Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (46 page)

At the end of the Confederate right, McLaws’s withdrawal had exposed the flank of Hood’s division. The encroaching enemy immediately threatened on the front and both sides, and the fierce fighters of the Devil’s Den and Little Round Top action had to run to get out of an envelopment. Colonel Sorrel had
not
taken the order of retirement to Evander Law.

In his shaky state, the chief of staff had been driven frantic by Longstreet. Sorrel was sent back by Longstreet to McLaws, whom he asked if it were possible to retake the position his division had just been ordered to abandon.

McLaws said that he “demurred most decidedly at the suggestion,” and asked Sorrel why he inquired.

Colonel Sorrel said: “Because General Longstreet has forgotten that he ordered it, and now disapproves the withdrawal.”

“But,” McLaws replied, “recollect that you gave me the order.”

“Yes, sir,” the staff officer said, “and General Longstreet gave it to me.”

They tacitly agreed to ignore the countermanding order. At the best, only loss of life would be accomplished by trying to retake the position. As it was, McLaws said, “the enemy made no attempt to advance against my part of the line after it had been re-established.”

While sending orders that he forgot about and not going near the ground himself, Longstreet rushed about among Alexander’s batteries on a job that the young cannoneer was doing quite well himself. Longstreet never remembered that the ammunition was low: Alexander did. In this final expression of his turmoil, Longstreet was acting like an excited field officer, with no communication with army headquarters and only sporadic and unsettling communication with his own command. At something that tickled his fancy, his laugh rang out immoderately over the somber field.

The personal behavior of the burly Dutchman revealed anything except the collaborative strategist of the memoirs. The fact that he was opposed to the attack—to all or any attacks—even before the army left Virginia cannot properly be cited in debating the question of his rightness on the third day. The third day occurred because of Ewell’s failure on the first and Longstreet’s on the second, within the pattern made necessary by Stuart’s failure to provide reconnaissance. Longstreet had been opposed to the offensive even before anyone could have conceived of their cavalry leader’s disappearance, and he held to it when Ewell’s victory needed only to be grasped. Because the final attack did fail—with various assists from him along the way—he was able to make out a case for his opposition.

What antagonized brother officers was that he built a case for the superiority of his own rejected strategy by denigrating and misrepresenting Robert E. Lee. His ultimate ignobleness as the Confederates saw it, was to claim that Lee’s assumption of all blame for the third day was actually an admission that he alone was to blame. In using the commanding general’s magnanimity to buttress his own position, Longstreet became a villain to all the supporters of Lee. And with the passing of years, as Confederates sought reasons for their failure Longstreet became the accepted goat.

More recently, objective historians and Longstreet partisans have tried to re-evaluate him outside the text of controversy. This is almost impossible. All evaluation must largely depend on his demonstrably inaccurate and inventive defenses, and on judgments of his contemporaries which read like a prosecutor’s plea for conviction. More than any other man on either side, Longstreet is inextricably involved with the happenings at Gettysburg in terms of the controversy of the following decades.

Yet, that Longstreet himself was disturbed about his part in the battle at the time is indicated by a letter of vindication which he wrote his uncle as soon as camp was established back in Virginia. And in the emergency at the end of the third day he certainly reverted to the role of a subordinate. He gave no thought to the commanding general, to decisions concerning the army’s course, or to any consideration except the details of his immediate front. As this was accepted by everyone as natural, it seems evident that the drama of Longstreet’s rejection as Lee’s strategical adviser was played out largely in Longstreet’s own mind. Because of this interior conflict, he lost control of himself and of his troops, and for two days was a poor corps commander. Many other men performed below their potential at Gettysburg, but only James Longstreet absolved himself by blaming Lee.

18

On the afternoon of the third day at Gettysburg, General Lee assumed that his most dependable subordinate was doing whatever was indicated on the right flank. In taking over the center himself, the commanding general adopted the role of personal field commander which he was to fill from that day onward.

His famous line “It’s all my fault” has been attributed to Lee’s magnanimity. He was magnanimous, and certainly he had no reason to blame his men or General Wilcox, but it was not merely the nobility of his character which was speaking. As a patriarch, he was acting very purposefully for the good of his clan.

Colonel David Mcintosh, who commanded one of the gun battalions of A. P. Hill that opened the first day’s action in support of Heth, was a thoughtful man, and he said this of Lee after the charge: “His greatest concern at the moment seemed to be to break the shock of the repulse, and its possible effects upon the troops, and probably it was this, coupled with his great magnanimity, that led him to say as reported, ‘It is all my fault.’”

General Lee could not conceivably have believed that the failure of the three-day battle was
all
his fault. He had made mistakes in judgment, of which the most fundamental was to attempt Jacksonian tactics without Stonewall Jackson. At some time after the battle he recognized this. He never believed that the invasion as such was a mistake. As the army’s ability to sustain that invasion had been tested, the failure demonstrably was in its command personnel, as, from perspective, Confederate participants pointed out. But as commander in chief, as Robert E. Lee, the patriarchal leader assumed responsibility for his people, and he was then most truly the “Uncle Robert” that his men called him.

When stricken soldiers paused around him, it was as their older kinsman that he soothed them. “All this will come out right in the end. We’ll talk it over afterwards. In the meantime, all good men must rally. We want all good men just now. …”

He formed them personally—squads out of what had been companies, companies out of what had been regiments—and skirmish lines were stretched along the brow of the hill.

If the counterattack came, he planned a defensive line in the woods along the crest of the hill. Constantly his words were directed toward heartening the officers and men in the performance of the next duty. He was trying to remove from them the sense of cataclysm and quiet them into orderly competence.

Wilcox, shaken by his purposeless losses, came up with the brim of his straw hat flapping. He had just brought his brigade out, and, as he tried to make a report to Lee, his voice broke.

