Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (36 page)

Brigadier General Steuart’s Virginia brigade had won an advanced position on the rocky slope at the end of the second day, and the assault was to be launched from there. Their line was only a quarter of a mile from the Baltimore pike, which served Meade’s army, and one mile in the rear of the Federal center on Cemetery Ridge, where Longstreet was supposed to strike from the front.

Although the darkness prevented Ewell from recognizing the full extent of his threat to the enemy’s position, he knew that gaining the crest of Culp’s Hill could, combined with Longstreet’s attack, open the way to the victory that had been hanging for two days. Also, impressed by his troops’ attacking power despite lack of co-ordination the day before, General Ewell made dispositions for realizing their striking potential which were sounder than any he had made since arriving on the field. He could not get guns up the craggy slopes, but the high spirit of Johnson’s infantry and Rodes’s two brigades showed their willingness to go in without artillery support.

By first light Allegheny Johnson, brandishing his club, had his men ready to open the action. But the Federals, uneasy about that half-open door at their backs, had Slocum’s corps ready at the same time, and fresh batteries had been brought into position on the pike by indefatigable General Hunt.

The guns opened first, and there was nothing that Ewell’s people could do except huddle close to their boulders and wait. When the cannonade ended, the men sprang ahead up the rocks, their bayonets glistening through the thickets in the early morning light.

The use of quickly erected breastworks had been developed by this stage of the war, and Slocum’s men were well dug in. Within a few minutes the desperately engaged men were repeating the pattern of the dusk fighting of the day before. The Rebels, with their familiar high screams, overran lines of works and clambered on, firing, toward the top. The Federals, holding steady when they fell back, counterattacked with shouts echoing over the hillside. All through the rise and fall of the action the Federal guns sprayed the Confederate troops, sometimes firing so closely over the defensive lines that shots burst among their own troops.

With heavy casualties and short breathing-spells, Johnson’s men, powerfully supported by Daniel’s North Carolinians, kept reforming and trying again. Each new effort promised to carry them all the way to the crest. At the hour when Lee, with Longstreet about three air-miles away, was thinking that he must send Ewell an order to hold off his attack until Long-street was ready at ten o’clock, the issue at the Federals’ back door was being decided. Hour after hour, to seven, to eight, to nine o’clock, Ewell’s men and Slocum’s gave the best they had and took the best the other had, and neither attack nor defense could change the pattern. Nothing could sweep the Federals from the crest, and nothing could prevent the reforming gray waves from rolling uphill-as long as the men’s energy lasted.

By the time the last of Pickett’s division came up back of Seminary Ridge, barely two miles away, the energy was fading and casualties were taking the weight from Johnson’s blows. A North Carolina battalion with Junius Daniel lost 200 of 240 men. When Ewell received Lee’s order to hold his attack off until ten o’clock, all attacking power had been drained from Old Allegheny’s division and its supporting brigades. This division, originally formed by Stonewall Jackson, was never the same again. Its glories were in the past.

After about nine o’clock, though rifle fire crackled on through the morning, men died, and groups maneuvered for new position, the issue was no longer in doubt. The Federal back door was shut, their rear was safe, and there was no threat to divert their attention from the center.

Historically, the fierce fighting on Culp’s Hill seems almost a peripheral action, which it was never intended to be. Seven of Lee’s brigades were allotted to that small field of action, only two less than were to form the charge at the center of Cemetery Ridge.

In ordering that dual attack Lee seems to have reverted to the goaded, slugging tactics of Malvern Hill, his poorest battle. As at Malvern Hill, feeling that a frontal assault should be accompanied by a flank thrust to divert the enemy, he attempted a combination movement with an army not capable of the co-ordination necessary for such an action. The difference was that at Gettysburg he had not acknowledged the breakdown of the methods of operation perfected after Malvern Hill. Believing that a proper concert of action was still possible, General Lee weakened each movement by dividing his total strength.

