Since Longstreet’s corps was not yet up—two of his divisions, those of McLaws and Hood, were on the way, and would arrive during the night; and the third, Pickett’s, would not arrive until late on July 2—Lee rode off to see for himself why Ewell had not yet taken Culp’s Hill. He found Ewell “in the arbor” of a small stone house on Carlisle Road, and to his dismay the commander of his Second Corps seemed indecisive and confused. “After he had reached Gettysburg [Ewell] had remained passive in the streets awaiting orders,” Freeman writes; but this is only partly true, since Colonel Taylor had already delivered Lee’s orders to Ewell in person, and Ewell had decided to ignore them on the grounds that advancing on Culp’s Hill and the near end of Cemetery Ridge was “impracticable.” This cannot have been an easy interview for Lee—all three of his corps commanders were being difficult that afternoon: A. P. Hill was “unwell” and unhelpful; Longstreet had lectured him about a flank move that Lee was in no position to make; and now Ewell was being uncommunicative and had seized on the polite “escape clause” in Lee’s orders to avoid doing what Lee wanted him to do—indeed what Lee had assumed was already in progress. It is not difficult to imagine that Lee may have regretted at that moment the absence of Stonewall Jackson, who would probably already have taken Culp’s Hill without being ordered to. Lee always rode Traveller on the lightest of reins, without using a whip or spurs, the horse responding instinctively to the gentlest of aids, and his way of dealing with his generals was similar. It was not in his nature to raise his voice, or threaten, or punish; he was used to obedience based on the awe which he produced in others—the story was told, and widely believed, that once when he had taken a nap, a whole division marched past his tent on tiptoe so as not to wake him—so he was at a loss now to know how to deal with all three of his corps commanders, who were behaving like balky or unruly horses at a critical moment in the battle. Even had he been inclined to do so, he could not fire them without endangering the army’s esprit de corps and self-confidence, and in any case he had nobody with whom he might replace them.
Ewell scarcely even seemed able to speak for himself. He sent for Major General Jubal Early, one of his division commanders, to explain what was already obvious as the day waned: Ewell “had abandoned all intention of attacking that evening.” Early, normally a fiercely thrusting general, and famous even among Confederate commanders for his ferocious beard, scowling expression, and hot temper—Lee often referred to him affectionately as “my bad old man”—now seemed uncharacteristically as cautious as his chief. Perhaps taken aback by Early’s reluctance to attack, Lee gave up any remaining hope he may have nurtured that Ewell would try to take Culp’s Hill before dark, and turned the conversation to his plans for the next day.
On this subject too Early, still speaking for Ewell, was pessimistic.* He thought that the Federals would be concentrated in front of Ewell’s corps in the morning, and that “the approaches were very difficult” to the Federal position around Cemetery Hill; he even suggested that the attack should be made farther to the right, perhaps aimed at two hills, Little Round Top and Round Top, which dominated Cemetery Ridge and were over 6,000 yards away to the south, hardly even visible anymore as the light failed. Neither Early nor his chief Ewell thought Lee’s suggestion of moving Second Corps to the right in the morning was practicable.
This was tantamount to saying that the Second Corps would play only a limited role tomorrow, and that the main attack would have to be made by others, farther south against the presumably less challenging ground in the middle of Cemetery Ridge, between Culp’s and Cemetery hills and the two Round Tops, for in the absence of Stuart’s cavalry the topography south of Cemetery Hill was still unclear.
The “blame” for what happened at Gettysburg seems already to rest squarely on Lee’s shoulders, not Longstreet’s—the moment Lee arrived at Ewell’s headquarters he should have ordered Ewell to take Culp’s Hill, at once, at any cost, or replaced him with somebody who would. Now he had sat in the arbor patiently hearing from Early enough pessimism to depress any commanding general, until it was eventually too dark to accomplish anything. If ever there was a moment when a flash of temper would have been useful this had been it, but Lee remained as courteous and impassive as ever. Why? Ewell, after all, had served under Stonewall Jackson, whose grim, fire-and-brimstone Old Testament wrath toward those who did not follow his orders exactly or who failed to pursue the enemy with enough vigor was notorious, and Jubal Early’s bad temper and nit-picking were a source of constant complaint among his own officers and men. A dose of anger was perhaps exactly what was needed to put some backbone into Ewell and get Early out of the arbor and back to leading his troops again, but it was not forthcoming.
A great man’s actions are indeed determined, if not foreordained, by his character—not necessarily just the faults in his character, but sometimes, even more tragically, the virtues. Lee was a gentleman, and the need to behave like a gentleman was more important to him than anything else, perhaps even victory. He had his father’s courage, but not his vanity, nor the combative, fearsome, self-dramatizing, and sometimes unscrupulous side of Light-Horse Harry Lee’s expansive nature—perhaps Lee had heard too much about it as a child, or knew the price other people, not just Light-Horse Harry himself, had paid for that angry temper and those sudden rages that led him step by step into disgrace, bankruptcy, and exile. If Lee must have had such feelings, for his aide Colonel Long recalled his repressed fury over some matter and noted, “Lee manifested his ill humor, by a little nervous twist or jerk of the neck and head . . . accompanied by some harshness of manner,” apparently not a rare condition for Lee. But he had learned to control them, surely at great cost to himself, for his angina was no doubt at least in part a result of the constant, lifelong effort at self-control that set him apart from other men.
