Lee should have obeyed his first instinct—
avoid a general engagement
. At the end of the day on July 1st, an entire third of the Army of Northern Virginia was still in transit from Chambersburg, and at least a third of that would not be within easy call for another thirty-six hours. But how does a hunter repair a bent trap? Especially when some of his prey is already snared there? And what explanation does he give his fellow hunters? It was here that Lee felt most keenly the absence of screening and scouting, because those functions would have warned Powell Hill’s corps away from Gettysburg on July 1st, and would have signaled to Lee on July 2nd that the other pieces of the Army of the Potomac were a lot closer to Gettysburg than he supposed. By the time the
12th Corps, then the
3rd Corps, and then the 2nd and
5th Corps arrived on July 2nd, any real hope that Lee’s destroy-them-by-pieces plan would work was mostly gone.
Lee did not know that, and the routine intelligence-gathering mission on which he sent Captain Johnston on the morning of the 2nd gave him the false confidence that the Army of Northern Virginia would, in fact, only be facing the ruined remnants of the 1st and 11th Corps on Cemetery Hill. Johnston’s staggeringly inaccurate assessment worked far more damage to the Army of Northern Virginia than Stuart’s vacancy, even though, once Johnston’s error became apparent, the great flanking arc Lee planned for
James Longstreet came marvelously close to success. Johnston’s mistake notwithstanding, Longstreet immolated both the 3rd and 5th Corps, plus a substantial amount of the
2nd Corps, all of which was, by any standard, a greater achievement than Stonewall Jackson’s more famous flank march at Chancellorsville two months before.
Longstreet’s attack fell so narrowly short of its goal that it gave Lee hope that he had regained control of his trap. Unfortunately, that regained control was an illusion. To the contrary, Lee experienced an unusually difficult time prodding his staff and other corps commanders to act. This was not because Powell Hill or Dick Ewell were incompetents—Ewell had certainly demonstrated an unusual amount of tactical skill in the Valley Campaign of 1862 and in capturing Winchester—but because they were too new at corps command to have shaken the smaller-scale habits of brigade and division command, and no longer operating on ground that gave them the confidence to act aggressively. (Powell Hill, in particular, is the mystery man of Gettysburg, a famously vigorous fighter who makes only the most infrequent and pallid appearances at Gettysburg.) For them, Pennsylvania’s endless barns and wheat fields, the tiny cross-check of farm boundaries, the everlasting and immovable fences created a landscape of uncertainty. “Our men are better satisfied on
this side of the Potomac,” wrote Lee’s adjutant, Walter Taylor, on July 17th. “They are not accustomed to operating in a country where the people are inimical to them.” Even for those like Ewell, who had briefly been stationed in Pennsylvania, the unfamiliar expanse of a free state induced paralysis. Only a few of Lee’s subordinates
acted
at Gettysburg, and when they did so it was often (as in the case of Stuart) in erratic and uncontrollable fashion.
30
It can be said, then, that Lee lost a battle he should have won, and lost it because (a) he began the battle without completely concentrating his forces, (b) he proved unable to coordinate the attacks of the forces he did have available, and (c) he failed to reckon with how tenaciously the
Army of the Potomac, in contrast to the
Russians in 1854 and the
Austrians in 1859, would hold its ground under direct infantry attack on July 3rd. Perhaps, if a cavalry screen could have brushed away Buford from outside Gettysburg on June 30th, or cushioned Hill from walking into a “general engagement” until that concentration had taken place … perhaps, if Dick Ewell had asked just a little more from his corps or taken greater care in getting them into place so that they could move together … perhaps, if Powell Hill had done likewise, and brought Wright, Posey, and Mahone banging with their full weight against
Cemetery Ridge that evening of July 2nd … perhaps, if those
fences had not been the way small-scale farmers kept their livestock from wandering into the
Emmitsburg Road … it might all have been different. But Stuart’s presence would only have averted an unscheduled contact; it would not have guaranteed victory in some subsequent, larger collision. As for Ewell and Hill, no one could have known from their brief time in corps command how far short of Stonewall Jackson’s mark they were going to fall, or how cruelly inadequate Lee’s minuscule staff would prove in directing them. And the fences were merely the mute resistance of free men and free soil to the invasion of
slavery, which few people would heed until it was too late. “I noticed after the battle,” recalled one Virginian, that “there were more dead and wounded by the fences than elsewhere,” probably because “the men came more directly in the range of the enemy’s guns while on the fence.”
