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  In their discussions the two generals pondered the army’s past record and future prospects. In nearly a full year commanding the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee had fought five major battles or campaigns. By any measure, his record was dazzling. Still, in the context of the Confederacy’s eventual survival, it was a record (as Longstreet phrased it) of “fruitless victories;… even victories such as these were consuming us, and would eventually destroy us….”

  On the Virginia Peninsula, in the summer of 1862, Lee had driven George McClellan away from the gates of Richmond, only to see the Federals reach a safe haven at Harrison’s Landing on the James. At Second Manassas in August John Pope became Lee’s victim, but Pope’s beaten army managed to escape without further damage into the defenses of Washington. Sharpsburg, on September 17, could perhaps be claimed by Lee as a narrow tactical victory, but his army was too weakened, and McClellan’s Federals too numerous, to continue the fighting to a showdown. Against Ambrose Burnside at Fredericksburg in December, and then against Joe Hooker at Chancellorsville in May, Lee won signal victories. But both times a larger victory eluded him when the enemy escaped back across the Rappahannock. Lee was heard to say that Chancellorsville depressed him even more than Fredericksburg had: “Our loss was severe, and again we had gained not an inch of ground and the enemy could not be pursued.” What he wanted in future was battle on his terms, on ground of his choosing, with no barriers to a final outcome. For that he had formed a plan.11

  Longstreet brought up the matter of Vicksburg and the dispatching of reinforcements to the western theater. Lee reiterated his objection to putting any of his men directly into Vicksburg under Pemberton’s command. In writing of this to Senator Wigfall, Longstreet was surely reflecting Lee’s blunt opinion when he remarked, “Grant seems to be a fighting man and seems to be determined to fight. Pemberton seems not to be a fighting man.” Should Pemberton fail to take the battle to Grant but instead allow himself and his garrison to be penned up in Vicksburg, Longstreet went on, “the fewer the troops he has the better.” Should Richmond decide to order Lee to send troops from Virginia, however, the proper course would be to give them to Bragg or Joe Johnston for an invasion of Kentucky. Only in that event was Grant likely to be drawn away from Vicksburg.

  This latter western strategy was of course what Longstreet had recently been advocating with such fervor, but now Old Pete underwent an abrupt change of heart. This seems to have been entirely by Lee’s persuasion. “When I agreed with the Secy & yourself about sending troops west,” Longstreet confessed to Wigfall, “I was under the impression that we would be obliged to remain on the defensive here.” Now, he continued, there “is a fair prospect of forward movement. That being the case we can spare nothing from this army to re-enforce in the West.” Indeed, he called on Wigfall to support the sending of any available reinforcements directly to General Lee.

  James Longstreet, in short, was made a convert to a new faith. What Lee confided to him was a plan to march north through Maryland and into Pennsylvania, and Old Pete declared himself enthusiastically in favor of the idea. “If we could cross the Potomac with one hundred & fifty thousand men,” he speculated to Senator Wigfall, it should at least bring Lincoln to the bargaining table; “either destroy the Yankees or bring them to terms.” He closed his letter with the observation that in a day or two Lee would be in Richmond “to settle matters…. I shall ask him to take a memorandum of all points and settle upon something at once.“12

  “We should assume the aggressive,” Lee had written Mr. Davis just a month earlier. He meant by that, in modern military terminology, seizing the strategic initiative. This idea was at the very core of Robert E. Lee’s generalship. It became his watchword the moment he first took command of the Army of Northern Virginia, back in June 1862. He recognized then—and it was even more obvious now, a year later—the stark reality that in the ever more straitened Confederacy his army would never achieve parity with the enemy’s army. On campaign he would always be the underdog. Therefore he must assume the strategic aggressive whenever he could, and by marching and maneuver disrupt the enemy’s plans, keep him off balance, offset his numbers by dominating the choice of battlefield. It must be Lee’s drum the enemy marched to.

