Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation Read Free Page B

a base for Federal operations. The only Confederate port still open was Vicksburg, approximately midway between Memphis and New Orleans, and this city was undergoing a siege from the river and the land. The river country to the north and south of Vicksburg was either occupied or had been ravaged in invasion; the defending Confederate forces were divided and ineffective; and unless the Confederate government could change the situation, its big river and the entire Confederate west would be lost.
    In considering a change in this critical situation, Commander in Chief Davis had at his disposal two other major armies—the Army of Tennessee in the Confederate center and the Army of Northern Virginia protecting Richmond—along with assorted garrisons of various sizes awaiting any threatening movements the enemy thought of to disperse the Confederate strength further. In meeting similar crises Davis’s habit had been to hurry troops from one army to another, risking the less-exposed force to add some strength to the more-threatened. At the time of the threat to Vicksburg, however, no other Confederate army or even garrison force was safe from immediate danger.
    Jefferson Davis had never before been confronted with a military dilemma that could not be solved, at least theoretically on his charts, by the shifting of troops. In his present consternation, he even asked the advice of his current secretary of war.
    James Seddon was the fourth man, and by all odds the best, to try to serve in the post which contemporaries said the president reduced to the status of a clerk. A scholarly Virginia planter and avocational politician, Seddon was intelligent, a devoted patriot, and knew his limitations in military affairs. He personally favored sending reinforcements from Lee’s army to Vicksburg, but he did not feel qualified to make such a momentous decision. The result was the high-level conference that the South’s only successful commanding general was summoned to attend.
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    When General Lee left his army camped outside the sacked old city of Fredericksburg to come to Richmond, his thoughts were heavy, but none of his broodings touched upon a town in Pennsylvania of which he had never heard.
    Although Davis exercised the prerogatives of his supreme authority with everyone, he had respect for Lee as a soldier, and, due to Lee’s patience and limitless tact, the president and the general enjoyed cordial relations. Neither was a revolutionary type, and Lee, having been trained from birth to respect constituted authority, gave the president the deference that Davis demanded. Beyond these surface relations, no two men could be more dissimilar.
    Davis, at fifty-five, was a lean, attenuated man above middle height who gave the impression of being tall because of his erect military carriage. His features were well defined, and, when younger and at his best, he had made a handsome appearance. Under the stress of responsibilities beyond his capacities his features had sharpened, his cheeks hollowed, and his mouth tightened. Except when he was relaxed with intimates, a cold rigidity of expression gave him the look of an unapproachable autocrat, which he was becoming increasingly by the spring that ushered in the third year of the war.
    A glaucoma had blinded one eye twelve years before, and the eyestrain of his paper work, along with the nerve-strain of his tensions, caused excruciating pain in his good eye and neuralgic spasms in his facial muscles. When he was suffering his organism’s protest at the unnatural burdens his will placed upon it, he became irritable and more highhanded than usual. When the attacks had passed, the effects showed in his expression and manner. At the conference of May 15–16 he looked an overtaxed man concealing his worries behind a mask of taut, proud reserve. Although as unaware of others’ dignity as he was sensitive about his own, when not affronted Davis was punctilious in manner.
    While everything about