Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  We do not know whether or to what degree Lee was annoyed by what he saw through his binoculars—his self-control yielded nothing to those around him. Directly ahead of him—he was looking due east—he could see the Lutheran Seminary on the long, low ridge that bore its name; beyond it, in a lower dip, the roofs of the town of Gettysburg just over a mile away; and to the south of the town, indistinct as seen through the haze of gun smoke, a long ledge of steeper, irregular higher ground, with rocky, lightly wooded hills at either end. Baltimore Pike ran straight as an arrow behind the higher ground to the south of Gettysburg, but without Stuart’s cavalry Lee had no idea how many Federal corps were marching down it toward the town.

  Three of Heth’s four brigades had been just about fought out, and Hill was reinforcing them as fast as he could deploy units from Chambersburg Pike. While Lee was pondering what to do, a stir to the right of the Federal line caught his attention. A “long gray line of battle,” General Robert Rodes’s division, was emerging from the woods to the north of Gettysburg—the first of Ewell’s corps marching south down the Carlisle and the Harrisburg roads and beginning to deploy in a position that would overlap the right flank of the Federal line. Freeman writes that this “could not have happened more advantageously if this chance engagement had been a planned battle,” but Lee did not think so at the time. When General Heth asked Lee if he had better not attack to support the Confederate assault from the north, Lee replied, “No, I am not prepared to bring on a general engagement today—Longstreet is not up.” It is difficult to guess in what tone Lee spoke, or to measure his vehemence, but it was essentially the same message he had conveyed to General Anderson at Cashtown, in shorter form.

  “But the very gods of war seemed to wear gray that hot afternoon,” Freeman wrote, as Jubal Early’s division of Ewell’s corps emerged from the woods to the left of Rhodes, forming a gray line nearly a mile long that curved around the Federal line north of Gettysburg. Lee now had four divisions on the field, giving him the opportunity to turn both the Union flanks. Changing his mind swiftly, Lee ordered Major General William Dorsey Pender’s division forward, and ordered a general advance, which drove the Federals back. By mid-afternoon the Federal positions, which had formed a kind of salient around the north and west of the town, had collapsed and Union troops were retreating in disorder to the higher ground south and east of town: Culp’s Hill, Cemetery Hill, and Cemetery Ridge. It was a victory of sorts, but not the kind that Lee was seeking. Federal troops, however disorganized, now held the high ground. Since General Meade had not yet arrived on the battlefield, he ordered Major General Winfield Scott Hancock to take command and decide if the army’s position on the high ground south of Gettysburg could be held. Hancock not only decided that it could be, but was just the man to restore discipline and prepare the ground for the assaults he knew were coming.

  24. Battle of Gettysburg, July 2–3, 1863.

  {Battle of Second Manassas, or Bull Run, August 30, 1862, and Battle of Gettysburg, July 2–3, 1863, by permission of Simon & Schuster Publishing Group, from General James Longstreet, by Jeffrey D. Wert, copyright © 1993 Jeffrey D. Wert.}

  Whether “the gods of war” were smiling on Lee or not as he rode over Seminary Ridge to within half a mile of the town, he was now in a perplexing position—although he had won the day, he had pushed the enemy back from a weak and scattered position into a strong and concentrated one. The Confederates held the ridges to the west of Gettysburg, and the town itself; the enemy held the two hills and the high ground to the south of the town, as well as Baltimore Pike, along which their main strength and their supplies were pouring unthreatened and unimpeded. Short of some tactical miracle their strength could only grow rapidly, despite what had happened at Gettysburg so far.