Lee took his hand. “Never mind, general, all this has been my fault. It is
I
that have lost this fight, and you must help me out of it the best way you can.”

Wilcox’s brigade, despite their losses of the past two days, represented one of the six unbroken units in the nearly two miles from McLaws’s unsettled left to the two brigades from Rodes’s division, Doles and Ramseur, deployed in Long Lane south from the town.

Of the other brigades in Anderson’s division (omitting Perry’s as a wreck) Wright’s was also cut up, and one of the two unused brigades, Posey’s, had revealed egregiously bad leadership on the second day. Dick Anderson’s actions were vague, as they had been all through the battle. Apparently his brigades that had started out late in support and then been recalled were returned by him to their original line of battle in readiness to receive attack. Wilcox reoccupied his position in support of Alexander’s batteries.

Farther north along the ridge, Powell Hill seems to have left Anderson to his own discretion, or Longstreet’s (as Longstreet had recalled Wright and Posey), and directed his attention to bringing order to his six fragmented brigades behind the line of the two unused brigades of Pender’s division. Only one of these latter, Colonel Perrin’s South Carolinians, had suffered heavily on the first day, and the men had been rested since and were ready. Along this stretch the enemy, having just seen what happened to Pickett, made no advance over the open country between the two ridges.

The position along Seminary Ridge as seen by the enemy assumed at least the appearance of order. What six brigades, three reduced in number, would have accomplished against a determined advance is problematical. Unquestionably, the corpses and the wounded littering the 1,400 open yards between the lines would have had a restraining effect on enemy troops who themselves had just been severely buffeted.

While the threatening advances were made against the Confederate right, a breakthrough at that end, or an overlapping of McLaws’s left, could quickly swell the action over against the uncertain center. General Lee for all his outward calm, showed his apprehension of a counterattack by his ceaseless efforts to form lines from the fragments in cover on the hill.

He dispatched all the officers of his staff to the task of reforming those troops, entirely without field officers, and alone on his gray horse rode among the disorganized and slightly wounded along the brow of the hill. Many as they reached that point of safety simply threw themselves on the ground. Lee was attracted to one fellow lying face down in a ditch, whose groans seemed a little loud and dramatic. After an inspection of the soldier, Uncle Robert personally hoisted him to his feet and sent him into a unit.

Many of the men had halted in the woods back of Alexander’s guns, and Lee went among them quietly, saying: “Don’t be discouraged. … It was my fault this time. … All good men must hold together now.”

Indefatigable young Alexander had been sending his batteries to the rear singly to be refitted. As the sun lowered behind them, his guns were assembled in fair shape, and that corps artillery was definitely one unit commanded by a cool, undaunted officer. One of the cannoneers said to Colonel Fremantle: “We’ve not lost confidence in the Old Man. This day’s work will do him no harm. Uncle Robert will get us into Washington yet; you bet he will.”

This spirit became increasingly evident among all the soldiers. Suffering disappointment, grief over the death of comrades and the wreckage of famous units, the men had been spared a sense of calamity by the assurance spread by General Lee’s physical presence. Where panic might have spread, an almost unnatural calm settled over the troops.

At sundown Lee left the advanced rows of guns, some of which were not supported by even a skirmish line, and rode among the reorganized groups waiting in line of battle in the woods on the crest. Most of the men looked very tired, and some seemed numbed, but they were resting quietly as they would have in camp after any other action. There was little talk, and that mostly about the officers and men who were gone.

At that time neither Lee nor the troops knew the fates of individual officers left on Cemetery Ridge. Many of the wounded—including old General Trimble, whose frustrating efforts to serve resulted in one hour of shattering action and the loss of a leg—had been captured. They were treated in Federal hospitals and later exchanged.

After seven o’clock a silence began to descend on the whole field. Then, along the crest, the men could hear the cries and moans of the wounded below them. The Confederate medical corps were always understaffed, and, because medicines were shut off by the blockade, the doctors and medical volunteers always worked without proper drugs. In amputations without anesthesia, screams would be torn from even the most courageous men, and these agonized sounds scraped across the nerves of the soldiers more harshly than the whine of the largest shells.

The wounded on whom no such sudden agony was inflicted bore their suffering with casual stoicism. They awaited their turns at medical care patiently, each trying to avoid creating a disturbance that would unsettle the group. Scores and even hundreds of the soldiers who had not reformed in the battle line were helping friends from their own units. Many of the helpers had been themselves slightly wounded. When some of these first returned to their sanctuary, they showed as curiosities welts along ribs from bullets that had torn through clothes and grazed the skin, and darkening bruises from spent shell fragments that had knocked them down. When they saw the silent suffering of the men more seriously hurt, those who had enjoyed narrow escapes became gentle and solicitous of their wounded fellows.

The Army of Northern Virginia never seemed more of a family than in that July dusk on Seminary Ridge. They were not aware that their struggle for self-determination had passed the point of logical hope. They were not thinking of their cause at all, but rather of the immediate details of life in the army. Their confidence in General Lee was unshaken, and their thoughts were not burdened with apprehension.

Lee was the one who was worrying about the safety of the men. During the afternoon hours as he rallied and formed the troops, he let slip one recorded remark that revealed his own feelings. To Colonel Fremantle, in suggesting that the British observer go to a less exposed position, he said: “This has been a sad day for us, colonel—a sad day.” Quickly recovering himself, he added: “But we can’t always expect to gain victories.”

When the general was sure that the enemy would not attack that day, and that his men had restored order, he went to his headquarters tent. There the mask of statuesque composure began to fall away. His staff officers and visitors observed the sorrow settling over his features as he began the somber task of planning the details of a retreat.