Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (33 page)

18

On that day big Robert Rodes, with a fiercely swirling mustache to emphasize the resolute mouth in his bony face, was not, as a Second Corps staff officer called him, “the best division-commander in the army.” The undoubted effect on some individuals of the uncertainty characterizing the total command situation seems particularly apparent in this thirty-four-year-old Virginian. Perhaps still shaken from the near-disaster the day before, Rodes displayed a lack of diligence and energy which was untypical of his career, as civilian or as soldier.

His troops had been resting around stacked arms all during the day of July 2 in the main street that crossed Gettysburg from the Chambersburg pike to the Hanover road. That was the point they had reached in their pursuit of Howard’s corps in the late afternoon of the 1st. Rodes knew that he was to attack simultaneously with Early, striking toward Cemetery Hill from southwest of the town. Yet, instead of getting his brigades out of the cramped quarters of a city street, he spent the time dickering with Pender’s division for support on his right when he went in.

Brigadier General Lane, who had only just succeeded the fallen Pender in division command, had no feeling of certainty in his new post. He spent much time trying to clear plans through A. P. Hill. By the dusk hour when Lane finally assured Rodes of support for his right, Early’s attack order had been given. Thus, while Early’s two brigades were approaching the ravine at the bottom of East Cemetery Hill, Rodes was getting his men out of the town.

The long line of marching men in columns of four had to clear the town to the west before swinging south, and then bend back to their angle of attack as they deployed. It was a dispiriting sort of movement. When the assaulting fronts were established, they had three quarters of a mile to advance across open fields and cornfields, with the usual fences, before reaching the enemy.

The two leading brigades, George Doles’s and Dodson Ramseur’s, had covered about half a mile toward the enemy’s lines when, in the dusk, the two young brigadiers got a good and very sobering look at the Federal position. These two, among the heroes of the preceding day’s fighting and naturally offensive-minded, studied the lines of enemy infantry behind stone walls and breastworks in front of massed guns, and went into a little conference. Before advancing farther, they agreed, as twenty-six-year Ramseur put it, “to make representation of the character of the enemy’s position” to the division commander.

When their query on instructions reached Rodes, the big blond had just been notified that Hays’s and Hoke’s brigades were falling back from East Cemetery Hill. It was then dark. As the time was past when Rodes’s assault could support Early’s, he decided that “it would be useless sacrifice of life to go on.”

Recalling the advance, Rodes evidently felt a sense of his own remissness, and Early’s division forever after blamed him. In his report Rodes sought to make the movement seem less futile than it had been. He said: “But instead of falling back to the original line, I caused the front to assume a strong position in the plain to the right of the town, along the hollow of an old roadbed. [Actually, this was a little-used private road called Long Lane.] This position was much nearer the enemy, was clear of the town, and one from which I could readily attack without confusion. … Everything was gotten ready to attack at daylight. …”

At the end of that day there were no plans for an attack at daylight of the next, and Rodes was claiming credit for an alertness he had not displayed. His troops should have been approximately in that fine position , “clear of the town,” for the attack he had been ordered to make that day. Had his division been ready when Hays and Hoke moved out, his assaulting troops would have diverted reinforcements from going in strength against the two brigades that had taken the hill. Conceivably Rodes’s fresh brigades could have created real havoc in the darkness, because the Federals’ attention, from privates up to and including Meade, was frantically directed at the Rebels who were up on the hill with them.

Unknown to Hays, he was only a quarter of a mile from the rear of the Union guns massed on the hill facing Doles and Ramseur. This was not unknown to the Federals. And Hoke’s scattered troops were within sprinting distance of Meade’s headquarters, so close that Lee’s old friend was himself excitedly sending in reinforcements.

If
Rodes had struck at that time
and
then Gordon had come on up in support of Hays and Hoke, possibly it would have been all over. Shaken as the Union army was from losses of the day before and successive assaults all during the late afternoon, a confusion beginning around Cemetery Hill might well have spread extensively enough to give Lee the needed victory of tremendous proportions.

But Ewell had no control over his corps. Three division commanders were co-ordinating without a central control—and one failed.

Although post-war arguments made Longstreet a controversial figure for years
after
the battle, he was only one of several who made of the chain of command something like a vacuum of command. Honest Ewell later said that “Gettysburg was lost by our mistakes and I committed dozens of them myself.” Because he was involved in no after-the-fact controversies, his failures were largely forgotten. At Gettysburg, however, Ewell was far more condemned in the army than was Longstreet. He actually had been given the chance on the first day, and his men had won it again on the second.

The worst said of Longstreet was that he had fought a poor battle tactically. But who at his level had not?

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General Lee, alone in the center of the vacuum, could not have been less aware of the total collapse of co-ordination than were his staff officers, who commented bitterly upon it. He was also aware, however, of the thrusting power of his veteran brigades and their near misses despite lack of coordination.

At three points in the three-mile Union fine the Confederate soldiers had barely missed carrying a position whose capture would cause the collapse of the whole line. Importantly, one of those irresistible assaults, Wright’s, had been seen by the general through his field glasses. He had watched his men storm the crest, silence the Union guns, and then fall back from want of support.

All through the frustrating day it had been the nonprofessionals who looked good. Unaffected by the collapse in the chain of command, the patriots had fought at the peak of their potential. At one end of the line twenty-seven-year-old Law, who determined the day’s action, was an educator; at the other end Hays, who barely missed winning the day, was a lawyer. Where the men had been directed to fight, there had been no failures. Lee’s soldiers seemed, as he said, “invincible.”

