Thanks for remembering the bd of George Pickett, an honorable and tragic figure of the battle of Gettysburg. Had Lee listened to his Corp Commander James Longstreet and, instead of getting his army destroyed at Gettysburg, turned south to undefended Washington DC, the capitol could have been taken along with the "busybody", war mongering, interventionist republicans and we might have been looking at quite a differant United States today.
Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda.
"Thanks for remembering the bd of George Pickett, an honorable and tragic figure of the battle of Gettysburg. Had Lee listened to his Corp Commander James Longstreet and, instead of getting his army destroyed at Gettysburg, turned south to undefended Washington DC, the capitol could have been taken along with the "busybody", war mongering, interventionist republicans and we might have been looking at quite a differant United States today."
Agreed on your assessment of Lee/Longstreet, but to suggest that DC was undefended was ludicrous. There was a pretty large-scale network of forts around DC that would've been tough to overrun as easily as you imagined.