Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (22 page)

Ewell had promised Early that he would open his attack when Johnson arrived with Stonewall Jackson’s old division. Away from Old Jube’s aggressive influence, he was not of a mind to open any action at all. He sent a message directing Allegheny Johnson to proceed through town and go into po sition opposite Culp’s Hill. He said nothing about any action when Johnson arrived there, and did not even suggest that he hurry the troop movement.

Even this late, with more than two daylight hours lost, Johnson’s men could have made a race for Culp’s Hill against the Federals sent there by Hancock. With no urgency in the message, Johnson allowed his tired troops, who had marched more than twenty hot miles that day, to proceed leisurely through town via a railroad cut. Walking along a railroad necessarily slowed the movement, but, even so, the middle of the strung-out brigades passed through Gettysburg around seven o’clock, when there was still enough light for a young soldier to read a letter delivered to him on the march.

Ewell now was thinking only of Lee’s impending visit and of the report he must make. As twilight gathered over the arbor outside temporary headquarters, he heard the commanding general’s party halting alongside the house. Suddenly Dick Ewell felt that he could not face Lee alone. He sent off a staff officer with his first urgent message of the day: Jubal Early must come back and be with him.

8

Dismounted, Lee moved slowly toward the arbor, his dark eyes appraising the listless headquarters scene. On his way over, he had observed the lack of purposeful action in all the units he passed. The men were cleaning the rings of powder grime from around their mouths. This disfiguration came from biting off the powder charge in their paper cartridges. Clearly they had no notion of using their rifles again that day.

Instead of preparing for attack, the men were relaxing and beginning to gather fence rails for campfires. The last of hoarded spoils from the march were being dug from knapsacks, and many messes had already returned to the regular skimpy rations of cornmeal and fatback. Individual soldiers and smaU groups, the indomitable foragers, were stalking off into the shadows, as unmindful of danger as if strolling in their own back yards.

By the time the commanding general reached Second Corps headquarters, he knew that Ewell had not tried to mount an attack. After one look at the sick depression on Ewell’s face, he knew why. Paralysis of will marked Ewell like a fatal disease. Just as others in lesser posts of importance had failed in the test of command during Lee’s thirteen months with the army, Lee saw that Jackson’s great subordinate had failed in his hour of decision.

The two men greeted each other courteously rather than warmly. They were but slightly acquainted, and their close military association during the past weeks had been conducted entirely through messages. Lee was fifty-six, ten years older than Ewell, and while Ewell had been an obscure captain of Border dragoons Lee had been perhaps the most famous and most highly regarded soldier in the old army. Now he was the most famous active soldier in the world. Correspondents from foreign papers and military observers from foreign countries followed him around, and wherever he went people wanted to get a likeness of him.

When Lee greeted Ewell with reserved graciousness, he was deeply fatigued by the strain of the day, and his face showed it. He looked older close up than at a distance, much older than a year before. Then he had seemed young for his years; in the dusk of the arbor he seemed greatly aged. His beard, which he had grown in the fall of ’61, had been gray when he took command: now it was turning white. His hair, too, had whitened and had receded at the forehead. Brushed sidewise across his skull from a part on the left, it was worn long over his ears, where it had grown fluffy.

As he followed Ewell into the shadowed arbor, Lee offered none of his usual pleasantries. Although his manner was composed, his face was tight in concentration and his gaze turned inward. During the day one corps commander had drawn him into an action he had wished to avoid; then, when the collision was salvaged, the commander of the mobile Second Corps had robbed the army of its chance to win the field. Unreflectively, Lee accepted this as a fact, as a new element in the problems to be solved.

Unlike other observers of Dick Ewell, he did not try to ascribe reasons for his inanition. Evidently he had had reservations about Ewell’s fitness for corps command from the beginning and Ewell had simply confirmed Lee’s worst fears. Lee did not reproach him, did not repine over lost opportunities. His mind was totally absorbed by the details of the next move.

With the whole invasion a tentatively extemporized movement, Lee had at no time sought the enemy for the purpose of attacking him. His seeking of the enemy for the purpose of discovering his whereabouts was essentially a protective measure forced by the absence of Jeb Stuart. From what Lee had said that morning to Anderson in Cashtown, where Lee originally planned to establish headquarters, it would appear that he preferred to establish a position and let the enemy come at him.

There was nothing defensive about this. Lee was one of the great natural counterpunchers of warfare. He induced his opponent to lead, and when the enemy had opened himself in attack, Lee found an exposed spot for a counterthrust. His most decisive victories, Second Manassas and Chancellorsville, had been counterpunches to the enemy’s lead. His way of fighting was to catch the enemy off balance, and only once in the war had he driven straight in on a power thrust.

At Malvern Hill, the last battle of the Seven Days, when subordinates’ failures had repeatedly allowed the Federals to escape his traps, Lee, goaded beyond clear thinking by continual frustration of his plans, simply threw in everything he had. Malvern Hill was his worst-fought battle. Only Lee’s retention of the initiative caused McClellan to continue to retreat after giving a costly and clear-cut repulse to the Confederates.

In the deepening dusk in the arbor north of Gettysburg, Lee was balancing in his mind the same type of failure he had contended with before reorganizing the army. A. P. Hill had not been an ideal choice for corps command; the best man available, he had performed about as expected, although his illness suggested instability. Ewell’s initiative was evidently inadequate to cope with his new responsibility.

The Powell Hills and the Dick Ewells were symptomatic of the breakdown through attrition which was undermining the South in its fight for independence. Its physical resources and manpower already were showing conspicuously the effects of the unequal struggle, and now the effects of the prolonged strain were appearing in the quality of command. Too many had been lost, and the pool of replacements was too small.

