Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (29 page)

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When Longstreet later wrote about overruling Hood’s sound plan, he said “that the move to the right had been proposed the day before and rejected.;”

As the purpose of Hood’s proposed tactical movement to the right was merely to get on the Union flank and rear
at Gettysburg,
Longstreet’s explanation amounted to a gross distortion. His proposal that had been rejected the day before was for a strategic withdrawal of the Confederate army around to the right
away from Gettysburg
to another position altogether. The only element common to Hood’s suggestion for a movement of one division within the battle and Longstreet’s proposed movement of the army away from battle was that the direction of both was to the right. In basing his rejection of Hood’s extemporized plan on the rejection of his own strategy Longstreet revealed the depth of the wound to his ego and the consequent undermining of his judgment.

When Longstreet’s reply reached John Hood, even so instinctively obedient a soldier could not accept it. As had McLaws, he explained the conditions a second time. Then, in a masterful understatement, he said “that I feared nothing could be accomplished by such an attack” up the Emmitsburg road “and renewed my request to turn Round Top.;”

Again the staff officer galloped off, and again he returned with the single sentence in reply: “General Lee’s orders are to attack up the Emmitsburg road.;”

Like McLaws, Hood still could not bring himself to commit his men to an attack in which, he recorded, “I could not reasonably hope to accomplish much… . In fact, it seemed to me that the enemy occupied a position so strong—I may say impregnable—that, independently of their flank fire, they could easily repel our attack by merely throwing and rolling stones as we approached.;”

Hood was then joined by his senior brigadier, Evander Law, whose Alabama regiments had done the great marching that morning. Law, from the reconnoitering of his own vedettes, had reached the same conclusion as Hood about attacking around Little Round Top. He had independently written out a formal protest against executing the existing order and offered it for Hood’s endorsement. Hood signed Law’s protest and grew emboldened to make a final, more urgent appeal.

Seeking out his adjutant general, Colonel Harry Sellers, he directed him to try to convey to Longstreet the impossibility of attacking according to the morning’s order. Sellers rode off to implore the commanding officer to shift the attack to the rear of the Round Tops.

A third time (as with Peter’s “I know not the man;”) came the answer: “General Lee’s orders are to attack up the Emmitsburg road.;”

Then, as in McLaws’s experience, a Longstreet staff officer arrived with a peremptory order to begin the attack at once.

Hood had no alternative unless he surrendered his sword. Resignedly he said to Law: “You hear the order?”

Law turned away. In his account he recorded only the fact that “I at once moved my brigade to the assault.”

When his five Alabama regiments came whooping out of the woods, they were joined by Hood’s old “Texas Brigade” —three Texas regiments and the 3rd Arkansas, under Brigadier General Robertson.

The Georgia brigades of Benning and G. T. Anderson began to form as reserves.

As the regiments deployed for their fatal action, Long-street rode up to see that Hood began the attack. Even with his troops in motion, Hood paused to show Longstreet the difficulties of following the orders and to stress the advantage of striking the open flank at the end of Round Top.

Longstreet said: “We must obey the orders of General Lee.”

Without answering, Hood rode ahead with his troops. The big man was riding with his old brigade when a piece of metal struck his arm with such force that he was unseated. Stretcher-bearers hurried forward to lift the huge frame onto a litter. They moved back with the fallen leader under the flying fragments and in the rising din of contact established by the first two brigades.

Longstreet had already ridden northward toward McLaws.

The command of Hood’s division devolved on Brigadier General Law.

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Evander Law was in looks a southern “gallant.” Handsome in the romantic fashion, the twenty-seven-year-old South Carolinian had a lean face, sensitive and strong. His clearly defined features and fine mouth were framed by a thin mustache and a closely trimmed dark beard growing down from the edges of his lips. His hollow cheeks were clean-shaven, and his eyes looked at the world with a certain gentle intensity.