  Lee’s gaze took in the landscape before him and he immediately realized that Culp’s Hill was the key to the situation; it was not all that high; it was roughly conical in form, fairly steep-sided, and heavily wooded; and like all the high ground to the south of Gettysburg, it was dotted with boulders and rocky outcrops dating from the Ice Age. From the top it would be possible to command Cemetery Hill to the east, and the whole long ridge from there to the two hills at the far end of it, almost three miles away, as well as Baltimore Pike, which ran between the two hills as it entered town. Union troops could be seen retreating across Culp’s Hill in confusion (Longstreet described their situation at that point as “Sauve qui peut,” or “Every man for himself”), and taking it as soon as possible would clearly be advantageous. A. P. Hill’s men were close to it, but Hill himself was ill—he told Colonel Fremantle that “he had been unwell that day,” and Fremantle commented that Hill looked “delicate”—an unusual way to describe a general—and reported back to Lee that his men were “exhausted and disorganized” after a day of desperate fighting in which the two Union corps lost close to 10,000 men, of whom 5,000 were taken prisoner, and the Confederate losses were considerable. One senses in Hill, throughout July 1 a certain listlessness, which Stonewall Jackson would not have tolerated for a moment in any of his generals, particularly Hill, about whom he had always had reservations.

  Fremantle managed to make his way through the crowd of Federal prisoners and Confederate wounded moving back up Chambersburg Pike and enter the town of Gettysburg itself, where the fighting had been intense, and where the streets were full “of Yankee dead and wounded.” Both he and everyone else seem to have realized that the day was inconclusive and required a final act to affirm and consolidate the hard-won Confederate victory on the ground.

  Lee did not, as he might have done, simply order A. P. Hill to pull himself together at once and resume his attack. Instead, he decided to have Ewell take Culp’s Hill from the north, although Lee himself was facing the hill from directly to the west of it, and could not therefore have any idea of how it would look from Ewell’s point of view. He sent his aide Walter Taylor off posthaste to give Ewell a message that it was necessary “to push those people” off the hill, and that he should do so at once “if practicable.”

  “Character determines action.” Lee’s natural politeness, his dislike of confrontation, his preference for letting his corps commanders make their own decisions—none of these a bad thing in a man, even in a general—came together in the afternoon of July 1 to produce a moment of hesitation that would have a fatal effect on the Confederates. Ewell was used to receiving his orders from Stonewall Jackson, and Jackson’s orders were famously brief and peremptory. The phrase “if practicable,” of which Lee was fond, was a mark of his good manners and his respect for his own commanders; it was not intended as an escape clause. Once Lee had indicated what he wanted done, he expected that it would be done, that his generals would find a way to do it their own way, since they were in touch with the situation in front of them, and knew the mood, the condition, and the position of their own troops. It was not, in Lee’s mind, up to him to tell Ewell how to take Culp’s Hill, it was enough that Ewell knew it was his job to find a way to do it.

  It may be that sending Taylor to give Ewell this order was a mistake. Taylor admired Ewell, whom he described as “a gallant soldier and gentleman” and a “chivalric spirit,” with “a heart as tender as a woman’s, [yet] brave as a lion,” although he also noted, with a little less admiration, that Ewell was “nervous in temperament and brusque in manner.” It is possible that Taylor, himself a pillar of courtesy, did not make it sufficiently clear to Ewell that Lee expected him to take Culp’s Hill before the day was out and while the Union troops on it were still disorganized and in flight; and Taylor himself reports that Ewell, rather than addressing himself to Lee’s order, was fussing about the number of Union prisoners he had on his hands “and the embarrassment of looking after them.” Ewell may also have felt that it was not up to a comparatively junior staff officer to tell a lieutenant general and corps commander what to do in the middle of a battle.* In any case, Ewell decided he could do nothing until the arrival of Major General Edward Johnson�
��s division on the battlefield, and in the meantime deemed it “unwise to continue the pursuit.” Clearly, if Taylor had carried a written order from Lee, however quickly scrawled or dictated, ordering Ewell to take the hill at once and at all costs before the Federals had time to prepare its defense, that would have made a significant difference. Given the fatal phrase “if practicable” Ewell immediately decided that it was not—he exercised “that discretion . . . which General Lee was accustomed to accord to his lieutenants,” as Taylor put it tactfully.