The men whom the ordeal had proved to be good were now asked to be great, and they were not. They were devoted and loyal, trained and experienced, but beyond these qualities they showed no X of the unusual. Lee must make do with what he had, and he must hurry. He must find ways to get at the enemy before Meade solidified his positions on those hills.

His thinking was shaped by the background of the South’s waning strength, by the present illustration of the attrition in high command, and by the need for a decisive victory away from home. Apparently it never occurred to him to concentrate and wait for Meade. His men were driving the enemy, and, though Ewell had kept them from clinching the victory today, Lee thought only of how to complete it the next day.

To that end, he asked Ewell and Rodes about the condition of their troops. Surprisingly, Rodes was very defenseminded. Still subdued by his near approach to disastrous defeat, Rodes stressed his 2,500 casualties and showed no optimism about what his units might do in another assault. Ewell supported his division commander’s attitude and added discouraging details about the number of men detailed to handle prisoners. While these two officers were talking as if they had survived a crushing defeat and were thinking only of saving lives, Jubal Early joined the party in answer to Ewell’s summons.

Lee now asked the question that had been forming in his mind. “Can’t you,” he said to Ewell, “with your corps, attack on daylight tomorrow?”

Ewell froze again. He said nothing at all.

His silence encouraged Early to take the floor as spokesman for the corps. But, during the hours of waiting for an attack that never came and watching the entrenchments of the Federals grow on their hill, Early had decided that the time for assault was past. The aggressive general of the afternoon told Lee that his reconnoitering had convinced him that no attack could now be made successfully on Cemetery Hill or Culp’s Hill.

Then, carried away by his ascendancy over the corps commander, Jubal Early was emboldened to advise the commanding general on battle plans. He had observed the high knobs of the Round Tops on the southern end of Cemetery Ridge, and he believed an attack there would be successful.

As this attack would involve other corps, Ewell heartily agreed on the wisdom of his subordinate’s suggestion.

Their attitude was more disturbing to Lee than the simple fact of Ewell’s failure to attack. The day’s omission was, as Lee saw it, remediable. A defensive attitude was something else. This defeatism, coming from veterans of Old Jack’s fierce strokes—three of the four responsible officers in the striking corps—momentarily shook his confidence in the army’s ability to attack.

Speaking aloud his fumbling thoughts, he said: “Then perhaps I had better draw you around to mv right, as the line will be very long and thin if you remain here. The enemy may come down and break through it.”

“Oh, no,” answered Jubal Early. On defense, the men could not be moved. The harsh terrain was favorable for defense either on top of the hill or at the bottom. Lee, he implied, could attack on the right, toward the Round Tops, in complete confidence that his left would be held.

Again Ewell seconded his subordinate, enthusiastic about any plan that demanded no decision from him in regard to his men. Even Robert Rodes spoke with conviction about holding the position they had.

Lee’s mind, visualizing the enemy’s ground and the position of his own troops, reverted to his desire to press home the attack.

All of Hill’s men were on the field, Dick Anderson’s division having come up late in the afternoon, but two thirds of the units were cut up and there were the personal limitations of Powell Hill to be considered. He had looked as white as a ghost all day.

The only fresh troops near at hand were two divisions of Longstreet’s corps—McLaws’s and Hood’s, approaching Gettysburg after a long though not forced march. At Chambersburg, Pickett had been released from rear-guard duty. He was a good marcher and eager to get his well-led, seasoned brigades into action, but he could not bring his men twenty-five miles over mountain roads in time for earlymorning action. That left the attack to Longstreet, with his two near-by divisions.

In considering these circumstances, Lee revealed his deep disturbance by speaking unguardedly in the presence of subordinates. “If I attack from my right, Longstreet will have to make the attack,” he said, as if to himself. “Longstreet is a very good fighter when he gets in position and gets everything ready, but he is
so slow
.”

None of the other three men present had ever before heard the commanding general give an opinion of another officer. In their own fixations, however, they were less impressed by the inner agitation Lee revealed than by the shifting of the attack to other units. Jubal Early, still speaking for the will-less corps commander, became very forceful in assuring Lee of what the corps would do in support of others. He reported that he promised “to follow up the success that might be gained on the [Confederate] right and pursue and destroy the enemy’s forces when they had been thrown into disorder by the capture of the commanding position on their left.”

Lee heard the assurances with some skepticism. In any case, he said, the corps might demonstrate against the enemy’s hills, to distract them from the defense of their left. Then, as if unable to accept the supineness that had come over his attacking corps, he added that they might turn the diversion into a real assault if it seemed practical.

On Lee’s usual proviso of “if practical,” even Ewell and Rodes joined Old Jube in agreeing to make a fine demonstration that
might
grow into an actual attack.

After a moment Lee arose and, with outward calm, bade the gentlemen good-night. He was profoundly unsettled as he turned from the now shadowy trio in the arbor. As soon as he rode off from the strangest conference in his time with the army, Lee’s mind began churning again in re-examination of the decision he had gropingly reached in fatigue, in necessity, in desperation.

9

It was full night when he rode along the Chambersburg pike from Gettysburg to the house on Seminary Ridge across the road from which temporary headquarters had been established. His tired staff were making their camp in the orchard.

Around him the army in bivouac was unusually quiet. Men lay down among the unburied corpses, and under the light of the rising moon the sleepers could not be distinguished from the dead, so still they lay. Few letters home were being written. The surgeon with Perrin’s South Carolina brigade, wearied from his work, looked at the photograph of his little son, George, before falling asleep with the men.

John B. Gordon was among those to whom sleep would not come. He kept getting up and listening to the Federals’ picks and shovels digging in on the hills, and then listening to the contrasting silence of the Confederate camp.