The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg's Forgotten History - Immigrants, Women, and African Americans in the Civil War's Defining Battle by Margaret S. Creighton
The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg's Forgotten History - Immigrants, Women, and African Americans in the Civil War's Defining Battle by Margaret S. Creighton
In the summer of 1863, as Union and Confederate armies marched on southern Pennsylvania, the town of Gettysburg found itself thrust onto the center stage of war. The three days of fighting that ensued decisively turned the tide of the Civil War. In The Colors of Courage, Margaret Creighton narrates the tale of this crucial battle from the viewpoint of three unsung groups -- women, immigrants, and African Americans -- and reveals how wide the battle's dimensions were.
With the arrival of the Confederate army in Pennsylvania's borderland, African Americans, free and fugitive alike, faced the very real possibility of capture and enslavement. In Gettysburg itself, civilian women were caught in the crossfire, as the homefront became the battlefront. At the same time, German Americans in the Union army -- particularly the "immigrant" Eleventh Corps -- faced the contempt of their adopted countrymen who considered them cowardly and unreliable. By taking readers beyond the fighting in the fields, The Colors of Courage transforms our understanding of the most important battle in American history.
A historian with a superb flair for storytelling, Creighton draws on memoirs, letters, diaries, and newspapers to bring to life the individuals at the heart of her narrative. Mag Palm, a free black woman living with her family near Cemetery Hill, was understandably threatened by the arrival of Lee's army; slavers had tried to capture her five years before. Like many of his fellow Germans, Carl Schurz was a political exile from Europe's failed 1848 revolution and brought a deeply held fervor for abolitionism to the Union army. Sadie Bushman, a cabinetmaker's nine-year-old 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 remarkable event.
Basic Books, Hardcover, 2005
THIS IS A BRAND NEW BOOK