The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (114 page)

Meanwhile the nearly 4000 rebel prisoners, wounded and unwounded, were being rounded up and sent to the rear. “Smart, healthy-looking men,” one Federal called them, adding: “They move very quick, walk like horses.” It was strange to see them thus, close up and de-fanged, without their guns and yells. They had a simple dignity about them which their ragged clothes served more to emphasize than lessen. Nor were all of them in rags. “Many of their officers were well dressed, fine, proud gentlemen,” another observer wrote soon afterwards, “such men as it would be a pleasure to meet, when the war is over. I had no desire to exult over them, and pity and sympathy were the general feelings of us all upon the occasion.” This last was not entirely true. At least one Union officer was alarmed by the thought that the prisoners—who, after all, numbered only a few hundred less than the surviving defenders of the ridge—might take it into their heads to renew the fight with the discarded weapons thickly strewn about the ground at their feet. There was, as it turned out, no danger of this; but the commander of a reserve battery, galloping forward in response to belated orders to reinforce the badly pounded guns along the center, received a different kind of shock. As he came up the reverse slope of the ridge he saw a mass of gray-clad men come over the crest ahead, and
his first thought was that the position had been overrun. He signaled a halt and was about to give the order to fall back, when he saw that the Confederates bore no arms and were under guard.

Meade had much the same original reaction. Arriving at last from Powers Hill, he too mistook the drove of prisoners for evidence of a breakthrough. Then, as he realized his mistake and rode on past them toward the crest, he encountered a lieutenant from Gibbon’s staff. “How is it going here?” he asked eagerly, and received the reply: “I believe, General, the enemy’s attack is repulsed.” Meade could scarcely credit the information, welcome though it was. “What!” he exclaimed. “Is the assault already repulsed?” By that time he had reached the crest, however, and the lieutenant’s assurance, “It is, sir,” was confirmed by what he saw with his own eyes: more captives being herded into clusters along the left and right and center, his own troops cavorting with abandoned rebel flags, and the fugitives withdrawing amid shellbursts on the far side of the valley, all unmistakable evidence of a victory achieved. “Thank God,” he said fervently. The lieutenant observed that Meade’s right hand jerked involuntarily upward, as if to snatch off his slouch hat and wave it in exultation, but then his concern for dignity prevailed. Instead he merely waved his hand, albeit rather selfconsciously, and cried, just once: “Hurrah!” This done, he gave the staffer instructions for the posting of reinforcements expected shortly, “as the enemy might be mad enough to attack again.” Adding: “If the enemy does attack, charge him in the flank and sweep him from the field,” he rode on down the ridge, where he was greeted with cheers of recognition and tossed caps. A band had come up by now from somewhere, and when it broke into the strains of “Hail to the Chief” a correspondent remarked, not altogether jokingly: “Ah, General Meade, you’re in very great danger of being President of the United States.”

Despite the evidence spread before him that the Confederates were in a state of acute distress, and therefore probably vulnerable to attack, the northern commander’s words had made it clear that he had no intention of going over to the offensive. No one on the other side of the valley had heard those words, however. If they had, their surprise and relief would have been at least as great as his had been on learning that their attempt to pierce his center had been foiled. This was especially true of Longstreet. A counter-puncher himself, he expected Meade to attack without delay, and he moved at once to meet the threat as best he could, sending word for Wright, whom he had halted when he saw the charge must fail, to collect and rally the fugitives streaming back toward the center, while he himself attended to that same function on the right. Now that the painful thing he had opposed was over, he recovered his bluff and hearty manner. He rode among the returning troops and spoke reassuringly to them, meantime sending word for McLaws
and Law to pull back to the line they had taken off from yesterday and thus place their divisions in position to assist in the defense of the weakened center. When one commander protested that his men could not be rallied, Old Peter mocked at his despair. “Very well; never mind then, General,” he told him. “Just let them remain where they are. The enemy’s going to advance, and will spare you the trouble.” Fremantle thought the Georgian’s conduct “admirable,” and when he paused at one point to ask if the colonel had anything to drink, the Britisher not only gave him a swig of rum from a silver flask but also insisted that he keep the rest, together with its container, as a token of his esteem. Longstreet thanked him, put the flask in his pocket for future reference, and continued to move among the fugitives with words of cheer and encouragement, preparing to meet the counterattack which he believed Meade would be delivering at any moment now.

But most of the survivors came streaming back the shortest way, straight across the valley toward the command post midway of its western rim, like hurt children in instinctive search of solace from a parent: meaning Lee. There the southern commander had remained throughout their advance and their brief, furious struggle on the distant ridge, until he saw them falter and begin their slow recoil; whereupon he rode forward to meet them coming back, to rally them with words of reassurance, and to share with them the ordeal of the counterattack he believed would soon be launched. Nor did he disappoint them in their expectations of solace and sustainment. “All this will come right in the end,” he told them. “We’ll talk it over afterwards. But in the meantime all good men must rally. We want all good and true men just now.” He made it clear to all he met that he considered the failure of the charge not their fault, but his, for having asked of them more than men could give. To Fremantle, who had ridden over from the right, he said: “This has been a sad day for us, Colonel. A sad day. But we can’t always expect to win victories.” After advising the visitor to find a safer point for observation, he continued to move among his soldiers in an attempt to brace them for the storm he thought was coming. “Very few failed to answer his appeal,” Fremantle noted, “and I saw many badly wounded men take off their hats and cheer him.”

