From every prisoner taken at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville he knew
the Northern army was discouraged and heartsick. That he could march his
ragged men, the flower of Southern manhood, into Pennsylvania and clothe
and feed them on her boundless resources he couldn't doubt. Virginia was
swept bare, and the demoralization of Hooker's army with the profound
depression of the North left his way open.
To say that Lee's invasion, as it rapidly developed under such
conditions, struck terror to the Capital of the Republic is to mildly
express it. The movement of his army from Culpepper in June indicated
clearly that his objective point was Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. If the
Capital of the State fell, nothing could withstand the onward triumphant
rush of his army into Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington.
To meet the extraordinary danger the President called for one hundred
thousand militia for six months' emergency service from the five States
clustering around Pennsylvania. And yet as the two armies drew near to
each other, General George Meade, the new Union Commander who had
succeeded Hooker, had but one hundred and five thousand against Lee's
sixty-two thousand. So terrible had been the depression following
Chancellorsville, so rapid the desertions, so numerous the leaves of
absence, that the combined forces of the Army of the Potomac with the
State troops under the new call reached only this pitiful total.
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