Ok, I have not recieved an answer on whether or not I can post someone else's story here, and since I just spent 90 minutes typing it from the book I will post the story. Let me be clear, THIS IS NOT MY WORK! This is a story from the book "The Consolidated What If? edited by Robert Cowley, copyright 1999 and 2001. The story is entitled "If The Lost Order Hadn't Been Lost" by James M. McPherson, a professor of History at Princeton University. I copied it word for word from the text. Please enjoy.
Knowing that most of the residents of western Maryland were Unionists, Lee imposed tighter security on the army than when in friendly Virginia, to prevent penetration of his camps by any local civilians who hung around the edge and undoubtedly included several spies among their number. Lee instructed his adjutant to deliver Special Orders No. 191 directly to the relevant corps and division commanders. They were to read them in Chilton’s presence and commit them to memory, after which all copies of the orders were burned except one, which Lee kept in his possession. In this way there could be no leaks.
Because of an inept defense of Harpers Ferry by its Union commander, Dixon Miles, and because of McClellan’s failure to advance rapidly, the garrison surrendered 12,000 men and mountains of supplies to Jackson on September 15. Meanwhile Jeb Stuart’s cavalry performed outstanding service, bringing up stragglers and guarding the passes through the South Mountain range against the ineffectual probes of Union horsemen trying to discover the whereabouts of Lee’s main force. On September 16, McClellan arrived at Frederick, which the rebels had vacated a week earlier. By then Lee had reconcentrated his army at Hagerstown. Thousands of stragglers had rejoined the ranks, and thanks to the captures at Harpers Ferry, the Army of Northern Virginia was well equipped for the first time in two months.
After a further pause for rest, while McClellan remained in the dark about Lee’s location and intentions, the rebels moved north into Pennsylvania. They brushed aside local militia and the outriders of Union cavalry who finally located them. Spreading through the rich farmland of Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley like locusts, Lee’s army – now 55,000 strong – was able to feed itself better than it had in Virginia. On October 1, the van reached Carlisle. Lee sent a strong detachment of cavalry and part of Jackson’s swift-marching infantry twenty miles farther to the railroad bridge at Harrisburg, which they burned on October 3. The Confederate commander also sent his Maryland scouts back into their home state to locate the Army of the Potomac. They found it near Emmitsburg, just south of the Pennsylvania border, marching northward with a determined speed that suggested McClellan finally meant to find Lee and fight him.
Those scouts also reported to Lee that they had discovered a series of hills and ridges around a town named Gettysburg where numerous roads converged, enabling an army of concentrate there quickly and fortify the high ground. On October 4 Lee ordered his army to Gettysburg. They arrived there only hours before the enemy, and by October 6 the Army of Northern Virginia was dug in on the hills south of town,
McClellan came under enormous pressure from Washington to attack the invaders. “Destroy the rebel army,” Lincoln wired him. From the Union position on Seminary Ridge, a reluctant McClellan surveyed the Confederate defenses from the Round Tops on the south along Cemetery Ridge northward to Cemetery and Culps Hills. McClellan evolved a tactical plan for a diversionary attack on the morning of October 8 against General James Longstreet’s corps on the Confederate right. When Lee shifted reinforcements to that sector, the Yankees would launch their main assault through the peach orchard and wheatfield against the Confederate left center on low ground just north of Little Round Top, held by Jackson’s corps. If successful, this attack would pierce a hole in the Confederate line, giving Union cavalry massed behind the center a chance to exploit the breakthrough. Napoleonic in conception, this plan had a crucial defect: It left Union flanks denuded of cavalry.
At dawn the Union I and IX Corps carried out the diversionary attack on Cemetery and Culps Hills. Lee saw through the feint and refused to shift his reserves, A.P. Hill’s light division, to that sector. Longstreet held firm so when the Union II, VI, and XII Corps attacked through the peach orchard and wheatfield, they found Jackson ready for them. Fierce fighting produced a harvest of carnage unprecedented even in this bloody war, with neither side gaining any advantage.
About 3:00p.m., Stuart reported to Lee that the Union right was uncovered. Lee immediately ordered Hill to take his division south around Round Top and attack the Union flank in the wheatfield. Undetected by the Union cavalry, which was massed more than a mile to the north, Hill’s 6,000 men burst from the woods and boulders of Devil’s Den screaming the rebel yell. Many of them wore blue uniforms captured at Harpers Ferry, which increased the surprise and confusion among Union troops of the XII corps. Like rows of falling dominoes, the exhausted and decimated Union brigades collapsed. With perfect timing the rest of Jackson’s corps counterattacked, smashing the fragments of Union regiments that had rallied to resist Hill. As the fighting rolled in echelon toward the North, Longstreet’s corps joined the counterattack at 4:30 p.m.
