Gary Gallagher: belief

Transcript context

…What was the military mistake there? What could Robert E. Lee done differently? I think what he could have done, the most perceptive Confederate soldier who wrote about the war was a guy named Edward Porter Alexander who was the most gifted artillerist. He’s in Lee’s army. He wrote after the war, Lee won a great victory on July 1st at Gettysburg, smashed two Union infantry corps, had a very strong position. He should’ve just hunkered down and said, “Okay, attack me. See what you can do.” He didn’t do that. He almost certainly would’ve won the battle if he had done that, but he, his, this, this is where his aggressiveness gets him in trouble. He was pushing for a more aggressive, more decisive outcome right then and he ended up costing… He lost probably 25,000 men at Getty, at least a third of his army. More than that, he went across the river, went across the Potomac with 52 generals in his army. 17 of them became casualties. He lost a third of his entire corps of generals killed, wounded, or captured in the Gettysburg Campaign. It’s a really bloody, costly campaign for him and he ends up retreating back into Virginia. It comes it, and Lincoln is at first very happy about it. There’s another, yet another general in command on the Union side. Hooker’s gone. A guy named George Meade is in and Meade does what McClellan did after Antietam. He lets Lee get away, doesn’t really harass him, and Lincoln is beside himself with disappointment. He writes a letter to Meade, thanks him for his great victory and then says, “You’ve let him get away. The war is gonna continue indefinitely,” says Lincoln. Then he doesn’t send the letter to… He writes it but doesn’t send it to Meade, but he gets another guy to tell Meade what’s in it, so he- Mm-hmm.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.