Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

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 out 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