While I am inclined to agree, remember that two more months to recover could easily have been two more months to deteriorate. Remember that the Army of Northern Virginia’s cardiac care plan was pretty much diarrhea and getting shot at.
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Remember that the Army of Northern Virginia’s cardiac care plan was pretty much diarrhea and getting shot at.
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Though according to Glenn Beck that still beats Obamacare.
Another factor worth remembering is that it wasn’t just Lee’s battle. Meade wasn’t another Hooker or Burnside or McClellan.
For perspective, either of those is more than the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in more than a decade, and more wounded as well. It’s hard to imagine that kind of warfare going on around a small strategically unimportant town in Pennsylvania.
And 53 years to the day later (What is it about the first day of July that causes this stuff?), the British lost over 19,000 on the first day of the Somme. Given the 1916 advantage of advanced technology, and the longer daylight of more northerly European summer for people to see who they’re killing, I think we as Americans should be impressed with our efforts nonetheless.
A HS junior in the summer of 1971, I stood over the diorama as Pickett’s Charge played out in flashing lights and crackly audio and asked the same thing. Then I stood at the edge of that fucking cornfield and asked, “What were they thinking?” But I had an answer at the cemetery, when one of our chaperones asked why the trees were so big and beautiful.
“They were well fertilized.”
Pardon me for being a Civil War nerd and incredibly nitpicky.
There’s a lot of back-and-forth on this issue. It goes back to Jeff Davis, not Lee, in this case, however.
Davis created a messy and crossed-up command structure in the West, as well as having multiple people giving Pemberton semi-quasi-maybe-orders and “good advice”. Aside from which, Pemberton’s own past inclinations and experience was pulling him in different directions. Ironically, he had been something of a southern patriot in effect, and had become infamous for making the correct military decision during his tenure at Charleston. The problem was that the Charlestonians were influential, that being secession city, and deeply distrusted the Pennsylvania-born Pemberton for his willingness to put the Confederacy’s needs above the city’s.
Additionally, Joe Johnston was not fully recovered from a previous when he arrived (just after Grant’s surprise attack from the south). He was evidently shaken by the chaotic situation. Additionally, Pemberton’s following of orders was haphazard because Davis had given him the aforementioned quasi-orders-good advice. Joe Johnston scraped together a force, but was driven off when the entire Federal Army bore down on him at Jackson, Mississippi.
He then tried to put together a force to attack Grant’s rear, while Pemberton was beaten in the field twice and retreated back to hole up at Vicksburg. This was basically counter to Johnston’s strategy and put the whole thing in a nearly impossible position. Johnston briefly had numerical superiority if you counted Pemberton’s men… who were blocked off by a siege camp with little or not communications by a well-supplied veteran foe just coming off of success. In that point, attack would be insane. I’ve read a lot of criticism of Johnston for not making that attack and many other things, and he was criticized even in his own time heavily for it, but it just didn’t make military sense. Many seem to blame Johnston for not living up to the largely-mythical Invincible General Lee, forgetting that Grant would go on to crush Lee in less favorable circumstances later.
However, Davis was absolutely mistaken in not rushing everything he could, ideally including Longstreet, to Johnston’s aid. With that force Grant would have been in a serious bind (at least, assuming Meade couldn’t advance and who knows what might happen then).
I’d have to check, but I believe that was not actually true even at the time. IIRC, more guns were arrayed against Vicksburg, and the Army of the Potomac later exceeded that number.
Actually, exchanges broke down as the Confederacy refused to exchange captured blacks. Post-war southern historians greatly preferred the above explanation, but that was a private opinion of Grant - who still offered to resume the exchanges but was refused by Lee on those grounds.
Ouch. Yeah, they deserve that one. tariffs were an issue, but more in the way of contributing to the general feeling of bad blood.
This is probably not true. I mean, he said it, but this was likely hindsight and his own natural restlessness. His telegrams to Washington, at least, were a lot more positive about them. And IIRC three of the routes would have done a marvelous job of flanking the enemy position in order to put him, as he said it, on dry land on the same side of the river as the enemy.
Definitely incorrect. Grant could bypass the Vicksburg at any time and the Confederates knew it; they correctly believed he could not supply himself if he crossed south of the city. But the fortress itself was not capable of blocking Grant from doing anything.
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As for Gettysburg, a northern defeat would have allowed Lee to advance on Washington and would have demoralized the North. The issue was that the battle was so close the first two days: the South nearly defeated the North each day. On the first day, Ewell didn’t press the attack (whereas Jackson would have if he had been alive). On the second day, if they capture Little Round Top, they win. Lee probably was so frustrated at how close the battle was that he ordered Pickett’s charge.
