Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  The host of Lee’s admirers assumed that Longstreet’s self-confessed lack of a “spirit of confidence” was all the evidence required to believe that he really had dragged his heels about “an attack at daylight.” Early delightedly recruited a coterie of Lee defenders to load the pages of the Southern Historical Society Papers with denunciations of Longstreet in a special issue in 1877, and they were joined in the years that followed by still more Lee acolytes who now “remembered” orders for a dawn attack on July 2nd, or who recalled Lee mysteriously anticipating Longstreet’s slow-footed handling of his troops. Longstreet inadvertently helped them pin the tail of defeat to his coat by turning Republican after the war and counseling Southerners to collaborate with the Reconstruction governments lest they get something worse in their place. But most of the accusations of Longstreet’s “delay” on July 2nd came from people who could have had only the most indirect sort of knowledge of any order from Lee for a dawn attack. Certainly, no written order to this effect has ever surfaced. Cadmus Wilcox, who commanded a brigade in Powell Hill’s corps, informed Early that he was “inclined to believe that he [Longstreet] was so ordered” but admitted that “of this I have no knowledge personally.” The further in time from July 2nd, the more suspiciously precise the recollections of Lee’s “order” become: “Longstreet was slow—unaccountably slow,” complained William Goldsborough, a staff officer in Ewell’s corps. “Had he attacked in the early morning, as he was expected to do, the enemy would have been driven from his strong position.” But this was what Goldborough remembered in 1900, thirty-five years after the war.32

  And yet, Longstreet was also guilty in the postwar years of exaggerating the doubts he expressed in 1863; he might question Lee’s judgment, but at Gettysburg, Longstreet never suggested that the outcome of Lee’s plan would be anything but “a certainty.” So, he turned back from Gettysburg to rejoin McLaws’ division at Marsh Creek for the night, and roused them at four o’clock to begin moving forward. “We were called to arms,” wrote a soldier in the 17th Mississippi, “and a detail of ten men from each company drew twenty rounds of extra cartridges for the bloody fray.”33

  PART 3

  The Second Day

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  One of the bigger bubbles of the scum

  LEE “BREAKFASTED and was in the saddle before it was fairly light.” The sun would be up at 4:12 the morning of July 2nd, but it would be hard to mark it at first because of a “considerable fog” that would not entirely burn off until 10:00 a.m. By midday, Lee would enjoy “a cloudless day.” The temperatures, which were already at 74 degrees at seven o’clock, would climb into the 80s, so that the “heat was intense.” Curiously, if what Lee expected was a dawn attack by Longstreet, he displayed suspiciously little anxiety about it. Nor should he have, since any decision about an attack somewhere on the right had to wait on someone to go and look at what was there. The two stony hills in the distance might conceal the unwanted approach of other Federal infantry, and Lee wanted to be sure that nothing of that nature had arrived under cover of darkness. He turned to Capt. Samuel Johnston, his staff “topographical engineer” and a former civil engineer in Virginia, and told him “to reconnoiter along the enemy’s left and return as soon as possible.”1

  Johnston took along one of Longstreet’s staff, Maj. John Clarke, and a small mounted escort, and together they swung south and west in a wide arc that would curl downward toward the stony hills. (Significantly, Johnston would write years later that nothing was said about a dawn attack by Longstreet: “I cannot see how Genl Lee’s friends can contend that … Lee gave order to … Longstreet to make an attack on the morning of the second.”) They picked their way along the Fairfield Road, crossed a bridge over Willoughby Run, and worked along a road which brought them to a farm owned by James Warfield, a black farmer who ran a blacksmith’s shop alongside his “excellent” fruit trees. The Warfield farm stood on a rise which was actually the continuation of Seminary Ridge, and from there, Johnston could turn east toward the Emmitsburg Road, past the peach orchard of Joseph Sherfy, which John Reynolds had passed only a day before, and follow the farm lanes to the rocky knobs that thrust up against the lightening sky—two hills which would only after the battle become known as Big and Little Round Top.2

  Click here to see a larger image.

