Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (48 page)

The most useful source for comparing and cross-checking this material is the battle reports and correspondence in
Official Records.
Most of the reports and correspondence relating to Lee’s army in the Gettysburg campaign are in Volume 27, parts 2 and 3, Volume 25, part 2, and Volume 51, part 2. (Federal reports are in part 1 of Volume 27.)

While there is a tendency in some quarters to revere the
Official Records
as infallible, these reports also are by no means free of the distortions of self-vindication. There are reports written by opponents in one action which read as if the accounts referred to different battles. Frequently generals in reports and correspondence stated as facts what they believed to be the condition of the enemy. It was customary for both sides to exaggerate the numbers opposing them: it was, of course, more heroic to defeat a numerically superior foe and less blameworthy to lose to “overwhelming numbers.” On the first two days at Gettysburg, when Federal forces were thrown into action piecemeal and were keenly aware that they lacked their usual numerical superiority at the point of contact, all Union officers overestimated the size of the forces opposing them.

As an illustration, Doubleday, whose troops fought magnificently against Heth in the morning action and stubbornly against Pender in the afternoon, was a vainglorious man. To explain the defeat of his fine regiments, he estimated Heth’s and Pender’s divisions as a force of 25,000, when half that figure would be more nearly accurate. He also stated that he captured 1,000 prisoners from Archer’s brigade, which was only 50-odd less men than the brigade’s complement at Gettysburg. In dramatizing the heroism of his men by overplaying the losses they inflicted in defeat, Doubleday doubtless estimated Archer’s brigade at a normal Confederate complement of between 1,500 and 2,000 men at that period; he had no way of knowing that on July 1, 1863, Archer’s brigade was dangerously below its normal strength. But, if Doubleday’s report of the first day’s action is accepted as accurate, one must be prepared to believe that on the third day Archer’s brigade charged up Cemetery Ridge with 50 men.

On the other side of the same action, Heth, two of whose brigades were badly cut up and driven from the field in the first spontaneous contact, was equally inaccurate. Understandably reticent, he listed “60 or 70” of Archer’s men as lost to “heavy masses” in his front and “overwhelming numbers” on both sides, and said: “The enemy had now been felt, and found to be in heavy force in and around Gettysburg.” Although this statement is true, it gives no hint of the desperate action which he was unable to break off and which, in effect, brought on the Battle of Gettysburg.

Thus, the
Official Records
also must be cross-checked, for, however official, these papers were prepared by all too fallible humans. Yet these records are generally the most accurate available. They were prepared shortly after the battles and, except for small, isolated actions, the reports were cleared through the staffs of the commanding generals of the battles and had to agree both with what the staff knew had happened and with the reports of other generals in the battle.

The
Official Records,
however, contain nothing about Longstreet’s behavior at Gettysburg or about the post-war controversy that illuminated his behavior on the second and third days. Almost the whole controversy, except where it was continued in book form, appeared in the
Southern Historical Society Tapers.

In Volume 23, pages 342—8, the Reverend J. William Jones traces the controversy from its beginning, when in Swinton’s
Army of the Potomac,
published in 1866, Longstreet was quoted in derogation of Lee. Longstreet was not answered then. After Lee’s death in 1870, he apparently permitted circulation of an 1863 letter to his uncle which claimed, Jones wrote, that “we lost Gettysburg because the Napoleonic genius of General James Longstreet could not overcome the obstinate stupidity of Robert Edward Lee.”

The contents of this letter were referred to in the first public speeches made against Longstreet, first by Jubal Early and then by Pendleton, who after the war had returned to the rectorship of the church in Lexington where Lee worshipped in his last years. Long-street’s answer was to attack Lee more violently than before in various articles written for publication.

The Count of Paris had asked Jones to obtain answers from Confederate officers to some questions about “the causes of Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg.” More than a dozen officers answered the questions in considerable detail, and all listed Longstreet as prominent among the causes of defeat. Some devoted the bulk of their studies to a hostile treatment of Longstreet’s failures, and a few revealed outrage and even hatred. Longstreet replied to his critics in the Philadelphia
Weekly Times,
and Jones reprinted the replies in the
SHSP.
Then Early, Wilcox, and Fitzhugh Lee replied to Longstreet with open vindictiveness, and the battle raged through twenty issues of the magazine, now in three bound volumes.

