During the first week of July 1863, General Robert E Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia – the most successful army of the Confederate States of America – collided with the Federal Army of the Potomac under the command of Union Major General George Meade. In common military parlance, this might be referred to as a ‘meeting engagement’ – as in: one that had not been anticipated or planned for. This, however, is not entirely accurate. Lee’s movement to the north was quite well-known by the Federal forces under Meade’s recent predecessor, Major General Joseph Hooker, who had endeavoured to keep the Army of the Potomac between Lee’s forces and the eastern cities of Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. Two years into the American Civil War, what Lee most likely had in mind was to expand the theatre of conflict from the American South, which had borne the brunt of the fighting so far, against the population centres of the Northern states – and thereby, he hoped, to pressure President Abraham Lincoln and the US Congress into suing for peace.
Up to this point, Lee’s forces had experienced great success against Federal forces in the field – but at great cost to the Southern states in terms of manpower and economics. A negotiated end to the war was, in Lee’s estimation, much to be desired. General Hooker, however, saw Lee’s movements rather as an invitation to strike at the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, and so intimated. President Lincoln was not enamoured of Hooker’s ideas, nor of his overall performance as commander of the Army of the Potomac. At the end of June 1863, Hooker insisted on taking over control of the Federal garrison at Harper’s Ferry – the strategic point in West Virginia at which the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers meet – threatening to resign if this was denied. Much to Hooker’s surprise, Henry Halleck, the General in Chief of the Armies of the United States, accepted his resignation, and replaced him with Meade.
Despite Hooker’s nickname of ‘Fighting Joe’, his stunning defeat at the hands of a much smaller force commanded by Lee at the Battle of Chancellorsville (30 April-6 May 1863) had shaken Lincoln’s confidence in his abilities. With the Army of Northern Virginia now headed north into Pennsylvania, Meade had been in command for a mere three days before the opposing forces clashed on the outskirts of the town of Gettysburg. Over the next three days (1-3 July 1863), Gettysburg would see some of the fiercest fighting of the American Civil War, as an estimated 71,000 Confederate troops were pitched against a Union force of around 94,000. It would serve as the high-water mark for the Confederacy, and prove to be the turning point in the war.
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