Robert E. Lee & the Battle of Gettysburg with Allen Guelzo | Pivotal Battles in American History #2

0:00 what if in fact lee had been victorious at gettysburg if he had i think there’s a of strong possibility that the army of the potomac which had met with so many defeats chancellorsville fredericksburg i think the army of the potomac might very easily have gone to pieces like napoleon’s army after

0:21 waterlow [Music] hi this is tony williams senior fellow at bri and we’re pleased to bring you another episode of the scholar talk series on pivotal battles in american history for this episode we’re very honored to have historian alan gilzo to speak with us about the battle of gettysburg

0:41 the guiding question for the series is how did this battle shape the outcome of its war and why was it pivotal in american history by way of introduction professor allen galzo is a senior research scholar in the council of humanities at princeton university and director of the james madison initiative in politics and

1:02 citizenship he’s the author and editor of a dozen best-selling books and has won numerous awards including the prestigious lincoln prize three times he’s the author of the newly released robert e lee a life and the battle of or just gettysburg the last invasion both of which will inform our discussion

1:25 of the battle of gettysburg and of the civil war alan i want to thank you very much for joining us well tony it’s good to be talking to you again excellent thank you well let’s jump right in um the subject of your new book robert e lee was a scion as you describe of an illustrious family served as an engineer

1:45 after west point and contributed to the victory in the mexican war which was a war that helped shape many events that led up to the civil war so can you tell us a little bit about lee’s background and and how those events did eventually lead to civil war robert e lee just to give you the basic

2:06 skeleton outline was born in 1807 at stratford hall on the northern neck of virginia which had been the ancestral home of many of the lee family a family which had roots in virginia back into the 17th century he attends west point he is class of 1829 graduates second in

2:28 his class when i say second he missed graduating first really by a couple of digits it was like one of those batting average contests where you have to take it out to the fourth digit to determine who the winner is and is posted to the elite corps of engineers and spends

2:48 a good deal the rest of his professional life in the army’s corps of engineers doing really core of engineering things he mainly is devoted to for fortification construction and as a specialty within that uh coastal fortification and coastal fortification is something of a specialty within uh that kind of

3:10 engineering which requires a great deal of imagination and it has to be said that lee was a very good engineer and a very dedicated engineer he also was a very frustrated engineer because promotion in the army as all and in the corps of engineers was sclerotic

3:31 to say the least the great advantage of army employment was that it was guaranteed and secure the downside was that it was slow and lee experiences this and it’s a source of great frustration he would like to move up when the mexican war comes he sees this as an opportunity and he grabs it he’s

3:51 sent off on one engineering uh assignment which doesn’t look terribly promising but then he is seconded to the staff of winfield scott winfield scott is about to mount one of the most adventurous amphibious expeditions in american military history and that is the joint army navy landing

4:12 at veracruz on the eastern coast of mexico lee is immediately ticketed by by scott as an up-and-coming person and becomes a major part of scott’s staff uh as a major assistance to scott in the capture of veracruz a company scott’s

4:32 invasion of mexico passed the battle at sarah gordo up to the battles around mexico city which eventually end in the surrender of mexico city and the end of the mexican war with the treaty of the guadalupe hidalgo all through it lee is very much winfield scott’s right-hand man and scott would later say years later

4:54 that all of the plaudits he scott won in the mexican war were really due to uh the advice that he garnered from robert e lee but the war is over lee goes back to doing coastal fortification with with corps of engineers is not terribly exciting and in fact it gets it gets if anything it gets worse because

5:14 in 1852 he’s assigned to become superintendent of west point now i know it sounds glamorous on the on the surface of it in 1852 it wasn’t uh at this point west point is still very much a core of engineering school which means that even though lee is the superintendent he has virtually no discretion about what to do

5:37 he is micromanaged for three years by the chief engineer in washington dc and finally at the end of it he is only too happy to grab an opportunity to transfer out of the corps of engineers and accept a commission as lieutenant colonel of the second cavalry in texas now texas is not what you would call in

5:59 those days an ideal posting it gives you an idea of some degree of his frustration that he’s willing to accept this but off to texas he goes as lieutenant colonel the second cavalry and there he really does nothing more than than chase uh comanches and uh various outlaws

