JUNE 26, 2013 12:00 AM
Twilight of the Confederacy
By Allen C. Guelzo
Looking back 20 years after it was fought, Alexander
Stewart Webb declared that the Battle of Gettysburg “was, and is now throughout
the world, known to be the Waterloo of the Rebellion.” Certainly Webb had
earned the right to judge. He was in command of the Union brigade that absorbed
the spear point of the battle’s climax on July 3, 1863, the great charge of the
Confederate divisions commanded by George E. Pickett. “This three days’
contest,” Webb said, “was a constant recurrence of scenes of self-sacrifice,”
especially “on the part of all engaged on the third and last day.”
One hundred fifty years later, one might imagine
that Alexander Webb was suffering from a touch of middle-age myopia. The word
“Gettysburg” is still powerful enough to be recognized by even the most
indifferent grade-schooler as a big-box event in American history. But does it
deserve to stand beside Waterloo?
It does. Gettysburg may have been the last solid
chance the breakaway southern states had of winning the Civil War and their
independence. In battle after battle, Robert E. Lee had led his ragtag
Confederate forces, the Army of Northern Virginia, to victory over the Union
Army of the Potomac. But the victories were all won on Virginia’s soil, and
they enfeebled the Virginia economy even as they defended it. Lee knew that
only by carrying the war into the Union states and leveraging the war-weariness
of the Union into peace negotiations could the Confederacy hope to win. There
would be state elections that fall in Pennsylvania and Ohio; if those states
turned against the war, they could force President Abraham Lincoln either to
begin peace talks or to resign.
Lee’s army, some 85,000 strong, struck northward in
the first week of June 1863, crossing the Potomac River and sweeping in a long
arc up the Cumberland Valley until his advance guard was perched on the
Susquehanna River. Lee’s goal was to lure the Army of the Potomac northward
after him, and, as soon as they had strung themselves out on the roads and were
unable to help each other, to turn and smash them piece by piece.
It nearly worked. The 95,000 men of the Army of the Potomac,
panting and uncertain, set off after Lee, and as soon as Lee was satisfied that
they had frantically marched themselves into disarray, he ordered his own army
to concentrate, ready to pounce on the first parts of the Army of the Potomac
that obligingly wandered into his trap. But the lead elements of the Army of
the Potomac got to the town of Gettysburg first, and when Lee’s own advance
units arrived there on July 1, they found Union troops ready to fight for dear
life to hold it. There were not many of them, and on July 1, Lee’s army was
able to clear them out. At nightfall, though, the Union soldiers were still
grasping a strategic height south of town: Cemetery Hill. Lee assumed that he
could wait for the next day to finish the job. But by the morning of July 2,
five of the seven infantry corps of the Army of the Potomac had raced to
Gettysburg, and Lee was forced to mount an ambitious and bloody assault on a
series of Union positions — the Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield, Little Round Top
— whose idyllic names belied the viciousness of the fighting that raged around
them.
Lee’s attack on July 2 came within an ace of
succeeding, so on the next day he launched what he assumed would be the
knockout blow against a Union army already hanging on the ropes. Lee sent three
divisions of rebel infantry straight at the vital nape of the Union army’s
neck, just behind Cemetery Hill. The rebels punched holes in the Union defenses
— but couldn’t hold them. Amazed at the failure of his gambit and appalled at
the cost in lives, Lee ordered a retreat back across the Potomac.
“The campaign is a failure and the worst failure
that the South has ever made,” wrote one Confederate survivor: “No blow . . .
has been so telling against us.” A soldier in the 11th Georgia Regiment
wrote his mother that “the Armey is Broken harted” and now “don’t Care which
Way the War Closes, for we have Suffered very much.” In fact, Lee would never
again regain the military initiative. Although fighting would go on for another
21 months, the Confederates were confined to the sort of defensive warfare they
could least afford. And no wonder: The costs that Gettysburg imposed on the
Confederacy included 2,592 killed, 12,709 wounded and 4,150 “captured or
missing,” according to the Army of Northern Virginia’s chief medical officer,
Lafayette Guild.
