The preface from my forthcoming book: After Gettysburg, Before Grant

Preface

 

This is not a book about the battle of Gettysburg. Nor is it the story of the Confederate retreat from Gettysburg and failure of the Union army to deal it a death blow north of the Potomac River.  It does not contemplate what might have happened if the South had won the great contest in Pennsylvania in July 1863.  As its foundation, this work accepts the historical fact that the Army of Northern Virginia lost the battle of Gettysburg and made a successful retreat back to Virginia. Rather, this book focuses on what happened in Virginia during the five months spanning the period between the battle of Gettysburg and the onset of the winter encampment of 1863-64.

 In examining this period, it is vital to avoid, as much as is humanly possible, the common pitfall of historical hindsight. One of the challenges historians face is that they usually know the end of their story, hence their efforts are usually bent toward trying to explain or find reasons for historical outcomes.  This is especially true of military historians, who, fully aware of who won or lost a given battle, campaign or war, seek to understand what brought those results about and conjecture on how the course of history might have been altered.  Naturally the American Civil War has not avoided this paradigm. Historians know the Confederacy lost the War Between the States.  Just exactly why the South lost and the North won will forever be an open question. However, no amount of disagreement on the causes of that outcome will ever alter the reality that the Union was preserved.  Knowing the rebellion was defeated, historians have tended to spend their energies explaining why the South lost or how the North won.

Legitimate and fascinating as these lines of inquiry are, they obscure a vital point. While the war was being waged no one knew for certain what the outcome would be. Many made predictions, legions more had hopes and fears regarding the result, but no one could say with certainty who would win, how long victory would take, what its cost would be, or what the world would look like once the fighting stopped.  One of the greatest tasks of the historian, therefore, is to try to recapture the uncertainty of the period he or she studies.  The decisions and actions of history's participants usually make more sense when viewed through the prism of the incomplete, often inaccurate, information they had at the time, as well as their ignorance of how their story would end.

Nonetheless, in our desire to understand why history unfolded the way it did, we often "clean up" the messy day-to-day reality of the past, searching for turning points, fateful decisions, errors and happenstance.  Consequently, many scholars have looked backward from Appomattox and seen the twin Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg as the turning point of the Civil War – the point after which Northern victory was certain and Confederate defeat a matter of time.  It is, in many ways, a natural conclusion.  These two great Northern victories, culminating within 24 hours of one another in July 1863, seem to have marked the point where Southern hopes of victory were permanently dashed, Rebel morale fatally wounded, Confederate strength and offensive capability crippled, and the North put firmly on the road to inevitable victory.

Shortly after the end of the war, the idea that Gettysburg was the great turning point gained traction.  There were many reasons for this.  The battle was the largest and bloodiest ever fought on American soil.  It was one of the few instances where the Army of the Potomac won a clear victory over Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia.  It turned back a Rebel invasion of the North launched in the aftermath of stunning Confederate victories at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville.  The drama of a closely fought battle, where the South appeared to come so close to victory, and a battle easily understood (at least in a simplistic way) by laymen, as well as Lincoln's immortal speech on the battlefield, made this one engagement, more than any other, the symbol of the great conflict. 

In addition, some former Confederate officers, holding Robert E. Lee up as the symbol of the South's "lost cause," sought to explain his defeat by arguing that Lee's lieutenants failed to carry out his orders at Gettysburg.  The great argument that ensued as to why the battle was lost and who was responsible for losing it garnered a great deal of attention, further helping solidify in the popular mind Gettysburg's critical place in deciding the outcome of the war. 

The idea that Gettysburg doomed the South to defeat, as well as the battle's fascinating drama, has led historians to lavish attention on the struggle. It has also led many to take a dip in the pool of "counter factual" history and postulate on ways the Rebels might have won the battle and what the outcome of Southern victory might have been.  The allure of engaging in this kind of theoretical exercise is irresistible and it almost always helps to further cement Gettysburg's vital place in the salvation of the Union and the destruction of the Confederacy.  Often visions of Lee triumphing over Meade at Gettysburg lead to speculation of the destruction of the Army of the Potomac, the capture of Washington and realization of Southern independence. Logically, if the outcome of a Confederate victory at Gettysburg is a complete reversal of the war's result, then Gettysburg must be the turning point.

