Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (24 page)

Longstreet’s jealous brooding over Jackson apparently led him into a misconception of the relationship between Lee and Jackson; and Old Jack, more than has been recognized, became a motivation in Longstreet’s behavior in the Gettysburg campaign.

Lee and Jackson were not equal collaborators, as they must have appeared to Longstreet. As Lee said, he, the commanding general, had merely to suggest to Stonewall. Suggestions from Jackson were not precluded, but always these were fundamentally tactical suggestions made within the context of a strategy on which the two generals shared that curiously intuitive understanding.

In contrast, Longstreet’s short-range defensive thinking was antithetical to Lee’s concepts of war, and he was by demonstration a limited soldier. To be a top-flight corps commander was in itself no small achievement (few were in the whole Confederacy), and it was a big leap for a contentedly physical type who two years before had been satisfied to serve as paymaster on an army post. In making that leap to the status of high-ranking subordinate Longstreet had employed his fullest potential. His ideas on strategy were vaporous and primitive, as he proved in his essays at independent command and in his suggestions to Lee.

Longstreet arrived at Gettysburg believing that he had already established his concept of a Jacksonian collaboration with Lee. He had even deluded himself into thinking that, in the collaboration, he had imposed his ideas of strategy on the commanding general. He was deeply shocked and bewildered when Lee, on Seminary Ridge during the afternoon of the first day, dismissed his suggestions. But he was a stubborn Dutchman. That night, while his troops were resting before moving up in the morning, Longstreet was making no plans for beginning the early movement that General Lee had requested. He was pondering ways of bringing Lee around to his own preferred plan of action.

Just as his secret stirrings of ambition had gone undetected, not one person in the army suspected that the Longstreet they depended on to solidify their victory was a stranger to them—and, in a way, to himself.

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From the time that Longstreet arose just before daylight on the 2nd, no one can ever know with any certainty what went on in his mind or what transpired between him and Lee and other officers. In the reports, each hour of the next two days became obscured by the entanglements of the “Gettysburg Controversy” that was waged between Longstreet and his former brother officers for from five to thirty years after the war.

Even the origin of the controversy was disputed, with each side claiming that the other had thrown the first stone. However, no evidence appears of any public attack on Longstreet prior to his derogation of Lee as quoted in a book published in 1866 and in a letter of his which was apparently in circulation around the time of Lee’s death in 1870. The first public criticisms of Longstreet in 1872, by Jubal Early and the Reverend William Pendleton, seem to have been primarily a defense of Lee. To attack Lee in that period would have been considered unchivalrous in anyone, and in Longstreet personally it was most unbecoming.

For Longstreet had committed what ex-Confederates considered the apostasy of “turning Republican.” Appointed to a post in New Orleans by his friend, President Grant, in 1867, he took an active part in the Reconstruction government there. By 1872, according to Claude Bowers, “in Louisiana … Longstreet was ostracised.” In September 1874 he commanded an occupation force that fired into a group of former Confederates who came at him with a Rebel Yell. The tensions and loyalties among disenfranchised Southerners created a climate of bitter passions in which the controversy over Gettysburg developed between Longstreet and men who became his enemies.

The high-ranking and highly placed officers who attacked Longstreet in print concentrated on his failures to the point of making him the villain of Gettysburg. In rebuttal, Longstreet expanded on his initial criticism, which claimed that Lee had failed because he refused to follow Longstreet’s advice, and made of himself the potential hero of Gettysburg. In these post-war writings, Longstreet’s attempts to prove his superiority led him into a rearrangement of his part in the battle to accord with a rational pattern of behavior based on his ignored strategy. But this after-the-fact version of the campaign revealed both a hazy memory of the events and a disregard of available facts.

Longstreet invented things that never happened, distorted recorded incidents, told outright lies apparently without realizing it, and contradicted himself in his various accounts. In reporting his undeclared duel with Lee, the stolid soldier attributed to himself some high-flown oratory which seems most unlikely in the circumstances and which not one officer present remembered hearing. However, the point of his conflicting versions is not so much that they are untrustworthy accounts of what he said and did, but that the self-vindications indicate Longstreet’s confusion about his own state of mind.

The state of mind derived from his misconception concerning a collaborative status with Lee, and from his delusion that before they came North the commanding general had agreed to fight according to his plan.

From the moment that Old Pete stepped into the Jackson role, he urged Lee to remain on the defensive in Virginia and wait for another Fredericksburg. Longstreet’s idea of military heaven was the Battle of Fredericksburg repeated indefinitely, with his men standing in nigh impregnable positions and receiving clumsy lunges from the enemy. As all Union generals could not be depended upon to perform as ineptly as had Burnside, and as such repulses accomplished nothing toward victualing the army or winning the war, Lee dismissed the advice with his usual courtesy. He explained that he was not launching an invasion to seek the enemy’s army. He hoped to draw the enemy out of Virginia after him and, while supplying his troops, he would receive battle where conditions offered opportunity for a decisive victory.

Satisfied that the army was not assuming the offensive, Longstreet regarded Lee’s plan as an extension of his own determination to fight
only
on the defense. He recommended to Lee that, “after piercing Pennsylvania and menacing Washington, we should choose a strong position and force the Federals to attack us. … I recalled to him the battle of Fredericksburg.”

With his mind burdened by the problems of operating in the enemy’s country, Lee had offhandedly agreed to the general principle of defensive tactics in a strategic offensive. He certainly did not eliminate what Bismarck called “the imponderables” of war and commit himself to a fixed plan that would restrain him from taking advantage of any opening.

