Honor Theme Analysis

Throughout The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara’s historical novel set during the Civil War’s Battle of Gettysburg, the notion of honor manifests on personal and cultural levels—especially in the Confederate Army. In Southern culture, so important is maintaining one’s honor that an accusation of cowardice compels General Dick Garnett to seek redemption through certain death. Similarly, no matter how wise the arguments of Confederate second-in-command James Longstreet for defensive warfare, General Robert E. Lee is unmoved, because he believes that a man of honor cannot turn his back to his enemy. Shaara critiques this understanding of honor as an inflexible code that defies wisdom and logic, ultimately reaping needless death for those who rigidly adhere to it.

Before the novel begins, Dick Garnett, commander of the Confederacy’s Stonewall Brigade, had withdrawn his troops from the First Battle of Kernstown without Stonewall Jackson’s orders. Jackson, one of the most revered Confederate generals, had threatened to court martial Garnett, but in May of 1863—less than two months before the novel begins—Jackson died before a court-martial could be carried out. Because Jackson’s charge of cowardice can now never be resolved, Garnett is effectively the walking dead; he knows he can only redeem himself by dying bravely in battle, and this inexorable code of honor prevents anyone from talking Garnett out of it.

Longstreet entrusts Garnett with one of Major General George Pickett’s brigades, but this is not enough to “redeem” Garnett in his own eyes, or in the eyes of many other Confederates. His “honor was compromised,” Shaara writes, “and he had not recovered from the stain, and in this company there were many men who would never let him recover.” Once lost, honor is something that cannot be easily restored, if it can be restored at all; even a gesture of confidence like Longstreet’s is not sufficient to cleanse the marks of dishonor.

In conversation with Fremantle, a British observer traveling with Lee’s army, Longstreet reiterates that Garnett is “no coward. But his honor is gone […] So now Garnett will have to die bravely to erase the stain.” Longstreet observes that Fremantle regards this as “the only thing for a gentleman to do.” As such, Garnett makes the suicidal choice to ride his horse into battle, making himself a prime target. Lewis Armistead, his fellow brigade commander, nearly weeps at this, but cannot dissuade Garnett because “honor [was] at stake […] he had to prove once and for all his honor, because there was Jackson’s charge, never answered, still in the air wherever Garnett moved.” Pickett, in turn, refuses to order Garnett not to ride. Garnett rides accordingly and dies as expected.

Honor manifests on less personal, though no less consequential, levels throughout the novel as well. For one thing, it shapes Lee’s battle decisions and renders him immoveable in the face of Longstreet’s arguments for defensive warfare. Longstreet’s forward-looking theories are regarded as an affront to Lee’s, and by extension even the army’s, sense of honor. Defensive warfare was not widely accepted by military leaders at the time because it advocated digging securely into a position of the army’s choosing and waiting to be attacked by the enemy, rather than proactively attacking (going on the offensive). While admitting Longstreet’s tactical genius, Armistead warns him, “this ain’t the army for it. We aren’t bred for the defense. And the Old Man […] is just plain, well, too proud.” He brings up the Richmond newspapers’ mockery of Lee’s previous attempt to dig trenches as a lingering wound for Lee, a “stain on the old honor.” Longstreet acknowledges this, reflecting that, nonetheless, “there was danger in [Lee’s attitude]; there was even something dangerous in Lee.”

Later, Longstreet attempts to explain this foreboding to a bewildered Fremantle. “Honor without intelligence is a disaster,” he says with uncharacteristic forthrightness; “honor could lose the war […] I appreciate honor and bravery and courage […] But the point of war is not to show how brave you are.” He goes on to describe the changing norms of warfare and how much deadlier the offensive has become to little avail; “like all Englishmen, and most Southerners, Fremantle would rather lose the war than his dignity.”

Still later, Longstreet is dismayed by Lee’s speech to him defending the necessity of going on the offensive, as Lee seems to think that Longstreet is mainly afraid of losing men. On the contrary, Longstreet’s “only fear was not of death, was not of the war, was of blind stupid human frailty, of blind proud foolishness that could lose it all.”

In his private reflections, Lee is aware that his tactics are tied to his sense of honor. “He had known all along that retreat was simply no longer an alternative, the way a man of honor knows that when he […] sees the blood of the enemy, a man of honor can no longer turn away. So he would stay. And therefore, he would attack.” In making the decision to send his men on the offensive, Lee justifies the move in part because “the men came here ready to die for what they believed in, for their homes and their honor, and although it was often a terrible death it was always an honorable death.”

Lee’s personal conception of honor is thus tinged with a conscious sense of inevitable tragedy. On the eve of the final engagement, Lee reflects that by breaking his oath to defend the United States, he has acted dishonorably in a certain sense and will suffer the consequences; but in another sense, he could not have acted otherwise, lest he go against home and kin. “There had never been an alternative except to run away,” he tells himself, “and he could not do that.”

Longstreet’s bitter resignation sums up Shaara’s argument that to cling too rigidly to honor is folly. Honor is a force unto itself, in Garnett’s case “unturnable, ridiculous […] a festering, unseen wound.” Garnett’s death demonstrates on a personal scale the deadly potential of honor slavishly upheld. The incomprehension of the dignity-conscious foreigner Fremantle, meanwhile, contrasts with Longstreet’s mounting despair as he realizes that, for Lee and most Southerners, preserving honor outweighs the realities of the battlefield. The story’s dramatic irony turns on the fact that Lee’s conception of honor dooms the Confederates to failure; none of Longstreet’s arguments sway Lee, because Lee is committed to a code of behavior that is more important to him than victory, even more important than his own or his men’s survival.