KEGEL : North with Lee and Jackson (fülszöveg)
For generations, historians have seen the campaigns of the Confederacy largely as opportunistic entities, unconnected with those that came before or those that followed. Jefferson Davis's policy of the offensive-defensive — waiting for the enemy to attack, but being ready to make limited initiatives when the opportunity afforded — seemed to dictate such a posture.
But James A. Kegel's challenging new book, North with Lee and Jackson: The Lost Story of Gettysburg, offers a different interpretation. Looking at the events in Virginia from 1861 to 1863, he sees a connected series of offensive plans all designed to take the war to the enemy — to wage it on Northern soil and do maximum physical and psychological damage to the Union. First to last, the strategy was championed by General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson.
Taking the war from the first guns in Virginia through the opening of the fighting on July 1, 1863, Kegel shows how two years of Confederate strategy-making by Jackson and Robert E. Lee led inevitably to the invasion of Pennsylvania and its denouement at Gettysburg. Ironically, Jackson was not there to see the culmination of his dream at Gettysburg, but certainly he was there in spirit and, Kegel argues, the Army of Northern Virginia might not have been there at all but for him.
This is revisionist history of the best kind: solidly researched, crafted over a period of nearly twenty years, informed by mature deliberation, and written by a car ful journalist. North with Lee and Jackson rewrites much of what we thought we knew about the Gettysburg Campaign and of the first two years of the life of the Confederacy in the East. It cannot be ignored.
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| KATALÓGUS | TARTALOM |