  Lee had other scouting parties out that morning, too. He directed Lindsay Long to take the chief of Powell Hill’s artillery, Reuben Walker, and identify a location with good elevation somewhere along Seminary Ridge which would allow Hill’s artillery to support an attack; he ordered William Nelson Pendleton, the chief of the army’s artillery reserve, to scout another useful position. While waiting for Longstreet, Lee paid a quick visit to Ewell at the almshouse, and by the time he had returned to his own headquarters at the Thompson house, the sun was up and the head of McLaws’ and Hood’s column could be seen, tramping down the Cashtown Pike toward Herr Ridge, preceded by Longstreet and his staff.3

  A generals’ call brought Longstreet, Hood, McLaws, Lee, and Powell Hill together, along with their staffs. This included Harry Heth, who had been hit in the head by a bullet late the previous day and saved by the rolled-up newspapers stuffed into the band of his purloined hat; he was unconscious for an anxiously long time, and would turn command of his division over to Johnston Pettigrew. (The gathering also featured a trio of foreign military observers: the Coldstream officer Fremantle, the Prussian Justus Scheibert, and Edward Fitzgerald Ross, English-born but German-educated and serving as a captain in an Austrian cavalry regiment.) Hood’s and McLaws’ men were “allowed to stack arms and rest until further orders.” To his gathered officers, Lee began laying out the plan he had devised—as soon as Longstreet’s two divisions were in hand, they would turn to their right and march south, following a route that Captain Johnston would provide upon his return.

  This would place them south and west of Cemetery Hill, and there they would wheel left and, facing north and into the rear of Cemetery Hill, “attack up the Emmettsburg road.” From there they would drive into whatever forces were guarding the left flank of the hill, and overrun the Union artillery and infantry posted there. Ewell would attack from the opposite side of the hill as soon as he heard Longstreet’s artillery go into action, and would provide the anvil against which Longstreet’s hammer would smash whatever was left of the 1st and 11th Corps, or any other Union reinforcements which might have arrived overnight. After that, Lee would be free to turn the entirety of the victorious Army of Northern Virginia either south or east to meet and crush in similar fashion the next batch of Union infantry to come blundering into his path. Long before the last Union regiment had been destroyed, he would be in either Philadelphia or Washington, and the cries for negotiation would inundate the Lincoln administration.4

  Lee seemed to John Bell Hood “full of hope, yet, at times, buried in deep thought.” In spite of the heat, he was primly dressed as if on parade, “coat buttoned to the throat, sabre-belt buckled around the waist, field glasses pending at his side,” as though already prepared to accept some Union general’s surrender. Longstreet had a new objection. He did not like the idea of launching a major attack with only two of his three divisions available, since George Pickett’s division had to come all the way from Chambersburg and probably wouldn’t arrive until late in the day. “I never like to go into battle with one boot off,” Longstreet remarked to Hood as he sat down on a tree trunk. As it was, one of Hood’s brigades (under Evander McIvor Law) had been “left by Hood on picket” below the pike stretching back to Chambersburg, and was far behind the others.

  Lee assured Longstreet that he could make up the deficit in numbers by borrowing Richard Heron Anderson’s division from Powell Hill. Anderson had five brigades behind Herr Ridge which hadn’t gotten into action at all on July 1st, and they could take Pickett’s place in this attack. “The enemy is here,” he said, repeating his sentiment from the evening before, “and if we do not whip him, he will whip us
.” Hill and Longstreet peeled away and sat down to discuss the intricacies of temporarily transferring command of Anderson’s division, while Longstreet sent off Edward Porter Alexander to “get an idea of the ground,” bring up the corps artillery, “and choose my own positions and means of reaching them.” If this was to be a second Chancellorsville, Longstreet wanted no risk of his march being spotted en route—that had happened at Chancellorsville, and only the unwillingness of Federal observers to see Jackson’s columns for what they were saved Jackson from having his trap sprung prematurely. Longstreet “specially cautioned” Alexander “to keep all movements carefully out of view of a signal station whose flags we could see wig-wagging on Little Round Top.”5

