Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (30 page)

A fresh regiment made a wild charge at them. The men did not know it was only a regiment, and they were exhausted. They had marched twenty-four miles between three in the morning and noon; after a rest, they had engaged in countermarching below Seminary Ridge for hours more; they had been fighting for more than two hours over the roughest imaginable country, with shells bursting over their heads and enemies springing out so close to them that officers went down from bayonet thrusts. There was no energy left for another charge up the mountainside, even if the scattered regiments could have been organized for a final concerted action.

The final action had been the climb up Little Round Top. When a second fresh brigade from Sykes’s corps began pouring shot down on them, the men sought shelter where they were. Some were near the crest of the spike, some at the base, the rest scattered between. This last fresh Union brigade had, urged on by Warren, arrived in regiments, so that in the smoke fog it seemed to the Alabama and Texas fellows that Yankee reinforcements were inexhaustible.

They could hear other fresh Federal units going in on their left, trying to support the broken fines of Birney’s division in the marshy little valley between their precarious mountain-hold and Plum Run Valley below them. From the little groups close to the coveted crest and those among the boulders around the base, the impetus was gone, and the hurrahing of freshly arriving Yankees turned their thoughts to possible counterattacks from the enemy.

Around half past six Major Rogers, now in command of the 5th Texas, mounted an old log to make “a Fourth of July speech.” He was urging the men to hold to the ground they had won when one of Law’s couriers, Captain Haggerty, came sidling up among the boulders.

“General Law presents his compliments,” said Haggerty, “and says to hold this place at all hazards.”

Interrupted in his speech, Rogers shouted: “Compliments, hell! Who wants compliments in such a damned place as this? Go back and ask General Law if he expects me to hold the world in check with the 5th Texas regiment?”

Major Rogers was wrong in thinking he represented the 5th Texas. Men from every regiment in Robertson’s brigade were clustered around him, and many survivors of the 5th were clinging to thicket clumps near the crest of Little Round Top.

By now the fatigue of the heavy action had begun to show up in individuals. Private Giles of the 4th Texas, disgusted when his ramrod jammed in his dirty rifle barrel, banged in the ramrod, cartridge, and all by striking it against a boulder. Then he raised the gun in the air and, hollering “Look out,” pulled the trigger. The rifle roared like a cannon, leaped from his hands, and struck a companion on the ear. While the companion was reviling him, Giles selected a new rifle. “The mountainside,” he said, “was covered with them.”

Through it all a small fellow from the 3rd Arkansas, firing carefully from behind a stump, was singing at the top of his voice:

“Now, let the wide world wag as it will,
I’ll be gay and happy still
”

While he sang, the rifles continued to bang away, and the Confederate sharpshooters in Devil’s Den took a steady toll of the gunners on Little Round Top. With their own artillery not up, it was the only way to silence cannon.

No counterattack was coming. The Federal troops were holding by the skin of their teeth, themselves awaiting another assault. The men of both sides were fighting literally—and only—for their own lives, and the toll continued to mount in the savage personal combats among the rocks.

So the day was ending for Hood’s division, with only General Law aware of the failure to take the key position. The men had done all that could be asked of mortals.

Attacking a position of forbidding natural strength, under enemy guns out of reach of their own and in the confusion of improvised battle plans, they had wrecked Birney’s division while fighting off flanking movements from other troops. With great stretches of almost impossible ground taken, they had halted only when fresh brigades on the top of the mountain came at them after they were physically spent and disordered from the prolonged action. That they had lost one third of their number in taking barren ground was not their responsibility.

Nor was Evander Law responsible for the fact that he had been delayed so long in taking the barren ground that his men were late, just too late, in reaching Little Round Top.

The battle plans had called for Lafayette McLaws’s division to sweep forward on their left, through the peach orchard, when Hood’s men advanced. But Hood’s division had attacked alone.

Its open left, where McLaws was supposed to be, had been exposed to merciless enfilade fire. At their climactic moment on the southern end of Little Round Top, when they were minutes and yards away from taking the crest, no other troops had exerted pressure on the Union troops to the north. Their own left brigade, G. T. Anderson’s Georgians, clung to a foothold on the northwestern wall of Little Round Top, making their own ragged line intact on the ground from which they had driven Birney’s wrecked division. That was as far as Hood’s division could go.

Evander Law, who did not have that day the luck of the brave, recognized that the troops could do no more than hold on. After sending his “compliments” to Major Rogers, the acting division commander rode across the frightful field, his horse picking its way among the corpses and the wounded, to discover what had happened to McLaws on the left.

14

Longstreet had happened to McLaws. Having pressed McLaws to the point of committing his troops to an assault that all general officers on the field regarded as impractical, Old Pete joined the division commander only to order him to wait until Hood went in. Then, when Hood’s men plunged forward, Longstreet gave no orders for supporting Hood.

Instead, in irrational anger, he pointed to a spot where the narrow back road by which they had approached the front emerged from the woods. “Why is not a battery placed there?” he demanded.

“General,” McLaws replied, “if a battery is placed there it will draw the enemy’s fire right among my lines formed for the charge … and will tend to demoralize my men.”

Longstreet’s reply was a peremptory order to place a battery there. As soon as the four guns opened, the heavy Union cannon began throwing shells, “cutting the limbs of the trees in abundance,” McLaws reported, “which fell around among my men, and the bursting shells and shot wounded and killed a number whilst in line formed for advance, producing a natural feeling of uneasiness among them.”

On Kershaw’s left, facing the peach orchard, white-haired William Barksdale, who looked more the “elder statesman” than the impetuous fighter, grew excited at all this maiming among his brigade and began to petition McLaws to let him go in. Badgered McLaws, forced to prepare the assault and then to hold his assaulting line idle under enemy fire, could only tell him that Longstreet’s orders were to wait. For what, McLaws did not know. Hood’s men were already heavily engaged as far as Little Round Top.

