House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  Longstreet waited till full dark meant the day’s work was surely done. When he turned to ride back toward Cashtown, Dr. Cullen, one of the surgeons on his staff, joined him and said triumphantly that the day had given them a fine success.

  Longstreet grunted. “I’d rather not have fought at all than fail to do what more we had a chance to do.” Dr. Cullen fell back, and Longstreet rode alone.

  His thoughts were heavy. They could not retreat. Lee was right. To countermarch this army back to Cashtown or to Chambersburg would be as hurtful as defeat. The men would yield to discouragement, the North would take heart. But surely Lee would not attack Meade in that strong position yonder. No army, outnumbered as they would be tomorrow, could successfully assault the line Meade would draw tonight: masses of infantry in every wood and behind every fence and wall, guns posted on the high ground at the cemetery and on the hills to the south to throw a cross fire through the ranks of the attackers.

  But Lee need not attack! The most promising maneuvre was to move to cut Meade’s lines of supply, just as Jackson had cut Pope’s last summer at Manassas. Then Meade must come to them, as Pope had come to Jackson. Then Meade must make his battle where they chose. Lee when he said a while ago he would attack tomorrow had spoken in heat and anger. After a night of quiet thought he would see more clearly.

  Longstreet, with Sorrel and Manning and Currain and Goree and the others riding quietly behind him, returned along the Cashtown road. It was almost ten o’clock before they met McLaws, leading his division. He and Longstreet and the others drew off the road to let the soldiers pass, and Longstreet said approvingly:

  “You’ve wasted no time, General.”

  “No, sir. We’ve done a dozen miles over the pass in less than six hours.”

  “Will your men be ready for work tomorrow?”

  “Anything you ask of them, General.”

  “There’s a big creek a little ahead of you. You’ll find good camping ground just beyond. Move your men before day, General. You’ll have about three miles more to do in the morning.”

  McLaws assented and went on, and Fairfax reported that the headquarters tents were pitched not far ahead. Before they reached the spot, Longstreet met General Barksdale with his brigade; and the Mississippian drew up to speak to him.

  “I’ve a letter from home, General. I was down there in January, you know; spent a day or two in Macon, met your kinfolks.”

  “Ah. What’s the Macon news?”

  Barksdale laughed. “Well, Mr. Ferris is still apologizing for defending Beast Butler.”

  “What was that? I seldom hear from my sisters.”

  “Oh, he wrote an editorial in the Beacon about what he called the ‘simulated’ indignation against Butler. He said he had no sympathy with ladies who so far forgot their modesty as to insult strangers in the streets of their city. He meant well, but you never know what people will read into what you write. As an editor I can sympathize with him.” Barksdale had for years edited the Columbus Democrat. “Poor Ferris has been explaining ever since.” And he added: “Noxubee County’s mighty proud of you, General. They expect great things from the First Corps in this campaign.”

  “There’s a Macon youngster in the Ninth Alabama,” Longstreet remarked. “A sharpshooter, Peter Minor, just a boy. He made himself known to me in Chambersburg. We’re all a long way from home, General.”

  “General Semmes, too,” Barksdale reminded him. “His home’s just across the Tombigbee from Columbus. But we’re here for good reason, General.” Though he and Longstreet were the same age, Barksdale’s hair was white; but his eye held a proud youthful fire. He had studied law in Columbus, not far from Macon, and settled there; and he went to Congress and served till war broke out. He was a violent pro-slavery man; for in Mississippi everyone grew cotton, and unless you owned slaves you were nobody. Barksdale, as Colonel of the Thirteenth Mississippi, had done well at First Manassas; at Malvern Hill last year he had won General Lee’s commendation by seizing the regimental colors and leading a desperate assault under heavy fire. His promotion to brigadier came soon afterward; he was a proved man.

  “For good reason, yes,” Longstreet agreed. “Give your men what rest you can, General. They’ll have work to do.”

