Let's Revisit the "Killer Angels"
This week, 1-3 July 2025, marks the 162nd anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, the three-day battle that many historians say was the turning point of the American Civil War. The Union victory marked the end of General Robert E. Lee’s second invasion of the North. The book that brought that battle alive for me was Michael Shaara’s 1974 “The Killer Angels.”
My wife and I first read it together back in the 1980s. It really moved us. When I heard that Joss Whedon, the writer and director of my favorite science fiction TV show (Firefly) and sequel movie (Serenity), based his characters on this novel, I always knew that I would re-read it again.
Historical Fiction
I'm not an American Civil War historian nor even an amateur expert. I'm just a historical fiction fan. I believe that these kinds of books can really animate historical events both large and small. In Shaara's case, he didn't just tell the story with facts and figures. He focused on the key leaders from both sides imagining conversations based on their recovered notes and journals. Shaara just didn't invent conversations. His characters said the things that they said in those written documents. A modern example is Erik Larson's 2020 historical fiction, "The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz." Larson tells the story behind Sir Winston Churchill's first year as Britain's Prime Minister at the start of WWII using his personal journals.
The Players
Although many generals from both sides have bit parts in this novel, the key players are
The Confederates - The Oath Breakers - the Army of Northern Virginia
General Robert Edward Lee, Commander.
Lieutenant General James Longstreet, Lee’s First Corps Commander
The Union - The Army of the Potomac
MG John Buford, Calvary Division Commander,
COL Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Commander of the 20th Maine Infantry Regiment
Before the Battle
The southern states started the American Civil War in 1861 and surrendered in 1865. "Real" historians generally agree that before this battle though, the war was a standoff in terms of casualties; close to 35,000 dead and wounded on both sides. But, Lee had an impressive 4-0-1 win/loss/tie record going into the battle:
Lee’s Win/Loss/Tie Record:
Win: Seven Days (June-July 1862):
Win: Second Bull Run (August 1862)
Win: Fredericksburg (December 1862)
Win: Chancellorsville (May 1863)
Tie: Antietam (September 1862)
Lee's generals and soldiers thought they were winning. Lee had gone on the offense into the North after Chancellorsville in an effort to get the Army of the Potomac out of their defensive positions and onto open ground.
The Union’s Win/Loss/Tie Record:
In contrast, President Lincoln had fired four generals of the Army of the Potomac and had just selected his fifth general (MG George Gordon Meade) just two days prior to Gettysburg. And you can see why. The Army of the Potomac's win/loss/tie record was an abysmal 0-3-2.
Losses:
Loss: Second Bull Run (August 1862)
Loss: Fredericksburg (December 1862)
Loss: Chancellorsville (May 1863)
Tie: Peninsula Campaign (Spring-Summer 1862): The army pushed to within miles of Richmond but was ultimately forced to retreat after the Seven Days Battles.
Tie: Antietam (September 1862): The Army of the Potomac, under McClellan, ended Lee's first invasion of the North. While not a decisive victory, it was strategically important.
Mead's calvary division, commanded by Buford, was keeping an eye on Lee as the Army of Northern Virginia moved north. The Confederates spotted him just as he was coming into Gettysburg. Lee turned his Army south and east to meet the Union Army. He got what he wanted, a fight on open ground.
Buford realized the advantage of the Gettysburg high ground (four terrain features on a rising slope in front of Lee: Willoughby River, McPherson's Ridge, East McPherson's Ridge, and Oak Ridge. There were two avenues of approach moving southeast into the city (Chambersburg Pike and a Railroad Cut) that intersected those four terrain features. Buford decided that he could hold this terrain (with his 3000 calvary) against Lee's entire Army until his boss (MG John Reynolds, First Corps Commander) could relieve him. And thus the battle was set.
The Southern Generals
The first part of the novel focuses on Lee, Longstreet, and many of the generals under Lee. We discover the devotion of the southern generals and soldiers to Lee; that they loved this man and thought they couldn't lose; were prepared to do anything for him; were prepared to die for him for the cause. Longstreet was Lee's favorite; his right hand man.
The First Day
On July 1, Buford fought Lee in a series of delaying actions retreating to each terrain feature until Reynolds showed up late in the afternoon.
Note: By all accounts, Reynolds was considered on both sides to be the best soldier and leader the Union had. Lincoln selected him to be the The Army of the Potomac's Commander before Mead, but Reynolds refused the appointment saying that he couldn't lead the fight back in Washington. Within hours of him making contact with Buford at Gettysburg, Reynolds was killed on the battlefield.
The Second Day
On 2 July, Shaara shift's the novel's focus to COL Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the Commander the 20th Maine Infantry Regiment (The Union). When Reynold's dies, Major General Abner Doubleday (credited with inventing baseball) immediately assumed command of the Corps but then Major General Winfield S. Hancock took over on the broader left wing of the Army of the Potomac and retreated to even higher ground south of Gettysburg. Chamberlain's boss (MG Vincent) placed him on the extreme left flank (Little Round Top - the second highest point in the area, the first was Big Round Top close by) and told him to hold. If Lee's Army got around the Union's left flank, the Confederates could roll up the Union side.
