Author Topic: Desperate Stand: What The Brickyard Fight Meant At Gettysburg  (Read 641 times)

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Desperate Stand: What The Brickyard Fight Meant At Gettysburg
« on: December 07, 2018, 05:27:53 pm »
Desperate Stand: What The Brickyard Fight Meant At Gettysburg

 

By Mark H. Dunkelman
SEPTEMBER 2018 • AMERICA'S CIVIL WAR MAGAZINE

For more than a century, the fighting that occurred in and around John Kuhn’s brickyard was most often a mere footnote in the history of the July 1863 Battle of Gettysburg. Two highly regarded 20th-century histories offer telling examples. General Edward J. Stackpole made no mention of the so-called Brickyard Fight in his popular 1956 book They Met at Gettysburg, and Edwin B. Coddington devoted only two sentences to it in his classic 1968 account, The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command. And so it went, year after year, in book after book about the most chronicled battle in American history.

Why exactly has the Brickyard Fight—which resulted in more than 770 Union and Confederate casualties—been neglected for so long in histories of the battle? The answer is twofold.

First, the action took place on the afternoon of July 1. Historians and popular memory have traditionally devoted more attention to the battle’s second and third days at the expense of the first. The July 1 battle has frequently been depicted as a prelude to more important events, an engagement that involved only portions of the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia, whereas both armies were present in full on the next two days. The first day was also a clear Confederate victory, which contrasted with the Union successes on the second and third days. In addition, the July 1 fighting occurred on grounds remote from the rest of the battlefield, with landmarks that received less attention than the famous sites of the second and third days. Likewise, the most memorable images captured by the photographers who visited Gettysburg in the aftermath of the battle—most notably depictions of the dead—were taken on the southern portion of the battlefield.

http://www.historynet.com/desperate-stand-brickyard-fight-gettysburg.htm