Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (20 page)

When the formerly boastful men of Iverson’s brigade huddled and lost direction under the galling fire coming from a stand of green timber, Daniel and his regiments were approaching the grassy edge of the railroad cut that had been so ruinous that morning to Heth’s new Mississippi brigade.

The men had passed through fields of golden wheat, and on their left they could see the tower of a college building (then called Pennsylvania College). Ahead of them through the drifting fogs of smoke Daniel saw clumps of Confederates. Assuming, correctly, that they must belong to Hill’s corps, he hastily sent a courier to find their officers and ask them to join his right. Combined, they could get at the Federals firing from the railroad cut. But those Confederate troops happened to be the survivors of that earlier experience with the railroad cut. With their commanding officers lost, the men would have nothing to do with Daniel. The
arrive
with Rodes’s division was left to resolve his situation as best he could.

It was at this period when Rodes’s gaudy reputation faced wreckage that Harry Heth, on the Cashtown pike, asked General Lee if he should not advance to relieve the pressure on Rodes. Lee said no. At that time he could not have known of the peril to Rodes’s division.

Jubal Early, hurrying toward the firing, did not know of it either, but he came out on Rodes’s left flank as if part of a battle plan. His lead division, which by chance was commanded by his best brigadier, John B. Gordon, deployed and struck on Rodes’s left in one continuous movement.

Without waiting for covering artillery and without throwing out skirmishers, Gordon’s Georgians fixed bayonets and moved in a steady line through a cornfield and a field of ripening wheat toward their old adversaries, the Germans of Chancellorsville. The swift pace slowed momentarily when the long lines of men passed through the willows of a little creek. Then, under fluttering red flags, the troops rushed in to close with the waiting enemy.

Not many of Howard’s XI Corps waited to come to grips again with the men of Stonewall Jackson’s corps. Those who stood bravely had no chance in the disintegrating units. Some fell back steadily enough until they were caught up in the rush of others who dropped their guns in order to run faster.

As for the commanders of the two divisions, General Barlow was wounded and left on the field, and General Schimmelfennig took refuge in a shed in town, where he hid during the rest of the Battle of Gettysburg. In minutes the attack from Gettysburg was broken, and Doles’s flank was secure.

Astride the road on the open plain, Doles had taken the brunt of Howard’s attack, and the steady fighter had shown no nervousness even when the XI Corps troops threatened to engulf both flanks. But the close call got the young man’s dander up. As soon as Gordon’s attack relieved the pressure on him, Doles, without orders from division command, sent his men thrusting ahead in lunging counterattack.

At the same time on his right, where O’Neal’s lost regiments and Iverson’s brigade were broken, tempestuous young Ramseur threw his fresh brigade forward with a high yell across the corpses and the moaning figures of their fellows.

With the momentum of battle suddenly reversed, newcomer Daniel, isolated on the extreme right, was finally rewarded for his cool courage. His men got an angle of fire on the railroad cut, and it became their turn to shoot in enfilade.

On Daniel’s left, Colonel Battle, whose 3rd Alabama had never got proper orders, sent a request for instructions. Beleaguered Daniel, in his first action with the army, sent back word that he had no authority over the 3rd Alabama. This happened when Ramseur was pushing through the debris of O’Neal and Iverson, and Battle on his own authority sent his regiment in on Ramseur’s right.

On Ramseur’s left, Doles, with the enemy recoiling from his front, sent his well-bunched units in pursuit of the Federals. A solid arc of a Confederate line was formed from north of Gettysburg to west of the town, where Daniel finally made juncture with A. P. Hill.

When Junius Daniel stood up under his own test of battle with the army, his troops got a gratifying revenge on their fellow Tarheels with Iverson. One of Iverson’s regiments lost its battle flag in the fight, and the 45th North Carolina in Daniel’s brigade enjoyed the satisfaction of capturing the Yankee who had the flag, and turning both over to the men who had taunted them with being home guards.

