Gods and Generals....

The sets are horrible in this movie. I love looking in the window of a house and seeing the trees behind said 2 dimensional structure.

 

Dammit...now I am watching the sets!!!

 

my bad i did mean stuart and you are very correct. but stuart's ride around the army of the potomac was not as big a deal as his ranging through pennsylvania doing who knows what, instead of harrassing the union flanks and doing the rocon as he was good at. stuart reinvented cavalry, his one grave error does not denote an idiot, heinously poor command decission but not an idiot. after gettysburg, if i remember my history correctly, he did an exemplary job of being a cavalry general.

jog my memory VP, was it early(sp) or hill that took command of jackson's corp? i think it was jubille early, anyhow, him not taking the hill that first night in gettysburg, from what i read, cost that campaign it's needed victory. also from what i read it is believed had jackson been there and in command he would have seized the high ground by brute force.

but it has been quite some time since i studied any of this and i cannot be certain.....

 

You are correct about Early - he took Jackson's Corps, and he did not take Cemetary Hill on the night of the 1st. However his failure to do so was Lee's fault. Lee's orders said to take the enemey position "if practicable" - which of course to Jackson would have meant take the hill - but Early wasn't Jackson and he didn't take the hill. If he had, Gettysburg never would have been a major battle because Meade would have been forced to retreat.

My professor used to often say that Getysburg was the price that the Rebs paid for having Lee as their main commander

 

Agreed, him marching longstreet's corp across that wide open feild was beyond a catastrophic error. from that point on lee faught a battle of attrition and he lost. be that as it may, after chancellorsville he only had one lieutenant he could really lean on, longstreet, and he had his corp, along with his best divisional cammander, armistead, killed.

when i was studying this and walked the battlefields at manassas, petersburg, gettysburg(visited as a kid) and fredricksburg i tried to imagine the fury and guts of those campaigns.

do you recall the german guys name that rode with stuart? his writtings from his diary are the most enlightening things i have read about the war. shit, i wish i could remember his name, quite the character.

one thing i did get a kick out of in the movie was the use of those famous quotes....