  If ever there was a moment when the gentlemanly instincts of three men combined to produce a disaster, this was it. Taylor makes it clear that if Ewell had been given a direct order he would have obeyed it. At least two of Ewell’s generals were infuriated at his order to halt when they were in reach of the hill. The enemy was in full retreat, many of them “throwing away their arms,” and generals John Brown Gordon and Isaac R. Trimble both believed it could have been “swept” over without difficulty. Trimble, who was famously outspoken and quick-tempered, later wrote that he had vehemently urged Ewell to let him take the hill. There are many versions of what he said, but in one of them he pointed at Culp’s Hill, from which the Union troops were retreating, and said, “There is an eminence of commanding position, and not now occupied, as it ought to be by us or the enemy soon. I advise you to send a brigade and hold it if we are to remain here.” In other versions, he volunteered to take the hill himself if Ewell would give him a division, a brigade, or even a regiment—badly wounded at Second Manassas, Trimble had attached himself to Ewell as an aide—and Ewell made an “impatient reply,” probably to the effect that when he wanted advice from an officer junior to himself he would ask for it, at which point Trimble is alleged to have thrown down his sword in disgust and walked away without saluting.

  Lee was unaware of all this—it was in any case exactly the kind of squabbling that he would most certainly have wanted to ignore—and therefore had every reason to suppose that Ewell was preparing to take Culp’s Hill. In mid-afternoon he paused to survey the battle scene from “the top of one of the ridges which form a peculiar feature of the country around Gettysburg,” presumably Seminary Ridge, in the company of A. P. Hill and Colonel Fremantle, who could clearly see the enemy retreating from the higher ground beyond the town. It had the appearance of a Confederate victory, though Fremantle, always a careful observer, climbed a tree to get a better view and noticed that the Federals were massing in better order with the town cemetery as their right, and that the position into which they had been driven “was a strong one.”

  He was not the only person to whom this thought occurred. General Longstreet had arrived—the forward elements of his corps were approaching Gettysburg, though still badly strung out all the way back to Chambersburg—and made a careful survey of the field with his field glasses. To him too the position the Federals were taking seemed “very formidable,” as he told Fremantle later that day, but he drew from that a positive conclusion. The ensuing short conversation between Lee and Longstreet has been at the center of a controversy that still sputters on 150 years later and marks the starting point for the whole “Lost Cause” school of southern history, best exemplified by Freeman’s three-volume biography of Lee, in which the blame for losing the battle of Gettysburg, and in a larger sense for the defeat of the Confederacy, is assigned primarily to General Longstreet. Longstreet, in this version of the history of the Civil War, is assigned a role comparable to that of the Serpent in the story of Adam and Eve—the man who was single-handedly responsible for depriving Lee of a decisive victory.

  Of course the difficulty with this scenario lies in the fact that we have only Longstreet’s version of what was said, and over time he added a few embellishments to his story, inserting several touches to emphasize his description of Lee as impatient. That was perhaps a natural failing in anyone writing over the years, for Longstreet did not publish his final version of their conversation until 1896, more than a quarter of a century after Lee’s death, and by that time he was sick of being blamed for what went wrong at Gettysburg. Also, Freeman, whose telling of the story is dramatic in the extreme, adds to the problem by his own shading of Longstreet’s words, as in “Longstreet retorted sharply. . . .” But in fact we do not know whether Longstreet spoke “sharply” to Lee or not; by his own account he remained extremely respectful of Lee, even though they disagreed. Given that Lee, perhaps mistakenly, retained his respect for Longstreet until the very end of the war, and for some years after its end, it does not seem likely that Longstreet ever spoke “sharply” to him, however little Lee may have wanted to hear what he had to say on the afternoon of July 1, 1863.*

  It must be remembered that Longstreet had argued against the invasion of the North in the first place, and when he lost that argument, he thought he had obtained Lee’s promise to fight a defensive battle, securing ground where the enemy would have to attack him, as at Fredericksburg. Having looked at the ground before them, he reintroduced, with a touch of complacency, and perhaps with an unspoken “I told you so,” what he had told Secretary of War Seddon and later Lee while the army was still on the Rappahannock. “We could not call the enemy to a position better suited to our plans,” Longstreet said. “All we have to do is to file around his left and secure good ground between him and the capital.”

