Lieutenant General Richard Ewell to take the hill if possible, but Ewell decided not to attempt it. That night Major General George Meade arrived with two divisions and set up a strong defensive position on Cemetery Hill.

On July 2, the second day of battle, Lee ordered General Longstreet’s forces, led by Major General John Bell Hood, to capture the area south of Cemetery Hill, known as Big Round Top and Little Round Top, on the Union left flank. Union forces, enduring heavy casualties, managed to hold their ground. The Federals also held their positions on Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill, despite determined Confederate assaults by Ewell’s divisions.

On July 3, Lee attempted to capture the center of the Union line on Cemetery Ridge. The assault was preceded by a heavy artillery bombardment, after which 12,500 Confederates marched three-quarters of a mile across open terrain, during which they were subject to intense Union rifle and artillery fire. This is popularly known as Pickett’s Charge, although Pickett led only one of the three divisions involved; the others were led by Brigadier General James Johnston Pettigrew and Major General Isaac R. Trimble. The charge was repulsed, with Confederate forces suffering heavy casualties.

Lee regrouped his army into a defensive position, thinking that the Union forces would attack. The counterattack never came, and on July 5, Lee’s army headed back to Virginia.

The Battle of Gettysburg resulted in an estimated twenty-three thousand casualties on the Union side and twenty-eight thousand on the Confederate side.

The Final Years of the Civil War
After Gettysburg, the tide turned against the South. Northern forces, under General Ulysses S. Grant, formed and executed a comprehensive strategy to destroy the Confederate army and its economic base. A series of battles forced Lee’s army to retreat to the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. At the Siege of Petersburg, trench warfare lasted for over nine months. In April, 1864, Richmond fell to the Union army.

Meanwhile, General William Tecumseh Sherman marched through Georgia, capturing Atlanta in September 1864 and Savannah in December. Lee, realizing that the Confederate position had become hopeless, surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865.

Recurring Metaphor
The title of the book points to a metaphor that recurs in the book. Before the first battle, Buford notices in the cemetery, among the gravestones, a statue of a “white angel, arm uplifted, a stony sadness.” After the first battle, Buford stops in the cemetery but cannot find the white angel. It is as if the brutality of the battle has driven away this divine image.

The metaphor recurs, but with a shift in meaning, later in the novel, when Chamberlain recalls learning a speech from Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, in which man in action is compared to an angel. On hearing his son recite the passage, Chamberlain’s father remarked, “Well, boy, if he’s an angel, he’s sure a murderin’ angel.” Chamberlain then gave a speech at school entitled “Man the Killer Angel.” The image recurs after the final battle ends, when Chamberlain surveys the battlefield, sees the corpses being laid out, and thinks again of man as the killer angel. The image conveys the paradox of man: he is blessed with noble feelings and high ideals, as shown in the soldiers’ devotion to a cause that transcends their individual selves. This higher aspect of man’s nature links him to God; it is what Chamberlain calls the “divine spark,” and yet man also has another side to his nature: He is aggressive and destructive, prepared to slaughter his own kind in terrible battles.

Music
Music is a recurring motif in the novel. The sound of military bands playing is an almost constant background to the movement of troops and the battles. As Chamberlain’s men enter Hanover, a band plays the “Star-Spangled Banner”; Buford hears the Sixth Wisconsin band playing “The Campbells are Coming” as they move to take up battle positions. The music is described as “an eerie sound like a joyful wind.” At Confederate headquarters, a band plays “That Bonny Blue Flag” in honor of Lee. This kind of stirring, patriotic music is designed to fill the soldiers with pride and steel their hearts for battle, but there is music of another kind that plays a key role in the novel, too. An Irish song sung by a tenor in the Confederate camp on the night before the final day of battle evokes tender emotions in all who hear it. The song is called “Kathleen Mavourneen,” about the sadness of old friends when the time comes to part, whether for years or forever. The officers who hear it are deeply touched, and stillness descends on the camp. For Armistead, the song recalls the last time he was with his close friend, Hancock, who is now fighting on the Union side. Music thus creates moments of reflective sadness when men feel the pain of loss and separation. Another moment comes earlier that same night, when Longstreet hears a boy playing a harmonica, a “frail and lovely sound,” and Longstreet thinks immediately of a comrade who rode off into battle and was killed. Music can therefore fortify the men for battle, or it can sadden their hearts by making them aware of the human price paid in war.

Music is also referred to in a metaphoric rather than literal sense in the description of the battles. In the midst of battle, Chamberlain hears the incredible variety of sounds, “like a great orchestra of death”; later, another unusual musical metaphor occurs: “Bullets still plucked the air; song of the dark guitar.”

Shaara's mastery of the short story may have contributed to the unusual format he used in The Killer Angels. He divided the novel into four major sections, one each to the three days of the battle and the first to June 29, 1863, as the armies groped their way through southern Pennsylvania, encountering one another at Gettysburg by mistake. Each section is comprised of many self-contained units, each told from the perspective of one of Shaara's major figures, alternating between North and South. Although some readers feel dislocated by these rapid shifts in perspective, Shaara achieves a powerful cinematic effect, undeniably conveying the dizzying reality of a battlefield engaging one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand men in an area more than five miles long.

