Free Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg by James M. McPherson

support it. In March 1863 Lee suffered what was probably a myocardial infarction. By his own account, Lee did not feel he had fully recovered and reported himself “more and more incapable of exertion.” Piecing together Lee's own references to his health and those of his physician, these two surgeons suggest that Lee had ischemic heart disease—an inadequate supply of blood to the heart—which eventually killed him in 1870 at the age of sixty-three. “This illness,” the doctors concluded in a medical journal article, may have “had a major influence on the battle of Gettysburg.”
    Precisely
what
influence is not clear. Did illness cloud Lee's judgment? Perhaps. But what we might call the “Chancellorsville Syndrome” may have been more important than Lee's health in this regard. Lee continued to think that he could win at Gettysburg as he had won two months earlier against greater numerical odds—by attacking. He had hit the Union flank at Chancellorsville and followed it up with a frontal assault, which had worked. He intended to try similar tactics at Gettysburg. He had come to Pennsylvania in quest of a decisive victory; he was determined not to leave without trying to achieve it. He believed that Meade had weakened his center to reinforce the flanks that were attacked on July 2. With Pickett's fresh division as a spearhead, he would send three divisions against the enemy center. He wouldalso have Stuart's cavalry circle around and come in on the Union rear, while Ewell would again assail the Union right to clamp the pincers when Pickett broke through the front. With proper coordination and leadership, his invincible troops could not fail.
    Over on the Union side of the lines, Northern officers pondered the day's events and wondered what would come on the morrow. Meade called a meeting of his corps commanders in the small farmhouse that served as his headquarters. (The house is still there, about three hundred yards east of the equestrian monument to Meade just behind the scene of the next day's fighting at the climax of Pickett's charge.) Meade asked for a vote by his generals on whether to retreat or to stay and fight. They all voted to stay.
    A myth long persisted that Meade wanted to retreat, but was only persuaded to the contrary by this vote. The origins of the myth lay with two Daniels: Dan Sickles and Major General Daniel Butterfield, Meade's chief of staff, whose main claim to fame was his composition, the previous year, of the bugle call “Taps.” Both Daniels were cronies of the deposed army commander Joe Hooker, and their loyalties lay more with Hooker than with his successor. When Meade took over the army on June 28, there was not time to replace the experienced Butterfield with a new chief of staff before the battle was upon him. Butterfield later claimed that on July 2 Meade hadinstructed him to prepare orders for a retreat. What actually happened was that Meade asked Butterfield to draw a map of all the roads in the Union rear and to prepare contingency plans for a withdrawal
in case it became necessary.
This was only prudent, and Meade could be justly criticized if he had failed to prepare for every contingency.
    But Meade, like his corps commanders, wanted to stay and fight. Butterfield's motive for stating the contrary was probably a desire to discredit Meade in order to make Hooker look better. As for Sickles, while recovering from loss of his leg he smarted at criticism of his move forward to the Peach Orchard contrary to orders. He continued to believe that this move had saved the army and won the battle—and also that by precipitating the fighting on July 2, it had undercut Meade's intention to retreat.
    Sickles lived long enough to argue this case many times. Elected to Congress in 1892, he introduced the bill that created Gettysburg National Military Park in 1895. He made sure that the park boundaries included the area where his Third Corps had fought, so that visitors would always