When Daniel’s and O’Neal’s brigades were removed from support of Rodes’s other brigades south from Gettysburg along Long Lane, Ramseur’s and Doles’s strong offensive units were relegated to an idle defensiveness on the flank of the assault that came at the Federal center. Although those two handsomely led brigades would have strengthened the center attack, they were wasted on both the second and the third days. In turn, Daniel and O’Neal, not providing sufficient weight to Johnson’s attack, were used up in what became the first of two separate battles. In so far as a combined dual movement affected the enemy, Ewell’s flank attack and Longstreet’s center attack might as well have been different battles on different days.

At ten o’clock, when Ewell’s action was beginning to dwindle into sporadic, personal fighting, Longstreet was
no more ready to attack than he had been when Lee left him at six. As is true of Old Pete’s inanition during the forenoon of the second day, no one knows what he did during those hours. He said that until noon the time “was consumed” in readying Pickett’s three brigades for the assault, but Pickett’s division needed no readying. On the contrary, from their arrival on the field until twelve o’clock, the waiting in the rising heat wore at their nerves.

None of the men knew anything about the two-pronged attack, one half of which had already been broken off. In his official report Longstreet never mentioned Ewell or in any way referred to the Second Corps’s assault that was to have coincided with his in the early morning. (Ewell, however, made a somewhat heated reference to Longstreet’s part in the joint action.) In Pickett’s division the troops knew only that they were going in, and, from general officers to privates, they wanted to get it over with.

The inspector general of the division spoke for them all. “It is said, that to the condemned, in going to execution, the moments fly. To the good soldier, about to go into action, I am sure the moments linger. Let us not dare say, that with him, either individually or collectively, it is that mythical love of fighting,’ poetical but fabulous; but rather, that it is nervous anxiety to solve the great issue as speedily as possible, without stopping to count the cost. The Macbeth principle— ‘Twere well it were done quickly’-holds quite as good in heroic action as in crime.”

4

When Pickett left his troops in the little valley and went to report to Lee, the thirty-eight-year-old major general looked confident and eager. To British military observer Fremantle, he appeared to be a “desperate-looking character.” The swashbuckling appearance was given by a dark mustache drooping and curled at the ends, a thin goatee, and hair worn long and curled in ringlets. His hair was brown, and in the morning sunlight it reflected auburn tints. George E. Pickett stood slender and graceful at the middle height, and carried himself with an air. Dandified in his dress, he was the most romantic-looking of all Confederates, the physical image of that gallantry implicit in the South’s self-concept.

Pickett was also of a romantic turn of mind. A widower, he was then engaged to young Sallie Corbel! a girl who had loved him since her childhood and to whom he was the embodiment of military glamour. She always called him “My Soldier.” Pickett was in the throes of a middle-life resurgence of passion, and he could think of nothing but his agonizingly postponed marriage to Sallie and the glory he wanted to win for her. Gettysburg offered him his first real opportunity for a big moment since he had volunteered for the Confederate army.

In the old army he had shown a flair for the spectacular. As a young lieutenant in the Mexican War, he had been the first American to scale the ramparts at Chapultepec, where he had planted the flag before the admiring gaze of his friend Longstreet. But in the Confederate army, fame had eluded him.

Arriving late in Virginia after secession, coming a roundabout way from Oregon, he went in at the customary rank of colonel and did not make brigadier until February 1862. He fought his brigade in the action around Richmond preceding the Seven Days, and in the savage battle at Gaines’ Mill he was wounded just before his troops went in with the final charge that won the day. His brigade, led by its senior colonel, Eppa Hunton, performed well, but the hero of the day was John Hood leading his Texas Brigade.

Although invalided out during the summer fighting that evicted the Federals from Virginia, Pickett was promoted to major general in October 1862 and returned to duty wearing two stars that Sallie embroidered in a wreath for his collar. It is probable that his advancement was helped along by the influence of Longstreet, who had long regarded Pickett almost as a younger brother. Their friendship was an example of the attraction of opposites, and stolid Old Pete was particularly proud of what he called Pickett’s “pulchritude.” Placed in Longstreet’s newly formed corps, Pickett was given five first-line brigades of 9,000 veterans to form one of the largest and best divisions in the army.

