When on the next morning, between daybreak and sunrise, General Lee, accompanied by Hill, Longstreet, and Hood, ascended to the same point on Seminary Ridge, and reconnoitred the opposite heights through his field-glass, they were seen to be occupied by heavy lines of infantry and numerous artillery.  The moment had passed; the rampart in his front bristled with bayonets and cannon.  General Hancock, in command of the Federal advance, had hastened back at nightfall to General Meade, who was still some distance in rear, and reported the position to be an excellent one for receiving the Southern attack.  Upon this information General Meade had at once acted; by one o’clock in the morning his headquarters were established upon the ridge; and when Lee, on Seminary Hill opposite, was reconnoitring the heights, the great bulk of the Federal army was in position to receive his assault.

The adversaries were thus face to face, and a battle could not well be avoided.  Lee and his troops were in high spirits and confident of victory, but every advantage of position was seen to be on the side of the enemy.

XVI.

THE TWO ARMIES IN POSITION.

The morning of the 2d of July had arrived, and the two armies were in presence of each other and ready for battle.  The question was, which of the great adversaries would make the attack.

General Meade was as averse to assuming the offensive as his opponent.  Lee’s statement on this subject has been given, but is here repeated:  “It had not been intended to fight a general battle,” he wrote, “at such a distance from our base, unless attacked by the enemy.”  General Meade said before the war committee afterward, “It was my desire to fight a defensive rather than an offensive battle,” and he adds the obvious explanation, that he was “satisfied his chances of success were greater in a defensive battle than an offensive one.”  There was this great advantage, however, on the Federal side, that the troops were on their own soil, with their communications uninterrupted, and could wait, while General Lee was in hostile territory, a considerable distance from his base of supplies, and must, for that reason, either attack his adversary or retreat.

He decided to attack.  To this decision he seems to have been impelled, in large measure, by the extraordinary spirit of his troops, whose demeanor in the subsequent struggle was said by a Federal officer to resemble that of men “drunk on champagne.”  General Longstreet described the army at this moment as able, from the singular afflatus which bore it up, to undertake “any thing,” and this sanguine spirit was the natural result of a nearly unbroken series of victories.  At Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and in the preliminary struggle of Gettysburg, they had driven the enemy before them in disorder, and, on the night succeeding this last victory, both officers and men spoke of the coming battle “as a certainty, and the universal feeling in the army was one of profound contempt for an enemy whom they had beaten so constantly, and under so many disadvantages."[1]