All Roads Led to Gettysburg: A New Look at the Civil War's Pivotal Campaign

Summary

It has long been a trope of Civil War history that Gettysburg was an accidental battlefield. Troy D. Harman argues for a new interpretation: once Lee invaded Pennsylvania and the Union army pursued, a battle at Gettysburg was entirely predictable, perhaps inevitable.

Most Civil War battles took place along major roads, railroads, and waterways. And yet this perspective hasn't been fully explored when it comes to Gettysburg.

Moreover, once the battle started, Harman argues, the blue and gray fought tactically for the two creeks that mark the battlefield in the east and the west as well as for the roadways that led to Gettysburg from all points of the compass. This is a perspective often overlooked in many accounts of the battle, which focus on the high ground—the Round Tops, Cemetery Hill—as key tactical objectives.

Gettysburg Ranger and historian Troy Harman draws on a lifetime of researching the Civil War and more than thirty years of studying the terrain of Gettysburg and south-central Pennsylvania and northern Maryland to reframe the story of the Battle of Gettysburg. In the process he shows there's still much to say about one of history's most written-about battles.