  Lafayette McLaws wondered out loud whether it wouldn’t be a good idea to send someone out along that path to scout the field, and Lee replied that not only had he done so, but that his scout was at that moment just arriving back. Captain Johnston returned from his reconnaissance between seven and eight o’clock, and found the “Generals Lee, Longstreet, and A. P. Hill sitting on a log near the seminary.” Lee wanted a report at once, and Johnston was able to trace on a map Lee was holding “the route over which I had made the reconnaissance.” It would require marching about five miles to get troops into position for the kind of attack Lee had in mind—maybe two hours at most. Lee pointed at the smaller of the two stony hills. “Did you get there?” Yes, Johnston replied. His party had even trotted up to the top, “where I had a commanding view.” And he had the very best news Lee could have desired: there were no Federal troops anywhere south of Cemetery Hill. Johnston had crossed paths with “three or four” Union cavalrymen, and trying to stay out of their sight had delayed his return. But otherwise, nothing. That was all that Lee needed to hear. The back door to Cemetery Hill was open.6

  Lee turned to Longstreet and said, “I think you had better move,” and Longstreet called over Hood and McLaws to give them directions. Porter Alexander did not “get the impression that General Lee thought there was any unnecessary delay going on,” and when Longstreet asked Lee for permission to wait the arrival of McIvor Law’s trailing brigade, Lee patiently gave it. But Law took even longer than Longstreet had expected. Estimates put their arrival at anywhere between ten o’clock and two, while Law himself remembered his brigade “arrived there shortly before noon.” Once Law’s Alabamians arrived, “we were allowed but a few minutes’ rest” before the “divisions of McLaws and Hood were moved in line by the right flank” (i.e., in column) and Longstreet’s flank march began. Captain Johnston and McLaws’ own engineer officer Lt. Thomas Moncure would ride ahead with the advance guard, so that Johnston could retrace his early morning scouting path. Richard Heron Anderson’s division had already been moved up into position along Seminary Ridge by Powell Hill by ten o’clock; McLaws and Hood (with Joseph Kershaw’s South Carolina brigade in the van of McLaws’ division) filed southward on Herr Ridge, twisting west on the Fairfield Road to the Black Horse Tavern, and then doubling to the south and east. The showers of the previous days had wetted the track sufficiently to keep down most of the dust, and the thick stands of woods would conceal them from the Union signalers on the ridges and hills to the east. To make certainty certain, “orders had been issued not to display the colors as we were supposed to be in ambush.”

  Click here to see a larger image.

  “We marched at a slow and halting gait,” remembered a captain in the 3rd South Carolina, slow and halting enough to tempt bored soldiers to hijinks. Some men in the 8th Georgia, jerking to a halt beside a deserted farmhouse, took it into their heads to loot the house. They came out, not with loot, but wearing a collection of women’s gowns and bonnets, and proceeded to ham things up to the howls and roars of their comrades. But most of Longstreet’s men were unusually silent on the march “save the tread of thousands in motion”—not from “any want of confidence or doubt of ultimate success,” but because “each felt within himself that this was to be the decisive battle of the war.” Longstreet shared their mood. One South Carolina officer saw Longstreet pass “once or twice,” and each time “he had his eyes cast to the ground, as if in a deep study.”7

  Robert E. Lee was also quiet. He took the opportunity of Longstreet’s departure to ride over to Ewell, where he could be sure of prodding Ewell into action when the noise of Longstreet’s attack commenced. But as the quarter-hours clicked away, nothing was heard.8

