I nonetheless choose to crack a e book open than to click on a mouse on the subject of analysis. Through the years, I’ve been lucky to construct up a small reference library that I continually use when engaged on the journal.
I’ve been on the lookout for a set of the three-volume New York Monuments Fee’s Closing Report of the Battlefield of Gettysburg, and I lastly discovered an inexpensive one in first rate form. The collection was revealed in 1900 by J.B. Lyon Firm of Albany, N.Y. The state of New York contributed extra troopers to the struggle than some other within the Union, and due to this fact has probably the most monuments on the sector, 87.
Quantity One kicks off the collection with a historical past of the battle, together with information tables on each day itineraries, regimental rosters, casualties all through the marketing campaign, and a chapter on the 1893 “New York Day” when the state monument was devoted within the Nationwide Cemetery.
The center of the collection, and its fundamental worth, are the chapters, organized chronologically by unit quantity, that include pictures of every unit’s monument, the inscriptions discovered on the monuments, and transcriptions of the monument dedication speeches. All needs to be considered with some skepticism, as an previous soldier’s reminiscences might be cloudy. However they nonetheless present element and a way of how the ageing vets considered their service.
My set was as soon as the property of Willard Devendorf of the first New York Mild Artillery, as he wrote his identify and unit contained in the entrance cowl of Quantity Two. That made me curious in regards to the New Yorker’s Gettysburg participation. To my shock, I discovered that, though his fifth Corps battery was posted on the northern extension of Little Spherical High on July 2, it didn’t hearth a shot. Devendorf and his comrades by no means had a transparent area of fireplace attributable to terrain, and pleasant troops have been virtually all the time of their entrance. On July 3, they have been despatched farther south, and didn’t get a crack at Pickett’s Cost. I believe they have been the one fifth Corps battery that was not engaged.
That story is only one instance of how analysis books result in additional analysis and extra data.
this text first appeared in civil battle instances journal
