America’s Civil War: Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet at Odds at Gettysburg

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History has come to many obscure places, has stayed awhile and, after its departure, has rendered those places famous. In America’s saga, perhaps no out-of-the-way place has taken on greater historic importance than the southern Pennsylvania village of Gettysburg. There, during three summer days, July 1-3, 1863, the nation’s fate may have been decided. When the battle was over, General Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia began the retreat to Virginia, defeated by Major General George G. Meade’s Union Army of the Potomac. ‘Gettysburg’ would forever hold a place in the minds of all Americans.

Since those unforgettable three days of battle, controversy has stalked nearly every facet of Gettysburg. In the postwar years, Southerners came to regard the battle as the great ‘if’ of Confederate history. Southern independence had beckoned on the farmers’ fields and wooded knolls for three days, then, like an alluring siren, had disappeared. To Southerners, the fault lay not with the great chieftain, Lee, but with his most trusted and senior lieutenant, James Longstreet. Of all Gettysburg’s controversies, none has so shaped history’s interpretation of the battle as has the Lee-Longstreet dispute.

The controversy had its origins in the days following Lee’s brilliant victory at Chancellorsville, May 1-5, 1863. In the woods and fields west of Fredericksburg, Va., Lee’s outnumbered army defeated the Federals of Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, the victory achieved by Lee’s audacious tactics and Lt. Gen. Thomas J. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson’s assault on the evening of May 2. Lee defied the odds, divided his army, and drove Hooker’s troops back across the Rappahannock River. It was arguably the crowning offensive stroke of the war for Lee, although its price was the mortal wounding of Jackson. In Chancellorsville’s wake, Lee held the strategic initiative in the East.

Lieutenant General James Longstreet, commander of the Confederate I Corps, had missed the Battle of Chancellorsville while serving with two divisions on detached duty in a supply operation in southeastern Virginia. Longstreet rejoined Lee outside Fredericksburg on May 9. The next day, a Sunday (the same day that Jackson would succumb to his wounds), the two generals began a series of private conferences that continued for four days. Together, they fashioned a plan that would carry the Confederate army northward in a second invasion of Union territory.

Longstreet was 42 years old at the time, the senior subordinate officer in the army. Since Lee had assumed command of the Confederacy’s major force on June 1, 1862, Longstreet had emerged as Lee’s finest lieutenant. In the aftermath of the Seven Days’ campaign outside Richmond, Lee had privately described Longstreet as ‘the staff in my right hand,’ and on the bloody field at Sharpsburg, Md. (Antietam), Lee called him ‘my old war-horse.’ Promotion to senior rank, above Jackson, followed for Longstreet, and he and Lee developed a relationship Longstreet described as ‘affectionate, confidential, and even tender, from first to last.’ Now, with Jackson gone, Lee needed Longstreet’s counsel more than ever.

At their initial meeting in early May, in all likelihood, Longstreet proposed a plan he had broached to Secretary of War James Seddon in Richmond a few days earlier. As Longstreet saw it, the Confederates needed to concentrate troops in Tennessee for an offensive thrust into Kentucky that would relieve the threat posed by Union Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Longstreet’s best friend in the antebellum U.S. Army, against Vicksburg, Miss. If the Southerners advanced into the Blue Grass State, the administration in Washington would pressure Grant to detach troops to the endangered region. Longstreet argued that two divisions from Lee’s army should be sent to Tennessee.

‘I laid it before him [Lee],’ Longstreet wrote later, ‘with the freedom justified by our close personal and official relations.’ But Lee objected to the plan, as he had during the previous weeks in Richmond. Lee wanted to exploit the initiative earned at Chancellorsville with a strategic offensive across the Potomac River. Lee argued that such a movement would disrupt Federal operations for the summer, garner needed supplies, and temporarily relieve Virginia of the war’s burden. Longstreet agreed to Lee’s operation, and on the 14th, the commanding general journeyed to the capital to persuade President Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Cabinet.

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Tags: 19th Century, American Civil War, Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures

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