Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (19 page)

It would be unthinkably humiliating to ask General Lee to make for him such a simple decision as going to Cashtown or Gettysburg. As he could not make it himself, he called in his generals to make it for him. He could not admit to his subordinates that he was immobilized by indecision, even if he admitted it to himself. Instead, he fell back on one of his dramatic rages as a cover for his indecision, and denounced Lee for sending him such an ambiguous order.

It was a strange trio of general officers who served as witnesses to Ewell’s greatest performance since returning, a humble Christian, to the army.

The magnificent-looking Rodes, younger than the others, new to division command and unacquainted with Ewell’s spectacular scenes, said little during the meeting.

Dark, bitter Jubal Early, chewing tobacco, also said little, though his hard, bright eyes grew speculative. Early’s division, coming down from York, had gone into bivouac a few miles away, and he had ridden over to confer with the corps commander. Early was not confused by Ewell’s high-flown invective. Every time Ewell pointed at the damnable message from Lee, he was looking for some loophole for himself. Early offered him none. He recognized his superior officer for what he was: a subordinate who needed a leader. On that night Jubal Early insidiously established an ascendancy over his commanding officer.

The third man present was an oddity: a sixty-year-old major general serving as a volunteer without troop assignment. Isaac Trimble was a West Point-educated Virginian who had been successful in railroad civil engineering. At secession, Trimble was general superintendent of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad, and Marylanders regarded him as one of their most distinguished citizens. Early in the war he commanded one of Ewell’s brigades, and so ferocious was Trimble in action that Stonewall Jackson had him ticketed for future command of his own old division.

Trimble’s personalized front-line leadership cost him severe wounds in action, and he lost additional time from troops because of various ailments of the flesh. He was on sick leave when the army was reorganized, and in his absence Jackson’s old division went to Allegheny Johnson. Recovered by June when the army was heading northward, Trimble was given command of the forces that were to protect the Shenandoah Valley while the army was away.

When Trimble reached his new post, he found no troops. Imboden’s cavalry were enjoying their northern expedition on Ewell’s flank, and the Maryland infantry had somehow got misplaced in the juggling of units. Even Lee could only write plaintively: “I do not know what has become of them.”

Old Trimble wasted no time in a fruitless search. He took off alone after the army and found Lee in his tent outside Chambersburg on Saturday the 27th. Lee, wishing to make use of his friend’s fiery spirit, sent him on to Carlisle to join Ewell as a sort of general officer without portfolio. He arrived on the Sunday when Ewell was in fine fettle over the prospect of taking Harrisburg, and was received warmly by his former division commander.

Thanks to this sequence of circumstances, Ewell’s night conference had one positive, outspoken member. Aggressive-eyed Trimble wore a scimitar-shaped black mustache across his bony features which gave him the aspect of a pirate leader, and he did not hesitate to give his opinion to anybody. Having gone with his native state on a point of principle, Trimble had no intention of suffering mutely failures in a cause for which he had sacrificed a successful career.

He reported that he said to Ewell: “I could interpret it [Lee’s ambiguous order] in but one way. After hearing from General Lee a few days before his plan to attack the advance of the enemy, wherever found … and that, as this advance was in Gettysburg, we should march to that place and notify General Lee accordingly… .”

Even that did not still the disturbance in Ewell’s mind, though it did end the weird conference for the night.

The next morning, July 1, he compromised as long as possible by following a road that for seven or eight miles went in the direction of both Cashtown and Gettysburg. When Rodes’s advance brigades neared the village of Middletown, where the roads divided and a choice must be made, a message from punctilious Hill reached Ewell. It advised him that Hill’s advance was nearing Gettysburg. That decided Old Baldhead. In his report he made no mention of his dilemma. Laconically he reported: “I … turned the head of Rodes’ column toward that place.”

