Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (130 page)

30
. John H. Reagan,
Memoirs, with Special Reference to Secession and the Civil War
(Austin, 1906), 120–22, 150–53.

31
. Lee to John Bell Hood, May 21, 1863, in Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin, eds.,
The Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee
(Boston, 1961), 490; cabinet member quoted in Foote,
Civil War
, II, 432; Longstreet to Louis Wigfall, May 13, quoted in Jones,
Confederate Strategy
, 208. After the war a controversy arose between Longstreet and several Virginia generals concerning responsibility for the defeat at Gettysburg. The Virginians criticized Longstreet for his half-hearted participation in an invasion he had opposed and especially for his alleged tardiness and inept leadership of the attacks on July 2 and 3. Such allegations were at worst false and at best distorted. Longstreet did support the invasion, as this letter indicates, though he later claimed that while endorsing a strategic offensive he had recommended defensive tactics once the Confederates reached northern soil. Longstreet asserted that Lee had concurred in this policy. No contemporary evidence supports such an unlikely commitment to defensive tactics by Lee. For a review of the controversy see Glenn Tucker,
Lee and Longstreet at Gettysburg
(Indianapolis, 1968), and Thomas L. Connelly,
The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society
(New York, 1977),
chap. 3
.

So Lee set about reorganizing his augmented army into an invasion force of three infantry corps and six cavalry brigades—a total of 75,000 men. A. P. Hill became commander of the new 3rd Corps while Jackson's old 2nd Corps went to Richard Ewell, now sporting a wooden leg as souvenir of Second Manassas. Having used the month after Chan-cellorsville to rest and refit, the Army of Northern Virginia was much better prepared for this invasion than it had been for the previous one in September 1862. Morale was high, most men had shoes, and few stragglers fell out as Lee edged westward in the first week of June to launch his invasion through the Shenandoah Valley. Ewell's corps led the way, adding to its laurels won in the Valley under Jackson the previous year by capturing 3,500 men in the Union garrisons at Winchester and Martinsburg.

This success and the apparently unimpeded advance of the fearsome rebels into Pennsylvania set off panic in the North and heightened southern euphoria. "From the very beginning the true policy of the South has been invasion," declared the
Richmond Examiner
as first reports arrived of a great victory in Pennsylvania:

The present movement of General Lee . . . will be of infinite value as disclosing the . . . easy susceptibility of the North to invasion. . . . Not even the Chinese are less prepared by previous habits of life and education for martial resistance than the Yankees. . . . We can . . . carry our armies far into the enemy's country, exacting peace by blows leveled at his vitals.

The date of this editorial was July 7, 1863.
³²

Only one untoward event had marred the invasion's success so far.

32
. The irony of the date of this editorial will not escape the reader, for it came four days after the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg. Word of that outcome did not reach Richmond until July 9, and it took a day or two longer for this inversion of initially optimistic reports from Pennsylvania to sink in.

On June 9 the Union cavalry crossed the Rappahannock in force twenty-five miles above Fredericksburg to find out what Lee was up to. Catching Stuart napping, the blue troopers learned that the enemy had begun to move north. The rebel horsemen rallied and finally pushed the Yankees back after the biggest cavalry battle of the war at Brandy Station. The southern press criticized Stuart for the initial surprise of his "puffed up cavalry."
³³
His ego bruised, Stuart hoped to regain glory by some spectacular achievement in the invasion. His troopers efficiently screened the infantry's advance. But the improved northern cavalry also kept Stuart from learning of Hooker's movements. To break this stalemate, Stuart on June 25 took his three best brigades for another raid around the rear of the Union infantry slogging northward after Lee. In its initial stages this foray caused alarm in Washington and added to the scare in Pennsylvania. But Stuart became separated from the Army of Northern Virginia for a full week. This deprived Lee of intelligence about enemy movements at a crucial time.