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Well, not really. Even if Lee pushed the Federals back, he was going to be doing exactly what eventually killed him: losing too many men and too many supplies. He could have pushed Meade to the Atlantic and it would have just wiped out his army. He had to completely overwhelm the federals and Meade gave him no chance to do so. Even if he could have broken through somewhere at great cost, Meade had reserves and lines prepared to repulse or reform. Simply put, Gettysburg at best could only have been a Pyrrhic victory without assuming numerous additional failures on the Federal’s part.
Possibly, but the time it would have taken to do so would have flunked it. it was already getting pretty late at that point, plus Meade had still more on the way. Come to think of it, even a breakthrough just couldn’t have done much even if the wide flank had been done with enough time; the Confederates wouldn’t have been able to turn the Federal left without even more advancing, while they would have been entirely exposed.
Moving towards Washington after a Gettysburg victory would have been a really bad plan for Lee. The government was aware Washington was in a vulnerable area and had built a ring of fortifications around it. And they always maintained a good sized garrison in the city - these might have been inexperienced troops at times but they could have held a fortified line. Lee had about as much chance of capturing Washington as he did of capturing Boston.
So he would have ended up besieging Washington and that would have been a disaster. Meade would have brought the surviving forces down from Gettysburg and gathered up the new reinforcements being sent in response to Lee’s raid. Lee would be pinned down outside of Washington and given Meade an easy immobile target. Lee would have ended up trapped between the Washington garrison and Meade’s army. And Lee would have used up most of his supplies and ammunition at Gettysburg and lost a lot of the men he had started with.
It would have been an annihilation. The Army of Northern Virginia would have not only been defeated but destroyed.
Stealing liberally from stuff I’ve already posted in this thread, I put together a sort of vignette or narrative about the battle and sent it to some friends yesterday. I don’t think they’re interested; I wrote it mostly for myself. But it’s occurred to me that some readers here might at least be interested in the topic, so here it is. Apologies to Sampiro if it seems like I’m trying to one-up the OP.
edit: and today’s the anniversary of Pickett’s Charge, so it’s as good a day as any to make a massive effort that ends in frustration. 
Gettysburg 150
One hundred and fifty years ago today, the Battle of Gettysburg was at its peak.
Historian James McPherson (and probably many others) noted the great strategic problem Lee’s Gettysburg campaign posed was the same as that of his previous invasion of the North, the Antietam/Sharpsburg campaign: outright conquest was beyond Confederate capability. So unless the North surrendered wholesale after a demoralizing Confederate victory, or the hoped-for foreign intervention brought about Northern panic, Lee would not be able to STAY on Northern soil. Both “invasions” were actually mere raids. And, even had he won victory on Northern soil, Lee would eventually have to retreat back to his supply lines in Confederate territory, which would inevitably LOOK like defeat.
Lee was not a stupid man, so he must have known this, and really been counting on a miraculous collapse by the Northerners before his retreat became unavoidable. He had had tremendous success against the Army of the Potomac’s previous commanders, cowing some, and outwitting others. George McClellan had recoiled when treated aggressively; the braggart John Pope had proven easy to bamboozle; bluff, honest Ambrose Burnside hadn’t even understood what Lee had done to him at Fredericksburg, the worst of all federal defeats; “Fighting Joe” Hooker had stolen a march on Robert E. Lee, but Lee’s counterstroke had left him, in Lincoln’s memorable phrase, “stunned…like a duck hit on the head.” But Lee was no longer facing Hooker – after Lee’s army started north toward Pennsylvania, Lincoln made another change of command, putting George Gordon Meade in charge of the nation’s principal army in the East. Meade was no dazzler, but he would prove difficult to scare, and he played to his own side’s strengths. He would not collapse – at least, not without a mightier push than Lee had yet made.
Why did men fight at Gettysburg? Although the town was at the junction of roads from eight directions, there was no real reason to fight there. Lee had given Confederate General Henry Heth (pronounced “heath”) explicit instructions not to bring on a general engagement, and Union General John Reynolds (who was so well-regarded he had previously been offered command of the Army of the Potomac, but turned it down), despite being under no obligation to fight for the town, wired back to Meade “I will fight [the enemy] inch by inch, and if driven into the town I will barricade the streets and hold him aback as long as possible,” while sending couriers to concentrate every Union unit on which he could lay hands at Gettysburg. Historian Bruce Catton summed up the cause of the fight at Gettysburg: men so ready to fight that even incidental contact would cause them to commit all-out. Meade had already chosen a different line to concentrate his army on, but proved flexible enough to change that plan, and trusted Reynolds’s decisions as the man on the spot.
