36 Books Like Gettysburg--Culp's Hill and Cemetery Hill

Confederate soldiers spent much of their brief time in the Keystone State antagonizing Pennsylvania civilians.

I find Wynstra’s book particularly powerful because he shows how senior Confederate generals struggled to rein in their enlisted men’s overwhelming desire for revenge. Furious over what they perceived as Northern abuses on the Southern homefront, rank-and-file Confederates wanted Northern civilians to feel the brunt of the war.

As Wynstra also shows, African American civilians fared far worse than their white counterparts. Confederate soldiers, furious over years of Underground Railroad activity, seized free Blacks and carried them back south into enslavement.

I have long been a fan of this book, in part because it was among the first books to seriously look beyond the three-day battle of Gettysburg and recount the military actions that erupted in the lead-up to the famous battle.

Mingus writes about Confederate general Jubal Early’s advance through Gettysburg and York and all the way to the Susquehanna River, where Confederates fought with a hodgepodge force of Union militia that managed to prevent a Confederate river-crossing. Simply put, this book is a great choice for Civil War buffs who want to look beyond the histories of the three-day battle or for general readers hoping to expand their knowledge. 

A lot has been written about the Battle of Gettysburg’s decisive third day, but I find myself returning again and again to Jeffry Wert’s book.

Wert is a brilliant writer and story-teller, providing readers with enough tactical military history to understand the movements of both armies, but not too much that readers get lost in the shuffle. The result is a great, lucid read about the battle’s dramatic finale. 

Kent Masterson Brown takes something that is often relegated to an afterthought—that the defeated Confederate army slipped back into Virginia—and reveals how it profoundly shaped the course of the war.

Brown shows us that for defeated General Robert E. Lee, extricating the Confederate army from Pennsylvania was no simple task. The Confederate army may have lost the battle, but after reading Brown’s book, one could argue that it won the retreat. 

Kegel ties together threads in the early history of the war that have an impact on its later course.

These include the adoption of an offensive strategy that would push the war out of Virginia and into Pennsylvania. Kegel elevates the importance of Stonewall Jackson as a strategic thinker in particular and elucidates his influence on Robert E. Lee.

In my own studies, I have found that Jackson did indeed make suggestions Lee later followed, particularly when it came to offensive operations, but Kegel leaves out a key figure in his work - Jefferson Davis.

Like Jackson, Davis shared a preference for offensive action, but Davis did not adopt this opinion from Jackson. Similarly, Davis and Lee had discussed many times taking the fight to the enemy before Jackson became involved at a strategic level.

Lee then carried out Davis’s orders in September 1862 when he led his army across… show more.

This one isn’t fantasy at all. In fact, it’s probably the most accurate fictional retelling of the battle of Gettysburg out there. But I love it so much I had to list it here.

Furthermore, the characters involved—such as Lee, Longstreet, and Chamberlain—are deeply spiritual men, meaning that many pages meditate on the meaning of all this blood and loss. These meditations evoke a sense fantasy often can: that the visible world contains a mystery deeper than our limited minds can grasp. 

Yet the text remains deeply human. The Civil War pits brother against brother, friend against friend. In it, there is a great speech by Col. Chamberlain addressing his men which captures a theme of the book.

“This is a different kind of army,” he says. “If you look back through history you will see men fighting for pay, for women, for some other kind of loot. They fight… show more.

I actually think that Shaara has outdone his father. Both, of course, weave the story around actual historical events, although Shaara Junior’s introduction of fictional characters livens the narrative up. I’ve enjoyed all of Shaara’s books, regardless of their historical setting, but I chose this one because it was a good way for me to learn more about the Civil War post-Gettysburg and also have a really good read.

Murfin’s readable classic account of the battle takes readers deeper into the military movements and fighting action. His detailed maps further enrich readers’ understanding of the “who” and the “how” of Antietam’s battle. Adding considerable numbers of personal soldier stories, Murfin’s work takes readers closer to understanding the common soldier’s experience, while tying those experiences to the larger objectives of senior military officers. Although his analysis generally reflects an earlier era, knowing how the battle was understood during the Civil War’s centennial provides context for most current interpretations of America’s bloodiest day.    

This pamphlet, although only 24 pages, is one of the best first-hand depictions of Civil War nursing.  Miss Woolsey and her mother travelled to Gettysburg in the aftermath of the battle and immediately launched into the nursing ranks of the U.S. Sanitary Commission.  She published her account shortly after returning home, when her services were no longer needed.

Jocelyn Green does an amazing job of highlighting the complications of the Civil War with multi-faceted characters who have to examine their faith, their loyalties, and their own pasts and prejudices. With an intricate plot and a cast of layered characters, Widow of Gettysburg was one that kept me enthralled. Not only is the amount of research and details from history clearly evident, Green is a master at making both history and story leap from the page. This was one I couldn’t put down.