  Barksdale rode on and Longstreet continued to where his tents were pitched. McLaws was up; Hood would be here in due season. There was no more he could do tonight. At supper he paid little attention to the lively talk around him. These men had no misgivings; tomorrow’s battle was in their minds already won. Tom Goree, that Texan whom Longstreet had met on his way to Richmond two years ago and whom he had kept since then by his side, was jubilant over today’s success; but little Peyton Manning suggested that the initial victory was rather the result of good fortune than of good management.

  “I’ll take the luck,” Goree retorted. “If God has decided to come down and take a proper view of the situation, we’ll win the war tomorrow.”

  The discussion ran on till someone asked Major Currain’s opinion. Longstreet listened for the answer.

  “Well,” Currain said, “I asked a man in Chambersburg, a minister, Mr. Schenck, how long the war would last. He said it would last as long as we kept on fighting, ten years, or twenty. He said that even in Chambersburg there were plenty of able-bodied young men not yet in the Union army. He said the North would raise a new army to replace any army we destroyed. He said the North can raise bigger armies than we can, feed them better, give them better guns.” He paused, but no one spoke, and he added: “Mr. Schenck had travelled in the South, and he said he hadn’t seen in the South any countryside as generally prosperous as this. He said all we had to do was look around us here to see how much stronger the North was than we are.”

  There was an almost resentful silence, but Longstreet thought what that minister said was true. In the South there were great plantations, and there were little two-room mountain cabins and the miserable hovels of the poor whites; but there were nowhere such fields and barns and well-kept and comfortable small farms as these he had seen in Pennsylvania. Every man here knew this. Their silence was an admission. Then Colonel Manning broke that silence with a laugh.

  “It doesn’t matter how many men they have; it’s the kind of men they are. As for their guns, the more they have, the more we’ll take away from them.”

  Longstreet thought contempt for the enemy was the great weakness of the Southerner, just as his confidence in himself was his great strength. Colonel Fremantle asked him a question. “Are you as confident as these gentlemen, General?”

  He was not, but he would not by admitting his own doubts plant doubt in the minds of these men who followed him. Besides, though Ewell had missed his chance tonight, if at dawn he stormed that hill south of town, these optimists might be proved right. Ewell was a fighter when the mood was on him, and big things might be done tomorrow.

  “To be sure, to be sure,” he said easily. He went to his tent and lay down, though not at once to sleep. Better not think now of the morrow, for at night every shadow was black. He put anxieties aside, forcing his thoughts to General Barksdale and to that little town in Mississippi where his sisters and his brother lived. Louisa had enjoyed her stay there two years ago. When the fighting was done, he must go back to see them all again; perhaps he could buy some land and settle there and turn planter.

  He lay long awake, hearing on the road near his tent the steady march of weary men. The bright moon was a blessing, for stumbling through dark night was hard work. They were McLaws’s men, or perhaps Hoods’s. Well, they were here, and by noon tomorrow Law might be here; and Pickett tomorrow afternoon. Once he had the First Corps in hand, he could face anything.

  Longstreet woke to the stir of men near his tent, and the stroke of axes and the crackle of fires. When he stepped out into the moonlight it was a little after three o’clock. Probably Law was just about starting from New Guilford.

  Moxley Sorrel spoke to him. “Hood is up, General. Law should be here t
his afternoon.”

  “Perhaps by noon,” Longstreet suggested. New Guilford must be twenty miles away over the Mountain, and any pace better than two miles an hour for a long march was fast work; but Law would come fast. “He will push hard. Where is Hood?”

  “In bivouac this side of the creek. He said he would move at three o’clock.”

  “Three o‘clock? It’s three o’clock now. He must be filling the road. I told McLaws to march before day. Direct him to let Hood pass, then follow.” And he asked: “Are those our wagons on the road here now?”

  “No, General; they’re the last of Ewell’s. They went into park at dusk to rest the horses and give our divisions the road. Our trains are coming behind them.”

