VIII. GETTYSBURG. I. PRELUDE TO GETTYSBURG. IF, leaving the burial-place at Gettysburg from the south side, the pedestrian follow the crest of Cemetery Ridge, keeping before him the bold figure of Round Top Mountain as a beacon, he will in a few minutes' walk reach a clump of woods which, so long as a tree thereof stands, must remain the most interesting memorial-spot of the greatest battle of the war. Into this bunch of woods a few it be a score may or two of the boldest and bravest that led the van of Pickett's charging column on the 3d of July, 1863, attained. Thus far the swelling surge of invasion threw its spray, dashing itself to pieces on the rocky bulwark of Northern valor. Let us call this the high-water mark of the rebellion. But in another and larger scope Gettysburg itself is the real high-water mark of the rebellion. For not only was the invasion of Pennsylvania in a geographical sense the most forward and salient leap of the Confederate army, but it was upon that field that the star of the Confederacy, reaching the zenith, turned by swift and headlong plunges toward the nadir of outer darkness and collapse. It is with good reason, therefore, that upon this action, morally if not materially the most decisive of the war, an unexampled interest centres : that its incidents are garnered by the historian; that the fields and roads and woods of Gettysburg are carefully plotted by the map-maker; that its landscape challenges the pencil and canvas of the artist. There is, first of all, to be noted one characteristic feature that distinguishes this campaign from all other operations undertaken by Lee, whether before it or after it. This is that it was the first, last, and only campaign of invasion, formally designed as such. Anticipating that the reader will mentally traverse this statement by the objection that the Maryland campaign, culminating in Antietam, was also an invasive movement, I answer that it became so not by design but by accidental circumstances. A recurrence to the discussion of that campaign in a previous chapter will show that it was not till Lee had driven Pope within the fortifications of Washington that he conceived the project of moving into Maryland, and that even then the movement was made, not so much with any invasive intent as with the view of holding the Union army on the north side of the Potomac until the season of active operations should have passed by. The Pennsylvania campaign was planned with far other purpose. This was invasion pure and simple-a flight of the boldest quarry- an audacious enterprise, designed to transfer the seat of war from Virginia to the North country, to pass the Susquehanna, to capture Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia: in a word, to conquer a peace on the soil of the loyal States. If there has been hitherto any doubt touching the point, it disappears in the light of official records. The unpublished manuscript report of General Lee, now lying before the writer, sets this matter forever at rest. Two motives prompted the Confederates to launch out in the daring policy of invasion. Of these the one concerned a matter which is yet involved in great obscurity—to wit, the relations of the Richmond Government with European powers. If some day the secret history of Confederate diplomacy in Europe he laid bare, it will, beyond a doubt, be seen that |