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The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg's Forgotten History: Immigrants, Women, and African Americans in the Civil War's Defining Battle

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History is written by the victors, or so the saying goes. Quite often, it is the disenfranchised that bears the brunt of histories rath, no more so than the groups outlined in Margaret S. Creighton's magnificent work, "The Colors of Courage".

So many books out there have painstakingly dissected the grand battle of Gettysburg, some tomes hundreds of pages long about just one day in the town. However, the stories contained here are rare and untold, and finally have seen the light of literature. And a finely crafted book it is.

Creighton, obviously relying on the sketchiest of details, has recreated the lives and passions of three groups of people affected in Gettysburg: immigrant soldiers, women, and African Americans. Creighton's style doesn't weigh heavily on the endless parade of names often associated with historical texts, but centers on a few people who represented each group. Their stories are compelling and intrguing. Even in the tale of nin year old Sadie Bushman, where research may not reveal much, Creighton provides an historical overtone to how childhood and especially girlhood, was revered in America in the 1800's. The effect is wonderful, and moves the story along.

Horrifying is the treatment of African Americans in the border town of Pennsylvania. Creighton tells the tales of a dual "Underground Railroad", one that returned slaves to the south as well as the more well-known one that saved them. I'm embarrassed to admit not having even known this was the case; thank goodness Creighton's book corrects the error.

I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to further develop their understanding of the terrible battle of Gettysburg. These groups now shall not be forgotten, thanks to the work of historian and author Margaret Creighton.

So much has been written about the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1 -- July 3, 1863), that it is difficult to find something new to say or a new and interesting way to say it. Margaret Creighton's book, "The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg's Forgotten History" (2005) succeeds on both counts. Margaret Creighton is Professor of History at Bard College, Maine. Her study of the Battle of Gettysburg focuses on the people and groups that frequently do not receive their full due: the Union XIth Corps, composed in large part of German immigrants, slightingly referred to as "Dutch", and its leaders, the German immigrants in the Borough of Gettysburg, the women of Gettysburg, and the African-American community in Gettysburg and its environs. Professor Creighton also discusses the "Louisiana Tigers" a much-feared unit of the Confederate Army. Each of these groups, Professor Creighton shows the reader, had something at stake in the Battle of Gettysburg over and above the military maneuvers and strategies, and each contributed something important to the result of the battle and to its significance.

The book begins with some stage-setting of where each group stood just before the Battle. Thus the Union XI Corps was smarting from the defeat of the Union Army at Chancellorsville, and it was viewed as the scapegoat because it was the victim of Stonewall Jackson's surprise attack on the far Union flank.

Professor Creighton gives a good picture of pre-war Gettysburg, something most other histories treat too lightly. Women of Gettysburg were of varying economic and social status and had to bear much of the brunt of the invasion because many of the men were in military service or had left the town in anticipation of the invasion.

Approximately eight percent of Gettysburg's population was African-American. Most of the African-American population was poor and stuggling, but some individuals had managed to acquire land and property and to attain positions of influence and respect within their community. With the Confederate invasion, most of the African-American population that was able to do so left town. And with good reason. The Southern Army seized African-Americans as "contraband," including those who had never spent a day in Southern slavery, and sent them South to a life of slavery. Professor Creighton describes this well as the "reverse Underground Railroad."

In Professor Creighton's account, we see how the XI Corps and its leaders tried to redeem themselves at Gettysburg. She shows how women conducted themselves heroically during the battle by offering a mixture of cooperation with and resistance to the invading troops. After the Battle, many women in the town made tireless and demanding efforts in caring for the wounded and the dying.

There is a great deal of attention paid to Gettysburg's African-American community and how it was changed by the Battle. I found the discussion of the African-American residents of Gettysburg the most fascinating part of the book and the part which has been least explored in other studies.

