★ INTRODUCTION ★
After three agonizing and incredibly bloody days of fighting in the scorching heat of July, 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg limped to a close. Both Union and Confederate armies were exhausted and had been mauled almost beyond recognition. Those three days had resulted in the costliest battle in the history of the United States. The Union had been victorious but had paid a brutal price. The Confederacy, with her smaller army and population base, had suffered even more severely. Estimates of the dead and wounded varied, but could have reached fifty thousand, split almost equally between the two armies.
As Confederate General Robert E. Lee watched his defeated Army of Northern Virginia withdraw from the field, he is said to have proclaimed that the defeat was all his fault and most historians will not dispute that sad fact. Those same historians will say that he overreached. He’d attacked a larger and well-trained Union Army that held the high ground as well as having the advantage of interior lines, and was led by a general, George Gordon Meade, who understood what he had to do to stave off defeat. Historians also fault Lee for thinking that the soldiers in his army could accomplish the impossible. They couldn’t. They were superb soldiers but they were mortal.
Still, it was a close victory for the North and most Union soldiers were glad to see the Confederates go on their way back across the Potomac and into Virginia. But Abraham Lincoln did not hold that view. He fully understood that the Rebel army had to be destroyed, not defeated, before the terrible war could be concluded. He prodded Meade into following Lee and drawing him into a climactic battle before he could escape across the Potomac. Meade followed, but not aggressively. He knew that his army had suffered grievous casualties and was exhausted and hungry. In short, Meade’s army was a fragile thing to send on a chase.
In real history, Lee successfully crosses the Potomac and escapes Meade’s slowly closing clutches. Both armies take the next few months to regroup and prepare for the next round of fighting. Lincoln recognizes that Meade is not the aggressive spirit who can demolish Lee’s army. A few months later, Grant takes over. Two bloody years later, Lee surrenders to Grant at Appomattox Court House.
But what if Lee had been unable to cross the Potomac and, gambler that he was, decided to launch an all or nothing attack against the plodding Union army? And what if he had won an enormous and totally unexpected victory for the Confederacy? How would that have changed the course of the war? What impact would it have had on the presidency itself?
There was no Fourth Day of Gettysburg. It is simply my term for that critical time following the actual three days of fighting at that now immortal Pennsylvania town. And while there might have been a Sixth Indiana Mounted Infantry, I cannot find when and where it actually took the field. Therefore, it and the personnel associated with it are figments of my imagination.
And finally, a word about sexual assaults: They have occurred in every war and the Civil War was no exception. There did seem to be a degree of restraint and the assaults appeared to be fewer in number and nothing like what occurred in European or Asian wars. This was due perhaps to the fact that people on both sides were basically of the same stock, spoke the same language, wore the same clothing, and were pretty much all Christians and Americans. Although attacks on female slaves and former slaves were more common than attacks on white women, they did occur. Historians rarely talked about them and one can only speculate as to why. Despite the apparent restraint, women were always in jeopardy, especially those in the countryside and atrocities did occur.
—Robert Conroy