's veterans. What you have there are Virginians and--and Pennsylvanians shaking a hand--shaking hands across that stone wall. This charge, especially in 1913, was going to inspire incredible outpourings of poetry, all kinds of souvenirs, all kinds of newspaper coverage. Newspaper coverage of the 1913 reunion at Gettysburg, especially that third day, the--the day that--where they were going to redo Pickett's Charge, drew national and even international attention. You can find articles about this reunion in 1913 in newspapers not just in Richmond and New York and--and Atlanta and New Orleans but in San Francisco and in--in the London newspapers. It--it w--it became a--a w--it drew attention worldwide.

Prof. REARDON: Whitelaw Reed was one of the--one of the most prominent Civil War correspondents and an eyewitness to many of the--to many of the actions that--that took place on July 3rd, 1863.

Prof. REARDON: He was a Northerner. He--he worked for a Cincinnati newspaper. He was one of over--well, somewhere between 40 and 50 Northern newspapermen who were on the field at the time. Some had been with the army for quite some time. There was a--an--a--a group of army journalists who traveled around with the armies and--and knew how to describe battles to some degree. An awful lot of them in the Gettysburg campaign just took advantage of the fact that the army--that the battle was taking place on Northern soil and just came down to take a look and see what was going on. So that--what that ends up doing, of course, is to make Northern newspaper coverage a--an interesting collection of very tightly written narratives of--of the action and some of the most outlandish collections of exaggerations you've ever seen.

Prof. REARDON: Jonathan Albertson was a Southern correspondent who wrote for newspapers in--it w--primarily in Richmond. Jonathan Albertson only signed his--him--himself with the letter A, but Jonathan Albertson--if we had to point to one person who has drawn for us in words the image that comes to most--most of our minds when we think about Pickett's Charge, it's Jonathan Albertson. He wrote an article that was--that appeared in a Richmond newspaper on about the 22nd or 23rd of July. This was not the only article that was written about Pickett's Charge, but it was one of the longer ones. It was more evocative than most. It did not stick to the journalistic tenet to just simply tell the story and move on; he in--injected his own opinion on--on many of--many occasions. And he would be one of the ones who would say forthrightly that Pickett's men did all that could have been expected of them. And, of course, this is exactly what a Virginia--Richmond audience wants to read. And he's going to be one of the ones who will very bluntly point the finger of blame at those troops that did not support Pickett--in other words, Pettegrew's North Carolinians, the Mississippians, the Alabamians--and--and--and helped to k--helped to inspire even further criticism.

Prof. REARDON: Mm-hmm.

Prof. REARDON: Sally Pickett lived well into the 20th century, into the 1920s, I believe. Sally Pickett--whe--when the first reunions were beginning, she--she tried to get to as many as she possibly could when she was pretty sure that it would be a--an audience that would welcome her. She would be one of the ones who would go to that 1887 reunion, that first big reunion between the Philadelphians and--and Pickett's men. And the Philadelphians embraced her as much as--as the Virginians did. She brought her son, her--her son, George Pickett Jr., I gue--I suppose, al--along for--for the ride.

And the Virginians, the Pennsylvanians, sometimes even used biblical descriptions to explain how important she was to the whole cause, that somehow she cemented--she helped to cement the spirit of reunion just by coming along and pointing out that young George Pickett used to show his most prized possession, which was his father's watch. It was a watch that Sally Pickett had gotten for the general just before he died. And it--on the cover of the--of the pocket watch were crossed flags, one o--one was the Stars and Stripes and the other was the Confederate flag. What a perfect sign of reunion. What a great thing for a little boy to go around and show to veterans in blue and in gray. `This is my dad's watch, and my dad is General Pickett.' It was a great thing at the time.

She didn't accept every invitation. She turned down one in 1888 for the silver anniversary because Union veterans, the ones who criticized the spirit of reunion, pretty much took that one over and said, `We're gonna do it our way,' and Sally Pickett decided she really didn't want to go to that one. But she would go to other ones. And she--she became a great favorite. Pickett's men loved Sally.

Prof. REARDON: Oh, I have a few more coming.

Prof. REARDON: The next one is a book that will--that right now sort of has a tentative title of `The Military Legacy of the Civil War: The American Inheritance.' The reason for doing that is, one of my first mentors in military history, Jay Luvaas, wrote a book a number of years ago called, "The Military Legacy of the Civil War: The European Inheritance.' Basically, what did European armies learn from our American Civil War? He always intended to do an companion volume, the American inheritance, what we learned from our own Civil War, and a--a volume on the naval inheritance, but he retired before he did it. Well, I'm going to pick up the torch and do the American version and use not just my interest in the Civil War but use my interest in professional military education from my time at the Army war college. I also do some--also have an association with Marine Corps professional military education. I've taken both soldiers and Marines out on staff rides to Civil War battlefields. It--it's interesting to me to see the lessons that can still teach this generation of s--of military professionals.

Prof. REARDON: No, I did not.