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

Although a few Confederates managed to reach the Union line and punch a small hole in it, the overall attack collapsed, with the loss of more than 1,100 killed and 4,500 wounded. By the end of the day, it was at last evident to Lee that he could not dislodge Meade from his position at Gettysburg. With his supplies and ammunition badly depleted, and almost 28,000 casualties from the three days of fighting, Lee wearily ordered the Army of Northern Virginia to retreat.47

After ten months of almost unrelieved bad news from the battlefield, the news of Gettysburg came as welcome relief to the North. In the Confederacy, it shattered the image of Lee’s invincibility and raised questions for the first time about Lee’s capabilities as a field commander. On August 8, assuming full responsibility for the defeat at Gettysburg, Lee offered Jefferson Davis his resignation. Davis refused, but at the same time, Lee would never again have complete control of Davis’s military policy, and in September Davis would detach Longstreet’s corps from the Army of Northern Virginia and send it west to reinforce Braxton Bragg. “One brief month ago,” wept Josiah Gorgas into his journal on July 28, “we were apparently at the point of success. Lee was in Pennsylvania, threatening Harrisburgh, and even Philadelphia. Vicksburg seemed to laugh all Grant’s efforts to scorn.” Now, the “picture is just as somber as it was bright then. … The Confederacy totters to its destruction.”48 At almost the same time, a Confederate officer in the Army of Northern Virginia wrote a similar lament in his diary:

Another month has passed and the results are perhaps more disastrous than even Feby. ’62. Vicksburg, Port Hudson & Gettysburg have been fought and leave a gloom on the country. Unless unceasing success attends the Confederate arms, fits of despondency at once overhang every community. Even the army grows despondent, and evidence of demoralization are visible. More desertions than usual are occurring. Rumors of renewed difficulties in the South are circulating.49

For Lincoln, however, Gettysburg offered only limited consolations. Although he was jubilant at Meade’s victory, he waited in vain to hear of Meade pursuing and destroying the defeated Lee. Instead, Meade, in a manner tiringly reminiscent of McClellan, rested his men and then cautiously set off in a perfunctory pursuit of the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac River on July 14, and after that, any hope that Meade would finish him off disappeared. Lincoln would have to keep on looking for the general who would fight and win the kind of war that he had in mind.

ADVANCE INTO THE CONFEDERATE HEARTLAND

Vicksburg fell to Grant the day after Meade’s victory at Gettysburg, and the conjunction of the two events gave the North its happiest weekend in two years of war. Still, the repulse of Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania and the reopening of the Mississippi probably meant a good deal less in strategic terms than they seemed to. Although Gettysburg had inflicted severe wounds on the Army of Northern Virginia, Meade’s failure to pursue Lee only ensured that the same cycle of invasions, retreats, and counterinvasions would have to begin all over again in the fall of 1863 or the spring of 1864. As for the Mississippi River, the anxiety Lincoln felt about reopening the entire length of the river to the Gulf was generated by his youthful memories of how dependent Western farmers had always been on the Mississippi for transporting their surpluses to market, and by the croaking of western governors such as Oliver Perry Morton of Indiana, who was convinced that his legislature would vote to secede and join the Confederacy unless the Mississippi was reopened.50

Lincoln’s memories were a generation old in 1863, and the mature Lincoln’s association as a lawyer with the railroads provided telling evidence of a dramatic shift in market transportation away from the north-south axis of the Mississippi River Valley and toward the east-west axis of the railroads, which now brought goods more swiftly to Chicago and New York than the steamboat could bring them to New Orleans. Even as Vicksburg bitterly surrendered to Grant, resourceful Northern farmers had already begun to turn to the railroads as their preferred means of shipment to market, and Mississippi River traffic never again regained the heights it had attained before 1861.

Of course, the conquest of the Mississippi did pay the Union a few dividends. The Confederates surrendered an entire army at Vicksburg—nearly 29,000 men—and the loss of the Mississippi cut them off from Texas, Arkansas, and most of Louisiana. But Braxton Bragg’s rebel Army of Tennessee was still intact and dangerous in middle Tennessee; what was more, none of the regions cut off by the capture of the Mississippi had been a critical source of supply for the Confederacy anyway. Whatever their loss did to damage the Confederate war effort, it did not prevent the Confederacy from waging war for almost two more years. In fact, the real heart of the Confederacy’s power to carry on the war—its factories, its granaries, its rail centers—never had lain along Halleck’s or Grant’s lines of operation on the Tennessee or the Mississippi. They lay, instead, in upper Alabama and Georgia, around the critical rail centers of Chattanooga and Atlanta, where the remaining pieces of the Confederacy’s two lateral rail lines still intersected, and around the new government-run gun foundries and ironworks at Selma and the great powder works in Augusta. This meant that the real line of successful operations for the Union in 1862 and 1863 would have to be the same eastern Tennessee line that McClellan had vainly urged Buell to follow back in January 1862.

A good deal more might have been made of this had not Buell shown himself no more eager to pursue his chances in 1862 than McClellan had been. In the spring of 1862, he had pretty much taken McClellan’s view of the war by announcing, “We are in arms, not for the