Nevertheless these halcyon June days seemed to mark a pinnacle of Confederate success. Lee forbade pillaging of private property in Pennsylvania, to show the world that southern soldiers were superior to the Yankee vandals who had ravaged the South. But not all rebels refrained from plunder and arson. The army destroyed Thaddeus Stevens's ironworks near Chambersburg, wrecked a good deal of railroad property, levied forced requisitions of money from merchants and banks ($28,000 in York, for example), and seized all the shoes, clothing, horses, cattle, and food they could find—giving Confederate IOUs in return. Lee's invasion became a gigantic raid for supplies that stripped clean a large area of south-central Pennsylvania. In Chambersburg, Longstreet's quartermaster began to break open shops with axes until local merchants gave him the keys. To a farm woman who protested the seizure of all her hogs and cattle, Longstreet replied: "Yes, madam, it's very sad—very sad; and this sort of thing has been going on in Virginia more than two years—very sad." Southern soldiers also seized scores of black people in Pennsylvania and sent them south into slavery.
³⁴

33
. Douglas Southall Freeman,
Lee's Lieutenants:
A
Study in Command
, 3 vols. (New York, 1942–44), III, 19.

34
. Quotation from Walter Lord, ed.,
The Fremantle Diary: Being the Journal of Lieutenant Colonel James Arthur Lyon Fremantle, Coldstream Guards, on his Three Months in the Southern States
(Boston, 1954), 224. See also Edwin B. Coddington,
The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command
(New York, 1968), 153–79. A Chambersburg woman described the seizure by Confederates of several black women and children in that town, who were "driven by just like we would drive cattle." James C. Mohr, ed.,
The Cormany Diaries: A Northern Family in the Civil War
(Pittsburgh, 1982), 328–30.

One of Lee's purposes in ordering restraint toward (white) civilians was to cultivate the copperheads. He placed great faith in "the rising peace party of the North" as a "means of dividing and weakening our enemies." It was true, Lee wrote to Davis on June 10, that the copperheads professed to favor reunion as the object of peace negotiations while the South regarded independence as the goal. But it would do no harm, Lee advised Davis, to play along with this reunion sentiment to weaken northern support for the war, which "after all is what we are interested in bringing about. When peace is proposed to us it will be time enough to discuss its terms, and it is not the part of prudence to spurn the proposition in advance, merely because those who made it believe, or affect to believe, that it will result in bringing us back to the Union." If Davis agreed with these views, Lee concluded, "you will best know how to give effect to them."
³⁵

Davis did indeed think he saw a chance to carry peace proposals on the point of Lee's sword. In mid-June, Alexander Stephens suggested to Davis that in light of "the failure of Hooker and Grant," this might be the time to make peace overtures. Stephens offered to approach his old friend Lincoln under flag of truce to discuss prisoner-of-war exchanges, which had stopped because of Confederate refusal to exchange blacks. This issue could serve as an entering wedge for the introduction of peace proposals. Davis was intrigued by the idea. He gave Stephens formal instructions limiting his powers to negotiations on prisoner exchanges and other procedural matters. What additional informal powers Stephens carried with him are unknown. On July 3 the vice president boarded a flag-of-truce boat for a trip down the James to Union lines at Norfolk on the first leg of his hoped-for trip to Washington.
³⁶

Lee's invasion also sparked renewed Confederate hopes for diplomatic recognition. In the wake of Chancellorsville, John Slidell in Paris queried the French whether "the time had not arrived for reconsidering the question of recognition." Napoleon agreed, as usual, but would not act independently of Britain. In that country, news of Lee's success stirred

35
. Dowdey and Manarin, eds.,
Wartime Papers of Lee
, 507–9.

36
. Alexander H. Stephens, A
Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States
, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1868–70), II, 557–68; Rowland,
Davis
, V, 513–19.