However, there have always been problems with giving Gettysburg this distinction and in recent years more scholars have begun to explore the inherent flaws in the turning point thesis.  A Rebel victory at Gettysburg could not have prevented the surrender of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863 or of Port Hudson five days later.  These Northern victories on the Mississippi split the South in two, and would have likely offset much of the morale effect of a Gettysburg defeat. Another obvious pitfall in claiming Gettysburg is the place where Union victory became inevitable is that the war went on for another 21 months after the great battle.  How is it that Southerners could fight for so long and with such tenacity if the fate of the war was already decided, their morale fatally shattered and their armies hopelessly weakened? 

The greater challenge to the Gettysburg thesis is that the North came closest to losing the war, and hence the South came closest to winning it, in the late summer of 1864 – more than a year after the battle in Pennsylvania.  Frustration that the triumphs of July, 1863, led only to the protracted and horrifically bloody battle between Grant and Lee, the stalemate at Petersburg, and Sherman's equally protracted, although less bloody, campaign to take Atlanta, very nearly led to Lincoln's political defeat. The election of George B. McClellan to the presidency on a Democratic platform calling for a cessation of hostilities might have led the North to abandon its effort to force seceded states back into the Union.

It has always seemed to me that there must be a bridge between what many believe was achieved by the Union in the summer of 1863 and the very near defeat of the North in the summer of 1864.  This is not a novel question. Recently, scholars have begun to examine and question the effect Gettysburg and Vicksburg on Southern morale.  Their findings reveal a quite different attitude toward the outcome of Gettysburg than was usually advanced in the postwar era, indicating the Pennsylvania battle was seen by Confederates as more of a disappointment than a calamity. Other historians have examined the campaigns of 1864. These struggles drained the North's will almost below the point of continuing the war, and only the last-minute victories of Sherman, Sheridan and Farragut buoyed Yankee hopes and led to Lincoln's reelection.

But no truly in-depth study has examined the campaigns waged between Lee and Meade from August to December of 1863.  There has been little interest and scant inquiry into what happened in Virginia after the battle of Gettysburg and before the arrival of Grant at the helm of the eastern theater.   Most historians quickly sum up the period by pointing out a stalemate ensued and shift their focus elsewhere.  But stalemates do not just happen. Perpetuation of military stalemate in wartime is a powerful force in and of itself, influencing strategy, tactics, politics, logistics and decisions about who commands armies. Seldom are generals and governments content with stalemate on the battlefield and they make mighty efforts to end it.  All of this was most certainly true in Virginia in the wake of Gettysburg.

In the fall of 1863 many believed the Union had an extraordinary opportunity to finish the war.  The Army of the Potomac was riding high after its great Gettysburg victory while Lee's legions were thought to be on the verge of collapse.  The constant numerical superiority of the Federals in Virginia became even greater when the Confederates were compelled to ship one third of Lee's army to Georgia, in hope of redeeming the Federal capture of Chattanooga.  Given these facts the South faced a truly bleak situation; probably the most dangerous it had seen in Virginia since McClellan stood at the gates of Richmond in May of 1862. 

The North's great opportunity came to nothing, however.  By the onset of the winter lull, the rival armies were still staring at one another across the Rapidan River, basically where they were at the start of the Gettysburg campaign.  Why?  How is it that the Union failed to take advantage of what appeared, to many, to be an unparalleled opportunity to finish off the Army of Northern Virginia once and for all? How did Robert E. Lee manage to hold Meade in stalemate when the odds were stacked so badly against the South?  What was the effect of that stalemate on the war's course?  What problems confronted both sides in Virginia after Gettysburg? What do they tell us about the state of the conflict and each nation's relative ability to claim eventual victory?  How did Lee's army recover from its Gettysburg defeat to become the formidable foe that mauled the Army of the Potomac in 1864?

