Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (45 page)

A typical brigade was composed of farmers and planters, some artisans and storekeepers, lawyers, educators, a book collector, and college students and graduates who had had no chance yet to find a career.

Despite his craving for glory and his life’s training in the hazards of soldiering, volatile Pickett felt very personally about his men. They had not chosen soldiering as a career. They were citizens on leave from their homes and families in defense of their land, and, as he saw it, the men had entrusted their lives to him.

In his shattering grief, Pickett possessed no inkling of the greater glory he had won for his name and his Virginians. It never occurred to him that the carnage he passed on his return over that field would immortalize his hour of anguish as the epic of “Pickett’s Charge.” He felt only shock at the death of a proud division and the failure of their charge to destiny.

Riding among haunted-eyed men with slack mouths grimed with powder, he was swept along by, rather than leading, the backwash of the assault.

Behind them the Federal guns were beginning to roar again, sending bursts of shells over the heads of men too spent to hurry or even acknowledge these blows at their backs. Great clods of earth spewed up among them, sending legs and arms into the air. One shell fragment sliced off the head of a lieutenant in a clean line above his mustache and goatee. Sightlessly the men trudged on toward their own lines, climbing the slope to Seminary Ridge. They were followed by Colonel Williams’s little bay mare, walking quietly and carrying her empty saddle.

Formations of enemy infantry ventured out from their walls and breastworks, advancing tentatively down their slope. The scattered hundreds of retreating men, singly and in small groups, climbed on, unaware of new danger.

On either side of them—from McLaws’s and Hood’s divisions to the south, from brigades of Dick Anderson’s division close by, and from Pender’s division to the north—gray lines fired angrily at the advancing enemies. Guns from Longstreet’s and Hill’s batteries blasted out again. Alexander was herding back into lines the guns that had followed the infantry out, and the gun crews were aching to see the threatening Federals come on toward them. The Federals halted. Their “feeling-out” had discovered no break in the spirit of Lee’s men.

To all of that the men stretched across the half-mile of hill from the road to the crest of Seminary Ridge were oblivious. They were not retracing the course of their charge. After falling back down the slope of Cemetery Ridge, they headed straight up the opposite hill. They were climbing in the vicinity of the plateau from which General Lee had watched the action.

When Pickett and his staff were part way up, General Lee on Traveler rode down alone to meet them. Sitting erect on his gray horse, the leader showed not a sign of emotion. The classic face was as still as a statue’s.

“General Pickett,” he said quietly, “place your division in the rear of this hill, and be ready to repel the advance of the enemy should they follow up their advantage.”

Captain Bright was still sufficiently alert to note that it was the first time he had heard General Lee refer to “those people” as “the enemy.”

Pickett, with his head down, salf sobbed: “General Lee, I have no division now! Armistead and Garnett and Kemper are all down, and—”

“Come, General Pickett,” Lee said, “this has been my fight, and upon my shoulders rests the blame. The men and officers of your command have written the name of Virginia as high today as it has ever been written before.”

Unable to answer, Pickett rode on.

General Lee, seeing four soldiers carrying a wounded officer in a blanket, then asked Captain Bright: “What officer is that they are bearing off?”

“General Kemper, sh.”

“I must speak to him.”

Feeling his bearers halt, Kemper opened his eyes and stared clearly at Lee.

The commanding general said: “General Kemper, I hope you are not very seriously wounded.”

“I am struck in the groin and the ball has ranged upward. They tell me it is mortal.”

“I hope it will not prove so bad as that.”

The seriousness of Kemper’s wound caused him to be left in a near-by house converted into a hospital for the critically wounded. He was later removed by Federal surgeons. After recovering in a Federal prison, he was exchanged and lived to be governor of Virginia, but he never regained his health.

General Lee asked: “Is there anything I can do for you, General Kemper?”

With apparently acute pain, Kemper raised himself up on one elbow. “Yes, General Lee,” he said intensely, “do full justice to this division for its work today.”

Lee bowed his head. “I will,” he replied in a low voice. For him the ordeal was just beginning.

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For General Lee, his officers, and his men, the Battle of Gettysburg did not end with the repulse of what came to be called Pickett’s Charge. A decision had not been won: the failure of the offensive climax of their invasion was a certainty. But the army was still an invading force in the enemy’s country, still in line of battle against the enemy’s army and exposed to counterattack. While the army had not won, it could still lose.

The war was not over because an assault had failed to win a decision on an invasion. Lee himself had turned back four full-scale invasion forces in his own country. On three of the four repulses, Lee had attempted to destroy the invading army, and he feared that Meade might try to do the same to him.

General Meade has been unjustly criticized for not counterattacking. A North Carolina soldier summed it up more aptly than most of the critiques. He said: “Both sides got the worst of the fight at Gettysburg.”

Strategically, Meade did not need a decision; time was on the Federal side. Tactically, his own army had been shaken and had suffered heavily (23,000 casualties to 20,000 Confederate), and Lee’s army, in reacting to counterthreats, showed no demoralization at all.

It was not Lee’s army that had been wrecked in the final assault, but only the nine of its thirty-seven brigades which had been involved in the charge. Besides the Confederate infantry, the cavalry was at hand, including Imboden’s fresh troopers, and no batteries had been lost. The quantity of ammunition was unknown to General Meade, as indeed it was to Lee. Actually, the scurrying directed by Alexander brought rounds from the reserve wagons to the caissons and he found that the distributed ammunition was “enough for one day’s fight.”

The smaller Confederate forces had inflicted higher casualties than they received, even though attack is proverbially costlier than defense and though most of the positions they attacked were formidable ones. Meade assumed that (as Grant found out the following spring) on defense the firepower of the Confederate rifles would be tremendous.

