In his four-volume, Pulizter prize-winning biography of General Lee, Douglas Southall Freeman gives his assessment of the reasons that the South lost at Gettysburg. The biggest, of course, was that Stonewall Jackson had been killed at Chancellorsville, but there were others. One of them was this: over and over again Lee's under-supplied army had performed the miraculous against seemingly impossible odds, and Lee evidently had just come to expect it of them. There was no reason to think that Pickett's Charge would be successful, but then there had been no reason to think they would be successful when Lee divided his army against a superior force at Second Manassas and Chancellorsville, or that they could have stood their ground against the onslaught at Antietam when the enemy knew that A. P. Hill's division had been dispatched to Harper's Ferry - but they had done it. So why not again at Gettysburg? But this time they failed.
This team seems to specialize in digging holes and climbing out of them. They have done it so often that we just come to expect it. They are down ten points? Don't worry: they will come back, no matter who the opponent is. It is almost like the game would be boring to them if they didn't spot the other guys a few points. But we went to the well too often against Arkansas State and got burned for it. That hill we could not take.
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