The 1st of July would never be remembered as a great day for Robert Rodes. Nervous in his zeal, he had immobilized O’Neal and set in motion a chain of costly repulses. Personally, Robert Rodes never lost his self-control when his battle seemed a grotesque failure, not even when Iverson sent the message about a deserting regiment, and he was quick to take advantage of the turn in his favor. He kept his men on the ridge driving forward until they made juncture with Hill, and on the flats his left joined Early’s right to form a continuous line rolling into Gettysburg.

Because his troops stood up under killing, because Daniel and Doles kept their poise, and because Gordon of Early’s division threw in his brigade without any fiddling around, the field was won. But the ex-professor felt none of the exhilaration of victory which had come to him at Chancellorsville.

In his heart he must have recognized the errors caused by his overanxiousness and everv detail of his salvation from disaster. On his black horse, the exhausted Rodes was a subdued victor when he rode into the confusion of the streets of Gettysburg.

He looked at the heights of Cemetery Hill, on which the retreating Federals were forming a hasty line, and decided that his troops had suffered enough casualties for the day. In the main street he laid out a skirmish line against counterattack and, for the first time since hearing the guns in the morning, waited for orders.

5

Sometime between three thirty and four o’clock in the fading heat of the afternoon General Ewell reached the field. Riding down the road that led from due north toward the town, he paused on a slight elevation near where Doles’s Georgians had stood so steady to their guns. From there he could see, over the small farm fields, the clotted streets of Gettysburg and beyond, the rampart-like rises of Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill.

Between him and the town, the only blue uniforms were worn by the dead and prisoners. Beyond the town, from which the broken blue masses were receding, he could see little knots of Federals scurrying for cover on the hills. The late sun’s rays glinted on a few enemy guns up there. Even a civilian, without reports, would have recognized across the debris of battle the size of the victory in the making. Ewell had reports too.

The men of Rodes’s division and A. P. Hill’s corps had driven everything before them through the town. Although Rodes’s and Hill’s troops had suffered heavy casualties and the men were hard used, Gordon’s and Hays’s brigades of Early’s division were only stung. The men were fresh and eager, and Gordon personally was pressing his people to take the hills before the enemy reformed there.

Ewell listened, looked, and then gave an order that was shocking to his staff. He sent a message to Gordon to break off the pursuit.

It was not past four o’clock, and close to four hours of daylight remained, when Jackson’s doughty former lieutenant gave the incomprehensible order. Then, as if bemused, the handsomely dressed gray-clad general with the quaint mustaches sat silently on a horse as still as its rider, a picture of inanition. The old dragoon, in the test of decision, had suffered a paralytic stroke to his will.

So he remained, with the bedlam of sounds in Gettysburg echoing around him, when young Gordon with flushed face galloped up on a stallion.

John B. Gordon, then thirty-one, was a Georgia lawyer of plantation background with no military experience, though he came of a long line of warriors and his family had distinguished themselves in the Revolution. Like Pettigrew in Hill’s corps, Gordon had risen steadily on his natural leadership of men and capacity to learn the rudiments of warfare.

Curiously, his erect carriage and stern features sharpened by a chin beard gave the impression of an old war-school martinet, and he looked, as his men said, “every inch the soldier.” He had trained them, learning as they learned, largely by the force of his personality, and in action he always had that indefinable quality called magnetism. Part of his appeal to Southerners was his chivalric attitude, which he had demonstrated during the afternoon’s fighting.

Just after his men had won their sector of the field and were forming for pursuit, Gordon came upon the wounded young Union General Barlow, who had been abandoned in the stampede to Gettysburg. Gordon immediately dismounted and offered his personal assistance. The Federal “boy general,” believing that he was dying, asked Gordon to get his effects to his wife, who was traveling with General Meade’s family. As Gordon’s wife also stayed close to the lines, he was pleased to be able to grant the dying request. This solicitude encouraged Barlow to ask Gordon to read him aloud his wife’s last letter and then destroy it. The captured Barlow recovered, and after the war he and Gordon established a friendship that lasted for the remainder of their lives.

