CHAPTER VI THE THIRD YEAR OF THE WAR CHANCELLORSVILLE opened the North to invasion and General Lee sprang to the opportunity. Vicksburg was the compelling reason; the series of defeats of the Army of the Potomac, the immediate encouragement. Grant was investing Vicksburg and its fall meant the reopening of the Mississippi and the cleaving of the Confederacy, hopelessly, from north to south; if Lee could sweep through Pennsylvania, levy tribute on its great cities, Pittsburg, Philadelphia; seize Harrisburg, and march down upon Washington, he might bring the war to an end and dictate terms of peace at the National capital. To the leaders of the victorious Confederacy the plan was not chimerical: there was the opportunity and there was General Lee, and the achievement of the plan might not seem impossible. Southern sympathizers at the North were voluble and communicative; the "Copperhead" element might be taken at its word and welcome the Confederate army: the North was rich, spoliation would be easy and Lee's army believed itself, because it believed its commander, invincible. There was also another impelling cause, less encouraging. The Confederacy, thus far largely successful, was straining to maintain itself; its resources, those of an agricultural country, were inexhaustible if cultivated and administered without serious interruption, but not easily responding to the sudden exigencies of war. The fundamental weakness of all slaveholding communities was becoming apparent-the wastefulness of the system. Food enough for the Confederate army existed at the South but transportation facilities were so rude, imperfect, and, amidst war, unimprovable, that the Richmond government was beset with obstacles, other than the incapacity of administrative officials. The Confederate government was a military absolutism under Jefferson Davis, ruled harshly by his favorites. It presented its one glorious aspect in General Lee, and his lofty character and great military record have naturally cast glory on the whole Confederate cause. But history at last gets on the witness stand and the world must listen to her; and history finds nothing heroic, nothing evincing the capacity demanded by the situation, in Jefferson Davis and his personal government. Like other Confederate leaders, he had spent his life in building up a system which contained fatal germs of decay because it rested on a false economy. The situation is defined when it is said that the moment the Confederacy became defensive it was bound to collapse; its only hope was in aggressive attack. General Lee knew this probably better than any other man identified with the South, and Davis knew it also. Thus in June, 1863, General Lee writes to Davis: "Our resources in men are constantly diminishing, and the disproportion between us and our enemies, if they continue united in their efforts to subjugate us, is steadily augmenting." General Joseph E. Johnston records, repeatedly, in his Narrative, the lamentable deficiency of the whole Davis administration; he would persuade posterity that the Confederate government was a monument of incapacity from beginning to end. He denies that the South lacked either men or the resources to support great armies, and holds to the conviction that had a different man been president of the Confederacy, a man who would have pursued an economical policy, utilizing the unconquerable loyalty of the Southern people to the Confederate cause, and the inexhaustible resources of the South, the Confederacy must have triumphed. But General Johnston, who, as military authorities agree, ranks with Lee and Jackson as a great soldier, was at perpetual odds with Davis, was persistently retired from all adequate opportunity to give the South the benefit of his genius, and has left to the world a record of Confederate weakness, which, had he been able to co-operate with Davis, as did Lee, would certainly never have been written, and, perhaps, could not have been written. The South got into action first and beat the Army of the Potomac all along the line, save the almost drawn battle of Antietam, until, with Chancellorsville, even trained Northern soldiers were asking whether it was possible to defeat Lee. But General Lee knew only too well the chief danger to the Confederacy—the men and resources of the North. Despite all supplies-and they were very great in the aggregate which the Confederacy received, chiefly from England, by running the blockade, the Richmond government knew that at the moment General Lee was fighting the battles around Chancellorsville, the Confederacy, as a fighting machine, was running at the limit of its power. The North did not, could not know this, and the South herself was not conscious of it, save the astute few, at the centre of all secrets, and of these, General Lee must be admitted to be first. Otherwise, his plan to invade Pennsylvania, which he rapidly elaborated after Chancellorsville, loses significance. It was a great stake to play, a last card to throw. If the play won, then Confederate independence; if it lost, then dogged resistance till overpowered. It was not a conquest of the North that Lee projected, but the conquest of peace and the recognition of the independence of the Confederacy. General Hooker, who despite his rashness, had the instincts of the soldier, suspected Lee's plan and divined its scope. But he suggested to Lincoln, that in case Lee moved northward, the Army of the Potomac should swiftly march upon Richmond and capture it: a plan which Lincoln promptly compassed, with all its perils. "I would not go south of the Rappahannock upon Lee's moving north of it. If you had Richmond invested to-day, you would not be able to take it in twenty days; meanwhile your army would be ruined. I think Lee's army and not Richmond is your sure objective point. If he comes toward the upper Potomac, follow on his flank and on his inside track, shortening your line while he lengthens his. Fight him, too, when opportunity offers. If he stays where he is, fret him and fret him." And again, and earlier, he advised Hooker against crossing to the south of the Rappahannock if Lee came north of it. "If he should leave a rear force at Fredericksburg, tempting you to fall upon it, it would fight in intrenchments and have you at disadvantage, and so, man for man, worst you at that point, while his main force would in some way be getting an advantage of you northward. In one word, I would not take any risk of being entangled upon the river like an ox jumped half over a fence, and liable to be torn by dogs in front and rear, without a fair chance to gore one way or kick the other." These plain words of Lincoln to Hooker, June 5th and 10th, testify that there was one man at the North who knew where the Confederacy's power lay: in General Lee and his army; that vanquished, the Confederacy was vanquished. "It is reported," write Nicolay and Hay, "that when it was suggested to General Lee that Hooker might take advantage of his absence to advance upon Richmond, he smiled and said, 'Very well, in that case we shall swap queens.' Meanwhile General Lee had set his army in motion, and General Ewell's corps left Fredericksburg, June 4th and 5th; Longstreet and Hood had already moved their corps to Culpepper Court House; Hooker now rejected his intuitions and doubted a general northward movement of the Confederates. On the 13th, Ewell was at Winchester, attacked General Milroy, captured a large portion of his force and put the remainder to flight. On the 22d, Ewell is again under way, reaching Carlisle, in Pennsylvania, the 27th. General Early seizes York and levies a contribution of supplies upon it. Harrisburg is his objective and on the |