Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War
The story takes place in 1863 when Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia are victorious at the Battle of Gettysburg instead of the United States. (Instead of attacking the Union line on July 2, 1863, Lee conducts a broad turning movement and forces the Army of the Potomac to attack him in a favorable position.) Gettysburg becomes something of a footnote in the main battle, which takes place at Union Mills in Maryland. The defeat at Union Mills is a grave setback to the United States, but it by no means spells the end of the war or determines its outcome, and the United States still has a lot of fight in it.
Battle of Gettysburg
Peter Carmichael refers to the military context for the armies, the "horrendous losses at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, which effectively destroyed Lee's offensive capacity," implying that these cumulative losses were not the result of a single battle. Thomas Goss, writing in the U.S. Army's "Military Review" journal on the definition of "decisive" and the application of that description to Gettysburg, concludes: "For all that was decided and accomplished, the Battle of Gettysburg fails to earn the label 'decisive battle'." The military historian John Keegan agrees. Gettysburg was a landmark battle, the largest of the war and it would not be surpassed. The Union had restored to it the belief in certain victory, and the loss dispirited the Confederacy. If "not exactly a decisive battle", Gettysburg was the end of Confederate use of Northern Virginia as a military buffer zone, the setting for Grant's Overland Campaign.