The book is brought to life by its treatment of individuals as well as groups. Thus we meet a variety of people in the XI Corps, from its Commander, General Otis Howard, through the German immigrant Generals Schurz and Schimmelfennig on Howard's staff, through the enlisted corporal Adam Muenzenberger who is taken prisoner on July 1 and dies in a prison camp. We see a great deal of Georgia Wade McClellan and her more famous sister, Jennie Wade, and learn more about them than is usual in battle studies. We also hear a great deal about Elizabeth Thorn, who in 2002 at last received a monument in her honor. Mrs. Thorn, pregnant and the keeper of the Evergreen Cemetery provided great and hazardous service before, during, and after the Battle of Gettysburg. Again Professor Creighton makes nuances and details of her story come alive that often get little attention.

The African-Americans described in Professor Creighton's study include Abraham Brian, whose home remains on the Gettysburg Battlefield on Cemetery Ridge at the center of the Confederate attack, the flamboyant Mag Palm, Owen Robinson, a successful businessman, and Basil Biggs, who did a great deal of work burying fallen soldiers after the Battle. Professor Creighton also uses a great deal of oral histories based upon her interviews with Catherine Carter and Margaret Nutter, descendants of African-Americans in Gettysburg at the time of the Battle. These sources are unusual and have much to teach about the Battle.

Professor Creighton tells her story in a clear, dignified way which, for the most part, is free of polemic. She reminds the reader that Gettysburg was fought for human freedom and that the goals of the battle and the Civil War, particularly the promise of freedom and dignity to African-Americans, sometimes were forgotten in the spirit of reconciliation that came to pervade American life following Reconstruction. Professor Creighton tells an important story, or a series of important stories, and she tells them well. Her book was a pleasure to read and taught me a great deal about the facts and the meaning of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Robin Friedman

Margaret Creighton fills in those gaps that most historians, in their tight focus on the battle and soldiers themselves, have left out of the picture. She shows the disregarded and suspect German-American 11th Corps accused of cowardice trying to atone for previous military failure, the African-Americans fearful of being captured and returned to slavery, the women left to deal with the terror of the battle and loss of husbands and children, the loss of their farms and animal, and the town itself in shambles after the battle left to cope with the sick and wounded.
She goes past the battle itself to the twentieth century to show how the issue of emancipation became less important that the reconciliation of the south and the north. A splendid work written with insight and care.

Many tourists who come to Gettysburg often find themselves in the middle of town and ask people for directions to the battlefield . When they are told that they are standing in the middle of it, they usually don't understand how Gettysburg and its citizens were affected by the battle which raged in the fields around them as well as in the town itself. This book gives an excellent description of how the white women of Gettysburg , as well as all black citizens, were deeply affected by the prelude to the battle as well as by its horrific lingering after affects. Also discussed is the role of German troops in the battle, and their efforts to overcome the prejudice against them which was rampant at the time. This book gives one a deep understanding of the battle's broader effects, beyond troop movements, casualties and other military matters.

This book tells us, not about the battle, but what went on in the town of Gettysburg itself. Having lived there for 5 years, I was steeped in the folklore that the soldiers ran back and forth throught the streets of the town for three days, and with the exception of Jennie Wade (story: warned to go to the basement, courageously continued making bread) the townspeople were unscathed and John Burns (story: an irascible old coot), no townspeople participated. I had never heard of the Brian Family!

I was not without resources. I was the director of the public library. I met Michael Shaara, Bill Frassinito, Col. Sheads, Charlie Glatfelter, and a host of lesser and unknown historians, Park Service tested guides, civil war buffs and re-enacters. Perhaps I never asked Shaara (the one time I met him) and the others whom I saw more often, tacitly understanding that this battle was a white male thing, about these things. Maybe I accepted the script because the Gettysburg as I knew it was a quiet town, didn't get involved, and maybe didn't in 1863.

How could all that fighting occur in the town, without an effect, as defined by the local folklore surrounding the battle? Could the soldiers really be so courtly that they put aside their survival needs as not to disrupt to the town's civilians?

There are people who know this battle in great detail. They can recite (and argue about) the numbers of blue and gray who died in the wheat field, the peach orchard the round tops, etc. I never heard them talk about how the soldiers got fed (did they think they had were 3 squares at a mess hall?)

