Battle of Gettysburg

Historical record
Excerpt from "Path to the Breach" by Daniel Watie, historian

Details of Gettysburg, like much pre-Breach history, are scarce. As best I am able to determine, the battle represented a final, desperate gambit by the forces of The Wastes, then known as the Confederacy, to invade Federal territory.

The Federals had waged a successful campaign of total tar, bringing the Confederacy to the brink of economic ruin. With their backs against the wall, it fell to Robert E. Lee to swing the odds. He devised a plan that was so bold as to be near insanity - he would abandon the tactics of a defensive war, and strike north at the heart of their enemies.

Caught off guard by this move, the Federals suffered several crushing defeats. Lee's path to the north was nearly open. Only the great city of Gettysburg stood in his path.

Defending Gettysburg was a great legion of Federals, led by one General Meade, the only man to have successfully broken the lines of Stonewall Jack, another great Confederate general. Most of the historical records I have read predict that Meade would likely have defeated Lee, were it not that he was stabbed to death in his sleep the day before Lee arrived.

No record exists, that I can find, to definitively connect Lee with Meade's death. It is nevertheless difficult to imagine that they were not, particularly when supported with rumors of the Gray Ghost's involvement. Nothing concrete, just a few diary entries and one speculative headline from a newspaper published the following day. But the legendary spy-turned-assassin had worked for Lee earlier in the war, and Lee may very well have turned to him in this hour of dire need.

With Meade dead, the Federal army at Gettysburg was left leaderless. In desperation, they commissioned the only other qualified man stationed close enough to arrive before Lee attacked - one General Armstrong Custer. While no Meade, the choice of Custer seems strong, at least on paper - he had won numerous unlikely victories in his short career.

The records of the ensuing battle are a riot of conflicting reports. Some say Custer played the man and distinguished himself admirably. Others portray him as a fool, a war-monger with no taste for sound counsel. Depictions of Lee are more unified in their admiration of his brilliance as a tactician, but the specifics of his actions have been sadly lost.

Two relatively certain facts do emerge from the fog of history. First, the battle was the bloodiest the war had thus far seen, though this dubious honor would prove to be short lived. Second, that Lee ultimately overwhelmed the Federal defenses, captured and executed Custer, and burned Gettysburg to the ground.

The victory at Gettysburg dealt a serious blow to the Federal war effort. Indeed, it seems that the entire tide of the war might have shifted sharply against the North were it not for yet another Federal general, one Ulysses Grant.

Accounts of Grant depict him as ruthless, tenacious, and brilliant. He rallied the Federal troops to maintain a defense of the Federal capital that proved unbreakable for Lee. Though Lee's army was reinforced by fresh troops, inspired to join by the news of the great victory, he was unable to make his way further north.

Grant, in turn, was prevented from overt offensive action by the division of his own government. War weariness had begun to set in. Presumably the continued aggression of Lee's forces persuaded the Federal leaders to allow their troops to stay in place, but that was as far as they would go.

At this point, the war moved into a new chapter, which I have begun calling the Standoff. I will detail this period in a future update.