A lesson learned from THREE ROADS TO GETTYSBURG, by Tim McGrath

Sometimes the people you should follow are the quiet competent ones, rather than the loud and boisterous ones.

    With the latest book I finished, I noticed that a lot of my recent entries have concerned the Civil War era and Russian history. which is merely an accident of which new History books I've gravitated to in my bookstores; the next titles in my queue concern radically different topics, so we'll get some variety back into this blog! That said, I greatly enjoyed Tim McGrath's Three Roads to Gettysburg as summer reading, as he does well at relaying military history while also not losing sight of the larger implications of the war (though most have gotten better in recent generations, Civil War historians were long notorious for knowing every minutia of every battle, while not wanting to talk at all about what the Northern and Southern soldiers were actually fighting for, ahem ahem...). In connecting the lives and stories of Abraham Lincoln, George Meade, and Robert E. Lee, there is an intriguing theme that emerges from McGrath's narrative. None of these men were particularly loud or boisterous, and that made them overlooked for long stretches of their careers, and yet they all became terrific and iconic leaders in their own way, and in the process they often bested far more flamboyant rivals who would initially hog the spotlight from them. That is a lesson very relevant for the modern world; gravitating toward the loudest and most confident men, at the expense of the quietly competent, can be a recipe for disaster.

    I've covered Lincoln's story and background pretty extensively in previous blogs, but he's unsurprisingly the moral heart of McGrath's book. Lincoln spent much of his life in relative anonymity, only becoming the leader the nation needed as the crisis of slavery's expansion gripped American politics in the 1850's. Throughout his political rise, Lincoln faced a variety of loud and boisterous rivals (most notably the ragingly racist Illinois politician Stephen Douglas), and he overcame them by maintaining a calm and friendly demeanor while never losing his core moral that slavery had to be put "on the path to ultimate extinction." Lincoln recedes into the background of the narrative for the actual Battle of Gettysburg--he was, by his own admission, no military expert and spent most Civil War battles nervously pacing telegraph offices awaiting news--and comes back for the book's finishing touch, as his brief, legendary speech so beautifully told the world what higher principles drove the Union war effort (fun trivia: I naturally make my kids study the Gettysburg Address, and they are always stunned both by how short and how readable it still is, given how scary huge 19th century-era speeches usually are to them).

    For much of McGrath's narrative, he focuses on the stories of Robert E. Lee and George Meade, the generals who actually duked it out on the battlefield of Gettysburg. Neither man was thought of as a brilliant general at the beginning of the war; in fact, both were far more known for their skills at organization and engineering. Their quiet, calm competence in battle was in stark contrast to the more cocky generals who were given commands in the early days of the war (in their different ways, both Lee and Meade had to overcome the obstacle of the main Union commander George McClellan, whom I read about prior to creating this blog but was truly one of American History's most insufferable and obnoxious characters). Lee's story is well-known, discussed, and debated, but I actually found McGrath's analysis of Meade's leadership to be the most fascinating. Even though he was the general who actually won at Gettysburg, Meade was long a footnote of History, both because of the more famous achievements of his fellow Union generals Ulysses Grant and William Sherman, and because some of his own subordinates dismissed his leadership after the war (largely covering up their own failures in the process). Recent historians have more seriously examined Meade and found a quietly competent general who never sought glory and never lead a spectacular charge, but whom nonetheless brought a calm sense of competence to a flailing Union army that was in desperate need of it. For my part, I was completely clueless prior to reading McGrath's book that the old engineer Meade was actually a brilliant lighthouse builder, designing renovations that made those crucial markers more reliable for decades after his own death.

    Overall, McGrath's book is a well written analysis of three men who became iconic leaders of their generation, even though none of them had particularly loud or flashy personalities. McGrath's book focuses on military history but does not lose sight of the larger social battles of the Civil War generation, and in the process he is honest about each man's flaws and blind spots. Even the most devoted Lincoln admirers admit his record toward Native Americans left something to be desired, and Meade for a while was far too close with the Union Army's traditional conservative leadership that was quite happy to dodge the slavery debate. Unsurprisingly, Lee's moral hypocrisies are most prominent; while the old slaveowner did emancipate his own slaves during the war, all of his pleas to his army to respect civilian property and rights did nothing to protect African-Americans from being terrorized by Confederate soldiers throughout the Gettysburg campaign (as McGrath notes, Lee either had to know what was happening or was being willfully ignorant). By taking a thorough and balanced view of Civil War History, McGrath tells a fascinating tale of three flawed but talented men who through their quiet competence lead their country as far as they were able, and showed the importance of respecting such personalities in the wake of louder, more arrogant leaders.