Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Loyalty
Loyalty is essential for an army to function
well, as soldiers have to trust their officers in order to follow
them successfully. The idea of loyalty appears many times in The
Killer Angels: Kilrain is loyal to Chamberlain; Goree and
Sorrel are loyal aides to Longstreet; and most important, the entire
Confederate army is fiercely loyal to Robert E. Lee.
But loyalty can be a double-edged sword, as
Longstreet learns. Despite his absolute certainty that Pickett’s
Charge will fail and result in the death of thousands of men, he
cannot bring himself to ask his fellow officers to turn against
Lee. He knows that the other officers and the other soldiers would
never follow him instead of Lee. But he cannot refuse to lead the
charge himself because he is bound by his own loyalty to Lee and
to Virginia—he is the best and only man for the job. Loyalty has
helped bring about many of the Confederacy’s victories, but at Gettysburg
it contributes to the loss.
Command Errors
Most of the primary characters in The Killer Angels are
generals, or at least colonels. Each of these men is in command
of a vast number of soldiers, and so each of their mistakes is magnified.
The history of the Battle of Gettysburg consists of a series of
tactical mistakes, and, in each case, the result is the death of
hundreds, even thousands of men. For the Confederacy, the trouble
begins early, when General J. E. B. Stuart, commander of the Confederate
cavalry, fails to report promptly on the movements of the Union
army. This absence prevents Lee from having accurate and timely
information about the size and position of his enemy, and it allows
the Union an unexpected element of surprise. The next mistake is
Generals Ewell and Early’s failure to take the high ground when
they have the chance. This mistake is partially Lee’s fault as well,
since he does not make it clear how necessary it is to take the
hill. The results are ultimately disastrous: without the high ground,
the Confederacy must fight a losing battle when it chooses to attack.
Later, Longstreet again has inaccurate knowledge of the Union position,
and he is forced to lose hours of time by countermarching his troops
to another position. Of course, the greatest failure is Pickett’s
Charge, which, in hindsight, was one of the worst tactical decisions
of the Civil War. The charge cost thousands of lives and, in the
opinion of many historians, broke the back of the Confederate war
effort.
Aristocracy
Since much of the book is written from the perspective
of the Confederate leaders, we are given a close look into the high
society of the Old South. Lee and Pickett in particular are examples
of the “Southern gentleman,” and represent values that they believe
would be erased by a Union victory. Historically, the Union army
was much more ethnically diverse than the Confederate army, being
filled with immigrants and the children of immigrants. While the
Union commanders were primarily white Anglo-Saxons, they were not
necessarily rich white men. The Southern commanders, on the other hand,
were primarily rich white men of British ancestry, with a few exceptions
such as Longstreet, who was not as wealthy and was part Dutch. In The
Killer Angels, this motif manifests itself in a few ways. For
Buster Kilrain, the war is less about freeing slaves than it is about
leveling the social playing field: “The point is that we have a country
here where the past cannot keep a good man in chains, and that’s
the nature of the war. It’s the aristocracy I’m after. ‘All that lovely,
plumed, stinking chivalry. The people who look at you like a piece
of filth, a cockroach, ah.’” On the other side, Arthur Fremantle,
the British observer, can think of nothing better than seeing the Confederacy
win and preserve the class system inherited from the Old World—to
him, the point is that the people of the South “do it all exactly
as we do in Europe. And the North does not. That’s what the war
is really about. . . . The Northerner doesn’t give a damn for tradition,
or breeding, or the Old Country. . . . Of course, the South is the
Old Country. They haven’t left Europe. They’ve merely transplanted
it. And that’s what the war is about.”
