Hallowed Ground - James M. McPherson [24]
Both armies settled down to an uneasy night interrupted by frequent firing from pickets alarmed by shadows and noises. Each side had suffered almost ten thousand casualties in what turned out to be perhaps the second bloodiest day of the war (the one-day battle of Antietam, with a combined total of 23,000 casualties, was the bloodiest). Confederates had made some gains at great cost, but had failed to achieve a breakthrough. Southern attacks had lacked coordination. Lee had followed his customary practice of issuing general orders but letting his corps commanders execute them as they thought best. The usual skills of generalship in the Army of Northern Virginia seem to have gone missing this day, especially on Ewell's front against Culp's and Cemetery Hills. On the Union side, by contrast, officers from Meade down to regimental colonels acted with initiative and coolness. They moved reinforcements to the right spots and counterattacked at the right times.
Despite the stout Yankee resistance, Lee believed that his indomitable veterans had won the day. One more push, he thought, and the enemy would break. Pickett's division and Stuart's three cavalry brigades had finally arrived and would be available on the morrow. (Across the way, Union Major General John Sedgwick's Sixth Corps had also arrived, more than balancing the Confederate reinforcements.)
Lee's mood and physical condition at Gettysburg have been the subjects of some controversy. He seemed unusually excited by the supposed successes of these two days. At the same time he may have been weakened by a touch of diarrhea. Or perhaps, as the novelist Michael Shaara suggested in The Killer Angels, a flare-up of Lee's heart condition left him by turns belligerent and indecisive, gnawed by the conviction that he had little time left.
Historians have tended to discount Shaara's interpretation. But two surgeons at the University of Virginia medical school, who also happen to be Civil War buffs, have offered evidence to support it. In March 1863 Lee suffered what was probably a myocardial infarction. By his own account, Lee did not feel he had fully recovered and reported himself “more and more incapable of exertion.” Piecing together Lee's own references to his health and those of his physician, these two surgeons suggest that Lee had ischemic heart disease—an inadequate supply of blood to the heart—which eventually killed him in 1870 at the age of sixty-three. “This illness,” the doctors concluded in a medical journal article, may have “had a major influence on the battle of Gettysburg.”
Precisely what influence is not clear. Did illness cloud Lee's judgment? Perhaps. But what we might call the “Chancellorsville Syndrome” may have been more important than Lee's health in this regard. Lee continued to think that he could win at Gettysburg as he had won two months earlier against greater numerical odds—by attacking. He had hit the Union flank at Chancellorsville and followed it up with a frontal assault, which had worked. He intended to try similar tactics at Gettysburg. He had come to Pennsylvania in quest of a decisive victory; he was determined not to leave without