The move would be the height of audacity and yet Lee had good reasons for believing its success possible and probable. His grey veterans were still ragged and poorly shod. With Southern ports blockaded and no manufacturing this was inevitable, but they had proven in two years' test of fire Lee's proud boast:
"There never were such men in an army before. They will go anywhere and do anything if properly led."
This opinion was confirmed to the President by Charles Francis Adams, a veteran of his own Army of the Potomac, whom he summoned to the White House for a conference.
"I do not believe," said Adams gravely, "that any more formidable or better organized and animated force was ever set in motion than that which Lee is now leading toward the North. It is essentially an army of fighters—men who individually, or in the mass, can be depended on for any feat of arms in the power of mere mortals to accomplish. They will blanch at no danger. Lee knows this from experience and they have full confidence in him."
He could not hope to enter Pennsylvania with more than sixty-five thousand men, but his plan was reasonable. With such an army he had hurled McClellan's hundred and ten thousand soldiers back from the gates of Richmond and scattered them to the winds. With a less number he had all but annihilated Pope's men and flung them back into Washington a disorganized rabble. With thirty-seven thousand grey soldiers he had repelled in a welter of blood McClellan's eighty-six thousand at Antietam and retired at his leisure. With seventy thousand men he had crushed Burnside's host of one hundred and thirteen thousand at Fredericksburg. With sixty thousand he had just struck Hooker's grand army of a hundred and thirty thousand men and four hundred and thirty-eight guns, rolled it up as a scroll and thrown it across the Rappahannock in blinding, bewildering defeat.
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.
Lee's swift column penetrated almost to the gates of Harrisburg before Meade's advance division of twenty-five thousand men had caught up with his rear at Gettysburg on July 1st.
Seeing that a battle was inevitable, Lee drew in his advance lines and made ready for the clash. The Northern army was going into this fight with the smallest number of men relatively which he had ever met—though outnumbering him nearly two to one. The difference was that here the North was defending her own soil.