Why Lee Attacked

by OSCAR HANDLIN

1

ON July 3, 1863, young Henry Adams wrote home from the English capital. He was tired. He wished the letter to be gay, but a tone of despondency crept into the phrases that described the events of the past few days.

A round of festivities had left him little time for sleep. Each morning he went for a long ride in the park, worked a bit in the afternoon, then stayed out to dinner until late in the evening. On Tuesday he had been a guest at the most magnificent ball of the London season.

But there was ever a bitter potion mixed in with the pleasuresome brew of which he drank. For it was not, after all, to be a gay blade that he had come to Great Britain. His mission was more serious. Sent off to London wit h his father before secession had led to war, he had not the opportunity to bear arms himself. But fully as earnestly as those who stood in the ranks of the Army of the Potomac, he was fighting for the safety of the Republic.

Even before the opening shots had disturbed the calm of Charleston Harbor in April, 1861, it had been clear that diplomacy would play a weighty part in the efforts of Southern states to dissolve the Union. Henry’s father, Charles Francis Adams, had been dispatched to London to foil the Southern cpiest for international aid. He knew that the European powers had the strength to intervene decisively should they wish to. The mere recognition of the Confederacy’s independence would open to it the resources of armaments, supplies, and money to resist indefinitely. This had been the calculation of the radicals who rushed the South toward secession. In their blindness, they imagined that they held in their grasp the one precious commodity that would turn all the world to their will. Cotton was king, they proclaimed, and for its possession the great manufacturing nations of the Old World would rush to curry favor with the Confederacy.

The Southern statesmen whose hopes ran in this vein were not long in being sadly disabused. It was true, after a year or so of war, Britain began to suffer from a cotton famine, and the factories of Birmingham and Manchester slowed the pace of their production. In France too the want of the precious staple created a minor economic crisis. But it was not over the question of cotton that Europeans were divided in their attitude toward the American war. Rather, they took sides because they perceived that the war involved the whole future of the Republic and of the way of life it represented.

A fundamental proposition was being tested: Could a great nation survive and expand with its government in the hands of common people, or must it inevitably revert to some form of aristocracy? This was the question involved in the future of slavery or freedom in America. This was also the question bound up in Lincoln’s denial that a state could secede and, of its own accord, destroy the government established by the people of the United States. The task of the Adamses, father and son, was to make that question clear to the English.

In some sectors of English society, the North found immediate sympathizers among men who understood the relationship of the war to the cause of liberty. One of them was John Bright, a Quaker and man of peace. A few years before, he had spoken out boldly against the Crimean War. But in the American Civil War he saw issues that held him to the Union side. In the half century of his life, England had advanced with gigantic steps toward the modernity of mass production. Bright was not tired of change; rather he resented its slowness. He longed for improvements in political and social legislation equivalent to those taking place in technology. In the way were an outmoded aristocracy and a monarchy that had resolutely opposed every step away from the past. But America seemed to offer me opportunities denied by Britain. For America in its marvelous growth in every sphere was the living demonstration of what men could achieve without the cumbersome burden of wornout institutions.

A square-shaped man who customarily turned up in the House of Commons in plain dress, Bright was through and through a liberal, a democrat, and a republican. As a member of Parliament from the industrial city of Birmingham, it required considerable political courage and integrity on his part to argue for the cause of the Union, regardless of the sacrifices that support of the North might entail for the profits of the textile companies and the wages of the millworkers on whose votes he was dependent. With him stood a large body of opinion in England, in France, and on the Continent.

Numerous as they were, such men as Bright, Richard Cobden, and William E. Forster were not in power in 1861. For thirteen years the conservatives of the Continent had been in the ascendancy. The revolutions of 1848 had threatened to destroy the older order. In desperation, the ancient regime had closed ranks and struck back. The shattered nobility had reformed and accepted an alliance with the men of new wealth. The established churches and the monarchs, shaky from the fleeting nightmare of a throneless Europe, had joined the alliance which was now everywhere dominant. The Hapsburg Emperor, the Romanoff Czar, the Hohcnzollern King of Prussia, stifled the Continent in reaction— shrewder and more flexible than in the past, but nonetheless determined to resist the newness of which the United States was the symbol.

2

OF THE alliance of reaction, the Emperor of France was the leading spokesman. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte had come a long way since t hose days when he had shivered in the fields fighting with the Italian revolutionaries of 1831. He had gained a throne and lost his honor. A petty man, he had discovered in 1848 which was the winning side; and betraying his comrades in arms, he had pulled himself to power by a succession of coups. His uncle’s great image he held constantly before him, yet he lacked the first Napoleon’s daring and resolution.