Longstreet argued with Lee about those tactics the night before. He wanted to make the move around the Union's flank. But Lee wouldn't budge. He decided on a frontal assault down the Chambersburg Pike road.
Chamberlain's regiment dug in among the boulders and the rocks on Little Round Top. He put a company of soldiers (B Company) to the extreme left breaking contact with the rest of the regiment. The purpose was to get early warning if the South tried to get around the flank
During the day, the Confederates (15th Alabama - 500 men) charged the hill four times and Chamberlain's 400 repelled each attempt. By the end of the day, both sides were exhausted and casualties were high. Before the fifth assault, Chamberlain's regiment had run out of ammunition and his lieutenants recommended a retreat. But Chamberlain ordered his men to fix bayonets and get ready to charge. He bent the left side of his line back 90 degrees forming a left angle. When the 15th Alabama hit the angle on the next engagement, Chamberlain ordered the angle to do a right wheel (like a door closing on a hinge) and everybody else to charge down the hill. When B company slammed into the 15th Alabama on the flank, the rebels ran away or surrendered.
After it was over, Chamberlain had captured hundreds of prisoners (mainly from the 15th and 47th Alabama regiments) and counted over a hundred wounded Confederates. For his leadership, two years later, General Grant chose now brevet Major General Chamberlain to lead the formal surrender ceremony. 30 years after the battle, the United States military awarded Chamberlain the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions on Little Round Top.
The Third Day
On 3 July, Shaara shift's the novel's focus back to Lee, Longstreet, Major General George Pickett (One of Longstreet's Division Commanders) and Pickets three Brigade Commanders:
BG Richard Brooke Garnett
BG Lewis Armistead
BG Lewis Kemper
The Union right flank is still exposed. Longstreet still advocates for the right flank maneuver but Lee decides again to attack the middle. He reasons that the Union would expect the flank attacks, reinforce those sides, and leave the middle weak. He sends Picket's division right up the middle and they get annihilated. They lost almost 7,000 men to the Union's 1500. It was Lee's first loss and some scholars suggest that the battle was the turning point of the war.
Even Better with Map Videos
Even with Shaara's excellent writing, I still had trouble visualizing how things were moving on the battlefield. I stumbled upon three YouTube videos created by "Jeff the Librarian;" one for each day of the battle. If you're like me and struggled to understand why Buford recognized Gettysburg as great ground, how did Chamberlain created "the angle" and "the right wagon wheel charge," and why Pickett's charge was such a massacre, these three relatively short videos will clear everything up.
What was the Civil War really about?
Throughout the story, Shaara uses his different characters to talk about what the Civil War was about. Of course, it was about slavery but he makes it clear that not all the southern generals and the soldiers on the field believed that or fought for that. Lee himself wrote that he couldn't bring himself to fight against his fellow Virginians regardless of what they were fighting for. That's why he broke his oath. Longstreet's views were similar and he was also a huge state's rights fan. He didn’t want the federal government telling his state what to do.
Shaara's Union characters couldn't understand the south's attitude. How could the rebels fight so fiercely to protect the slavery institution, the subjugation of an entire race? In the book, they frequently asked their southern prisoners what they were fighting for. Most of them couldn't articulate anything as precise as protecting slavery. They knew the north was trying to make the south follow their rules and they didn't like that, but it was all fairly vague.
In the novel, the Union soldiers all thought that the war was about slavery. In one of the best passages, Chamberlain is having a conversation with his first sergeant, a completely fictional character named Buster Kilraine, about the idea of persecuting an entire race. Kilraine says this,
"But the thing is, you cannot judge a race. Any man who judges by the group is a peawit. You take men one at a time, and I’ve seen a few blacks that earned my respect. A few. Not many, but a few. There’s many a man worse than me, and some better, but I don’t think race or country matters a damn. What matters is justice. ’Tis why I’m here. I’ll be treated as I deserve, not as my father deserved."
I love that. Judge men and women individually on how they act and what they do; not because they belong to a set of people who all have the same color skin.
War - A Very Hard Thing to Do
There is one more passage that really stood out to me. Lee and Longstreet are talking about the profession of soldiering. Lee says this,
“To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. That is … a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so very few good officers. Although there are many good men.”
I’m a US Army 25 year veteran so this hit me hard. I had never thought about it like that.
How Shaara Wrote the Book
The story of how Shaara wrote the book is heartbreaking. He took his family to the Gettysburg battle site as a tourist and was so moved by the characters that he decided to tell the story. He was a writer who had never really broken through but he thought this was a worthy project. It took him seven years to gather and consume all the source material and write the first manuscript. Fifteen publishers turned him down. Finally, a small publishing firm decided to publish it in 1974. But nobody read it. Shaara was deeply frustrated. Then, out of the blue in April 1975, he got a telegram. His book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He thought he was finally getting his recognition.
