Little Round Top A Detailed Tour Guide by Garry E. Adelman

Gettysburg is arguably the most-visited Civil War battlefield in the United States. Therefore, there are a lot of books written about it and one subsection of those books are battlefield guides—books that take all or part of the conflict and help the reader/tourist understand the fighting on a more detailed level.

If you visit Gettysburg regularly—and I do—then at a certain point you want books that will take you to a certain section of the battle and walk you through the action step by step. “Little Round Top” is one of these books, and it's definitely highly recommended.

Adelman looks at the fighting on Little Round Top from a chronological perspective, rather than by walking across the top of the hill that sits at the eye of the so-called fishhook formation created by General Meade to defend at Gettysburg. Therefore, while a person walking along with the book may be a bit flummoxed by why they start at one end of the hill, move to the other, and then back again, (especially if it's ninety plus degrees and they have a hernia) the logic becomes clear as you read the text.

Fighting in a Civil War battle is never clean and neat, with a row of fighting moving left to right. It's a chaotic mess occurring—at least hopefully if you're the attacking party—several places at once. In the case of the fighting at Little Round Top, there's a need to get the perspective of General Warren first. Adelman helps you get into the mindset of those there at the time by telling you what Warren saw from the same spot that you are standing on.

From there, it's a bit of a walk to get over to the scene of the fighting made famous by the movie Gettysburg, namely Chamberlain's 20^th Maine. Adelman walks you through the fighting by that famous regiment as well as its neighboring units, who actions were no less heroic—they just didn't get the top billing when the cameras rolled.

In this general area, there's a bit of nice commentary on the changing nature of the battlefield park. Sometimes we tend to think that the park comes into place whole, protecting things as they looked and nothing about it needs to be changed. Well, that's completely untrue. After all, there weren't neat paved roads, fences decay over time, and of course there's the constant threat of vandalism. Adelman helps the user of this guide understand the changing face of Little Round Top, winding it seamlessly into the narrative of the battle itself.

While the majority of the fighting did occur near Chamberlain's men, Adelman makes sure we know about the other troops involved that day. While their fighting was not quite as intense, other troops plugged the gap in the Union Line, preventing the Confederates from enacting their planned flanking maneuver. Warren grabbed troops from wherever he could, and by the end of the day (and the end of the walking tour), troops from New York and Pennsylvania manned the hill and kept the Confederates at bay, even doing a bit of late-day charging to make sure the position held the night.

The last stop on the tour is the location of an old amusement park on the battlefield. I wish I were kidding. Thankfully, we'd never stop to such crass commercialism today. Of course not.

As is appropriate for a work this detailed, Adelman gets into smaller work, such as the sweeping of the lower hill or the placement of little-known batteries of artillery. He also laces the work with pictures both old and modern to help the reader make sure they are in the right place. (Very key for a few of the harder-to-access locations.) There's also a set of visual challenges, though I did not attempt them.

Even though this is a small tour guide, Adelman notates all of his sources and references, just like a more formal work, should the tourist wish to delve into the material further. It's a nice extra touch that makes this such a well-constructed book.

One word of warning should you use this book—since it is nearly 10 years old now and the Park Service is working on redoing the battlefield, you may have a bit of trouble locating some of the tour stops. My friend—who's been to Gettysburg more times than I have and that's saying something—ran into a bit of trouble here and there. Also, when you go may play a large part in how adventurous you choose to be. I got mauled in briers and gave up trying to get across the face of the hill for location 7A.

With plenty of maps for each part of the tour and just enough description to aid the reader-viewer without bogging down into minutia, “Little Round Top” is a great book for veteran Gettysburg visitors to pick up and use on their next trip to the hallowed ground my friend refers to as the promised land.

On the Bloodstained Field by Gregory A. Coco

The Battle of Gettysburg is almost a cottage industry in and of itself, amongst a larger industry of putting out as many Civil War books as the reading publish will purchase. (At last count, this was more titles than dollar bills in the national debt.) It is particularly notable for being a battle that contains little dramatic stories that get collected into books like, "On the Bloodstained Field," a collection of "130 Human Interest Stories" as stated on its cover.

This is not to say that other battles lack human interest. A lot of more modern books on the war try to capture the feeling of the common solider, with varying results. It's just that Gettysburg, because of its name recognition, tends to draw more memories out of the woodwork, leading to a plethora of books in the style of this one.

If you are a fan of anecdotes, then this is a book you'll love. Short, sweet, and grouped into the different phases of the battle, each story tells a small part of the battle from those who experienced it, or at least their best memory of what happened. I admit that I am skeptical of a lot of the book's stories, simply because so many of them are memories from long after the war was over. Time heals all wounds and embellishes all good stories, just anyone who ever hears any of mind. (Coco does provide a source for all the stories--it's not like I'm saying he's made them up. I am simply of the opinion that tales recounted over the fireplace in 1893 need to be looked at carefully.)

This is a very typical example of the material within, called "The Twelfth Battle":

"Just before the Battle of Gettsyburg, Sergeant Edward B. Rollins of Company A, 15th Massachusetts Infantry, sent a card to his wife with the name of eleven battles he had fought, beautifully inscribed upon it. He left space for inscribing one more name, and wrote to her that after he had fought in his twelfth battle, he would come home.
"He was killed at Gettysburg on July 2 -- his twelfth battle."