Longstreet, with his insensitivity to the nuances of human relationships, convinced himself that the polite gentleman had actually promised that he would fight only as Longstreet had suggested. In fact, Old Pete later contended that he had “consented” to the invasion only because Lee promised that he would fight on the defensive. The use of the word “consented” by a corps commander shows the depth of his delusion about the equality of the collaboration.

Such a promise was so remote from Lee’s thoughts that after the war, when he was told about Longstreet’s contention, he could not believe that Longstreet had ever said it.

A friend recorded that Lee said “that the idea was absurd. He never made such a promise and never thought of doing any such thing.”

That General Lee did not even remember the conversation about the defensive invasion would explain his distracted dismissal of Longstreet’s importunities when Old Pete joined the commanding general’s party on Seminary Ridge late on the first afternoon. The collision between the two armies had then dictated the nature of the action, and, except for Longstreet, every general on the field recognized that solidifying their gains was the one urgent necessity for the decisive battle sought by Lee.

But in his fixation on fighting a defensive battle, another Fredericksburg, Longstreet ignored the condition of the battle that had evolved its own pattern. Despite the circumstances that he found at Gettysburg, he clung to a course which could not possibly apply to the existing situation.

Longstreet could not have been in full possession of his military faculties when he determined on changing winning tactics, to which the whole command of the army was committed, in the midst of an engagement. Nor could the after-the-fact rationale he attributed to his behavior have been present when he began the day of July 2 with the purpose of thwarting the plans of the high command which the rest of the army was preparing to execute.

After a breakfast while the stars were still shining, he left his temporary camp along Marsh Creek and started the four-mile ride to Seminary Ridge. His mind was demonstrably not on getting his troops up as early as possible. He was hurrying to Lee to find means of persuading the commanding general to shift the battle to make it Longstreet’s fight. Offense had been the strength of his late rival, Jackson. He had no intention of trying to replace Stonewall by operating in the sphere of Old Jack’s strength.

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Robert E. Lee was not at his clearest in ordering Longstreet on an unsupervised offensive movement with only the general type of orders which he had used with Jackson. The year before, at Second Manassas, Longstreet had delayed so long in delivering the heavy counterstroke designed by Lee that Jackson’s men were fought to the narrow edge of collapse and probably would have lost their pivotal position under more skillfully delivered Federal attacks. But at Gettysburg Lee, forced to use the only fresh troops at hand, depended on the only system he had perfected, even though the personalities involved no longer fitted that system.

In perspective, it would appear that in the beginning cautious Longstreet would have been a wiser choice than impetuous Hill to lead an advance force doing the work of cavalry. However, all post-facto reflections reveal that Lee was suffering from, and in a way reflecting, the strain that attrition was bringing to his whole country and its best army. As his command personnel was not what it had been at its Chancellorsville peak, so the overburdened general did not have on an invasion of vast consequence the self-command that had been his in a more limited and more strictly military situation.

He was trying to do too much himself. Solving the South’s problem of self-defense was properly the function of the government. Lee had assumed responsibilities beyond his normal capacities because he alone conceived in terms of the whole. Consequently, the failures in his command, beginning with Stuart’s mysterious absence, inevitably made a constant drain on his nervous energy, despite the face of calm strength he presented to his men.

Thinking of everything from Vicksburg to North Carolina ports, further distracted and enervated by having to struggle against the constituted authority to achieve even such compromise measures as the invasion represented, the aging Lee (like Heth and young Rodes on the first day)
did not think of his generals’ suitability to the nature of their assignments.

Of course, once the battle was joined on July 1, he was allowed little choice. To him, “duty” was the “sublimest word” in the language, and he extemporized battle plans in the expectation that each officer would do his duty as he did his. The soldiers would do the rest. That his reasoning was fallacious is not the point: his reasoning reflected the mental condition created by a strain too great for a mortal to carry. A powerfully built man, always very fit (his son said: “I never remember his being sick in his life”), he aged more physically than any other commander on either side.

At Gettysburg, then, Lee perfectly represented the failing condition of his army and his country.

Having allowed impetuous Hill to make the reconnaissance, Lee “suggested” that congenitally slow Longstreet move up for an early attack on the morning of the 2nd.

With Pickett only that day released from rear-guard duty back at Chambersburg, Longstreet had with him only one division with a consistently glowing record in attack. That was Hood’s. In striking power the four brigades (two Georgia, one Alabama, and Hood’s former Texas Brigade) were more typical of Jackson’s old Second Corps than of Long-street’s reliables.

They all bore the imprint of Hood’s own native aggressiveness and absolute self-expression in combat. Many finely trained general officers in both armies excelled at those aspects of warfare which were necessary adjuncts to the actual commitment of men to the business of killing. John Bell Hood was among those who were at their best when armed forces came to the ultimate test of battle. As brigade commander and division commander, he never lost his head in action, and he handled his fierce units with a sure touch.

Hood’s reputation was marred later when he essayed strategy after he was unwisely promoted beyond his capacities to army command. He was a fighter, not a thinker, and on July 2 he was at the top of his potential as a division commander and at the fullness of his tremendous physical powers.

The tall, magnificently built Hood was then thirty-one, ten years out of West Point, though his hound-dog eyes and the drooping expression of his long tawny-bearded face gave the impression of a much older man. A native of Kentucky, he had fallen in love with Texas when he went there as a lieutenant with the Second Cavalry and it became his adopted state.

Hood first came to Virginia as a cavalry officer with “Prince John” Magruder’s forces on the Peninsula. In March of 1862 he was made brigadier in command of the Texas regiments, who were to make him as famous as he made them. In the bitterly fought battle of Gaines’ Mill, in the Seven Days Around Richmond, the blond giant led his Texans to the break in the Union line which marked the beginning of the first great Confederate victory since Bull Run, the year before.