During the fight west of the town on July 1, General Reynolds, leading from the front, hurling men against the attacking Confederates as fast as they arrived, was killed (according to most theories, by a sharpshooter, i.e., sniper) and Union forces were defeated and driven back through the town on July 1, mainly because the Confederates concentrated more troops faster. By nightfall, Union reinforcements arrived and settled in on the high ground southeast of the town itself. Cavalry commander John Buford is credited with selecting Cemetery Ridge and its associated hills (the famous “fish hook” position) and fighting desperately to hold that line for arriving Union forces. Upon reviewing the position, General Winfield Scott Hancock (blessed with the spectacular nickname, “Hancock the Superb”), said, “I think this the strongest position by nature upon which to fight a battle that I ever saw.” Lee asked the notoriously brave General Ewell to take Culp’s Hill on the northern curve of the “fish hook,” but for whatever reason Ewell did not. Badly wounded in previous battles, something had gone out of him, and eventually Lee would have to remove him from command.
On July 2, some of the worst fighting of the war would rage on the far right and left of the Union line, searing place names both innocuous and sinister into the national memory: the Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield, Devil’s Den, Little Round Top. At that last place, Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, an introspective professor, would win immortality and the Medal of Honor. Ordered to hold the extreme left flank of the entire Army of the Potomac at all hazards, Chamberlain’s Maine men ran out of ammunition as superior Confederate forces massed for another charge. Coolly ordering his men to fix bayonets, he led a downhill rush that surprised and dismayed the attackers, taking many prisoners and ending the threat to the flank. Although quite literally mild-mannered, Chamberlain turned out to have an aptitude for war, and would be wounded seven times during the conflict, while being given steadily more rank and responsibility. He would eventually be selected as the man to receive the surrender of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
Elsewhere, Union political general Dan Sickles had posted his men too far forward in an exposed position – he had not been chosen for his tactical skills. His men were forced back in hard fighting, and Sickles was shot in the leg. Before being carried off the field, Sickles insisted on lighting a cigar and waving it around to show his troops he was still breathing. He would make a pilgrimage to visit the amputated leg every year for years to come. One writer adds that the undaunted Sickles later famously engaged in an affair with the deposed nymphomaniac queen of Spain.
At Hancock’s portion of the line, troops had been pulled away to reinforce other areas just as Anderson’s division approached. Without any remaining options, Hancock turned and looked for troops to plug the gap – he needed to buy five minutes. He found the 1st Minnesota regiment. “Colonel, do you see those colors?” the general indicated the flags at the heart of the mass of onrushing attackers. Colonel Colvill asserted that he did. “Take them.” The Minnesota boys ran forward into more than five times their number and were destroyed, taking a higher percentage of casualties than any other unit in the war. But they bought TEN minutes. Hancock was able to scrape together a new line that held.
July 3. Lee had invested too much blood and too much of the vaunted Army of Northern Virginia’s reputation in the battle to withdraw without a victory now. Believing his men could fight their way out of the dilemma he had created, and having failed to break either Union flank, Lee was determined to strike the center, in the vain hope that it had been fatally weakened to shore up the flanks. His trusted subordinate James Longstreet (“old Pete”) urged him to move around the strong Union line and force a fight at a time and place of Confederate choosing. But Lee was without his cavalry scouts (flamboyant J. E. B. Stuart was off trying to retrieve his own reputation instead of reporting Union movements to Lee) and some historians suggest Lee had recently had a mild heart attack. Feeling blind and pressed for time, possibly operating at diminished capacity, Lee refused Longstreet’s suggestion and ordered one last all-out effort…a charge by his last large formation of fresh troops, commanded by well-liked, academically-challenged George S. Pickett (who had graduated last in his class at West Point). Longstreet was aghast – he understood the killing power of massed rifle fire better than most Civil War leaders, and had already designed a system of entrenchments to protect infantry that would become standard on both sides by the war’s end. He argued with Lee as much as he dared. “General, I have been a soldier all my life. I have been with soldiers engaged in fights by couples, by squads, companies, regiments, divisions, and armies, and should know, as well as any one, what soldiers can do. It is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position.” But Lee was adamant. “The enemy is there, and I will strike him there.”
Before the charge, Lee would give artillery a try – a LOT of artillery. 150 to 170 Confederate guns opened a preliminary cannonade to break the Union line at the chosen point of attack. This was the largest artillery barrage, not just of the war, but ever in the Western hemisphere. The guns jumped in their carriages, flattening great fans of grass with each sharp report. I’ve stood behind, beside, and very far in front of Civil War cannons firing reduced powder charges, and as loud as they are from the side, it’s an order of magnitude worse when the concussion wave is pointed right at you. Smoke soon obscured both lines as the cannons boomed.
