Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg (5 page)

Night fell on a field made hideous by three thousand dead and dying soldiers and the moans of many of the additional seven or eight thousand wounded. The exhausted survivors slept fitfully unsure of what the morrow might bring.

B
Y DAWN OP
July 2, all of the Army of Northern Virginia had reached Gettysburg except Stuart's cavalry and Major General George Pickett's division plus Brigadier General Evander Law's brigade, both in Longstreet's corps. On the Union side, the large Sixth Corps was still many miles away while the Fifth Corps was nearing the battlefield after an all-night march.

Lee was eager to renew the attack, believing that momentum and morale were with his army. From their observation post near the Lutheran Seminary, Lee and Longstreet peered through their binoculars at the Union lines a mile or more away. These lines occupied the high ground south of town in a shape that resembled an upside-down fishhook with its barbed end curving from Culp's Hill through Cemetery Hill and the shank running south along Cemetery Ridge to the eye of the hook on the rocky
prominence of Little Round Top. This was a strong position. It followed high ground except for a half-mile just north of Little Round Top, where the ridge dipped into a swale commanded by higher ground in a peach orchard along the Emmitsburg Road nearly a mile to the west. The convex shape of the Union line, with its flanks only two miles apart, enabled troops to be shifted quickly from one place to another to reinforce weak spots. By contrast, the much longer concave exterior lines held by the Confederates made communication between the widely separated flanks slow and difficult.

A master of defensive tactics, Longstreet recognized the strength of the Union position. Some Southern officers considered Longstreet ponderous, stubborn, and phlegmatic. But in reality he was reflective and sagacious. He recognized better than some of his colleagues that courage and dash could not overcome determined defenders armed with rifled muskets. These weapons had an accurate range three times greater than the smoothbore muskets of the Napoleonic Wars or the Mexican War, in which many senior Civil War commanders (including Longstreet) had fought.

After studying the Union position on the morning of July 2, Longstreet concluded that an attack had little chance of success. He urged Lee to move south (toward Washington) and find some good defensive terrain. This maneuver, said Longstreet, would compel Meade
to attack the Confederates, who could stand on the defensive and repeat the victories of Second Manassas and Fredericksburg. But Lee's blood was up. He rejected the advice. The model of a successful battle most vivid in his mind was Chancellorsville, just two months earlier. Courage and dash—plus some dazzling tactical maneuvers by Lee and Jackson—had enabled them to overcome superior numbers and win that battle by attacking, not by fighting on the defensive. Longstreet had not been at Chancellorsville. With Pickett's and Major General John Bell Hood's divisions, he had been operating against Union forces in the Norfolk-Suffolk region of Virginia. Nor had Longstreet arrived at Gettysburg on July 1 in time to see Hill's and Ewell's divisions drive the enemy pell-mell through the town. Confederate success on July 1 had confirmed Lee's belief in the invincibility of his men. Their morale was high, despite the seven thousand casualties they had sustained. According to Colonel Arthur Fre-mantle, a British observer accompanying the Army of Northern Virginia, the Confederates were eager to attack an enemy “they had beaten so constantly” and for whose fighting capacity they felt “profound contempt.” They might regard the move that Longstreet suggested as a retreat, and lose their edge. With limited supplies and a vulnerable line of communications to Virginia, Lee could not stay in Pennsylvania indefinitely He had come there to win a battle; he intended
to do so that day. Pointing toward Cemetery Hill, he said to Longstreet, “The enemy is there, and I am going to attack him there.” Longstreet replied, “If he is there, it will be because he is anxious that we should attack him; a good reason, in my judgment, for not doing so.” But Lee had made up his mind. Longstreet turned away sadly, as he wrote years later, with a conviction of impending disaster.

Lee's intent was to attack both Union flanks on July 2. But after looking over the position on Culp's Hill and Cemetery Hill, he agreed with Ewell that the Union right was too strong. Lee therefore ordered Longstreet to take his two divisions (the third, Pick-ett's, would not arrive in time) plus Hill's one division that had not fought the previous day and attack the Union left. Ewell would demonstrate against the enemy in his front, and convert the demonstration into an attack if Meade weakened that flank to reinforce his left against Longstreet's assault.

Longstreet took a long time getting his troops into position for the attack. A large part of the delay was not his fault. The shortage of cavalry had made it difficult to scout a route to the jump-off point. (Stuart's troopers were finally on their way to Gettysburg, but would not get there until evening.) Because the Confederates did not want to telegraph the point of attack, Longstreet had to countermarch several miles after
discovering that the original approach road could be seen from a Union signal station on Little Round Top.

Part of Longstreet's slowness on July 2 may also have resulted from a lack of enthusiasm for the attack he had been ordered to make. After the war, he became a target of withering criticism from Virginians who dominated the writing of Confederate history. They accused him of insubordination and tardiness at Gettysburg. They held him responsible for losing the battle—and, by implication, the war. But some of this criticism was self-serving, intended to shield Lee and other Virginians (chiefly Ewell and Stuart) from blame. In the eyes of unreconstructed Southern whites, Longstreet also made the mistake of urging them to accept the results of the war. Even worse, he became a Republican and received a federal appointment from President Ulysses S. Grant, a friend of Longstreet from their days together at West Point.

We will leave Longstreet's troops for a while and proceed south along Seminary Ridge on the park road called West Confederate Avenue, which follows part of the Confederate line of July 2 and 3. Along the way we will see many cannons and monuments of various kinds—as indeed we have been seeing since the beginning of our tour. The numbers of monuments and cannons and other physical artifacts of the battle and its commemoration are far greater than at
any other battlefield. There are something like 1,400 monuments and markers of various sorts, and almost four hundred cannons. The carriages of the latter are replicas, but most of the guns themselves actually date from the war, and some of them were at Gettysburg in 1863. They are placed today in the approximate position where they, or ones like them, fought during the battle (there were more than four hundred cannons with the two armies at Gettysburg).

