June 19, 1863, The New York Herald
It appears that the detachment from General Lee’s forces which for several days was in occupation of Chambersburg has fallen back to a safer position; that Harrisburg is secure, and that the general drift of the advanced fragments of the rebel army has been turned westward, as if destined for Pittsburg or Wheeling, on the Ohio river. Unquestionably, we think the government, in creating, the other day, the Department of the Monongahela, and in placing General Brooks in command of it at Pittsburg, had some positive information of a formidable rebel movement on foot in that direction. Satisfied, however, that General Brooks, on the approach of any hostile force which can be sent against him at Pittsburg or Wheeling, will be amply prepared to meet and defeat it, we may turn our attention to the more immediate movements of General Lee.
Assuming that, with the main body of his army, he is in the Shenandoah valley, we must conclude that General Lee meditates a descent upon the rear of Washington, or calculates upon drawing away and so dividing the army of General Hooker as to render it an easy task to cut in between his detached columns and cut them up in detail. These rebel movements into Maryland and Pennsylvania may have thus been intended to divert a considerable portion of Hooker’s troops to the defence of those States; but if any such calculation was involved in these diversions it has signally failed. We have now a united and compact army against a divided and widely scattered army – an advantage which always heretofore, down to General McClellan’s march from Antietam, has been with the enemy in our military operations in Northern Virginia. We hope this advantage will not be relinquished or neglected. Viewed in any light, this Northern advance of the rebel Army of Virginia is a desperate enterprise, and furnishes the most favorable opportunity we have had during the war for demolishing that army and capturing Richmond at the same time.
The simple truth is that the crisis of the rebellion has come; that Lee could not afford to stand still; that he was compelled to move and to attempt something, however desperate, in order to revive the drooping spirits and sinking fortunes of his hopeless cause. He has thus left Richmond defenceless, South Carolina at the mercy of a few negro regiments, and Bragg powerless for any movement except a retreat; and all for the purpose of first dividing and then demolishing the army of Hooker by overwhelming numbers. Let this army, then, be held together; let fifty thousand of our militia and new recruits be thrown into the fortifications of Washington; and let the veteran soldiers of Heintzelman be joined to those of the peninsula for an advance upon Richmond, and, with the inevitable fall of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, the fall of the rebel capital will precipitate the dissolution of the army of Lee, even without another battle.
All our accounts from the rebellious States represent them as in the most forlorn and despondent condition. Confederate scrip in Richmond has come down to eleven cents on the dollar; the paper money fabric of the Davis confederacy is thus already gone to the dogs, and the planters involved have no longer any strong temptation to sustain their Confederate treasury. The Richmond Whig represents the encircling field of our anaconda operations as “ a belt of desolation,” steadily curtailing the resources of the rebellion and increasing its wants and widespread destitution. The Chattanooga Rebel, in a vision of a hundred thousand Yankee cavalry raiders moving down into the cotton States, sees nothing but universal ruin and chaos; and we believe that fifty thousand Union cavalry could bring the cotton States to submission in ten days. Col. Grierson, after having gone through he entire length of Mississippi, says that the rebellion is an empty shell; that all its strength is in its outer crust of armies and fortresses, and that inside it is utterly defenceless; that in an interior exploration of five hundred miles he met hardly an able bodied white man, except refugees, who was not attached to the rebel army.
Sink or swim, like a desperate gambler, the rebel General Lee, therefore, may be regarded as having resolved to stake his desperate fortunes upon the turn of a single card. The game is so clearly in the hands of the military authorities at Washington that, with liberal allowances for blunders, we cannot believe they will play so stupidly or negligently this time as to lose it. Put McClellan at the head of the Army of the Potomac, and the game will be won.