This new weekly column will be a rummage in the great toy chest that is the Times Archive. Big and small stories, battles and first nights, obits and ads will all provide the inspiration, and I will be happy to take any reader's suggestion and see if it will make an entertainment for the rest of us.

Today the finger drops on the year 1863, and the place is a small town in Pennsylvania called Gettysburg. What you have to know by way of background is that The Times was deeply ambivalent about the American Civil War, which had begun two years earlier. Conscience should have favoured the abolitionist North, but there were many in the British Establishment who sympathised more with the romantic and economically less competitive South.

By the summer of 1863 the armies of the Confederacy had won most of the big battles, and General Robert E. Lee invaded the North in the hope of inflicting a defeat that would force President Lincoln into negotiation. On July 1 rebel forces encountered a Union detachment just outside Gettysburg; the first shots were fired in what afterwards came to be regarded as the decisive battle of the War Between the States.

This was not, however, quite how it looked at the time to “Our Special Correspondent” who was what we might now call “embedded” with the Confederate Army. The Victorian Times reader had to wait until August 18 to discover what he (or she, I suppose) was to make of this unnamed person's dispatches from across the Atlantic.

Times Archive 1863: The Battle of Gettysburg

Through the deepening twilight and on far into the night the fierce struggle continued

• Gettysburg: Times leading article, August 1863

Background

• History doesn't repeat itself

Although printed at the same time, these accounts of Gettysburg had been jotted down between July 1 and 23, straddling the approaches, the fighting and the aftermath of the battle, and then sent off together. Our Special Correspondent noted gloomily, that “the long and inexplicable delay” between the sending and receiving of his reports “has taught me to dismiss all hope of any freshness surviving and attaching to - what I write, when - if ever - it is read”.

Such pessimism didn't prevent him from writing a vivid, occasionally poetic portrait of the fighting, which took place in countryside “reminding the spectator of the gently swelling banks densely clothed with trees which are found between the towns of Dorking and Reigate”.

What our man in the Southern Confederacy witnessed was a prolonged rebel assault on a defensive position composed of a series of ridges and wooded hills. This culminated, in the third day of the battle, in a catastrophic frontal charge - most notably by Pickett's Division of Longstreet's Corps, on the Union centre. OSC captures the impulsiveness of this attack, but gives it his own, attractive classical twist. “Far back into the mountains the reverberations rolling from hillside to hillside startled strange and unmusical echoes. Vast cumuli of cloud, such as would have shrouded 10,000 Homeric goddesses, had they cared in these days of villainous saltpetre to mingle in the mêlée, floated over the strife...”

The next day both armies disengaged. The Union forces regrouped, the Confederates, after a delay, retreated back into Virginia. Technically it was possible to

suggest a bloody draw; strategically, however, it was a terrible reverse for the South. This perspective was, for whatever reason, denied to OSC. From Hagerstown in Maryland on July 8 he suggested that the result, though a failure for Lee in his primary purpose, nevertheless favoured the South. It was a failure that, “while wholly unexpected, is more likely to delay its [Lee's plan] execution than altogether to frustrate its ultimate design... In spite of their losses,” he continued, “the Confederate Generals and troops were never fuller of fight.”

Our Correspondent, at this point, still had boundless faith in the military abilities of the South's fighting men and their leaders. There was a Napoleonic parallel, he believed. “The frightful but level battles at Gettysburg will resemble another Eylau [a bloody draw, Ed.], and be the prelude ere long to another Friedland [a huge

Napoleon victory, Ed], to be

followed, as is everywhere most earnestly desired, by a Tilsit [a successful peace negotiation, Ed] at no distant date.”

But by July 23, now back in Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, a slightly less exuberant Correspondent predicted the impossibility of triumph for either side.

“Every day shows more and more plainly that it is almost an impossibility that an influential and decisive victory should in this war be ever gained by either party,” he calculated. The sheer size of America, and unconquerability of the South made it inconceivable that a military conclusion would be achieved, and if the war continued “the child just born will be a mature man before the dispute is settled”.

A year later General Sherman was marching his Union forces through Georgia; within 20 months General Lee was surrendering at Appomattox. The child was still in diapers.

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