A few years after writing this entry (2005), I picked up in a second-hand bookstore a work titled "Lost Triumph: Lee's Real Plan at Gettysburg--and Why It Failed" by Tom Carhart. The principle hypothesis in it is that Stuart's action at East Calvary Field around the same time as Pickett's Charge was actually a coordinated attempt by Lee to have Stuart turn the Federal right flank and charge up the Baltimore Pike, hitting the Union rear at (hopefully) the same time Pickett was arriving at their front.
Carhart rallies a good amount of circumstantial evidence to lay out his case, but in the end there's the underlying problem that there doesn't seem to be anything explicit in any general's memoirs or after-battle reports which would be a smoking gun, to the effect of "Well, we were planning to hit them front and rear at Gettysburg, too bad it didn't work out." The counterpoint would be, well, what then exactly was Stuart doing way out in East Calvary that required that large a force moving towards the Union lines? The traditional belief that he was just holding the Confederate flank doesn't hold well, either: you don't typically hold a flank by massing one's calvary and going forward, then responding to what looks like token resistance with an all-out calvary charge.
The more macro lesson I took from it is that doing historical research off of often fragmentary evidence doesn't lend itself to easy answers, and often results in multiple interpretations even when working from the same texts.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-06-18 01:08 am (UTC)Carhart rallies a good amount of circumstantial evidence to lay out his case, but in the end there's the underlying problem that there doesn't seem to be anything explicit in any general's memoirs or after-battle reports which would be a smoking gun, to the effect of "Well, we were planning to hit them front and rear at Gettysburg, too bad it didn't work out." The counterpoint would be, well, what then exactly was Stuart doing way out in East Calvary that required that large a force moving towards the Union lines? The traditional belief that he was just holding the Confederate flank doesn't hold well, either: you don't typically hold a flank by massing one's calvary and going forward, then responding to what looks like token resistance with an all-out calvary charge.
The more macro lesson I took from it is that doing historical research off of often fragmentary evidence doesn't lend itself to easy answers, and often results in multiple interpretations even when working from the same texts.