the problem is, ewell is blocking the road. by the time burnside gets here, the army of northern virginia has basically filed down this road. look how wide open it is. no problems. and because it is smooth sailing, the rearguard of engineers have blocked a small stream. ok, so when you see the stream the engineers, that is it. because it is dusk, burnside pulls up and he sees confederates on the other side of the river, which is really a creek not wider than two of these tables. it has steep banks. burnside sees the confederates on the other side and he is a little nervous. because ambrose burnside is wonderfully mediocre, he chooses not to force a crossing. and instead, he chooses to backtrack and follow the other two corps. now the backtracking alone is problematic, but what he actually does is he turns the whole column around, so the lead regiment stays in the lead, rather than have everybody turn around like this. everybody has to march. i am sure my military discipline is fantastic. we are going to march. and it creates a

jackson would say to ewell and talafor, gentlemen, bring out your men. they would open the fight for jackson with part of the command. at 4:30 p.m. he ordered them to move the batteries. the second virginia and second wisconsin would engage for nearly 15 minutes before reinforcements arrived. jackson bringing reinforcements, georgians himself would be funneled in from the federal side as well. 30 minutes into the fight, general ewell got the rest of his men in the action. every i tack that jackson had thrown out had been perried. -- parried. by 8:00 p.m., jackson's command finally achieved a superiority in numbers along the line and he pushed the assault forward to finally clear his front. the losses of this engagement were heavy for jackson's command, losing 1,250 men in the engagement of which his own brigade, the old stonewall brigade, had suffered 340 casualties of the 800 they took into combat that afternoon. why jackson chose to attack this lone federal division is interesting. particularly as we already established that jackson was concentrating h

>> ewell, the press figures in terms of the argument of the piece is that great things were expected of grant coming east. and those expectations fall short during the over lpd campaign. he's not going to defeat lee in a single blow, et cetera. but what happens during that campaign is meade starts a war with the press, some of his subordinate commanders -- he becomes pretty childish of what he sees. that's his moment. if he'd gotten shot at that point, we would remember warren as the man who saved round top and not some obscure college professor. college professor and obscure, that's redundant anyway. but meade can't win on this. and meade understands this. if the army wins, the credit will go to grant. if the army lieuses, then they'll blame me. meade is not good at structuring that politics of image, which i would argue is essential. for all the talk about actual performance, nis is a people's war in which people's perception of leadership is crucial to what's going on. and lincoln who himself has a rather naive and informed notion of leadership, he buys into. from the beginning al