★★★★★ Gettysburg as seen by Chamberlain and Longstreet

The Killer Angels

Michael Shaara

Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels may be the best historical novel I've ever read. (The only close competitor would be Herman Wouk's Winds of War duology, but that is so different in nature as not to be comparable.) My admiration of The Killer Angels is of course widely shared. It won a Pulitzer in 1975 and many other awards.

The Killer Angels tells the story of the Battle of Gettysburg from the points of view of some of the military leaders involved. There are 23 chapters. Seven are told from the point of view of Union colonel Joshua Chamberlain, six from the point of view of Confederate general James Longstreet. The third-most featured is Confederate commander-in-chief Robert E Lee, who gets four chapters. I was surprised that so much attention was given to two relatively obscure (to me, at the time) men. Now I know all you Civil War buffs out there are scoffing at me for calling Chamberlain and Longstreet "obscure". Fair enough. But I am not, I think, telling a lie when I say that a kid who learned what he or she knew about the American Civil War in public school in the northeastern USA might never have heard the names of Chamberlain and Longstreet, or at least not heard them in such a way as to be likely to remember a few years later. That was me.

The Killer Angels was the first step in remedying this educational defect. Although still far from expert on the Civil War, I have read many a book (including, for instance, Shelby Foote's masterful Civil War trilogy, not to mention that I am at this moment reading Elizabeth Varon's new biography of Longstreet). And I spent one of the more memorable days of my life wandering around Gettysburg National Military Park.

Chamberlain is in one way an obvious choice for point of view, because he led one of the most exciting and important actions of the battle, the Defense of Little Round Top. Longstreet is a less obvious choice. Longstreet's role in the battle became controversial because after the war he became a Radical Republican -- a prominent defender of the rights of black people. For this he was vilified as a traitor by Lost Cause Confederate veterans and retroactively blamed for the loss at Gettysburg. Shaara's picture of Longstreet is relatively sympathetic.

If you want an exciting, readable, yet for the most part detailed and accurate fictional presentation of one of the most important battles in American history, you will not do better than The Killer Angels.

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