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FIVE BEST
Seven Score and Three Years Ago
Top books on Gettysburg.

BY GABOR BORITT
Saturday, July 1, 2006 12:00 a.m.

1. "Gettysburg" by Stephen W. Sears (Houghton Mifflin, 2003).

A first-class writer and splendid historian--a combination to be cherished--gives us the best book on America's most famous battle. Sears smoothly integrates up-to-date scholarship that has enriched our understanding of the battle since Edwin Coddington's "The Gettysburg Campaign" (1968), a classic but one that few can slog their way through. Sears has strong opinions. His Robert E. Lee fails to manage his subordinates well, and George Meade, "unexpectedly and against the odds," thoroughly outgenerals him. Only Civil War buffs will find things to argue about in this gripping account of the military moment that helped save the nation.

2. "The Colors of Courage" by Margaret Creighton (Basic Books, 2005).

The Civil War came, in big way, to just one Northern town, and Creighton brings alive the time and the place through the vivid stories of 15 individuals, obscure and forgotten witnesses to the battle at Gettysburg. Through their portraits, we're shown how the bloodletting that took place transformed ordinary people, moving them to behave in extraordinary ways--as when a young woman given to swooning at the very sight of blood is changed into one who goes about nursing horribly mangled soldiers. Creighton does a superb job of weaving these noncombatants' stories into those of the battle itself.

3. "The Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara (David McKay, 1974).

The difficulty historians have in bringing the past to life stems from the need to stick to facts--a problem fiction writers don't face. What a general Lee or Longstreet actually felt as he struggled over tactics we can never know. Novelist Michael Shaara nevertheless provides a persuasive imaginative account of these soldiers and of the battle. Shaara conveys the costs in graphic detail as we follow such actual participants as Joshua Chamberlain--former college professor and determined Union soldier: "He stood up. Pain in the right foot, unmistakable squish of blood." Shaara skillfully takes us into the minds of the combatants--and on an extraordinarily rewarding journey.

4. "Haskell of Gettysburg" edited by Frank L. Byrne and Andrew T. Weaver (State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1970).

The best account of the battle by a participant is to be found in a hundred pages of this volume of letters, written by Union soldier Lt. Frank Haskell to his brother. Many suspect that Haskell wrote with future publication in mind. It doesn't matter. Despite using the era's flowery language, he succeeded in transmitting details of the fighting accurately and with remarkable immediacy. ("Men are dropping dead or wounded on all sides, by scores and by hundreds, and the poor mutilated creatures, some with an arm dangling, some with a leg broken by a bullet, are limping and crawling towards the rear. They make no sound of complaint or pain. . . . A sublime heroism seems to pervade all.") It is telling that when Haskell returned to Gettysburg four months later for the battlefield's dedication as a national cemetery, he left in mid-ceremony. The civilian throngs, he said, despite their reverence, had no idea of the horrors that had taken place on those grounds. Haskell died the following spring at the battle of Cold Harbor.

5. "Lincoln at Gettysburg" by Garry Wills (Simon & Schuster, 1992).

Around the world, "Gettysburg" brings to mind not so much the battle as the name Abraham Lincoln and the address he delivered there. In Wills's rendering, the Civil War president managed, in some 270 words, to remake the U.S. into a nation dedicated to equality of the races, creating out of Gettysburg's ravages a new understanding, a new vision, for the country. Wills's prose is scintillating, but his central message is a bit overcooked. Lincoln was, indeed, the greatest of American presidents, and the Gettysburg Address a sublime work. But the speech did not remake America, much less the world, as Wills suggests. Still, that the book's main thesis is dead wrong in its excess should take little away from the pleasure of reading it.

Mr. Boritt, director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, is the author of the forthcoming "The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows" (Simon & Schuster).

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