The Killer Angels Turns Fifty
The Killer Angels: It sounds like an apocalyptic thriller about dark spiritual forces. Only the first page – and the picture on the cover – reveal that this is a novel about an event that reached its climax 161 years ago, today: the battle of Gettysburg.
This year, the fiftieth birthday of Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, commemorating Gettysburg’s anniversary ought to include appreciating the novel that I suspect has done more than any other book to shape the public image of the battle in recent decades.
Early on, The Killer Angels won Shaara the prestige of the Pulitzer Prize, but it failed to gain him the love of readers. “Growing up in my father’s house, he was mostly unsuccessful or unhappy about his work,” Shaara’s son, Jeff, lamented in 2000 to the Daily Record of York, Pennsylvania, a paper published thirty miles from Gettysburg. “Even with a Pulitzer Prize, he couldn’t make enough money writing.” Instead, Michael Shaara was making a living as an English professor when he died in 1988, at only fifty-eight. The son added that his father “never was a success while he was alive. He had no idea what he left behind.”
But when The Killer Angels was adapted into the 1993 movie Gettysburg it at last became a bestseller. Now, signs of people’s love for The Killer Angels – or at least the film it inspired – are not hard to find. Historians are slow to praise historical fiction, but The Killer Angels is exceptional. Williamson A. Murray, author of the chapter that discusses the American Civil War in The Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare, said The Killer Angels “tells us more about the battle than most histories.” James M. McPherson, long the dean of Civil War scholars, called it his “favorite historical novel” in a blurb printed on the cover of a reprint of The Killer Angels and told the New York Times that it “provides the most incisive insights into the various meanings of the war for the men who fought it.” A metal band and a folk band have both written songs based on it. According to historian Allen C. Guelzo, the novel is one reason “visitors to the Gettysburg battlefield could buy keychains, t-shirts, and Christmas ornaments adorned with” pictures of a figure who was obscure a century after the battle. I have personally encountered many people who appreciate The Killer Angels, starting with my dad, who read me parts of the book – bleeping out the damns – when I was about nine. That was when The Killer Angels became one of my favorite books. Soon after, when I gave a speech to my homeschool group as a historical character I admired, I chose Brig. Gen. John Buford, one of the central characters in The Killer Angels, used the novel as the source for my speech, and even gestured toward a map that came from the book.
The Killer Angels is a tragedy, an homage to obscure people who change the course of history, and an account of how the United States forsook tradition for modernity. It is not a work of history, though it sometimes feels like it. Shaara said, “I have not consciously changed any fact,” used mostly real people as characters, and structured the story with the real events of Gettysburg. Nevertheless, making up the old Union soldier Pvt. Buster Kilrain and cutting his anchors to the historical sources by inventing dialogue and inner monologues makes The Killer Angels a work of fiction.
The story centers on the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and the Union Army of the Potomac, the two largest forces fighting over possibly the most significant and certainly the most iconic terrain of the Civil War, the one hundred miles of Virginia between Richmond and Washington. By mid-1863, the Army of Northern Virginia, led by Robert E. Lee, had repeatedly bamboozled and humiliated the Army of the Potomac, led by a succession of generals fatally flawed by timidity, incompetence, and ego. Just off his most spectacular feat, taking gut-churning chances to defeat an army more than twice as large as his at Chancellorsville in May 1863, Lee invaded the North the next month. But the Army of Northern Virginia was not what it once was. Lee’s right-hand man, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, was mortally wounded at Chancellorsville, leaving James Longstreet as Lee’s only reliable high-ranking subordinate. Still, momentum was with the Confederates. The Union could have been forced to sue for peace and the United States partitioned if the Army of the Potomac suffered defeat on the upper side of its namesake river.
Shaara characterizes the Confederacy as traditional, English, and aristocratic. He dramatizes this through the characters he chooses to focus on. He pays most attention to Lee and Longstreet, the Confederate high command, and he also gives significant attention to Arthur Fremantle, a starry-eyed observer from the military of monarchical Britain.
The Union is modern, a preview of the future of the United States. The Army of the Potomac is “a polyglot mass” containing “strange accents and strange religions and many who do not speak English at all. Nothing like this army has been seen upon the planet.” It is urban. And Fremantle notes that its “only aristocracy is the aristocracy of wealth.”
Shaara dramatizes the North’s lack of aristocracy by showing little of the Union high command, focusing instead on the perspectives of Union officers of lower rank. The first of these is Buford, commander of a division of cavalry, a fed-up professional who scorns his blundering superiors, “an odd man” who “had been too long out in the plains.” On June 30, he rides up to Gettysburg and recognizes that “the high ground” southeast of town offers the Army of the Potomac a strong defensive position. He stations his troopers northwest of town to fight a delaying action then summons infantry reinforcements to seize what he has discovered. On July 1, a much larger Confederate force stumbles into his cavalry, but Buford’s men hold because he has them fight dismounted and because they are some of the few armed with repeating rifles in an age of single-shot muzzle-loaders. The infantry arrives in time and establishes a fishhook-shaped line on the ground Buford has chosen.
