By the late winter of 1870, Robert E. Lee had only months to live, and he knew it. When he spoke of Gettysburg now, he spoke feelingly, and the man writing down his words was William Allan, a professor at Washington College who had once served on the staffs of Stonewall Jackson and Jubal Early. Allan had known Lee since the general became president of the college after the war, and Lee himself had invited him to teach mathematics there.
On February 19, 1870, Allan noted what Lee said about the battle that had come to define his reputation. Lee acknowledged that much had been said about risky movements. Everything was risky in our war, he told Allan. He knew often times that he was playing a very bold game, but it was the only possible one.
Lee’s mind went back to the campaign’s beginning. Before marching into Pennsylvania in 1863, he said, he had urged President Jefferson Davis to bring General Pierre G. T. Beauregard to Manassas with all the troops that could be gathered there, and to threaten Washington from that quarter.
Davis promised to do so, but it was never done. Probably the difficulties were too great. Lee did not expect much more than a demonstration from Beauregard, but a few troops there would have produced a great diversion and a great moral effect. Davis had not liked the movement northward.
He said he was afraid Lee could not get away, that the enemy would attack him while he was separated from Richmond. Lee told Allan he had no fears about getting off. The only trouble was about Richmond, but he thought that by concealing his movements and managing well, he could get so far north as to threaten Washington before the Federals could check him. Once that was done, he knew there was no need of further fears about their moving on Richmond.
He had succeeded in that part of the plan. But he failed at Gettysburg from a variety of causes. One was that J. E.
B. Stuart failed to give him information, and this deceived him into a general battle. Then, once the battle was joined, he never could get a simultaneous attack on the enemy’s position. Often thinks that if Jackson had been there, he would have succeeded, Allan recorded.
Two years earlier, on April 15, 1868, Allan had committed to paper a fuller account of what Lee said about the same campaign. In this earlier memorandum, Lee insisted he had not intended to give general battle in Pennsylvania if he could avoid it. The South was too weak to carry on a war of invasion, and his offensive movements against the North were never intended except as parts of a defensive system. He did not know the Federal army was at Gettysburg.
He could not believe it, because Stuart had been specially ordered to cover Lee’s movement and keep him informed of the position of the enemy, and Stuart had sent no word. Lee found himself engaged with the Federal army unexpectedly and had to fight. That being determined on, victory would have been won if he could have gotten one decided simultaneous attack on the whole line. This he tried his utmost to effect for three days and failed.
Ewell could not be got to act in decision. Rodes and Early and Johnson attacked and were hurt in detail. Then Longstreet and Hill and the others could not be got to act in concert. Thus the Federal troops were enabled to oppose each of our corps or even divisions in succession.
As it was, however, he inflicted more damage than he received and broke up the Federal summer campaign. When he retired from Gettysburg, he would have crossed the Potomac at once if he could have done so. The river was so swollen as to delay him, and hence his entrenchments and defensive works at Hagerstown, Maryland. He would not have been sorry if Meade had attacked him there, but he did not stop specially to invite it, but because the river was high.
Meade’s failure to attack, Lee thought, showed how he had suffered. As for going into Pennsylvania at all, Lee considered it far better than remaining at Fredericksburg. He had twice been attacked there and succeeded, but he did not wish again to remain there to risk another attempt. The position was too easily flanked, and the plan Grant afterwards pursued in the spring campaign of 1864 might have been tried at any time.
Lee thought it best to improve the advantage gained by going north, thus drawing away the enemy from the Rapidan, exciting their fears for Washington, and by watching his opportunities baffle and break up their plans. To have lain at Fredericksburg would have allowed them time to collect force and initiate a new plan on the campaign. In going into Pennsylvania, he diverted their attention, kept them thinking of Washington instead of Richmond, and got ample supplies for his army. He did not want to fight unless he could get an opportunity to hit them in detail.
He expected, however, probably to find it necessary to give battle before his return in the fall, as it would have been difficult to retreat without it. He had no idea of permanent occupation of Pennsylvania. He was troubled as to his forage, so weak was the force he could spare for this purpose. He expected, therefore, to move about, to maneuver and alarm the enemy, threaten their cities, hit any blows he might be able to do without risking a general battle, and then towards fall return near his base.
In Allan’s telling, Lee placed the blame for what followed squarely on his cavalry commander. Stuart’s failure to carry out his instructions forced the battle of Gettysburg. And the imperfect, halting way in which his corps commanders, especially Ewell, fought the battle gave victory, which as Lee said trembled for three days in the balance, finally to the foe. Lee recalled a particular moment, one day, he thought it was the second, when he consulted Ewell and told him that if he could not carry his part of the line, he would move the Second Corps to the right of Longstreet and threaten the enemy’s communications with Baltimore.
But Edward Johnson and Ewell said the line then held could be carried. Johnson rose early, however, attacked in succession, and was not able to hold any advantage. The promise of a coordinated blow dissolved into a sequence of disjointed assaults, each one broken in turn. Then Lee spoke of the criticism to which he had been subjected after the battle.
He told Allan that critics talked much of what they knew little about. He said he had fought honestly and earnestly to the best of his knowledge and ability for the cause, and had never allowed his own advantage or reputation to come into consideration. He cared nothing for those things. Success was the great matter.
He instanced General Joe Johnston’s sensitivity on that score and how wrong and unwise it was. Lee also addressed a reported conversation of Longstreet’s in which the latter stated that General Lee was under a promise to the lieutenant generals not to fight a battle in Pennsylvania. The general said he did not believe this was ever said by Longstreet, that the idea was absurd. He had never made any such promise and had never thought of doing any such thing.
Allan’s memoranda, taken together, offer a remarkable window into Lee’s own version of the Gettysburg campaign. The first memorandum from 1868 lays out the strategy behind the invasion, the reliance on Stuart’s intelligence that never came, and the three-day failure to coordinate an attack. The second, recorded less than a year before Lee’s death, adds the strain of his disagreement with Davis, his insistence that the offensive was defensive in character, and his sharp rejection of the notion that he had promised his generals he would not fight in Pennsylvania. What stands out most in these notes is how closely the narrative Lee laid out matches the way historians still describe the battle today: Stuart’s missing cavalry, Lee’s decision to fight despite having no word of the enemy, the broken coordination among Ewell, Longstreet, Hill, and Johnson, and the sense that victory hung in the balance for three days before slipping away.
Lee’s own account anticipated the standard interpretation by more than a century. Just as striking is the plan Lee described for a prolonged campaign. He expected to remain in Pennsylvania until the fall, maneuvering to threaten Washington, Baltimore, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and other cities, all while living off the land and avoiding a general battle until he had to fight one. That plan never came to pass, because Stuart’s failure brought on a battle Lee had not sought, and because his commanders could not deliver the simultaneous attack he demanded.
Lee himself left the field on the fourth day, his army intact enough to fight again, but the campaign that was meant to be a raid on the enemy’s own ground had become the battle he could not win. Allan carried these conversations out of the war and into the postwar world, where he became one of the leading voices of the Lost Cause interpretation of the conflict. His notes on Lee’s words were preserved, and later transcribed by the Encyclopedia of Virginia, which is how they survive today.
They remain what they were when Allan first set them down: the voice of the commanding general, explaining, in his own words, why the high tide at Gettysburg went out.