The boys in blue huddled behind their low stone wall and hung on amid the dust and smoke of the terrific bombardment. As it went on and on, men’s nerves began to fray. Then Hancock showed how he’d earned his nickname, riding out into the storm of shot and shell. His adjutant pleaded for him to come back. “General, the corps commander ought not to risk his life that way.” Hancock is said to have replied, "There are times when a corps commander’s life does not count.”
Confederate artillerymen were short on ammunition, and would eventually slacken their fire before using the last of their reserve (which was held back in case of an emergency), but the larger problem was the low standard of training in the Confederate artillery arm – the gunners failed to anticipate a common problem with sustained barrages, and did not correct for the progressive shock of recoil driving the tails of the cannons lower, thus inadvertently elevating their muzzles. Much of the shot flew high and landed well behind the strong Union position they were trying to destroy. Smoke prevented them from realizing this was happening. I’ve read that more experienced Union gunners recognized the problem from watching the fall of the Confederate shot. In later wars, especially World War I, the limits of artillery preparation would gradually become better understood, but as of Gettysburg, it had never been tried on that scale, and Lee may have expected it would work a lot better than it did. Certainly the bombardment looked and sounded fatal. 80 Federal guns replied for a while, but soon fell silent. Inexperienced Southerners took that to mean they had been knocked off their carriages or abandoned by panicky Federal artillerymen, but the old hands knew their opponents were saving their ammunition for a much more important target: Lee’s tattered gray ranks of infantry.
Stationed near the treeline, Pickett’s fifteen-thousand-odd men waited in the heat and smoke. They were tired, they were hungry – the Army of Northern Virginia was ALWAYS hungry – and although they were scared of their role as targets in the coming assault, which they could see would be a desperate affair, they were fiercely proud of their reputation as the finest infantry in the world when on the attack. They may also have scented the desperation of Lee’s battle plan. According to legend, when a rabbit suddenly started and ran past the lines of nervous men, one veteran reportedly shouted, “Run, ol’ hare! If I was an ol’ hare, I’d run too!’
Finally the young Confederate artillery chief sent word to Longstreet – the guns were down to their reserve. It was now or never. Longstreet did not want to give the order. He looked across that mile of open ground toward the cannon-studded wall manned by masses of blue infantry, and he knew what was coming.
Pickett, anxious for the glory he believed the war had so far denied him, tossed his famous hair and pressed for permission to charge. Longstreet couldn’t speak, but could barely nod.
Pickett led his men out into the open, where they deliberately formed up into a huge mass of human beings, multiple lines a mile wide, before beginning their measured pace. Across the field, the Federal infantry, admiring the courage of their foes and their military precision, suddenly remembered their own worst day, and – seeing their opportunity for payback was at hand – spontaneously began chanting, “Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!” as the Southerners started to move.
There’s more to the story, burned into our national memory in fragments like yesterday’s nightmare…Richard Garnett, although sick with a fever and injured, insisting on going with his men, his courage having previously been questioned by the now-dead hero Stonewall Jackson…the Federal long guns opening first…the first men falling, and the others leaving them, closing up the line, and stepping onward…the boys in gray dismantling the fence beside the Emmitsburg Road under fire… the flail of canister shot opening huge gaps in the line as the men staggered closer…Lo Armistead, whose best friend Hancock led the very troops the charge was aimed at, holding his black hat aloft on the point of his sword so his men could pick him out, crossing the wall into the Union position and actually laying one hand on a Federal artillery piece before he too was shot down…Lee riding out to meet the sullen survivors returning from across that field, crying “This is all my fault. All my fault!”
But perhaps, even though I have no sympathy for the Confederate cause, it is better to look away from that terrible climax and remember the moment just before, William Faulkner’s unbearable “what if” that haunts the Southern imagination:
“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble…”
But it DID happen. Two o’clock came and went, a hundred and fifty years ago tomorrow. The Army of Northern Virginia would fight on for almost two more years, but never again make another major attack. The reasons are many, but are perhaps best summed up by George Pickett’s tearful response when Lee asked him to get his division ready to resist a possible Union counterattack. “General, I HAVE NO DIVISION!”
Far across the country, Vicksburg would fall to Grant on the same day, the long siege ending, and the Confederacy would be split into two, never to recover. Shattering defeat in the west and the east on the same day.
Back at Gettysburg, as night fell, it began to rain.