Yet, again he was passed over by opportunity. His division saw little action at Fredericksburg (December 1862), and he spent the following winter and spring in Davis-inspired guard duty and sieges, interspersed with pointless marches and defensive stances in southeastern Virginia and North Carolina. He was relieving the tedium of camp by stolen rendezvous with Sallie when the army opened the spring campaign, and missed the great day at Chancellorsville when Pender and Rodes won glory.

Then, for the Gettysburg campaign, he was deprived of his two largest brigades and, as the army’s smallest division, was held at Chambersburg during the convergence on Gettysburg. When Pickett marched his men to Seminary Ridge on the morning of the 3rd, he was the only division commander on the field who had seen no action with the army during the entire year. Having missed all opportunities for distinguishing himself, General Pickett was on that morning only another division commander, with no legends about him or record of proved performance.

Even without Sallie, this would have been hard on Pickett, a born soldier. Growing up in the James River plantation country in the environs of Richmond, he had never wanted to be anything else.

Pickett’s grandfather, a vastly wealthy Richmonder, had left a working plantation to each of his three sons. But Pickett’s father, like many another of his generation, enjoyed the idyll of plantation life without the talents for sustaining it. Although George Pickett grew up in an aura of baronial privilege, the strong man in the family was his mother’s brother, Andrew Johnston, a successful attorney. Johnston had been associated in law with Abraham Lincoln, and the Pickett boy, visiting his uncle in Quincy, became Lincoln’s intimate friend. When Johnston showed a lack of enthusiasm about an army career for George at a time when Virginia appointments were going to his cousin Harry Heth and to Powell Hill, it was Mr. Lincoln who was instrumental in obtaining for the Richmond boy an appointment to West Point from Illinois.

According to Sallie, who became Mrs. Pickett, Lincoln wrote the seventeen-year-old that “I should like to have a perfect soldier credited to dear old Illinois.” Mrs. Pickett also stated that Mr. Lincoln gave the boy advice to follow “the old maxim that ‘one drop of honey catches more flies than half-a-gallon of gall.’” Wherever the advice came from, George Pickett had a pleasing personality. Genial, informal, and considerate, with a turn of humor, he made many friends. Perhaps because of his quick temper and the theatrical element in his character, he was—like other colorful personalities—abidingly disliked by a few.

This dislike, inflamed by jealousy of the post-Gettysburg glory that came to him, was an element in a subsequent denigration of Pickett’s personal conduct at Gettysburg. The ancient canard should be disposed of here. A South Carolinian named Haskell started a rumor that Pickett and his staff huddled in the Spangler barn during the assault, and Kirk Otey, a Virginian from Pickett’s division, published in a Richmond newspaper a charge that two of Pickett’s staff officers were waiting their turn at the “whisky wagon” in the rear of the lines during the attack. In time the two slanders merged to form the single story that Pickett and his staff were drunk in the stone barn.

Every conceivable form of evidence was published in refutation of the slander, including the indisputable fact that the Spangler barn had been burned before the charge. Long-street and Wilcox, in official reports uninvolved with the scandal, substantiated the staff officers’ accounts of their performance of hazardous duty. The truth is that the calumny made a better story than the facts.

An element in Pickett’s actual behavior that offended some brother officers before and after Gettysburg was the emotionality brought to the surface by his autumnal romance; at times he behaved more like a mooning schoolboy than was considered seemly by contemporaries in the army. But, whatever personal reservations his fellow officers may have had about him, the open enmities and the “controversy” were in the future when General Pickett joined the group with Lee on the crest of Seminary Ridge.

During the prolonged period of waiting, while others clearly showed their tension, Colonel Alexander observed that Pickett seemed cheerfully composed and “sanguine of success.” Moving back and forth from the command post to his troops, General Pickett passed the time by writing a letter to Sallie. He was acutely aware of the diminished strength of his division, reduced to 4,500 men from 8,000, but he was even more aware that his hour of destiny had come at last.