The story of the campaigns that answer those questions has attracted only passing attention from historians – largely because they produced no great bloodletting such as Fredericksburg, Manassas or Gettysburg. In war, however, everything of significance and importance is not purchased in rivers of blood.  The Confederacy won an important victory in the fall and early winter of 1863.  Lee and his troops managed to forestall one Union offensive, and then foil another, thus maintaining the stalemate in Virginia that had existed to a greater or lesser degree since the Peninsula campaign of 1862.  What is more, that victory was won without paying a tremendous price in casualties – a commendable achievement given the South's dwindling supply of manpower.

By contrast the North endured a disappointing defeat, albeit one whose full impact was hidden by the astounding success of Federal armies in the West.  Nonetheless, at the time, much was expected of George Meade and his army after Gettysburg. Little, however, was delivered.  If the Federals could have capitalized on the unique circumstances they encountered in Virginia during the fall of 1863 the war may have ended a year earlier than it ultimately did.  But the failure to grasp the opportunity and make the most of it did more than disappoint the Northern press and public.   It convinced the Lincoln administration that George Meade was not the general it had been looking for and, therefore, helped produce the decision to appoint Grant as commander of all Union armies.  The fall campaigns foreshadowed the extensive use of field fortifications by both sides that would become the conflict's hallmark in 1864. More importantly, by perpetuating the stalemate in Virginia, these campaigns literally set the stage and produced the conditions and context in which Grant's Overland Campaign would play itself out the following spring.  The casualties and frustrations of that effort would almost cost the North the war.

The Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia did not go into hibernation during the five months after Gettysburg.  Although the attention of most historians shifts to the dramatic struggles around Chattanooga in the fall of 1863, a great deal of real importance happened in Virginia during this same period.  These events had a profound effect on the course of the conflict.  They helped restore Southern morale and military strength in the wake of Gettysburg, allowing Confederate armies and civilians to prepare for what would truly be the decisive campaigns of the war – Grant’s drive against Lee and Sherman's quest for Atlanta.  More importantly, they highlight the real difficulties of the North in capitalizing on its Pennsylvania triumph, continuing the war and finding a way to defeat Lee.  These months also demonstrate the ability of the Confederacy to recover, with remarkable speed, its morale, determination, strength and equilibrium in the aftermath of the twin failures at Gettysburg and Vicksburg.

If we eschew knowledge of how the war eventually turned out, and place ourselves back in the late summer and fall of 1863, the course of the Civil War looks very different and thus the importance of Gettysburg less sure.  Americans, in the months between Gettysburg and the bloodbath of 1864, had no ability to see through the fog of war and glimpse the eventual verdict of history. The ultimate victor in their struggle remained unpredictable; the course of events still held possibility for both triumph and disaster.  Living through those days meant grappling with enormous strain, sacrifice and uncertainty.  As always, war brought agony and doubts, determination to see the struggle through to victory and arguments that the task was misguided and hopeless.   
 

What follows then is an examination of that period as viewed through the eyes of the commanders, soldiers, politicians, civilians and newspapermen of both sides. Although history usually passes lightly over the campaigns of Lee and Meade between August and December, 1863, at the time they were followed with keen anticipation, the movements of each army full of possibility for a decisive showdown.  During those months the rival armies would march hundreds of miles and thousands of men would be killed or maimed. The leaders of the two armies and two governments would struggle for advantage and cope with a myriad of logistical, political and military dilemmas. Meanwhile the hopes and fears of tens of thousands of civilians on the two home fronts would swell or recede with each letter or newspaper column detailing the movements and combats of the two armies. For this, if for no other reason, the story of this period deserves to be studied and told.