What Meade would do was not known along the slope of Seminary Ridge during the backwash of the assault. The immediate knowns were the gaping center and the possibility of demoralization affecting the troops on the widely separated flanks.

Ewell’s corps, extending in a long semicircle from Culp’s Hill to southwest of Gettysburg, contained something like 15,000 men left after casualties. Of the corps, only Johnson’s division and Daniel’s brigade from Rodes’s division had been extensively engaged during the day, and three of Rodes’s brigades had experienced no more than sharpshooting and some distant artillery fire since the first day. Robert Rodes, who had missed his chance on the second, never was given another in the campaign, though he kept hoping for it. In Early’s division, Hays’s and Hoke’s brigades (the near-heroes of the dusk fight on Cemetery Hill at the end of the second day) were cut up; but Gordon’s superb brigade had been inactive since he was halted by Ewell on the first day, and Extra Billy Smith’s brigade were still unused. Gordon was so disgusted at his inaction that he wrote in his battle report: “The movements during … July 2nd and 3rd I do not consider of sufficient importance to mention.”

At that end of the line, then, the attitude of the leaders and the condition of the troops indicated that they could take care of themselves at least temporarily. General Ewell would not be burdened with the necessity to make decisions in repelling a thrust, and the curved nature of the Federal defense position, where the troops were entrenched behind works, would make an attack by them physically difficult to mount. Whether or not he consciously considered these elements, General Lee diverted none of his attention to the left flank.

In terms of actual fighting, the Battle of Gettysburg was over for Ewell’s corps. The officers and men, without this knowledge, remained tensely alert. The soldiers were unaware of the magnitude of the Confederate failure which history associated with the charge. As most of Ewell’s men did not witness what they thought of as Longstreet’s attack, for them the battle was still going on, though not, for the moment, on their front.

The sense of failure came to individuals in posts of command, especially to Richard Stoddert Ewell, who generously confessed his mistakes. Too well liked for the mistakes to be held against him, he aroused more sympathy than condemnation. But obviously he was no successor to Stonewall Jackson. Although he would never again experience such a harrowing afternoon as came when his power of decision became paralyzed under his first big test, he was physically and temperamentally unsuited for corps command. Gettysburg had proved what Lee apparently suspected from the first about a general whose devotion had to be considered in a personal army. Yet Lee, by leaving the unwieldy left flank in Ewell’s care, showed that he retained respect for Ewell’s fundamental qualities as a soldier in actions that demanded little initiative.

The commanding general also showed that his trust in James Longstreet had not been shaken. If, however, he had known what his old warhorse was doing on the right flank, Lee might well have been troubled by a few doubts.

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When the disorganized men of Pickett’s division and Hill’s corps came limping up Seminary Ridge, Longstreet forgot all about his status with the commanding general and turned his distracted attention to his own corps. From the beginning of his essays at strategy, Longstreet’s interest had revolved around the nature of the fighting that he and his own corps would do. When all questions of strategy had been settled by the debacle, Longstreet revealed his true status and his true condition.

As far as is known, no exchanges passed between him and Lee in the aftermath of the attack. Lee expected no consultations with Longstreet, any more than he had from the beginning. Suspecting nothing of Longstreet’s agitation over his failure to establish a partnership, Lee accepted it as natural that a subordinate should look only to his own troops. Lee assumed personal responsibility for the broken center and, as he had turned over the left to Ewell, turned over the right to Longstreet.

It was against the Confederate right that the enemy directed their action after the assault, though for some while Longstreet ignored the divisions of Hood (now under Evander Law) and McLaws. Their unused brigades were dangerously projected in an angle to the southeast, with their own center in effect caved in below them. Law’s brigade was still on the high ground in the rough country south of Little Round Top. But Longstreet was bustling about the batteries at Seminary Ridge as the gunners brought their pieces back to new positions, and for a time no orders went to the two divisions.

All along the irregular Confederate right, enemy skirmishers kept starting out menacingly, at first one place, then another. Although nothing came of the probings, the threats kept Law and McLaws on edge. Half their general officers were gone, the separated brigades were commanded by untried colonels and a major, and Law had been in temporary command of a division only since the day before.

Then the extreme right was unsettled by a reckless cavalry attack that Brigadier General Farnsworth was ordered to lead against the flank. The newly promoted brigadier had protested that the charge was “suicidal,” and so it turned out for him. Law faced a brigade about to drive off the enemy troopers, and his line against the Federal infantry was thus stretched even thinner. Uneasy about his flank, he sent a courier to Lafayette McLaws to request a brigade in support.

The message had just reached the stocky Georgian when Longstreet’s first order came. It was delivered by Longstreet’s A.A.G., Colonel Sorrel, now in bad physical shape. His left arm was partially paralyzed from the blow of a shell fragment the day before, and he had been shaken up during the afternoon when a shell burst under his favorite horse and he was heavily thrown to the ground.

When McLaws told Sorrel of Evander Law’s request for a brigade, the staff officer said: “Never mind that now, general; General Longstreet directs that you retire to your position of yesterday. Retire at once, and I will carry the order to General Law to retire Hood’s division.”

Lafayette McLaws immediately protested against the order. He explained that his advanced ground had been won at great cost and, though Pickett had been defeated, there was no reason for him to retire where no enemy pursued.

Colonel Sorrel interrupted McLaws and said: “General, there is no discretion allowed. The order is for you to retire at once.”

Having protested against Longstreet’s orders three times the preceding day, General McLaws resignedly turned his attention to the withdrawing of his four brigades. They were no sooner posted in a new position back from the Emmitsburg road than McLaws saw the enemy advancing “clouds of skirmishers,” with, he supposed, “their lines of battle behind.” Apprehensively he sent a skirmish line back into the peach orchard. The enemy halted there on his front.