Not unlike a Twilight Zone episode, no?

Some of the stories, such as Hampton's duel or John Burns' wounds, are things I've read before. Others are light fare like a man who shoots in the air to "scare" the enemy. While the topic is deadly serious and the tales are often poinent, the reading depth is light. It's a nice break from deeper, scholarly accounts and a fun read for those looking for another way to witness the battle or material to tell the kids on vacation.

Twilight at Little Round Top by Glenn W. LaFantasie

There are a ton of Civil War books out there, and of those books, tomes written about Gettysburg are probably the most numerous. Lord knows, I have at least a whole shelf of them, with more to come with each trip to the Battlefield.

As a result, the quality tends to vary rather wildly. Authors take different tacks, type in differing styles, utilize differing facts, and so on, to make sure their book has a hook or angle that makes people want to read it.

"Twilight" is no different, except that in this case, at least for me, the authorial voice was ham-handed and trying at every turn to be a book that emphasized sound bites and minimized historical detail. Perfect for your uncle who only wants to read maybe five Civil War books in his life, let alone five in a month preparing for a trip to Gettysburg. Not so perfect for a reader who's expecting a more serious treatment, especially when the book itself is so specialized.

And that, if I may be pardoned for starting a sentence with and, is why the book failed utterly for me. I don't expect a general Civil War book to read like a clinical text or a scholarly essay. I don't even expect an overview of a large battle, such as Gettysburg or Vicksburg or even Manassas to get into too much minutia.

However, when your book is about not just a specific day of a specific battle, but of a particular *part* of that specific day, I expect something along the lines of a research essay expanded to the level of a book. I suspect that's also what most people would think, so when you're reading a book geared more to the "hey, I just saw something on TV about the Civil War" set inside the cover of a detailed title, there's a disconnect you can't get over.

What I can't figure is the thinking behind the book. Surely this is too detailed an account for those who watched and enjoyed "Gettysburg" but don't plan on joining the Civil War Preservation Trust, yet it reads just that way.

Here are a few sample quotes to give you an idea:

"Too often we forget that the Civil War transformed America into a bloody carnival of death."

WHAT? I'd expect that as part of a tour program, but a serious Civil War study? I find it hard to believe that anyone reading this book is out there going, "eh, it was only several hundred thousand lives so I could bore the wife and kids on vacation." The only thing forgotten here is the audience!

"Long after the war, Longstreet tried self-servingly to free himself of blame for the defeat at Gettysburg and earned instead the vilification of his former Confederate comrades in the Army of Northern Virginia..."

Umm, first of all, Longstreet was right. Secondly, he became an ally of the Union Reconstruction, never having been all that keen on secession in the first place, even joining the Government after the Civil War in aid of his old friend, President Grant. The sentence above is a woeful oversimplification that might be excused in a more general text but is out of place here.

"Beneith the mettle of a young professional soldier was a romantic heart that could croon a ballad before wielding the sword."

Do I even need to comment on this one?

I feel like it's a little unfair to pull such smal quotes out like this, but I could not think of any better way to explain my problem with the writing style. At every opportunity, LaFantasie throws in some melodramic text, either about how awful it was to be a soldier, how desperate things were, or how no one knew if they were going to see the dawn.

That might be what appeals to a certain type of reader, but that certain type of reader isn't me.

In addition, a lot of the early part of the book is taken up by setting the stage for the events on Little Round Top. It's not something that needs to go on for nearly 100 pages of a specialized book. About 25 pages of scene-setting would have been plenty for a book with a narrow topic. It would be like talking about 20 years of elections for nearly half of a book called "2008: The Debates."

This is really getting negative, which is a shame because I did like some of this book. I didn't really know the details of Warren's desperate attemps to get troops up the hill without a prior road--here's a General who got down in the muck and personally assisted in getting an artillary piece on to Little Round Top--for example. I also like the idea of showing how chaotic the battle could be, how certain players moved about, and so forth. I feel like I had a better idea of what took place after reading the book.

The trouble is that I would have been even better informed had the author took a little less time to personalize the account--there are first-person diaries aplenty for that, and are a better read (they often lack the "drama" factor that is in high gear here)--and more time to ground the reader in plain english. In other words, more "Sgt. So-and-So tried hard to rally his troops around a rock outcropping you can still see today" and less "Sgt. So-and-So kept thinking about his brother on the other side of the battlefield."

Does this make me a heartless person that doesn't care about the Carnival of Death? Perhaps from the author's perspective. I admit I'm more interested in the military details than in the life stories of every person who ever wore blue or butternut and grey. But I think in his attempt to humanize the struggle, LaFantasie went too far, and turned dramatic tension into a set of stereotypical soap opera cliches. In addition, the book takes too much time to get to its real subject, overdoing the oversiplifications along the way. That dooms the book to failure, at least in my eyes.

The blurbs call this a "face of battle" account. I guess that's just not something I much care for. However, if you really like the human side of things and want to read more about Gettysburg than in the Park Guide or a Bruce Catton trilogy, then you might like this one better than I did. If you're a serious Civil War scholar, however, you should let this one hang back with the 6th Corps in reserve of better titles.