Meade and Lee After Gettysburg: The Forgotten Remaining Stage of the Gettysburg Marketing campaign, from Falling Waters to Culpeper Court docket Home, July 14-31, 1863

Jeffrey Hunt’s
Meade and Lee After Gettysburg: The Forgotten Remaining Stage of the Gettysburg Marketing campaign, from Falling Waters to Culpeper Court docket Home, July 14-31, 1863 exposes for Civil Battle readers what has been hiding in plain sight for 150 years: The Gettysburg Marketing campaign didn’t finish on the banks of the Potomac on July 14, however deep in central Virginia two weeks later alongside the road of the Rappahannock.

Opposite to standard perception, as soon as Robert E. Lee’s Military of Northern Virginia slipped throughout the swollen Potomac again to Virginia the Lincoln administration pressed George Meade to cross shortly in pursuit—and he did. Moderately than observe in Lee’s wake, nevertheless, Meade moved south on the east facet of the Blue Ridge Mountains in a cat-and-mouse sport to outthink his enemy and seize the strategic gaps penetrating the excessive wooded terrain. Doing so would entice Lee within the northern reaches of the Shenandoah Valley and probably carry in regards to the decisive victory that had eluded Union arms north of the Potomac.

The 2 weeks that adopted was a grand chess match with all the things at stake—excessive drama crammed with laborious marching, cavalry costs, heavy skirmishing, and set-piece combating that threatened to escalate into a significant engagement with the potential to finish the struggle within the Jap Theater. All through, one factor stays clear: Union troopers from personal to basic continued to worry the lethality of Lee’s military.

Meade and Lee After Gettysburg, the primary of three volumes on the campaigns waged between the 2 adversaries from July 14 by the tip of 1863, depends on the Official Information, regimental histories, letters, newspapers, and different sources to supply a day-by-day account of this fascinating high-stakes affair. The vivid prose, coupled with authentic maps and excellent pictures, presents a major contribution to Civil Battle literature.

Because of Hunt these necessary two weeks—till now overshadowed by the battle of Gettysburg and virtually utterly ignored by writers of Civil Battle historical past—have lastly gotten the eye they’ve lengthy deserved. Readers won’t ever view the Gettysburg Marketing campaign the identical manner.