Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

Should it indeed be Lee’s intention to march north on either a raid or an invasion, Hooker had told the president on June 10, and if he were permitted “to operate from my own judgment,” he would seize this opportunity to strike at Richmond—“the most speedy and certain mode of giving the rebellion a mortal blow.” According to Hooker’s information, hardly more than a provost guard now defended the Confederate capital. He argued that in case Lee should attempt a counterstroke against Washington, the garrison there could hold the fortifications long enough for “all the disposable part” of his army to “be thrown to any threatened point north of the Potomac at short notice. . . . ” It was an intriguing proposal, and if executed with the sort of imaginative planning that Hooker had employed in the opening of his Chancellorsville campaign, it would almost certainly have forced Lee to cancel his Pennsylvania incursion. President Davis was as sensitive about Richmond’s safety as President Lincoln was about Washington’s; surely Davis would summon Lee to the rescue the moment a Yankee army appeared before the gates of Richmond. As it happened, however, it was the sensitivity about Washington that decided the question. Within ninety minutes of receiving Hooker’s telegram, the president quashed the idea. “I would not go South of the Rappahannock, upon Lee’s moving North of it,” the commander-in-chief told his general. “I think Lee’s Army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point.”...