McClellan had kept his favorite V Corps in reserve. Steadied by Brigadier General George Sykes’s division of regulars, they held back the yelling rebels for a brief time. But as the sun dipped below the South Mountain range, the V corps also broke. In a desperate attempt to rally them, McClellan rode to the front. “Soldiers!” he shouted. “Stand fast! I will lead you!” As he drew his sword, a minie ball smashed his skull and toppled him dead from his horse. Word of McClellan’s death spread like lightning through the thin and scattered ranks of Yankee units that were still fighting. The last remnants of resistance winked out. Thousands of dejected bluecoats surrendered; thousands more melted away into the dusk, every man for himself. The Army of the Potomac ceased to exist as a fighting force.
News of the Battle of Gettysburg resounded through the land and across the Atlantic. “My God! My God!” exclaimed Lincoln in the White House. “What will the country say?” It said plenty, all of it bad. Peace Democrats redoubled their denunciations of the war as a wicked failure. “All are tired of this damnable tragedy,” they cried. “Each hour is but sinking us deeper into bankruptcy and desolation.” Even staunch patriots and Lincoln supporters like Joseph Medill, editor of the Chicago Tribune, gave up hope of winning the war. “An armistice is bound to come during the year ‘63” he wrote. “The rebs can’t be conquered by the present machinery." Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. of the 20th Massachusetts, which had suffered 75 percent casualties at Gettysburg, wrote in November the “the army is tired with its hard and terrible experience. I’ve pretty much made up my mind that the South have achieved their independence.”
In Kentucky, Union and Confederate forces had clashed at the indecisive Battle of Perryville on the same day (October 8) as the Battle of Gettysburg. Encouraged by the news from Pennsylvania, Confederate commanders Braxton Bragg and Edmond Kirby- Smith decided to continue their Kentucky campaign. Having already occupied Lexington and Frankfort, they began a drive toward the prize of Louisville as the Union army under Major General Don Carlos Buell, discouraged by the reports of McClellan’s defeat and death, fell back listlessly. In Pennsylvania, after a pause for consolidation of his supply lines, Lee began an advance toward Baltimore. Newly emboldened pro-Confederate Marylanders openly affirmed their allegiance. Although reserve troops manning the formidable defenses ringing Washington dissuaded Lee from attacking the capital, there was no Union field army capable of resisting Lee’s movements.
Hesitant to goad last-ditch resistance by attacking a major city, however, Lee paused to await the outcome of Northern congressional elections on November 4. The voters sent a loud and clear message that they wished the war to end, even on terms of Confederate independence. Democrats won control of the next House of Representatives and the peace wing established firm control of the party.
At almost the moment the election results became known, the British minister to the United States, Lord Lyons, presented Secretary of State Seward an offer signed by the governments of Great Britain, France, Russia and Austria-Hungary to mediate an end to the war on the basis of separation. “We will not admit the division of the Union at any price.” Seward responded. “There is no possible compromise.” Very well, responded Lyons. In that case Her Majesty’s Government will recognize the independence of the Confederate States of America. Other European governments will do the same. “This is not a matter of principle or preference,” Lyons told Seward, “but of fact.”
Despite Seward’s bluster, he was a practical statesman. He was also a student of history. He knew that an American victory at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777 had brought French diplomatic recognition of the fledgling United States, followed by French assistance and intervention that proved crucial to the achievement of American independence. Would history repeat itself? Would French and British recognition of the Confederacy be followed by military assistance and intervention – against the blockade for example? As they pondered these questions and absorbed the results of the congressional elections, while Confederate armies stood poised for attack outside Baltimore and Louisville, Lincoln and Seward concluded that they had no choice.
On a gloomy New Year’s Day 1863, a melancholy Lincoln called Republican congressional leaders and state governors to the White House. “This is not the duty I had hoped to discharge today,” he told them. “Last July 1 I decided to issue a proclamation freeing the slaves in the rebel states, to take effect today,” he continued sadly. “There is no chance of that now. Would my word free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel States?” Instead, “We are faced with a situation in which the whole world seems to be against us. Last summer, after McClellan was driven back from Richmond, I said that in spite of that setback, ‘I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me.’ Gentlemen, the people expressed their opinion in the last election. The country has forsaken us, and the next Congress will be against us. Whether or not we admit we are conquered, we must admit that we have failed to conquer the rebellion. Today I will issue a proclamation accepting the insurgents’ offer of an armistice. Secretary Seward will accept the good offices of foreign powers for President’s voice choked as he concluded: “Gentlemen, the United States no longer exists as one nation, indivisible.”