6:19 around the countryside to no very particular purpose he never really fires a shot in anger himself uh it is not until 1861 that things begin to warm up in 1861 he’s recalled to washington by winfield scott ostensibly to help rewrite the army regulations but really scott wants him in washington

6:41 because the country is splitting apart seven southern states have seceded from the union there is a possibility of conflict scott wants lee and washington because scott’s feeling is that if anyone should take command of federal forces in dealing with secession it should be robert e lee

7:01 the firing on fort sumter takes place and indeed abraham lincoln puts him to process uh an invitation to lee it comes through old francis preston blair uh one of the great political wire pullers of washington blair sits down with washington with lee and basically says to lee president lincoln would like you to take command of the armies in the

7:23 field and lee says no which is a great surprise but lee explains it this way i cannot raise my hand against my native state now virginia at that point had not yet seceded but it was hovering on the brink of doing so

7:45 and lee simply says i can’t i can’t do that what lee does in fact is not only refuse that invitation he then goes home and writes out a letter of resignation from the army and he might have stopped right there but at that same moment he receives an invitation from the state authorities

8:08 the virginia state authorities in richmond to come there and help them oversee the organization of state forces and he agrees to do that so he goes to richmond he is commissioned as a brigadier general of virginia forces when virginia joins the confederacy he’s made a general in the confederate army and from that point he takes off he

8:29 becomes general lee at that point he becomes the man who is the victor in the peninsula campaign of 1862 victor’s second bull run escapes near destruction at antietam victor at chancellorsville in fredericksburg near victor at gettysburg fights things out

8:50 against ulysses grant in 1864 in the overland campaign undergoes the siege of richmond and finally surrenders to ulysses grant at appomattox courthouse on april 9 1865. and that is usually where people think the bookend occurs in lee’s life actually it’s not uh because

9:11 he’s offered and it’s a very strange offer he’s he’s made the offer by washington college in the upper shenandoah to become their president it was an act of desperation on their part this was a small college which hardly hardly had a pulse uh at the end of the war the surprising thing is that lee accepts

9:32 he becomes president of washington and to everybody’s surprise turns into a remarkably successful college president completely revamps the curriculum he gets starts moving people away from the traditional greek and latin classics curriculum to a more vocationally oriented curriculum with engineering and journalism and business

9:55 he is enormously successful in raising money and in bulking up the student body to the point that by the time of his death in 1870 he has made washington college uh an educational powerhouse on a par with the university of virginia those last five years of his life were really the most successful years

10:15 of his life and curiously he shocked one student but he said the great mistake of my life was taking a military education in other words i should have been doing something like this all of my life so so robert e lee then who had suffered over the years increasingly from heart trouble heart attacks finally succumbs to a stroke and a heart

10:37 attack and dies on october 12 1870 and is buried there on the campus of the college which then renames itself as washington and lee university all right well thank you for that that great overview i’d really like to to dial in a little bit on on on that very controversial decision about lee joining

10:59 the confederacy um you examined for for several pages in the book the copious and yet conflicting testimony about that decision so my simple question is why did he join the confederacy well i think the answer has to be taken in stages a lot of interpreters of lee had wanted this to be as douglas sotholl freeman once put it the decision he had

11:22 to make the decision he was made to make and i don’t really think that’s the case at all uh i think that lee found himself staring at not just one decision but several decisions and each one of them was a swamp for one thing robert e lee had been

11:43 serving in the united states army for 30 years when he confronted this crisis and he understood that secession from the union was a dodge the southern slave states which couldn’t abide the election of abraham lincoln and were determined to break up the union rather than tolerate lincoln’s

12:05 presidency tried to explain what they were doing as succession they argued uh six ways to sunday that this is somehow constitutional uh nobody but they really believed that and robert e lee didn’t believe it he understood secession was was uh a phony argument he characterized what

12:26 they were doing pretty frankly as revolution not success that was the word he used but what is going on is revolution but characterizing it that way was the easy part the hard part was going to come if he was expected to do something about it and of course that’s what he was that’s what the francis preston blair offer was

12:47 about and that was where he had to make the first decision because lee balks at that point lee makes it clear to blair he’s not he’s not refusing this offer out of any interest in slavery he says to blair if i could free all of the south slaves in order to avert the crisis being posed by secession i’d do it i would do it