“The true rain came in a monster wind, and the storm broke in blackness over the hills and the bloody valley; the sky opened along the ridge and the vast water thundered down, drowning the fires, flooding the red creeks, washing the rocks and the grass and the white bones of the dead, cleansing the earth and soaking it thick and rich with water and wet again with clean cold rainwater, driving the blood deep into the earth, to grow again with the roots toward Heaven.
It rained all that night. The next day was Saturday, the Fourth of July.” --Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels
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Well done, sir. Despite any criticism, that was masterfully done.
'Tis worth remembering Longstreet’s response to Lee before the charge was ordered. That if the Union men were there in that position, it was because they hoped to receive an attack against it. Longstreet had his faults (as did all Generals, being human) but he was among the most clear-eyed of all Confederate leaders and the least blinded by emotion in anything he did.
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Stealing liberally from stuff I’ve already posted in this thread, I put together a sort of vignette or narrative about the battle and sent it to some friends yesterday. I don’t think they’re interested; I wrote it mostly for myself. But it’s occurred to me that some readers here might at least be interested in the topic, so here it is. Apologies to Sampiro if it seems like I’m trying to one-up the OP.
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One-up away, that was great!
The year before he had suffered a major depressive episode over losing three of his children to scarlet fever in a matter of days; he had also nearly died from disease. Much has been written that this may have affected his judgment, but he seems to have been pretty lucid to me.
(There’s a small restaurant where I live named after him because it was once owned [or patronized by, or driven slowly and waved at by] one of his descendants. I drove by yesterday to see if they were having any commemoration- a "$1.50 off “I told you so special” would have seemed ideal- but, nothing.)
150 years ago today: both sides had to withdraw as the Gettysburg Battlefield National Military Park was reserved for a Fourth of July celebration. It became very clear from a cursory look at the carnage that neither side was getting their deposit back.
Yes, isn’t it amazing that so many Civil War battles were fought in national parks?
Lee was always a gambler. But, while Lee would have loved to take or seriously threaten DC, those weren’t his sole goals, or even his main goals in invading the north, I don’t think.
First of all, Northern Virginia was all tore up. There had been a year and a half of fighting in Northern Virginia, the economy was being ruined by two enemy armies marching back and forth, foraging and requisitioning supplies, crops and livestock was being seized and destroyed.
To invade Pennsylvania, even if the campaign only lasted a few months, would have given Northern Virginia a break. It would give the area some breathing room, where the farmers didn’t have to worry about an army marching by and taking everything, it would give them time to get their crops in, and time to get things back in order.
Plus, it would now impose the same devastation on the North. Let Pennsylvania farmers worry about hungry soldiers ruining their farms. Plus, the North is rich. Everybody knows that. Plenty of places to raid and ship goods south. The first rule for an army is, when you can, live off the enemy’s supplies, not your own.
So, you’re Lee, and lets say you manage to invade and smash Hooker, and now you find yourself sitting in Central Pennsylvania. You’ve got the bluebellies hopping, because you’re got so many choices. You can swing around, head south and threaten Washington. You can strike down and hit Baltimore, You can move towards Philadelphia. Maybe even New York. Make the Yankees holler for a change. It’s about changing the momentum. First principle of war, go on the offensive. Take the initiative. Make the enemy respond to you. For too long, you’ve been responding to them. And the war’s starting to get unpopular up north. Maybe if they feel threatened, maybe if they actually see we can hurt them, they might be more willing to end the war.
Plus, Richmond’s been on you to send troops west to reinforce Vicksburg, but d-ded if you’re going to do that. These are your boys. You’re not going to let them go, let them serve under some other commander who they don’t love, who’d just get them killed. But maybe an invasion of the North would do the same thing. Make those people bring troops east to deal with us. That would certainly ease the pressure out west.
This just wouldn’t have happened. You’re seriously underestimating how big a risk Lee was taking. It was, in fact, two huge risks. By taking the Army of North Virginia into Pennsylvania, Lee was cut off from supplies and reinforcements. And the further north he went, the more cut off he was. He was just conducting a large-scale raid and had to keep moving. If he got pinned down or if Meade had maneuvered to cut off his line of retreat, then Lee’s Army would have died.
The other big risk was that by taking his army into Pennsylvania, he was leaving Virginia undefended. It wouldn’t have mattered what threats he made against Washington or Baltimore if he had lost Richmond as a result.
The Americans had the advantages of numbers and logistics on their side. Lee could overcome that temporarily by surprise but he couldn’t win an extended campaign. If he had tried to stay in Pennsylvania he would have lost the war there.
Huzzah for our gallant boys in blue - at both Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863!