  Longstreet was surprised, or claimed to be, when Lee, instead of agreeing with him, struck the air “with his closed hand,” and replied: “If he is there tomorrow I will attack him.” In describing the exchange, Freeman writes that this was “rather remarkable language for a subordinate to address to the commanding general, ten minutes after his arrival on the field of battle, and when he had not been advised of the strength of the enemy,” as if Longstreet’s remarks to Lee were a form of lèse-majesté, but nothing Longstreet said was unfamiliar to Lee; he had heard it all before, and he had always allowed Longstreet considerable freedom to express his views.

  Longstreet was struck by Lee’s “nervous condition” and “uneven temper,” and did not realize that the cause might be “the wanderings of the cavalry,” though one would have thought that Longstreet ought by now to have been aware of Stuart’s absence. In any event, he replied, “If he is there tomorrow it will be because he wants you to attack.”

  There is no reason to suppose from Longstreet’s account that he said this sharply. He also suggested taking “that height,” presumably Culp’s Hill and the cemetery behind it, immediately, while the Confederates on the field still outnumbered the Federals by nearly two to one. At that point Lee turned to other matters, probably to Longstreet’s relief, for he noted that “a little reflection would be better than further discussion,” apparently under the impression that Lee would calm down, think things over, and accept Longstreet’s recommendations. At any rate, Longstreet realized that further argument at that point would serve no purpose.

  Although modern portrayals of Gettysburg—particularly The Killer Angels and the film based on it—tend to assume that Longstreet was right and Lee was wrong, the reality is a good deal more complex. Lee still had no cavalry, so he could not be sure how many corps Meade was bringing up or when the bulk of the Army of the Potomac would arrive. The idea of moving his whole army to his right “to secure good ground between [Meade] and Washington” was fraught with risks. Lee’s entire army would be exposed for at least two days to flanking attacks as it lumbered around the far end of Cemetery Ridge and off toward—nowhere, since Lee had no idea where this magic “good ground” could be found, and no way to look for it until Stuart arrived with the cavalry.

  Besides all that, there was the question of time. Ewell’s supply and ammunition train alone was fourteen miles long, and the notion of marching all three corps and their trains down the narrow Emmitsburg Road flanked by the enemy only a few hundred yards away was not one that would appeal to any general. For hours, for days, Lee’s army would be vulnerable and exposed to attacks that might cut off one unit from another, reducing the
line of march to bloody chaos. What is more, since his army was obliged to live off the country, how was it to find food and forage along the way? Men and animals might starve on a long, flanking march in search of the right place to fight, and the army would be exposed and strung out on the road or roads all the way. Rightly or wrongly, Lee was in the process of concentrating his army at Gettysburg, and considered that his best hope to was to complete that concentration as fast as possible and attack Meade before Meade’s whole army was up. Far from being an irresponsible decision, it was the only one he could make.

  Clearly Lee had already made that decision, whatever Longstreet thought then or later, for almost immediately Lee asked Longstreet where his corps (First Corps) was on the road to Gettysburg. Longstreet replied that McLaws was “about six miles away,” but otherwise gave Lee no information about the rest of his divisions. Freeman alleges that this was because Longstreet was angry at Lee’s rejection of his plan, but since McLaws was in the lead and Pickett was still, on Lee’s orders, guarding Chambersburg until Imboden’s troopers arrived to relieve him, it would have told Lee what he needed to know. Although Colonel Long, Lee’s principal aide, was present during most of the day, and was later very critical of Longstreet’s “tardiness” over the next two days of fighting, he makes no mention of any rudeness or disrespect toward Lee on Longstreet’s part, as he surely would have done if he had an example of it. Colonel Charles Marshall, another of Lee’s devoted aides, although he gives page after page to Jeb Stuart’s failure to support Lee before Gettysburg, does not mention any trace of discourtesy toward Lee on Longstreet’s part, let alone any “sullen resentment.”