Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

When General Pickett was asked to explain the failure of his charge, he famously remarked, “I think the Union army had something to do with it.”

“We should assume the aggressive,” Lee had written Mr. Davis just a month earlier. He meant by that, in modern military terminology, seizing the strategic initiative. This idea was at the very core of Robert E. Lee’s generalship. It became his watchword the moment he first took command of the Army of Northern Virginia, back in June 1862. He recognized then—and it was even more obvious now, a year later—the stark reality that in the ever more straitened Confederacy his army would never achieve parity with the enemy’s army. On campaign he would always be the underdog. Therefore he must assume the strategic aggressive whenever he could, and by marching and maneuver disrupt the enemy’s plans, keep him off balance, offset his numbers by dominating the choice of battlefield. It must be Lee’s drum the enemy marched to.

“Under no circumstances were we to give battle, but exhaust our skill in trying to force the enemy to do so in a position of our own choosing.”

He might now march forth across the Potomac with renewed confidence in his military judgment. That was essential. There was sure to be great risk in thus marching into enemy country, and the general commanding would require a full measure of self-confidence to carry it off.

The very concept of Stuart’s expedition was fueled by overconfidence and misjudgment at the highest command level.

Lee’s orders stipulated that Stuart pass around the enemy without hindrance; surely here were hindrances enough to send him back to the main army. Stuart only became more determined; contempt for the enemy overcame reason.

The B.M.I.’s Sergeant Milton Cline, for example, used the cavalry fight at Aldie to slip his espionage party behind enemy lines. They slipped back during the Upperville battle to report on the location of Longstreet’s divisions and to confirm that A. P. Hill was also in the Valley.

So it happened—thanks to an intelligence drought and a consequent miscalculation—that the two armies were set to marching on a collision course. The Army of the Potomac’s intelligence chief, Colonel George Sharpe, fixed the stakes for the contest when he wrote that day, “I hope our friends understand that in the great game that is now being played, everything in the way of advantage depends upon which side gets the best information.”

General Lee had been strangely passive (or perhaps supremely self-confident) ever since entering Pennsylvania, particularly in this matter of keeping track of the opposing army. Over the past year he had become totally dependent on Stuart to deliver intelligence on the Yankees, or to arrange for its delivery. Now, at this critical moment, Stuart was not there. “It was the absence of Stuart himself that he felt so keenly,” Major Henry McClellan wrote of Lee. “. . . It seemed as if his cavalry were concentrated in one person, and from him alone could information be expected.” Should any delay or mischance befall Stuart’s bold scheme—surely distinct possibilities—Lee had no contingency plan, no one else on whom he could or would rely.