13:10 yet he says i can’t draw my sword against my native state against virginia which is a little odd and there are odd things about this decision process that poke out at every point he says he couldn’t raise his sword against virginia that’s odd because actually virginia had not yet seceded when he has this interview with um

13:32 with blair not only had it not seceded but the secession vote that the virginia secession convention does take uh actually has to go through a referendum process that will not conclude until the 25th of may so strictly speaking he is not in a position where he necessarily has to draw his sword

13:54 against virginia because virginia’s not out of the union yet the odder thing still is lee talks about virginia as his native state but the truth is he hadn’t lived in virginia for most of his life he was born on the northern neck but he very quickly when he’s when he’s eight years old

14:15 the family moves from stratfor to alexandria well today alexandria is in virginia but when they made that move alexandria at that part point was still part of the district of columbia and would remain such until the 1830s so growing up in alexandria he’s not growing up in virginia he’s growing up

14:35 in the district of columbia and then he goes off to college at west point he goes to new york his next assignment as soon as he graduates from uh from west point is to georgia uh he puts in some time at fortress monroe which is virginia but it’s the tip of virginia into the chesapeake

14:57 from there goes to st louis spends a number of years in st louis rebuilding the the waterfront uh from saint louis uh he is going to go to new york to become post-engineer at fort hamilton on the on the tip of long island spends six years at uh at fort hamilton

15:19 and from fort hamilton goes into the mexican war comes out of the mexican war goes to baltimore to begin the construction of fort carroll then from baltimore to new york again as superintendent of west point and then a superintendent of west point to texas until 1861. so there are intervals when he is living

15:42 in virginia on leave but most of his life has really lived in other places in fact he take if you add up the exact amounts of time i think it’s safe to say he probably spent more of his life in new york than he spent in virginia so that’s an odd

16:03 argument as well how how do you untangle these arguments well i think you untangled in this way first of all he himself may not have lived all that long in virginia but he did have an enormous swathe of relatives in virginia and these were relatives who had come to the rescue of his family when it was on

16:24 hard times in alexandria these were people he owed big time and when i say relatives i don’t mean just someone that he exchanged a christmas card with now these were these were relatives that owned property he had lived there with his f with his mother and his siblings for four or six months at a time out of the year now

16:44 these were second homes so these were people he owed a great deal and there were a lot of them i think it could be safely said that if robert e lee had thrown a brick down a street in alexandria he would have hit one of his relatives uh he’s a man with it’s well it’s been reckoned that he he had 80 first cousins that’s that’s a pretty thick

17:06 network of relatives and when he says he can’t raise his hand against virginia i think that’s the virginia he’s talking about the virginia of that family but there’s another complication that also enters into this and that’s arlington uh lee called arlington i mean today when we think of arlington we think of the national cemetery

17:27 but before it was a national cemetery it was arlington house and he called arlington home for a lot of his adult life yet it was never actually his property uh he is there because he married into the family of george washington park custis who did own arlington

17:48 and for that reason robert and mary custis lee and their seven children uh spend a good deal of uh a good deal of time there especially mary robert will go off to these various postings robert goes off to texas mary stays in arlington mary was as wedded to arlington her parents home as she was to her husband it seems it’s a really obsessive

18:10 relationship in 1857 lee’s father-in-law old george washington park custis dies but in his will custis cuts robert out of the succession it a it’s a bizarre document to say the least and this is only one one

18:32 of several bizarre parts of it but he cuts robert out of the succession uh mary gets a life interest in leading living there but the property itself is deeded over robert’s head to robert’s eldest son george washington custis lee custis lee was so scandalized by what

18:53 his grandfather had done that he actually offered to deed the property over to his father but his father said no no no no no this is what your grandfather wanted we’ll we’ll stick with us but when lee is put to this situation in 1861 what he has to calculate is what is going to happen to my family

19:14 what is going to happen to the property that is supposed to come to them if i make a decision in a certain way if i decide to accept command of the union armies doubtless virginia will confiscate arlington sure it will because arlington sits on this bluff on the on the overlooking the potomac river i mean it’s the perfect place to

