Duane P. Schultz

An epic battle;and like Peleliu, Arnhem and the Hurtgen Forest; many casualties for little gain. Excellently researched and well told; it is a thorough and compelling story of commitment, courage, and futility. A penetrating look at the inadequacies of the B 24: truly a flying coffin. The mission was confounded by limited, flawed and ignored reconnaissance compounded by criminally poor command decisions prior to and during the flight.

In November, 1864, Colonel John Milton Chivington, also known as the "Fighting Parson" (he would often appear in the pulpit wearing two guns,) led several hundred regular and irregular (I doubt if prunes would have helped) Colorado army troops down on an Indian village at Sand Creek. Hundreds of Indian women and children were killed and mutilated. Ironically, the village was flying the American flag. Duane Schultz describes why the village was flying the American flag and the aftermath of show more the massacre in Month of the Freezing Moon: The Sand Creek Massacre. November 1864.

In 1851, the Treaty of Horse Creek had ceded land to various tribes. In return, the Indians, mostly Cheyenne and Arapaho, agreed not to attack whites crossing their land. The U.S. agreed to pay$50,000 a year for 50 years. (This was later changed to 10 years without informing the tribes.) Concurrently, Denver was about to undergo an enormous boom during the winter of 1858-59 when gold was discovered in the hills. Almost overnight it increased in size to some 6,000, adding buildings wherever possible. One Indian walked into the first newspaper building and announced how impressed he was with the presses but could not understand why anyone would build in a creek bed. He raised his hand over his head showing how deep the water could rise. No one paid attention until the next year when the snow pack melted and the presses were finally located several miles downstream. The enormous population increases meant expanded stagecoach traffic. Indians would occasionally accompany the stages as they bumped along at ten mph with 9 passengers inside and perhaps 7 on top. There was a great deal of hatred for the Indians.

Chivington was a rather complex character. Viciously antislavery, he was once threatened with tar and feathering unless he stopped his pro-abolition sermons. The next Sunday he placed two pistols on the pulpit and proceeded to lash out at the pro-slavery forces in the congregation. He received no further threats. Denver was only 250 miles from Texas so when the Civil War broke out the national government raised 15,000 troops to protect Colorado (and its gold.) The threat from Texas failed to materialize. Chivington meanwhile had risen to the rank of Colonel and distinguished himself in battle becoming a bonafide hero. It became necessary for Governor Evans (the founder of Northwestern University) to justify payment of all those troops. He desperately needed a war. The local Cheyenne, Arapaho and Cherokee refused to cooperate despite numerous treaty violations by the government. Then came the Sioux uprising in New Ulm, Minnesota. Out of fear, soldiers and whites began shooting Indians on sight. The regular army was not eager for war and wrote several reports detailing how war could be avoided. In fact, Major Edward Wynkoop, at considerable risk to himself and his men, negotiated with the Arapaho and Cheyenne. He promised them a safe conduct to Denver. When he and the chiefs arrived he was shocked to learn that Evans refused to meet and would not discuss peace terms. Evans still had to justify to Washington the large army force he insisted he needed. Wynkoop was relieved of command and Evans told the Indians if they removed themselves to Sand Creek and Smoky Hill they would not be attacked.

Chivington remarked on the day before the attack that "I long to be wading in gore." He was granted his wish. His 700 troops surprised the camp at sunrise and shot every Indian in sight including those walking toward the troops with their hands in the air. All semblance of order was lost and most of his few casualties were from friendly fire. He and his soldiers took scalps and mutilated the bodies. It was this action more than anything that resulted in his downfall. The Senate found his conduct reprehensible and he even lost the support of the Denver crowd when it was learned he had conspired to kill one of the officers who testified against him. The Indians, of course, lost all faith in anything they were told, and the Cheyenne moved north to combine with the Sioux where they were to meet another self-righteous colonel with somewhat different results at Little Big Horn. Ironically Chivington's wife and son were killed by a marauding Indian war party several years later. He had been forced out of the army and had started a freight line which would have prospered had it not suffered from attacks by unfriendly Indians. show less

