Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  The subsequent victories at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville he regarded as little more than distractions from his larger plan for a second attempt at invading Pennsylvania. “At Fredericksburg,” Lee admitted, “our people were greatly elated,” but “I was much depressed. We had really accomplished nothing; we had not gained a foot of ground, and I knew the enemy could easily replace the men he had lost.” The same thing happened after Chancellorsville. “Our people were wild with delight—I, on the contrary, was more depressed than after Fredericksburg; our loss was severe, and again we had gained not an inch of ground and the enemy could not be pursued. … I considered the problem in every possible phase, and to my mind it resolved itself into the choice of one of two things—either to retire on Richmond and stand a siege, which must ultimately have ended in surrender, or to invade Pennsylvania.”35

  However, each of these three parts of Lee’s success as a commander also carried within it the seeds of Lee’s destruction. Lee’s heavy reliance on the talents of his corps commanders to win battles rendered him much too vulnerable, emotionally and strategically, should any of them fall to wounds or death. At Chancellorsville, this was exactly what happened to “Stonewall” Jackson. Accidentally wounded by his own men while performing a risky nighttime reconnaissance, Jackson suffered the amputation of his left arm, and then eight days later died of complications from the amputation. With Jackson’s death, Lee lost one of the few men capable of turning Lee’s audacious plans for offensive warfare into tactical victories, and he never found a satisfactory replacement. “There never were such men in an army before,” Lee told John Bell Hood, one of his up-and-coming division commanders and a personal pet. “They will go anywhere and do anything if properly led. But there is the difficulty—proper commanders. Where can they be obtained?”

  Similarly, Lee’s influence over Davis tended to operate to the advantage of Virginia, but at the expense of the rest of the Confederacy. By 1863 Davis was under substantial pressure from within his own government (and especially Secretary of War Seddon) to shift the weight of the Confederate war effort to the west and reduce the war in Virginia to a holding action. Lee, however, had sacrificed his first career in the United States Army for the sake of Virginia, and he was not about to see his second career in the Confederate army compel him to make a similar choice. Lee tenaciously fought every suggestion that the Army of Northern Virginia be denuded to reinforce the west, and his influence over Davis guaranteed, at least until the fall of 1863, that the defense of Virginia would always be able to outweigh the demands for help from the Confederate forces in the West.36

  Lee’s tactical judgment was inevitably going to be affected by the increasing deterioration of his health and by the deepening sense of fatalism caused by the losses his incessant urge for the offensive produced. By the spring of 1863, Lee was fifty-six years old, prematurely white-haired and already suffering from severe arthritis. During the Maryland campaign, his horse bolted while Lee was seated on the ground, holding his reins, and the general was dragged over the ground by the frightened animal, spraining both wrists and breaking bones in his hands. Then, on March 30, 1863, Lee suffered the first of a series of heart attacks, a premonition of the heart disease that would, after the war, eventually kill him. All of these ills and accidents took a severe toll on Lee’s energies, both in camp and in battle. “Old age & sorrow is wearing me away,” Lee wrote to his wife, Mary Custis Lee, in March 1863, “& constant anxiety & labour, day and night, leaves me but little repose.”37

  Along with the physical wear and tear of his command, Lee had to cope with the deaths of irreplaceable subordinates such as Jackson, and the deaths of his beloved daughter Anne Carter Lee and daughter-in-law Charlotte Wickham. “In the hours of night, when there is nothing to lighten the full weight of my grief, I feel as if I should be overwhelmed,” Lee wrote after Annie Lee died in 1862. “I had always counted, if God should spare me a few days of peace after this cruel war was ended, that I should have her with me. But year after year my hopes go out, and I must be resigned.” Lee’s sense of resignation increasingly found shape in a mystical submission to the mysterious workings of an all-controlling Providence. “The ties to earth are taken, one by one, by our Merciful God to turn our hearts to Him and to show us that the object of this life is to prepare for a better and brighter world.” Yet, as in so many similar cases (including Lincoln’s), Lee’s sense of divinely ordered purpose in these afflictions only made him more willing than ever to throw himself and his army into the balances of battle. “Our country demands all our strength, all our energies,” Lee wrote. “If victorious, we have everything to hope for in the future. If defeated, nothing will be left for us to live for. … My whole trust is in God, and I am ready for whatever He may ordain.”38