Confederate sympathizers into vigorous action. During June a flurry of meetings among southern diplomats and their supporters on both sides of the channel worked out a plan for a motion in the British Parliament favoring joint Anglo-French steps toward recognition. Napoleon gave his blessing to the enterprise. But the M. P. who presented the motion, a diminutive firebrand named John Roebuck whom Henry Adams described as "rather more than three-quarters mad," put his foot in his mouth with a speech on June 30 that indiscreetly disclosed all details of his conversation with the French emperor. The notion of allowing the Frogs to dictate British foreign policy was like a red flag to John Bull. The motion died of anti-French backlash, but British proponents of recognition eagerly awaited reports of Lee's triumph in Pennsylvania. "Diplomatic means can now no longer prevail," wrote Confederate publicist Henry Hotze from London on July 11, "and everybody looks to Lee to conquer recognition."
³⁷

Northerners abroad understood only too well the stakes involved in military operations during June 1863. "The truth is," wrote Henry Adams, "all depends on the progress of our armies." In Washington, Lincoln was not pleased with the progress of Hooker's army. When Hooker first detected Lee's movement in early June, he wanted to cross the Rappahannock and pitch into the rebel rear. Lincoln disapproved and urged Hooker to fight the enemy's main force north of the river instead of crossing it at the risk of becoming "entangled upon the river, like an ox jumped half over a fence and liable to be torn by dogs front and rear without a fair chance to gore one way or kick the other." Hooker seemed unimpressed by this advice, for a few days later he proposed that since the Army of Northern Virginia was moving north, the Army of the Potomac should move south and march into Richmond! Lincoln began to suspect that Hooker was afraid to fight Lee again. "I think
Lee's
Army, and not
Richmond
, is your true objective point," he wired Hooker. "If he comes toward the Upper Potomac, follow on his flank, and on the inside track. . . . Fight him when opportunity offers." With the head of the enemy force at Winchester and the tail still back at Fredericks-

37
. Slidell quoted in Frank Lawrence Owsley,
King Cotton Diplomacy
(Chicago, 1931), 465; Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., June 25, 1863, in Worthington, C. Ford, ed., A
Cycle of Adams Letters
1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), II, 40; Hotze quoted in Brian Jenkins,
Britain and the War for the Union
, 2 vols. (Montreal, 1974–80), II, 313.

burg, "the animal must be very slim somewhere. Could you not break him?"
³⁸

Although Hooker finally lurched the Army of the Potomac into motion, he moved too late to prevent Lee's whole force from crossing the Potomac. But this actually encouraged Lincoln. To Hooker he sent word that this "gives you back the chance [to destroy the enemy far from his base] that I thought McClellan lost last fall." To Secretary of the Navy Welles, Lincoln said that "we cannot help beating them, if we have the man." But Lincoln became convinced that Hooker was not the man. The general began to fret that Lee outnumbered him, that he needed more troops, that the government was not supporting him. Looking "sad and careworn," the president told his cabinet that Hooker had turned out to be another McClellan. On June 28 he relieved Hooker from command and named George Gordon Meade in his place.
³⁹

If the men in the ranks had been consulted, most of them probably would have preferred the return of McClellan. Although Meade had worked his way up from brigade to corps command with a good combat record, he was an unknown quantity to men outside his corps. By now, though, their training in the school of hard knocks under fumbling leaders had toughened the soldiers to a flinty self-reliance that left many of them indifferent to the identity of their commander. The men "have something of the English bull-dog in them," wrote one officer. "You can whip them time and again, but the next fight they go into, they are . . . as full of pluck as ever. They are used to being whipped, and no longer mind it. Some day or other we shall have our turn."
⁴⁰
As the army headed north into Pennsylvania, civilians along the way began to cheer them as friends instead of reviling them as foes. Their morale rose with the latitude. "Our men are three times as Enthusiastic as they have been in Virginia," wrote a Union surgeon. "The idea that Pennsylvania is invaded and that we are fighting on our own soil proper, influences them strongly. They are more determined than I have ever before seen them."
⁴¹