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The Killer Angels By Michael Shaara Essay

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There was never a bloodier war on American soil than the Civil War. Those short four years took the lives of thousands of soldiers and destroyed many infrastructures of America. The war, however, was more than a battle between Lincoln and Davis, the North and the South, slavery and freeman. The Civil War was a war of ideals. The accounts told by the soldiers shown that, although the two sides did not agree on most topics, the North and the South did held certain ideals. In The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, the eyes of James Longstreet and Joshua Chamberlain expresses the battle between the North and the South as an opportunity to show their major contributions, their loyalties to their troops, and their opinions of the war that shaped them.
Lieutenant General James Longstreet contributed to the Civil War despite the lack of appreciation from his fellow men. Longstreet opposed offensive warfare in Gettysburg and argued that the “enemy outnumbered you and outgunned you and would come looking for you anyway if you waited somewhere on your own ground” (10). He did not openly express his arguments all the time but was often ignored by General Robert E. Lee and many of the Confederate troops when he warned them that an offensive tactic at Gettysburg would cost the Confederacy numerous casualties. Even though soldiers like Brigadier General Lewis Armistead agreed with many of Longstreet theories of defensives, the South would never listen to Longstreet. The problem was the

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