31
George Meade’s problem was the exact opposite of Lee’s—Meade’s difficulty was restraining his subordinates from acting as though he didn’t exist. Corps commanders like Slocum and Reynolds were accustomed to seeing George Meade as an equal, or even a junior; they certainly did not see him as their superior. To the extent that the Republican major generals also saw Meade as an acolyte of McClellanism, they had all the more reason to do what was right in their own eyes. This attitude was not ameliorated in the slightest by Meade’s ferociously molten temper and his willingness to let political
identities cloud his military judgment, especially in the treatment he dealt out to
Abner Doubleday and David Birney, and the dismissive fashion in which he planted Sickles and the
3rd Corps as far out of sight as he could.
Meade has had his admirers over the years, but much of the admiration is dutiful rather than enthusiastic, almost forced. Apart from his single impulse to organize some sort of strike on the morning of July 2nd, Meade’s behavior at Gettysburg was entirely reactive, a matter of responding to critical situations as they were thrust upon him. He missed the first day’s fighting completely, and began the battle of Gettysburg off balance. Granted: he was in top command for only three days, with staff he didn’t know and didn’t have time to replace, on a battlefield he hadn’t chosen and wasn’t even noddingly familiar with. But he also stayed reactive to the very end, even down to missing Pickett’s Charge. “Having suddenly and unexpectedly thrust upon him a problem with which he was utterly unprepared to grapple, without plans or time to prepare them, and with the certainty that within a few days … he would be compelled to meet a victorious and exultant enemy,” wrote
Thomas Rafferty (who commanded the 71st New York at Gettysburg), Meade could be forgiven for failing to rule the Army of the Potomac with a rod of iron, “to employ it to its fullest extent and annihilate Lee’s army.” But that only meant that winning the battle had less to do with Meade than it did with a bevy of otherwise minor characters—Pap Greene, Joshua Chamberlain, Samuel Carroll, Alexander Webb,
Francis Heath,
Patrick O’Rorke,
Strong Vincent, Gouverneur Warren, Norman Hall,
George Stannard—who stepped out of themselves for a moment and turned a corner at some inexpressibly right instant. These self-starting performances became almost routine for Union officers at Gettysburg; by contrast, they are achingly absent from the Army of Northern Virginia.
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It is possible to say, in that light, that Robert E. Lee lost the battle of Gettysburg much more than George Meade won it. “He escaped complete defeat,” as one officer in the Vermont brigade ungenerously put it, “through the want of proper co-operation among his assailants.” But this does not mean that Lee’s decisions were foolish. When he concluded not to press Ewell into an attack on
Cemetery Hill or
Culp’s Hill unless it was practicable, Lee was not being prissy or ill-informed. Ewell’s corps was exhausted; it had had a long, debilitating march, sustained some unexpectedly fierce resistance, and there was no reason to suppose that much in the tactical picture as it appeared on the night of July 1st would change all that much by the morning of July 2nd. Based on what Lee knew of the scattering of the Army of the Potomac across the Maryland landscape, he should have had no difficulty wiping Cemetery Hill clean and then converting it into a club to beat the hapless Federals with whenever the rest of them finally arrived.
Longstreet’s attack, likewise, was an unobjectionably logical approach to the situation as Lee found it on the morning of July 2nd. He would stage a repeat of Chancellorsville; Longstreet would circle onto the Federal flank and knock it silly; and if Longstreet did not actually send the Federals completely over the moon by nightfall, all that Lee would need to do the next day was follow matters up the way he had at
Hazel Grove and
Fairview Cemetery at Chancellorsville. Only this time, the Army of the Potomac would not be retreating across the Rappahannock; it would be streaming in despair for the Susquehanna crossings, and the Keystone State would be ready to go up in flames. “Between the repulse of McClellan … and the Battle of Gettysburg, most of the adherents of the North were consciously hoping against hope,” wrote
William Michael Rossetti, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Walt Whitman’s British editor. “By “the time of … the Northern invasion by Lee in 1863,” the Union’s British sympathizers “were almost ready to confess the case desperate.” The ultras in the Army of the Potomac, like
Henry Nichols Blake, would never let Meade forget that he deserved only “a very small degree of the honor for this decisive triumph.” But considering what happened at Chancellorsville, and how easily it might have happened all over again at Gettysburg, that was a well enough earned honor, after all.
