by Ronald Sellers

Created on: July 01, 2010

In early July of 1863 Confederate General Robert E. Lee was a very close reflection of Southern society, the Southern economy and the Southern war machine. He was war weary. He was physically and mentally strained to the breaking point. General Lee, always the gambler, surmised that his invasion of the North would be his final gamble; he would either win or lose and even if this operation did not outright secure independence for the South, there was always the outside chance that a major victory on Northern soil would lure Great Britain or some other European power into the war on the Southern side, not for ideological reasons but for economic ones. Lee was both cosmopolitan and pragmatic. He understood that European sympathy was anti-slavery and that slavery was the polarizing lenses by which the non-Confederate world viewed the conflict. He also understood that European Nations would stand to benefit financially if the American conflict were ended and that industrial and human resources from any developed European power combined with the heretofore irresistible military prowess of the Army of Northern Virginia would crush the Union in the East just as the French intervention, once committed, had rapidly defeated the British, effectively ending the American Revolution and gaining Independence for the former British Colonies henceforth known as The United States of America.

The movement into Pennsylvania was indeed a gamble. Lee was confident in his ability to read enemy dispositions, the terrain and the tempo of battle. Until Gettysburg virtually of Lee's gambles had paid off. Yes; Lee was a gambler but not a reckless gambler; not the arrogant cavalier that some have painted him to be. He was confident in his decisions and he did ask the impossible of his soldiers, because they had delivered the impossible before, with regularity. Lee, however, also considered subtractive qualities into his decision to order a frontal assault on the Union center that day. Lee realized that the North could logistically fight along the line they now occupied all summer, whereas he would be obliged to quit the field after another two days of fighting at the most. His former second in command and Commander of the Confederate III Corp, General Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson was dead. Lee and Jackson enjoyed a working relationship that few military leaders have ever demonstrated in recorded history before or since. Lee could communicate his intent to Jackson in the most vague

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