High Tide at Gettysburg: The Campaign in Pennsylvania

"Gettysburg had everything, " Henry Steele Commager recently wrote. "It was the greatest battle ever fought on our continent; it boasts more heroic chapters than any other one battle. It was the high tide of the Confederacy."

This is the way Glenn Tucker has always seen it and this is the way he reports it in High Tide at Gettysburg. The story of Gettysburg has never been told better, perhaps never so well as in this volume. Glenn Tucker has the immediacy of a war correspondent on the spot along with the insights that come from painstaking research. The armies live again in his pages.

In his big, generous book Glenn Tucker has room to follow Lee's army up from Chancellorsville across Maryland into Pennsylvania. With Jackson recently killed, Lee had revamped his top command. Mr. Tucker watches it in operation. In Pennsylvania he reports how the Southern troops got along with the Pennsylvania civilians and how they ate high on the hog in the hot, lush farm country.

When Meade's men caught up with the Confederates and the two armies were probing to locate each other's concentrations, Mr. Tucker's account becomes sharper, more dramatic. His rapidly moving, vivid narrative of the three-day battle is filled with fascinating episodes and fresh, stimulating appraisals.

Glenn Tucker is akin to Ernie Pyle in his interest in people. With him you meet Harry King Burgwyn, "boy colonel" of the 26th North Carolina, just turned twenty-one, who slugged it out with Col. Henry A. Morrow of the 24th Michigan until few survived on either side. You feel the patriotic surge of white-haired William Barksdale, who led his Mississippians on the "grandest charge of the war" and died as he broke the Federal line. You sense the magnetism of Hancock the Superb, and feel the driving power of rugged Uncle John Sedgwick as he hurried his big VI Corps to the battlefield. With Old Man Greene you struggle in the darkness to save the Culp's Hill trenches. And much more. Mr. Tucker weaves in many sharp thumbnail biographical sketches without slowing the action. Many North Carolinians, previously slighted, here receive their due.

Some historians, believing Lee "ought to have won, " write of the battle looking for a villain -- Longstreet, Ewell, Stuart -- who spoiled Lee's effort. Like Lee, Mr. Tucker seeks no scapegoat. He believes that, although the Confederates made some mistakes in timing and failed to make the best use of their artillery, the decisive factors were in small part luck and in large part individual character, often of subordinate commanders.

Full, dramatic, immediate, here is Gettysburg.