Lee approached the river with fifty thousand to fifty-five thousand men, a force that had been replenished by Richmond after Second Manassas. Twelve days later he had less than forty thousand.18 The cause was straggling on an unprecedented scale. Some of the men fell away for lack of shoes, some because of illness or diarrhea or malnourishment. Many wanted nothing to do with an invasion of the North. They were fighting only to protect their homeland, as they saw it, only to repel the invader. But “straggling” didn’t quite cover what was going on: a lot of this was outright desertion by men who
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