Creighton gives us not only the narrartive but also the answers as to how this history got burried.

Excellent work! Bravo Margaret Creighton!

Finally! Something new about the one of the most talked about battles in American history. This book is a refreshing and fascinating take on Gettysburg.

A lesson that comes through in Margaret Creighton's excellent The Colors of Courage is one, you'd think, we wouldn't need to learn: that the courage displayed by soldiers on the battlefield doesn't exhaust the meaning of the word. Curiously, though, it's a point that our culture seems to resist. Although we use the word "courage" in a number of different contexts, the template for our thinking about what it means to be courageous almost always is the battlefield with all its conventional associations.

But as Creighton points out, using the battle of Gettysburg as her focus point, courage comes in many "colors," and when it comes to the Civil War, we're only now beginning to discover what some of them are. Certainly, men facing one another on the battlefield display courage (although, as Gerald Linderman pointed out in his Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War, what counted as courage changed as the war progressed). But other kinds of courage as documented in Creighton's book include

--the courage of the civilian women at Gburg who protected their families (many of the town's men being absent) during the battle, negotiated with Confederates to avoid trouble, and tended the thousands of wounded before and after the three days;

--the courage of the African American residents in Gburg and southern Pennsylvania who had to contend with slave catchers that accompanied Lee's invading army, federal authorities who refused to let them bear arms against the invaders, and the gradual romanticization of the Civil War as a conflict in which "both sides fought for what they thought was right" that minimized the horror of slavery;

--the courage of German-Americans (derogatorily referred to as "Dutch"), who were seen by native-born Americans who viewed them as cowardly soldiers, lazy civilians, and buffoons everywhere. The heavily German-American 11th Corps, which (largely through no fault of its own) had been routed at Chancellorsville by Stonewall Jackson's surprise flank slam, were derided for their entirely honorable actions at Gburg simply because they were "Dutch";

--and the courage of generals such as Oliver Otis Howard and Carl Schurz, who both refused to subordinate moral to physical courage, and recognized that the stakes involved in putting an end to slavery were much more important than those offered by "the vogue of rugged, tough, and secular masculinity" (p. 234) too often then and now identified as courage.

A masterful book that opens new vistas on both the battle of Gettysburg and the meaning of the Civil War.

I enjoyed Margaret Creighton's book. From far off Yarmouth, Maine, she has thrown her nets far and wide and hauled in a lot of historical flotsam and jetsam that might have escaped other scholars, in service of putting together another of her finely tuned historical studies of the underserved in American history. Here we find out more about the immigrant populations who comprised the Union Army, as well as the actual lives of the women of Gettysburg and the black citizens of the surrounding area. These are the shadow puppets of history, the folks who you might never have learned about by visiting the national park nor studying your social studies book.

You probably heard more about Mamie Eisenhower's residence at Gettysburg than you did about the women who were drafted into battle, whether they were forced to nurse, to cook, to slave, or to fight. Why is this? Partially, as Professor Creighton explains, these women were told, and they believed it, that their sacrifices did not matter. And that, perhaps, there was even something a little bit shameful about what they did, particularly if they were required to assist the invading Confederate army. Of the ravishment and rape that undoubtedly occurred, we know little but can surmise much, thanks to Creighton's research and the guarded testimony of forty Gettysburg women, mostly farmwives. Creighton looks at the nuance behind every statement, searching out human reality wherever it crops it head. "A middle-aged woman on a farm opened her door to a soldier on July second. By the way he was dressed, she was sure that he was a Louisiana Tiger. He told her that `General Lee had said that they should ask for food and if they would not give it they should demand it and that was what he was going to do.' She fed him ham. He ate some of it and then insulted her. The bread, he complained, was not fit to eat, `Madam,' he said, `I can go into any cabin in Virginia, poor and desolate as it is, from Winchester to Richmond, with not a fence standing, and get a better dinner than this.'" Creighton returns to this anecdote to eke out perceptions on the nature of resistance, and the implacability of the bad ham (Gettysburg women had to be fine actresses, for otherwise the Tiger in question might have guessed that the farmwife had fine chickens hidden with their beaks taped.)

