Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

  That morning, while awaiting Johnston’s report, General Lee met with a succession of his lieutenants in a shaded eminence on Seminary Ridge near the Lutheran Seminary building. Foreign observers gathered there too to watch the prospective battle—British Colonel Fremantle, Prussian Captain Justus Scheibert, Austrian Captain FitzGerald Ross (“very Scotch as to name,” noted staff officer Moxley Sorrel, “but Austrian to the core”), and London Times correspondent Francis Lawley. Fremantle and Scheibert climbed into the crotch of a big oak tree to better observe the action. “Just below us,” Fremantle wrote, “were seated Generals Lee, Hill, Longstreet, and Hood, in consultation—the two latter assisting their deliberations by the truly American custom of whittling sticks.”

  Longstreet had been first to join the general commanding, at daylight, and he once again took up his argument against assuming the offensive that day. He pressed on Lee his idea of a turning movement that would position the army between General Meade and his capital and force Meade to do the attacking. “He seemed resolved, however,” Longstreet later wrote, “and we discussed the probable results.”

  That mild summation papered over what was by now a seething disagreement between the general commanding and his senior lieutenant. Moxley Sorrel, Old Pete’s chief of staff, perceptively captured the moment. The lieutenant general, Sorrel wrote, “did not want to fight on the ground or on the plan adopted by the General-in-Chief. As Longstreet was not to be made willing and Lee refused to change or could not change, the former failed to conceal some anger. There was apparent apathy in his movements. They lacked the fire and point of his usual bearing on the battlefield.“29

  As he waited expectantly for intelligence on the enemy, General Lee paced along the ridge, pausing at intervals to inspect with his binoculars the lines across the way on Cemetery Ridge. When John B. Hood reported his First Corps division had reached the field, Lee remarked to him, “The enemy is here, and if we do not whip him, he will whip us.” The focus of his evolving plan was clearly a flanking attack spearheaded by Longstreet’s First Corps. “The General is a little nervous this morning,” Longstreet explained to Hood; “he wishes me to attack; I do not wish to do so without Pickett. I never like to go into battle with one boot off.” Hood noticed that Lee “seemed full of hope, yet at times, buried in deep thought.”

  Lee’s deep thought crystallized upon Captain Johnston’s return from his reconnoiter. Lee was sitting on a log in conversation with Longstreet and A. P. Hill when Johnston rode up and was invited to report. Whatever the actual phrasing of his report—only Johnston’s suspect recollection is on record—he left the indelible impression that the Yankees’ left flank was exposed, in the air, without an anchor, susceptible to being rolled up. This immediately roused memories of Chancellorsville and another unsuspecting Yankee flank in the air. No sooner had Johnston confirmed the target’s vulnerability than Lee turned to Longstreet and said, “I think you had better move on.“30

  Presently Lafayette McLaws arrived with the second of Longstreet’s divisions. General Lee now took a startling and quite uncharacteristic action. It had been his habit, since taking command of the Army of Northern Virginia, to follow a strict battlefield protocol: He would deliver an overall tactical plan to his lieutenants, then leave it to them to carry out its specific workings. Now, as Longstreet paced back and forth within earshot, Lee called McLaws to him and proceeded to lay out exactly where he was to go and exactly what he was to do in the forthcoming offensive. This intrusion into Longstreet’s prerogatives was Lee’s deliberate signal to his reluctant lieutenant that he was in no temper to brook further disputation and was thereby taking full direction of the offensive.

  Lee marked a position on the map perpendicular to the Emmitsburg Road, south of the Peach Orchard, from which to open an oblique attack against the enemy’s Cemetery Ridge line. “I wish you to get there if possible without being seen by the enemy,” he told McLaws. “Can you do it?” McLaws said he saw nothing to prevent his doing it, but wanted to take a skirmish party and reconnoiter. Lee told him that Captain Johnston of his staff had already reconnoitered the area, to which McLaws said, in that case he would go with Johnston to see for himself. At this, Longstreet stepped in and said, “No, sir, I do not wish you to leave your division.” Pointing to the map, Longstreet told McLaws to take a position parallel to the Emmitsburg Road.