Barksdale was only forty-two, despite his snowy locks, and one of the few generals who had been violently pro-slavery and secessionist—both as a newspaper editor and Mississippi Congressman in Washington. A little out of hand that afternoon, like most of the others, the ante-bellum “fire-eater” approached the corps commander directly. “I wish you would let me go in, general,” said the Mississipian. “I will take that battery in five minutes.”

Longstreet told him to wait. “We are all going in presently,” he said.

With the battle joined, Old Pete had lost his outward surliness. To his A.A.G., Longstreet looked “a martial figure” as he rode back and forth with fine horsemanship, “most inspiring.” The fighting had stimulated the aggresive man out of his mechanical state, but his actions showed that he was not in full control of himself.

In holding back McLaw’s division, he may have been motivated by no more than his natural deliberateness. It was obvious to everyone else that action was demanded immediately and was, indeed, long overdue. But Longstreet may well have been unconsciously trying for another Second Manassas.

There he had thrown a counterstroke designed by Lee’s great battle plan. At the peach orchard, however, the withheld attack was no part of a counterstroke and only vaguely related to any battle plan. One half of his corps having on their own gone straight ahead, McLaw’s division could now only make a frontal assault in order to come up on Hood’s left. With the northward-angled attack simply abandoned, all that was left for McLaws was to drive the enemy from the rough country of the ridge north of Little Round Top. A successful thrust could still win the Union flank by power, instead of by the originally planned enveloping movement, but it is axiomatic that a power thrust should come with the full weight of the attacking force. (McClellan, with overwhelming numerical superiority, had failed at Sharpsburg the summer before by throwing his attacking units in piecemeal.)

If Longstreet was thinking at all, he may have decided to let Hood’s division completely entangle the Union left, drawing off reinforcements, in the hope that the heavy firepower of McLaw’s division could then break through. Hood’s Texas Brigade at Gaines’ Mill in the Seven Days had made the same sort of breakthrough by a direct thrust at a stretched line.

The difference at Gaines’ Mill was that the whole Confederate line attacked simultaneously and kept up the pressure until something had to give. At the peach orchard, one division was wearing itself out while the other waited, and Anderson, farther north, was in turn waiting on McLaws. The result was piecemeal attacks that nullified the combined weight of the three divisions. When McLaws at last was sent in, Evander Law had already turned his men to throwing up rockpiles in order to hold their comfortless ground.

Longstreet left no record of the reasoning processes that led him to restrain McLaws until Evander Law came back from Little Round Top and asked Kershaw for support even to hold his position. Determined to shift the blame to Lee in his post-war self-defense, Longstreet limited his report to glowing descriptions of his men’s fighting. “The attack was made in splendid style by both divisions,” he said in one place, with no mention of the fact that they attacked separately.

Yet it was not even true that “the attack was made in splendid style” if that implied co-ordinated troop action. Certainly no troops ever fought more valiantly, with less regard for life, and seldom have troops been given less chance to make their valor count. In McLaws’s attack, a confusion in command separated the two lead brigades before they even started out.

As the brigade that delayed belonged to impetuous Barksdale, it must be assumed that the orders from division headquarters reached Barksdale later than the attack order reached Kershaw. The slackness in the army’s control that hot afternoon reached from general command down to every level. After many hours of Longstreet’s erratic assertions of authority and changes of plan, McLaws retained little sense of control over his own troops and little certainty about their purpose.

He perceived that Longstreet, who had held them all to the letter of Lee’s orders, was now himself belatedly violating the order for an oblique attack. He was committing them to a frontal assault when the divisions, McLaws said, “were not strong enough to cover the front of attack, much less envelop the flank.” McLaws believed that Longstreet should either have arranged for this second wave to go in with Anderson’s division or, preferably, conferred with Lee. But it was now too late for that.

Even McLaws’s operational control of his division was undermined by Longstreet’s periodically assuming personal command of Kershaw’s brigade. Kershaw said of his numerous orders: “These instructions I received in sundry messages from General Longstreet and General McLaws… .”

The final message to Kershaw directed him to move out, in conjunction with Barksdale, at the firing of signal guns. Longstreet himself was there to start out with the brigade. Because of the rough ground, all generals and staff officers moved out on foot, burly Longstreet among them.

That a corps commander should walk out with a brigade, while ignoring McLaws, its division commander, shows the extent to which Longstreet’s disturbance had broken down his command of himself and of his troops. As a corps commander, he was no longer responsible for his actions, and no one was responsible for the assault.

Waving his hat and urging on the men, the lieutenant general left Kershaw’s brigade at the Emmitsburg road. Beyond the road, heavy contact would be made with the enemy. Even as Longstreet shouted encouragement, Kershaw, with sinking heart, heard Barksdale’s drums beat the assembly. He said: “I knew
then
[his italics] that I should have no immediate support on my left.”

It would appear that Barksdale, impatient to go in, had received no instructions about the signal guns. McLaws reported that when the order to advance “was signified to me, I sent my aide-de-camp, Captain G. B. Lamar, Jr., to carry out the order to General Barksdale.” Lamar reported that “when I carried him [Barksdale] the order to advance, his face was radiant with joy. He was in front of his brigade, his hat off, and his long white hair reminded me of ’the white plume of Navarre.’ I saw him as far as the eye could follow, still ahead of his men… .” So strong was their impetus that when they reached a picket fence, “the fence disappeared as if by magic… .”

Barksdale filed no report. He fell, mortally wounded, soon after passing beyond Lamar’s field of vision. But certainly that eager fighter who had chafed at the waiting was not responsible for the delay.