The Colors of Courage

by Creighton, Margaret

• ISBN13: 9780465014569
• ISBN10: 0465014569
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-12-31
• Publisher: Basic Books

Summary

Gettysburg has been written about and studied in great detail over the last 140 years, but there are still many participants whose experiences have been overlooked. In augmenting this incomplete history, Margaret Creighton presents a new look at the decisive battle through the eyes of Gettysburg's women, immigrant soldiers, and African Americans.An academic with a superb flair for storytelling, Creighton draws on memoirs, letters, diaries, and newspapers to get to the hearts of her subjects. Mag Palm, a free black woman living with her family outside of town on Cemetery Ridge, was understandably threatened by the arrival of Lee's Confederate Army; slavers had tried to capture her three years before. Carl Schurz, a political exile who had fled Germany after the failed 1848 revolution, brought a deeply held fervor for abolitionism to the Union Army. Sadie Bushman, a nine-year-old cabinetmaker's daughter, was commandeered by a Union doctor to assist at a field hospital. In telling the stories of these and a dozen other participants, Margaret Creighton has written a stunningly fluid work of original history--a narrative that is sure to redefine the Civil War's most essential battle.

Author Biography

Margaret S. Creighton is Professor of History at Bates College. The author of Rites and Passages: The Experience of American Whaling, and co-editor of Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700-1920. She lives in Yarmouth, Maine.

Table of Contents

Introduction	vii
Maps	xxi
The Gettysburg Campaign, 1863 (Chronology)	xxv
PART ONE
Prologue: The Lay of the Land	3	(6)
CHAPTER ONE An Afternoon in the Badlands	9	(24)
CHAPTER TWO The Season of Disbelief	33	(16)
CHAPTER THREE Desolation's Edge	49	(22)
PART TWO
CHAPTER FOUR Flying Thick Like Blackbirds	71	(26)
CHAPTER FIVE Bold Acts	97	(26)
CHAPTER SIX The Wide Eye of the Storm	123	(22)
PART THREE
CHAPTER SEVEN The Aftermath	145	(18)
CHAPTER EIGHT The Seesaw of Honor; or, How the Pigpen Was Mightier than the Sword	163	(22)
CHAPTER NINE Women and Remembrance	185	(22)
CHAPTER TEN Making a Living on Hallowed Land	207	(26)
Afterword	233	(4)
Notes	237	(56)
Bibliography	293	(16)
Acknowledgments	309	(4)
Index	313