Not infrequently Napoleon III was seized by the turncoat’s fear of having chosen the wrong cause. Lurking memories of discarded hopes from time to time moved him to ruthless repression of the remnants of French liberalism. His secret police were active — even in the United States, where his spies kept watch over the agitation of radical refugees and labor leaders. For Louis Napoleon had disturbing recollections of the New World. He had crossed the Atlantic as a fugitive, and with his own eyes he had seen the growing power of the young Republic and the vigorous spirit that attached its people to democracy. Better than any of the other crowned heads of Europe, he understood the menace of Americanism to the old order.

Incessant fright of the future also drove Napoleon III to seek security in a dynastic marriage. Fearful lest power be snatched from him, he imagined that he could plant his roots back in an imperial past by marrying a princess from one of the oldest lines in Europe, even if but from an obscure branch of it. After 1853 a queen of Spanish origin reigned by his side in the palace of the Tuileries.

Eugénie de Monti jo was the last blossom of the court of Madrid. For a century that court had been the scandal of Europe — thoroughly selfish, completely immoral, and dedicated to no larger interest than gratification of the whims of the royal family and its courtiers. Even now rumor linked t he queen of Spain in a love affair with a pianist. This was the atmosphere in which Eugénie had grown up, vain and selfish, carefully guarding her honor, which was the price of a good marriage, and credulous to the point of superstition. In Paris she imagined that she was surrounded by enemies of all sorts, and embarked, in the time-honored tradition of her house, upon a career of intrigue. Of the Americans and all they represented, she disapproved in any case; but in addition family reasons made her hostile to the Republic.

It was inevitable that Louis Napoleon and Eugenie should cook up an extravagant scheme for restraining republicanism even in the New World. They had taken under their wing a simple young Austrian archduke, whom they had singled out as emperor of Mexico. The venture was not only intended to create an empire in the New World; it would also aid French business interests and sustain the Catholic Church, then under attack in Mexico. Unfortunately, no statesman in the government in Paris had ability or courage enough to point out the disastrous flaws in the plan.

Reassured by promises of French support, with an entourage and an army supplied by Louis Napoleon, Maximilian in 1863 assumed the crown and prepared to go in person to govern his new domain. He had the support of the local conservative political clique in Mexico City. But most of his subjects were violently hostile. Imperial authority did not extend beyond the limits of the capital, and the provinces were torn by full-scale revolts. Furthermore, it was altogether clear that the United States would not recognize him; and while the Republic was for the time being in tumult at home, it promised to give him its attention the moment that its domestic distractions ended. For Napoleon and Eugenie the potential threat from the North to the empire was an additional motive for desiring the failure of the Union forces and the permanent division of the United States.

From the first, therefore, France was ready to aid the South. But it was not free to act without the agreement of England. Napoleon had too many irons in the fire to embroil himself in overseas commitments without the assurance that the British Navy would be friendly.

3

IN ENGLAND a substantial body of conservative opinion favored the South and disunity. Tories who had not forgotten 1776 viewed with joy the collapse of the American experiment. Others considered the Enited States the source of the insidious republicanism and democracy that now threatened their own society. “The vaunted democracy,” sneered Blackwood’s, dragged from “his proper obscurity an ex-rail-splitter” and put “its liberties at bis august disposal.” Ender British institutions, the magazine boasted, neither he nor any of his cabinet could have emerged “from the mediocrity to which nature had condemned them, and from which pure democracy alone was capable of rescuing them.” In the House of Commons and the House of Lords a majority favored the Confederacy and awaited a strategic opportunity for expressing that preference.

The final decision, however, rested with Queen Victoria’s ministers. Three members of the British cabinet were in a position to affect the critical decision. The first was Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, an old hand at politics, who was now in Ins seventies and who could look back with satisfaction on an eventful career. All his life he had found it advantageous, and even amusing, to play the role of the wily diplomat not bound by usual standards. Yet in actuality he had always been attentive to popular impulses; and like his old master. Canning, he had taken the liberal side in foreign affairs and been friendly to the Americans.

With the two other most powerful members of the ministry, Palmerston had frequent fallings out. At the head of the Foreign Office in 1861 stood Earl Russell, who was approaching seventy. The noble earl was known to Americans as a liberal, for his name was associated with the great reform measures of the 1830s and 1840s. Yet he had no real taste for the role into which he had been forced by the exigencies of party politics. Time and again ho found himself on the popular side against his will. The Foreign Secretary was perfectly willing to recognize the South, and in December, 18(51, had composed an ultimatum which, had it been dispatched, might well have led to war with the Enited Slates. Cooler heads had averted the crisis, but Russell continued to believe that the Enion divided would make Britain stronger everywhere in North America. Such an outcome would free Canada from the threat of the expanding Yankees and would increase commercial opportunities in the South and in the North. Both regions would bo dependent on England, which could then play one off against the other.

