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

meeting with Lincoln. If the Army of the Potomac shunned battle and concentrated on shielding Washington, Lee could still “subsist his army” on the fat Pennsylvania countryside “for two months” and allow the battered farmlands of northern Virginia a brief respite.42

Without Stuart’s cavalry to provide intelligence, Lee was thrown back on what little he could glean from spies, captured newspapers, and Southern sympathizers. He did not discover from them until June 28—when his own army was itself strung out in an awkward triangle between Carlisle, Chambersburg, and York—that the Army of the Potomac had made uncommonly fast time in its pursuit of him out of Virginia and was closer to parts of the Confederate army than those parts were to each other. Lee at once ordered a concentration of the Army of Northern Virginia on Cashtown, a small village eight miles west of Gettysburg.

In the process, A.P. Hill allowed one of his divisions to become entangled in a firefight with Federal cavalry just west of Gettysburg on the morning of July 1, without realizing that two Federal army corps (1st and 11th) were only a few miles south of the town. The Yankee infantry pounced on Hill’s troops, and in turn, Hill committed more of his corps to the fight. Lee, at Cashtown, heard the sound of fighting in the distance and rode out to see for himself. Caution might have dictated that he break off the engagement until he could find out if more federal infantry was lurking nearby. But by the time he arrived at the scene of the battle that afternoon, Richard Ewell’s corps had shown up from Carlisle on its own, and Hill and Ewell together were successfully driving the Federal infantry through the town and to a low, flat plateau known as Cemetery Hill, just south of Gettysburg. Unwilling to back off from a battle his men were clearly winning, Lee summoned Longstreet’s corps to come up from Chambersburg, ordered Ewell to secure the other hills south of the town if Ewell thought it “practicable,” and in general behaved as though he had just had the battle he had hoped to fight near Gettysburg delivered to him on precisely his own terms.43

This might have been a fairly reasonable procedure, given what had happened at Chancellorsville, and provided the Army of the Potomac was still commanded by someone like Hooker. By this time, however, Hooker was no longer at the head of the Army of the Potomac. Angered over slights he had received from the War Department, Hooker resigned on June 27, and Lincoln replaced him with the commander of the Army of the Potomac’s 5th Corps, George Gordon Meade. Meade was a throwback to the McClellanites (Meade was a Philadelphian, from the same social circle as the McClellans, and a Democrat), and his selection may have been a compromise on Lincoln’s part to forestall calls to restore McClellan to command once again. In any case, Lincoln hurriedly shoved command of the army’s 95,000 men into Meade’s hands to take care of the invasion emergency.44

Meade’s first instinct would have played right into Lee’s plans. Given command on such short notice, Meade proposed to adopt a defensive posture, digging the Army of the Potomac into a line behind Pipe Creek, in northern Maryland, and then sitting down to protect Washington. But the engagement at Gettysburg on July 1 forced Meade’s hand fully as much as it had forced Lee’s, and Meade hurriedly ordered the Army of the Potomac to converge as rapidly as possible on what was left of the 1st Corps and 11th Corps on Cemetery Hill. During the night, Meade assembled almost all of the Army of the Potomac there, and rendered null any prospect that Ewell would be able to capture Cemetery Hill by just walking up and taking it.45

This was still the Yankee army Lee had twice defeated in the last seven months, and on the morning of July 2, Lee decided to launch an imitation of the blow that had floored the Yankees at Chancellorsville. He sent James Longstreet’s newly arrived corps in a long flanking hook to hit the Union left, and when Longstreet did so late that afternoon, the results almost perfectly mirrored Stonewall Jackson’s attack exactly two months before. Union troops managed to save the most prominent high ground, a rock-littered hill known locally as Little Round Top, throwing back Confederate brigades of Alabamians and Texans with little more than grit and bluff. (One Union regiment, the 20th Maine Volunteers, and their colonel, the former Bowdoin college rhetoric professor Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, surprised the Alabamians by launching a counterattack of their own at Little Round Top, catching the Confederates so completely by surprise that they broke and ran.) In every other respect, however, Longstreet wrecked half the Army of the Potomac by the time the sun set on July 2, and only vigorous protests from his corps commanders prevented Meade from throwing in the towel and ordering a retreat.46

Just as had happened at Chancellorsville, Lee now had the Army of the Potomac on the ropes and was ready to deliver the knockout blow. This time, though, he had sustained so many losses in killed, wounded, and missing that the blow would have to be struck with the only uncommitted division he had left, one of Virginians from Longstreet’s corps under Major General George E. Pickett, supported by North Carolinians from Hill’s depleted corps—approximately 10,500 men in all—against the center of the Union line of battle. By the example of the British attack on the Alma in 1854, this should have swept the Army of the Potomac from the heights of Gettysburg. Instead, Pickett’s charge turned into a reverse of Fredericksburg. The Confederates were compelled to cross almost a mile of open ground under a murderous fire of artillery, then confront the fire of Federal infantry from the 2nd Corps of the Army of the Potomac, who were convinced that the outcome of the war was resting on their shoulders.