One among the fugitives most in need of encouragement was Pickett, who came riding back with an expression of dejection and bewilderment on his face. Leading his division into battle for the first time, he had seen two thirds of it destroyed. Not only had his great hour come to nothing; tactically speaking, it added up to considerably less than nothing. Lee met him with instructions designed to bring him back to the problem now at hand. “General Pickett, place your division in rear of this hill,” he told him, “and be ready to repel the advance of the enemy should they follow up their advantage.” At least one bystander
observed that in his extremity Lee employed the words “the enemy” rather than his usual “those people.” But Pickett was in no state to observe anything outside his personal loss and mortification.

“General Lee, I have no division now,” he said tearfully; “Armistead is down, Garnett is down, and Kemper is mortally wounded—”

“Come, General Pickett,” Lee broke in. “This has been my fight, and upon my shoulders rests the blame. The men and officers of your command have written the name of Virginia as high today as it has ever been written before.… Your men have done all that men can do,” he added after a pause for emphasis. “The fault is entirely my own.”

He repeated this as he rode from point to point about the field: “It’s all my fault,” “The blame is mine,” and “You must help me.” To Wilcox, who was about as unstrung as Pickett in reporting that he was not sure his troops would stand if the Federals attacked, Lee was particularly solicitous and tender. “Never mind, General,” he told him, taking his hand as he spoke. “All this has been my fault. It is I who have lost this fight, and you must help me out of it the best way you can.” Fremantle, who had not followed his advice to find a place of safety, thought it “impossible to look at him or listen to him without feeling the strongest admiration,” and when he rode forward to the line of guns, the Britisher found the cannoneers ready to challenge any blue attack on the disrupted center. They had much the same reaction as his own to Lee’s appeal. “We’ve not lost confidence in the old man,” they assured him, speaking defiantly, almost angrily, as if someone had suggested otherwise. “This day’s work will do him no harm. Uncle Robert will get us into Washington yet. You bet he will.”

By no means all responded in that fashion, however—especially among the troops who had been all the way to the enemy ridge and back, as the artillerists had not—and even concerning those who did there was considerable doubt as to whether they would stand their ground, this soon after their delivery from chaos, if they were exposed to more than the possibility of further danger. In point of fact, there was strong evidence that they would not. When some officers managed to form a line along the forward slope of Seminary Ridge, still in plain view of the Union batteries, the rallied fugitives broke badly under the long-range fire their concentration drew. “Then commenced a rout, that increased to a stampede,” an indignant witness later wrote. Fleeing rearward over the crest, the mass of several hundred fear-crazed men was funneled into a ravine along the western slope, and there, without regard for orders or appeals from their officers, who were swept along in the crush, they “pushed, poured, and rushed in a continuous stream, throwing away guns, blankets, and haversacks,” until at last a straggler line, composed of the more stalwart few among them, was thrown across their path and “dammed [them] up.”

Lee did not reproach them even then, knowing as he did that time alone could heal the wounds their morale had suffered in the hour just past. What was more, his ready acceptance of total blame for the failure of the assault was not merely a temporary burden he assumed for the sake of encouraging his troops to resist the counterattack he believed Meade was about to launch at them; he continued to say the same things in the future, after the immediate need for them was past and the quite different but altogether human need for self-justification might have been expected to set in. “It’s all my fault. I thought my men were invincible,” he told Longstreet the next day, perhaps by way of making specific admission that he had been wrong in overruling his chief lieutenant’s objection that the charge was bound to fail. And in his official report to the President, forwarded on the last day of the month, he repeated for the record his assertion that such fault as might be found could not properly be applied to the men who had bled and died to sustain his pride in them. “The conduct of the troops was all that I could desire or expect,” he wrote, “and they deserved success so far as it can be deserved by heroic valor and fortitude. More may have been required of them than they were able to perform, but my admiration of their noble qualities and confidence in their ability to cope successfully with the enemy has suffered no abatement from the issue of this protracted and sanguinary conflict.”

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Protracted the conflict had certainly been, and sanguinary too, three days of fighting having produced a combined total of about 50,000 casualties North and South. Nor was it quite over yet. Although Lee could not and Meade would not renew the infantry action, two indecisive and as it were extraneous cavalry engagements—one three miles east of Gettysburg, deep in the Federal right rear, and the other just west of Round Top, on the Confederate right flank—were, respectively, still to be ended and begun. The former, which reached a climax at about the time Pickett and Pettigrew surged up Cemetery Ridge, was the result of Jeb Stuart’s attempt to carry out his instructions for placing his troopers in a position from which to harry the expected, or at any rate hoped-for, blue retreat; whereas the latter, fought about an hour after the gray attackers fell back across the valley, was the result of Judson Kilpatrick’s attempt, in the absence of instructions, to strike while the tactical iron was hot and thus not only throw the rebels into retreat but also provoke a panic that would prevent them from achieving a getaway. Neither Stuart nor Kilpatrick, quite different in makeup and ability, but altogether similar in their thirst for action and applause, succeeded in accomplishing
what he set out to do. In fact, as the two things turned out, both generals would have done better to remain within their respective lines, together with all their men: especially Kilpatrick.