Book Report On The Killer Angels By Shaara

A great divide occurred in America during the Civil War, and country was split into two sides; the Union or the Confederacy. A book by the name of The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara is a novel about one of the bloodiest battles in the Civil War, which was the Battle of Gettysburg (which lasted three days). It has several historical figures in the book who fought in the war and suffered injuries, such as Henry Heth, Richard Stoddart Ewell, and John Buford. The Civil War was one of the many turning points in America’s history. It began with the seceding of the Southern states as they refused to emancipate their own slaves and letting them rebel. Abraham Lincoln, the president at the time, had tried his best to not initiate any war, and was

“[Ewell] had lost a leg at Manassas and had just recently returned to the army, and he was standing awkwardly balancing himself against the unfamiliar leg… swaying nervously, clutching a fencepost,” (Shaara, 224). He is missing part of his leg, and explains that a minie ball hit his leg “just below the jointed knee” (Shaara, 225); back in the day minie balls were used and could shatter bone, so doctors would render the wound untreatable and amputate the limb it hit. Amputations were very common and done with anesthesia, which was recently made at the time; sometimes they didn’t use it when amputations occurred. When James Longstreet, a lieutenant general, is riding off back to the camp after the first day of the battle, he sees a wagon with many limbs in it. “[Longstreet] passed by a hospital wagon, saw mounded limbs glowing whitely in the dark, a pile of legs, another of arms. It looked like masses of fat white spiders,” (Shaara, 207). There would be piles of limbs, which were all bloodied and infected; surgeons usually used saws and didn’t clean them often due to lack of time to do proper surgeries and need to tend to many of the injured. This would lead to many infections and diseases to spread amongst the wounded