Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (41 page)

Longstreet, in his turmoil, missed the point the cannoneer was trying to make, and seized on the scarcity of ammunition as an excuse for calling off the attack.

According to both their versions, he shouted: “Go and stop Pickett right where he is, and replenish your ammunition.”

Alexander must have looked with astonishment into the general’s small blue eyes. It was Longstreet’s responsibility to stop Pickett if he wanted to. As the troops had not then emerged from their shelter, Pickett’s division of Longstreet’s corps was behind him. Longstreet could at least halt Pickett until he had advised General Lee of the ammunition problem.

It was Alexander’s impression that Longstreet waited for him to agree, but in his “youth and inexperience” he felt unqualified to assume still more responsibility for General Lee’s plans. As he had throughout the long, baffling morning, Alexander kept his answers to the point at hand. He explained that the ordnance wagons were down to 20 rounds a gun, “too little to accomplish much.” While the cannoneers broke off fire to bring up that twenty rounds, “the enemy would recover from the effect of the fire we were now giving him.”

Longstreet looked at Alexander and said: “I don’t want to make this charge; I don’t believe it can succeed. I would stop Pickett now, but that General Lee has ordered it and expects it.”

Longstreet, in later accepting this version of Alexander’s, perceived no fault in his attitude. Rather, he used the quote to buttress the soundness of his judgment, and expatiated on the point that people had suggested he
should
have used his discretion and halted the attack. This was part of his later life’s distortion of his status in Lee’s army. He was given no discretion to halt an attack ordered by the commanding general, except for the purpose of conferring with him, as on the ammunition. Lee’s one criticism in his official report was of the failure to notify him of the lack of ammunition to support the charge; had he known, he would have called it off.

Even where Longstreet was not ordering events to fit his post-war rationale, time and self-defensiveness increasingly clouded his memory of Gettysburg. Sometime during the hot afternoon he took a couple of swigs from Colonel Fremantle’s flask of rum, and it is possible that he was more confused on the field than has ever been recognized.

After his demoralized outburst at Alexander, he just stood there, with no apparent awareness, then or later, that Lee’s desired “concert of action” depended on him. Alexander understandably made no reply to these strange words from a corps commander at what the gunner considered a crisis for their country.

At that moment Garnett’s troops came out of the woods behind the guns, then Kemper’s men appeared over the brow of their hollow, and the exchange was ended.

Forgetting Longstreet in his meticulous attention to his duties, Alexander gave orders to cease fire so that the damp-faced troops could pass between the guns. As the artillerist stood back, he saw Dick Garnett, the older man who had befriended him during his first days of service on the plains. As there was no firing to be supervised for the moment, he ran over to Garnett, who, wrapped in his blue overcoat, was unsteadily holding his saddle, determined to live down the stigma placed on him by Jackson. Alexander walked alongside Garnett’s horse until they reached the slope that faced the enemy.

“Good-by,” Alexander said. “Good luck.”

11

The assault whose delivery Lee entrusted to Longstreet was called “Pickett’s Charge” primarily because George Pickett led the crack division from the corps designated as the attacking force. The other troops filled out the complement of the force and, as the attack was designed, essentially served as substitutes for the First Corps. It was part of the tragedy of Hill’s men that, in a way, they were the orphans of the assault force. Because of Longstreet’s state and the confusion of command between him and Hill, the soldiers from Heth’s and Pender’s divisions were left to tag along.

Despite all his uncontrollable shirking of duty, Longstreet was responsible for the attack, and it was from him, through Alexander, that the orders came for Pickett to move out. The movement into action of Pickett’s three brigades began the charge.

They were the first attacking troops seen by the enemy and by their own comrades. The attention of both armies was fixed on them from their first appearance, and they held it to the end. It was as if both sides felt that as went Pickett’s fresh, compact division, so went the charge. But Pickett commanded only those three brigades, and was given no responsibility beyond them.

