In this Blogger’s opinion, the Confederacy was doomed once General Stonewall Jackson was killed, by force majeure, by his own victorious troops, by mistake, after the Battle of Chancellorsville. This Blogger believes that if Jackson had been in tactical command of Lee’s strategic vision at Gettysburg, as he would have been, the South would have won. Jackson’s death is analogous to the Gods interfering in the Trojan War; a Divine Act which altered History. Pickett’s Charge was 12,500 Southerners, the crème de la crème of  Southern manhood, Virginian cavaliers, and North Carolinian Tar heels(including Rev. Billy Graham’s grandfather) charging across an open field, almost a mile wide, into the vengeful waiting guns and cannons of the Army of the Potomac, sheltered by a wall. Slaveholders and sharecroppers joined together in a bid for Destiny’s favor.  Southern Slavery did not produce poets. It is remarkable to this Blogger how few great writers the South produced under slavery. The best a

    The Battle of Gettysburg was the greatest clash of arms on American soil, in American History. On the first day alone, July 1, 1863, Union forces lost 9,000 casualties; the Confederates lost 6,000 casualties, in one day, in the first day of battle. The Union forces were led by Maj. General George Meade, a steady, unimaginative,    and uninspiring general. He commanded one of the most resilient armies in history, the Army of the Potomac. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia was commanded by one of the great generals in American arms, the hero of the Mexican-American War, General Robert E. Lee. It was an army fresh from the greatest feat of arms on American soil, the American Cannae, Chancellorsville, in which Lee had subdivided his inferior force into three parts and defeated the vast army of the North. General Lee, flushed with victory, had invaded the North, into Pennsylvania, on his way to Philadelphia or New York City; where there was a large pro-Southern community of Irish