this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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The north was so busy clapping the south in the west. They got a little distracted in the east. That dream about gettysburg was about as real as Hittlers dream about Stalingrad.
iirc the dream wasn't to secure Gettysburg, it was to destroy the Army of the Potomac.
It wasn't as easy a call as it sounds now that we know the disposition of both armies. Longstreet's assessment was more accurate about how much the rate of fire had increased the lethality of the kill zone over the past decades, and Lee should have listened to him. I suspect Lee was mostly guided by his sense of how it would impact the morale of each army - because that was crucial to which army would break first. He might also have overestimated the effectiveness of his artillery. Turns out he was wrong.
Iirc the artillery dug into the muddy ground and ended up mostly over shooting the union lines. But the other reality they were dealing with was the advent of industrial warfare. As you point out rifles were suddenly as easy to use as smoothbores, making infantry a lot more accurate and giving them a lot more range. The Civil War sits at the very start of a period of very bad times for infantry assaults, that wouldn't be solved until tanks were invented in World War 1. Even the generals of World War 1 who grew up watching this problem become worse over their career, could not figure out a good way to solve this problem with solely infantry and artillery. I don't think Lee could be expected to come up with an answer that generals with 50 more years of experience in industrial warfare were unable to find.
Great point -- it was a difficult problem. The Germans in WW1 came up with assault tactics that involved infiltration tactics, storm troopers, mission command, and artillery "creeping barrages", but they had a rich organizational structure developed over decades to allow such experimentation. The Confederate Army was basically created just as their war began.