Mahan at West Point, “Gallic Bias,” and the “Old Army”: the Subconscious of Leadership at Gettysburg
Mahan at West Point, “Gallic Bias,” and the “Old Army”: The Subconscious of Leadership at Gettysburg Michael Phipps “In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point.” Douglas MacArthur “…Napoleon stands unrivalled.” Dennis Hart Mahan “God and the soldier we like adore, In time of danger, not before. The danger past and all things righted, God is forgotten, the soldier slighted.” Thomas Jordan 1 Introduction What follows is not a discussion of the direct results of leadership on the Battle of Gettysburg. That subject is one of the most widely and deeply covered in all of American and world history. This paper is rather an examination of the subtle impact on the battle caused by the background of the highest-ranking leaders on the field. In a sense, it is a look at the subconscious of the leadership on the field. The Battle of Gettysburg, and with it the entire American Civil War, was in one sense, not a fight between slave and free, states’ rights and central federal, industrial and agrarian, north and south, “Johnny Reb” and “Billy Yank,” or the overdone cliché “brother against brother.” Rather, it was a fight at the highest command level between men with virtually identical backgrounds. That background consisted of four or five years attending the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. There at least a year was spent in the classroom of Dennis Hart Mahan, Professor of Civil and Military Engineering and the Art (or Science) of War.
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