The Foreign Observers at Gettysburg: The Real Lt. Colonel Fremantle 🇬🇧🇺🇸 

Very informative thank you. And even to this day Officers of the Coldsteamers are habitually late!

Having a Prussian observer climb up a tree to get a better view of the battle is the most Prussian thing i have heard about in a while.

Another famous observer was Count Zeppelin who was interested in the use of observation balloons. The Balloon Corps was started early on in the first years of the War and he was there to take notice of its potentiality as a weapon of war(I am sure that was what was going through his mind when he asked questions of some of the German engineers)

Time to binge all of your videos. You are a wonderful presenter, I learned so much from this. Thank you so much!

note: Arthur J L Fremantle book,Three months in the Southern States” was a Lt Col on vacation. He was 27 and did not wear a red uniform. He was often mistaken as a rebel officer (many CSA officers wore Civilian Attire) since he was clean, well dressed in a Gray jacket with long riding boots. At Gettysburg, he climbed a tree to get a better look and used his Field glasses then Federal Artillery started raining down on his position. He asked why they fired on us? The Quartermaster he was sharing a tent said “you look like an officer and when they see a spotter (for artillery), you are fair game.” He converted his Gold Sovereigns For CSA notes … said Richmond was very cheap if you had silver/gold (50 cents a day in silver). But spending CSA notes were difficult. When he visited a Maryland Farm house after the battle, with a Rev officer, the farmers said they cleaned out. When he provided a gold coin, food showed up and said it was the best food he had in the last three months. When he crossed into Union Lines, he converted his gold into Greenbacks and surprised how easy they were accepted in the North.

An Englishman is never late. Nor, is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to. Also, Freemantle's book was one of the first I read on the US civil war. Just the day to day happenings were interesting enough for me! Cheers!

Awesome perspective. It's a breath of fresh air to find a good tuber. Gettysburg is a yearly Pilgrimage for me. It did not know that Fremantle missed the charge . The cannon barrage of 300 guns for an hr and a half is kind of hard to dismiss.. lol

Nice video! You rarely hear of FitzGerald Ross (Englishman in Austrian Service) or Captain Justus Scheibert (Prussian service) despatched to observe the effect of Rifled cannon in battle. The movie makes Fremantle into a bit of a character but reading his narrative he seems far more subtle and professional than history tends to depict him.

Technically, because of the double rank system in the Guards and wider British Army Fremantle was a Captain in the Coldstream Guards and a Lieutenant Colonel in the rest of the Army. The Guards double rank system was abolished around 1871

One of the interesting perspectives I have read is that the sympathy of the British ruling classes for the Confederacy was based on the fact that southerners were attempting to institutionalize a class-based system not dissimilar to the one already existing in Britain. And they had an abhorrence of the meritocracy that the USA was at the time. Not to mention that Britain and the USA were still hostile to one another and many brits saw anything that weakened the USA as being good for the British Empire.

This was an excellent video...great job.

Highly informative as usual.

Amazing content! Subscribed immediately!!

You are not only looking like a confederate general ( gues who is meant ;-) ) , you are a fountain of knowledge about the civil war. How I could miss you channel up to today, I will never understand. So I subscribed at once to your channel to be more enlightened about the event, wich determined the history of the USA at most. Thanks for your work from a similar looking man, living in Germany. People say, that I look like the wizard in the saddle. I think, they are right. ;-) Major Scheibert is one of my antcesters, and I can confirm, that he wore his most splendid uniform at Gettysburg. A german officer would never go to a battlefield in civilian clothes, despite the fact that he is a mear observer. Style and guts were everything at that time. Better dead, than honor lost by beeing unproperly dressed. This tradition still exist in families, descending from those brave men. 3 years later, he puts his knowledge to good use in the battle of Königgrätz 1866, were the Prussians annihilated the Austrians..

Yes, that stupid tea-cup in the movie was the worst cliche the director could come up with.

"What was that noise?" - Col. Fremantle on July 3rd, probably

Excellent video, learned quite a bit of new information from it.

I was hoping after the movie Gettysburg that they would make a movie about Col. Fremantle using the same actor he was great!!