William Gladstone’s calculations led to the same conclusion. Gladstone never outlived the conservatism that had once led him to proclaim himself “an out-and-out inequalitarian.” This devout believer in an established crown, church, and aristocracy disliked the Enited States and was an earnest sympathizer with the South.

For the moment, the British cabinet hung back; it hesitated to lake steps that would outrage liberal opinion at home. Furthermore, Charles Francis Adams had let the English know in no uncertain terms that the United States would bitterly resent any expression of sympathy in behalf of the Confederacy. Through the first year of the war, therefore, Her Majesty’s Government was cautious. It. recognized the South’s belligerency, but not its national independence. It gave no official, direct support to the rebels, yet it permitted their agents to operate openly in the British Isles.

The crisis approached as 1862 drew to a close. Union defeats in the Peninsular Campaign and the Second Battle of Bull Run had only partially been offset by the victory at Antietam. There seemed no reason to expect that the South would ever be crushed. In October, at Newcastle, Gladstone announced that Jeflerson Davis had made a nation.

But Palmerston’s deliberateness held the English back. He would not be hastened by colleagues he disliked and distrusted. Yet, in December, 1862, another Union defeat at Fredericksburg brought the point of intervention closer. Napoleon III, emboldened, proposed mediation and was rebuffed by the Enited States. He now awaited the nod of assent from London to proceed to more act ive steps on behalf of the Confederacy, which, for its part, had indicated it would support the Mexican empire.

Meanwhile, in Britain’s shipyards, the Lairds were building a pair of rams and a cruiser to join the Alabama and the Florida, which were already at sea, creating havoc in the American merchant and whaling fleets. (Two hundred and fifty Yankee ships were to go to the bottom under their guns.) Charles Francis Adams had protested that the rams were warships, and ought not to be transferred to the Confederacy. Yet shrewd men in London and Richmond had no doubt that somehow the ships would find themselves under the Stars and Bars and under the command of Confederate captains. In any case, a loan successfully floated by the Confederacy had just then yielded the means for paying for these ships and other supplies.

As London moved into the summer season described by Henry Adams, the time was ripe for a final effort to assure English recognition of the Confederacy. It was only necessary, through some dramatic demonstration, to show the North the futility of further fighting and at the same time to demonstrate to Europe that the South could not be conquered. To that objective the best military minds of the Confederacy were turned.

On the surface of things, two years of fighting had hardly changed the situation of 1861. The Confederacy had successfully beaten off the attacks upon its capital. It had suffered losses in the West, but these had not affected ils center of power. Even in the remote regions of the South, the Confederacy could still strike back; only recently it had retaken Galveston from the Yankees. Secure on the defensive, the Confederacy had no doubt that it could resist indefinitely.

This defensive posture, however, was irksome to those who shaped the military policy of the South. President Jefferson Davis longed for the decisive moment that would establish the permanence of the Confederacy. He wished to be finished with the burdensome expenses of war and free to lead the new nation toward the romantic destiny he envisioned for it. If only t he energies of the new state were not squandered before then, peace brought by some single decisive blow would justify secession.

This also was the desire of the Commander in Chief of the Army of Virginia. Ever since he had resigned his commission in the Army of the United States to take command of the Confederate forces, Robert E. Lee had remained on the defensive. On the familiar ground of Northern Virginia he had brilliantly frustrated the successive Union stabs at Richmond. But he was weary of being attacked, weary of seeing the battle rage back and forth across the lovely landscape he cherished. He knew what the war was costing his people; and he knew also that there would be no end to it in this interminable, bloody beating off of one thrust after another from the North.

In any case, it was not thus that he saw himself — ever parrying, ever waiting for the enemy, and with no power of initiative. He had preferred that other war in Mexico, in 1846 — a war of long marches and daring assaults. An inner image of himself flickered frequently in his thoughts — the vision of a gallant leader riding fonvard. No doubt it was that vision which, at a review on June 8, led him impulsively to put his horse Traveller at a gallop, to ride wildly three miles forward and three miles back.

What Lee wanted was some decisive feat that would bring a satisfying peace to the South. Again and again his mind came back to a daring idea. As the spring of 1863 drew to a close, his resolution was fixed. Determined to believe in its success, he minimized the risks involved and persuaded himself and the government that his strategy was feasible.

