Bradley M. Gottfried

This book is a fine addition to the Gettysburg corpus, as well as the inaugural volume in a fine new series by Savas Beatie. It consists of a series of maps, on the right-hand pages, and a description of the maps on the left-hand pages. The maps are usually tactical in nature, although some, describing the advance to and (Confederate) retreat from Gettysburg, cover a larger area. There are some minor omissions, none serious. The one truly annoying flaw is the depiction of terrain elevations in gross terms only. As a result, some significant terrain is ignored.… (more)

There are several fine books out about the Battle of Gettysburg, most notable being Edwin Coddington’s superb one volume work, The Gettysburg Campaign and Harry Pfanz’s exhaustive 3 volume study. But like just about every book on the Civil War, the maps are barely adequate. The maps in Coddington’s book are good but there is just one single map showing the movements of both armies from June 3rd, when Lee began pulling out from Fredericksburg to June 30th, when both armies began concentrating in the Gettysburg area. To say that following the movements of the armies is tedious is understating the case. But graphics are expensive to reproduce in a book, and require a different type of attention to detail. It is no wonder that so many books fall short.

Books of maps--atlases--exist, but usually these are just one-page affairs of a particular battle with a very brief summary of the battle itself. Ghettysburg was the most complex battle of the Civil War, and one-page maps do not even begin to cover the numerous individual engagements which together made up the three days of fighting.

In The Maps of Gettysburg, Gottfried pioneered a new format. He broke down the entire campaign--from the start on June 3rd to the end of Lee’s retreat on July 14--into sections. Each section--sometimes covering one or more days’ of marching, sometimes just a few hours of fighting--has two pages; the left-hand page is text summarizing the action portrayed on the right hand page, which is a map,

The format works beautifully. The text is by necessity a stripped-down, concise summary of events, but that’s no problem; Gottfried is a fine writer. Gottfried has done a wonderful job with both maps and text. There are errors, but they are pretty obvious in most cases, and should not detract from the overall enjoyment of this very fine work. I for one found that for the first time, I understood the movements of both armies from Virginia to Gettysburg.

In addition, there is information on some aspects of the campaign that receive very little attention in works about the battle, such as the short but decisive engagement of Second Winchester on June 10-12 and the cavalry fights that occurred on July 3rd. Lee’s retreat to Virginia is well covered.

Highly recommended.… (more)

I read this book along with The Gettysburg Campaign It was a very interesting and entertaining read, and the two of them together was quite a treat. In this edition the maps are all in color and at times it seemed like I was reading a kid's picture book. The color helps contrast the features in the maps which are full of details. The maps show the topography, fences, roads with the different fields marked off with the types of grains or trees in the fields. There are a total of 121 maps in 29 sets for different aspects of the campaign. The battle maps have a scale from 150 to 300 yards to 3/4" with time intervals between 15 and 40 minutes. To the left of each map is a page of text explaining the action in the map. The only problem I had with the small scale maps was the necessity to go back to a large map to see where I was on the battlefield. I haven't seen a better portrayal of the action of a campaign and I am going to take a look at Gottfried's other books.… (more)