As Shaara presents it in The Killer Angels, the ultimate social disruption of civil war encompasses a broad spectrum of moral issues, from the individual's struggle to maintain his integrity to the dismemberment of a nation. For Shaara, slavery is only one factor that contributed to the Civil War; he briefly shows a Northern unit rescuing a wounded fugitive slave, but he treats the episode as an illustration of the flash point of the war, not as an end in itself. Slavery in The Killer Angels is peripheral to Shaara's analysis of the war's central cause, which he sees as a fundamental clash between two radically different concepts of society.

Shaara builds his view of the battle, and by extension, his reading of the entire Civil War, around a paradox: at Gettysburg in June of 1863, the Army of Northern Virginia, unified by culture, tongue, and creed...