Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

  Lieutenants Turner and Early climbed to the crest of the hill and found no Yankees anywhere—except those clearly visible to the west on Cemetery Hill. From Culp’s Hill, they reported, the enemy’s position could be rendered untenable. It so happened that either the two lieutenants did not discover the Iron Brigade, ordered over to Culp’s Hill by General Hancock, because of the thick tree cover, or they reached the scene just before the Yankees did. In any event, their reconnaissance produced yet another miscalculation by the Confederate high command.

  Allegheny Johnson had by now reached Gettysburg, but his division had not, and he was in an ill temper about it. His four brigades had marched some 25 miles that day, he said, and were held up along the Chambersburg Pike by a lumbering wagon train—no doubt one of A. P. Hill’s trains—and contrary to his earlier promise they would not be up for another hour. The delay meant an arrival time of sunset or later. Mulling over this latest complication, Ewell was struck by a new thought: occupy Culp’s Hill immediately by using Jubal Early’s two brigades already on the scene, Hays’s and Avery’s. Johnson’s troops when they arrived could move into Early’s line on the Gettysburg front.

  But Old Jube—his earlier belligerence evaporating—bristled at the thought. His command, he said, “had been doing all the hard marching and fighting and was not in condition to make the move.” Johnson for his part did not appreciate the implied invidious comparison with his command, and the two generals exchanged sharp words. Dick Ewell now made his first real mistake of the day. Instead of ordering the immediate occupation of the (supposedly) unoccupied Culp’s Hill, he humored Early and let his men stand down, and assigned the task to Johnson’s division whenever it might arrive.

  Ewell’s decision had momentous consequences. To be sure, just then Hays’s Louisianians and Avery’s North Carolinians would have been forced to make a fight for the (in fact) occupied Culp’s Hill, but with some 2,400 men to confront the few hundred weary survivors of the Iron Brigade, and with as much as two hours of daylight to work with, and with Johnson’s reinforcements soon at hand to secure the hill, the outcome would seem assured.4

  Allegheny Johnson’s division made its way through the battlefield and into Gettysburg along the roadbed of the abandoned railroad, its last brigade not arriving until after sunset. Ewell sent the division around to the east toward Culp’s Hill, assigning Lieutenants Turner and Early as guides. His orders to Johnson were strangely tentative. Johnson was to take Culp’s Hill—if he found it unoccupied. Soon afterward Ewell was visited by General Lee, became preoccupied with matters of larger strategy, and absent-mindedly left the matter of Culp’s Hill entirely in the hands of General Johnson.

  Rodes and Early were present with Ewell at the generals’ conference, convened in an arbor behind a house on the outskirts of town, and Early left the only record of what was discussed there. Early’s recollection is freighted with self-importance and special pleading, but at least in outline probably reflects the subjects that were discussed. General Lee, who had not met with Ewell since the start of the campaign, inquired about the overall state of the Second Corps as well as its condition after the day’s fighting. What was not discussed, apparently, was any assault that evening on Cemetery Hill; Lee accepted the fact that Ewell had not found it practicable. What the commanding general did want to know was whether it would be practicable the next day. “Can’t you, with your corps, attack on this flank at daylight tomorrow?” Early quoted Lee as asking.

  Early cast himself in the lead role at finding fault with this idea. The terrain was against it, the enemy was in force there, the result “might be doubtful.” Even if successful, “it would inevitably be at very great loss.” Ewell and Rodes added their own arguments against such an offensive, which led Lee to ask if the Second Corps might be at risk where it was. Might it be better to “draw you around towards my right,” said Lee, before the enemy broke through the corps’ extended line? There came a chorus of objections to this idea as well. After winning such a dramatic victory that day, it was said the troops would be demoralized by having to pull back from their conquests. There were the wounded to consider, and the booty collected from the Yankees. General Lee was assured that the enemy would encounter great troubles launching an attack from the heights of Cemetery Hill; “we could repulse any force he could send against us,” Early proclaimed.

