Decisive actions

                 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.

Thanks for reading.