I'd like to add and discuss some "counter-narrative" history. I hope at least some posters find that interesting.
I'll start with two issues related to the Battle of Gettysburg:
- It wasn't REALLY a mistake for Lee to order what became known as Pickett's Charge on July 3, 1863.
- Meade shouldn't REALLY be blamed for failing to destroy to Army of Northern Virginia after the battle.
WRT #1:
The conventional narrative is that the Union line was more-or-less impenetrable and Lee's frontal assault on it was a catastrophically bad decision. Even before the attack, most of Lee's subordinates felt this way. Ironically, General Pickett who will forever be known for the charge that bears his name was one of those who thought the idea was near madness.
Obviously with 20/20 hindsight Pickett and Lee's other subordinates were correct, the attack WAS a bad idea. I'll even add that, on a tactical level, it was a fairly obviously bad idea before it was launched.
That said, I actually think that Lee made the right decision for strategic rather than tactical reasons. The macro-strategic situation for the Confederacy was already bad in the summer of 1863 and it was deteriorating rapidly:
- Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation issued after Antietam had effectively eliminated the chance of support for the Confederacy from any major European power.
- The South's industrial base was a pathetic fraction of the North's.
- The Union's population was substantially larger than the Confederacy's such that Northern battle losses were being replaced and the Grand Army of the Republic was actually growing. The Confederacy's losses were irreplaceable.
Charging at the Union fishook at Gettysburg was bad tactically but it made strategic sense because it was the best chance the Confederates could realistically hope for. If they had waited and tried again in the summer of 1864, they would have been outnumbered and outgunned more severely than they were on July 3, 1863.
WRT #2:
Shortly after the battle Lincoln reportedly said of Meade that he "had the Confederate Army in the palm of his hand and let them slip away" or words to the effect.
This all stems from the geography of the battle. The Confederate (Southern) line was actually North of the Union (Northern) line. In theory then, once the Union won the battle, they should have been able to prevent the Confederates from escaping back to their supplies.
The conventional narrative is that Meade missed a golden opportunity that should have been obvious to him. Had he acted to prevent their escape, the Confederates could have been trapped in hostile territory in Pennsylvania with dwindling supplies of food and ammunition and the entire Army of Northern Virginia could have been killed or captured.
For many years I believed this, but I wanted to know more. Particularly, I couldn't understand how a military man trained in such things could possibly have overlooked the opportunity that seemed so obvious to me and had seemed so to Lincoln as well.
A few years ago I read
Retreat from Gettysburg, Lee, Logistics, and the Pennsylvania Campaign because I wanted to find out. The book credits Lee for his handling of the retreat (escape really) and explains Meade's hesitations.
The short version is that Lee did a masterful job of masking his location, direction, and intentions and that Meade had plenty of his own problems to deal with.
In retrospect, Lee's Army was critically low on ammunition and Meade probably should have been able to guess that was the case. However, Meade didn't KNOW that. What he KNEW was that his own army was bloodied and low on ammunition and Meade was hesitant to get into a battle without having enough ammunition to actually fight.
