162 years ago today, George Gordon Meade was placed in command of the Army of the Potomac by Abraham Lincoln. Meade protested. He thought that role should have gone to John Reynolds. He also expressed his concern about being placed in charge of the army when he knew nothing about its positions or dispositions.
Meade requested to be relieved of the order. Lincoln refused. "Well," said Meade to a friend, "I've been tried and condemned without a hearing, and I suppose I shall have to go to my execution." He wrote the president:
The order placing me in command of the army is received. As a soldier, I obey it, and to the utmost of my ability will execute it.
The transfer of command was achieved.
After this, Meade turned his attention to the scattered whereabouts of his troops, most of them on the march toward Frederick, Maryland. One Federal officer declared, "General Meade evidently felt very heavily the responsibility thus thrown on his shoulders."
Meade was not as timid as his predecessors. He was determined to move the army as fast as possible against the enemy. The next day he wrote his wife Margaret, "I am moving at once against Lee. Pray fervently for the success of my country. Love to all."
In those early hours of his command, Meade must have thought of the lessons he learned as a cadet at West Point. Could he force the enemy to concentrate somewhere in his front? Would the army be up to the task?
In the North, it seemed as though few people had any confidence at all that Meade's army would, or even could, defeat Lee. But it did. And thus Meade became perhaps the greatest general of the American Civil War.