Booknotes: Stay and Fight It Out

New Arrival:

• Stay and Fight it Out: The Second Day at Gettysburg, July 2, 1863 - Culp’s Hill and the North End of the Battlefield by Kristopher D. White & Chris Mackowski (Savas Beatie, 2023).

A number of Emerging Civil War volumes have been devoted to major bits and parts of the Gettysburg Campaign and battle, two of them being Kristopher White and Chris Mackowski's coverage of Gettysburg's Day 1 and the second day's fighting on the southern end of the battlefield. Their latest contribution (without co-author Daniel Davis this time), Stay and Fight it Out: The Second Day at Gettysburg, July 2, 1863 - Culp’s Hill and the North End of the Battlefield, continues the pair's Gettysburg series within a series.

From the description: After the events of July 1 and the establishment of the Union army's famous "fishook" defensive position along the high ground below Gettysburg, "July 2 saw a massive Confederate attack against the southernmost part of the line. As the Southern juggernaut rolled inexorably northward, Federal troops shifted away from Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill to meet the threat. Just then, part of the Army of Northern Virginia’s vaunted Second Corps launched itself at the weakened Federal right. The very men who had broken the Union army the day before resolved to break it once again."

The ensuing struggle—every bit as desperate and with stakes every bit as high as the more famous fight at Little Round Top on the far end of the line—imperiled the entire Union position. “Stay and fight it out,” one Union general counseled his peers. The Confederates were all too willing to oblige." Stay and Fight it Out "recounts the often-overlooked fight that secured the Union position and set the stage for the battle’s fateful final day."

Featured actions include artillery dueling between Union batteries atop the heights south of Gettysburg and Confederate guns on Benner's Hill, the fighting at Brinkerhoff's Ridge, and the evening to night assaults on Culp's Hill and East Cemetery Hill. All of that text is supported by maps and numerous period and modern photographs. The appendix section contains a downtown Gettysburg walking tour, a driving tour of Culp's Hill (both of these are accompanied by photographs and, for the space available, are quite extensive) and ends with two essays (one a brief preservation piece and the other a short discussion—with images—of early art and photography associated with the fighting on the hills). As per usual with ECW series installments of this type, the volume concludes with orders of battle and a suggested reading list.