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I am 66, a former political reporter and columnist and I now work for a member of Congress, do free lance writing and political consulting.

My grandfather, Judge John T. Goolrick Sr., was a member of the Fredericksburg Artillery. He was wounded, but returned to action in time to be at Appomattox when Lee surrendered. He walked home and later engineered in 1902 the first Union Army reunion south of the Mason-Dixon line. By then General Meade had been long dead, but as I recall General Sickles -- not a good name to mention to a Meade fan -- attended and delivered a speech. My grandmother, a direct descendant of George Mason of Gunston Hall, was a teenage girl when Burnside shelled Fredericksburg in 1862. She later wrote about the experience and the evacuation of the city .

I share my father's opinion that General Meade was a superb commander who has not gotten the full share of credit he deserves. As my father notes, Lincoln, with no military experience, thought he knew more than those who had experience, and that Halleck wasn't up to his job.

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John Goolrick on Meade

"Cadiz, Spain, looks out upon the sea and there George Gordon Meade first looked upon the world. He was the child of American parents who had long lived in Spain and the son of a man who was close to the King. In 1815, the year of his birth, Waterloo had marked the end of Bonaparte's domination of Europe. "

Thus begins the double spaced typed manuscript of nearly 450 pages titled, 'The Patrician General: A Biography of General George Meade.'

I came across it again not long ago while rummaging through one of my closets, the first time I had looked upon it in many years. And I wondered as I often had in the past, why my father-John T. Goolrick Jr., the son of a Confederate private who was at Appomattox when the surrender took place:-had written a long and mainly sympathetic book about a Yankee general.

Of course, I was doubly cursed. My grandfather, who marched with the Fredericksburg Artillery , had died years before I was born and, though a historian, wrote little about his own role in the war. And my father, struck by wanderlust early in life, had as a page in the U.S. House of Representatives fetched tea for William Jennings Bryan; lived off the 1and in the wild west; worked for newspapers in California; traveled throughout Africa and broken his neck in a diving accident in Hawaii before returning home many years later to Fredericksburg.

Perhaps, he wrote the book simply to earn a living since he was apparently on the payroll of the federal Works Progress Administration in the tough depression years of the 1930s when historians were in scant demand. And since my father died before I reached my teens and developed an abiding interest in history , I can only speculate.

I do know that he submitted the manuscript to the Macmil1an publishing company in .New York but the timing was exquisitely bad because Hitler and his Nazis were overrunning Europe and the public interest was focused there. An editor wrote back that while an editorial board liked the book very much, several recent Civil War period books had been commercial failures.

Reading the yellowing manuscript again recently I was convinced that the style is good and spare and strong. But it is no longer publishable material because it is hopelessly outdated. Thousands of new source materials have been uncovered since its completion some 65 years ago and besides that we live in an age when biography to satisfy and sell must attempt to delve deeply into the psyche of the individual being profiled. The cult of personality rules.

My father's work treats General Meade kindly , perhaps rightly so, and portrays him as another of the West Point leaders who played vital roles in the war. He also contends to a degree that because Meade was not one to try to ingratiate himself with the news media and often castigated reporters, the press turned on him with a vengeance and gave glowing accounts of the alleged deeds of lesser leaders who fawned over them.

Certainly, there are a number of students of the war who would not agree that Meade deserves any great amount of praise. In his wonderful novel, 'The Killer Angels’, Michael Shaara describes Meade as, 'Major General, forty seven. Vain and bad tempered, balding, full of self pity No decision he makes at Gettysburg will be decisive, except perhaps the last."

Three days before the crucial battle of Gettysburg started, Meade was named commander of the Army of the Potomac only because another Union general who could not stand Washington intrigue turned it down. Thus it was Meade who ranked all the valiant unions soldiers who endured the turmoil, carnage and bloodshed of those three jumbled and confused days when the fate of the nation was literally at stake.

My father believed that since Meade would have gotten the full measure of blame had his army lost at Gettysburg, that it is only fair and just to credit Meade for the victory, for literally turning a disorganized Army into one that with only a few exceptions performed valiantly.

