Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

proposition in advance, merely because those who wish… to believe that it will result in bringing us back to the Union.” Cynical, perhaps, but “should the belief that peace will bring back the Union become general, the war would no longer be supported, and that after all is what we are interested in bringing about.”32

Looking to wear down Northern morale before Northern numbers could overwhelm him, Lee leaped to the attack at every opportunity he could, invading the North twice in 1862 and 1863 and taking the tactical offensive in every major battle he fought in those years (except for Antietam and Fredericksburg). The cost in lives for this aggressiveness was not cheap—Lee’s men sustained 42,000 casualties in his first four months in command of the Army of Northern Virginia (almost as many men as Albert Sidney Johnston commanded at Shiloh)—but Lee at least achieved in the process the most extraordinary combat victories of the war, and at Second Bull Run he came as close as any other Civil War general to the complete annihilation of an opposing army. Lee was prepared to fight the Civil War in Virginia as a great Napoleonic conflict, and even after the terrible pounding his army took at Antietam, Lee was ready four days afterward to “threaten a passage into Maryland, to occupy the enemy on this frontier, and, if my purpose cannot be accomplished, to draw them into the [Shenandoah] Valley, where I can attack them to advantage.”33

Ultimately, though, it was not in Virginia that Lee wanted to fight Yankees. “Stonewall” Jackson began pressing Lee in the summer of 1862 to take the war northward, across the Potomac, “and transfer this campaign from the banks of the James to those of the Susquehanna” in Pennsylvania. Lee could not have agreed more. “After much reflection,” he told Jefferson Davis, “I think if it was possible to reinforce Jackson” and send him to “cross Maryland into Pennsylvania,” it would relieve the pressure on northern Virginia’s threadbare farms and pastures, and “call all the enemy from our Southern coast & liberate those states.” When Joe Johnston’s wounding put command of the Army of Northern Virginia into his hands, Lee wasted little time in taking his own advice, and the 1862 Maryland campaign would have been a Pennsylvania campaign had it all not ended so abruptly at Antietam.34

The subsequent victories at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville he regarded as little more than distractions from his larger plan for a second attempt at invading Pennsylvania. “At Fredericksburg,” Lee admitted, “our people were greatly elated,” but “I was much depressed. We had really accomplished nothing; we had not gained a foot of ground, and I knew the enemy could easily replace the men he had lost.” The same thing happened after Chancellorsville. “Our people were wild with delight—I, on the contrary, was more depressed than after Fredericksburg; our loss was severe, and again we had gained not an inch of ground and the enemy could not be pursued. … I considered the problem in every possible phase, and to my mind it resolved itself into the choice of one of two things—either to retire on Richmond and stand a siege, which must ultimately have ended in surrender, or to invade Pennsylvania.”35

However, each of these three parts of Lee’s success as a commander also carried within it the seeds of Lee’s destruction. Lee’s heavy reliance on the talents of his corps commanders to win battles rendered him much too vulnerable, emotionally and strategically, should any of them fall to wounds or death. At Chancellorsville, this was exactly what happened to “Stonewall” Jackson. Accidentally wounded by his own men while performing a risky nighttime reconnaissance, Jackson suffered the amputation of his left arm, and then eight days later died of complications from the amputation. With Jackson’s death, Lee lost one of the few men capable of turning Lee’s audacious plans for offensive warfare into tactical victories, and he never found a satisfactory replacement. “There never were such men in an army before,” Lee told John Bell Hood, one of his up-and-coming division commanders and a personal pet. “They will go anywhere and do anything if properly led. But there is the difficulty—proper commanders. Where can they be obtained?”

Similarly, Lee’s influence over Davis tended to operate to the advantage of Virginia, but at the expense of the rest of the Confederacy. By 1863 Davis was under substantial pressure from within his own government (and especially Secretary of War Seddon) to shift the weight of the Confederate war effort to the west and reduce the war in Virginia to a holding action. Lee, however, had sacrificed his first career in the United States Army for the sake of Virginia, and he was not about to see his second career in the Confederate army compel him to make a similar choice. Lee tenaciously fought every suggestion that the Army of Northern Virginia be denuded to reinforce the west, and his influence over Davis guaranteed, at least until the fall of 1863, that the defense of Virginia would always be able to outweigh the demands for help from the Confederate forces in the West.36

Lee’s tactical judgment was inevitably going to be affected by the increasing deterioration of his health and by the deepening sense of fatalism caused by the losses his incessant urge for the offensive produced. By the spring of 1863, Lee was fifty-six years old, prematurely white-haired and already suffering from severe arthritis. During the Maryland campaign, his horse bolted while Lee was seated on the ground, holding his reins, and the general was dragged over the ground by the frightened animal, spraining both wrists and breaking bones in his hands. Then, on March 30, 1863, Lee suffered the first of a series of heart attacks, a premonition of the heart disease that would, after the war, eventually kill him. All of these ills and accidents took a severe toll on Lee’s energies, both in camp and in battle. “Old age & sorrow is wearing