Gary Gallagher: belief

Transcript context

…So Joe Hooker retreats across the Rappahannock. Lee is frustrated because he hasn’t dealt more damage to Hooker, and this is what he decides to do. He decides to move north for a second time. His army is strengthened. He builds it up to 75,000. This is his army at its absolute apogee as he gets ready to go north. It’s confident. It’s well-supplied, well-led. And so they head north second week in June, and here’s what his goal is. He has two main goals. He wants to take the war out of Virginia so that the agricultural sector isn’t subject to the presence of the army, so to let agriculture recover a little, and he wants to provision his army off the rich Cumberland Valley in Pennsylvania, siphon fodder and food and animals while he’s north of the Potomac, and he wants to stay up there for a long time to keep the war out of Virginia. He doesn’t wanna– He has no… The movie Gettysburg, he says he wants to capture Washington. No, he doesn’t wanna capture Washington. He knows it’s too strong. He has no idea of doing that, but he knows he’ll pull the Union Army after him and simply reorient the war, and he knows it’ll be bad politically for Lincoln- … if he’s actually operating in the United States. So off he goes to the north. He gets north of the river. His cavalry under Jeb Stuart is not doing its job because poor Jeb, who is a very good cavalryman but has a sort of adolescent streak where he has to be praised all the time, he fights the biggest cavalry battle of the war near Culpeper, Virginia, Battle of Brandy Station on June the 9th, and he almost loses, and it hurts his little feelings. And so he decides that he needs to do something dramatic so the newspapers will love him again. And he decides to ride all the way around the Army of the Potomac, which he did when McClellan was in command. It’s easier to do it when McClellan’s in command ’cause he’s never moving. He decides he’ll do it again here. And just as he gets east of the Army of the Potomac, the Army of the Potomac starts to move north, and so Stuart is trapped with… and he can’t communicate with Lee. So Lee doesn’t know what’s going on ’cause his cavalry isn’t doing its job. He spreads his army across southern Pennsylvania and then finds out from a sort of civilian spy, guy named Harrison, that the Army of the Potomac is actually following him and is much closer, and Lee at the end of June orders his army to concentrate near Gettysburg and not to bring on a battle, and they concentrate. Most of them come together. There’s a little clash on June the 30th, but on July the 1st, the armies make contact to the west of Gettysburg in, in a meeting engagement and more troops coming on each side. of them come together. There’s a little clash on June the 30th, but on July the 1st, the armies make contact to the west of Gettysburg in, in a meeting engagement and more troops coming on each side. It builds into what turns into the three-day biggest battle of the Civil War. It’s not something Lee had planned and it wouldn’t have happened if his cavalry had been doing its job, but they weren’t, and so here they come and there’s a battle that goes for three days. Lee has the– He takes the tactical aggressive every day. He does the attacking. The Federals do the defending. Lee’s army’s 75,000. The other army’s about 85,000, 88,000. And famous terrain, Little Round Top, Round Top, Devil’s Den, the Peach Orchard, all these famous places, and it ends on the third day. Lee comes close on the second day, a huge victory for the Confederates on the first day. Third day, Lee’s frustrated and he just decides to let his infantry take care of it for him and the result is what most people call Pickett’s Charge. Pickett was just a part of the charge. 12 and a half thousand infantry in a direct assault and it fails completely and he retreats the next day. I think you can draw a straight line between May the 3rd at Chancellorsville when his infantry fought their way together and July the 3rd at Gettysburg. He admits it too as he writes letters to both his wife and Jefferson Davis saying, “I asked too much of my infantry. No fault is on them. All the fault is on me.” And he was right. All the fault was on him. He and Grant are alike that way. They accept responsibility, not like McClellan. His first reaction is, “It’s not my fault,” to pick a general at random who did this. “It’s not my fault. It must be somebody else’s fault.” Lee took responsibility. He expected too much from his infantry. His subordinates had not been doing that good a job and they lost the biggest battle of the war. What was the military mistake there? What could Robert E. Lee done differently?…

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