Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (45 page)

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The attention Meade lavished on the planned morning attack around
Wolf’s Hill stands in puzzling contrast to the offhand decision he made that morning to park Dan Sickles’
3rd Corps far out of range of his attention, near the conical hills at the end of Cemetery Ridge. In response to Reynolds’ early-morning instruction that “he had better come up,” Daniel Sickles already had most of the 3rd Corps on the road to Gettysburg by midday on July 1st, with the band of the 26th Pennsylvania cheerfully playing
“Home, Sweet Home” as they crossed the Pennsylvania state line. Already in his short tenure as commander of the Army of the Potomac, Meade had been cuttingly abrupt with
Sickles, and if there was any corps commander he would gladly have cashiered on the spot, the self-important New York solon was it. So, although Slocum had originally sent orders for Sickles to move up and link with the left flank of the
11th Corps on
Cemetery Hill, Meade issued different instructions when he arrived on the scene. Hancock and the
2nd Corps, who were expected to arrive by six o’clock on the morning of July 2nd, would be slotted into the position beside the 11th Corps; Sickles and the
3rd Corps could content themselves with a more distant perch at the tail of Cemetery Ridge.
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The less George Meade saw of Sickles, the happier he was, and he was more than content to place Sickles out of sight and out of mind on the far left. Meade would discover too late that in getting Sickles out of his own way, he had put him directly in the way of Robert E. Lee.

The commander of the
Army of Northern Virginia never aspired to be an innovator (unlike the man to whom he would eventually surrender,
Ulysses S. Grant, who understood that “War is progressive, because all the instruments and elements of war are progressive”). Whenever Robert E. Lee found a tactical trick that worked, he liked to keep using it until it broke. This was a pattern he had established on the Peninsula in 1862, when he had used headlong frontal assaults to win the day at Gaines’ Mill, only to find out at Malvern Hill how costly and fruitless they could be. He then learned at Second Bull Run how frighteningly effective it was to clinch one part of an enemy’s army, even at unfavorable odds, while gathering and landing an overwhelming blow on the enemy’s flank. This had worked to even more devastating effect at Chancellorsville, when Stonewall Jackson’s lengthy loop to the west concluded with a descent on Joe Hooker’s flank that splintered everything in its path. This, therefore, would be the trick he would play on George Meade at Gettysburg. Dally and fool with Meade on his right around Cemetery Hill and
Culp’s Hill, while launching a stealthy but massive blow on the other side of Cemetery Hill. It might well be a costly attack, and he no longer had Jackson to carry this through. But he did have the man who had first shown him how it worked at Second Bull Run, and that was
James Longstreet.
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Longstreet had had a busy day on July 1st, accompanying Lee that morning as far as Cashtown, then turning back to nudge his two stalled divisions to tread on Allegheny Johnson’s heels and move toward Gettysburg. When he rejoined Lee at Gettysburg around five that afternoon, it was only to report that these two lead divisions—
John Bell Hood’s and
Lafayette McLaws’—had been “completely blocked up” on the
Cashtown Pike by Johnson’s division in its struggle to rejoin the rest of Ewell’s corps. As the daylight expired, McLaws’ division had only made it as far as
Marsh Creek, and Hood would
not make it even that far until midnight. When Lee quizzed Longstreet on how close his corps was, Longstreet had to point backward and admit, “General, there comes the head of my column where you see that dust rising,” some “three or four miles in our rear.” Longstreet offered to push up his two lead brigades, if that would help, but Lee declined. It was “too late … to go on this evening.” Lee’s mind was already turning on how he could use Longstreet’s corps the next day, and Longstreet sent a courier back to Chambersburg to summon the last of his divisions, George Pickett’s, to Gettysburg.
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This became the moment on which the next great controversy of the battle would hang, as the postwar keepers of Lee’s memorial flame shifted the artillery of blame from Stuart’s ride and Dick Ewell at
Cemetery Hill to Longstreet. In 1866,
William Swinton, the Scottish-born correspondent for the
New York Times
, wrote a bulky survey,
Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac
, with material from interviews he conducted with a number of the commanders, including Longstreet. The burly Longstreet did not mind telling Swinton that “General Lee expressly promised his corps-commanders that
he would not assume a tactical offensive
, but force his antagonist to attack him.” But as they approached Gettysburg, Lee abandoned his promise and went on attack. This, Longstreet added, was “a grave error,” but “having … gotten a taste of blood in the considerable success of the first day,” Longstreet believed that Lee had “lost that equipoise in which his faculties commonly moved, and he determined to give battle.”