  So it was left, rather hazily, that the Second Corps would remain in and around Gettysburg, facing south, confronting the Yankee line on the heights. Although Early in his account did not mention it, Ewell surely told Lee of his proposed occupation of Culp’s Hill, and how that ought to dominate the enemy’s position on Cemetery Hill. The main thrust on July 2, Lee suggested, would be against the Federal left, with Ewell to deliver a diversion against the Federal right—with the option (wrote Early) of making the diversion “a real attack on discovering any disorder or symptoms of giving way on the enemy’s part….“5

  After Lee left to return to Seminary Ridge, Ewell and his staff relaxed and reflected on a good day’s work. Ordnance chief William Allan remembered that “everybody was in fine spirits. After all we had gained a great victory….” Ewell’s adjutant, Sandie Pendleton, remarked with particular satisfaction that “we finished the 11th Federal corps which we had beaten at Chancellorsville.” This pleasant interlude was interrupted by the arrival of Colonel Charles Marshall of the headquarters staff with a message from General Lee. The general commanding, on second thought, had decided to evacuate Gettysburg, and to swing the Second Corps back around to join the rest of the army on the right. This announcement stunned Ewell. After discussing it with Rodes and Early, he determined to ride back with Colonel Marshall to argue the case with Lee personally.

  General Lee took the stone house of the widow Mary Thompson, on the Chambersburg Pike, as his headquarters. (Library of Congress)

  Lee and his lieutenant talked for an hour, and Ewell must have been persuasive. His chief argument was that with Allegheny Johnson’s division occupying Culp’s Hill, he could drive the Federals off their Cemetery Hill citadel with comparative ease. That ought to immeasurably aid any offensive on the right. This argument—perhaps combined with Ewell’s newly evident aggressive attitude—caused Lee to change his mind once again and allow the Second Corps to stay where it was.

  It was after midnight when Ewell returned to his headquarters outside Gettysburg, and he immediately sent Lieutenant Turner to check on Johnson’s occupation of Culp’s Hill—something he had neglected to do before he rode off to meet with Lee. Turner’s report gave Dick Ewell his second major shock of the night. General Johnson, as it happened, had not gotten around to carrying out Ewell’s order of some five hours earlier to take Culp’s Hill, should it prove to be unoccupied. Reminded now to do so, Johnson sent out a reconnoitering party “with orders to report as to the position of the enemy….” Near the crest of the hill, in the darkness, the party met a sharp fire, suffered several casualties, and beat a hasty retreat. (This ambush was the work of the 7th Indiana, one of Lysander Cutler’s First Corps regiments that had spent the day in the rear guarding trains. It reached the field that evening and was rushed over to Culp’s Hill to extend the Iron Brigade’s line.)

  If this was not bad news enough, on its return to Confederate ground the reconnoitering party captured a Union courier bearing a dispatch written at 12:30 A.M. by General Sykes, commander of the Fifth Corps, to General Slocum, commander of the Twelfth Corps. It revealed that the Fifth Corps was just four miles east of Gettysburg and would resume its advance at 4:00 A.M., while the courier’s presence on the outskirts of Gettysburg suggested that the Twelfth Corps was already on the scene.

  Lieutenant Turner delivered this captured dispatch to Ewell, along with Johnson’s report of his belated reconnaissance and his request for further orders regarding Culp’s Hill. Whatever might have been, whatever chance there was to seize Culp’s Hill with little bloodshed, was gone now. The chance to shift the Second Corps to a new position wa
s gone as well. “Day was now breaking,” wrote Ewell in his report, “and it was too late for any change of place.“6

  In the postwar years much would be made of the Confederates’ failure to follow up their July 1 victory by promptly driving the Federals out of their Cemetery Hill sanctuary. Dick Ewell was most often found guilty in these old-soldier skirmishes. Ewell’s crime, it seems, was that he was not Stonewall Jackson. Yet absent any help from Hill’s corps—a decision entirely General Lee’s—it is highly doubtful if even Stonewall could have conquered Cemetery Hill on July 1. That was Porter Alexander’s informed opinion. “This delay has been sometimes criticised,” Alexander wrote. “I think any attack we could have made that afternoon would have failed.” Campbell Brown of Ewell’s staff put the case nicely when he wrote, “The discovery that this lost us the battle is one of those frequently-recurring but tardy strokes of military genius of which one hears long after….”

