“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
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