The problem before him, he thought, “resolved itself into a choice of one of two things — either to retire to Richmond and stand a siege, which must ultimately have ended in surrender, or to invade Pennsylvania.” Of the two he preferred the latter. He would abandon‘the defensive and strike boldly at the heart of the North. It would not be difficult to confuse the Union Army at a time when it was still leaderless. McClellan was discredited. Lee could sweep to the left of the mountains directly toward the interior of Pennsylvania. Only forty miles away, waiting to be taken, was Harrisburg.

From the strictly military point of view, the strategic utility of the move was questionable. This region was not vital to the economy of the North, and the attack might not seriously disturb the Union armies. But the psychological value of the plan was incalculable. Northern morale, already shaken by heavy drafts of men and by the financial sacrifices of the war, would collapse. The Democratic governors of the Northern states would be bolstered in their growing discontent with Republican administration. Dissension would spread. The Yankees would at last perceive the futility of continuing the long struggle. Most important of all, the seizure of the capital of one of the great Northern states —not guarded as Washington was — would be the convincing demonstration to frie’ndsof the South throughout Europe that the Confederacy was unbeatable. Such a stroke would in short order earn the recognition so eagerly desired.

4

ON JUNE 3, General Lee began to move his splendid force toward the Shenandoah Valley. The Union Army, uncertain of his intentions, took up a dilatory pursuit. Following the line of the Shenandoah, Lee moved slowly northward, keeping the mountains between him and the Federal troops. At the middle of the month he crossed the Potomac, and by the 23rd his advance forces were in Pennsylvania, approaching Chambersburg in the Cumberland Valley.

At this juncture Lee suffered his first loss, although he would not for two weeks realize its importance. He sent the main body of his cavalry, under J. E. B. Stuart, off on one of its sweeping raids through Maryland. Finding the road to Washington almost open, Stuart was tempted to approach to within four miles of the Federal capital. In that act of useless daring, he was separated from Lee’s main army.

Meanwhile, the whole of Lee’s army had marched into Pennsylvania, and his advance force was now only twenty miles from Harrisburg. By the end of June the Confederates were within ten miles of the Pennsylvania capital.

Lee prepared for the decisive battle. He could not advance further north; for without his cavalry he had no idea of the whereabouts of the Union Army. From a spy behind the Yankee lines, he learned that the Federals under a new commander, Meade, had crossed the Potomac after him. But, he confessed, “I do not know what to do without General Stuart, the eye of the army.” Undecided, he therefore pitched camp along the eastern slope of South Mountain near Cashtown and, with his rear protected, waited for the opportunity to resume his advance.

There he seemed likely to stay, because the Union Army was not in a position to launch an aggressive attack. It had just suffered one of its periodic changes of command, as George Gordon Meade replaced “Fighting Joe ” Hooker. Meade was a man of extravagant caution — as the next week would prove. He had no intention of leading his army into an attack that might be as disastrous as those that had overwhelmed his predecessors in the command. He took a position behind Pike Creek in Maryland and waited for Lee to attack him. On the last day of June, 1863, the two armies rested in the lovely rolling countryside that would soon be stained by their blood.

Lee then had no fixed plan of operations, for Stuart’s cavalry had still not rejoined him, and he was uncertain as to just where the Army of the Potomac would turn up. He had to choose between the alternatives of retreating back down the valley of the Cumberland and the Shenandoah, and of advancing on to Harrisburg. Either course was risky in the absence of accurate information as to Meade’s whereabouts. Of necessity he decided to stay where he was and to await the outcome of events.

Then a chance encounter precipitated the decisive battle that neither Lee nor Meade was seeking. Advancing into enemy territory, the Confederate commanders had looked with envy upon the pleasant towns as yet untouched by war. The neat homes and well-stocked shops offered a poignant contrast with the country they had left behind. For the soldiery it was worse. Ill-equipped and short of supplies, they had come into a region abounding in goods of every sort. On the 28th, Lieutenant General Early had laid the town of York under the tribute of cash and shoes. Elsewhere marching soldiers snatched the hats from the heads of civilian bystanders to shield themselves from the hot June sun. Now, as they waited, momentarily idle, they thought of fitting themselves out even better.

Ten miles from the Confederate encampment was the thriving town of Gettysburg, a regional market center. On June 30, part of General A. P. Hill’s division drifted down to see whether they could replenish their stock of boots there. Marching alertly on the hot summer roads, they approached the Lutheran seminary on a hill just west of the little town. There, by surprise, they came upon the advance guard of the Army of the Potomac, Buford’s cavalry division. So began the four-day battle that would, in a longer perspective, determine the fate of the Confederacy and the Union.