In Volume 4 of the
SHSP
are the papers of Early, Colonel Long, Fitzhugh Lee, Colonel William Allan, Alexander, Wilcox, Colonel Walter Taylor, Hood, and Heth. In Volume 5 are Longstreet’s two papers from the
Weekly Times,
the bitter replies of Early and Fitzhugh Lee, and less personal studies by the Count of Paris, foreign observer with the Federal forces, and Major Scheibert, foreign observer with the Confederate forces. In Volume 6 are Wilcox’s lengthy angry reply to Longstreet, and a vivid battle account by Colonel Oates, whose Alabama regiment in Law’s brigade came the closest to capturing Little Round Top. Volume 7 contains a very full anti-Longstreet account by McLaws and a less controversial article by General B. D. Fry, who led Archer’s brigade in the third day’s assault.

Although passing references, usually in uncharitable language, were made to Longstreet’s failure in other articles, the formal phase of the “Gettysburg Controversy” was concluded in Volume 7. Longstreet never accepted Jones’s invitation to present his case in the magazine, but he continued to argue his side in print, and multiplied his self-contradictions in articles in
Battles and Leaders
and
Annals of the War,
and in his own book,
From Manassas to Appomattox.

The controversy in the
SHSP
went far beyond an expression of former brother officers’ bitter feelings about Longstreet and their contrasting devotion to Lee. The articles, as well as revealing much about the men writing them, provide a body of material on Gettysburg as Confederate officers view their lost opportunities and failures from the perspective of fourteen years. While, for reasons already stated, the individual accounts are not always accurate in detail, in bulk the articles are rich in information on the campaign as seen by general officers and staff officers of the commanding general and of other generals.

In other volumes accounts, uneven in quality, are left by privates, line officers, and field officers, to complete the presentation of the battle from all viewpoints. Without attempting to make an inclusive list of every item dealing with Gettysburg in the
SHSP,
I will list the articles that were most useful to me. As all of them relate to Gettysburg, I omit titles except where information regarding the battle was found in articles not specifically on that subject.

VOLUME
9. Pages 29—35: Major General Isaac Trimble.

VOLUME
10. Pages 170—4: Colonel William Allan, in a review of Doubleday’s book on the battle, is concerned largely, in disproving Doubleday’s high estimates, with arriving at an accurate figure for Confederate troops. His total—64,159 infantry and artillery as of the time the army moved northwest from the Rapidan—is the same as my composite of all records. (Volume 10 is, for some reason known to collectors, a rare item, though it contains nothing of special value except a dozen Gettysburg battle reports from the
Official Records.
Reports from
OR
are scattered through several volumes of
SHSP.)

VOLUME
11. Pages 98—113: Alexander, the most literate of all Southern soldiers, mentions Gettysburg in “Confederate Artillery Service.” Pages 320—7: G. W. Beale, in a running letter to his mother, gives a vivid description of Stuart’s ride as seen by a young soldier. Pages 283—6: An editorial, with published letters, refutes Doubleday’s representation of Armistead’s dying words.

Doubleday wrote that Armistead, “dying in the effort to extend the area of slavery over the free states, … saw, with a clearer vision, that he had been engaged in an unholy cause, and said to one of our officers, who leaned over him, ’Tell Hancock that I have wronged him and wronged my country.’” W. H. Moore, a soldier with the 97th New York, was lying wounded beside Armistead when the Confederate general died, and he denied that Armistead had made the statement, which Doubleday claimed had reached him secondhand. Moore said that all who saw Armistead were impressed by his “intense, all-consuming desire for the Confederates to win the battle … [and] … to die like a soldier.”

A number of Confederates wrote indignantly about Doubleday’s statement and about the harshness of spirit that attributed to Armistead, a regular-army man of a regular-army family, a purpose “to extend the area of slavery over the free states.” In his post-war references to “rebels” (he never called his former enemies anything else), Doubleday aroused lasting resentment by a vicious piety that ignored the avowed purpose of the war—preserving the Union. In praising the charge of a cavalry colonel, Doubleday said that he “saved the army and the country from the unutterable degradation of the establishment of slavery in the Northern states.”