  The Confederates’ failure to even attempt to seize Culp’s Hill that evening or night, however, finds General Ewell guilty of inattention at the least. He appeared not to credit the Federals with the wit to see how important Culp’s Hill was to their defensive position, and consequently did not order Early’s brigades to take it when the taking was good. In regard to Allegheny Johnson’s misadventure, Major Brown remarked, “I know that Gen’l Ewell held him not altogether free from blame in the matter….“Yet Ewell, by failing to sufficiently impress Johnson with the importance of his task, and then failing to monitor his progress (or lack of it), was hardly free of blame himself. In this instance, Dick Ewell seems to have misplaced that touch of Stonewall Jackson decisiveness he had displayed earlier in the day.7

  ROBERT E. LEE spent the evening of July 1 engrossed in hours-long deliberations with his lieutenants, trying to decide on his course. When not meeting with Ewell to negotiate the Second Corps’ next actions, he was consulting with Hill or Longstreet. Old Pete was singularly unimpressed with the prospects before them, and as Lee’s senior lieutenant and self-appointed senior adviser he did not hesitate to express himself on the subject. Longstreet’s idea of the perfect battle was Fredericksburg, where, firmly established on the high ground, he had shot the attacking Federals to pieces. Now, as he stood on Seminary Ridge studying the high ground opposite him with his field glasses, he could envision a Fredericksburg in reverse.

  Longstreet chose an oblique approach to the commanding general. “We could not call the enemy to position better suited to our plans,” he observed. “All that we have to do is to file around his left and secure good ground between him and his capital.” His remark was an unspoken reference to the “understanding” he believed the two of them had reached back in Virginia—that in Pennsylvania they would combine offensive strategy with defensive tactics—and he assumed Lee would surely agree with those “ruling ideas of the campaign.”

  But Lee did not agree. He said, with a show of impatience, “If the enemy is there tomorrow, we must attack him.” Longstreet’s reply was prompt and more pointed than he perhaps intended: “If he is there, it will be because he is anxious that we should attack him—a good reason, in my judgment, for not doing so.”

  Longstreet’s blunt rejoinder was a measure of his dismay. In a postwar letter to General Lafayette McLaws, he explained how he and Lee had reached their understanding, so he thought, about giving or accepting battle in Pennsylvania. “You will now understand my surprise at finding all of our previously arranged plans so unexpectedly changed,” he wrote, “and why I might wish and hope, to get the Gen. to consider of our former arrangements.”

  James Longstreet, Lee’s senior adviser, opposed Lee’s tactics at Gettysburg. (Cook Collection, Valentine Museum)

  By Longstreet’s description, he and the commanding general had an extended discussion on the subject, interrupted only by Lee’s visit to Ewell’s headquarters. Longstreet seems first to have suggested a wide turning maneuver by the whole army. The march would be southward and then a turn to the east to get between Meade and Washington, thereby forcing Meade to do the attacking to regain his supply line and defend his capital. Such a march route might pass through Fairfield, southwest of Gettysburg, then swing eastward, perhaps on the roads through Emmitsburg and Taneytown. (Indeed, the ideal position in which to invite a Federal attack might be the Pipe Creek line that General Meade had earlier chosen for his ideal battlefield.)

  Any maneuver of this kind could only take place behind a cavalry screen, of course, and Lee no doubt explained that he finally had word from Stuart, and that the cavalry would not be rejoining the army for perhaps twenty-four hours. The Federals would have to be scouted to fix their position, another function of cavalry. The army might remain in place for those twenty-four hours, waiting for Stuart, but Lee was intent on challenging Meade in detail, before all the Yankee forces reached the scene. With that, Old Pete suggested a less radical movement, one that was more tactical than strategic—still a swing around the enemy’s left, but closer in, on or near the present battlefield. As he later put it, “I thought that we should move around to his left, that we might threaten it if we intended to maneuvre, or attack it if we determined upon a battle.”