  Affliction was now, in the summer of 1863, about to be visited on Lee in unprecedented amounts. In September 1862 the Confederate Congress authorized Lee to subdivide the Army of Northern Virginia into two corps, commanded by Jackson and James Longstreet (who would be awarded the rank of lieutenant general). The size of these corps had proven, in practice, “too large for one commander,” and in the weeks after Chancellorsville and Jackson’s death, he redistributed the units of the two corps to make three, retaining Longstreet as commander of one and turning command of the other two over to Richard Ewell and A. P. Hill. Ewell was “an honest, brave soldier, who has always done his duty well,” and Hill “is the best soldier of his grade with me.” But Longstreet was a moodier and more truculent subordinate than “Stonewall” Jackson, and neither Ewell nor Hill ever matched Jackson’s raw hitting power. What was worse, Ewell had only just recovered from a wound at Second Manassas that had cost him his leg, and neither he nor Hill was given much time to become accustomed to their new responsibilities before Lee was once more turning his head toward Pennsylvania.39

  Lee opened his new campaign northward on June 3, quietly pulling Ewell’s corps off the Army of Northern Virginia’s defensive line behind the Rappahannock River and slipping it into the Shenandoah Valley, where Ewell easily overran a Union occupation force at Winchester. Longstreet and Hill followed, and by June 22 the advanced elements of Ewell’s corps had crossed the Potomac and were already in Pennsylvania, leaving the baffled Federals to hop belatedly after them. Despite orders from Lee that discouraged foraging and looting, Lee’s underfed soldiers were a visitation of famine on the Pennsylvania countryside. Amos Stouffer, a Swiss-German farmer from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, wrote in his diary that “the Rebs… are scouring the country in every direction. … They take horses, cattle, sheep, hogs, &c.,” and even took over a Chambersburg mill and forced the farmers to grind wheat for them. The Confederates also made off with what they regarded as yet another form of moveable property: not only Chambersburg’s “horses and cattle” but also its “Negroes.” Out of a free black population of 451 in and around Chambersburg, more than fifty were rounded up by Confederate soldiers and started south to be sold into slavery.40 On June 27, an advance column of Ewell’s corps was in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a short distance across the Susquehanna River from Harrisburg; the next day, one of Ewell’s divisions was in York.

  Once again, however, Lee’s plans were thwarted, this time by the loss not of orders but of his cavalry. Lee’s cavalry commander, J. E. B. Stuart, slipped the long leash Lee kept on his trusted subordinates and managed to become hopelessly separated from the main body of Lee’s infantry. So, instead of providing Lee with scouting and reconnaissance, Stuart effectively rode right off the map, leaving Lee strategically blind. No matter; Lee’s general plan was “to push boldly forward… to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, seize the capital of the commonwealth and fight a decisive battle somewhere upon her soil.” He assured Longstreet that whatever battle he fought, he would assume the tactical defensive and allow the Army of the Potomac to immolate itself the same way it had at Fredericksburg. But Lee also reserved to himself a more aggressive alternative: if the Army of the Potomac strung itself o
ut in an attempt to pursue him northward, he would wait for the first moment that the separate parts of the Union army pulled far enough away to become isolated from each other, then turn on them, one after the other, and crush them in detail.41

  That, Lee told Isaac Trimble, might occur somewhere in the open country between Harrisburg and the Potomac, near the crossroads town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. In that event, the much-beaten and demoralized Army of the Potomac would probably disintegrate (as John Pope’s Army of Virginia almost had after Second Bull Run) and perhaps allow him to threaten Baltimore or Washington. The most optimistic view held that the public outcry in the North would be so great that Lincoln might finally be forced to open negotiations, and for that purpose Jefferson Davis had asked his vice president, Alexander H. Stephens, to be on hand to represent Confederate interests in a face-to-face meeting with Lincoln. If the Army of the Potomac shunned battle and concentrated on shielding Washington, Lee could still “subsist his army” on the fat Pennsylvania countryside “for two months” and allow the battered farmlands of northern Virginia a brief respite.42