I picked The Most Glorious Fourth: Vicksburg and Gettysburg, July 4, 1863, by Duane Schultz, off of a shelf at a used book store willfully, as I was searching for something more to read about Gettysburg. We had plans shortly to visit the Gettysburg Battlefield on its sesquicentennial year, on our way down to North Carolina for my son’s graduation. As a Civil War history buff for some years, I am no stranger to the significance of the battle, but since my interests in the Civil War era lie show more more firmly anchored to its political and social ramifications for United States history, rather than its military dimension, I had not previously studied the battle itself in any depth. To address that, I most recently read Stephen Sears’ Gettysburg, hailed by many as the best one-volume treatment of the clash, which is virtually encyclopedic in its coverage of the battle, its principal combatants and its indelible contribution as a “great event” in the progress of the war. As I am less than enthusiastic about military history, the Sears book was nonetheless magnificent, albeit far more comprehensive in its coverage than I sought, even on the eve of visiting the battlefield. Still, I wanted more: I was looking to augment Sears and the Ken Burns documentary and the Gary Gallagher Teaching Company CD’s and Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote and a lifetime of previous study of the Civil War to get a bit more details of human interest and to probe more carefully the socio-political hemisphere of history that most incites my passion. I also wanted to “get” Gettysburg fully in context with the year 1863 and how that year a hundred and fifty years ago came to clearly mark what was to follow not only for what remained of the Civil War, but for the subsequent history of the United States of America. Since the Schultz book also included the pivotal contemporaneous taking of Vicksburg by Grant, I thought this volume might do the trick.
I didn’t realize until later that I had read Schultz before: his book The Dahlgren Affair was a well-written exploration of a little known alleged but unproved Union plot to assassinate Jefferson Davis which had some consequence for both sides ever after. I enjoyed that book, which seemed to bode well for this one. In The Most Glorious Fourth, Schultz interweaves the story of Gettysburg and Vicksburg – which each culminated in Union success in time for the Fourth of July 1863 -- a logical approach surprisingly eschewed by most historical treatments. The lesser known Vicksburg campaign in the west was actually a far more consequential Union victory than Gettysburg in the east for the eventual defeat of the South, for it divided the Confederacy in two and essentially doomed their war effort. Gettysburg had consequence, as well, of course, in that it permanently derailed Lee’s efforts to invade the North again and resulted in a decisive Union victory after a string of military disasters at Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Still, Lee’s army got away from Meade and lived to fight on; Grant took Vicksburg and the Mississippi was lost to the Confederates forever after.
Schultz alternates chapters between the two theaters of war, but almost from the start it is a bit awkward. Gettysburg is a relatively rapid march of two huge armies paralleling one another who come to converge at a sleepy farming town in Pennsylvania and over a three day period fight the largest battle ever conducted in North America using military tactics that include a mile wide infantry attack against impossible odds that was never to be repeated again in American history. Vicksburg, in contrast, was the climax of a long campaign in the west by Grant to control the Mississippi that wound up in a very long siege. As such, there is a kind of dissonance when the narratives are juxtaposed. One is a tale of civilian hardships that include living in caves and consuming their pets while they brace for the inevitable loss to the besiegers, while the other is a more fluid narrative along a timeline of a series of events that are dramatically punctuated by remarkable action episodes.
Schultz does a fine job of resurrecting the human drama from the graveyard of military minutiae in both campaigns, and I much enjoyed the way he tells the story of ordinary people on both sides – soldiers and civilians – a surprising number of whom had longstanding friendships and other relationships that pre-dated the war, and this is clearly the strength of the work. Still, most of the book is devoted to Gettysburg, and he seems to be struggling at times to fill in the pages to balance the two theaters. This again points to the inherent weakness in the structure of the narrative to which I alluded earlier: one story moves at a rapid pace, while the other hardly has movement at all. Schultz could perhaps have addressed this flaw by filling out the larger context of what Vicksburg represented in the west for the Southern war strategy, but he only sketches this in, rather than fully fleshing it out on the socio-political sphere as might have provided him with the material that seemed to be wanting for the Vicksburg segment.
Other critics have taken Schultz to task for his historical inaccuracies in this book, and while I lack the scholarly expertise to appropriately address this on every level, it does seem that multiple factual errors would tend to discredit any historian. On the one hand, and in his defense, the Civil War is often clouded by myth and ideology, even among scholars, so it is no surprise when anecdotal reports with little foundation in fact manage to creep into more popular treatments; this occurs in spots even in the highly regarded Ken Burns The Civil War production. Here Schultz repeats the persistent legend that the Battle of Gettysburg began over shoes, which springs to life in Shelby Foote’s chronicle and elsewhere, which both my Battlefield Guide at Gettysburg debunks as well as other more scholarly sources. More egregiously perhaps, however, is Schultz’s biographical sketch of General George Pickett’s relationship with his wife Sallie, which echoes the myth that the two met when she was four years old and that they maintained a courtship from a distance for many years until their marriage when she was a very young teenager. It turns out that Sallie, who was actually much older than that, falsified her birth date and manufactured that story after the war as she promoted Pickett, a heroic figure in her eyes only. While a remarkably creepy and perhaps irresistible literary fable, solid research by a serious historian should have excised such tripe from the manuscript before it went to print.
Finally, I don’t usually urge authors to make their works longer, but I would have liked to see Schultz flesh out his theme with greater vigor. If in fact The Most Glorious Fourth is about how the twin victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg altered the war and US history – with which I concur – then I would like him to have added at least one fat chapter devoted to exploring that with some depth. Still, for all of its numerous flaws, I enjoyed reading the Schultz book. He is a capable writer who certainly holds the reader’s attention, and he succeeds admirably in animating the various characters so that we – the descendants of these long dead Americans who defined to some degree the world we were born into – can almost feel them walking among us. show less

Although I was aware of the Sioux Uprising, I did not know much about it and so this book served as my introduction to this major event in Minnesota history. I would have liked to see more memories from the Sioux survivors, but overall I felt the author did a fair job of showing how there were honorable and dishonorable men on all sides of the conflict.