Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation by Clifford Dowdey Read Free Book Online

with Longstreet’s two divisions at Culpeper, still waiting for Pickett, and A. P. Hill held alertly at Fredericksburg. On June 14, one month after the day Lee had gone to Richmond for the conference, Ewell’s corps fell on a Union force at Winchester and disposed of it, with the usual welcome acquisition of stores and guns.
    The consequences of this action bore out Lee’s belief in forcing the enemy to constrict instead of dispersing to meet his numerically superior dispersals. The Union’s Milroy had been waiting at Winchester to join another Union force from the western mountains and threaten the fertile Valley, in the expectation that Lee would detach forces to save his “breadbasket.” Instead, with Milroy gobbled up in passing and Lee headed north, the western force abandoned the Valley project. Also, because of Lee’s counterthreat, a hostile force approaching Richmond from the east was withdrawn and turned to defense. Finally, Hooker acted as Lee had anticipated: he broke camp to move northward, shifting to place his army between Lee and the city of Washington.
    Having seized the initiative from the enemy, Lee sent Longstreet after Ewell into the Valley and northward, and directed A. P. Hill to follow Longstreet. By mid-June, Virginia was left exposed save for Davis’s scattered garrisons.
    Riding with Longstreet’s corps along the Shenandoah Valley northward out of Virginia, Lee was still depressed about those scattered garrisons and continued to importune Davis and the war office with pleas for support of his total plan. In his anxiety, he wrote Davis instructive essays on the rudiments of military strategy. The letters were not answered.
    Then, as his widely separated forces stretched out in Pennsylvania, General Lee became preoccupied with a more immediate and acute problem-the continued and unexplained absence of Stuart’s cavalry.
    Stuart had guarded the Blue Ridge passes against the probing enemy until Lee’s infantry marched northward. In the cavalry’s movement, Stuart was given the choice of moving north on the east side of the mountains or of following the infantry to the Potomac crossings and then pushing eastward through the passes. In either case, his orders were to guard the passes and the army’s flank, and to provide information about the enemy’s movement. As it was evident that Stuart had not followed the infantry west of the mountains, Lee expected daily that the cavalry would appear through one of the passes to the east. But each night when the commanding general went to his tent there had been no sign of his troopers and no word from Stuart.
    Nothing like this had ever happened before. It was incredible that a commanding general, burdened with the responsibility of directing an invasion of the enemy’s country, should have his attention distracted and his energies diverted by wondering where his own cavalry was. While his men marched confidently northward, an apprehension settled on Robert E. Lee which conditioned all of his actions on the campaign. His concern over the loss of Jackson, over the size of his force, over the halfhearted support from the government, and over the strange disappearance of one of his most trusted subordinates unsettled Lee inwardly as he had never been unsettled on any previous campaign.
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    The commanding general’s forebodings were not communicated to the army. The men walked the strange roads under their red battle flags in the highest spirits. Indeed, such was their faith in Lee that the soldiers marched northward away from their own land, with their army divided into three parts, in the mood of tourists.
    Shielded by the ramparts of the Blue Ridge, the men walked a steady fifteen or twenty miles a day in good order through the Virginia counties (now West Virginia) north of the Shenandoah Valley. “This country enchants me more and more,” artillerist Ham Chamberlayne wrote his mother. After a year among the war-made barrens of middle Virginia, the