Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (27 page)

This newest and totally unexpected failure in his plans intensified Lee’s inner disturbance. As he rode along the ridge, staring from the enemy’s thickening lines to Hill’s idle troops, Lee in his agitation mistook a group of guns in position for one of Longstreet’s artillery battalions.

The sixteen guns were commanded by young William Poague, a V.M.I, graduate who had been captain of the Reverend General Pendleton’s Rockbridge Battery of college students from Lexington. Poague was as able a cannoneer as his dead friend Pelham had been, though less spectacular, and during the Battle of Fredericksburg Pelham had said to Poague: “Your men stand up better under killing than any gunners I’ve ever seen.” Promoted to colonel commanding a battalion attached to Pender’s division, the young cannoneer had his pieces well placed in four batteries, and great was his consternation when the commanding general lashed out at him for not hurrying on to the right with Longstreet.

Poague mumbled that he was not attached to Longstreet; since the abolishment of the reserve artillery, his battalion belonged to Hill’s Third Corps.

Instantly apologizing, Lee showed his shaken control by asking this colonel of an artillery battalion: “Do you then know where General Longstreet is?”

The bewildered young man shook his head and called for his commanding officer, Colonel Walker. Lindsay Walker, bored with waiting five hours for the attacking signal, had found a bank where he could lie in the shade, shielded from the hot sun. He hurried forward and offered to guide his commanding general to Longstreet.

Colonel Walker recorded that on the way through the hilly woodland, detouring around wagons and ambulances and stray groups of soldiers, “General Lee manifested more impatience than I ever saw him show upon any other occasion; seemed very much disappointed and worried that the attack had not opened sooner, and very anxious for Longstreet to attack at the earliest possible moment… .”

Around eleven o’clock Colonel Walker and the commanding general came upon Longstreet. He and his staff were gathered in complete idleness.

Except for getting his artillery out, ready to take positions, the burly corps commander had made no movement in the two and a half hours since Lee had given the order. Nobody knows how he passed the time.

Longstreet had confided in no one. In fact, as if to give a logical explanation of his tacit disobedience of Lee’s order “to move on,” he had said to Hood: “The general is a little nervous this morning; he wishes me to attack; I do not wish to do so without Pickett. I never like to go into battle with one boot off.”

Knowing nothing of this exchange, Lee was impatient at what he asssumed to be a slowness excessive even for Longstreet, and his only concern was to prod the stolid man into action. His controlled anger was apparent to the other officers.

His words of command are not recorded, but they must have been very firm—nothing discretionary about them. Lee himself reported that “Longstreet was directed to place the divisions of McLaws and Hood on the right of Hill, partially enveloping the enemy’s left, which he was to drive in.”

When Lee, who never used an “I” in his reports, said “Longstreet was directed,” he meant that Longstreet was
ordered
to execute his assigned duties immediately.

Longstreet recognized the difference in Lee’s tone and phrasing. Old Pete still had one legitimate excuse for further delay. Saying nothing to Lee about Pickett, who was hours away, he asked that he be allowed to wait until Hood’s division was completed by the arrival of Law’s brigade. As Law was reported to be wthin half an hour of the field, Lee agreed, and Longstreet’s wait continued.

7

There are those who believe that this exchange over Evander Law never happened. Longstreet himself gave several versions of the episode, and Lee none. The circumstance of Lee’s known impatience makes it seem likely that some reason was advanced to persuade him to countenance further delay, and Longstreet’s request would have been reasonable. The Federals’ Brevet Major General Henry J. Hunt, highly observant and articulate chief of artillery with Meade, accepted this version, and said that Lee would have done better to use Anderson’s fresh division from A. P. Hill’s corps rather than wait for Law’s brigade. As Lee saw it, merely another half-hour would be added to what had already become a more than two-hour wait, so he accepted the condition that, according to Longstreet, would make him ready to go in.