As Creighton acknowledges, the presence of women on the Gettysburg battlefield is currently a contested site for scholars, particular feminist scholars, and she acknowledges that a host of others are trawling the same fields. The material remains of interest, and does indeed widen our picture of what happened that summer long ago, but I wondered, after finishing the book, if perhaps she might have written three separate books, for there's a sense in which the struggles of the immigrant soldiers, the Gettysburg women, and the freed, escaped or citizen slaves are experiences of very different registers and don't mesh together especially well except under cloudy language of the deracinated and ignored, and although Creighton tries her best, she can only link them this vaguely for the first two hundred times, then after that her rhetoric grows tiresome.

This book is well-worth reading. It offers the fascinating unknown history of the contributions of African Americans, women, and immigrants to teh Union victory at Gettysburg. The book is well-written, thoroughly researched, and fascinating! Kudos to the author for shedding new -- and important light -- on a battle over a century old.

The visit to Gettysburg a couple of summers ago as part of a graduate work in American History was an astonishing tour and recap of the course I was enrolled. This was my second visit to Gettysburg, although the content and experience was quite different from my trip there as an eight year old. At that time it appeared to me that we were visiting a lot of open fields, quite boring in fact. However, I was delighted when my siblings and I climbed climbing on top of a cannon. I think I still have that picture. How different my second visit was. My professor, was passionate about the The Civil War, we were required to read Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson prior to the trip. After the visit I took back a much different opinion of Gettysburg, my perspective and focus was no longer a child's point of view, but an older, perhaps wiser, student and avid historian walking the hallowed grounds. I couldn't get enough of the history surrounding this small hamlet that was the epicenter of such violence and death.

While visiting the bookstore on site, I purchased Margaret Creighton's book, The Colors of Courage. I couldn't pass this up. It was the title that immediately got my attention. I knew so little about her claim of "the forgotten history," the invisible people she wrote about, the immigrant soldiers, African Americans and women.

The Battle of Gettysburg took place over three days and considered by most to be the turning point of the war. Creighton's remarkably engaging narrative taken from letters, diaries, military records, primary and secondary sources creates a picture walk of history that took place during the days leading up to the battle, during and the weeks and months that followed. I am thrilled to be able to take advantage of her extensive bibliography and notes included at the end.

We know the Battle of Gettysburg was a horrific bloody barbarous battle between the North and South. These two sides, two distinct armies met during the first days of July 1863 in the midst of a small rural town, that until then had no military significance. This book reveals what went on while the battles were being waged. Where were the residents? What happened to the residents? What happened to their homes, fields and farms, that became the center of massive devastation and misery? All African Americans, some who lived on the land of engagement known as Pickett's Charge had to flee or hide so that they would not be taken as contraband by the Southern Soldiers. Their status of freeborn was irrelevant to Lee's army. African women and men often hid rather than run as monetary and other options impaired their ability to escape. However, they remained very much an integral part of the scene, as they assisted with cooking and helped the white women of Gettysburg cook for soldiers on all sides. Homes still occupied were in direct line of bullets pinging and canon discharges, the deafening explosions a constant accompaniment.

I could go on, but would rather you experience the lives of those everyday people who lived in Gettysburg. Colors of Courage should be read by all Americans and anyone interested in a better understanding the impact of this war had on all people. It is a powerful book that begs reflection as we face the xenophobia, racial & gender prejudice of the past that endured through this major battle yet still lingers today. With new material, Margaret Creighton has uncovered and added clarity to the stories of ordinary citizens and soldiers who were very much a part of the Battle of Gettysburg. This is a phenomenal book that brings their clouded and overlooked past to life. My copy of the book is teeming with sticky tabs to note important passages. This is one intriguing history book that I call irresistible.

Margaret S. Creighton is a professor of history at Bates College in Maine. She has written Rites and Passages: The Experience of American Whaling and is contributed and co-editor of Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700-1920.

Originally published on my blog, Bookworm's Dinner. Wisteria Leigh 2011