Was Pickett’s Charge a blunder or a calculated risk?

The short answer

• Why Lee rolled the dice again. Lee presented Davis with a difficult choice: remain behind the Rappahannock while supplies ran short, or invade while his army still had an advantage and seek a decision. Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville had given him reason to trust his soldiers. They also encouraged his belief that those men could break a Union line, a belief that discounted the protection rifled muskets and earthworks gave defenders. The third day at Gettysburg tested that confidence at great cost.
• Vicksburg as a problem of approach. A direct river approach to Vicksburg meant facing its batteries; swamps protected the approaches from the north. Grant’s winter experiments with canals and bayous failed to solve the problem. He changed the direction of attack, moving south on the opposite bank and crossing into open country to approach the fortress inland. The defenders would have to fight or endure a siege. At Donelson and later Chattanooga, too, Grant looked beyond a strong front to the system sustaining a position.
• Two societies under strain. As the armies’ needs grew, both governments turned to conscription; the Confederacy acted first, in 1862. Yet the burden was not shared equally. Northern men could pay $300 in commutation, while the Southern “twenty-negro” exemption protected certain overseers. Such provisions gave force to the complaint of a “Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight”. New York saw draft riots, and Richmond had bread riots that spring. Each society had to sustain the war amid anger over who bore its costs.

What it changed

The Confederacy is halved. Move the map forward and look at Texas, Arkansas and western Louisiana. They remain charcoal, still Confederate territory, but a Union-controlled Mississippi separates them from the eastern armies. The trans-Mississippi region has become much less able to support the main war effort across the river.

Black soldiers change the war’s meaning. In the summer of 1863 Black soldiers fought and suffered casualties at Fort Wagner, Port Hudson and Milliken’s Bend. Their service challenged Northern doubts about whether Black men would fight, and it strengthened a claim that reached beyond the battlefield. Frederick Douglass put it this way: “He who fights the battles of America may claim America as his country. And have that claim respected.” The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments would later address citizenship and voting rights. Confederate fury at Black service also had deadly consequences, as Chapter 9 shows at Fort Pillow.

The last hope becomes political. The Confederacy could still hope to win politically after July 1863. If continued fighting cost the North enough, voters might reject the war and accept negotiated independence. Battlefield endurance would then serve a political purpose. The campaigns of 1864 unfolded with the November election in view.