The first day of the Somme, bloodiest day in British military history, commenced a mere 53 years after another watershed battle, the bloodiest in the history of the United States. And we shall have to see how Monday's SCOTUS rulings cause more damage than 9/11. July seems to attract cataclysms.
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. Not this time. 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.
©2024 Bas Bleu
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