4

When thirty-four-year-old Robert Rodes received orders to direct the head of his column to Gettysburg, the new major general found himself (as had Heth in his attack from the west) in sole command of the field. General Ewell was riding in the rear when in midmorning the big blond Rodes was startled to hear cannon fire reverberating across the hilly farmland in his front. He was then perhaps four miles from Gettysburg, coming from the northwest along the Mummas-burg road, and his total information about the situation was that A. P. Hill was moving toward Gettysburg to discover what enemy troops were there.

Like Heth, Rodes was under restraining orders to avoid bringing on a general engagement if he encountered the enemy head-on. The enemy was there, a few miles in his front in strength unknown. Rodes determined to meet him with all he had.

To his right ran a wooded ridge, and from his maps the young general discovered that this, an extension of Seminary Ridge called Oak Hill, passed just in front of the town toward which he was headed and from which the firing seemed to be coming. Without breaking stride he deployed a brigade along the rough going of the ridge and pushed on. Soon cavalry began banging at them with new repeating carbines. These were a few of Buford’s busy people, firing as they fell back and sending frantic couriers with the news of Rodes’s approach.

Rodes’s hardened soldiers took no chances on what those summer woods ahead might be concealing beyond the blue troopers. He got a second brigade up on the ridge, and then part of a third—his own former Alabama brigade, commanded by Colonel O’Neal. Without losing their steady motion forward, the fourth and fifth brigades deployed in line of battle as they marched across farmed fields in the rising heat.

In early afternoon, where a road crossed Oak Hill, Rodes came out on a sharp elevation, and suddenly before him lay the smoky panorama of battle. He was looking at the left of Hill’s line, across the Cashtown turnpike and directed toward the ridge that Rodes’s troops were astride. The firing between Hill’s men and the Federals had grown desultory by the time Rodes viewed the action. It was the period when Heth was waiting for developments and before General Lee reached the field. Rodes, finding himself potentially on the flank of Hill’s enemy, saw his position as an opportunity.

Even as he watched, portions of the troops in front of Hill faced about in line of battle toward Rodes about half a mile away. The vague dark blurs of moving units took position in the woods near the railroad cut that paralleled the Cashtown pike, and found the protection of one of the stone fences with which the Pennsylvania farmers divided their small fields. These troops were of Robinson’s division, the reserves of Reynolds’s I Corps, which Doubleday had been handling against Heth.

At the same time Rodes saw great blots of blue troops moving toward him from the streets of the town itself. These were two divisions of Howard’s XI Corps, the Germans, who had broken ranks at Chancellorsville and whom the Confederates particularly hated as “bounty troops.” They had hurried fast to the field and were tired, but they wanted to erase Chancellorsville from their record.

The quickly swelling Federal strength in his front had no effect on Rodes’s decision to attack. Like Lee, he wanted the initiative himself. Like Powell Hill, he reacted to the opening of action with an impetuosity that counted no costs.

He quickly established field headquarters, with the flag run out over the tent, on a hill across the road from the big farmhouse of the Forneys. Then he sent staff officers galloping off with orders to brigade commanders. Counting on Early’s division to come up on his left flank, Rodes placed only one brigade on his left to meet the threat from Howard’s troops moving out of Gettysburg. The other three brigades at hand he prepared to send forward along the ridge. A fifth was coming up in general reserve. Considering its audacity, Rodes’s plan for battle was sound enough, except that in his eagerness the recent civil engineer took no account of his brigadiers’ suitability to the nature of their assignments.

Aggressive young Dodson Ramseur was ordered to place his brigade in general reserve. The defensive position on the open plain between the Middletown road and the ridge Rodes assigned to the Georgia brigade of George Doles, another offensive-minded fighter. This thirty-three-year-old Georgian, without formal military training, had showed solid ability ever since the first fighting. A genial, courteous disciplinarian, Doles had been promoted to brigadier the previous November and was one of Rodes’s dependables.

For the crucial pivotal slot between Doles, posted across the road on defense, and the two attacking brigades on the ridge, Rodes unwisely designated his own old Alabama brigade under a colonel new to brigade command, Edward O’Neal.