As Doubleday was not so big a fool as to believe any such outlandish statement, which charge would include Confederates who had once been his brother officers in the U.S. Army, his post-war hate-mongering against a beaten foe made him seem contemptible in contrast to the majority of old-army Federal officers, many of whom resumed former friendships with Southerners.

VOLUME
20. Pages 370—95: General James A. Walker, in a long sketch on Hill, includes the battle under the title “Oration on the Unveiling of A. P. Hill’s Statue.”

VOLUME
23. Pages 205—29: Colonel Charles Marshall. Pages 229—37: Captain Martin Hazlewood. Pages 253—59: Captain Leslie J. Perry, of the Federal War Office. Pages 238—47 and 348—53: Colonel John S. Mosby.

VOLUME
26. Pages 116—28: Trimble. Pages 12, 13: References to the battle in “War Diary” of Captain Robert Emory Park, 12th Alabama.

VOLUME
31. Pages 228—36: Captain Robert A. Bright—a vivid account of the third day by one of Pickett’s staff officers.

VOLUME
32. Pages 33—8: Charles T. Loehr, of Kemper’s brigade. Pages 183—9: Colonel Rawley Martin—a personal description by an officer who reached the stone wall with Armistead and fell, wounded, near his leader. Pages 189—95: Captain John Holmes Smith, who went up the hill with Kemper, was wounded near the wall, and made it back to the Confederate lines. The narratives of both Colonel Martin and Captain Smith are literate, detailed, informative, and among the best.

VOLUME
33. Pages 26—31: Colonel Winfield Peters. Pages 118—34: Judge James F. Crocker. Pages 135—60: Captain James Power Smith—an interesting and valuable record by Jackson’s former staff officer who, en route to staff service with Ewell, rode with Lee. Smith, a thoughtful young man, was later a minister and secretary of the
SHSP.

VOLUME
34. Pages 327—35: Colonel Joseph C. Mayo, of the 3rd Virginia—his account is rich in details in individuals in the charge, and he has a sharp eye for horses.

VOLUME
37. Pages 21—37: Colonel T. M. R. Talcott, sometime staff officer of Lee. Pages 74—143, Colonel David G. Mclntosh—a full and reflective study by Hill’s fine cannoneer, with an adverse though temperate criticism of Longstreet. Pages 144—51: the Reverend James E. Poindexter, formerly captain in the 38th Virginia, with Kemper. Pages 210—31: Dr. Randolph Harrison McKim, first lieutenant and A.A.G. with a fellow Marylander, Brigadier General Steuart, and later chaplain.

VOLUME
38. Pages 184—96: Mosby in private controversy with Talcott. Talcott counterattacks on pages 197—210. Pages 253—300: McKim, very full and scholarly, with a warm defense of Lee and a strong, though brief, indictment of Longstreet.

VOLUME
41. Pages 37—48: Talcott shifts his attack from Mosby to Longstreet, with a well-documented study of the third day.

VOLUME
44. Pages 233—40: Under the title “The Heth Papers” there are letters from Longstreet and Early which reveal the continuing controversy between former comrades, and a touching 1877 letter addressing Heth as “Dear Friend” from the Federal hero of Little Round Top, General G. K. Warren.

There are no military references beyond Volume 44; the last issues are devoted to reprints of the sessions of the Confederate Congress, which were not published in the newspapers of the time.

All through the first forty-four volumes are scattered little items of personal detail, such as a description of a Confederate soldier making his camp and a description of Lee’s horse, Traveler, which have not been cited because they did not deal specifically with Gettysburg and the line has to be drawn somewhere in mentioning references. An illustrative exception is a newspaper editorial, reprinted in Volume 41, pages 82—7, on the death of Colonel Walter Taylor, Lee’s personable young A.A.G., who wrote so informatively and modestly of his wartime association with the commanding general and is himself a source for any study of the Confederate army at Gettysburg.