  “No, General,” said Lee firmly, “I wish it placed just perpendicular to that.” McLaws repeated his request to reconnoiter with Johnston, but (wrote McLaws) “General Longstreet again forbade it.” Lee said nothing further, and McLaws returned to his division to prepare for the march. “General Longstreet appeared as if he was irritated and annoyed,” McLaws wrote, “but the cause I did not ask.”

  McLaws’s account of this episode might suggest that Lee thought the enemy’s line was actually posted that morning as far forward as the ridge along which the Emmitsburg Road ran, and by positioning McLaws’s division perpendicular to it he believed an attack along the road’s axis would strike the Yankees squarely in the flank. Yet from Lee’s vantage point on Seminary Ridge the actual Federal line on Cemetery Ridge could be plainly seen; what could not be seen from there, however, was how far south along the lower portion of Cemetery Ridge it extended. Captain Johnston’s report seemed to settle that question. By posting McLaws in a concealing position on the Emmitsburg Road, Lee was simply indicating the northerly thrust of his design for assaulting the exposed enemy flank on Cemetery Ridge.

  In addition to the divisions of McLaws and Hood, Lee told Powell Hill that he wanted Dick Anderson’s fresh division from the Third Corps to join the assault on the Federal left. Anderson’s position would be to the left of Longstreet’s two divisions, to attack toward the center of the enemy’s Cemetery Ridge line and assist in rolling it up. Of necessity, Anderson would have to be in position first, so that McLaws could form on him. His division was back on Herr’s Ridge to the west, and it was noon by the time it was brought forward and started into position.31

  In the meantime, Lee rode over to consult with Dick Ewell at his headquarters outside Gettysburg. Ewell had already toured his lines that morning with Major Venable of Lee’s staff, pointing out the difficulty of mounting a major attack from the Gettysburg front. Once again Lee broached the possibility of shifting the Second Corps around to the right to shorten the Confederate lines and add weight to an offensive there. And once again Ewell persuaded the general commanding to leave his corps where it was.

  General Lee surely recognized that Ewell’s position north and northeast of Gettysburg, curling as it did nearly all the way around the hook of the Federals’ fishhook, was a poor one tactically. It greatly extended the army’s lines, and confronted the most defensible part of the Federal lines. Indeed, having failed to seize Culp’s Hill, the Second Corps’ potential was now largely being wasted in this position. Nevertheless, on this 2nd of July, in his unaccustomed misalliance with his subordinates, Lee yielded to Ewell’s views … and overrode Longstreet’s.

  It was left that as soon as he heard Longstreet’s guns, Ewell would move against Cemetery and Culp’s hills—at the least to prevent the enemy from reinforcing his threatened flank, at the most to convert the threat into the capture of one or both these pieces of high ground. According to Jed Hotchkiss, Lee was “not, in my opinion, very sanguine of its success.“32

  Lee returned to Seminary Ridge at 11 o’clock and announced his decision on Ewell’s role. Longstreet took this to be the commanding general’s official go-ahead for the movement. Lee was said to be exasperated that his lieutenant had not earlier begun his preparations for the march. On the other hand, having made plain by his orders to McLaws that he was assuming tactical command of the operation, Lee had not issued any earlier start-up order.

  However that might be, Longstreet had not been entirely idle. He put Porter Alexander in charge of the corps artillery, and told him to investigate the elevated ground at the Peach Orchard for his guns and the best
route to get them there. Alexander was especially cautioned to stay out of sight of the Yankee flag-signal station now visible on Little Round Top. He set out along the route of the Johnston reconnoitering party. At what Alexander described as “a high bare place” in full view of the Yankee signal station, he turned off and led his battalion cross-lots “through fields & hollows” and back to where the road was again concealed from view. He parked his guns along Willoughby Run and awaited the infantry.