Man, I need to get to Gettysburg again

Very interesting. Thank you.

Thank you, I enjoyed this.

Good vid - very informative! Aloha 😊🤙🏼👏🏼

What is really sad is that line of suburban homes in the background. I was in Gettysburg as a kid and it was really an amazing history trip for a kid in 1970 and there were no homes in the distance. I remember how still and vast the areas of the battlefield were. It seemed like an unspoiled shrine in the country and you could imagine the lines of soldiers. So many historic sites are threatened by urban sprawl now, especially in the East, it seems that not saving these sites for future generations is a great mistake.

I would have thought he would have worn his uniform, so he would not have been confused as a spy. I can see it both ways.

Every war has foriegn observers: both for politics and what to learn about the development of warfare.

Very nice video from Australia 😁

sir garnet wolseley spent time with the northern armies , and crossed the Potomac to join the southern armies, he met with general lee

I've mentioned this elsewhere, and I still can't recall who said it, but it is true: "Armies never learn from other armies." All the faults the observers found were soon manifest in their own armies, be it the French paying too little attention to accurate, rapid fire in 1870 or the British having to use poorly trained volunteer units in South Africa, and later when raising a large volunteer/conscripted army in 1914-18. It's a tricky business being among foreign troops, though. You are part diplomat, part entertainer, you must look wise and knowing and a little superior and also very impressed by turns. You have to bite your tongue one minute and hide your ignorance the next. Like people, all armies are different and yet basically the same.

from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. - Abraham Lincoln

40,000 Canadians fought in the US Civil war. 7k on the side of the South 33k for the North

The FMO's (Foreign Military Observers) most likely saw little they cared to copy, hence von Moltke's comment about "armed mobs," but certainly someone reported back on the efficacy of military railroad transportation. The Prussians put that to use PDQ.

Did anyone else who grew up in the Rocky Mountain west feel disconnected from the civil war? I was basically taught that it happened a long time ago on the east coast and wasn't our western concern. Therefore, I wasn't interested in it until recently.

The British mills needed the cotton. Didn't they move on to Egypt and India as a source of cotton due to the Civil War?

What's the name of opening music tune? Love it.

What lessons on how to fight a war were learned by the foreign observers?

I wonder what "embedded" observers like Dilger and Von Borcke had to say. Too bad the Europeans didn't make much of an effort to cover Grant's decisive campaign.

Do you know anything about Colonel Augusto Fogliardi of the Swiss Army who is also allegedly at Gettysburg?

Surely Freemantle didn't just head off to the Civil War because HE had a fancy for "observing" that conflict. If he was in the British Army, he must have had the approval of a high-level Commander before he set off.

Excellent commentary! I thought “carriageway” was a little strange though.

If that music was any louder it could cause hearing loss. I've been to Metallica concerts that weren't this loud.

GET TROLLED LINCOLNITES!

07:35 If I may also contribute a slight bit of context as a fellow historian (Birkbeck, UCL) about the UK and the Confederacy. Until the Gettysburg Address, the British were unofficially, but officially pro-Confederacy. This is because some ships were running the Union Blockade to sell guns to the confederacy, mostly smoothbores and older types, following an old adage still used by both of us to not arm a potential enemy down the line with the same weapons you have. But it was also (sort of) just private enterprise and contractors, but her Majesty's Government did not stop them, pretending it was a free trade issue. With that First example you can see that the British were toeing a line of helping the Confederacy, but not officially to rile up the North while potentially "betting on the wrong side". They'd have to live with the Union if they won afterwards, the British with all their experience were also mindful of that. Secondly, the British prefer Confederations to Federations. This was exactly one of the issues over recent decades with the EU and the objection to a "federal Europe". The British have always advocated a loose trading confederation. It's an abstract political science argument, but one that was made in polite society in Britain, as well as the free trade issue. The Third and final reason was actually the main one, which was too gauche and obvious to say out loud, except for in private minutes at the Foreign Office, which was that a weakened US was better geopolitically than a strong one that was industrialising from the North if the Union won. Lincoln was aware of all of this and the blockade running, though ineffectual compared to having massive factories of your own churning out rifled guns. The Gettysburg Address served more than one purpose, among them to "shoot the British fox", which it did by making the war all about slavery. Doing this brilliant bit of legalese effectively knocked the British out of the Civil War, since they had to be consistent in their then massive global prerogative to abolish slavery. Lincoln knew this, hence that brilliant speech, which was also diplomatic as well as for internal consumption. About your own comments, Manchester was always abolitionist since the late-18th Century, when the issue flared up into the British consciousness. Manchester and London were pro abolition, because their ports did not make money from slavery. Liverpool and Bristol, then the UKs Second city were, because they did. People used to make the "jobs" argument back then with slavery, like they do with the defence industry now regarding unethical weapons like cluster bombs or air-dropped mines. Finally and in those contexts, clearly Lt. Colonel Fremantle was there as an unofficial official (sic) observer for those Southern Interests, no doubt the news of so many English observers on the Confederate side for that big Battle might well have pushed Lincoln further in making that address later and ending all of that effectively from the British side, with Lt. Colonel Fremantle left holding the turkey, sort of proving why the British often fudge things like that, so they can just say he was some sort of eccentric.