19:36 put artillery to bombard the national capital people were calling in richmond for the uh seizure and fortification of arlington so if he makes a move like that kiss goodbye to arlington and all the all the other custis properties that would have come to his children on the other hand if

19:58 he goes to richmond or if he declares neutrality then maybe there won’t be a war there won’t be a federal occupation of arlington and he can squeeze through the cracks and preserve the property for his family

20:18 and in large measure i think that’s what he intends to do because after he declines the offer from old f p blair uh he writes out a resignation of his commission in the army and all the appearances are that he’s going to stay neutral try to stay out of the whatever conflict is coming at this

20:40 point nobody knows what kind of conflict is coming but then he’s visited by two representatives of governor lecher of virginia and he agrees to go with them to virginia to oversee the organization of virginia’s state military forces he goes to richmond he never comes back

21:00 to arlington as this becomes the big mistake of his life and it’s really the third decision that he makes and that third decision is to heed the invitation of the governor of virginia once again bear in mind what are his motivations here a lot of the

21:21 evidence suggests that lee goes to richmond with a view towards thinking that he’s going to act as some kind of peace broker because all along in this process in the months prior to april of 1861 people had talked incessantly about the union breaking up about it organizing itself into one two

21:43 three four five different confederacies but then after a period of time everyone cooling off and getting together in a constitutional convention and reconstructing the union that’s by the way that’s where the term reconstruction first gets used and lee there’s evidence that lee saw himself as being part of a process like

22:05 that that he would help to guide the reunification process once the secession fervor had worn off what you see the man doing is taking step by step by step by step further and further into the swamp and by may of 1861 it’s clear there isn’t going to be any reconciliation it’s clear that the virginia is going to

22:26 unite itself to the confederacy at that point he actually writes to his wife and says well maybe it’s maybe i should just resign now maybe i should just retire and wash my hands of all this but it it by that point it’s too late so he finds himself now an advisor to confederate president jefferson davis and a confederate general

22:46 but it’s the kind of process you watch him going through and it looks like he’s shadow walking always thinking that the result is going to be different but the result never is different so it’s not a one-off one-time dramatic movie edit decision and it’s certainly not as freeman made

23:07 it look the decision he was doomed to make from the very beginning in his life it’s it’s an incremental step-by-step getting sucked further and further in kind of decision and my next question is lee and his army seemed to have the initiative uh and the north had sagging morale and he eventually invaded pennsylvania in 1863

23:30 so can you describe the war in the east since antietam and and widely invaded the north when you watch robert e lee in action as a general bear in mind that this man learned the practicalities of real war under winfield scott in mexico

23:52 and the primary lesson he learns from scott in mexico is the importance of the continuous offensive even if the numbers are not on your side take the offensive keep the initiative in your hands keep moving onwards because that is what will eventually demoralize an enemy and allow you to

24:13 destroy the anime army that is the rule by which lee took his army of northern virginia across the potomac in 1862 and probably would have taken it into pennsylvania at that point there might have been a battle of gettysburg in september of 1862. instead there’s the famous incident of

24:33 the lost orders the terrible intelligence coup which allows the federal commander general mcclellan to understand what lee’s plans are results in the battle of antietam and lee is forced to retreat into virginia but lee never loses sight of the need for taking the war northwards

24:54 lee understood and i think he understood this better almost than any other confederate leader that the southern confederacy’s resources were too meager to last for a 15-round heavyweight bout with the north he’d lived in the north quite long enough to know what the north’s resources were

25:14 like and he knew that the south could not compare to those if the south was to win its independence it would need to score an early knockout in the early rounds a surprise knockout and the only way to do that would be get across the potomac get up into pennsylvania and either win a battle there or even if you didn’t fight a battle at

25:35 all just run around the countryside showing how the lincoln administration was incapable of defending its own home turf that would then have a political knock-on effect it would convince northerners that the lincoln administration was incapable of defending them and that the war really ought to be

25:56 brought to an end because there is really no way to subdue the confederates and that’s the rationale behind the invasion first in 1862 and then ultimately the thrust north into pennsylvania in 1863. i mean you have to figure in the fall elections of 1862. lincoln has just issued the emancipation

