On July 4, 1863, as he stared across the fields near Gettysburg at Robert E. Lee’s battered army, George Meade issued a general order expressing his thanks for the “glorious result” of the previous three days’ fighting. The victory already won would be “matters of history ever to be remembered,” the elated commander of the Army of the Potomac declared. Still, he allowed, “Our task is not yet accomplished,” and he looked to his troops for “greater efforts to drive from our soil every vestige of the presence of the invader.”

The message enraged Abraham Lincoln.  As he had in the general order issued prior to the battle, upon being placed in command of the army, Meade seemed to regard the Confederates as invaders rather than insurgents, as the forces of a separate state rather than rebels.  In an attempt to get his timid chief of staff, Gen. Henry Halleck, to spur Meade to destroy Lee before he could retreat to Virginia, Lincoln pointed out that the South was equally “our soil.”  Lincoln understood the purpose of the war to be a new order across America, not, as he feared his generals did, a return to the pre-war status quo.