I have the Fremantle book. Walking around doing a video selfie? C'mon.

The wounded on both sides at Solferino inspired the founding of the Red Cross, now helping in the Ukraine.

Do I hear the Protestant Boys at the beginning?

I'm not sure I understand from what you said. Was Fremantle an official observer on assignment for the British army, or was he here on his own dime, unofficially?

U say they wrote that they didnt see much innovative while over here. Perhaps they picked the wrong side to observe from. Had they picked the northern side to observe from, They might have seen machine guns of a few various types, Arial reconnance with reports telegraphed from the air as to enemy movements. They would have seen canned food and milk, Military railroads running all over the north. Telegraph lines from the generals back to Lincoln. Several repeating rifles, grenades,

I disagree the battle of CHANCELLVILLE is a brilliant set of military maneuvers enacted by generals Lee and STONEWALL JACKSON still studied by war colleges around the world which is a study in depth on how a inferior in terms of men and supplies can repel a superior much larger other battles such as FREDRICKSBURG and the SHANANDOAH VALLEY CAMPAIGN also demonstrates how a much larger military force can be defeated by a superior command structure

Observation balloons, trains for moving troops, the war was so different the observers didn’t have a reference

" Doing their bit to end slavery"????. What UTTER TOSH!....The working people of Lancashire didn't have a choice about the cotton famine. It was caused totally and utterly by the blockading of the South's exports of cotton to Britain by the Northern states. The mill owners ran out of cotton, had to close their mills and put people out of work. It wasn't until Egyptian cotton could be brought in , in larger amounts, that the mills started to open again. They could only then produce much inferior products, as Egyptian cotton was much harsher than Southern Cotton; in the period before the civil war it had only only been used to bulk out Southern states cotton by mixing in small amounts, when the price of American cotton rose above a certain level.

You mention his later witnessing the New York Draft Riots, largely carried out by Irish immigrants. One wonders how much the ancient Anglo-Hibernian rivalry would have colored his perceptions of that event.

If the European professionals hadn't been so snobbish about the Civil War and noted some of the problems of attacking defended positions - Fredricksburg, Pickett's Charge, Coldharbour, Siege of Richmond - they might have realised that trench warfare was going to occur in WW1. Maybe in that case the Learning (Bleeding) Curve would not have been so terrible for the troops. That said I accept there are two lines of evidence - Franco Prussian War, Russo Japanese War etc - and it is natural for people to go for the one which they prefer and ignore evidence for the other line hence the emphasis on the attack in 1914 (and for an army to say it couldn't attack would make itself redundant_.

If only the South had won at Gettysburg. The slaves would have eventually been freed. Probably most Southerners considered slavery evil. But most Southerners didn't fight for slavery. They fought against a strongly centralized government which Lincoln embodied . True freedom died with the Confederacy.

👎🏼👎🏼👎🏼👎🏼👎🏼 Rambling man

Britain might have free'd slaves before we did, but at least we didn't colonize half (or any) of Africa. Which hurt far more people than slavery did here in the U.S P.S An independent America did not survive.