About a hundred battery markers today indicate the principal locations of each six- or four-gun artillery battery during the battle. Other official bronze markers (placed by the War Department a century ago, when it administered the battlefield) stand where each of the seventy Union and fifty-six Confederate brigades fought. Union brigade markers have a square base, and Confederate markers a round base. Granite markers with a bronze tablet stand at or near the command sites of the twenty-two Union divisions (2,500 to 5,000 men) and ten Confederate divisions (5,500 to 8,000 men). Similar corps markers indicate the headquarters of the seven Union infantry and one cavalry corps and the three Confederate infantry corps and one cavalry division. These markers describe the actions and casualties of those units during the battle.

The monuments of greatest interest to most visitors are those erected by the veterans (or their descendants) of many Union regiments and a few Confederate
regiments that fought at Gettysburg, or by their states. Conforming to no single pattern or material or size, regimental monuments commemorate the actions and casualties of those regiments during the battle. Sometimes they list all the battles (and casualties) of the regiment during the entire war. Union regimental associations began placing monuments in the 1880s— forty-seven in 1885 alone—and by 1904 there were some 360 regimental and state monuments on the battlefield, nearly all of them Union. Many Northern states appropriated five hundred dollars or more to supplement private contributions for regimental monuments, and appropriated larger sums for the imposing state monuments.

Few Southern veterans or states had the resources or interest to commemorate a battle they had lost. Beginning with Virginia in 1917, however, Southern states and Confederate heritage groups began placing monuments, some of them of impressive size and beauty. My favorite, from an aesthetic standpoint, is the Virginia monument at midpoint on West Confederate Avenue. By one count, however, in the year 2000 there were 472 Union regimental and state monuments in the park, compared with only twenty-seven such Confederate monuments.

Our next stop will be at one of those Confederate monuments—and one of the park's newest—the equestrian statue of Longstreet near the Pitzer Woods
sign on West Confederate Avenue, several hundred yards north of the observation tower visible in the distance. This is the first monument to Longstreet anywhere—testimony to his lack of popularity in the South. And for many years the North Carolina branch of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which launched the drive for a Longstreet monument with the slogan “It's About Time,” had difficulty raising funds. With the support of other groups (some in the North), they finally succeeded, and the monument was dedicated before a crowd of four thousand people on July 3, 1998, the 135th anniversary of the battle's final day.

It
is
about time for Longstreet to get his due. Historians have long recognized his abilities and have absolved him of responsibility for “losing” Gettysburg. Michael Shaara's novel
The Killer Angels
(1974) and the 1993 movie
Gettysburg
based on the novel have given Longstreet's role at Gettysburg high and favorable visibility. Nevertheless, his monument has not escaped controversy. The careful observer will note that one hoof of the horse is off the ground. Yet Longstreet was not wounded in the battle, so the monument does not conform to the Gettysburg pattern. The sculptor wanted to portray Longstreet as reining in his galloping horse as he arrives to deal with a crisis. He received permission from the Park Service to show the left front hoof of the horse in the
air as its rider pulls back the reins. Fair enough. The sculptor also placed the monument at ground level instead of on a pedestal, for greater realism. Many visitors like that notion. But in a milieu where all of the other equestrian statues of generals are on pedestals, conveying an idea of heroic stature, the down-to-earth Longstreet seems to some observers to be somehow demeaned.

And almost everyone notices that the horse is too small in comparison with the man. Curiously, that was intentional. I dropped in on the sculptor one day when he was working on the clay model for this bronze sculpture. He explained that Longstreet was full size and the horse four-fifths size so that when one looked up at the monument on its pedestal, the proportions would appear correct. But then why put it at ground level? If that was a later idea, why not then make the horse full size? There is a mystery here that no one has yet explained to me. In any event, a colleague commented that the Virginian Jubal Early, an unreconstructed rebel who led the postwar campaign against Longstreet's reputation, would have selected precisely this kind of monument for Longstreet.

We must now cast our imagination back to 1863. It is almost 4:00
P.M.
on July 2 of that year. Longstreet's troops have finally arrived and deployed for attack after their roundabout march of several miles to avoid detection from enemy observers on Little Round
Top. One of Longstreet's brigades, Alabamians commanded by Evander Law, had marched twenty-five miles since breaking camp at 1:00
A.M.
Our
walk will take us only four-tenths of a mile south from the Long-street monument to climb the observation tower, which is located near the site of Longstreet's headquarters during the ensuing attack. From the tower we get a panoramic view of the southern half of the battlefield, and can even see the Eternal Light Peace Memorial more than three miles to the north. Behind us as we face to the east is the Eisenhower National Historic Site, a beautiful farm to which Dwight Eisenhower retired after his presidency. Tickets to visit the farm can be obtained at the park visitor center.

But our concern is with the events that took place in our front during the three hours after 4:00
P.M.
on July 2, 1863—some of the most intense fighting and concentrated carnage of the whole Civil War. One-third of a mile due east is the famous Peach Orchard. The peach trees there today cover less than half the acreage of its historic predecessor. A quarter-mile south of the orchard we see the surviving buildings of the Rose farm, where some of the most famous photographs of Confederate soldiers killed in the battle were taken. Visible a half-mile east of the Peach Orchard is the Trostle farm, where the most famous wartime photographs of dead artillery horses were taken.