33
Many people assumed that the battle of Gettysburg was, as Blake said, “a decisive triumph,” and given the forces involved, the length of time elapsed, and the casualties afterward, perhaps it should have been. But not in 1863. “An army of 60,000 or 80,000 men is not to be knocked in pieces by any such battle as we have fought yet,”
Andrew Atkinson Humphreys reminded the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War when he testified before them in March 1864. If by decisive, people meant a single knockout round which ended matters on one battlefield, Humphreys was right, and Lincoln was wrong—those kinds of decisive battles, where an army closed its hands and eliminated the enemy, were no longer tactical possibilities, as they had been in the days of Napoleon. Even with the horrendous losses Lee sustained, and even with the Army of Northern Virginia’s back to the Potomac, “it is a rare thing to read of an army being completely broken in pieces, so that it cannot be collected together again.” And it is probably wise not to assume that the Gettysburg Campaign would have yielded such an end.
As it was, Gettysburg did not end the war; even the powerful combination of Gettysburg
and
Vicksburg did not end the war. It would go on for almost two more years, because two more years would be required to grind the latent resistance of the Southern Confederacy down to the nub. The Army of Northern Virginia’s morale, which sank so low in the weeks after Gettysburg, proved how elastic a factor like morale could be, rebounding through
the fall and winter of 1863 to the point where Confederates could open a new campaigning season in 1864 “in fine spirits and anxious for a fight.” Even Stuart’s cavalry shook off the pall of blame and “is now generally considered to be in better spirits & health, also better armed and equipped &c, than at any previus [
sic
] time during the war.” Nor did Gettysburg write a blank check for the Union forces. Little more than a year after Gettysburg, two Federal armies (in
Virginia and in
Georgia) would appear to be hopelessly mired in sieges of Atlanta and Petersburg which had no visible ending point, and Abraham Lincoln would be so close to losing the White House to George McClellan (as the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 1864) that he felt the need to obtain a pledge from his cabinet to fight the war down to his last day in office, because after McClellan would take the presidential oath, everything would go straight to the negotiating table.
But Gettysburg
was
record setting for its sheer carnage: in a war which began with one-day set-piece battles over a field two or three miles square, Gettysburg had been drenched in three days of unremitting slugging, cast over fifteen square miles, like some gigantic boxing tournament gone wildly into three-digit extra rounds. Gettysburg also put an end to a certain set of expectations—that the South really could carry the war into the North, that the Army of Northern Virginia could triumph on valor alone, that Robert E. Lee was so magisterially wise that only an act of God (like the Lost Orders before Antietam) could frustrate him. Even as he led his Alabamians up the slopes of
Little Round Top to grapple with
Strong Vincent,
William Oates knew that the long-term odds were against the Confederacy, even if “none of us were ready to admit it.” After Gettysburg, they could stave it off no longer. Oates and his fellows would recover their fighting spirits and continue “to fight manfully for the cause and win victories.” But when contemplating their long-term prospects, even the optimists “began to despair when Lee turned back from Gettysburg.” And when Lincoln won reelection, and with it the support of the North for pressing the war to its last bitter drop, it would become possible to look back at Gettysburg and really see it as a sort of turning point in the war. “The battle of Gettysburg,” declared
Michael Jacobs, “must be regarded as the great and decisive battle of this wicked war. Although treason has been met in many a bloody field … at Gettysburg it received a blow, from which it will never recover.”
34
In the final accounting, Gettysburg was a victory, for George Meade, for the Army of the Potomac, and for the Union. “Public feeling has been wonderfully improved and buoyed up by our recent successes at Gettysburg and Vicksburg,”
John Nicolay, one of Lincoln’s secretaries, rejoiced. It was not decisive enough to bring the Confederacy to its knees, but it was decisive
enough for the Union that, as even Jefferson Davis conceded, “the drooping spirit of the North was revived.”