The Killer Angels still sings

“Very fine people on both sides” was one of the first Trumpisms to enter our national lexicon. In the heady days of 2017, when Donald Trump’s presence in the White House was still a novelty and liberal resistance at its peak, the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia precipitated a full-blown political crisis. Trump, in his inimitable fashion, clumsily suggested that those protesting the statue’s removal had a point, an argument that was widely interpreted as proof of his secret affinity for Confederate sympathizers, white supremacists and other far-right fanatics. In truth, Trump was awkwardly defending a version of the Civil War that has lately been eclipsed in our national consciousness.

Is Trump a history buff? Probably not, but he grew up in an era characterized by a certain consensus view of America’s bloodiest conflict. Roughly before Obama’s second term, a bipartisan understanding of the Civil War prevailed in middlebrow America. This was history as told by Ken Burns documentaries, battlefield monuments that paid tribute to both Union and Confederate soldiers, and The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the Battle of Gettysburg that turned fifty this year.

The Killer Angels is a fascinating novel to revisit in 2024 because it has become a historical artifact in its own right, a literary relic from an earlier era of America’s self-understanding. Of the book’s three major point-of-view characters, two of them — Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet — are Confederate generals. Throughout the book, southern officers are portrayed as misguided but basically honorable men fighting for an unworthy cause. The book was not, however, particularly sympathetic to the Confederacy’s war aims. The character most taken with the southern cause is a British officer attached to Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia as an observer. His predictions of an imminent southern victory turn out to be totally delusional.

The most prominent Union character, meanwhile, is Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the professor-turned-colonel who led the 20th Maine at the Battle of Little Round Top, an action that arguably saved the Northern army at Gettysburg, and hence changed the course of the war. Chamberlain is portrayed as an abolitionist and an idealist, but he leads a regiment from one of the most lily-white states in the union. At the beginning of the book, his brief encounter with a runaway slave marks the only appearance of a non-white character.

Shaara’s biography tells us something about the power of this historical consensus, or national mythology if you prefer, in late twentieth-century America. Despite his fascination with the war, Shaara was not descended from Connecticut Yankees or southern gentry. He was the son of Italian immigrants, whose youthful interest in the Civil War was fostered by books and history lessons and boyhood trips to old battlefields. In an era of pervasive identity politics, Shaara’s deeply felt connection to a chapter of American history he had no personal or familial links to is refreshing.

Fifty years later, The Killer Angels seems out of step with the times, probably because the institutions charged with preserving American memory have changed significantly since the book’s publication. In 1990, interest in the novel was revived by Ken Burns’s Civil War, a PBS documentary series that was watched by nearly 40 million Americans. The films’ success turned narrator Shelby Foote, the honey-tongued grandson of a Southern planter, into an overnight celebrity. Like The Killer Angels, Burns’s film was sympathetic to individual Southerners, even as it identified slavery as the war’s root cause and celebrated the Union’s ultimate victory.

Since then, Burns has adopted the language of modern progressivism, an approach that reflects broader changes within America’s academic and media institutions. Indeed, his career arc is an indicator of how dramatically ideas about American history have shifted, at least within the culture-making industries. In 1990, a term like “white supremacy” would have been reserved for outfits like the Klu Klux Klan. In 2024, Burns freely used this anachronism when discussing a documentary on the American Buffalo. And if today’s PBS commissioned a film that sympathetically portrayed Southern generals, there would probably be a staff revolt.

Yet the old Civil War consensus, which was capacious enough to acknowledge southern courage while celebrating Lincoln’s triumph and honoring abolitionist heroes like Frederick Douglas, had much to recommend. Beyond the carefully researched history and occasionally stirring writing, there are practical reasons to prefer The Killer Angels’ s ecumenical approach. Shaara never shied away from the bloodshed and horror of Gettysburg, but there is a redemptive quality to his narrative that suggests the possibility of reconciliation and progress after the war ends. The alternative brings to mind the acerbic left-wing critic Thomas Frank’s recent New York Times column, which opened with a visit to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Beneath an old painting, Frank observed, was a matter-of-fact description of America’s westward expansion as “settler colonialism.”   

We don’t know what Shaara would have made of the removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue from Charlottesville or the “very fine people” on both sides. His son expressed support for relocating certain monuments and adding historical context to others, a reasonable, middle-of-the-road prescription that bears little relation to what actually happened during the recent monument-toppling mania, which exiled Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt from New York City and removed a monument to Confederate war dead from Arlington Cemetery. Lee, who stands apart from other Confederate generals because his gracious surrender at Appomattox likely forestalled years of guerilla war, was nonetheless evicted from Charlottesville and Richmond. The Virginia university that bears his name went so far as to rewrite a memorial plaque to Traveller, Lee’s beloved warhorse.    

Meanwhile, Stone Mountain, an unabashedly triumphalist Confederate monument, still stands in Georgia. The progressive vision of American history, fixated as it is on our faults and failures, may have captured museums and universities, but it hasn’t overtaken the wider culture. Instead, it’s left a fragmented and uncertain landscape in its wake, where overt Confederate nostalgia rubs shoulders uneasily with joyless left-wing lectures on “white supremacy.” The Killer Angels is worth revisiting today because there is another way forward. All we have to do is look back.