Lee rode back to his headquarters in the dark to draw up his plans for the next day. He had realized at once, talking to Ewell and Early, that the attack would have to be made on the enemy’s left, with Ewell’s corps playing a supporting role. Since A. P. Hill remained ill, and his corps had been badly mauled in the day’s fighting, Longstreet’s corps would have to make the main attack. He had contemplated this while he was in the arbor, and Jubal Early would later write that Lee had said, “If I attack from my right, Longstreet will have to make the attack,” then added, as if talking to himself, “Longstreet is a very good fighter when he gets in position and gets everything ready, but he is so slow.”
This was prophetic, but based on experience—Longstreet’s slowness at Second Manassas had very nearly cost Lee the battle. In any case, Lee made Longstreet’s attack the linchpin of the next day’s battle, Ewell was not to move until he heard Longstreet’s guns. The attacks would have to be coordinated over a distance of nearly three miles, from Round Top to Culp’s Hill—a plan made more risky by the fact that Stuart’s cavalry had not scouted out the ground, so Lee had no clear picture of what was ahead of him.
Still another difficulty was that Longstreet would not only have to move his corps down to Gettysburg, minus Pickett’s division, but then move it to the right along Emmitsburg Road behind A. P. Hill’s corps before he could attack, leaving Hill on his left. Moving one corps around another was bound to be slow, and much of it was very likely to be in sight of the enemy, who held the high ground, so the element of surprise was almost certain to be lacking. The one piece of good news for Lee was that Stuart had sent word at last that he was on Carlisle Road approaching Gettysburg; but this would have little or no effect on the next day’s battle. Had Stuart been there, and able to interrupt or interdict the flow of men and supplies along Baltimore Pike, that would have been helpful, but Lee knew that with every passing hour more Union brigades were marching unthreatened toward Cemetery Ridge. The time of Longstreet’s attack was therefore of great importance, and was to give rise to another of the fatal misunderstandings that dogged the Confederates throughout the three days of the battle.
Longstreet had returned to his headquarters in the late afternoon, and presumably over supper had confided to Colonel Fremantle his concern that the enemy would “intrench themselves strongly during the night,” which was true enough, as well as the fact that he didn’t like fighting without Pickett’s division—that it was like going into battle “with one boot off.”* Later in the evening he rode off to join Lee—who had just sent Ewell orders not to move to his right, but to attack Culp’s Hill when he heard Longstreet’s attack begin in the morning—and made it clear to Longstreet that he wished him to attack as early as possible in the day, before Meade was fully concentrated. Lee did not give Longstreet a specific time when he wanted the attack to begin, perhaps because he was not in the habit of doing so, and Longstreet, writing about it afterward, remarked, “General Lee never, in his life, gave me orders to open an attack at a specific hour. He was perfectly satisfied that, when I had my troops in position, no time was ever lost.”
That is very likely true: Lee had always believed in letting his commanders decide for themselves how to fulfill his orders. But it seems unlikely that Lee failed to convey at least that the earlier the attack took place, the better. In any event Lee dismissed the officers present with another fatal instruction: “Gentlemen, we will attack the enemy as early in the morning as practicable.” One might have supposed that the words “if practicable” or “as practicable” would have had a cautionary effect on Ewell earlier in the day, but they reappeared, and with similar results. The accusation that Lee set sunrise as the time for Longstreet’s attack, and that Longstreet ignored this out of pique because Lee had not followed his advice about strategy—still one of the sharper controversies regarding Gettysburg—is doubtful: in a spirited correspondence long after Lee’s death, Long conceded the point to Longstreet. But at the very least it has to be admitted that Longstreet did not spend the night hurrying McLaws and Hood forward, as Jackson might well have done. Lee rode to a small house his staff had found for him to get a few hours of rest, and Longstreet went back to his headquarters to do the same, with whatever reservations or misgivings he had about Lee’s plans for the morning.
Gettysburg: The Second Day
Probably no major battle in history has been as minutely studied and described as the three days of Gettysburg, and surely nowhere else is the most important ground of the battle preserved with such devoted care, so it is ironic that much of what happened there remains intensely controversial after a century and a half, and that many accounts of it differ widely. Of all the battle’s many puzzles, the most difficult one to resolve, and the most sensitive to southerners, is General Longstreet’s behavior on July 2 and July 3. Longstreet himself made matters worse over the years after the war by writing several versions of his account, which differ in detail. The final one was written during a period of five years when he was in his old age, and smarting under attacks from fellow southerners because of his friendship with his West Point friend Ulysses S. Grant, and his acceptance of a string of lucrative Federal appointments.