26:18 proclamation and he is punished for it the republican party loses 34 seats in the house of representatives it loses two key northern governorships uh in new york and new jersey that’s 1862. in the summer of 1863 there are two more key northern governorships up for grabs

26:41 pennsylvania and ohio and both have serious democratic anti-administration contenders clement vollandigan ohio and george woodworth in pennsylvania if lee is able to score a victory in pennsylvania or even just use pennsylvania as a base of operations that the union army can’t nudge him from

27:03 then in october when the gubernatorial elections take place in ohio and pennsylvania people will turn out and vote for democrats to vote for the end of the war and if you have a corps of states at the center of the north new york new jersey ohio pennsylvania with democratic anti-lincoln governors they’re going to fold their arms and say we’re not

27:24 cooperating with this bloodshed anymore this is a useless war which is being foisted on us by radical abolitionists we want an end to this war we’re not sending any more troops we’re not uh permitting any more supplies to go uh to lincoln’s army you have to open negotiations with the confederates well once you opened negotiations with the

27:45 confederacy they weren’t going to go back to shooting and the independence of the confederacy would virtually be conceded that was linked that was lee’s strategy and he saw that that making war in effect on the political will of the north was the way for the south to win the civil war

28:07 right um excellent um so can you describe the the course of events in these fateful three days over the battle of gettysburg lee crosses the potomac substantially ahead of the federal army of the potomac

28:28 and his his army arcs northwards through the cumberland valley all the way up to the susquehanna river just across from the pennsylvania capital at harrisburg but his real goal is not harrisburg his real goal is to make the army of the potomac chase him so far and so fast

28:48 that it becomes winded exhausted disorganized and disconnected and when it does then he can turn and concentrate pick off pieces of the federal army one by one and defeat them in detail and that is what he has in view as a military plan he puts his finger down on

29:08 gettysburg on a map and says this is where we will probably meet the federal army and defeat it well he was close he planned to concentrate his army at gettysburg on the 1st of july and then wait for this straggling federal army to come up and get its nose bloodied piece

29:28 by piece what what put that out of kilter was that pieces of the federal army got to gettysburg first got there on june 30th and were prepared to hold on to gettysburg as tightly as they could until the rest of the army at the potomac could come up and support them this surprised and disconfidently

29:51 but there weren’t that many federals holding gettysburg so he decides to push ahead with his plan and push the federals out of gettysburg which he succeeds in doing and in the process he basically ruins two of the seven army corps of the federal army of the potomac he ruins the first corps he ruins the 11th corps he

30:12 probably would have mocked them up completely but for the fact that his army had been marching all day fighting all day dusk was coming on because it was an overcast day it was coming up dusk was coming in somewhat early um the federal forces managed to regroup on cemetery hill south of the town and lee’s feeling is all right well

30:32 we’re not going to try and push ahead now let’s regroup and tomorrow morning we’ll finish them off and be in a position to deal with the next parts of the federal army as it comes up the road well that was a mistake because by the next day the other parts of the federal army had in fact gotten to gettysburg

30:52 and when he launches an attack on july 2nd to his surprise he finds out that there are three more pieces of the army of the potomac in place in his path even so his attack almost succeeds on july 2nd it really comes within inches of a complete destruction of the army of the potomac

31:13 so his solution is that all right tomorrow we will finish them off tomorrow july third he wasn’t entirely wrong either because by the morning of july third of those seven infantry corps in the federal army of the potomac basically five of them were out of action one of them was in being held in reserve and the other one

31:34 only had about parts of two divisions prepared to defend the rear of cemetery hill whereas lee had an entirely fresh untested division that belonging to george pickett so on george on on july 3 he launches george pickett’s division along with some supporting troops at these remnants holding on to cemetery

31:55 hill and it fails it fails uh against every expectation and at that point lee realizes he he has no more where with all to continue this fight and begins a withdrawal uh back across the potomac into virginia and gettysburg

32:16 very much to many people’s surprise turns out to be a union victory people often asked after the battle and continue to ask to the to this day what caused the confederacy what caused robert e lee to lose the battle of gettysburg when it seemed like he had everything going for him george pickett answered that question

32:37 and i think he gave probably the best answer that could be given i think the yankees had something to do with it it was a tenacious fight on the part of the army of the potomac and that is really the best explanation i think that people can come up with and so uh my my final question is going