If Longstreet had been in condition to perform his duties as a capable subordinate, he might have been immortalized as the leader of “Longstreet’s Charge” instead of being a subject of controversy, and history might have been different.

The charge as it became immortalized was the quintessence of Southern myth and aspiration. It was dramatically, if not tactically, sound that the doomed assault should be associated with an elite division of troops descended from the somewhat fabled founders of Virginia, who preferred the land they founded to the nation that grew around it.

Pickett, though aware of supports he would supposedly be able to call on, nevertheless felt that his immediate responsibility was to his own division. This is shown in the words he addressed only to them: “Up, men, and to your posts! Don’t forget today that you are from Old Virginia.”

Johnston Pettigrew, leading Harry Heth’s division, addressed his troops in the same localized sense of responsibility. Indeed, the recently appointed and temporary commander of the division forgot the veterans from Alabama, Tennessee, and Virginia in his inherited division and spoke only to the North Carolina brigade with which he had joined the Army of Northern Virginia. Turning to Colonel Marshall, who had temporarily succeeded him in command of the brigade, Pettigrew called: “Now, colonel, for the honor of the good old North State, forward!”

One hundred or more yards behind Pettigrew’s two lines, General Trimble could make no regional appeals to the two brigades from Pender’s division placed in support. General Lee, apparently uncertain of Lane’s capacities, had placed sixty-year-old Isaac Trimble in command of the two North Carolina brigades barely an hour before, shortly before the cannonade began.

As Trimble said, “these troops were entire strangers to me.” Nonetheless, he tried to “inspire them with confidence” by a short speech, which he concluded by saying that “I should advance with them to the farthest point.” There was no doubt that this major general without a permanent command would certainly try.

In his anxiety to establish a quick accord between himself and the strange Tarheels, General Trimble accepted the disposition of his supporting line as he found it. The alignment was faulty, and nothing more revealed the attacking force’s lack of responsible command than this weakness in the rudiments of offensive warfare.

Jim Lane, commanding one of the two brigades, had retained temporary command of Pender’s division until replaced by Trimble, and it was Lane who had made the disposition under the divided authority of Hill and Longstreet.

Acting on Lee’s orders, Powell Hill had directed Lane to assume command of the two brigades in support of Pettigrew and told him to report to Longstreet for specific directions for troop alignment. Obviously the punctilious Hill felt it proper for the general commanding the troops in the attack to assume authority for their alignment. And Longstreet appeared to think it proper that he should exercise this control, for Lane’s official report stated: “General Longstreet ordered me to form in the rear of the right of Heth’s division. …”

When Lane formed his troops according to Longstreet’s orders, he observed that Pettigrew’s line of four brigades was “much longer” than the line of his own brigade and Scales’s commanded by Colonel Lowrance. In his official report he stated: “There was consequently no second line in rear of its [Pettigrew’s] left.” Shortly after Lane noticed this, he was relieved of command. But he said nothing to Trimble, nor to Hill or Longstreet, about the faulty alignment that Longstreet’s orders had caused. The silence of James Lane is something of a mystery.

A college professor in civilian life, he was a consistently able brigadier whose North Carolina regiments boasted a record of steady achievement. On the first day their attack had been part of the wave that rolled the enemy back to Cemetery Hill. Perhaps his dutiful acceptance of the weakly disposed attacking line indicated no more than a limitation that had caused Lee, in evaluating Lane, to place Trimble in command of the supporting line. Lane remained a brigadier until the end of the war, a good man at that rank.

This further illustration of the breakdown in command completed the arrangement for disaster. While the two good North Carolina brigades were placed behind Pettigrew’s line at the point where it was to join Pickett’s, the two least dependable brigades in the attacking force Davis’s and Brock-enbrough’s, were left unsupported on an exposed flank.

