Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 04.djvu/77

Rh

March 15th, 1877.

Rev.

Secretary Southern Historical Society:


 * I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your letter enclosing a copy of a communication from ———— in which he requests information to be used in a forthcoming work, upon certain points connected with the battle of Gettysburg.

Upon them he expresses his convictions as follows: " At present, as far as my studies of this period go, my opinion on the question is this: The mistakes which brought upon the Confederate arms the repulse at Gettysburg, with its fatal consequences, were the following:

"1st. It was a mistake to invade the Northern States at all, because it stirred up their military spirit. The best chance of the Confederacy was the pecuniary exhaustion of the North, and not the exhaustion of its resources in men. The invasion was the death blow to what has been called the Copperhead party. It called under arms thousands of men who would never have enrolled otherwise, and who became experienced soldiers in '' 64'; and, moreover, it diminished for one or two years the resisting powers of the Confederate army.

"2d. If the invasion was to be undertaken, only raiding parties should have been sent until the Army of the Potomac should have been defeated. It was a great mistake to bring her on the Northern soil, where she fought ten times better than in Virginia. A real invasion—viz: the establishment of the Confederate army in Pennsylvania, with its communications well secured, was an impossibility as long as the Federal army was not crushed. The proof is, that as soon as the latter began to move, Lee, who had undertaken nothing but a raid on a too large scale, found himself so much endangered, that he was obliged to fight an offensive