32:58 to be simply why was the battle of gettysburg pivotal to the outcome of the civil war and to american history broadly well it was pivotal but it was also not pivotal uh let me at least do the pivotal part first what if in fact lee had been victorious at gettysburg

33:18 if he had i think there’s a of strong possibility that the army of the potomac which had met with so many defeats chancellorsville fredericksburg i think the army of the potomac might very easily have gone to pieces like napoleon’s army after waterloo it had just been defeated so many times

33:39 under so many generals that it just seemed like it was no longer worth it some parts of it would have cohered but other parts of it would simply have walked away as a as from a lost game at that point lee would have been able to threaten baltimore washington philadelphia there would probably have been political

33:59 uprisings in the north demanding an end to the war i mean as it was only two weeks after the battle of gettysburg there’s a major draft riot in new york city that turns new york city upside down uh new york city is not the only place where riots like that take place explain we call them riots well yeah they were draft riots they

34:21 were also racial pogroms uh but the fundamental message was we’re not going to be we don’t want to fight this war anymore this war is hopeless it’s lost we might as well admit it and if lee had been victorious at gettysburg lincoln might well have had no choice politically speaking either to resign or to have opened those negotiations

34:42 with the confederacy as it was jefferson davis had sent his vice president alexander stevens in a in a messenger boat into the chesapeake with a request to come up to washington now the ostensible request was to discuss prisoner exchanges but a lot of people suspected that what

35:03 uh alexander stevens had up his sleeve uh was some kind of document from davis for lincoln saying all right let’s let’s open negotiations that might well have happened if lee had been victorious at gettysburg the fact that lee is not victorious at gettysburg means that nothing of that happens so that is a pivotal battle

35:23 and in fact the military fortunes of the confederacy go nowhere but into a slow slide downhill after that but here’s the other side of the coin in some senses it wasn’t pivotal because the civil war is going to go on for another 22 months and gettysburg turns out not to be pivotal

35:46 basically for two reasons one is lee does escape george gordon mead the commander of the army of the potomac at gettysburg was a cautious soul he was a democrat politically who was convinced that the lincoln administration was interested in nothing

36:06 but embarrassing him and taking credit for itself so he was not going to shiny out on any strategic limbs he does not pursue lee in the way that let’s say the duke of wellington pursues napoleon after waterloo there’s none of this up guards and adam in uh in george

36:27 meade mead is is content to let lee get across the potomac and that’s the end of the campaign this infuriates lincoln but there’s not too much lincoln could do about it because look here’s a general who won a battle here’s a federal general finally won a battle what is he going to do punish him so there’s not too much there’s not too

36:47 much wiggle room politically speaking for uh for president lincoln at that point but it does mean the war is going to go on that’s going to drag on through 1864 it’s going to drag on through the overland campaign it’s going to drag on really right up until lincoln is re-elected in november of 1864. and it’s when lincoln is reelected that finally the handwriting is on the wall

37:09 for the confederacy people often ask me what i think the turning point of the civil war was and they expect me to say gettysburg and i don’t i tell them turning point of the civil war appomattox courthouse and i say this uh partly to be uh snarky but but also partly in in a serious

37:31 frame because in the summer of 1864 the campaigns that lincoln was responsible for were going so poorly that lincoln himself did not expect to be re-elected if he was dumped by the voters in november of 1864. the new president would be george

37:52 mcclellan and mcclellan would from a variety of forces operative on him from the democratic party uh have been forced to come to some kind of negotiations with the confederacy and as soon as you started those negotiations that was the end that would mean the independence of the confederacy so even though gettysburg is a pivotal

38:13 battle in preventing something like that from happening in 1863 it’s not quite pivotal enough to have prevented something like that from happening in 1864 and we really don’t get the handwriting on the wall until after the election of lincoln and then it becomes clear that the confederacy is really on the ropes

38:34 excellent alan galzo it’s an honor as always i want to thank you for joining us well it’s very good to be talking to you again thank you very much and thank you all for joining this episode of scholar talks please check out our other installments of pivotal battles in american history on the battles of saratoga and midway as well as our

38:55 previous series on the cold war and the presidency as well as black intellectuals in the african-american experience thank you very much for joining us