As Shaara presents it in The Killer Angels, the ultimate social disruption of civil war encompasses a broad spectrum of moral issues, from the individual's struggle to maintain his integrity to the dismemberment of a nation. For Shaara, slavery is only one factor that contributed to the Civil War; he briefly shows a Northern unit rescuing a wounded fugitive slave, but he treats the episode as an illustration of the flash point of the war, not as an end in itself. Slavery in The Killer Angels is peripheral to Shaara's analysis of the war's central cause, which he sees as a fundamental clash between two radically different concepts of society.

Shaara builds his view of the battle, and by extension, his reading of the entire Civil War, around a paradox: at Gettysburg in June of 1863, the Army of Northern Virginia, unified by culture, tongue, and creed, and commanded by the charismatic Robert E. Lee, "the most beloved man in either army," nonetheless begins to break its heart at Gettysburg and shatter, while the Army of the Potomac, dissimilar in temper, voice, and backgrounds, led fumblingly by a succession of undistinguished Northern generals held in check by Washington policies, begins to find itself at last.

Stonewall Jackson had died at Chancellorsville that May, and James Longstreet is newly second-in-command to Lee. Shaara chose Longstreet, stubborn, gifted, grieving for his dead children, to pose the moral questions the South can no longer avoid asking, the ones its mode of life could never answer. In the complex relationship between Longstreet and Lee, whom Longstreet loves more than he could love a father, Shaara explores the sanctity of a soldier's oath, for the Southern officers, trained by Lee at West Point, were forced to choose between their nation and their home and now are invading the land they had once sworn to defend. Shaara also probes the mystery of leadership in the context of military theory. In the face of the new defensive warfare Lee's pride prevents Longstreet from implementing, Lee's outmoded Napoleonic tactics prove heartbreakingly futile in the three-day battle at Gettysburg, against military technology a half-century beyond Waterloo; but the Southern soldiers can never love Longstreet, who weeps as he passes on Lee's orders for Pickett's charge, as they do Lee, whose honor leads them up the slope to dusty death.

Through his principal Northern protagonist, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, also an historical figure, Shaara pits young, risk-filled democracy's idealistic faith in the dignity of man against "the curse of nobility" the Southerners had brought from Europe. In the end, as Shaara sees it, the North must prevail, not by superior leadership or even by the luck of the battlefield, but because their cause is just: "the American," Chamberlain believes, "fights for mankind, for freedom; for the people, not the land."

• 1860s: Advances in weaponry lead to high casualty rates during the American Civil War. Muskets are deadly at ranges of hundreds of yards; rapid-firing rifles are common, and artillery becomes more mobile and lethal.

  1970s: In the Vietnam War, the most common weapon issued to American troops is the M16A1, 5.56mm assault rifle, a gas-operated, magazine-fed rifle capable of semi-automatic and automatic fire with an effective range of three hundred meters and a practical rate of fire of sixty rpm.

  Today: U.S. troops in Iraq are equipped with M16A2 semiautomatic rifles. The maximum effective range of this weapon over an area target is eight hundred meters; for a point target, the range is 550 meters. It fires forty-five rounds per minute and can also fire 40mm grenades when equipped with a M203 grenade launcher.

• 1860s: The United States endures its most bitter and deadly conflict. The Civil War results in the deaths of about 646,000 soldiers. Two-thirds of the deaths are due to disease.

  1970s: The Vietnam War comes to an end. In 1973, a ceasefire agreement is signed and the last U.S. forces leave Vietnam. Over 58,000 U.S. servicemen die in the war. Lasting eleven years, the war is the longest in U.S. history. In 1975, Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, falls to North Vietnamese forces.

  Today: The United States is engaged in a costly war in Iraq. As of January 2007, the United States has lost over 3,000 servicemen since U.S. forces invaded Iraq in 2003; Iraqi dead are estimated to exceed 600,000.

• 1860s: After the Civil War ends, Lee campaigns for reconciliation between the North and South. In 1865, Lee becomes president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, a position he retains until his death in 1870. Lee makes a point of recruiting college students from the North as well as from the South.

  1970s: In 1975, following a vote in Congress, President Gerald Ford issues a posthumous pardon for General Lee and a restoration of his U.S. citizenship. Ford issues a statement that the pardon corrects a one-hundred-year-old oversight in U.S. history.

  Today: In 2006, The Atlantic, in its list of the hundred most influential Americans of all time, places Lee in fifty-seventh position, and states, “He was a good general but a better symbol, embodying conciliation in defeat.”