Evander Law’s only military training had been as a student at The Citadel, where in his senior year he doubled as an assistant professor of
belles lettres.
Graduated at twenty, he became an educator, and before he was twenty-five the dreamy-looking Law founded a military high school in Alabama. He came into the Confederacy with a volunteer company that he raised, and he rose on natural ability. In the March before Gettysburg he married the daughter of a wealthy planter, and, promoted after Gettysburg, Law was to live to be the last surviving major general of the Confederacy-dying in 1920.

Applying his intelligence to warfare, Evander Law—unlike that other natural soldier, John B. Gordon—refused to allow the system of command to negate the course of military logic. In one of the least-mentioned aspects of whole “Longstreet drama,” Evander Law flatly disobeyed orders.

He caused the second day of Gettysburg to be fought in defiance of Lee’s battle order to which Longstreet gave stubborn obedience.

Before the command of the division came to him, Law, on his own responsibility, sent his brigade straight toward the base of Little Round Top, in violation of the orders to move obliquely northward. If the division was not to be allowed to take the bastion from the rear, then he would try it straight on. He refused to march the backs of his men to enemy guns.

In a sense, the battle on the right became Law’s battle for Little Round Top. Strangely, Little Round Top was defended, at the time Law’s brigade got there, by a Federal general who also acted on his own responsibility.

Meticulous Meade had sent General Warren on a late inspection tour of the lines, and this alert Federal detected the sunlight on the rifle barrels of Hood’s concealed troops waiting to spring out of the woods. With no time to consult Meade, Warren personally directed brigades from Sykes’s corps to change their course from supporting Birney’s division in Plum Run Valley and take up positions among the thickets on the rocky ground of Little Round Top.

At the moment of contact, while Longstreet was literally obeying orders that he knew the commanding general had issued without knowledge of the actual conditions, Warren was anticipating orders that his commanding general would have given had he known the conditions.

From then on, it became a soldiers’ battle. To John West of the 4th Texas it seemed “more like Indian fighting than anything I experienced during the war.” Private Bradfield of the 1st Texas said: “Every fellow was his own general. Private soldiers gave commands as loud as the officers—nobody paying any attention to either.”

The confusion began when Law sent his Alabamians straight ahead instead of obliquely, as ordered. Although his plan was sound, its extemporaneous adoption threw a burden of alignment on Robertson’s Texas Brigade to his left. Robertson, like all the others on the ground, knew what they were up against and what Law was doing, and tried to adjust his regiments to keep contact with Law.

The heavy Federal fire of near-by rifles and artillery from the ridge made the going difficult over craggy ground where ravines sliced across ranks and boulders separated units of troops. Alert Federal officers seized every opportunity to enfilade flanks even momentarily exposed, and Federal units, in their turn cut off, made incredible counterattacks to throw the advancing line off balance.

General Robertson, by his own account, finally abandoned Longstreet’s senseless order of holding to the Emmitsburg road and fully committed his four regiments to Law’s attack toward Little Round Top. By then his regiments were separated.

His two left regiments, the 1st Texas and 3rd Arkansas, became enveloped in fire, and their left flank was attacked from the north. Colonel Manning, of the 3rd Arkansas, turned two companies to face left and protect the flank with fast firing. The rest of the force plunged on up the hill along Plum Run Valley and drove the enemy from a troublesome battery posted there.

The two companies on the left were being engulfed. Leaving two companies from the 1st Texas to hold the captured guns on the hill, Robertson rushed the rest back to the 3rd Arkansas companies that were on the flank. The hill was lost and then retaken. General Robertson sent a staff officer through the terrible field of fire to recall the 4th and 5th Texas. They had drifted to the right in trying to keep closed on Law’s left.

By the time Robertson’s order reached them, the 4th and 5th Texas had become mingled with the center of Law’s regiments, and the whole line was hacking its way to the stronghold of Devil’s Den. Both their colonels, Key and Powell, were down—Powell’s body was riddled with bullets. Then their lieutenant colonels fell, Bryan heavily wounded and Carter dying. Majors sprang forward to lead the regiments to the rock masses of Devil’s Den.