  Without Stuart’s cavalry to provide intelligence, Lee was thrown back on what little he could glean from spies, captured newspapers, and Southern sympathizers. He did not discover from them until June 28—when his own army was itself strung out in an awkward triangle between Carlisle, Chambersburg, and York—that the Army of the Potomac had made uncommonly fast time in its pursuit of him out of Virginia and was closer to parts of the Confederate army than those parts were to each other. Lee at once ordered a concentration of the Army of Northern Virginia on Cashtown, a small village eight miles west of Gettysburg.

  In the process, A.P. Hill allowed one of his divisions to become entangled in a firefight with Federal cavalry just west of Gettysburg on the morning of July 1, without realizing that two Federal army corps (1st and 11th) were only a few miles south of the town. The Yankee infantry pounced on Hill’s troops, and in turn, Hill committed more of his corps to the fight. Lee, at Cashtown, heard the sound of fighting in the distance and rode out to see for himself. Caution might have dictated that he break off the engagement until he could find out if more federal infantry was lurking nearby. But by the time he arrived at the scene of the battle that afternoon, Richard Ewell’s corps had shown up from Carlisle on its own, and Hill and Ewell together were successfully driving the Federal infantry through the town and to a low, flat plateau known as Cemetery Hill, just south of Gettysburg. Unwilling to back off from a battle his men were clearly winning, Lee summoned Longstreet’s corps to come up from Chambersburg, ordered Ewell to secure the other hills south of the town if Ewell thought it “practicable,” and in general behaved as though he had just had the battle he had hoped to fight near Gettysburg delivered to him on precisely his own terms.43

  This might have been a fairly reasonable procedure, given what had happened at Chancellorsville, and provided the Army of the Potomac was still commanded by someone like Hooker. By this time, however, Hooker was no longer at the head of the Army of the Potomac. Angered over slights he had received from the War Department, Hooker resigned on June 27, and Lincoln replaced him with the commander of the Army of the Potomac’s 5th Corps, George Gordon Meade. Meade was a throwback to the McClellanites (Meade was a Philadelphian, from the same social circle as the McClellans, and a Democrat), and his selection may have been a compromise on Lincoln’s part to forestall calls to restore McClellan to command once again. In any case, Lincoln hurriedly shoved command of the army’s 95,000 men into Meade’s hands to take care of the invasion emergency.44

  Meade’s first instinct would have played right into Lee’s plans. Given command on such short notice, Meade proposed to adopt a defensive posture, digging the Army of the Potomac into a line behind Pipe Creek, in northern Maryland, and then sitting down to protect Washington. But the engagement at Gettysburg on July 1 forced Meade’s hand fully as much as it had forced Lee’s, and Meade hurriedly ordered the Army of the Potomac to converge as rapidly as possible on what was left of the 1st Corps and 11th Corps on Cemetery Hill. During the night, Meade assembled almost all of the Army of the Potomac there, and rendered null any prospect that Ewell would be able to capture Cemetery Hill by just walking up and taking it.45

  This was still the Yankee army Lee had twice defeated in the last seven months, and on the morning of July 2, Lee decided to launch an imitation of the blow that had floored the Yankees at Chancellorsville. He sent James Longstreet’s newly arrived corps in a long flanking hook to hit the Union left, and when Longstreet did so late that afternoon, the results almost perfectly mirrored Stonewall Jackson’s attack exactly two months before. Union troops managed to save the most prominent high ground, a rock-littered hill known locally as Little Round Top, throwing back Confederate brigades of Alabamians and Texans with little more than grit and bluff. (One Union regiment, the 20th Maine Volunteers, and their colonel, the former Bowdoin college rhetoric professor Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, surprised the Alabamians by launching a counterattack of their own at Little Round Top, catching the Confederates so completely by surprise that they broke and ran.) In every other respect, however, Longstreet wrecked half the Army of the Potomac by the time the sun set on July 2, and only vigorous protests from his corps commanders prevented Meade from throwing in the towel and ordering a retreat.46