As for Anderson, recently transferred out of Longstreet’s corps, Lee seemed uncertain as to his proper placement in the command situation. As if to avoid offending sensitive Hill by removing a division that had not yet fought with his corps, and yet to allow Longstreet to call on Anderson without going through Hill, Lee instructed Anderson “to cooperate … in Longstreet’s attack.” This order was the vaguest he ever gave. He did not specify whether Anderson was to act under the orders of Longstreet, commanding the attack, or of Hill, his new corps commander, or Lee’s own. He seemed to be reverting to the loose structure of his early days in command.

Longstreet later went so far as to reproach Lee for not personally accompanying the attacking column. Not only would this have been contrary to Lee’s custom of allowing corps commanders to fight their own battles, but the criticism overlooked—as others have since—the sizable point that Lee was in command of the whole army. Its two attacking columns would be separated by five miles, with the potential threat of a counterthrust of the enemy at its center. Lee operated from an informal general headquarters at that center, almost directly across the valley from Meade’s headquarters. There Longstreet, Hill, and Ewell could send for consultation or guidance, though there was no obligation on them to do so. The afternoon of July 2 was to put to the test Lee’s familiar pattern of field command, with two new corps commanders and one rebellious dependable.

General Lee did ride with Longstreet for some distance at the beginning of the covered march to the Emmitsburg road. Probably he wanted to see for himself that the long-delayed movement had begun at last—it was then around one o’clock. In parting with Longstreet to return to his command post, most certainly he did not suspect that his most dependable commander was riding into battle in what amounted to a mutinous state of mind.

For that matter, the other officers and even soldiers who began to observe Longstreet’s unconcealed ill-humor did not suspect its nature. Lafayette McLaws said it for them all: “The cause I did not ask.” They accepted Longstreet merely as a man out of humor.

Actually, his usually immobile face was reflecting the torments of his frustration and outrage. He had been rejected as “another Jackson” in council, his advice had been finally dismissed with a brusque order, and his delaying tactics had succeeded only in arousing the Old Man’s impatience. Prodded on to this attack of which Lee knew he disapproved, he had been treated like any other subordinate.

As he rode southward in the hot shadows of the woods south from Seminary Ridge, Longstreet, perhaps unconsciously, resolved to be no more than a subordinate who mechanically does as he is bid, regardless of circumstances. His native stubbornness gave him the capacity to turn himself into something like an automaton. As such, he doggedly followed Lee’s order even
after
he learned that the conditions which had prompted the order no longer existed.

As a corps commander, Longstreet was allowed the initiative to shift the details of the battle plan in his sector according to the conditions he found. If he did not wish to assume this responsibility, he could send a staff officer to Lee and report the changed conditions. Longstreet did neither. He obeyed the order precisely as it had been given, and this he did dully, in the self-imposed stupidity of renouncing all initiative.

However, except for his slowness, Longstreet had given no hint that his bad humor reflected a disturbance so profound that he would be reduced to a state of incompetence for command.

8

From the beginning of the movement out, in which Long-street managed to consume another hour even after the arrival of Law’s brigade, there is nothing except disagreement among the men who recorded it—Longstreet, McLaws and his brigadier, Joseph Kershaw, and the luckless Captain Johnston, who led the way. A composite of the reports seems the best chart of the strange course of the troops going into battle.

Nobody can ever know exactly what happened between one o’clock, when the two divisions started from the western slope of Seminary Ridge, and four o’clock, when the first troops went into action across the Emmitsburg road. Kershaw’s brigade of McLaws’s division led the march along a lane on the western side of Herr Ridge (west of Seminary Ridge), with that rise obscuring them from the enemy. They all agreed that they moved slowly and that it was awfully hot. The stone fences to be climbed, the post-and-rail fences and worm fences to be torn down, were a constant hindrance and annoyance. Few farmhouses were passed, and even the Texans had no mind for foraging. The gunfire on the other side of the ridge, while still desultory, grew heavier and more constant. The men’s canteens emptied, and the sultry heat created an apprehension about water.

