Booknotes: The Weather Gods Curse the Gettysburg Campaign

New Arrival:

• The Weather Gods Curse the Gettysburg Campaign by John M. Nese & Jeffrey J. Harding (Arcadia Pub and The Hist Press, 2025).

Among the many unappealing aspects of Civil War soldiering, horrific wounding on the battlefield and intense suffering from any number of camp diseases without the benefits of modern medicine tend to send shivers down the spines of today's readers. However, one of the things that gets me most is the prospect of marching twenty miles or more for any number of days in a row during extremely hot summers amid choking humidity and dust, all the while enduring a thick woolen uniform, little protection from the sun, poor hydration, and iffy footwear. The other side of the equation, having to navigate days of seemingly endless driving rain and seas of mud, offered challenges of their own. Throw in some chronic diarrhea and the fact that you have to fight a major battle at the tail end of all that, and you gain nothing but respect for the physical and psychological hardiness of our Civil War forebears. Such weather effects and human endurance tests are on full display in John Nese and Jeffrey Harding's The Weather Gods Curse the Gettysburg Campaign.

The 1863 Gettysburg Campaign has been viewed from a variety of perspectives, but while we all know that heat and other elements of weather played a major role in the soldier experience there hasn't been a full-length volume specifically dedicated to the subject until now (I could be wrong about that, but no others immediately come to mind).

From the description: "As the nation’s future hung in the balance, the Weather Gods delivered a wrath of fury on Union and Confederate forces throughout the Gettysburg Campaign. First, record-breaking heat and humidity wore down the warring armies during ungodly forced marches. Next, relentless storms plagued the soldiers with resultant muddy slogs on nearly impassable roads. As the armies met in mortal combat, soul-crushing heat turned the bucolic fields of Gettysburg into a sanguinary and barren expanse. Finally, torrential rains haunted the Confederate retreat and narrow escape across a swollen Potomac River."

In The Weather Gods Curse the Gettysburg Campaign, meteorologist Nese and independent scholar/licensed GNMP battlefield guide Harding "present firsthand accounts, harrowing narratives and groundbreaking meteorological research that reshapes how we view the Civil War’s Gettysburg Campaign." Background material includes some introductory-level weather science discussion as well as information as to where Civil War-period weather data was recorded and compiled. How weather affected the campaign on a day by day basis is then presented and analyzed through narrative text heavily augmented with primary source excerpts, that writing in turn supported by copious numbers of combat maps, weather maps, data tables, photos, and other illustrations.

This study looks to be a real treat for readers on a constant search for those rarities that offer fresh lenses through which our previous understanding of Civil War military campaigns can be materially enhanced and/or altered.