Readers often compare Shaara's fiction to Hemingway's; the similarity lies more in a curious combination of outwardly raw physical courage and inward tenderness — Robert Penn Warren once described Hemingway's soul as a brawny male fist clutching a rose — than in literary style. Shaara uses description far more than Hemingway did, and Shaara's essential subjectivity is remote from Hemingway's famous objective dialogue-dominated prose. The subject of The Killer Angels and its surfeit of horrors also recalls Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895), but Crane's naturalism denies man's potential for growth, while Shaara's humanistic insistence on the possibility of human nobility, like Hemingway's celebrated "grace under pressure," gives meaning and even hope to one of the most desperate moments in American history.

Shaara's greatest debt, other than to the men who fought and died at Gettysburg, seems owed to Abraham Lincoln. Like Lincoln, Shaara believes that Gettysburg is America's "holy ground," consecrated and hallowed beyond human addition or detraction. The Killer Angels does not presume to do so; but by bringing the men of Gettysburg to life again in his pages, Shaara insists once more on the values for which "they gave the last full measure of devotion." In their struggles as well as in their nation's agony, Shaara implies the only meaning worth the tragedy, that a government allowing its individual citizens to achieve their individual destinies "shall not perish from the earth."

Jeff M. Shaara, Michael's son, has written the prequel to The Killer Angels, entitled Gods and Generals (1996). Jeff Shaara follows the same four men — Lee, Jackson, Hancock, and Chamberlain — as his father had in The Killer Angels, through the years leading up to the Civil War. He captures Lee's and Hancock's disillusionment over their early careers, Lee's conflicts in loyalties, Jackson's overwhelming Christian ethic, and Chamberlain's lack of experience. The perspectives of the four men, particularly concerning the battles at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, make vivid the realities of war. Taken together, the two novels present a powerful portrait of the generals who won and lost the Civil War.

During his life, Shaara had worked intermittently at a screenplay version of The Killer Angels, but he never completed it. Although in the mid-1970s the Vietnam-weary public lacked interest in any more battle involving American casualties, the novel has taken on a life of its own, and it continues to inspire readers with its enormously powerful reaction to America's most crucial battle. Producer Ted Turner turned The Killer Angels into an enormous film, Gettysburg, released in 1993, first for TNT, then in a theater version (four hours plus intermission), and finally in video. Writer-director Ronald F. Maxwell received mixed reactions to his adaptation of The Killer Angels. Stanley Kaufmann, voicing the consensus of most critics and viewers, noted the ineffectiveness of Martin Sheen as Robert E. Lee, praised Jeff Daniels for the best portrayal in the film, and grudgingly observed that "Despite the mushy interludes, it fascinates — terribly."

The release of Gettysburg sparked renewed interest in The Killer Angels. Overall, the novel is considered the finest account to date of the Civil War fighting, and video historian Ken Burns, who produced the acclaimed Civil War series for PBS, claims that the novel ignited his interest in the Civil War.

The Killer Angels was also recorded in an unabridged, nine-cassette audio version in 1994 by Cathedral Audio Books. It contains an interview with Shaara's son Jeffrey, who describes his father's seven-year writing of the novel.

The Killer Angels was adapted by Turner Pictures and aired as the television miniseries Gettysburg, in 1993.

The novel was also recorded, in an unabridged audio version by Books on Tape and published in 1985.

Sources
Adams, Phoebe, Review of The Killer Angels, in Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 234, No. 4, October 1974, p. 118.

Douthat, Ross, “They Made America,” The Atlantic, Vol. 298, No. 5, December 2006, p. 74.

Review of The Killer Angels, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 206, No. 2, July 8, 1974, p. 69.

Review of The Killer Angels, in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4916, June 20, 1997, p. 25.

Shaara, Michael, The Killer Angels, David McKay, 1974.

Stoppel, Ellen K., Review of The Killer Angels, in Library Journal, Vol. 99, No. 15, September 1, 1974, p. 2092.

Weeks, Edward, “The Peripatetic Reviewer,” in Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 235, No. 4, April 1975, p. 98.

Further Reading
Chesnut, Mary, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, Yale University Press, 1993. Wife of a Cabinet member under Jefferson Davis, Chesnut describes the Civil War, much of which she witnessed. She was in Charleston during the firing on Fort Sumter, for example, which began the conflict. The 1982 edition of this book received the Pulitzer Prize for History.

Foote, Shelby, The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian, Random House, 1963, pp. 467–581. This is one of the best accounts of the Battle of Gettysburg written to date. It brings the personalities of the soldiers to life and clearly recreates the ebb and flow of battle as it really was, not as legend has made it.

Hartwig, D. Scott, A Killer Angels Companion, Thomas Publications, 1996. Hartwig is a historian at Gettysburg National Military Park, and in this book, he examines the extent to which Shaara’s novel reflects the truth about the Battle of Gettysburg and its key figures. He also discusses what happened to the major characters after Gettysburg.

Lewis, Clayton, “The Civil War: Killing and Hallowed Ground,” in Sewanee Review, Vol. 103, No. 3, Summer 1995, pp. 414–25. Lewis argues that in many respects the novel is quite conventional. Its achievement, however, is the use of modern fictional technique to convey the immediacy of Civil War combat.