  Longstreet’s second step was to petition General Lee to await the arrival of Law’s brigade of Hood’s division. Old Pete had been told there was not time enough to wait for Pickett’s division, but he was stubborn about wanting Hood to have a full division for the assault. He was also stubborn about not starting his march until it was certain that Law would get there. Lee agreed to wait. The delay was only some 40 minutes, for Law set a remarkably fast pace. Having started out from New Guilford at 3 o’clock that morning, his men marched 24 miles in some nine hours. It was noontime when Law’s brigade reached Gettysburg, and within the hour Longstreet set his divisions in motion.33

  At just about this time, after General Lee’s field headquarters on Seminary Ridge had emptied out and was quiet, Lee received yet another of his lieutenants, the long-lost Jeb Stuart. Early that morning Stuart had left his cavalry column on the road from Carlisle and ridden alone on ahead to Gettysburg. No one witnessed his meeting with Lee (or at least no one, including Lee and Stuart, left a record of it), but the report making the rounds in the army was that Lee’s greeting was abrupt and frosty. As soldier-historian Porter Alexander put it, “although Lee said only, ‘Well, General, you are here at last,’ his manner implied rebuke, and it was so understood by Stuart.” Stuart seems to have confided his chastisement to his aide Henry McClellan, who regarded the incident as painful beyond description. The commanding general ordered the cavalry, when it would finally arrive, to support Ewell on the army’s left. 34

  By Lee’s orders, McLaws’s four brigades led Longstreet’s flanking column, followed by Hood’s four—14,500 infantry all told, plus three battalions of artillery. From their starting point on Herr’s Ridge to the Emmitsburg Road and the Peach Orchard was some four miles by the intended route. The intended route, however, soon produced unintended consequences.

  Captain Johnston was designated by Lee to guide the column because (as McLaws put it) “he alone of all of them had reconnoitered, and … every step taken was under his direction….” Longstreet, classifying himself on this march as a supernumerary, rode with Hood’s trailing division. The first part of the march, from Herr’s Ridge southward to the crossing of the Hagerstown Road at Black Horse Tavern, was uneventful. Then, just beyond the tavern, they reached the “high bare place” Porter Alexander had encountered earlier. The guide Johnston must have been taken aback, for when he rode through here in the early morning there had been no signal station on Little Round Top. Now wigwagging signalmen’s flags were clearly visible, and to cross the open hilltop would unmask the column before it had gone a third of its way.

  McLaws and Johnston went off on a search for an alternate route. The tracks where Alexander’s batteries had turned off cross-lots to avoid the hilltop were plainly seen, but no one in the infantry column knew anything about them. Alexander himself, on an errand to the rear, happened on the scene, saw the halted column, and pointed out the solution to the impasse. Unfortunately, at the moment no one in authority was present to take the decision; no regimental colonel was about to assume the responsibility of directing the First Corps off into the fields and hollows. Alexander rode on, shaking his head.

  In due course, McLaws and Johnston returned and then Longstreet rode up from the rear to find the reason for the holdup. He rode with McLaws to the crest of the hill to reconnoiter. “Why, this won’t do,” Longstreet snapped. “Is there no way to avoid it?” All he could see to do, said McLaws, was to countermarch and try another route. Grudgingly, Longstreet agreed. Brigadier Joseph Kershaw was watching all this, and reported, with polite restraint, “Very soon those gentlemen returned, both manifesting considerable irritation, as I thought.”

  The divisions of John B. Hood, left, and Lafayette McLaws attacked the Union left on July 2. (Valentine Museum–Museum of the Confederacy)

  (It was just here that what Moxley Sorrel termed his chief’s “apparent apathy” may have affected the march. On another day, Longstreet would likely have resolved an impasse like this decisively—finding out about Alexander’s detour, say, then following his tracks with the confidence that if Alexander’s guns went this way, then the rest of the corps’ guns, infantry, and wagons could as well. But Old Pete did not step up to reclaim the lead he believed Lee had expropriated.)

