| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Margaret S. Creighton. The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg's Forgotten History; Immigrants, Women and African Americans in the Civil War's Defining Battle. New York: Basic Books. 2005. Pp. xxvii, 321. $26.00.

Abraham Lincoln was not the only person to deliver a Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863. He was preceded by famous orator Edward Everett. Lincoln's speech was remembered because it was stirring and poetic, but also because it was vague: its sentiments were general enough to survive reinterpretations of the meaning of the Civil War in the years after 1880. Margaret S. Creighton's project is to recover the world Everett described in his Gettysburg Address. As she points out, Everett's understanding of courage included far more than the bravery of a soldier in battle: it encompassed the moral courage of all who stood up against slavery, the courage required of civilians whose towns became literal battlefields, the courage of those who cared for thousands of wounded soldiers, and the courage needed to survive being kidnapped into slavery. Yet today few remember Everett's speech or his broad notion of courage. By the late nineteenth century, Creighton notes, the story of Gettysburg had narrowed into a tale of a fight between white native-born northern and southern soldiers, and this narrative has not been much altered since. Gettysburg remains a tragedy of "brother against brother." To reintegrate into history the diverse mix of people Everett praised in his speech, she focuses on the experiences of three groups of Americans: the German American soldiers of the Army of the Potomac's Eleventh Corps, the white women of the town of Gettysburg, and the African American inhabitants of Gettysburg. Relying on a broad variety of archival and published sources, some well known and others not—including local African Methodist Episcopal Church records from a private collection—she argues that including the experiences of these three groups fundamentally reshapes our understanding of courage and of the battle of Gettysburg itself.

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