  Longstreet remembered all those roads that converged on Gettysburg, thinking that on each road men and wagons, their own and the enemy’s, were hurrying to the town where presently they would collide. An army was a sprawling thing. His First Corps counted twenty thousand men, eighty guns, well over a thousand wagons. You might sit in one spot for a day and a half or two days and watch the First Corps pass, with its tramping feet of men and its thudding hoof beats of the horses, and its bands and its bright flags flying. There were many flags, since each regiment and each brigade had its own; for the South was a Confederacy of sovereign states which fought as allies.

  Herein lay a difference between this army and Meade’s. The Northerners fought under one flag, the Southerners under many. Was that perhaps a source of weakness? Could a confederacy ever be so closely knit as a union? He brushed aside the doubt. That was a matter for the politicians. He was a soldier.

  It was still dark when they breakfasted, but moon and stars were bright; and as they rode toward Gettysburg, day broke fast ahead of them. They overtook and passed regiments of McLaws’s division already on the march; and the sun rose, glaring in their eyes, red and angry. A hot day dawning, and hot work to be done.

  At a little after five in the morning, Longstreet topped the rising ground and saw again the town beyond and turned aside to the squat little house with a broken paling around the yard where Lee had established his headquarters. The tents were pitched among trees beside the house. General Lee greeted him.

  “Ah, General, good morning. Where are your men?”

  “Close behind me.”

  “Good! Those people are still on the hill above the town.” Lee looked that way. “But I don’t see any force on the ridge south of the cemetery. I’ve asked Captain Johnston to inspect the ground on our right, and General Pendleton has gone that way, too. I sent Major Venable to Ewell to ask whether he can seize the cemetery this morning.” He added: “Ewell and Early and Rodes were all against an attack there last night, but their views may have changed. I told Major Venable to make it clear that the question is whether to move all our forces around to our right.”

  Then General Lee was still considering a move around Meade’s flank to maneuver him out of that natural fortress yonder. Thinking he read the other’s mind, Longstreet nodded. “Exactly. And even if we can’t see them, Meade must have poured men into the position south of the cemetery all night long. They may be behind the swell of ground out of our sight. The light’s still poor, and the sun’s against us.”

  Lee said regretfully: “We’re still in doubt as to the force over there, but Ewell captured a dispatch that gave us some information. General Sykes’s Fifth Corps camped four miles east of Gettysburg last night, and apparently the Twelfth Corps is already on the ground. I wish Stuart were here to tell us what we have to face.”

  “Meade had at least two corps here yesterday?” Lee had said so, last evening.

  “Three, or so our prisoners tell us. The Third Corps came on the field at sunset.”

  “And now the Fifth and the Twelfth. That’s five Corps you can be sure of. Probably more. Meade is a careful man. After what Ewell and Hill did to him yesterday, he would not be over there now unless he were in force.”

  “I hope Ewell can hit them this morning.”

  “If he doesn’t see the way clear,” Longstreet said surely, “we need only maneuver to the right to call Meade to ground of our own choosing.” He did not elaborate the point. Before their northward march began, now almost a month ago, he had urged that in any engagement their role should be defensive; and Lee’s silence then had seemed consent, as it did now. Yesterday the commanding general had said he would attack today, but clearly the night had brought wisdom. Lee was himself again, the game was in their hands.

  They mounted and rode to that jut of trees from which they had watched the dying battle yesterday, and Lee levelled his glasses on the town and the cemetery and the low ridge to the south of it. Longstreet joined him in that long scrutiny. As the sun in their faces burned the dew away, a faint dawn mist thinned across the fields. The morning was a breathless hush, the silence a pressure and a burden; yet the air itself seemed to beat like a pulse, as though it matched the rhythmic respirations of the thousands of men gathered in this neatly ordered countryside, as though the world were a pig’s bladder such as children inflate to use as toys, and which filled and emptied as these hosts of men inhaled and exhaled. Longstreet was as conscious of these thousands all around him as though they were massed here under his eyes; his pulse kept time to theirs, he breathed when they breathed.