When the artillery fire began to grow heavy between Rodes’s guns and the enemy’s, as each felt out the other, Rodes belatedly developed some doubts about O’Neal as commander of the connective brigade between Doles and Iverson. In his excitement and determination to excel, Rodes, without thinking of O’Neal’s feelings, reverted to his former authority over the brigade and acted as if he still commanded it. There was no intimacy between the two men to begin with, and O’Neal resented Rodes’s orders to his regiments.

Rodes’s instructions began when the Federal cannon fire was growing particularly troublesome to waiting troops; he ordered O’Neal’s brigade back from its exposed position. To O’Neal’s right was Iverson, with Junius Daniel’s brigade of North Carolinians in support. Rodes personally placed O’Neal’s right regiment in alignment with Daniel’s left, and ordered O’Neal to form his brigade line upon this regiment, the 3rd Alabama.

Then, as Rodes tensed for the moment of launching his attack, he observed a gap between O’Neal’s left and Doles’s right. To remedy this oversight of O’Neal’s, Rodes pulled the 5th Alabama out of line and placed it under his personal command.

Rodes had not assumed personal command of the 3rd Alabama, on the right, but only shifted its position to form the brigade line. However, O’Neal seemed to think that both regiments—extreme right and left—had been removed from his command, and his resentment of the interference with his command seemed to confuse him.

Finally, when Rodes was ready to give the command to advance, he instructed O’Neal precisely on the order in which his regiments should be sent forward. Instead of following the orders, O’Neal choked into complete inanition and did nothing at all.

When the whole line swept forward over the rough country, O’Neal placed himself stiffly with the reserve regiment, 5th Alabama, and three of his regiments pushed forward on their own. In the confusion the 3rd Alabama, on the extreme right, received no proper orders at all. Its colonel, Cullen Battle, simply moved along with Daniel’s brigade, on whose left he had been placed by Rodes.

Robert Rodes watched with mounting horror the result of his first engagement as major general. The three unled regiments of O’Neal’s brigade compressed when they struck the brutal fire of the enemy, leaving the left flank of Iverson’s brigade hanging in the air. Caught in enfilade, Iverson’s men were slaughtered. One regiment went down in such a neat row that when its survivors waved shirt tails, or any piece of cloth remotely white, Iverson thought that the whole regiment of
live
men were surrendering. The shaken brigadier added to Rodes’s woes by sending him the erroneous report that a regiment had deserted to the enemy. That was the attacking unit.

The compression of O’Neal’s three advancing regiments also exposed the right flank of Doles’s Georgians, the brigade on defense, and they were being overlapped on both sides by the Federals coming out from Gettysburg.

Of his four brigades in action, Rodes saw Doles fighting desperately on defense, O’Neal’s pivotal brigade useless Iverson’s exposed brigade shattered and its commander demoralized, and Daniel on the extreme right going on in an extemporized independent movement that was entering a zone of acute danger. When Iverson’s enfiladed brigade drifted leftward for cover, Daniel, instead of coming up on Iverson’s right as planned went on in lonely isolation on the right flank. Perhaps Rodes remembered then that he knew nothing about Daniel’s fitness for command nor about the behavior of his troops. These North Carolina regiments had been brought to the Armv of Northern Virginia only after Chancellorsville, as replacements for losses.

Although new to Virginia, the troops had been long in Confederate service. Composed mostly of volunteers for militia companies, they had achieved an early pride by fighting in the first battle of the war, Big Bethel, on the Virginia Pen insula. The men had come to regard that action as no more than a skirmish, and during the later great events of the war they had been restricted to local fighting in North Carolina. When the brigade was ordered to Virginia, some of the men, grown soft in peripheral fighting near home cooking, immediately deserted. Others were eager to test their mettle with the big army in the main theater, and their pride was stung by fellow North Carolinians among Iverso/s veterans who jeered at them as home guards. Junius Daniel, a tall Carolinian, had his personal pride at stake. He was a West Point graduate who had enjoyed little chance of showing his skill.