Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (40 page)

That is the way Longstreet wanted to remember. What he actually wrote Alexander, who published the note, was:

Colonel: The intention is to advance the infantry if the artillery has the desired effect of driving the enemy’s off, or having other effect such as to warrant us in making the attack. When that moment arrives advise Gen. Pickett and of course advance such artillery as you can in aiding the attack.

The letter assured Alexander that the cannonade was to open as scheduled, but, as he wrote, “The responsibility would be upon me to decide whether or not Pickett should charge. … I felt it very deeply, for the day was rapidly advancing … and whatever was to be done was to be done soon.”

He anxiously questioned General Wright, who had breached the crest on the day before. “It is not so hard to get there,” Wright said. “The trouble is to stay there.”

Then Alexander left his guns to search for Pickett. He found the division commander standing with his staff, Garnett, and Armistead in front of the troops. All were obviously waiting to go in. The guns of Dearing’s artillery battalion, which was to be moved out in immediate support of Pickett, were limbered up and ready to roll, though Dearing was frantically sending gunners back to look for the ordnance wagons in order to replenish his caissons.

In approaching men of an older generation with awesome reputations earned in the old army and in Lee’s, young Alexander retained his clear-headed coolness. With native discretion, he did not tell Pickett of the question in his mind. Instead, he sounded out the general.

Pickett stood gracefully, with the sun bringing out the auburn lights in his flowing dark hair. His answers to Alexander’s questions showed that he was entirely confident of the success of the charge, “and was only congratulating himself on the opportunity.”

Partially reassured, Alexander returned to his post at the peach orchard. Still not believing that the enemy’s guns would be driven off even by his massed batteries—75 pieces stretching for nearly a mile, with 60-odd more of Hill’s continuing the line northward—the Georgian then wrote Long-street a very guarded and carefully phrased note.

General, when our fire is at its best, I will advise General Pickett to advance.

This note was not answered. Instead, Longstreet
then
wrote Colonel Walton (and not earlier, as he claimed afterward) to fire the signal guns from his own battalion. Commanded by Major Eshleman, the Washington battalion was posted about midway in the First Corps batteries.

There is no record of the time the message was at last, reluctantly, sent by Longstreet. After Walton received the message and gave the order to Eshleman, it was between 1:00 and 1:11 p.m. when the first gun from Miller’s battery boomed out in the silence hanging over the field. A moment later the second gun fired. The battle was to begin.

9

Porter Alexander believed that “any halfway effort would insure the failure of the campaign.” He said: “After all the time consumed in preparation for the attack, the only hope of success was to follow it up promptly with one supreme effort. … My mind was fully made up that
if the artillery once opened Pickett must charge.”

The italics are his. In his whole-souled commitment to the assault, Alexander intended that Pickett should start not later than fifteen minutes after the fire opened. Pickett’s men had about 400 yards to move from the brow of the wooded hill and the concealing swale before starting down the slope in view of the enemy. They would then move over half a mile, 1,000 yards or better, in the open, all downhill and up, with several fences to cross.

As soon as Alexander ordered his batteries to fire, he turned to arrange for the nine guns to follow behind the infantry. But the guns had been moved elsewhere. It seemed a portent of the nature the “one supreme effort” was to assume.

As the two miles of batteries commenced firing, blasting by salvos that shook their world, the enemy’s powerful guns replied. With revealing association of ideas, Alexander said: “As suddenly as an organ strikes up in church, the grand roar followed from all the guns of both armies.”

Soldiers in both armies could liken it to nothing thev had ever heard. One of Pickett’s men said: “Such a tornado of projectiles it has seldom been the fortune or misfortune of any one to see.” Though the cannonade lasted barely two hours, to the most hardened and experienced veterans it seemed to go on indefinitely. The sky became “lurid with flame and murky with smoke.” The sun was obscured by sulphurous clouds, eclipsing the light “and shadowing the earth as with a funeral pall.”

Each side was shooting at the other’s guns. In Alexander’s own twenty-six-gun battalion, nearly 100 horses and over 100 men went down. A Union battery, coming into line, lost 27 of 36 horses in ten minutes. From that side the concentrated blast of an exploding caisson penetrated the roar, heartening the Confederates momentarily.

Alexander was peering through the thickening smoke, trying to discover whether any enemy batteries were affected by his fire. He could observe no slackening at all when his allotted fifteen minutes had passed. On the hill behind and north of the stout Codori barn he counted eighteen guns jammed into a projection of the stone wall where a grove of chestnut trees (shaped like “umbrellas,” according to a resident) stood out along the barren crest rolling southward from the cemetery. This “little clump of trees” was the guiding-point for the attack, a landmark for the eyes of brigadiers and colonels, captains and guide sergeants.

In the units that were to go in, officers and men were suffering their final ordeal of waiting. The shells from the Union batteries, frequently overshooting, whined over the swale and along Seminary Ridge to burst among the huddled troops.

A young soldier in Kemper’s brigade said: “The atmosphere was rent and broken by the rush and crash of projectiles. … The sun, but a few minutes before so brilliant, was now darkened. Through this smoky darkness came the missiles of death. … The scene of carnage beggars description … The men remained steadfast at their posts … [but] it must not be supposed that men were not alarmed. … Many a poor fellow thought his time had come. … Great big, stout-hearted men prayed, loudly too. … They were in earnest, for if men ever had need of the care and protection of our Heavenly Father, it was now.”

Near the young soldier a solid shot burrowed under a man, lifting him three feet into the air. He fell back dead, without having been actually struck. In another company in Kemper’s brigade, a whole squad—eight men— were killed or wounded under one burst. Then the young soldier started to lift his head to get some fresh air, and his lieutenant said: “You’d better put your head down or you may get it knocked off.”

