Let me chip in my armchair strategizing since I owe it to my great-grandfather who was at Culp's Hill.
The observation that Lee is not recognized by most folks for his authentic genius is quite true. After the battle of Seven Pines Lee took command of the vastly outnumbered and outgunned force with its back to the city walls of Richmond whose investiture by McClellan would have spelled the end of the war before the rebellion had scarcely begun.
It was Lee who turned loose Stonewall Jackson in the Valley who thus pinned McDowell down thereby preventing the combination against the Confederates before Richmond of a really overwhelming force. For some reason, Lee from the very beginning recognized Jackson's eccentric genius and gave him a full play both in the Valley where he acted independently and on the left flank of the Confederate forces in the Seven Days Battle which ultimately saved Richmond. After McClellan's much superior force was driven back from Richmond and marginalized, Lee again turned Jackson loose. He contrived to get on Burnside's rear and the ensuing battle of Second Manassas completed the elimination of federal forces on the soil of the Old Dominion. An astonishing turnaround really from the desperate plight of the Confederates on this day in 1862 when Lee took over.
Both Lee and Jackson were superb tacticians but each took the longer strategic view and to my knowledge their fundamental assumptions about how the war should be fought were never at variance so long as Jackson lived. Their strategic conception was to drive the Yankees out of the war by beating them on their own soil and thus undermining the war party along with the morale of the North. This is a course Jackson had been advocating since 1961 and lee undertook it just as soon as he could drive the Yankees out of Virginia in the fall of 1862.
So Lee made his first invasion of the North which culminated in the single bloodiest day of the war at Sharpsburg. The battle was mismanaged by McClellan who, again, vastly outnumbered and outgunned the Confederates but he committed his forces piecemeal against Lee's line. The casualties were appalling on both sides and the day was only saved for the Confederates by the nick of time arrival of AP Hill's forces literally running themselves to exhaustion from Harpers Ferry. The scene is something that Hollywood would contrive: the federals are finally combining to cross Antietam Creek and are pushing in Lee's line which means the day is lost and, with the day, his Army. Lee asks a younger officer with younger eyes to look to the east and tell him what he sees in the dust made by moving troops. "Those are Yankees sir" Lee pivots in the saddle and points to the South, "what do you see there?" The junior officer replies, "those are Confederates, sir." Lee says only, "thank God, it is AP Hill come from Harpers Ferry."
AP Hill was in Harpers Ferry pursuant to written orders which had assigned Stonewall Jackson the task of investing and taking the place. By another Hollywood quirk, a copy of the orders was somehow caused to be wrapped around a few cigars and left behind for the Yankees to discover near Frederick, Maryland. Even McClellan could not fail to be electrified by what these orders told him: Lee had divided his inferior force thus offering McClellan with his hosts the opportunity to smash him in detail! For once in his career McClellan acted with dispatch and pursued Lee who drew up what forces he could collect on the West side of a rill known as Antietam Creek.
The fighting was so vicious that it moved Stonewall Jackson to declare "anyone who cannot see the hand of God in this affair is blind, sir, blind!" The day, he added was won, "only by hard and stern fighting." My ancestors fought in the vicinity of the Dunker Church under Stonewall Jackson near the cornfield where rows of men were cut down as neatly as the corn itself, row on row, until there was nothing left of the field but dead bodies and corn stubble. The Confederates, out of ammunition, held their ground throwing rocks at the Yankees.
The Army of Northern Virginia, badly battered, was not broken and the battle was a tactical draw but the draw was converted into a strategic victory for the North by Lee's reluctant, stubbornly delayed, but unavoidable withdrawal back across the Potomac, necessitated by his inferior force. Abraham Lincoln's announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation completed the conversion of a tactical draw into a strategic victory.
The year 1863 in many ways was a replay of 1862.
Virginia was again invested by overwhelming numbers of Yankees and Lee loosed Stonewall Jackson on the right of the Yankee line at Chancellorsville where Jackson's surprise was so complete that the Union force was nearly destroyed. Lease victory has been described as the single greatest military stroke in American history.