The cost of the Union’s victory was even higher.
George Gordon Meade, who commanded the Army of the Potomac, cited 3,155 of his
own men killed, 14,529 wounded, and 5,365 “captured or missing.” In 1900, Thomas
Livermore, who fought in a New Hampshire regiment in the battle, painstakingly
recalculated unit reports for the Army of the Potomac and put the reckoning at
3,903 dead, 18,735 wounded, and 5,425 “missing,” so that the entire butcher’s
bill edged up to 28,063.
But much of the Union believed the price was worth
paying. “What do the people of the North think now of the Old Army of the
Potomac,” exulted a soldier in the 28th Pennsylvania Regiment. Richard Henry
Dana, the prominent Boston lawyer and literary lion, believed that Gettysburg
“was the turning-point in our history,” not so much because the Union had won a
victory as because it had avoided a defeat that would have proven the Army of
the Potomac’s — and its own — last defeat. “Had Lee gained that
battle, the Democrats would have risen and stopped the war. With the city of
New York and Governor [Horatio] Seymour, and Governor [Joel] Parker in New
Jersey, and a majority in Pennsylvania, as they then would have had, they would
so have crippled us as to end the contest. That they would have attempted it we
at home know.” As it was, New York City blew up in draft riots ten days after
the battle: If Robert E. Lee had been crossing the Susquehanna River rather
than the Potomac River on that day; it might have been the Army of Northern
Virginia that was called in to restore order rather than Union veterans fresh
from their victory at Gettysburg. Gettysburg did not end the war in one stroke,
but it was decisive enough to restore the sinking morale of the Union, decisive
enough to keep at bay the forces that hoped Lincoln could be persuaded to
revoke emancipation, and decisive enough to make people understand that the
Confederacy would never be able to mount a serious invasion again.
It remained for Lincoln to illumine the ultimate
significance of Gettysburg, in the words he spoke at the dedication of the
national cemetery laid out on Cemetery Hill in the months after the battle. The
words of the Gettysburg Address have been worn so familiar with quotation that
it may be hard now to grasp the depth of meaning in Lincoln’s “few, brief
remarks” — all of 272 words — at that dedication in November 1863. In Lincoln’s
mind, the fundamental significance of Gettysburg — and the Civil War — was the
survival of democracy itself: whether “any nation so conceived and so dedicated
can long endure.” In 1863, liberal democracy looked like anything but “the end
of history.” Every other democratic experiment launched in the heyday of
popular revolutions had gone up in smoke, with the thickest smoke rising from
the French Revolution. And how, the monarchs and dictators were eager to ask,
could it help but be so? Democracies are run by the “consent of the governed” —
they assume that the most ordinary of their citizens are competent to
participate in governing. But are they? Ordinary people can be ordinary in
mean, selfish, and very dull ways, and can allow government to disappear in a
dysfunctional maelstrom of money, self-interest, and incompetence.
Lincoln saw in Gettysburg a rainbow in the
maelstrom. Gettysburg and its dead were proof that a great many of those
otherwise dull and ordinary bourgeoisie were willing to make the ultimate
sacrifice to preserve the solidarity of their nation, the nobility of
self-government, and the propositions on which it was built. Lincoln could not
look out across the semicircular avenues of the dead in that cemetery — where
fully a quarter of the 3,900 buried men were unknowns — and not feel
confirmed in the staying power of democracy. He called on living Americans to
dedicate themselves “to that cause for which” the dead of Gettysburg “gave the
last full measure of devotion” and to ensure that government “of the people, by
the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Gettysburg clearly
had great military significance. But even more, Gettysburg still sings for us
because of how Abraham Lincoln translated the raw experience of battle into an
anthem for democracy.
– Mr. Guelzo is the author of the New
York Times bestseller Gettysburg: The Last Invasion. He
teaches at Gettysburg College
Four score and seven
years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived
in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great
civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so
dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We
have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for
those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether
fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense,
we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The
brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above
our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember
what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the
living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought
here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated
to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take
increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of
devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in
vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that
government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from
the earth. --- A. Lincoln
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