  General Lee did not reject Longstreet’s schemes out of hand, and he certainly had them in mind when he sent Colonel Marshall to Ewell with orders to evacuate Gettysburg and bring the Second Corps around to the army’s right. Campbell Brown recorded Lee’s caution to Ewell that night that he should not become too entangled with the enemy: “I have not decided to fight here—and may probably draw off by my right flank … so as to get between the enemy & Washington & Baltimore—& force them to attack us in position.” In the end, however, it was Ewell’s strenuous objections to evacuating Gettysburg, and his assurances about occupying Culp’s Hill, that caused Lee to change his mind again and to leave the Second Corps where it was.8

  When Longstreet returned to his camp that evening, he was of the belief that Lee may have made up his mind to attack the next day, but was “confident that he had not yet determined as to when the attack should be made.” In fact no attack orders for July 2 were issued by Lee that night; all planning was left to the next day. Longstreet did issue orders, however, to Pickett’s division at Chambersburg and to Evander Law’s brigade of Hood’s division, at New Guilford, to march immediately for Gettysburg.

  That evening Old Pete did not share the general euphoria in many Confederate camps over the results of the day’s fighting. Writing to the general after the war, Dr. Dorsey Cullen, the First Corps’ medical director, recalled how Longstreet did not take the “same cheerful view of it that I did; and presently you remarked, that it would have been better had we not fought than to have left undone what we did.” The enemy had taken a posting, Longstreet said, “that it would take the whole army to drive them from, and then at a great sacrifice.” In conversation with British Colonel Fremantle, Longstreet even suggested that the Federals’ position at Gettysburg had “greater advantages” than the position the Confederates had occupied at Fredericksburg. 9

  In his campaign reports, Lee did not even list Longstreet’s proposals for a turning movement among his options that Wednesday evening. Instead he gave two rather lame reasons for deciding to pursue the battle on July 2. Should he attempt to pull back to or through South Mountain, he said, withdrawing the army’s “extensive trains would have been difficult and dangerous.” Remaining where they were to await an attack was no better—foraging in the countryside “in the presence of the enemy” would be risky, due especially to the parties of local militia. Surely General Lee and his veteran army had nothing to fear from Pennsylvania’s Sunday soldiers, especially when he could call on Imboden’s troopers back at Chambersburg and, shortly, Stuart’s entire cavalry division. And surely the trains could withdraw safely in any direction with the entire Army of Northern Virginia to shield them.

  If Lee gave thought to standing on the defensive right where he was, forcing the decision-making onto Meade’s shoulders, he lef
t no hint of it beyond the faint excuse of a supply problem. In fact, on July 2, supplies were not a problem. Confederate foraging parties had at hand at least a week’s supply of food, with the potential of much more to be collected, under the cavalry’s protection, in untouched Fulton and Cumberland counties to the west. Nor, according to the astute engineer’s eye of Porter Alexander, was there a problem with Seminary Ridge as a defensive line. “It was not such a really wonderful position as the enemy happened to fall into,” Alexander admitted, “but it was no bad one.” And he added, “it could never have been successfully assaulted.” Alexander concluded that in the end, committed to this great invasion of the enemy’s country, General Lee was simply too audacious for such a conservative tactic.

  By Longstreet’s recollection, Lee was not his usual self that evening of July 1: “He seemed under a subdued excitement, which occasionally took possession of him when ‘the hunt was up,’ and threatened his superb equipoise. The sharp battle fought by Hill and Ewell on that day had given him a taste of victory.” Other observers traveling with the army had their own thoughts about what was different about Robert E. Lee after he reached Gettysburg. “Lee was not at his ease, but was riding to and fro,…making anxious enquiries here and there, and looking careworn,” recalled the Prussian military observer Justus Scheibert. The London Times correspondent Francis Lawley found General Lee “more anxious and ruffled than I had ever seen him before, though it required close observation to detect it.”

  The fact of the matter seems to be that Robert E. Lee was deeply angered. At midday, talking to General Anderson and to Ewell’s aide Campbell Brown, he had made no effort to conceal his anger at Jeb Stuart for failing to obey instructions. Lee was surely displeased with Harry Heth for disobeying his instructions, to not bring on a general engagement, and equally displeased with corps commander Powell Hill for letting it happen. Under questioning, Dick Ewell (along with his lieutenants) had displayed, first, strong reluctance to move against the enemy’s right, then strong reluctance to shift forces around to the enemy’s left as Lee proposed. Longstreet was being stubbornly and outspokenly contrary to the whole plan of battle. Lee was without Jeb Stuart’s eyes, on which he had grown utterly dependent. He was entangled in a battle he had not wanted in a place he knew little about against a foe he could not describe. It was not any wonder that he seemed “anxious and ruffled.“10