Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (26 page)

With threats at the other end of the Union line on Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill, and with demonstrations in the center, the maneuver was soundly conceived. Not brilliant nor reflective of Lee at his imaginative best, the operation was within the potential of his troops and contained the elements of success.

Longstreet, in his claims for his own plan, attributed Lee’s rejection of it to a bloodthirstiness that caused him to think only with adrenalin when he was fighting. There is no question that Lee, like all great fighters, was a killer once the battle was joined. That should not be taken as meaning, however, that blood lust inundated his brain when he stared through his field glasses at “those people” gathering on the opposite ridge.

His blood might have been up after the taste of victory the day before, but, according to the enemy’s reports on his movements, Lee was “coolly calculating.” However, several of the officers standing with him while he waited for the reconnaissance report observed his tension. As of eight o’clock Lee believed the southern end of Cemetery Ridge to be unoccupied in the vicinity of the Round Tops, but he needed the report of the engineering officer for confirmation before he could order the execution of his battle plan.

Contrary to general impressions, Lee’s nervousness during this waiting period was unrelated to Longstreet. Although Longstreet’s two divisions were not ready to go in and his artillery was not up, Lee did not know this. Longstreet personally waited on the grassy knoll with the other generals and staff officers, and, within the limits of Lee’s observations, all of his lieutenants were prepared for action and waiting on his command.

Lee’s strain came from the accumulation of responsibility which he bore alone, all focused that morning in the wait for an engineering officer to do the work of the absent cavalry. As usual, he tried to conceal his tension. His face was outwardly composed in what a staff officer called “the quiet-bearing of a powerful yet harmonious nature.” As always, he was extremely neat about his person. His cadet-gray coat was buttoned to his throat, around his trim waist he wore a sword belt without sword, his dark boots were polished, and his light-gray felt hat, of medium-width brim, sat squarely on his head. His nervousness revealed itself in an inability to keep still.

A. P. Hill, partially recovered from his mysterious ailment of the day before, had joined the group, looking very slight among the large men. With Hill came Harry Heth, wearing a bandage around his head, and too shaken from the shell blow to assume command of his division. As the group was increased by arriving generals and their staffs, Lee paced up and down in the shade of a line of trees as if alone. Occasionally he interrupted his pacing to peer through his glasses across the valley where the Union troops were still gathering. Then he sat down on a fallen apple tree and began to study his map.

Although his ridge rolling southward from the seminary was lower than Cemetery Ridge, it was wooded for most of its length, and Lee seemed convinced that approaches to the attacking-point could be found which would conceal the troop movement from the Federals. According to the incomplete details of the map, the land between the two ridges at the southern end would favor his envisioned enveloping movement, once the men were in attacking position.

The Emmitsburg road ran diagonally across the shallow valley between the ridges, beginning within the Union lines. At about a thousand yards south it was still no more than two hundred yards from the crest of Cemetery Ridge. There the fence-lined road bent sharply to the southwest, toward the Confederate position. At the end of its course between the lines, the road passed below the point where Seminary Ridge faded off. In that area Lee had no troops at eight in the morning. But there the Emmitsburg road climbed the crest of a low rise, and Lee had selected this stretch of the road—where it was more than a mile from Cemetery Ridge—as an anchorage for his assault troops.

Around eight o’clock in the morning General McLaws rode up and reported that his troops were up. Lee greeted him and directed his attention to the map.

Pointing to the high part of the Emmitsburg road, Lee said: “General, I wish you to place your division across this road,” and with his finger showed that he wanted the troops placed in a line perpendicular to the road. Then, explaining that he wanted the troops to get there, “if possible, without being seen by the enemy,” he asked the direct question: “Can you do it?”

McLaws replied forthrightly that he knew nothing to prevent him, and added that he would “take a party of skirmishers and go in advance and reconnoiter.”

Lee told him that Captain Johnston had been ordered to reconnoiter the enemy’s country and said: “I expect he is about ready.”

Lee meant that the engineering officer was about to report, but McLaws, thinking Lee meant that Johnston was ready to start, said: “I will go with him.”

Longstreet, who had been pacing near by, turned and said quickly to McLaws: “No, sir, I do not want you to leave your division.”

Lee, in his absorption, apparently paid no attention to this exchange.

Longstreet then stepped up beside the seated commanding general, leaned over him toward the map, and said to McLaws: “I wish your division placed so,” and ran his finger in a line parallel to the road.

Lee raised his head and said quietly: “No, general, I wish it placed just perpendicular to that, or just the opposite.”

Longstreet turned away without answering. McLaws, perceiving that Lee had no further orders, then asked Longstreet for permission to accompany the reconnoitering party. Longstreet flatly forbade it, and to McLaws it “appeared as if he was irritated and annoyed.” McLaws rode off to his troops and made a personal reconnaissance of the woods south of Seminary Ridge in search of a concealed approach to the point of attack.

Some while after he left, Captain Samuel Johnston rode up to Lee’s group with what turned out to be the most fateful misinformation of the Gettysburg campaign. The engineering officer’s reconnaissance report also represented one of the costliest consequences of the cavalry’s absence, and the desperate expedients to which it forced General Lee. In the emergency, Lee placed his reliance on a single staff officer to perform the mission of mounted troops.

At best, Captain Johnston’s information of the Little Round area was incomplete. There were no detailed sketches of the hazardously rough ground at the southern end of the Federal line. Information obtained by an apprehensive individual crawling about on wooded precipices would naturally give an inadequate picture of the obstacles to mass troop movement. Johnston was intent on what he was to survey when he reached the top.

