Should-Read: On Lost Causes, with a capital "L", a capital "C", and a persistent unwillingness to face the fact that the cause was rotten from the start. As U.S. Grant said: they "fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause... [that] was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse..."
William Faulkner (1948): Intruder in the Dust http://amzn.to/2wZt4Ms: "For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863...
...the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago...
