This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [159]
And yet this dazzling victory was sterile. Not only had it cost the Confederacy more than the Confederacy could afford to pay — it killed Stonewall Jackson, who was literally irreplaceable, and it put twelve thousand of other ranks out of action to boot — but it left the high command facing a problem that proved finally to be beyond solution.
Hooker had been whipped, and the spring invasion of Virginia had been canceled. But the war was not a duel between generals, and the enormous forces it had set loose would not finally dispose of themselves just because one man was stronger than another. Chancellorsville with its great flame and smoke and noise had done little more than give the Confederacy time to take a second look at its desperate predicament.
Destiny lay in the West. Grant had Vicksburg surrounded now. His army held a great semicircle that ran east of town from the Chickasaw Bluffs and curled around to the banks of the Mississippi a few miles downstream. Within this semicircle Pemberton and his thirty-one thousand were locked up, helpless; outside the semicircle Joe Johnston and an inadequate army tried in vain to find some way to crack the shell. Grant had been reinforced, he was receiving all the supplies the North could send to him, and he was able without effort to hold Johnston off at arm’s length while he waited for Vicksburg to fall. Three hundred miles to the northeast, Rosecrans was beginning to move with his Army of the Cumberland. Bragg, who opposed him, was outnumbered. In Mississippi and Tennessee the doom of the Confederacy was beginning to take visible form. Against long odds, battles might be won in Virginia, and the Yankee invader might be made to retreat across the Rappahannock, perhaps even across the Potomac; but Vicksburg would fall and Tennessee would be lost, and if these things happened the Confederacy would be a cut flower in a vase, seeming to live for a time, but cut off forever from the possibility of independent existence.
This was the reality that demanded the attention of the Confederate government as the spring of 1863 drew on toward summer.
Perhaps there was no really good answer. General Longstreet, who had missed Chancellorsville and who was consulted by President Davis in Richmond, urged that troops be taken from Lee’s army and sent to Tennessee; given such reinforcements, Bragg could perhaps defeat Rosecrans and compel Grant to draw back from in front of Vicksburg. Secretary of War Seddon believed that reinforcements from Lee’s army might go direct to Mississippi, so that Johnston could smite Grant’s iron ring directly. There was no certainty that either of these expedients would work; they were just cards that might possibly be played.
Lee could read the future no better than anyone else. He did point out that the government must in effect decide whether to hold the line in Mississippi or to hold it in Virginia. To give up Virginia would be to give up Richmond, national capital, symbol of nationhood, source too of essential munitions and manufactures; loss here would probably mean speedy loss of the war itself, whereas the doom that would descend in the West would at least come more slowly. Furthermore, it would not do to wait and defend Virginia passively. Chancellorsville had humiliated Hooker’s army but had not crippled it; in a month or two the Federals would inevitably be ready to invade Virginia anew. Better (argued Lee) to defend Virginia by fighting in the North. A battle won above the Potomac might convince war-weary Northerners that the Confederacy could never really be beaten; it might induce the government at Washington to recall Grant and Rosecrans for home defense; it might even bring reality to that will-o’-the-wisp of southern dreams, recognition of the Confederacy by England and France. It might, in short, be the stroke that would change everything, and at the very least it