Drawn into the conflict unexpectedly, each commander committed himself slowly to the decisive struggle. On July 1 the Confederates drove the Union forces through the town of Gettysburg and southward into the open fields. There the two forces took positions on opposing ridges that commanded the main road back to the South. Their names would acquire heart-rending familiarity in the memories of survivors and of the kin of those who died there — Seminary Ridge where Lee rested, and Cemetery Ridge where Meade drew the Federal forces together.

At this point Lee took the offensive. He did so against the strong opposition of his senior corps commander, Longstreet. But Lee knew that he could no longer afford to wait. He could only attack or withdraw; and to withdraw was to abandon all hope for the dramatic blow that would bring peace out of an interminable war. The only chance lay in a desperate attack, at whatever odds and against whatever difficulties.

On July 2 came the first of the great lunges against the entrenched Union defenses. This was an uncoordinated movement aimed at the flanks of the Union line. The Southerners advanced, in the. north, up the slopes of Culp’s Hill; in the south, through the Peach Orchard and across the rocks of the Devil’s Den. For a brief hour Lee’s men held the heights; then they were driven back by Federal reinforcements.

On July 3 came the second, climactic assault. An indecisive struggle at the southern end of the ridge occupied the morning; then it subsided and quiet fell across the lorn battlefield. Thirty thousand casualties had already been carried away. In his headquarters northwest of the battlefield, Lee with increasing desperation pondered the alternatives of advance and retreat. His hopes mounted with each onward surge, and he refused to let them fall with each withdrawal that followed.

Already Lee had determined that if he could not turn his enemy’s flanks, be would stake all in a daring thrust at the very heart of the Union position. In the cpiiet hour, as noon passed, he prepared to throw fifteen thousand men against Cemetery Ridge in a supreme effort to break through and destroy Meade’s army. Longstreet, knowing the desperate odds against them, argued to the point of insubordination for a retreat. But t he gray man on the gray horse would not surrender his dream of victory.

Thus across the torn fields the men advanced, in the long lines of a charge, the bright banners dotting the green fields with color. They came eager and confident, spurred on by the rebel yell of the Old South that was to die with them that afternoon.

They had gone halfway across the fields, some 250 yards, and still had met no opposition. Then, as they crossed the Emmitsburg Road and approached the slopes of the ridge, the Union artillery opened a murderous fire on them. A fence and beyond it a stone wall halted the Confederates just long enough to frame them as a perfect target for the Yankee marksmen. Yet the suicidal attack continued, carrying a few survivors to the very crest of the ridge. But the decimated group who made it found the ground impossible to hold. The Union troops closed in about them, and the handful who had stormed the ridge were shot down or captured. The main Confederate force retreated to Its base. In the brief engagement, twenty-seven generals had fallen and thousands of their men.

Lee had come forward to the line of battle and met the retreating remnants of his shattered divisions. “This has been my fight,” he told General Pickett, who led the charge, “and upon my shoulders rests the blame.” The commander readied his men for the counterattack that did not come, and took stock once more of the situation.

On July 4, Lee was still in position weighing the possibilities for a further attack. Then at last, that evening, he yielded to the facts. Somberly, in the dark, the great army gave up its hope for victory and peace, and retreated south to the Potomac. The dream of conquest had ended.

Many dreams died that day on the bloody fields of Gettysburg. The little cemetery on the hill, grown large now, had been consecrated by the brave men who struggled there. From every end of the country, from many parts of the world, they had converged upon this Pennsylvania hill to bury there the delusion that secession might succeed. And in that burial they had determined that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth. The South fought on for want of alternative, but no longer in the conviction that it could win. It was thereafter a matter of time before the greater strength of the North crushed the last embers of hope for the Confederacy. For it was now clear that aid from Europe would not come. The news of the batt le went back to London, where the Adams family received it with jubilation.

The British cabinet now knew it could not intervene, and accepted the prospect of an ultimate Union victory. Across the Channel, Napoleon III also grasped the significance of the event and surrendered his hopes of an empire in the New World. Maximilian’s flimsy empire survived a few years more, until American pressure and Mexican revolutionaries ended it against a stone wall, before a firing squad.

And with these dreams also died the last hopes of European reactionaries that the American experiment in democratic republicanism would fail. In 1869 as the English approached a democratic franchise, in 1871 as the Parisian revolutionaries pulled apart Napoleon’s empire, the European consequences of the demonstration became apparent. At home, the Union, now one and indivisible from coast to coast, never again faced the question as to its identity or authority. These were the stakes of the momentous struggle that swayed across the fields of Gettysburg.