Lee and General James Longstreet, who both have complicated attitudes toward the war and the Confederate Cause. In fact, a sizeable part of the book takes us inside the heads of the two most important Confederate commanders-General Robert E. Chamberlain-really the main character in The Killer Angels-represents the Northern, anti-slavery perspective in the book, but Shaara also lets us see what the Confederates believed they were fighting for-a way of life and a social order… even if it was all built on slavery. Now that the war really was about slavery, Gettysburg became the battle that would decide the fate of the South's "peculiar institution," as slavery was called back in the day. After the Battle of Antietam in 1862, which was the second bloodiest battle of the war after Gettysburg, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, saying that the slaves in the rebellious states were now "forever free." (The slaves in border states that were still loyal to the Union would later be freed with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.) However, the goal of the war eventually changed to involve the actual abolition of slavery.
Abraham Lincoln, while he personally believed that slavery was wrong, said that he didn't intend to destroy slavery in the South he just wanted to prevent its spread into new territories. Originally, the Civil War was fought to keep the states together in one Union-at least, that was the stated goal. It's no wonder this baby won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974, the year it was published. More significantly, this novel helps explain why the war was fought, letting you see the central motivations of the characters and explore their ideas about what they were fighting for. Shaara takes you right inside the minds of the officers on the field during the fight, giving you an up-close and deeply researched picture of the battle as it unfolded. Michael Shaara's The Killer Angelsdeals with what many would call the most important battle in American history-the Battle of Gettysburg-and makes it all personal.
0 kommentar(er)
