Gettysburg (eBook)

The Campaign

The Gettysburg Campaign marked Lee’s second invasion of the North. It was risky in that it stretched the limited offensive capability of the Army of Northern Virginia and the already thinly distributed resources of the Confederacy, but it offered Lee the tantalizing possibility of a decisive victory.

Perhaps the most well-known battle of the Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg was fought between General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and Major General George Meade’s Army of the Potomac. Gettysburg was Lee’s second invasion of the North and another effort to gain the decisive victory that would perhaps lead to European intervention or a negotiated peace. Instead, Meade defeated Lee in a three-day battle that forced Lee back into Virginia and eliminated the Army of Northern Virginia as a future offensive threat.

The Battle of Gettysburg was part of a larger campaign that began shortly after the Confederate victory at Chancellorsville (April 30-May 6, 1863). Campaigns are “a series of related major operations aimed at achieving strategic and operational objectives within a given time and space.” Battles are “a set of related engagements that lasts longer and involves larger forces than an engagement.” Engagements are “a tactical conflict, usually between opposing, lower echelon maneuver forces.”

The Battle of Chancellorsville left the Federal Army of the Potomac in a command crisis and the momentum with the Army of Northern Virginia.

The Gettysburg Campaign began when Lee initiated his move north on June 3. It ended on July 14 when the Army of Northern Virginia returned to Virginia. Within that campaign, the three days from July 1 to July 3 comprise the Battle of Gettysburg. Within that battle, a host of engagements occurred at places like Culp’s Hill, Devil’s Den, and Little Round Top.

The Campaign Takes Shape

On May 1, 1863 Lee launched an attack on Chancellorsville that dealt a devastating blow to Major General Joseph Hooker and the Army of the Potomac. Although the battle was a great victory for the Confederates, it proved to be a costly one with the loss of Lieutenant General Stonewall Jackson. Previously Lee had had two corps commanders with Jackson leading one corps and Lieutenant General James Longstreet leading the other. Each corps had some 30,000 men, and Lee felt that with Jackson gone there was no one commander who could replace him and manage a unit that large. Instead, Lee reorganized the Army of Northern Virginia into three corps. Longstreet would command one, Lieutenant General Dick Ewell would take Jackson’s old Second Corps, and Lieutenant General A. P. Hill would command the new Third Corps. Ewell and Hill had both served ably as division commanders, but it remained to be seen if they were up to the challenge of corps command.

Chancellorsville had left the Federal army of the Potomac reeling, and Lee proposed a second invasion of Northern territory to build on this momentum. Complicating such a move, however, was the fact that at the beginning of 1863, the Confederacy was faced with two completely different situations in the eastern and western theaters. The Confederate success in the east was reversed in the western theater where Major General Ulysses S. Grant posed a mounting threat to Lieutenant General John Pemberton’s beleaguered command at Vicksburg and the Confederacy’s ability to maintain some control over the strategically important Mississippi River.

On May 19, Secretary of War James Seddon, encouraged by the likes of Longstreet, General Pierre Goustave Toutant Beauregard, and Senator Louis Wigfall, asked Lee for his thoughts on sending one of his divisions west. For Lee, the discussion boiled down to “a question between Virginia and the Mississippi.”

Accidentally shot by one of his own men, Stonewall Jackson’s death at Chancellorsville cost Lee the irreplaceable services of his best corps commander and his right-hand man.

Indeed, Lee’s loyalties had always been first and foremost to Virginia. Shortly after resigning from the U.S. Army he said, “I devote myself to the service of my native state, in whose behalf alone, will I ever again draw my sword.” This loyalty had a profound influence on Lee’s strategic thinking and now an invasion into Northern territory would relieve some of the ravages Virginia had suffered as the principal battleground of the war.

There were others who looked to the western theater as being the more important theater. This “western bloc” advocated sending reinforcements from Virginia west to help Pemberton instead of mounting an offensive in the eastern theater. Lee countered these arguments, saying that an invasion of the North would cause such alarm that the Federals would be forced to divert their attention away from Vicksburg. It was a fairly tenuous assertion, but by this point in the war Lee had such enormous prestige that his opinions were hard to ignore. When Lee presented his plan to invade Northern territory to President Davis and his cabinet on May 15, 1863, Davis concurred and the question was settled.

Plans for a Northern Invasion

The initiation of the Gettysburg Campaign can be traced to June 3, when Lee started moving his 89,000 men north from an assembly point at Culpeper, some 30 miles (50 km) northwest of Fredericksburg. Paying close attention to the security of his army and the secrecy of the move, Lee shifted two-thirds of his force to the northwest and past Hooker’s flank. Lee left Lieutenant General A. P. Hill’s corps entrenched around Fredericksburg, spread out to give the impression the entire army was still there. Lee also used Major General Jeb Stuart’s cavalry to hold the passes in the Blue Ridge and South mountains to screen the army’s advance and protect its supply line. Then Lee quietly began moving westward up the Shenandoah and Cumberland valleys.

Hooker was still stinging from his defeat at Chancellorsville, and he proceeded cautiously given his uncertainty of the situation. After taking command of the army, Hooker had initiated several administrative reforms including a reorganization of the Bureau of Military Information under Colonel George Sharpe. The improvements in the Federal intelligence arm had been significant, and as early as May 27, Sharpe was reporting that “the...