  Taking the strategic aggressive on campaign did not necessarily imply an equal tactical aggressive when the chosen battlefield was reached. Indeed, in the best execution of the idea, it would mean just the opposite—marching and maneuvering so aggressively on campaign that Lee might accept battle or not, as he chose, with his opponent forced to give battle—to attack—at a time and in a place of Lee’s choosing. According to Longstreet, this was precisely his and Lee’s “train of thought and mutual understanding” for the proposed Pennsylvania campaign. “The ruling ideas of the campaign may be briefly stated thus,” Longstreet summed up. “Under no circumstances were we to give battle, but exhaust our skill in trying to force the enemy to do so in a position of our own choosing.“13

  There was of course nothing unique or even novel about the “ruling ideas” of this strategic and tactical plan. It was exactly what any field general always hoped and dreamed of achieving—to maneuver the enemy into attacking him in circumstances and on defensive ground of his own selection. Already twice in this war Lee (with Longstreet’s crucial participation) had come close to achieving the ideal. Second Manassas was fought defensively on ground chosen by the Confederates, and won by a breakthrough counterattack against the enemy’s flank. It was marred only by the Federals’ escape into the nearby Washington fortifications. At Fredericksburg, allowed by the bumbling Ambrose Burnside to defend a virtually impregnable position, Lee’s army inflicted almost three times the casualties it suffered. Yet the defeated Burnside was able to retreat back across the Rappahannock without further harm. Next time, on the Federals’ home ground in Pennsylvania, there should be opportunity for maneuver and for a greater and perhaps decisive victory.

  In his later writings, flailing against the snares of those who would label him scapegoat for the campaign, Longstreet implied that Lee promised him he would fight tactically only a defensive battle in Pennsylvania. “Upon this understanding my assent was given…,” said Old Pete loftily. That of course was nonsense. No commanding general is obliged to promise a subordinate any future action, particularly anything like this that would tie his hands. Lee said as much when asked about it after the war. He “had never made any such promise, and had never thought of doing any such thing,” was his reply, and he termed the idea “absurd.” So it was. A younger and more rational Longstreet, in May 1863, was confident that General Lee had heard him out and that they were in full agreement on the right and proper course—to (ideally) maneuver the Yankees into committing another Fredericksburg on any disputed ground in Pennsylvania. Longstreet even volunteered his First Corps to handle the defense of that ground (as he had at Fredericksburg), leaving Lee and the rest of the army free to fall upon the Army of the Potomac and destroy it. 14

  WHETHER OR NOT General Lee took “a memorandum of all points” with him to Richmond, as Longstreet suggested, he surely went well prepared to argue his case. On May 14 he boarded the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac’s afternoon train to the capital, and on Friday the 15th presented himself at the War Department in the old Virginia Mechanics Institute building on Franklin Street to confer on future strategy with President Davis and Secretary of War Seddon.

  Like General Lee, the president was suffering poor health that spring, and for much of the past week he had been too ill to leave the Confederate White House. It was a measure of the importance of the meeting that he willed himself to attend at all. Davis looked pale and drawn, and in the days following he would have to return to his sickbed. The strain of the crisis marked Seddon as well. A few days earlier, clerk Jones had described the war secretary as “gaunt and emaciated…. He looks like a dead man galvanized into muscular animation.”

  Secretary Seddon, however, was both determined and dedicated, and it may be
assumed he came to this conference with Vicksburg still very much on his mind. Even though the decision had already been made not to add Pickett’s division directly to Vicksburg’s defenders, the situation in Mississippi remained the Confederacy’s overriding crisis of the moment. James Seddon had not given up the thought of assistance of some sort to try and save Vicksburg from the Yankees. Jefferson Davis would have been at the least a sympathetic listener; Mississippi was his native state.