Lee arrives with the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia. He plans to repeat his past successes and hit the Army of the Potomac with a devastating assault commanded by Longstreet. Longstreet is the odd man out in the Army of Northern Virginia. Fremantle notices how English the names of the Confederate officers are – but discovers an unwelcome exception when someone points out that Longstreet is Dutch. Longstreet is the army’s one representative of modernity. Lee “believes absolutely in God” and leaves the results of battle to Him. Longstreet believes God is dead. Embittered over the recent deaths of his children, he finds that “there was no one there and no words came” when he tries to pray. Lee attacks out of confidence in the power of human virtue – the men’s “courage” and “faith” – and out of principle, because “a man of honor” cannot retreat unless he has been clearly defeated. Longstreet believes modern weapons – rifles – have made offense too dangerous. He has little use for honor, but “his theories on defensive warfare,” Shaara writes, “are generations ahead of his time.” While he respects Lee, he sees his aggression as “old Napoleon and a hell of a lot of chivalry.” Longstreet counsels Lee to leave Gettysburg, move around the Union’s left flank, and take up a strong defensive position elsewhere, but Lee’s success has birthed the fatal flaw of hubris.
Reluctantly obeying Lee, Longstreet hits the Union left flank on July 2. Once again, the great man is foiled by a middle-rank Union officer, Col. Joshua Chamberlain, a rhetoric professor until the war came, commander of the Twentieth Maine. Like Longstreet, Chamberlain is a modern man. Unlike Longstreet, whose modernism is pragmatic, Chamberlain represents an ideologically driven modern man. “He had grown up believing in America and the individual,” Shaara writes, “and it was a stronger faith than his faith in God.” To Chamberlain, this “new faith” demands that each man “stand up free of the past, free of tradition and blood ties and the curse of royalty and become what he wished to become.” This will be achieved by destroying slavery and the South’s aristocracy and establishing equality among “all these former Poles and English and Czechs and blacks.” Chamberlain believes American ideals will eventually spread all around the world. His men occupy the leftmost position of the Union line high up on Little Round Top. If they withdraw, they place the Army of the Potomac at risk of having its flank rolled up like a carpet. With ammunition running low, Chamberlain uses an unorthodox maneuver to stave off one last assault.
The Confederate tragedy culminates on July 3. Longstreet warns Lee against an attack. “They will break,” Lee replies and orders Longstreet to hit the center of the Union line with three divisions. One is led by George Pickett, a curly-haired fop who “whooped with joy” when ordered to join the charge that will one day bear his name. On June 30, before the battle begins, cynical Buford predicts that Union troops will end up attacking Confederate forces on the high ground at Gettysburg and that they will go “straight up the hillside, out in the open in that gorgeous field of fire, . . . will attack valiantly and be butchered valiantly, and afterward men will thump their chests and say what a brave charge it was.” Buford proves prophetic – except that in reality the identities of the armies are flipped.
It is easy for historical fiction to descend into costume drama: stories that make their main contribution by giving readers the pleasure of seeing the past brought to life. Jeff Shaara became a prolific author by imitating his father’s style in stories on the Civil War, Mexican War, American Revolution, and First and Second World Wars. For providing readers – including me – with echoes of The Killer Angels Jeff deserves gratitude, but none of these books achieve greatness.
Jeff Shaara wrote more than his father, but only The Killer Angels rises to the level of literature. Michael Shaara achieved this by distilling the past into a few key plot points, rather than merely putting it on display, and by his great writing. His narrative voice is restrained but dramatic and peppered with memorable phrases. Chamberlain “dreamed of Maine and ice black water; he awoke to a murderous sun.” Buford sensed “an idea . . . blowing in his brain.” Shaara is the first author I have ever read who uses “gloom” as a verb. His dialogue sounds the way real people talk – or at least how they would want to talk. Confederate general Lewis A. Armistead remarks of his men: “Never saw anything like it in the old army. They’re off on a Holy War. The Crusades must have been a little like this. Wish I’d a been there. Seen old Richard and the rest.” “They never took Jerusalem,” Longstreet replies.
Even where it is intending to convey the facts, The Killer Angels is not always right. Most of Buford’s men fired Sharps carbines. Because they were breechloaders, they could be fired rapidly, but they were not repeaters. According to Guelzo’s 2013 history of Gettysburg, Chamberlain’s “flair for self-promotion” helped him to turn fighting on “more of an outpost than the real flank of the Union line” into a plumped-up reputation. Some recent historians including Guelzo have begun to say that battle’s added lethality from the adoption of the rifle shortly before the Civil War is overrated.
Still, these are minor quibbles. The Killer Angels is a rare marriage of history and great fiction, and its stirring pages are worth reading every time the first three days of July roll around.