  Just beyond Black Horse Tavern, the road turned sharply to the east and mounted to a small rise about twenty or thirty feet higher than the rest of the roadbed. There, Longstreet’s column stopped. Longstreet moved up to see what had caused the stoppage, and when he caught up with McLaws, Moncure, and Captain Johnston at the head of the column, Longstreet found exactly the problem he had warned Porter Alexander against—from the rise, Johnston and McLaws “were in full view of Round Top, from which the signal flags of the enemy were rapidly wavering.” Any column of infantry marching over that rise would give themselves away as surely as if they were giants on stilts. “What is the matter?” Longstreet asked, puzzled, when he met McLaws on the reverse slope of the hill. “Ride with me,” McLaws irritably replied, “and I will show you that we can’t go on this route, according to instructions, without being seen by the enemy.” Longstreet and McLaws rode “to the top of the hill,” and that ended all argument from Longstreet. “Why this won’t do. Is there no way to avoid it?” No, there wasn’t, and McLaws was foaming with irritation at Johnston, who was supposed to have known all about the route they were taking. “He seems to have forgotten that he was the guide conducting troops over ground,” McLaws fumed, “he alone of all of them had reconnoitered, and that every step taken was under his direction, of course.” And from there, McLaws descended to “saying things” which one member of Kershaw’s brigade “would not like my grandson to repeat.”9

  There was nothing for it but to turn around, countermarch the entire huge column back to the last crossroads, and find an alternate route, out of sight. In the tactics books, a countermarch required something more complicated than just to “cause the column to face about”—it meant peeling the heads of a column to the right and the left and pivoting them around to the rear, company by company, regiment by regiment, with the colonel of each regiment superintending the process. It was, in other words, tedious and time-consuming; but it was necessary if the regiments and brigades were to retain the march order which would, later on, allow them to deploy in the pattern to which they had been drilled. Executing the order was not helped by the fact that some of Hood’s units had “lapped” the rear of McLaws’, so that it took “some little time” to get the mess sorted out and the men moved back. The countermarch pulled the advance back to the tavern and back up the Fairfield Road for a half a mile, until the entire column (with McLaws still in the lead) found a farm lane that led to the right and allowed the Confederates to regain their original route on the far side of the all too revealing hill. Two miles farther on, they passed a schoolhouse and turned eastward on the Millerstown Road until they reached the west-facing slope of Seminary Ridge, a little more than 600 yards from the Emmitsburg Road.10

  What Longstreet and McLaws expected to see from this point was a broad and unoccupied vista, with the Emmitsburg Road stretched out parallel to the battle lines they would shortly deploy into. Ahead and to the right, there was a studding of farmhouses and barns—directly ahead, the deserted Warfield farm and Joseph Sherfy’s house and barn, with his peach orchard just on the other side of the Emmitsburg Road, and then, as the ground dipped down on the far side of the road, a stone farmhouse and barn belonging to George Rose, and another, owned by John Slyder, still farther to the right. Beyond the farmhouses, there was another low, stony ridge, carpeted with trees; but behind that loomed the Round Tops, reminding one of the officers in Anderson’s division of “a volcano.” To the left, a mile northward, was the flank brigade of Richard Anderson’s division, waiting for McLaws and Hood to deploy and create one vast
attack line behind Seminary Ridge. Longstreet overhauled McLaws to ask how he planned to deploy his division. “That will be determined when I can see what is in my front,” McLaws replied. No worry, Longstreet answered, “There is nothing in your front; you will be entirely on the flank of the enemy.”11

  McLaws rode forward, and when he “reached the edge of the woods” on Seminary Ridge, “one rapid glance” showed him that Captain Johnston had made more than one mistake that morning. Instead of an unobstructed path along which they could wheel north, bracket the Emmitsburg Road, and move up to crush the Union forces on Cemetery Hill, McLaws was looking at lines of Union soldiers, arrayed on the east side of the road, clenching Sherfy’s peach orchard with artillery, and “in force much greater than I had, and extending considerably beyond my right.” As Longstreet rode up “to see the cause of the delay,” he and his staff had the same disappointing epiphany. “Just as we rode from the timber into the open,” wrote one of Longstreet’s couriers, they were “brought face to face with the Union army,” which was settling into a long line along the length of the Emmitsburg Road as far south as Sherfy’s peach orchard, and then bent eastward at a right angle until it disappeared out of sight over the stony ridge. “The Union army … had piled rails and whatever else they could get that would aid in making a breastworks, and were lying behind these rails awaiting our attack.”