Johnston Pettigrew, on assuming command of Heth’s division the day before, had found the brigades aligned from right to left as they had arrived on the field after the first day’s fighting. As the division remained in reserve on the second day, there was no reason to rearrange their position. The thirty-five-year-old lawyer directed his attention to the colonels, Marshall and Fry, who were placed at command of his own brigade and Archer’s, and neglected to acquaint himself with the personnel of Davis’s and Brockenbrough’s brigades. As in the excitement of ordering the attack he addressed only the North Carolinians in his own brigade (the troops who had first heard of the shoes in Gettysburg), he would seem to have relegated the unfamiliar troops to the care of their immediate commanders. With all his civilian accomplishments and qualities of leadership, Pettigrew was a modest and deeply courteous man, and perhaps he did not presume to supervise brigades in a division to which he was new.

Also, by the order of command, Pettigrew could exercise no supervision on the two brigades under Trimble which were placed in support of his division. As no one supervised the left wing of six brigades, Joe Davis’s new brigade of Mississippians formed part of the unsupported flank, and the brigade farthest to the left, actually alone on the flank, were those Virginians, temporarily under Colonel Brockenbrough, whose morale was shaken by continued lack of a permanent commander. (There is evidence that Brockenbrough was replaced on the third day by Colonel Robert Mayo, but, as Mayo himself later stated that he was not in command, Brockenbrough—who was replaced after Gettysburg when a permanent brigadier was appointed—is presumed to have led.) With Pettigrew responsible only for his attacking lines and Trimble only for the two supporting brigades the only “concert of action” possible between the units of the assault was their common objective of attack.

On the right wing of the attacking line the only co-ordination was in Pickett’s division. In Anderson’s division, no orders for advance went to Wilcox, who was to support on Pickett’s right, or to Perry, whose small Florida brigade (three regiments) was to come up as support. Without orders these two brigades remained stationary even after Pickett’s men began the first stage of the march out with their own flank completely open.

General Pickett and his brigadiers and colonels had no attention to spare for forces other than their own. Each officer concentrated on the group of men entrusted to his immediate care. The last words addressed to troops before the division advanced were probably those of Lewis Armistead. It was his custom before an attack to walk up and down in front of his line. He said: “Remember, men, what you are fighting for. Remember your homes and your firesides, your mothers and wives and sisters, your sweethearts.” Then he halted in front of Blackburn, color sergeant of the 53rd Virginia.

“Sergeant, are you going to plant those colors on the enemy’s works over yonder?”

“Yes, general, if mortal man can do it, I will.”

Armislead shouted a command to follow the colors of the guide battalion and stepped out twenty paces in front of the 53rd, the regiment of direction. In front of him the lines of Garnett and Kemper started forward at regular time. Those generals, both mounted, rode up and down behind the lines of the marching men. Garnett was on a black horse, Kemper on a little sorrel.

Armistead, a foot soldier all his life, led in the cavalry tradition of “Follow me.” He unsheathed his sword and, uncovering his gray head, placed his black hat on the sword point. Thrusting it out, he boomed: “Forward, guide center, march!”

Leaving their woods, the men looked back at the wounded left behind. “Good-by, boys. Good-by.”

12

The prevailing impression of the charge is a panoramic picture of one long battle line emerging from the woods of Seminary Ridge and marching straight forward to their doom. That is not the way it was. The two wings of the assault started separately, and it was Hill’s six brigades who emerged from the wooded crest of Seminary Ridge and marched out across the open country north of Lee’s command post.

Pickett’s three brigades came out of the woods and the hollow and moved down into a ravine, or swale, that coursed in a northeast direction. A ten-foot rise there ran in front of Spangler’s Woods from about the center to the northern end of the timber. At the beginning of their advance, though they had been seen by the enemy, Pickett’s division had this cover.

When the troops of both wings began their march, Alexander and Walker, commanding Hill’s guns, broke off fire. The gunners stood by to allow the infantry to pass between the pieces. When the Confederate guns ceased firing, the Federal artillery fire also faded off. The enemy gunners were preparing their pieces for the infantry.