  “Hour of trial is upon us” was the latest stark message from Mississippi’s Governor Pettus. “We look to you for assistance. Let it be speedy.” At the same time, the editors of the Jackson Mississippian petitioned Richmond with the claim that “three-fourths in the army and out” were doubtful of General Pemberton’s abilities and even of his loyalty. (It was widely noticed that Pemberton had been born and raised in Pennsylvania.) However unjust it might seem, they said, they wanted the general immediately replaced. “Send us a man we all can trust,” pleaded the editors, and they nominated either General Beauregard or General Longstreet for the post. Mr. Davis had replied, “Your dispatch is the more painful because there is no remedy. Time does not permit the changes you propose if there was no other reason….” 15

  President Jefferson Davis, left, and his able secretary of war, James A. Seddon. (Chicago Historical Society-Museum of the Confederacy)

  As for the immediate military situation in the West, no news had reached Richmond more recent than Pemberton’s complaints about being outnumbered and Joe Johnston’s admission that the enemy had cut off his effort to reach Vicksburg with a relief column. The only reinforcements then on their way from the East were three brigades—some 7,700 men—that Secretary Seddon had wrangled out of General Beauregard in Charleston. Seddon, then, would probably have focused any such discussion at this War Department conference on the earlier plan to reinforce Bragg’s Army of Tennessee with troops from Lee’s army so as to take the offensive in central Tennessee, and from there to strike through Kentucky. The hope thereby was to force Grant to turn to meet this threat to the Northern heartland.

  A month earlier, General Lee had addressed just this proposal from the western concentration bloc, stating the basic difficulty with any such reinforcement scheme. “I believe the enemy in every department outnumbers us,” he had written, “and it is difficult to say from which troops can with safety be spared.” He certainly did not see how the Army of Northern Virginia could safely spare any troops. As he had been reporting almost daily to Richmond ever since Chancellorsville, all his intelligence evidence suggested that the Army of the Potomac was being reinforced. As recently as May 11, Lee’s count of these reinforcements had reached 48,000. This promised to make good the Federals’ Chancellorsville losses and then some. “It would seem, therefore,” Lee had explained to Davis, “that Virginia is to be the theater of action, and this army, if possible, ought to be strengthened.”

  Thus the simple, convincing argument, presumably laid out in his typically quiet, authoritative way by the Confederacy’s most successful general: Any attempt to turn back the tide at Vicksburg as Seddon was proposing was bound to put Lee’s army in Virginia at unacceptable risk. Possibly Lee clinched his argument with some variation on what he had said to Seddon back on May 10: “You can, therefore, see the odds against us and decide whether the line of Virginia is more in danger than the line of the Mississippi.”

  Robert E. Lee was not by nature a pessimist, however, and he must surely have offered Davis and Seddon some words of counsel on the Vicksburg dilemma. He had done so before. General Johnston, he had said in April, should “concentrate the troops in his own department” and then promptly “take the aggressive.” As Lee saw it, it was essential in Mississippi (just as it was in Virginia) to seize the strategic initiative and thereby baffle the designs of the enemy. Act first, before the enemy could act. Unfortunately, it appeared that Joe Johnston had not taken this advice (or could not). Now it looked as if he and Pemberton, separately, would have to play out their dangerous game with the cards each had been dealt.16

  Armchair critics would come to call Lee’s position on Vicksburg parochial. His strategic focus, it was said, bore solely on the Virginia theater, at the expense of the failing Confederate war in the West. Yet at this strategy conference in mid-May of 1863 Lee could scarcely have taken any other stance. His intelligence sources told of his opponent, Joe Hooker, being heavily reinforced. If that pointed to a renewed Federal campaign, as seemed likely, it could be met with no better odds than before, which had been bad enough. The return of Longstreet’s two divisions to the Rappahannock front did little more than make up the army’s Chancellorsville losses. Robert E. Lee was right. The choice for President Davis was Virginia or Mississippi, and just then there were simply no troops to spare in Virginia. It was in truth a Hobson’s choice. 17