Longstreet’s comments were lost in one of Swinton’s footnotes until 1872, when
Jubal Early sketched the outlines of an accusation which would help sink Longstreet’s reputation even lower than Ewell’s—that after the evening conference at the almshouse, “Lee left us for the purpose of ordering up Longstreet’s corps in time to begin the attack at dawn next morning.” Longstreet, however, dallied. His “corps was not in readiness to make the attack until four o’clock in the afternoon of the next day,” and by that time all hope of success had evaporated. Early was seconded a few months later by Lee’s old artillery chief,
William Nelson Pendleton, who also insisted that Lee had ordered Longstreet “to make an attack at daylight the next morning,” which Longstreet failed to do “but sat on his horse until about 4 p.m.” on July 2nd.
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A good many of Lee’s and Longstreet’s subordinates, including
Lafayette McLaws,
Charles Venable, and
Charles Marshall, scoffed at Early’s claim. But stung by Early’s charges, Longstreet wrote two self-justifying articles, “put together rapidly,” for the
Philadelphia Weekly Times
in 1876. In 1887, Longstreet contributed yet another article, “Lee’s Invasion of Pennsylvania,” to
The Century
’s “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War” series, frankly laying out his disagreement with Lee about attacking the Federal army. According to
Longstreet, Lee demurred: “No, the enemy is there, and I am going to attack him there … I am going to whip them or they are going to whip me.”
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The host of Lee’s admirers assumed that Longstreet’s self-confessed lack of a “spirit of confidence” was all the evidence required to believe that he really had dragged his heels about “an attack at daylight.” Early delightedly recruited a coterie of Lee defenders to load the pages of the
Southern Historical Society Papers
with denunciations of Longstreet in a special issue in 1877, and they were joined in the years that followed by still more Lee acolytes who now “remembered” orders for a dawn attack on July 2nd, or who recalled Lee mysteriously anticipating Longstreet’s slow-footed handling of his troops. Longstreet inadvertently helped them pin the tail of defeat to his coat by turning Republican after the war and counseling Southerners to collaborate with the
Reconstruction governments lest they get something worse in their place. But most of the accusations of Longstreet’s “delay” on July 2nd came from people who could have had only the most indirect sort of knowledge of any order from Lee for a dawn attack. Certainly, no written order to this effect has ever surfaced. Cadmus Wilcox, who commanded a brigade in Powell Hill’s corps, informed Early that he was “inclined to believe that he [Longstreet] was so ordered” but admitted that “of this I have no knowledge personally.” The further in time from July 2nd, the more suspiciously precise the recollections of Lee’s “order” become: “Longstreet was slow—unaccountably slow,” complained
William Goldsborough, a staff officer in Ewell’s corps. “Had he attacked in the early morning, as he was expected to do, the enemy would have been driven from his strong position.” But this was what Goldborough remembered in 1900, thirty-five years after the war.
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And yet, Longstreet was also guilty in the postwar years of exaggerating the doubts he expressed in 1863; he might question Lee’s judgment, but at Gettysburg, Longstreet never suggested that the outcome of Lee’s plan would be anything but “a certainty.” So, he turned back from Gettysburg to rejoin McLaws’ division at
Marsh Creek for the night, and roused them at four o’clock to begin moving forward. “We were called to arms,” wrote a soldier in the 17th Mississippi, “and a detail of ten men from each company drew twenty rounds of extra cartridges for the bloody fray.”
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PART 3
 

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN  

L
EE “BREAKFASTED
and was in the saddle before it was fairly light.” The sun would be up at 4:12 the morning of July 2nd, but it would be hard to mark it at first because of a “considerable fog” that would not entirely burn off until 10:00 a.m. By midday, Lee would enjoy “a cloudless day.” The temperatures, which were already at 74 degrees at seven o’clock, would climb into the 80s, so that the “heat was intense.” Curiously, if what Lee expected was a dawn attack by Longstreet, he displayed suspiciously little anxiety about it. Nor should he have, since any decision about an attack somewhere on the right had to wait on someone to go and look at what was there. The two stony hills in the distance might conceal the unwanted approach of other Federal infantry, and Lee wanted to be sure that nothing of that nature had arrived under cover of darkness. He turned to Capt. Samuel Johnston, his staff “topographical engineer” and a former civil engineer in Virginia, and told him “to reconnoiter along the enemy’s left and return as soon as possible.”
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Johnston took along one of Longstreet’s staff, Maj.
John Clarke, and a small mounted escort, and together they swung south and west in a wide arc that would curl downward toward the stony hills. (Significantly, Johnston would write years later that nothing was said about a dawn attack by Longstreet: “I cannot see how Genl Lee’s friends can contend that … Lee gave order to … Longstreet to make an attack on the morning of the second.”) They picked their way along the
Fairfield Road, crossed a bridge over
Willoughby Run, and worked along a road which brought them to a farm owned by
James Warfield, a black farmer who ran a blacksmith’s shop alongside his “excellent” fruit trees. The Warfield farm stood on a rise which was actually
the continuation of Seminary Ridge, and from there, Johnston could turn east toward the
Emmitsburg Road, past the peach orchard of
Joseph Sherfy, which John Reynolds had passed only a day before, and follow the farm lanes to the rocky knobs that thrust up against the lightening sky—two hills which would only after the battle become known as Big and
Little Round Top.
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