Decisional Dilemma: Vicksburg or Gettysburg?

This paper is a discussion of the events surrounding the Confederate decision to conduct an offensive campaign into Pennsylvania as opposed to an alternative course of reinforcement against the Union siege of Vicksburg during the summer of 1863. No primary accounts of the meetings of the Confederate War Cabinet on the issue are known to exist. This paper summarizes the existing secondary accounts of what happened in meetings between General Robert E. Lee and the Confederate War Cabinet during the month of May, 1863. It then explores the strategic environment of 1863 in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the many potential influencing factors bearing upon the Confederacys decision. Traditional instruments of national power are used to frame the discussion economics, military capability, and politics. The element of how a nation uses information as an instrument of power is applied in retrospect to further understanding of the Confederate decision. Discussion of the strategic environment of 1863 is based upon primary and secondary sources, as well as statistical records. It is impossible to determine all of the influencing external and internal factors that contributed to the Confederate decision to conduct offensive action into Pennsylvania. However, given existing conditions, the paper concludes that the decision was a rational, understandable attempt to gain a decisive victory on Northern soil. This paper offers an historical application of the national instruments of power and the surrounding strategic environment to better understand how to apply the process for present and future scenarios. In applying a relatively new and formal process of analysis Wardens five rings coupled with nodal analysis to events of the past, attempts to apply the same process to events of the future may result in greater understanding and awareness of factors that weigh upon statesmen and soldiers as they make decisions within their given strategic environment.