  Turn to the Virginia front, however, and Lee believed there was a meaningful choice to be made. In effect, he offered an antidote to the sickly prognosis for the West. In laying out for Davis and Seddon his plan to march north, Lee would not have been unveiling something new and unexpected. Back in April, before Hooker launched his Chancellorsville offensive, Lee had announced a May 1 deadline for an offensive of his own—into Union territory. “The readiest method of relieving pressure upon Gen. Johnston,” he had pointed out to Seddon in a reference to the western theater, “…would be for this army to cross into Maryland.” As a preliminary, he had ordered strong raiding parties into the Shenandoah Valley to disrupt Federal communications and to stockpile supplies for the army’s planned advance. At the same time, substantial supplies to support the movement were being gathered by Longstreet in southeastern Virginia. The operation there took on the markings of a giant victualing expedition, and collected enough bacon and corn to feed the army for two months. As it happened, Hooker’s attack had forestalled these preparations, but a foundation was laid. Now Lee proposed to build on it.18

  IF IT IS NOT possible to list the precise arguments Lee may have used that day to gain approval for his Pennsylvania campaign, it is possible, through his dispatches and recollections, to record his thinking on the subject.

  It had become General Lee’s basic premise that his army should not—indeed could not—remain much longer on the Rappahannock. In the first place, it was not a good setting for yet another battle. At Chancellorsville, even in losing, Hooker had certainly improved on Burnside’s effort of the previous December, and Lee had to wonder if he could fight off a third attempt. “To have lain at Fredericksburg,” he would later say, “would have allowed them time to collect force and initiate a new campaign on the old plan.” Even if he managed to repel a new effort, there was no promise of a decisive outcome. The Yankees would simply pull back across the river again and be out of reach.

  In the second place, his men in their Rappahannock camps were hungry. They had been hungry there since the first of the year, and it appeared they were going to be hungry for some time to come if they remained there. In the Army of Northern Virginia the only occasion for full stomachs thus far in 1863 had been immediately after Chancellorsville, when they feasted on the contents of thousands of captured or abandoned Yankee knapsacks. Even now Lucius Northrop, the Confederacy’s peevish commissary-general of subsistence, was drafting yet another rationing edict—a quarter of a pound of bacon daily for garrison troops, a third of a pound for those in camp in the field, raised to half a pound only when on active campaign. This was to be in force, Northrop said, “until the new bacon comes in” in the fall.

  For the Army of Northern Virginia, the paltry rationing imposed by Richmond was made all the worse by a tenuous supply line. The decrepit Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac was not up to the task of supplying an army on the Rappahannock. This had nearly left Lee in dire straits at Chancellorsville. He was forced to accept battle there short 20,000 men, including Longstreet’s two divisions absent on their victualing duty in southeastern Virginia. It was not an experience he intended to repeat. The most
expedient way to solve this particular problem, he decided, was to live off the enemy’s country. Lee was going to requisition the burdened barns and smokehouses of Pennsylvania to feed his army.19

  There were two additional, probable factors behind Lee’s determination to march north that he would not have mentioned to Davis and Seddon that day. They were private thoughts pertaining to his own soldierly judgments, thoughts he did not directly articulate but which surely colored his thinking. One had to do with Lee’s previous invasion of enemy country, in September 1862. He had intended then, as he intended now, to seek a favorable battleground in Pennsylvania. But McClellan had trumped him, forcing a battle at Sharpsburg in Maryland before Lee was ready for it. Lee had liked to think he understood his timid opponent, and this abrupt resolution of McClellan’s seemed totally out of character. Over the winter, said his aide Charles Marshall, “Gen. Lee frequently expressed his inability to understand the sudden change in McClellan’s tactics.”

  Then, just this spring, Lee had finally learned the truth of the matter. He read in Northern newspapers of McClellan testifying to a congressional committee that “we found the original order issued to General D. H. Hill by direction of General Lee, which gave the orders of march for their whole army, and developed their intentions.” To Lee’s mind that must have explained a great deal. He had not been wrong in his calculations for that campaign after all. It was Fate or simply sheer misfortune, in the form of the infamous Lost Order, that had checked his plans at Sharpsburg. He might now march forth across the Potomac with renewed confidence in his military judgment. That was essential. There was sure to be great risk in thus marching into enemy country, and the general commanding would require a full measure of self-confidence to carry it off. 20