In addition to this incompleteness, the report of the engineering officer who personally reconnoitered the Round Tops was nullified by a stroke of incredibly bad luck. Captain Johnston had scrambled through the thickets to the choppy rock summit of Little Round Top just after the guarding troops of the night had been withdrawn and just before their replacements arrived. He started his risky journey back with the accurately observed information that Cemetery Ridge in the vicinity of the Round Tops was unoccupied by Federal troops.

Those projecting peaks had not yet been occupied, as Samuel Johnston reported to Lee. But the Round Tops were not the objects of Lee’s attack. He aimed inside of them, to the north, where his men could climb the sloping ridge and get in command of the ground before Meade concentrated there. That area of Cemetery Ridge was likewise free of blue soldiers when the engineering officer glanced along the ridge, but only because of a freak accident of timing.

To that area Meade was even then sending the bulk of Sickles’s corps, with artillery support, to extend southward the line that Hancock’s corps was forming in the center. Onto the ridge between the flank
at
Little Round Top, not
on
it, and what might be considered the center of his line—a distance of about a mile and three quarters—Meade rushed between 15,000 and 20,000 men by nine o’clock in the morning.

That was the hour when Longstreet’s reserve artillery, temporarily under young Porter Alexander, arrived at the field and at last completed the concentration of the attacking forces—except for the one brigade, Law’s that was hurrying toward Gettysburg from its rear-guard post.

By nine o’clock the time when Lee could attack with advantage had already passed. The numbers and guns of the two armies were becoming equalized on the southern ends of the ridges, and Federal troop units were constantly pouring onto the field while Longstreet’s men still lounged in groups around their stacked arms.

But, due to the report of Captain Johnston which confirmed his own appraisal of the situation, Lee assumed a condition on the Federal flank which no longer existed. He also assumed that Longstreet’s troops were ready to move out at once. After he listened to the engineer officer’s report, Lee nodded slowly, as if he had made the final decision to commit his battle plan to the test.

Then he turned to Longstreet and said quietly: “I think you had better move on.”

This first direct order to Longstreet to move out was given somewhere between eight and nine o’clock. After giving the casual order, the general mounted his iron-gray horse and rode the arc from Seminary Ridge around Gettysburg to Ewell’s headquarters north of Cemetery Hill.

By leaving the field to Longstreet, Lee showed that nothing had happened to cause him anxiety about Longstreet’s performing with his usual dependability. If, in his concentration on Cemetery Ridge, he had noticed Longstreet’s surliness, as others did, Lee ignored it. He certainly did not associate the sullenness with deliberate procrastination, nor did anyone else at the time.

Such was his trust in Longstreet that the commanding general left his command post in the expectation of a coming attack. He personally went to investigate the man who, because of his failure the day before, Lee regarded as the unpredictable corps commander.

6

Since the night before, when General Ewell had come to Lee’s headquarters with a resolve to attack
un
occupied Culp’s Hill, the situation there had changed drastically. The tumbled mass of thicket-grown rock had been fortified by fresh men hurried to the field, who had dug defense lines and placed heavy artillery on the crest. On East Cemetery Hill, where Early’s men had been halted the night before, the reformed fugitives had also dug themselves in and brought more guns to support them. General Lee needed no conference with Ewell to know that changed conditions could cause the brave resolves of midnight to be dismissed at daylight like a dream.

Adjusting as he must, Lee changed Ewell’s plans, assigning him to make a strong demonstration in conjunction with Longstreet’s attack. However, trusting in the younger field officers and the fighting spirit of the men, Lee made it plain that he hoped the demonstration might grow into a full-scale assault. He underscored his wishes by not too gentle reminders of Ewell’s failure to take the positions the afternoon before. The demonstration was to begin when Longstreet’s guns were heard.

From Lee’s viewpoint, capture of one end of the Union line would be as profitable as capture of the other. If both went, Lee would carve a victory of great magnitude. At the least, vigorous action by Ewell could distract Meade’s attention from his left and prevent troops from reinforcing the Round Top end of the line.

In A. P. Hill’s order to demonstrate against the center, Pender’s division had directions to exploit any advantage. Anderson’s unfought division was to support Longstreet’s left as part of the attack. Heth’s division, now commanded by scholarly, militarily untrained Brigadier General Pettigrew, was in general reserve.

That was the plan. It seemed, on the one hand, to restrain Hill’s impetuosity and, on the other, to place no excessive demands on Ewell’s initiative. The key was dependable Longstreet.

When Lee started back toward Seminary Ridge,
and not before,
he began to listen expectantly for Old Pete’s guns to open. As he had left Longstreet not appreciably more than an hour before, it seems clear that Lee—unmindful of any attitude that would cause deliberate delay—had believed that Longstreet was ready to go in when he left him. So confident had he been of this that when he returned to the crest of the ridge around ten o’clock Lee could not conceal his surprise at finding the two armies precisely as he had left them.

Pender’s division stretched southward from the Seminary, with the men resting behind the artillery placed at intervals in four-gun batteries. Southward beyond them, out of Lee’s vision, the men of Anderson’s division, who were to support Longstreet’s attack, were similarly resting. Farther back, westward, on the ridge, lounged the men of Heth’s division, the reserve troops under acting commander Pettigrew.

Periodically during the morning the hills had echoed with the quick rattling of skirmish lines firing, as units of troops on one side or the other maneuvered for ground positions to their liking. When the astonished Lee rode slowly down Hill’s lines, the only sound was the thin crackle of individual rifles, indicating no more than sharpshooters practicing their skills on the unwary. The guns were silent.

In consternation Lee turned to his aide and said: “What
can
detain Longstreet?”

Only the day before, he had asked Dick Anderson the same kind of question about Stuart: “Where
can
Stuart be?”

When Colonel Long gave no answer, Lee said: “He ought to be in position now.” It was as if he were saying:
“Even
Longstreet ought to be in position by now.”