But even with the Pulitzer, nobody ready it still. Shaara considered it a failure. He never wrote another historical fiction novel and the things he did write never had much success either. In 1985, he signed an agreement with producer and director Ron Maxwell to make a movie based on the novel, but the project never got any financial backing. Shaara died in 1988 from a heart attack never knowing how beloved his book would become.
And then the book got a break. Ken Burns used it as source material when he made his famous Civil War documentary, "The Civil War" that PBS broadcast in 1990. Burns encouraged entertainment mogul Ted Turner to fund the “Killer Angel”project as a TV mini-series. Turner broadcast it on his TV station, TNT, in 1993. The audience loved it then and continues to love it today. On the popular movie review site, Rotten Tomatoes, over 30 years later, 81% of the critics liked it and 89% of the general population liked it. Back in the 1990s, the mini-series propelled Shaara's book to the top of the NYTs best seller list; at least two years after his death.
The TV Series
I tried to watch the mini-series recently and I have to disagree with the critics. The producers spared no expense for the battle scenes and the uniforms. That's obvious. But it's all a bit dated. The score doesn't match what's going on in the story, the writing is stilted, and it's so obvious that everybody is wearing fake beards that it took me out of every scene. The actor, Jeff Daniels, does a good job playing Chamberlain, but all the other heavy hitter actors (Tom Berenger, Martin Sheen, Sam Elliott, etc) seem to be struggling. I had to turn it off about a quarter of the way in.
Buyer beware.
The Oath Breakers
One last thing, I want to be very clear here about how I feel about the Southern side of the Civil War.
Before the Civil War, most of the southern generals fought for the United States Army in the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). 151 Confederate generals were West Point graduates (The Union had 294). They all took an oath to become officers.
“I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter, so help me God.”
Shaara's novel is romantic about the "southern cause." He takes pains to explain why moral and honorable men, men with world class military minds, like Lee and Longstreet , would fight for slavery, would defend their state's rights to succeed from the Union because of it. Intellectually, I understand their logic. It comes directly from the American Declaration of Independence:
"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."
That's the aspirational principle that formed the United states.
But in the very next line, the declaration says this,
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
The south succeeded for slavery, maybe not every citizen, not Lee and Longstreet perhaps, but the Confederate leaders did. And the generals went along with them and broke their oath to the United States Army. I think that's unforgivable. I have no romantic notions about the "southern cause." I can admire Lee and Longstreet for their generalship but their decision to join the Confederate side is inexcusable.
Take Aways
For the 162nd anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, do yourself a favor and read this book. I highly recommend it to the general reader and I will likely read it again somewhere down the line. If you’re visually challenged like me, watch the three excellent battle maps created by Jeffrey the Librarian (Links below).
One thing though, it does need to be remade into a better TV movie.
Source
Michael Shaara, 1974. The Killer Angels [Book]. Goodreads. URL https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/682804.The_Killer_Angels
References without Notes
David Gran, 2024. The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara: A Powerful Civil War Novel [Book Review]. The Military Reading Room. URL
Jacqueline Adelaide “Calamity Jade” Devereaux, 2010. July 1-3, 1863 - Pennsylvania: The Battle of Gettysburg [Blog]. Calamity Jade Blogosphere. URL https://jacqueline-devereaux.blogspot.com/2010/01/1er-3-juillet-1863-etats-unis-la.html
Jeffrey the Librarian, 2022. Gettysburg Battle with Maps - Day One (1 July 1863) - Buford’s Stand [Animated Map]. Youtube. URL
Jeffrey the Librarian, 2022. Gettysburg Battle with Maps - Day 2 (2 July 1863) - Little Round Top and COL Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain [Animated Map]. Youtube. URL
Jeff the Librarian, 2020. Gettysburg Battle with Maps - Day Three (3 July 1863) - Picket's Charge - Minute 14:19 [Animated Map]. YouTube. URL
Jon Thompson, 2021. The Best Book Ever Written About the Civil War: The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara [Book Review]. The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable. URL https://www.clevelandcivilwarroundtable.com/the-best-book-ever-written-about-the-civil-war-the-killer-angels-by-michael-shaara/
Ken Burns, 1990. The Civil War [PBS Documentary]. IMDb. URL https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098769/?ref_=fn_all_ttl_4
Kenneth Andres, 2023. Reflection Paper: Michael Shaara’s ‘The Killer Angels: A Novel of the Civil War’ [Book Review]. Medium. URL https://medium.com/@kennethandres/reflection-paper-michael-shaaras-the-killer-angels-a-novel-of-the-civil-war-2131c8dc9496
Kenneth Craycraft, 2024. The Morality of War: Lessons from Michael Shaara’s “The Killer Angels” [Book Review]. The Good Newsroom. URL https://thegoodnewsroom.org/the-morality-of-war-lessons-from-michael-shaaras-the-killer-angels/
Ron Maxwell, 1993. Gettysburg [TV Movie]. IMDb. URL https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107007/
Staff, 2015. Declaration of Independence: A Transcription [Historical Document]. National Archives. URL https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
Staff, 2025. Gettysburg [Movie Review]. Rotten Tomatoes. URL https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1046038-gettysburg