Covered with Glory: The 26th North Carolina Infantry at Gettysburg. (Book Reviews).

Covered with Glory: The 26th North Carolina Infantry at Gettysburg. By Rod Gragg. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, c. 2000. Pp. xvi, 304. $27.50, ISBN 0-06-017445-5.)

The battle of Gettysburg exacted a high toll from General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, and no regiment paid a higher cost than the 26th North Carolina Infantry. After bringing more than eight hundred men onto the field--the largest regiment in Lee's army--it left Gettysburg reduced to barely one hundred survivors.

Rod Gragg crafts a fine portrait of the early history of the 26th North Carolina and then attempts to reconstruct the bloody events at Gettysburg that so completely gutted it. By 1863 its first colonel, Zebulon Vance, had become North Carolina's governor, and he followed its fortunes with special interest. On July 1 at Gettysburg his successor, twenty-one-year-old Colonel Henry Burgwyn Jr., fell dead while leading an assault on the Union's vaunted Iron Brigade in Herbst Woods. Over five hundred Tarheels died or fell wounded around him, but they also inflicted 80 percent casualties on the 24th Michigan that tried to stop them. On July 3 more fell in the final southern assault on Cemetery Ridge in an attack best known as "Pickett's Charge"--a name, created by the wartime Richmond press, that the North Carolinians came to despise.

Gragg's description of the 26th North Carolina's two bloody days at Gettysburg rests heavily on southern eyewitness accounts. Most narratives of the bloody clash in Herbst Woods rest on northern memoirs from Iron Brigade survivors, and Gragg provides balance with a detailed southern perspective. Most accounts of Pickett's famous assault focus solely on his own Virginia troops, an approach that invariably relegated the 26th North Carolina and their Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee comrades-in-arms to either obscurity or the role of scapegoats for the defeat; instead, Gragg gives the starting role to the forgotten half of the July 3 charge against Cemetery Ridge. That said, however, in his account of July 3 Gragg possesses too few sources to keep a tight focus on the 26th North Carolina alone, and other elements of James Johnston Pettigrew's and Isaac Ridgeway Trimble's commands occasionally steal center stage. Even more problematic, in addition to the postbattle letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts on which he builds his narrative, he also borrows heavily from prolific quantities of postwar Tarheel memoirs without consistently considering the invariable taint of frail memories, North Carolina state pride, resentment of Virginia's control over Confederate history, and other challenges to these sources' objectivity.

Nonetheless, in its nontraditional perspectives on several key clashes at Gettysburg, Gragg's book reminds us that, even now, the last word on that battle has not yet been written.