The Killer Angels BOOK REVIEW Many disagreements between the North and South existed following the end of the American Revolution in 1782, by the 1850’s the disputes between the sections intensified and ultimately threatened the survival of the nation. One major controversy was slavery, and though it remained economically vital to the south, northerners viewed it as “...a cancer in the heart of the American democracy, a moral outrage that mocked the nation’s claim to be a model of social and political enlightenment...” (The American Pageant, 348) Slavery became a state’s rights verse federal power issue. Northerners feared that those supporting slavery had too much control in government and Southerners feared losing this control to anti-slavery forces. Break outs erupted between proslavery and antislavery supporters by mid-1800’s which were settled by the civil war in 1861. The economic issues between agricultural south and industrial north also played a major role in the cause of the war. Historians Eric Foner and Eugene Genovese emphasized “each section’s nearly paranoid fear that the survival of its distinctive way of life was threatened by the expansion of the other section” as another root cause of the civil war. For example, northerners hated slavery because it minimized opportunities for unemployed white laborers, and this “free labor” ideology became the reason for which the North claimed superiority over the South. The South saw this as a threat to their way of life. By 1860, these issues and the election of Abraham Lincoln resulted in the secession of eleven Southern states, which became known as the confederate states with Jefferson Davis as their President. The confederate forces immediately attacked the union initiating the civil war. In the beginning, most believed that the war would be short-lived, but the North underestimated the determination of the South to remain independent. The battles raged over four long years, with some three million men fighting for their cause and resulting in the loss of some 620,000 lives. In the end, the Union prevailed resulting in the restoration of the United States and the end of slavery. The fictional novel, The Killer Angels, written by Michael Shaara, depicts one of the most important battles of the Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg, from the perspective of real-life generals and soldiers who were involved in the battle. Killer Angelsis different from regular history books because Shaara avoids historical opinions and bases his novel primarily on the letters, journal entries, and memoirs of the men who were there. He focuses on “what it was like to be there, what the weather was like, what men’s faces looked like.” (Killer Angels, xiii) Killer Angels gives a broader view of the controversy between the North and South during the Civil War, because it focuses not only on the well-known leaders of the war like General Robert Lee and
