The Killer Angels
...different perspectives and faults, most have homogenous basic points. Two of these were General Robert E. Lee was a God among men, and that the brunt of the blame for the confederate loss at Gettysburg lies with General James Longstreet. In Michael Shaara’s book, The Killer Angels, Shaara takes these theories and tips them on their head. Shaara gives a compelling argument by humanizing the celestial Lee, and placing a great deal of the blame for the loss of Gettysburg, and thus the war, on his shoulders.
In the beginning of the novel, Shaara states that his motives for writing the book were to give the perspective of being there. Shaara made a point to draw our attention to this. A lot of the war is about the legacy of the characters that fought it, rather than the experience of enduring it. It is this perspective that separates Shaara’s novel from many of the others who have written similar novels. Instead of Lee being the gallant general who lead his brave men into battle, he is listed among several other generals who were just as much a part of those three fateful days as he was.
When the novel begins the night before the battle commences, Shaara starts the story by showing the conundrum that Lee begins with. Only a few short weeks earlier Lee had lost his most crucial, and important officer, Stonewall Jackson. Shaara introduced, right at the start, Jackson’s replacement, General James Longstreet (Shaara’s central character with Col. Chamberlain) , and the spy he has hired, Sorrel. Shaara demonstrated early that without Jackson, Lee doesn’t have the luster that most believed him to have. Lee’s scout, J.E.B. Stuart is no where to be found. Lee doesn’t even know that the Union army is practically on top of him. It was the night before a battle he didn’t even know he was about to fight.
Day one of the battle only continued Lee’s lack of...
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