In the savage hand-to-hand fighting among the rocks, men shot at one another from the opposite side of the same boulder, sometimes so close that clothing caught fire from the blaze of an enemy’s rifle. The high-pitched Rebel Yell and the full-throated Federal huzzahs echoed through the rocks as first one side and then the other gave way. Bursting shells whined into the most secret crevices. In trying to climb on Devil’s Den, one Texan found that “there were places full ten or fifteen feet perpendicular … in which a mountain goat would have revelled… .”

In the worst of it, the men again had their minds called to food. The stuffed haversack of Dick Childers, their most formidable forager, was struck by a shell that “scattered biscuits all over that end of Pennsylvania.” The soldier was paralyzed by the blow, but his companions contended that it was the destruction of the biscuits given him by a Dutch lady which shocked Dick into paralysis.

A slight nineteen-year-old Texan named Will Barbee had been detached to act as a courier, but when Hood went down, Barbee sneaked off in the confusion and galloped across the rough country toward the Devil’s Den fighting. His little sorrel was shot from under him, and Barbee landed running. He made it to sheltered space behind a boulder “as big as a 500-pound cotton bale,” where half a dozen wounded were lying in the temporary shelter.

Little Barbee scrambled on top of the boulder, the only man in sight unprotected, and began firing as fast as the wounded men loaded and passed rifles up to him. He fell back when a Miniç ball caught him in the leg, but immediately scrambled back on his one good leg. Another shot got his good leg and back he fell again. A third time he crawled up and hardly fired a shot before a body wound dropped him on his back in the crevice. He did not die. He lay there cursing because no one would push him up onto the rock again.

Order was lost as groups sought shelter in one place while other groups rushed ahead to new positions. With no wind stirring, the dense smoke hung in veils over the thickets, and officers could scarcely distinguish their own men at any distance. And too many officers were numbered among the appalling casualties.

Colonel Manning, of the 3rd Arkansas, was wounded as his men, restoring their left flank, drove the dark-clothed enemy into the woods to the north of the Devil’s Den ridge. Then brigade commander Robertson fell from a Miniç ball below the knee. When he was carried from the field the brigade command devolved on Lieutenant Colonel Work of the 1st Texas, the only one left of the five field officers who had led troops into the action.

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Word reached Evander Law that he was in command of the division. Making his way back from the boulders around Devil’s Den, he surveyed the whole field. Then he sent in the reserve brigades of Benning and G. T. Anderson to plug the gap between the lines and to support the exposed left of the virtually surrounded remnants of the 1st Texas and 3rd Arkansas.

With the stimulus of these reinforcements, the whole division drove straight ahead. Even the soldiers recognized that Longstreet’s order to attack at an angle had to be abandoned unless they were to be annihilated. The arrival of the fresh troops freed the first fighters of attacks on exposed flanks, and all the men advanced with high yells. Birney’s Federal division began to fall back before them all along Plum Run Valley.

The Lone Star flag was planted on Devil’s Den. Then Benning’s reserve brigade came up and the Georgia flag floated beside the Texas. Even before the ground was secured, decimated regiments of Law’s brigade, with odd unite from the 4th and 5th Texas, had plunged on eastward up the steep south slope of Little Round Top. With Colonel Oates’s Alabama regiment in the lead, the troops themselves were struggling toward the point that Law and Hood had wanted to attack from the beginning.

In this race with the Federal’s Warren, of which the leanfaced Law was unaware, his men almost got there first. Climbing and slipping among the rocks and boulders, the men were nearing the crest when they came under the fire of a fresh brigade, Vincent’s from Sykes’s corps. Oates’s men paused, seeking shelter as they gauged the volume of metal coming at them and then began a final desperate clambering up the slope. One more lunge would win the position that was the key to the whole Union line.