Robert E. Lee by Allen C. Guelzo

Author:Allen C. Guelzo [Guelzo, Allen C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

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The second heart attack was not as severe as the one he had suffered in the spring. Although at first it gave him “great pain & anxiety” and he could mount Traveller only with “fear & trembling,” he was not bedridden, and by November he could claim that he had “been through a great deal with comparatively little suffering.” The trouble was that the symptoms persisted into October, when one official, visiting Lee’s headquarters at Orange Court House, was “sorry to find General Lee quite unwell from an attack of rheumatism.”19

Not that the Army of the Potomac gave him much about which to be active. George Meade crossed the Potomac in pursuit of Lee on July 19 hoping to chase him down to Culpeper. But Meade was distracted first by the “excessive heat of the weather,” then by the need to send an entire brigade to New York City in the wake of the draft riots there, and then unsettled by unprecedented news from the west. Longstreet’s two divisions arrived to support Bragg just in time to deliver a staggering blow to the federal Army of the Cumberland at Chickamauga in mid-September. The Federals retreated in disarray to Chattanooga, where Bragg proceeded to fasten them in a siege that promised to starve them into surrender, a Vicksburg in reverse. To deal with this disaster, Lincoln dispatched Ulysses Grant to Chattanooga to retrieve the situation and pared off two of the Army of the Potomac’s infantry corps to go west and assist him. In the meantime, as Lincoln insisted, he was “unwilling now that” Meade “should now get into a general engagement” with the Army of Northern Virginia.20

It thus became Lee’s turn once more to grasp the initiative by making “a grand & daring flank movement and place his Army between Meade and the Potomac.” On October 9, Lee crossed the Rappahannock, again heading north and retracing the route that had led him to Second Bull Run a year before. Meade just as hurriedly backpedaled, and on October 14, Powell Hill repeated his overeager mistake at Gettysburg by attacking what he thought was the Army of the Potomac’s rear guard at Bristoe Station, five miles south of Manassas Junction on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad. “Guns, knapsacks, blankets, etc., strewn along the road showed that the enemy was moving in rapid retreat, and prisoners sent in every few minutes confirmed our opinion that they were fleeing in haste.” Instead, Hill walked into the fire of two federal infantry corps. Two of his brigades were “badly cut up and scattered in confusion,” and on the seventeenth Lee (“in no good humor”) called off his advance and plodded back toward the Rappahannock. The “wasted state of the country, a wilderness & a desert with food for neither man or beast,” together with the 1,300 casualties Hill had piled up, made any further movement toward the Potomac foolish.

Hill struggled to take the blame onto his own shoulders: “This is all my fault, General.

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