“The” Turning Point of the War: The Wilderness, not Gettysburg
I was working at the Wilderness today, and I couldn’t think of a better place to be sitting in the wake of the Gettysburg sesquicentennial. Why? Well, while throngs of people stare at the bronze tablet by the copse of trees along Gettysburg’s Cemetery Ridge, I’m hanging out on the battlefield where the war’s most significant turning point really took place.
Zac Cowsert’s outstanding post earlier today did an excellent job of deconstructing the very notion of “a” turning point. The war had many. But here in the Wilderness, where Ulysses S. Grant chose to go to the left and the south around Robert E. Lee’s army on the evening of May 7, 1864, the very nature of the entire war changed.
Read on, Macduff, at Emerging Civil War.
Zac Cowsert’s outstanding post earlier today did an excellent job of deconstructing the very notion of “a” turning point. The war had many. But here in the Wilderness, where Ulysses S. Grant chose to go to the left and the south around Robert E. Lee’s army on the evening of May 7, 1864, the very nature of the entire war changed.
Read on, Macduff, at Emerging Civil War.