Gettysburg, page 7
For the defeat at Gettysburg exposed a fundamental flaw in Confederate strategy. At least one reason for the invasion of the North had been the hope that pressure here would compel the government at Washington to withdraw support from Grant, thereby enabling the South to save Vicksburg and the Mississippi Valley. This had not happened. Once Grant got Pemberton and his army locked up in Vicksburg, Washington sent him strong reinforcements, in men and in matériel. He lacked for nothing he needed to bring Pemberton to surrender, and Lee’s march into Pennsylvania did not cause the Lincoln administration to turn a hair. Not one man, gun, or wagon-load of supplies was withheld from Grant because of the invasion of Pennsylvania. Even if Lee had actually driven the Army of the Potomac away from the Gettysburg heights, the Union would still have taken Vicksburg. This gamble was lost before it was made.
In addition, the Gettysburg campaign had involved the Army of Northern Virginia in the kind of fight that it had very little chance to win. Gettysburg had been one of the costliest of battles. In the three days of fighting the Confederates had lost more than 20,000 men—slightly less than a third of Lee’s combat strength. Federal losses, to be sure, were higher—at 23,000; but Federal strength was greater, too, and in proportion to the numbers available the Confederate loss was heavier than the Union loss.
A year later, when the Army of the Potomac was slowly and painfully fighting its way south across war-ravaged Virginia, it was argued that the Union was engaged in a simple war of attrition, accepting heavy losses for the sake of inflicting heavy losses, knowing that Northern resources were far greater than Southern resources. As a matter of fact, the war of attrition had begun much earlier … in the Gettysburg campaign. When the South undertook to invade the North in the face of Northern superiority in man power, it made a war of attrition inevitable. Not even Robert E. Lee could win that kind of fight.
The shortcomings of Lee’s subordinates at Gettysburg fall into better focus once this fact is appreciated. Ewell might indeed have been dilatory (where his predecessor, Stonewall Jackson, would have moved like jagged lightning) in mounting the attack on Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill late in the afternoon of the first day; Stuart may have left Lee blind by going far afield and getting his cavalry corps blocked out of the play at the crucial moment of invasion; Longstreet may have been slow, handling his part of the fighting on the second and third days without the furious driving energy Lee wanted—all the complaints on these points, made not by Lee himself but by his admirers, may have been justified. But the hard fact remains that when an army like Lee’s took the offensive against a larger army, in the enemy’s own country, it committed itself to the wrong kind of fight. At Gettysburg it could do nothing but get in close and slug until something broke. What broke was its own offensive power.
In addition to all other considerations, there is a final point: Lee at Gettysburg was fighting against a man who never wore a uniform or fought a battle: the eminent Illinois civilian Abraham Lincoln. The whole rationale of the Confederate offensive that summer (aside from the purely minor matter of temporarily relieving Virginia of the weight of the war and collecting supplies in Pennsylvania) was the belief that the Northern government would crack under the strain—that it would take troops away from General Grant, lose confidence in final victory when it saw Confederate troops in the Northern heartland, find the price of the war too great to pay, and so consent at last to a formal separation.
None of this happened. The Northern government did not collapse, did not waver in its resolve to go on with the war until slavery and secession were both dead, did not flinch at the fearful price that would still have to be paid … and for “the Northern government,” read “Abraham Lincoln.” He was Lee’s ultimate opponent at Gettysburg; he won, partly because Meade and the Army of the Potomac stood firm, but even more because Lincoln himself was where Lee’s army could not reach him.
In the fall of 1863, after the armies had gone their ways and entered upon new campaigns, Lincoln himself went to Gettysburg to talk about what had been done there: what had been done, and what it all might possibly mean.
The dead men were all under the ground by now and on the low hill and the long ridge there was the beginning of a great park. There was a formal cemetery, with the soldiers’ graves arranged in neat arcs of a series of concentric circles, headstones flush with the ground bearing names and unit identifications … hundreds of headstones bearing no names but simply testifying to the presence of bodies that would go forever unidentified. The little clump of trees still stood at the summit of the long slope that came up from the Emmitsburg road, and although it is so small that a couple of good woodsmen could have felled all its trees in one morning, it is nevertheless the most famous little grove in all America. And thousands of Lincoln’s fellow countrymen went to Gettysburg for the dedication of the cemetery, and heard famous orator Edward Everett deliver a polished address that left no echoes whatever, and at last stood in silence while Lincoln spoke the few sentences that made cemetery and park something more than a simple memorial to human courage.
No one could explain it better than Abraham Lincoln. When he said that people would never forget what the soldiers had done on this battlefield, he added that no one would long remember what anyone said there; and this was a slight mistake, because what he said there is something the American people will always turn to when they want to know why this great hour of tragedy had to take place and what it meant in the growth of a great nation.
Two or three generations earlier, Lincoln reminded his listeners, the American people had brought forth a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The terrible Civil War itself, he said, was simply a matter of testing whether that nation and the dream that inspired it could go on living. The unlimited potential embodied in the great word “America” depended on the way the challenge was met. The soldiers had done their part … to the last full measure of their devotion. The rest, then and thereafter, would be up to the living.
To the living of all subsequent generations, including this one, Gettysburg left an unending responsibility. A nation built on the idea that all men—all men—are of equal worth and equal rights summons every one of its citizens to a life-long commitment to put that idea into practical effect.
Gettysburg, then, was the price we paid for our service under that great concept. It was one step in a long progression; not an end, but a beginning—a pledge written in blood that freedom should be reborn in every generation.
So Lincoln explained it, looking across the graves to the truth that gave them meaning. That is why Americans will long remember what was done and what was said on this greatest of their battlefields.
Bruce Catton, Gettysburg
