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How Second Most Important July 4 in U.S. History Unfolded in 1863
‘The Killer Angels’ shows how the Battle of Gettysburg halted Gen. Robert E. Lee’s invasion of the North
An old joke says that South lost the Civil War because the Confederate Army “couldn’t win on the road.”
There’s some truth to the gallows humor. On July 4, 1863, Gen. Robert E. Lee withdrew after the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, halting his invasion of the North and helping to turn the tide of the war.
But the South couldn’t win at home, either. On the day Lee retreated from Gettysburg, the besieged city of Vicksburg, Mississippi, surrendered. That gave the Union Army control of the Mississippi River, a vital supply line and trade route. For 81 years, Vicksburg wouldn’t celebrate the Fourth of July.
Michael Shaara focuses on the Pennsylvania events in his 1974 historical novel, The Killer Angels (and the late historian Winston Groom gives a widely praised nonfiction account of the Mississippi siege in his 2009 book Vicksburg, 1863). Shaara, a New Jersey native, took a risk in trying to show Lee’s role at Gettysburg afresh: Southerners look askance at Yankees who lay claim to telling their history and the general’s life is well-trammeled ground.
