Lost triumph

by Tom Carhart

A bold new thesis in the study of the Civil War suggests Lee had a heretofore undiscovered strategy at Gettysburg that, if successful, could have changed the outcome of the war. Conventional wisdom has held that on the third day of the battle, Lee made one profoundly wrong decision. But there is much more to the story, which Tom Carhart addresses for the first time. With meticulous detail, Carhart revisits the historic battles Lee taught at West Point--the victories of Napoleon at Austerlitz, Frederick the Great at Leuthen, and Hannibal at Cannae--and reveals what they can tell us about Lee's real strategy. What Carhart finds: Lee's plan for a rear assault that, combined with Pickett's Charge, could have broken the Union forces in half. Only in the final hours of the battle was the attack reversed through the daring of an unproven young general--George Armstrong Custer.