Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War

Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War is a book written by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen. It was published in 2003 and became a New York Times bestseller. The book centers on several prominent characters leading up to the Civil War Battle of Gettysburg. The story takes place in 1863 when Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia are preparing to attack the North and end the war. The book is an alternate history in which the South wins the Battle of Gettysburg instead of the North. It is the first part in a trilogy in which the next books are respectively Grant Comes East and Never Call Retreat. The book (and the trilogy as a whole) seems to be counterpoint to Ward Moore's classic Bring the Jubilee (1953), which starts off from the same point of departure — i.e., a Confederate victory at Gettysburg. In Moore's book, that spells the end of the war with a total Southern victory. The Confederacy dictates the terms of peace and establishes itself not only as a sovereign nation but as the dominant power in North America, with the rump USA totally broken and reduced to its backward powerless satellite into the Twentieth Century. Gingrich and Forstchen evidently challenge this by a diametrically opposite thesis: losing Gettysburg is a grave setback to the North, but it by no means spells the end of the war or determines its outcome, and the North still has a lot of fight in it.

Historical figures

• John Buford, U.S. general
• Joshua Chamberlain, U.S. colonel
• Winfield Scott Hancock, U.S. general
• Herman Haupt, U.S. general
• Henry Jackson Hunt, U.S. general
• Robert E. Lee, Confederate general
• Abraham Lincoln, U.S. president
• James Longstreet, Confederate general
• George Meade, U.S. general
• Daniel Sickles, U.S. general
• Gouverneur K. Warren, U.S. general