Gordon was a highly intelligent man and, having applied his intelligence for more than two years to handling units of men in armed conflict, he did not need to be a Napoleon to recognize that the natural fortress south of Gettysburg must be taken to complete the day’s victory. However, in learning the rudiments of warfare, he had of necessity learned the protocol of command.

When Ewell’s first order to break off the pursuit reached him, Gordon’s military intelligence wrestled against protocol, and the intelligence won. He continued fighting. He wavered when a second order came, but still he did not break off the action: his men were going too well. When the third emphatic order came, Gordon recognized that a brigadier who ignored a lieutenant general was playing a losing game.

Yet, with the invasion at stake, he could not supinely obey. He sent orders to his colonels to check the pursuit, forming their lines, and went hunting for General Ewell to discover for himself what exactly was going on. In the presence of the corps commander—fifteen years his senior, a trained soldier out of West Point and Old Jack’s great division commander—Gordon could say nothing. He sat his own unquiet black horse hoping that his excited presence would stimulate General Ewell to explanations.

Ewell paid no attention to him. Gordon looked at the frenzied young staff officers and they looked at him.

Those young men had all served with Jackson. One of them, Sandie Pendleton, a V.M.I, graduate and son of the chief of artillery, had been a particularly valued member of Old Jack’s military family. In the quick intimacy of camp life Sandie Pendleton had formed a friendship with Henry Kyd Douglas, the volunteer aide from Maryland who had been transferred to the staff of Allegheny Johnson.

While Gordon’s feelings were battling his acquired military manners, good-looking Harry Douglas rode up to the group with a message from division commander Johnson. “Old Allegheny,” having completed his chores with the wagon trains from Carlisle, had crossed South Mountain and was hiking his men toward Gettysburg on the Cashtown pike. He wanted it known that he would arrive late in the day, but that he was on his way and his men would be ready when they reached the field.

Harry Douglas’s message from Johnson conquered John B. Gordon’s self-control. No protocol could restrain him from saying that he was all ready to go in with Johnson’s fresh division, and that there was plenty of light for taking the hill before the enemy’s main army came up.

If Ewell heard the impassioned presumption of the young brigadier, he gave no sign. In his strangely muted manner, he answered Douglas’s report by saying that General Johnson should proceed on his journey toward Gettysburg until other orders were sent him.

Even Douglas was appalled by the absence of urgency in the command. Johnson’s unused men were not directed to hurry forward to support Gordon or co-operate with him in taking the hill that was manifestly the key to a complete wining of the field. The atmosphere was as calm as a day in winter camp.

When Douglas (who was to be wounded and captured the next day) turned his horse slowly around, his face must have reflected his bewilderment. Sandie Pendleton saw it and said: “Oh, for the presence and inspiration of Old Jack for just one hour!”

Douglas nodded, sharing the memories and the sickness, and rode off toward Johnson’s trudging troops.

Ewell took no more notice of his staff officer’s remark than he had of Gordon’s importuning. Lost in his own torments, Ewell could only reach the simple decision to go into Gettysburg, from where he heard sporadic firing. At least action was preferable to sitting his horse outside the Blocher house surrounded by accusing faces. Gordon rode along with his commanding officer, still hoping for a change of orders which would let his troops go on to Cemetery Hill.

6

The fighting in the town was growing fitful when Ewell and Gordon rode into a side street from the north. A sniper’s ball hit Ewell’s wooden leg. The general was philosophical about missing that wound, and for a moment he seemed more like his usual self. Still he made no decision as he and Gordon rode on to the square in the center of the town, where the ragged men in gray were celebrating. In the confusion of gathering thousands of prisoners, of hunting down snipers and winf cellars, of organizing their own units, soldiers congregated around
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lieutenant general, the corps commander.

Ewell checked his horse under the shade of a tree and sat there receiving salutations from jubilant Rebels who thought that they had won an easy victory and that the battle was over. A young officer was so exhilarated that he accepted a bottle of wine from a brazen forager and offered it to the general.