James Reasoner. Gettysburg. Cumberland House, 2001.

Well, the last book I reviewed turned out to be fifth in a series. Gettysburg turns out to be sixth in a series of ten novels, each named for a battle of the American Civil War. I was interested to see how this book deals with the battle I am probably most familiar with. I have visited Gettysburg and toured the battlefield—I have done that at a number of historic sites connected with both the Civil War and the American Revolution. But also my great-grandfather was a fourteen-year-old apprentice working in Gettysburg in 1863. He did not get there till after the battle, but heard Lincoln give his Gettysburg Address in November.

Reasoner’s Gettysburg is told from a Southern point of view. He follows the vagaries of five brothers from Culpeper in Northern Virginia. Four are in the Confederate Army and together cover a lot of what the CSA soldiers would experience. One is in Vicksburg. He is just mentioned in passing here; clearly, he will probably be the main character in Reasoner’s Vicksburg, number five in this series.

Titus Brannon is currently a prisoner in Camp Douglas in Illinois. Camp Douglas was the most notorious Union POW prison, sometimes called the Andersonville of the North. Yes, here the Union does not come across too well. As in the writings of Mary Chesnut or Henry Timrod, the Yankees typify pharisaical self-righteousness—at least most of them do. What complicates things is that everyone back in Virginia thinks Titus is dead. There was no Red Cross or Geneva Convention overseeing POWs back then and sending notes home. Some Quakers attempt to do their part with some success.

One of Titus’s fellow prisoners is his brother-in-law, Nathan. Nathan joined the Union Army but was imprisoned from a mistaken identity. He has come to loathe the North, too, because of his treatment at Camp Douglas, though he still believes slavery is wrong.

The main focus is on the two brothers in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia: Mac, a cavalryman under Jeb Stuart and Fitzhugh Lee, and Will, an infantryman. Because they are in very different units and usually miles from each other, they only run into each other from time to time. However, their peregrinations with the army keep the reader abreast of the travels of Lee from Virginia to Pennsylvania and the various skirmishes they have before the big one in Gettysburg.

Will is a Captain. He enlisted back when the war began but has been promoted. From his perspective we get a sense of what a typical Confederate infantryman would have experienced. As a junior officer, though, he is privy to some strategy sessions and orders, so we also get a sense of what A.P. Hill, Ewell, and others were thinking during the month leading up to the battle.

Macbeth “Mac” Brannon’s perspective gives us the closest sense of the Confederate command. He is an aide to General Fitzhugh Lee, who is just under Stuart in the cavalry’s chain of command and nephew of Robert E. (“Uncle Bob” to Fitzhugh). Mac has one of the best horses in the country, so he not only fights vigorously, but he also is often called upon to deliver messages to and from the command. Through his persona we get a good sense of what Lee and Stuart are thinking. Indeed, Stuart and both Lees are significant characters in the story.

One cannot help but compare this to probably the most famous novel about Gettysburg, The Killer Angels, upon which the film Gettysburg is based. That novel tells the story from both sides, focusing primarily on Lee and Longstreet for the South and Hancock and Chamberlain for the North. While there are also fictional characters who are important in the story, the personal narratives are mostly about the historical figures, unlike this Gettysburg which focuses on the Brannon family.

Besides the Southern sympathies expressed by the Brannons and other characters, Gettysburg has much more about the events leading up to the Gettysburg battle. We read about Brandy Station and Winchester, and a number of the skirmishes both the Stonewall Brigade and Stuart’s Cavalry get into. Since the series is more of an attempt to cover the whole war, we get an overview of what the armies in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania are doing between Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. Only chapters 21 through 23 out of 24 chapters in all are about the actual Battle of Gettysburg itself.

While The Killer Angels focuses on Little Round Top and Pickett’s Charge, Gettysburg deals more with Culp’s Hill—which changed hands and had its own share of brutal fighting—and the cavalry skirmishes of Stuart around Harrisburg and Hanover.

There is one curious parallel. The Killer Angels tells us a bit about a foreign military officer who is observing the Southern army, namely Arthur Fremantle, an attaché apparently assigned to help England determine whether or not to recognize or support the Confederacy. While Fremantle is mentioned on one page, Reasoner’s Gettysburg introduces us to another foreign military officer who also wrote about his experiences in the war, Johann Heros von Borcke (Reasoner spells it Borke). Borcke was a Colonel in the Prussian army and had immigrated to North America specifically to join the Confederate Army. I guess we will have to find a copy of his memoir and see what he has to say.

One slight literary allusion runs through the novel. All the Brannon siblings’ names are inspired by Shakespeare. Titus is Titus Andronicus, Macbeth is obvious, Will is William Shakespeare Brannon, Cory in Vicksburg is Coriolanus, and Nathan’s wife and the Brannons’ sister is Cordelia. There is also the youngest brother Henry, who is still at home keeping the family farm with his widowed mother. There are any number of Henrys, but we assume Henry V was his namesake.

There could be complications back home, too. Since everyone in Culpeper thinks Titus is dead, Henry and Titus’s wife are developing an interest in one another. Guess I will have to read the next novel to find out what happens: Kind of like reading Richard II through Richard III with the six Henry plays in between to learn English history during their civil war in the fifteenth century.

This book is slightly reminiscent of the nonfiction Witness to Gettysburg because it details a number of battles leading up to the big one in Pennsylvania. Unlike Witness to Gettysburg, this novel has no maps, a real liability for readers.