The core of the disagreements concerns a point where their concealed lane climbed a hill on which the troops would come in view of the Federal signal station established on Little Round Top. Captain Johnston called attention to their exposure. Up until his warning, there is no serious disagreement among the accounts. Thereafter the hard-worked Samuel Johnston became involved in Longstreet’s recalcitrance.

Longstreet’s mind was now so controlled by his denial of any responsibility in Lee’s plan that he, a general in command of a corps, turned over the movement of his leading division to an engineering officer lent him as a guide. This he did without telling anyone, least of all Captain Johnston.

For his part, this engineering officer assumed no more authority than would, say, a friendly local civilian who offered merely his knowledge of the country. In his account the conscientious captain said that he “had no idea that I had the confidence of the great Lee to such an extent that he would entrust me with the conduct of an army corps moving within two miles of the enemy’s line, while the lieutenant-general was riding at the rear of the column.”

General Longstreet was not actually at the rear. He rode in the middle of the column because, he said, “I was relieved for the time from the march.” He reported with a straight face that he accepted a guide sent by Lee as “relieving” the corps commander from the march.

The general riding with Captain Johnston was stocky Lafayette McLaws, at the head of his division. According to his version, when they reached Black Horse Tavern the tern-porary guide, in some surprise, pointed out their exposed position to him. McLaws said that, from where he paused, “the Round Top was plainly visible, with the flags of the signal men in rapid motion.”

McLaws ordered his division halted, and rode with Captain Johnston in search of an alternate route. They could find no unconcealed way that led to their attacking-point a mile or more farther south. On their way back toward the head of the column they encountered Longstreet, who was riding forward to discover why the march was halted. McLaws reported that he showed Longstreet the route that exposed them to the enemy, and suggested a countermarch as the only alternative to revealing the troop movement.

Longstreet, very evasive about the incident in all three of his conflicting versions, summed up the halt in one account by saying “after some delay… .”

Captain Johnston, later a friend of Longstreet’s, said that he “called General Longstreet’s attention” to the exposed rise. His report was skimpy on physical detail and inclined to ignore McLaws’s presence.

Joe Kershaw, commanding McLaws’s leading brigade, said: “We were halted by General McLaws in person while he and General Longstreet rode forward to reconnoitre. Very soon these gentlemen returned, both manifesting considerable irritation, as I thought.”

Forty-one-year-old Kershaw, a cool-headed officer, was neither enemy nor particular friend to any of the other three. Of a Revolutionary South Carolina family and son of the Mayor of Camden, Kershaw—a lawyer, like his father—was a state legislator. His only previous military experience had been with volunteers in the Mexican War when he came into the Confederate army with a volunteer regiment that he raised. Natural leadership and applied intelligence had advanced him to brigade command, and he was tabbed as future material for division command. A resolute, scholarly-looking man, Kershaw was clean-shaven except for a drooping light mustache; he had a bold nose and intense eyes under projecting brows.

His version did not conflict in essentials with the others, though only he and McLaws said that from the point of the halt the troops did countermarch. Longstreet in one of his vague references said: “There were some halts and countermarches.” This does not substantially contradict McLaws and Kershaw, and a countermarch as described by Kershaw would account both for the time known to have been lost and for the confusion that all agreed occurred between McLaws’s and Hood’s troops.

As Kershaw remembered the countermarch, “in so doing, we passed Hood’s division, which had been following us. We moved back to the place where we had rested during the morning, and thence by a country road to Willoughby Run, then dry, and down that to a school-house beyond Pitzer’s [house]. There we turned to the left [east], moving directly toward Little Round Top. General Longstreet here commanded me to advance with my brigade and attack the enemy in the Peach Orchard, which lay a little left of my line of march, some six hundred yards from us.”