  The quickest way to countermarch was simply to about-face the troops, but McLaws had been assigned specifically by General Lee to lead the column into attack position and he felt obliged to hold that place. Much time passed as the column doubled back on itself. Eventually the marchers returned nearly to their starting point, turned northeasterly on the Hagerstown Road, then by way of country tracks and farm lanes wound their way along Willoughby Run and back to the road leading to Seminary Ridge and the Peach Orchard. (With fine irony, this detour produced a deception. Federal signalmen sighted the marchers at the point where they were momentarily heading away from the battlefield. The Little Round Top signal station warned, “A heavy column of enemy’s infantry, about 10,000 strong, is moving from opposite our extreme left toward our right.”) 35

  At last, approaching 3:00 P.M., the column came in sight of its objective—and was startled to find it swarming with Yankees. General McLaws, writing to his wife a few days later, recorded the moment: “The intention was to get in rear of the enemy who were supposed to be stationed principally in rear of Gettysburg or near it. The report being that the enemy had but two regiments of infantry and one battery at the Peach orchard. On arriving at the vicinity of the Orchard, the enemy were discovered in greater force than was supposed….”

  From this, it is evident that further intelligence on the Federals in the Peach Orchard must have reached the column during the march, but while superior to what Captain Johnston had furnished, it still fell far short of reality. Obviously new orders were needed. In the meantime, Kershaw’s lead brigade deployed, essentially as a matter of self-defense, paralleling the Emmitsburg Road and fronting the Peach Orchard. “The view presented astonished me,” McLaws wrote, “as the enemy was massed in my front, and extended to my right and left as far as I could see.” He reported the new conditions at the front to Longstreet in the rear, then posted the rest of his division. Barksdale’s brigade went to Kershaw’s left, connecting with Cadmus Wilcox’s brigade of Anderson’s division in Pitzer’s Woods. (It was Wilcox who had tangled earlier with Sickles’s 1st U.S. Sharpshooters.) McLaws positioned Wofford’s and Semmes’s brigades in a second line in immediate support of Kershaw and Barksdale.

  Twice aides had ridden up to McLaws with Longstreet’s queries as to why the attack did not open as planned. A third order was peremptory, and McLaws shrugged and replied that he would go forward within five minutes. Moments later a courier dashed up with orders to hold up his assault. Longstreet said that now Hood’s division would take the lead—on the right. With General Lee’s concurrence or at his bidding—impatient at all the delays on the misbegotten march, Lee had ridden forward to join Longstreet—the day’s battle plan was being altered at the last possible moment. Learning of the need for a new plan, Longstreet with Lee’s approval ordered Hood to double his men past McLaws’s division

  and take position to the right, or south, along Seminary Ridge, to search out the true position of the Yankees’ flank.

  Shortly after this, Longstreet himself appeared at the front and began sniping at McLaws about the placement of his guns and other matters. It was growing late on an altogether bad day, and both men were suffering from frayed tempers. James Longstreet, opposed in principle to the whole offensive, was sti
ll smarting from Lee’s earlier dilution of his role. Lafayette McLaws, caught between two feuding superiors, regarded this as a day on which just about everything had gone wrong. From his perspective he largely blamed Longstreet. Five days later he was still angry, and unburdened himself to his wife. “I consider him a humbug,” he wrote of Longstreet, “—a man of small capacity, very obstinate, not at all chivalrous, exceedingly conceited, and totally selfish.”

  In his new role as attack leader, General Hood concluded that a fresh reconnaissance would be very much in order, and sent out a party of trusted Texas scouts to investigate his front. They discovered Round Top to be free of the enemy and, more importantly, that the Federal rear, east of Round Top, was entirely undefended. Hood then sent a flurry of pleading messages to Longstreet to allow him to change the plan of attack. Hood captured the gist of these appeals in a postwar letter to Longstreet: “I considered it my duty to report to you at once my opinion, that it was unwise to attack up the Emmitsburg road, as ordered, and to urge that you allow me to turn Round Top and attack the enemy in flank and rear.”

  This kind of turning movement was exactly what Old Pete earlier had urged on Lee. The problem now was that instead of undertaking it with a sizable fraction of the army, as Longstreet had proposed, Hood wanted to attempt it with his single division—and with only McLaws’s division, already in contact with the enemy, for support. And already the day was far gone. Three times Hood sought Longstreet’s agreement for the change. Three times he was denied. It was close to 4 o’clock and Confederate batteries had already opened when Major John Fairfax of Longstreet’s staff delivered to Hood the final and peremptory order: “It is General Lee’s order—the time is up—attack at once!“36