The issue may never be settled because of those who say the south lost because J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry was derelict in not showing up to scout out enemy positions and because of slovenly performance by some key Confederate commanders, particularly General James Longstreet. And then there are those who claim that Robert E. Lee was far from the top of his game at Gettysburg and sent his men headlong into heavily fortified enemy positions instead of trying to lure Meade's troops to more favorable fighting ground as Longstreet allegedly suggested only to be rebuffed.

I can see Meade's point, however, when my father describes the message sent by General Halleck back in the safety of Washington that President Lincoln was dissatisfied (with Meade’s conduct) because in the wake of the great victory he had allowed Lee's army to escape due to lack of vigorous pursuit.

Meade's reaction was unbridled anger. As my father wrote, 'Knowing he had done all that could be done with the worn army he was commanding, and himself fagged by constant days and nights in the saddle trying to get over bad roads in rainstorms with long wagon trains, Meade wrote to himself a message that was beyond the limits of military etiquette But he was persuaded by cooler heads around him to modify it. 'Having performed my duty conscientiously and to the best of my ability, the censure of the President conveyed in your dispatch of 1 p.m. this day is, in my judgment, so undeserved that I feel compelled most respectfully to ask to be immediately relieved of the command of this Army.'

That brought Halleck and Lincoln up short. Northern papers were proclaiming Gettysburg as a noble triumph. A headline in The Philadelphia Inquirer read, "VICTORY, WATERLOO ECLIPSED.' There was no way Meade, the hero of the hour, could be sacked just a week or so after he had been put in command and earned such glory for the formerly ‘woe-begone’ Army of the Potomac.

But for Meade the glory was to be fleeting. My father thought that Meade's 'childish' hostility toward the press caught up with him when "utterly baseless" charges that his leadership at Gettysburg had been incompetent and his failure to pursue Lee inexcusable began to appear regularly in the press. "Meade saw his reputation being tarnished by mud-flinging, and the victory due to days and nights of sleepless vigilance. pictured in the press as an act of God."

The waning of his star increased dramatically when U.S. Grant came east and took command of all Union forces. Unlike his predecessors, Grant commanded from the field and gave orders directly to Meade. To his credit, Meade offered to resign but Grant kept him on. One wonders how Meade must have felt on the evening of Apri19, 1865 when word was brought to his encampment four miles away from Appomattox Courthouse that Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Grant that day and Meade, still in command of the Army of the Potomac, had not even been present to witness one of the most memorable scenes in American history .

It is idle speculation, but my father might have been intrigued by Meade because the General was certainly one of the most frequent and unwelcome visitors to the Fredericksburg region in its history .He commanded troops in the battles of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness and Spotsylvania and dueled valiantly with Stonewall Jackson at Fredericksburg. He played a large role in the war yet his name did not gain the lasting resonance of such Union commanders as Grant, Sherman and Sheridan.

I recall once loaning my father's biography to a friend who was a Civil War buff and he later inquired why I had not tried to have it published. My response was that World War II was my war-I was ten when it ended-and my heroes, whose portraits hang in my residence, were Winston Churchill and General George Smith Patton Jr. Over the years I had read voraciously about my war only later in life to realize that my grandfather's war was endlessly fascinating in its complexity and its pitting of so many former comrade in arms against each other.

Compared to others, there have not been few biographies published about George Gordon Meade, though there is a Meade Society in Philadelphia dedicated to the preservation of his memory. His main role in history is that of the commander whose troops repulsed the Confederacy at Gettysburg and turned the tide of the war forever.

Those who say the deed was lessened by his failure to chase Lee fail to note what a close run thing Gettysburg was for the Union.

George Meade died in 1872, and President U .S. Grant attended his funeral services. He is buried in Philadelphia’s historic Laurel Hill Cemetery. He may have been vain and bad-tempered, as Shaara claims--opinions vary on the subject--but he is an important figure in the history of our nation and that can never be denied with any credibility.