  Just as had happened at Chancellorsville, Lee now had the Army of the Potomac on the ropes and was ready to deliver the knockout blow. This time, though, he had sustained so many losses in killed, wounded, and missing that the blow would have to be struck with the only uncommitted division he had left, one of Virginians from Longstreet’s corps under Major General George E. Pickett, supported by North Carolinians from Hill’s depleted corps—approximately 10,500 men in all—against the center of the Union line of battle. By the example of the British attack on the Alma in 1854, this should have swept the Army of the Potomac from the heights of Gettysburg. Instead, Pickett’s charge turned into a reverse of Fredericksburg. The Confederates were compelled to cross almost a mile of open ground under a murderous fire of artillery, then confront the fire of Federal infantry from the 2nd Corps of the Army of the Potomac, who were convinced that the outcome of the war was resting on their shoulders. Although a few Confederates managed to reach the Union line and punch a small hole in it, the overall attack collapsed, with the loss of more than 1,100 killed and 4,500 wounded. By the end of the day, it was at last evident to Lee that he could not dislodge Meade from his position at Gettysburg. With his supplies and ammunition badly depleted, and almost 28,000 casualties from the three days of fighting, Lee wearily ordered the Army of Northern Virginia to retreat.47

  After ten months of almost unrelieved bad news from the battlefield, the news of Gettysburg came as welcome relief to the North. In the Confederacy, it shattered the image of Lee’s invincibility and raised questions for the first time about Lee’s capabilities as a field commander. On August 8, assuming full responsibility for the defeat at Gettysburg, Lee offered Jefferson Davis his resignation. Davis refused, but at the same time, Lee would never again have complete control of Davis’s military policy, and in September Davis would detach Longstreet’s corps from the Army of Northern Virginia and send it west to reinforce Braxton Bragg. “One brief month ago,” wept Josiah Gorgas into his journal on July 28, “we were apparently at the point of success. Lee was in Pennsylvania, threatening Harrisburgh, and even Philadelphia. Vicksburg seemed to laugh all Grant’s efforts to scorn.” Now, the “picture is just as somber as it was bright then. … The Confederacy totters to its destruction.”48 At almost the same time, a Confederate officer in the Army of Northern Virginia wrote a similar lament in his diary:

  Another month has passed and the results are perhaps more disastrous than even Feby. ’62. Vicksburg, Port Hudson & Gettysburg have been fought and leave a gloom on the country. Unless unceasing success attends the Confederate arms, fits of despondency at once overhang every community. Even the army gr
ows despondent, and evidence of demoralization are visible. More desertions than usual are occurring. Rumors of renewed difficulties in the South are circulating.49

  For Lincoln, however, Gettysburg offered only limited consolations. Although he was jubilant at Meade’s victory, he waited in vain to hear of Meade pursuing and destroying the defeated Lee. Instead, Meade, in a manner tiringly reminiscent of McClellan, rested his men and then cautiously set off in a perfunctory pursuit of the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac River on July 14, and after that, any hope that Meade would finish him off disappeared. Lincoln would have to keep on looking for the general who would fight and win the kind of war that he had in mind.

  ADVANCE INTO THE CONFEDERATE HEARTLAND

  Vicksburg fell to Grant the day after Meade’s victory at Gettysburg, and the conjunction of the two events gave the North its happiest weekend in two years of war. Still, the repulse of Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania and the reopening of the Mississippi probably meant a good deal less in strategic terms than they seemed to. Although Gettysburg had inflicted severe wounds on the Army of Northern Virginia, Meade’s failure to pursue Lee only ensured that the same cycle of invasions, retreats, and counterinvasions would have to begin all over again in the fall of 1863 or the spring of 1864. As for the Mississippi River, the anxiety Lincoln felt about reopening the entire length of the river to the Gulf was generated by his youthful memories of how dependent Western farmers had always been on the Mississippi for transporting their surpluses to market, and by the croaking of western governors such as Oliver Perry Morton of Indiana, who was convinced that his legislature would vote to secede and join the Confederacy unless the Mississippi was reopened.50