Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

Lee never indulged much hope for the future for slavery. “In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country,” Lee wrote in 1856. But in his mind, emancipation “will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery controversy.” And so Lee deplored slavery—and still held slaves, rented slaves, and on one occasion whipped them. As the Union began to tear itself apart over slavery in the winter of 1860–61, Lee felt a similar ambivalence. His long service in the army, and in so many different locales, made it obvious to him that the American republic “contained no North, no South, no East no west, but embraced the broad Union, in all its might and strength, present and future.” But when Virginia finally made up its mind to join the Confederacy in April 1861, Lee was pulled in the other direction by the enormous debts he owed to the “kith and kin” who had kept him afloat in his youth. Lee had never owned a square inch of Virginia soil in his own name, and thought of the Lower South fire-eaters as a malignant political cancer; but Virginia’s people had been the single safety net that his mother and her children had known, and to that intervention Lee owed everything.5 Despite the pleas of Winfield Scott, and an offer of high command from Abraham Lincoln, Lee resigned from the only professional world he had ever known. He was pr...