  He and General Lee looked past a house and across fields on some of which the wheat had already been cut to a rise of ground a mile away. The fields in their front bore no wounds of war. Yesterday’s fighting had been west and north of the town and in its streets, not here. A few single trees dotted the fields between them and the town, and a house and a small orchard lay off to their right, and other houses and other orchards along the Emmitsburg road beyond. Longstreet saw a few cows grazing; but in these open pastures cows need wear no bells, so there was not even that small sound. A hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand men in battle harness waited here within a two- or three-mile radius; but except that he could see a few batteries in position, and a few blue uniforms over yonder, the scene was as peaceful as a Sunday morning.

  General Hill joined them, and General Heth, his head bandaged because of a wound received the day before. Then Hood rode through the trees to report to Longstreet. “My men are moving into the fields behind us here,” he said. “McLaws is on our heels.”

  Longstreet nodded. “Good!” He heard Moxley Sorrel call to someone, and turned and saw Colonel Fremantle and a fat little man in soiled white pants and a short jacket, perched in a tree for a better view. Sorrel advised Colonel Fremantle to come down; but the Englishman said he was comfortable where he was. Longstreet asked Sorrel about the other man.

  “That’s Captain Scheibert,” Sorrel explained. “He’s the Prussian young Dewain told us about, the one who took an impression of a wet painting on his pants.”

  Longstreet smiled faintly. He turned his horse, riding back along the Hagerstown road and across the fields behind the wood till he saw Hood’s men filing off the Chambersburg pike. Yesterday the Yankees had been driven back up that slope along which the men now were marching; and Longstreet saw a few unburied dead, each the focus for a swarm of flies buzzing in the sun. The leaders of the advancing column sometimes swerved to avoid them. He sought McLaws and bade him place his men beyond Hood’s, conveniently ready to move.

  When Longstreet returned to the commanding general, Lee was sitting alone on a log at the edge of the trees, and Longstreet dismounted and joined him. Lee said, his controlled tones suggesting his impatience: “Venable has not yet returned. Nor Captain Johnston. Nor General Pendleton.”

  “McLaws is coming up,” Longstreet told him. “I think Law will be here by noon, Pickett this afternoon.”

  Lee made no comment. Longstreet’s eyes swept the gently undulating levels which lay between him and the enemy position; but there was nothing to see, nothing to hear except the occasional bark of a skirmisher’s rifle. Major Currain requested permission to go and exchange a word with Brett Dewain,
and Longstreet gave it. Hood approached, and sat down on the log, and selected a dead stick and produced his knife and began to whittle aimlessly. A man whittled as a woman knitted, to ease taut nerves. Longstreet too opened his knife, tried it on his thumb, picked up a twig from the ground and sharpened it to a needle point with careful strokes of the keen blade. It was not yet eight o’clock, but already the sun was baking hot, the shade was grateful.

  Lee rose and walked away, and Hood said quietly: “General, he’s going to attack. He told General Hill if we don’t whip Meade he’ll whip us.”

  “Attack?” Longstreet spoke in gruff incredulity. “If we’d wanted to attack, we could have done that in Virginia, without marching God knows how many hundred miles!”

  Hood did not reply, and Longstreet watched Lee, a little way off, his coat buttoned to his chin despite the increasing heat, his hands clasped behind him, walking to and fro with bowed head. Sorrel came up beside them and asked in a sprightly tone: “Well, General, how does it look?”

  Longstreet grunted, not answering. Sorrel was as talkative as a woman, but this was no time for talk. If Hood was right, Lee’s blood was up! That fighting heart, that instinct to plunge headlong at the enemy had him in command.

  But if Lee ordered an attack, a thousand men would die today in these fields beyond which Meade was waiting! Yes and die vainly! Longstreet lifted his glasses to study the ground yonder. The cemetery was somewhat higher than the spot where he sat. He watched Yankee skirmishers come toward the Emmitsburg road and lie down in the wheat. Meade was organizing his position to crush the assault he expected, and General Lee could see those movements over there plainly enough. Surely Hood was wrong!