Jennifer Murray

author of ""Your Golden Opportunity is Gone": George Gordon Meade, The Expectations of Decisive Battle, and the Road to Williamsport"

January 11, 2019

Dr. Jennifer M. Murray is a military historian, with a specialization in the American Civil War, in the Department of History at Oklahoma State University. Murray’s most recent book publication is "On A Great Battlefield: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park, 1933-2013," published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2014. Murray is also the author of "The Civil War Begins," published by the U.S. Army’s Center of Military History in 2012. She is currently working on a full-length biography of George Gordon Meade, tentatively titled "Meade at War."

Published in "Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America's Civil War," this chapter explores the leadership decisions of Army of the Potomac General George Gordon Meade in the final days of the Gettysburg Campaign. Specifically, this chapter places President Abraham Lincoln's expectations of a decisive victory over the Confederate army within the broader context of military history and argues that battles of annihilation are incredibly rare and thus Lincoln and northern citizens' expectations misplaced.

Consequently, General Meade's leadership during the pursuit from Gettysburg, culminating in the actions at Falling Waters, must be understood within the broader contours of the feasibility of annihilating a citizen-soldier army and the rarity of coupling a battlefield victory with an aggressive pursuit of the enemy forces.

URL: https://library-dep.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2019-honorees/jennifer-murray

Last Updated: 11 January 2019