This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [160]
Few soldiers called on by government for advice are ever able to speak with the overpowering prestige that was Lee’s in the spring of 1863. When he proposed that he take the Army of Northern Virginia and march into Pennsylvania, the issue was settled. Only Postmaster General Reagan, of all the Cabinet, continued to argue for a troop transfer to the West; President Davis and everyone else backed their winning general, as they were humanly bound to do, and by the middle of May the invasion of the North was ordered.
Probably no other decision could have been made, given all of the circumstances. Yet once again there had been profound miscalculation: the latest in a series of miscalculations, all of them fatal.
It had been calculated that in the concept of the Union of the states there was not anything so compelling that men would fight and die for it; that the institution of slavery could be made to live on in a world that was dreaming broader dreams; that this war (which itself had come against calculation) could be waged as a formalized contest that would go by familiar rules and not as an upheaval of terrible infinite forces that would go by no rules ever heard of and would forever change the people who were fighting it. Of these miscalculations the Confederacy was dying a slow death; to them, now, there was added the hopeful belief that if the brilliant stroke that had been so dazzling at Chancellorsville could just be repeated in Pennsylnia, all that had been lost could be happily redeemed.
Fog of war lay on the land, and men had to make the best decisions they could by the murky light that was available. The men in Richmond determined that the Army of Northern Virginia must march to Pennsylvania, and there it did march, pulling the Army of the Potomac after it — a fated, tragic march that led to the nation’s most unforgettable single moment of tragic drama, but that led away from the main current of the war itself. Between them, the two armies that had to make this march would pay fifty thousand casualties for it.
2. Moment of Truth
Most of the men in the Army of the Potomac had been soldiers for very nearly two years. In those years a man who had been in all of the army’s battles — and very few had been in all of them — might have known as many as twenty days of actual combat. All the rest was monotony; endless days in camps, hour upon hour of work on the drill field, long marches on bad roads with hot sun and dust or cold rain and mud for accompaniment. The soldier’s greatest enemy always was simple boredom. The high adventure of army life came down at last to the eternal performance of dull tasks and to an unbroken routine of physical discomfort.
Life after Chancellorsville went on much as it had always gone. The troops were sullen and perplexed, yet there was no great drop in morale as there had been after Fredericksburg. The memory of the terrible battle in the blazing thickets seemed to be dulled very quickly. The old routine caught men up again; by its very familiarity it brought a revival of spirits; by the end of May it was almost as if the battle had not been fought. The army was living wholly in the present.
Yet with all of this there was a growing sense of great things to come. Chancellorsville had settled very little; it had been prelude, not finality, and army life was in a condition of unstable equilibrium. The desolate camping ground by the Rappahannock could not be a permanent abode. There was a rising tension, a dim foreknowledge of approaching climax. The big showdown that had seemed so near when the army moved for the Rappahannock fords at the end of April had not come off; it would come, and when it came it would be cataclysmic, bringing a day of violence worse than anything that had gone before.1
The army’s failures had always been failures at the top. It was a great army, capable of great deeds, but no commander had ever used it with full throttle. McClellan, Pope, and Burnside had been either too cautious or