Another Hollywood scene before the battle is offered: Lee, fully aware of the overwhelming odds against his inferior force sits down at a campfire with Stonewall Jackson to plan their salvation. They had been informed that the Yankee right was "in the air" and there was a possibility that a force could make its way around to the left and, if the gods of surprise favored, attack the Yankee line at that point of vulnerability. It is necessary to emphasize the gross disparity of forces in which the Union, led by Gen. Hooker, vastly outnumbered Lee's forces. Both men around the campfire were well aware of this daunting inferiority when Lee turned to Jackson and asked, "how many of your command will you take with you?" Without dramatics Jackson uttered a phrase which must have turned Lee's heart cold because of its implications, "I will take my whole command."
If Jackson took his whole command on a Hail Mary pass to the left and he failed to get on Hooker's right or if Hooker simply attacked Lee's denuded remnant, the game was over because Lee simply could not survive against those overwhelming odds. Put yourself in Lee's place and consider what moral courage it took to assume responsibility for such a breathtaking risk. If the gamble failed the fault was all Lee's. If he kept his force together only to watch it slowly attrited into extinction, history could not fault him for simply obeying the first maxim of war: do not divide your force in the face of a superior enemy. Lee knew the risks and he shouldered them at the peril of his own reputation.
This was not the only time in the war that Lee took tremendous risks when he felt that circumstances warranted. I believe that Gettysburg was simply a bridge too far for the man who before and after Gettysburg demonstrated that he had the moral courage to risk all when he considered that the conventional path was riskier.
Lee's second invasion of the North was itself a strategic gamble and it was made as much out of desperation as it was out of confidence. It is well known that the reason the battle was fought at Gettysburg was because elements of Lee's forces had heard that there were shoes to be had there. Such was the embarrassed state of Lee's army of invasion.
Worse, four this invasionLee did not have Stonewall as his trusted lieutenant who could be relied upon to go "straight as the needle to the poll to the effectuation of my purpose." Lee did have his "old war horse" General Longstreet. Longstreet was the sort of general who said, "I do not like to go into battle with only one boot on." There was a fundamental philosophical difference of emphasis between the Lee/Jackson way and Longstreet's approach. Lee was never under any illusion that eventually the South would be overwhelmed by the weight of Northern numbers and matériel. Therefore, he regarded risks, including tactical and strategic risks, must be consciously accepted in order to overcome these strategic deficiencies. To some degree Lee felt that the strategic imbalance to be so grave as to justify tactical risks. We saw that at The Seven Days, at Second Manassas, and at Chancellorsville. We saw in Lee's first invasion of the North and now in 1863 in his second invasion of the North.
Longstreet had a strategic conception which was that the Confederate Army ought to interpose itself between the Union Army and some strategic objective which the union must fight for or lose the war such as Washington or Philadelphia or Baltimore. The Confederates should choose to give battle with an eye to topography, forcing the Yankees to fight at considerable disadvantage on the ground. In a sense, Longstreet wanted tactics to drive the strategy. He wanted Lee not to offer battle on the third day of Gettysburg but to maneuver around Meade to interpose himself as described.
Lee was not unaware of Longstreet's conception but he replied, "there is the enemy and there he must be defeated." If one stands at the jump off point of Pickett's charge and gazes up the rise to the copse of trees near the point of the high watermark of the Confederacy, one cannot help but ask, how could men be expected to carry that objective? They could not carry it and Robert E. Lee owns the ultimate responsibility for ordering the attempt. He would be the first to say so, in fact, he was the first to say so. One of the most poignant scenes of the war surely must be the figure of Robert E. Lee wandering in among the retreating remnants of Armistead's Virginians saying, "it is my fault, it is my fault, it is all my fault."
As a boy I learned as an article of faith widely held by Virginians that if Stonewall Jackson had been at Culp's Hill on the first day the battle at Gettysburg he would certainly have taken that high ground and the battle of Gettysburg would surely have gone the other way. The people of the south of more than a half-century ago believed that they saw the hand of God in this, that Stonewall Jackson was suffered to be killed at Chancellorsville so the south would lose the war and God's grand purpose that the union should be preserved would thereby be effected. Thus did the South reconcile itself to the union and actually become the most patriotic region of the land, becoming devout believers in America exceptionalism-God ordained exceptionalism.
