The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg’s Forgotten History: Immigrants, Women, and African Americans in the Civil War’s Defining Battle.

CREIGHTON, Margaret S.

Item Number: 124589

New York: Basic Books, 2005.

Early printing of this stunningly fluid work of original history. Octavo, original half cloth, illustrated. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the title page, “For Sue, with many thanks for a lively November Evening at the Curt Margaret S. Creighton November 8, 2007.” Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Pracher Designs. Jacket photograph by Corbis.

Gettysburg has been written about and studied in great detail over the last 140 years, but there are still many participants whose experiences have been overlooked. In augmenting this incomplete history, Margaret Creighton presents a new look at the decisive battle through the eyes of Gettysburg's women, immigrant soldiers, and African Americans. An academic with a superb flair for storytelling, Creighton draws on memoirs, letters, diaries, and newspapers to get to the hearts of her subjects. Mag Palm, a free black woman living with her family outside of town on Cemetery Ridge, was understandably threatened by the arrival of Lee's Confederate Army; slavers had tried to capture her three years before. Carl Schurz, a political exile who had fled Germany after the failed 1848 revolution, brought a deeply held fervor for abolitionism to the Union Army. Sadie Bushman, a nine-year-old cabinetmaker's daughter, was commandeered by a Union doctor to assist at a field hospital. In telling the stories of these and a dozen other participants, Margaret Creighton has written a stunningly fluid work of original history -- a narrative that is sure to redefine the Civil War's most essential battle.