Civil War students argue frequently about which event/battle/decision was the key moment or most important battle of that four-year struggle. The American Civil War Museum recently hosted a two-day seminar on the topic. Six presentations, six learned speakers, six different answers. The same topic is frequently discussed during the Civil War Institute and attendees are treated to the same variety of topics.
Now, opinions are like mud. You can find mud anywhere. Sometimes the
consistency is different, sometimes the color is different. You find more rocks in your mud in one area than you might in another. Still, the one constant about mud is that it is messy.
So it
is for debates over finding specific events that decided the fate of the
American Civil War. There are many, many candidates for such a moment: The
results of the siege of Vicksburg, July 4, 1863; the ascendance of General
Ulysses S. Grant (whose actual name was Hiram Ulysses Grant) to Commander of
the US Army; the botched Confederate siege of Chattanooga; Sherman’s march to
the sea; the Battle of 7 Days and the re-election of Abraham Lincoln in 1864.
Oh, and one other: Gettysburg.
Dr.
Gary Gallagher has argued that the siege of Vicksburg did not even eliminate
Confederate use of the Mississippi River because that little chore was
completed when the Federals reasserted US control over New Orleans. Gallagher
can be very persuasive. The Battle of 7 Days, he said, was more important.
Some would argue that
Grant’s appointment was important but not the key because plenty of fighting
was still ahead. Eliminating the Confederate choke-hold on Chattanooga allowed
Sherman’s march to the sea but was not so important as Sherman’s march. And the
march to the sea ruined one Confederate army but not the most important one.
The Battle of 7 Days was important, but did it seal Union victory? Lincoln’s
re-election, it can be argued, effectively closed the future for the practice
of slavery but did not decide the course of the war.
That leaves us with that
tidy, little military action in southern Pennsylvania covering the first three
days of July, 1863.
Your Loyal Blogger would
argue that Robert Edward Lee, Commanding General of the Army of Northern
Virginia, lost the battle of Gettysburg on July 2, 1863 and then lost the war
the next day when he ordered the attack we have come to call Pickett’s Charge.
The abbreviated version
of the Readers Digest summation goes like this: Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania
went through Maryland, where he hoped to gain some volunteers to join his army.
He then wanted to throw a scare into the northern populace by spending time
threatening key cities, such as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Washington, DC.
Lee was pandering to the insurgent peace movement then growing in the northern
states. Lee wanted the fighting to be on northern soil long enough to allow
farmers in Virginia and other Confederate states to plant and harvest enough crops
to feed the Confederate people and his army.
Lee’s supply train
straggled to the point that it was as much as eighty miles long by late June,
so he slowed his advance to allow for a contracting of his lines. While that
was supposed to be happening, parts of Lee’s army ran into George Gordon Mead’s
federal Army of the Potomac on July 1 and the great battle started. The
Confederates were successful on the first day. A grand Confederate attack came
close to succeeding on July 2 but it failed. The Confeds actually seized parts
of the battlefield during that attack, but the two most important locations,
the Union flanks on Culp’s Hill and both Round Tops, remained in Union hands.
Those two elevated positions were reenforced overnight and Meade owned them for
as long as he wished. The Battle of Gettysburg was decided.
Lee’s army was the best
led and best fighting army the Confederates had. The attack on July 2 left that
army damaged and bleeding. The officers’ corps had been thinned and
replacements had to be found. As was later proven, the replacement officers
were not always of the same capabilities as the officers lost. Officers can
lose a war but it takes rifle-carrying foot soldiers to win one and the
southerners lost a lot of those guys, too, in the heavy fighting of July 1-2 at
Gettysburg. What Lee had hoped to do to the northern army was done to his
instead.
When Lee ordered the
attack on July 3, he took an injured beast and turned it into a dying animal.
Lee’s reasoning for the July 3 attack has been debated every time two or more
students of the war happen to cross paths. I believe I understand his thinking:
His army had usually delivered when called upon, he might never again have such
an opportunity on northern soil and his army had come so close to succeeding
the day before that one more solid punch might win the fight.
That’s what might
have happened, what Lee hoped would happen. Instead, as history tells
us, elements of Lee’s army breached the Union wall in spots on July 3, but not
so seriously as to force a retreat. The Confederates suffered terrible losses and
the integrity of the federal wall was not seriously threatened. The losses on
July 3 were horrible, especially when you lump them atop the gory story from
the first two days.
That sealed the deal. The
war dragged on for nearly two more years, but the Army of Northern Virginia was
never the same. It was the south’s most important army and it was fatally
injured.
That’s a pretty decisive
event.