Young David Johnston replied: “A man had about as well die that way as suffocate for want of air.”

At that moment a shell burst over them, carrying off the heads of two men above the ears, and a downbreaking piece struck his side. He was knocked insensible for several moments and came to “lying off from the position I was in when struck, gasping for breath.”

His colonel ran up, gave him water, and made a cursory examination. Johnston’s ribs on the left side were fractured, his left side and leg were paralyzed, and later a contusion of a lung was discovered. Two friends from the company moved him out of range and placed him on a blanket at the base of an apple tree.

The casualties while the men waited were never computed. Soldiers believed that a minimum of three hundred were killed or wounded before they ever moved out. Some men fainted from the heat and the strain of waiting.

Chaplains moved up and down the lines of tense-faced men. For once, only one joke was recorded among Confederate troops, and that one rather wan. A soldier, seeing a rabbit dart out from some bushes and head for the rear, called out: “Run, old hare. If I was an old hare, I’d run too.”

But nobody moved to the rear. Nobody moved at all, except to squeeze closer to the brushy earth. Describing the waiting under the shellbursts, a soldier in the 1st Virginia Regiment from Richmond contented himself with saying: “It was simply awful.”

Lewis Armistead and Dick Garnett, friends whose families were friends, stood together in somber silence. A shot struck a tree near by, shaving a splinter that stuck out toward them. Armistead picked the wood off and turned to the troops. “Boys, do you think you can go up under that? It is pretty hot out there.”

Most nodded, some spoke in assurance, but there was no swell of voices. That would come as an expression of relief when they moved out—if they ever did.

Pickett finished his running letter: “Oh, may God in His mercy help me as He has never helped before … remember always that I love you with all my heart and soul … that now and forever I am yours.” Then he sealed “the scraps of pencilled paper” and walked out to join Garnett and Armistead.

A courier came riding through the woods. He dismounted before their group and thrust a paper at General Pickett, who read: “If you are coming at all you must come immediately or I can not give you proper support; but the enemy’s fire has not slackened materially, and at least 18 guns are still firing …” from the angle containing the clump of trees. It was signed “Alexander.”

This was the nearest thing to an order that Pickett received. In his eagerness to relieve his men of the horror of waiting, he seized on the discretionary words as a command subject only to Longstreet’s approval.

The hour had come. Pickett shook hands with Garnett and Armistead. The three men murmured “Good luck” and parted.

The brigadiers went to their commands. A horse was brought up for Dick Garnett, too weak to walk. Except for staff officers, no officers below brigade rank were to ride, though Colonel Eppa Hunton and Colonel Lewis Williams, on account of physical illness, were allowed mounts. Colonel Hunton was suffering from a painful fistula.

Pickett, riding a black horse, joined Longstreet at the snake fence from which he was glumly watching the field.

Alexander had continued his fire additional periods of fifteen minutes each, and, he wrote, “the enemy’s fire was so severe that … I could not make up my mind to order the infantry out into a fire which I did not believe they could face …” But the decision had been left to the twenty-eight-year-old cannoneer. Although “I could not bring myself to give a peremptory order to Pickett to advance,” he nevertheless, “feeling that the critical moment would soon pass,” had dispatched the discretionary note that sent Pickett riding to Longstreet.

The powerfully built lieutenant general was dismounted, and Pickett, swinging down, handed him the note. Long-street read it through without a word or a change in his heavy expression.

Even so close a friend as Pickett had no inkling that his corps commander was immovably opposed to the charge. Evidently thinking only that his stolid friend was slow to speak, Pickett asked cheerfully: “General, shall I advance?”

In his reluctance to give the order, Longstreet could do no more than lower his head.

Pickett was too excited to study Longstreet’s mood. He said confidently: “I am going to move forward, sir.” He saluted, swept lightly into the saddle, and galloped back to his lines.

10

The general commanding the attack had actually made no decision about sending the men in and had given no order. Yet, as soon as Pickett rode out of sight, the finality of the moment seemed to overcome him.

Just as on the preceding day the action had stirred him to erratic impulsiveness, so, while orders were being shouted in the near-by woods, Longstreet was again seized with an impulse to movement that bore no relation to assuming control of the eleven brigades. Unaccountably, he rode down to the peach orchard, where he found young Alexander in a state of high excitement. Disturbed because Pickett had not responded immediately to his note, he had been suddenly heartened when through his glasses he saw the eighteen guns in the clump of trees limber up and move out of range. He reasoned: “As the enemy had such abundance of ammunition and so much better guns than ours that they were not compelled to reserve their ammunition for critical moments (as we almost always had to do), I knew that they must have felt the punishment a good deal, and I was elated by the sight.”

His hopes betrayed him. The enemy guns
had
moved to reserve ammunition. Under the stimulation of his false impression, and carried away by the magnitude of his assignment, Alexander quickly scrawled another note to Pickett: “For God’s sake come quick; the 18 guns are gone.” As his rank of colonel commanding a gun battalion entitled him to no couriers except the one he had sent off earlier, he urged a lieutenant and a sergeant away from their guns, gave one the note and the other the oral order.

Then, turning from his role of extemporized commander to his temporary assignment of artillery corps commander, the Georgian asked captains and lieutenants about the ordnance wagons that had been moved. He had just learned that the men had located the missing wagons and found them perilously low in ammunition when General Longstreet appeared alone. He had ridden away from his staff—his later explanation was that he had gone forward to a vantage point for watching the assault column move out. The troops were now behind him.

Apparently Longstreet asked no question of Alexander. He was always very vague about the encounter. The accounts of both men agree that Alexander volunteered the information about the nine supporting howitzers having vanished and about the scant supply of ammunition. Alexander mentioned the ammunition because of his anxiety to get Pickett moving forward while support could still be given.