Upthreaded:
re: #332 steve_davis

sorry, the pedant in me, which is 99% of me, is calling “Gettsyburg viewed as a turning point” as complete and utter bullshit. By the time Gettysburg happened, the South had already lost the war. Vicksburg was the turning point. Gettysburg was just lee trying desperately to find boots for his nearly shoeless army.

Not that it’s not a useful pastime re-fighting Civil War campaigns, BUT….
1. The capture of Vicksburg as a (“the”?) turning point of the ACW was noted, generally, only afterwards: the final surrender on July 4 was the culmination of a six weeks’ siege; and was looked on at the time as vaguely a sort of anticlimax. Though no one in the North wasn’t going to celebrate, anyway. (My own opinion is that the Union finally seizing control of all of the Mississippi served to validate Winfield Scott’s much-derided “Anaconda Plan” of 1861, which few on the Blue side wanted to be reminded of)
2. The story of the Confederates raiding Gettysburg looking for shoes rests on a single post-war account which (AFAIK) has been questioned by most modern historians. It’s considered more likely that the two armies collided at that particular town because of the way the local road system was oriented: leading the more-mobile Confederates to concentrate their forces quicker. Which, as usual, they did.
3. Not that it needs much repeating, but Donald Trump’s grasp of the Battle of Gettysburg is like most else in that lump of mush he calls a brain… a National Disgrace.