When uneasy silence descended on the field after nine o’clock, General Lee evidently retained the image of those troops sweeping across the rough fields and storming the enemy’s hill, and he could envision his men holding that high ground—when the army had restored co-ordination among its units. Nothing that he recorded indicated any apprehension about the army’s ability to achieve co-ordination As the failures that spread successively from right to left had come from usually dependable men, Lee knew that the potential for co-ordination existed; and he believed that, by exploitation of the advantages won during the day, the potential could be realized. This, in effect, he wrote in his report.

If there was one moment when he made the conscious decision to renew the attack the third day, the general took no one into his confidence. Across the dark valley, General Meade held a council of war, and his general officers agreed to hold the ground against one more thrust. As the enemy assumed that Lee would try to exploit his gains, it is probable that he felt this to be the inevitable, if the obvious, course. His army was now too far entangled with the enemy’s position to permit any other maneuver except withdrawal, and that alternative seems not to have occurred to him. He had come North for a decision.

At full night, when the reports on another day of might-have-beens came in, Robert E. Lee was not put in possession of the details of the failures. Longstreet, with no one knows what feelings, stayed away from general headquarters that night. He established corps headquarters at a little school-house, hardly larger than a corn crib, in the area from which his troops had launched their assault. There he remained, sending in a verbal report but not asking for orders for the next morning.

Sometime during the night he began plotting new maneuvers for persuading Lee to adopt his obsessive plan of swinging around Meade’s left. As when he appeared on the field the first day, Longstreet still could not relate himself to the battle that was going on. His conviction about succeeding to Jackson’s status may have been fading, but he had not resigned himself to the role of a subordinate, and he was as determined to fight another Fredericksburg as he had been before the army left Virginia.

None of this was known to Lee, two miles away, where headquarters tents were pitched in a clearing south of the road from Cashtown. Even more significantly, he did not know the details of Longstreet’s mismanaged battle, and it was in these—not in the much-discussed delaying tactics—that the “warhorse” displayed his unreliableness at Gettysburg.

Despite all the controversies over Longstreet’s dragging of his heels and the dramas built on its consequences, his delay in moving into action had not, of itself, ruined the second day for the Confederates. Only by moving with an unaccustomed urgency could methodical Longstreet have launched Hood and McLaws at the Little Round Top end of the line appreciably before nine o’clock in the morning. By then the ridge where Lee designed the attack was defended in about the same strength that the Confederates encountered at four.

Not until approximately eight thirty did Lee tell Long-street: “You had better move on.” Longstreet’s delay of nearly eight hours before sending troops into action unquestionably affected the resistance his assaulting columns met, for in the interim Union reinforcements reached the field to contain the breaks accomplished by independent deviations from the Confederate battle plan. Yet, even in the absence of the reinforcements of the late afternoon, Lee’s original order could not have been executed as he planned it. On the other hand, the Union left could conceivably have been taken if Long-street had fought a sound tactical battle.

Lee’s ignorance of Longstreet’s unsound battle and the reasons for it was an element in his conviction that “proper concert of action” could be achieved after two days of unprecedented lapses. Another element in his clinging to this conviction was unquestionably the toll taken on Lee’s faculties by the cumulative nerve strain of the campaign.

Staff officers observed that he showed more tension than on any former campaign. The combination of the crucial nature of the invasion and the unremitting frustrations from subordinates’ failures would explain such tension—and its effects. Lieutenant Colonel Blackford, Stuart’s staff officer and a reliable witness, reported that on the second night the General was “in weakness and pain” from a severe attack of diarrhea. It seems unlikely that a man of his vigorous health, inured to changes of food and water by more than thirty years of army life, would suffer from dietary causes an ailment that afflicted none of the staff officers who reported his. Whatever the cause of the diarrhea, its severity was exhausting and, added to a general lowering of energy, would tend to impair judgment.

This is not to say that General Lee’s belief that his soldiers could win the Federal ridge
with
co-ordinated action was evidence of impaired judgment. Major Scheibert, the observer from the Prussian Royal Engineers, and many of Lee’s officers believed that the enemy’s position could be won by, as Major Scheibert said, “one concentrated and combined attack.” But, in his condition, Lee was influenced by the desperate need of the elusive victory into believing that the failures in his command system were remediable at Gettysburg.

Lee defied the maxim “A good general knows when to retreat” because in his heart he knew that the next retreat he began could have only one end. He had defied many maxims —“Never divide an inferior force in the presence of a superior force” was one—but in those decisions he had been, as on the first two days at Gettysburg, “coolly calculating.” On the night of the 2nd, in the midst of the restlessness of his camp, he was not.

Ultimately, General Lee’s decision to renew the attack on the third day was based on the knowledge that the soldiers sleeping in the darkness around him represented the last gathering of his army capable of delivering an assault for a decision. All of his far-flung forces were on or near the field, except some oddments of cavalry; and they, finally accounted for, were due the next day.

It is impossible to arrive at an acurate number for the Army of Northern Virginia, or for the Federal army. No one agrees with anyone else, and critics dismiss even Meade’s own estimate that his army aggregated something over 100,000 of all arms. A composite of most figures approximates 60,000 Confederate infantry who reached the Gettysburg area. Losses on the first two days had been extremely heavy (the second was the heaviest of the campaign), and Lee would not have more than three fourths of his original number for the final effort.

By a similar composite approximation, Meade began with 80,000 infantry. His losses had been somewhat heavier, though proportionately the same, and Lee would renew the attack with the same ratio of strength as when the armies collided.

Federal artillery outnumbered Confederate in a ratio of four to three, and Meade’s gunners had the advantage of weapons superior in weight, range, and accuracy. But Lee’s cannoneers had some good Federal guns too, scattered among their batteries, and two long-range British rifled guns that had recently come in through the blockade.