In the summer of 1863, Robert E. Lee was taking the war
into the North. Up until June of that year, nothing significant had happened in
the East above the Mason-Dixon line. Lee wanted to change that for a number of
reasons.
For one, all the slogging around Virginia was wreaking
havoc on vital agriculture. He hoped that a swoop through Pennsylvania might
give the Old Dominion a rest. At the same time, in the time-honored custom of
armies everywhere, he expected to pick up a few things to keep the Army of
Northern Virginia going. (There was a shoe factory in nearby Chambersburg, for
example.)
Finally, he hoped to convince Northern pols that fighting
to keep the South in the union wasn’t an economically or politically viable
proposition. Invading Harrisburg or even Philadelphia would give a lot of
people pause to think.
And from his experiences with the Army of the Potomac and its various commanders, he reckoned he had a reasonable chance of making
that happen.
Well, except he was operating under a couple of
handicaps: his most gifted general, Thomas J. Jackson (known as Stonewall from
his performance at the first
battle of Manassas), had died of wounds inflicted by his own troops at
Chancellorsville in May. Lee had considered Jackson his right arm and it was
a grievous loss.
The second drawback was that his cavalry commander,
J.E.B. Stuart (James Ewell Brown, if you’re asking) had basically disappeared
up his own behind. One of the main functions of cavalry was to gather
intelligence about the enemy’s movements. After making big splashes in the
Peninsula and Maryland campaigns of 1862 by dashing around the Army of the
Potomac, he separated his unit from Lee’s main force in late June, leaving Lee
with no reliable data on the Army of the Potomac’s whereabouts.
Lee found them, under the command of George G. Meade (of
whom it might be said that at least he wasn’t Joe Hooker. Or George B.
McClellan. Or Ambrose Burnside), at Gettysburg, a small town with a theological
seminary and interesting topography, on 1 July.
The two armies maneuvered some and fought for three
days in July heat that you cannot imagine unless you’ve experienced it. Thanks
to the actions of cavalry Brigadier General John Buford at the first meeting, Union forces held the high
ground, but it can’t have felt like much of an advantage to those who were
there.
To a certain extent fighting blindly (Stuart showed up on
2 July, but didn’t have much in the way of intel to share), Lee issued
uncharacteristically ambiguous orders to Lt. General James Longstreet on the 2nd, and then sent Maj. General George Pickett’s division up Cemetery Ridge on the 3rd,
resulting in utter carnage.
(In Ken Burns’ seminal documentary, The Civil War, historian Shelby Foote made
a comment on Pickett’s charge that has stuck with me. It was something to the
effect that, if he’d been a soldier given the order to cross that open space and run up the hill in the face of massed Yankee fire, he’d have said, “Lieutenant—I
don’t think so.” That comment came back to me when I stood at
Colleville-sur-Mer and looked down from the cliff onto Omaha Beach. I don’t
know how either the Georgians or the GIs of the 29th Infantry Division
took those steps.)
After three days of this, the armies faced each other in
heavy rain on the 4th; then Lee withdrew. Meade did not pursue. The
Union held the ground, but the Army of Northern Virginia (what was left of it)
was able to return to Virginia and regroup.
Up until then, Lee had believed in the invincibility of
his army—he’d asked it to do impossible things so many times, and it had. At
Gettysburg, he was heard to repeat, “It is all my fault.”
Combined with the surrender on 4 July of Vicksburg to
U.S. Grant (breaking the lines of communication for the Confederacy in the
West), Gettysburg basically was the point at which it became clear that the
North was never going to quit, and the South was never going to win.
But the war would continue for another 22 months, with
Grant taking command of the Army of the Potomac steadily grinding down Lee’s
armies, and Sherman implementing the concept of total war through Georgia and the Carolinas.
Gettysburg was the tipping point, 150 years ago today.
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