Regrettysburg

Poet's Coroner

Mr. Peperium

A recent post in this space recounted a long-ago game night at the Peperium household. It involved one of those strategy-and-tactics affairs Avalon-Hill put out in the 70’s. Taking place years before the Internet, the game was played on a flat, board-like surface. There were also, I recall, plenty of unit counters and unit arrival schedules and odds tables—all the math required to resolve combat being done on scraps of paper. The subject of the game was even more dated than the manner of play: it re-created the Battle of Gettysburg.

Ok, so it’s not the kind of marital revelation that’s going to lead me to quit golf. But wait, there’s more. The “interesting” part of the post—the part that set the comment thread abuzz and had Crackie quietly rocking on his barstool at his club in barely suppressed mirth—was the revelation that I had “allowed” Mrs. P to be the Confederates. When it was added that Mrs. P won, well, I think Crackie fell off his stool. All our other regular readers (both of them) were probably suffering similarly. After all, they know I spend my precious leisure hours knee-deep in history, usually of a military nature. I mean, the irony of it all, right?

Of course, Mrs. P’s posts are seldom sometimes always thought-provoking (Hon, don’t you have somewhere to go?) This one provoked me to reconstruct what exactly happened on that fatal evening. How, I asked myself, could I have thrown away both my moral and intellectual ascendancy over my new bride? Squandered my chance at having her look up to me as a King among men—and thus any chance of talking her into doing creative things with aerosol cheese? Oddly enough, it was an essay by James McPhearson that provided the answer to those and other probing questions.

In American Victory, American Defeat, McPhearson addresses, among other things, the tendency of some schools of history to a rigid determinism. If the Union won the war, then that outcome must have been inevitable. McPhearson counters this with the notion of historical contingency: Americans won their independence from Great Britain against far more daunting odds than the Confederacy faced in 1861. 40 years before our Civil War the Greeks triumphed over the Turks. A little bit further back, the Greeks managed the same thing against the Persians. The whole thing can be summed up neatly in the reassuring words of the Honorable Gallahad Threepwood: “Chin up. I’ve seen stickier things than this come out alright.” 

In our Civil War one of the stickiest of those things was the Battle of Gettysburg. And after reading McPhearson’s essay I started thinking about what I had done wrong in that game all those years ago. As Mrs. P said, I had done everything I should have done—I had followed the battle plan, right? Thinking about it in the light of McPhearson’s essay it suddenly occurred to me: No, I hadn’t. Not because I had failed to understand the plan, but because there was no plan to understand. In the best tradition of historical contingency Hancock, Howard, Meade and Co had reacted to a fluid situation as it unfolded from moment to moment and won a (limited) victory.

What I had done on the game board was simply seize the famous “fish hook” line. On the first day of battle I hadn’t bothered trying to forestall A. P. Hill’s Third Corps around the Lutheran Seminary or Ewell’s Second north of town around the almshouse. More than that, on the second day I hadn’t thrown Sickle’s Third Union Corps forward to the Peach Orchard to form the infamous salient. I had just occupied the place history told me the battle had been won on: the high ground between Culp’s Hill and the Roundtops.

After all, didn’t history let me know beforehand that the fight on McPhearson’s Ridge against Hill was a losing proposition? And even more emphatically, didn’t history teach that Sickle’s salient among the tree-fresh produce was a near-disastrous mistake? When I marched everything I had onto Cemetery Ridge, Cemetery Hill, Culp’s Hill and the Roundtops, I figured it was all over except the snide remarks.

But when the smoke had cleared the snide remarks, as anyone who reads this blog knows, came from an entirely different quarter.

 Why?

 Historical contingency, of course. In other words, it was the “mistakes” as much as the “brilliant decisions” that won the fight for the Union. Back when I worked on the Ford account (no, I’m not getting off topic) we were charged with telling people about things called “crumple zones”. These were areas built into Ford products specifically designed to progressively collapse, absorbing the shock of a collision and diminishing it before it reached the passengerss of the car. I began thinking of McPhearson’s Ridge on the first day and Sickles salient on the second day—especially Sickle’s salient on the second day—as the military equivalent of crumple zones: giving the Confederate assaults something they had to wade through before they reached the main Union position.

Granted, in both cases that “main Union position” had not been established yet. Cemetery and Culp’s Hills had to be occupied in a hurry with fragments of commands left over from fighting north of town on the first day, and Meade and Hancock had to look pretty slippy on the second day too, shoving whoever he could find into the space where Third Corps should have been. But it’s just as true that the Confederate attacks that rolled over McPhearson’s Ridge and the Peach Orchard paid a stiff price in casualties and daylight. The shadows were getting long on July 1^st when Ewell began contemplating an early evening assault on Cemetery and Culp’s Hills. Likewise, on July 2^nd Law’s brigade approached Little Round Top and it’s fabled meeting with Vincent’s brigade with just a few daylight hours to spare. And while they arrived relatively fresh, the rest of their division—the men who could have provided decisive support—had spent themselves fighting their way through Sickle’s ill-conceived but stubborn (Bigelow’s Battery is just one example) salient.

In other words, with all the hubris of a grad student incautiously asked about his thesis or an actor who’s been given talking points from the latest conference of green scientists, I stood revealed as a historical determinist. Like, who knew?

Comments

[Robbo]

I think there's a certain natural attraction in historickal determinism as a kind of refuge: If you start playing the What If game - If J.E.B. Stuart had done his job tracking the Union Army, if Longstreet had persuaded Lee to break off and find a good defensive position...Heck, if Meade had gone with his own preference to fall back to Plum Creek...well, you can quickly find yourself in a state of madness contemplating all those roads not taken, especially when you realize that they are literally infinite.

But never mind all that. In fact, I for one am glad that you suffered defeat because I have been amusing myself ever since I read that post with a vision of Mrs. P decked out as a Scarlett O'Hara in butternut uniform saying, "Suh, you are mah priz'nah!"

[Crackie]

I remember the era when Mr. P's posts got hardly any comments--creating yet another awkward situation from time to time in the P hosehold. So I am happy to say that this was a very interesting reflection, Mr. P. By the by, I have a seat belt on my bar stool for just such moments as my reading of Mrs. P's initial account. And I am still skeptical about the claim that Mr. P won the Regrettysburg rematch (Re-Regrettysburg?) fair and square.

[Old Dominion Tory]

Excellent thoughts on numerous topics, Mr. Peperium.