There are therefore two competing accounts of the second and third day of the battle from the Confederate point of view: one by Longstreet, which places the blame on Lee; and another, the classic “Lost Cause” narrative, which places the blame on Longstreet. Certainly, it would have been better if Longstreet had attacked early in the morning, as Lee apparently expected him to do—at daybreak most of the long ridge between Cemetery Hill and Round Top was still comparatively bare of Federal troops—but the question remains whether Lee actually ordered Longstreet to do that, and whether Longstreet ignored Lee’s order and balked and delayed out of sullen resentment.
Longstreet’s own view, in From Manassas to Appomattox, was a sharply worded criticism of Lee’s handling of the battle. “Colonel Taylor says that General Lee urged that the march of my troops should be hastened and chafed at their non-appearance. Not one word did he utter to me of their march until he gave his orders at eleven o’clock for the move to his right. Orders for the troops to hasten their march of the 1st were sent without even a suggestion from him, but upon his announcement that he intended to fight the next day, if the enemy was there. That he was excited and off his balance was evident on the afternoon of the 1st, and he labored under that oppression until enough blood was shed to appease him.”
This is strong stuff, and Longstreet cannot have been surprised that it brought the wrath of many, indeed most, southerners down on his head, though by that time he may not have cared. It must be borne in mind, however, that Longstreet had always, from the very beginning, argued against invading the North, and once he lost that argument, imagined he had won Lee’s promise not to seek out a “general engagement” with the enemy, but to place the army on good ground and wait for the Union to attack. Because of Stuart’s absence and the lack of reliable intelligence Lee had allowed himself to be placed in a position where he felt himself obliged to do exactly the opposite. Now Meade had been forced into a formidable defensive position, with short interior lines and an unbroken line of communication, which Lee was proposing to attack. It is hardly surprising that Longstreet may have been less than enthusiastic about being the linchpin in a strategy against which he had been arguing for two months. The situation in the early morning of July 1 was exactly the nightmare that he had predicted, and which he still believed could be avoided by moving toward the right and placing the army athwart Meade’s line of communication, and between Meade and Washington, so that he would have to attack Lee on ground of the latter’s own choosing.
The reference to Lee as being “sanguinary,” as Colonel Long put it in his spirited reply to Longstreet’s assertion, is puzzling, given the respect that Longstreet usually paid to Lee. One sees what he means, and it is in fact a useful corrective to the portrayal of Lee as a plaster saint. Lee was a general, and not only that—he was a singularly fierce and aggressive one, who neither brooded on casualties nor allowed himself to be deterred by them. Yeats’s words, “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!”* come to mind when one thinks about Lee’s view of casualties. He could be sympathetic when an individual caught his eye: thus after the failure of Pickett’s Charge on the third day of Gettysburg he paused to comfort a badly wounded Union soldier lying on the ground who shouted out, “Hurrah for the Union!” as Lee rode past him; Lee dismounted, shook his hand, and said, “My son, I hope you will soon be well.” But like Grant he could close off his mind to the inevitable mass horrors of war. Battles were fought at close range in the mid-nineteenth century, and the weapons of the day produced devastating wounds; there was no way to insulate oneself from the sight and sounds of carnage, nor was Lee a man who commanded from a safe distance.
None of this, however, means that he either craved or required bloodshed. What Longstreet seems to have been saying, though with singularly ill-chosen words, is that Lee was determined to fight in the early morning of July 2; that he desired a battle, indeed felt he had no other choice; that he thought he could win it; and that he had closed off his mind once and for all to Longstreet’s pleas to go around the enemy’s left. “The enemy is here,” Lee told General Hood, “and if we do not whip him, he will whip us.” It is hard to disagree with this judgment, although Longstreet did.
Even the question of time is contradictory in accounts of the day. Longstreet begins his account of it by writing. “The stars were shining brightly on the morning of the 2nd when I reported at General Lee’s head-quarters and asked for orders,” which were not forthcoming. In his old age Longstreet may have been confounding the time when he arose and breakfasted with the time when he met Lee. Fremantle, who was at Longstreet’s headquarters and who seldom fails to consult his pocket watch, notes that “we all got up around 3:30 a.m.,” when indeed the stars may have been “shining brightly,” but it was not until “first light,” which is to say just before dawn, that Lee, Longstreet, A. P. Hill, Hood, and Heth met on Seminary Ridge, where they were observed from above by Colonel Fremantle, by Fremant
le’s Austrian colleague with the fancy uniform and waxed moustaches, and by Captain Scheibert of the Prussian army from a perch on a branch of a tree. The observers had climbed the tree to get a better view of the day’s events—prematurely, as it turned out. Longstreet and Hood, Fremantle notes, indulged in “the truly American custom of whittling sticks.” Freeman has Lee eagerly looking “for Longstreet’s veterans,” but this seems unlikely, since if Longstreet was present, whittling away at his stick, Lee could have asked him when his troops would begin to arrive. Longstreet may again have argued his case for avoiding a frontal attack and trying to turn the enemy’s left instead, but if so Lee rejected it.
In any case, no attack could have been made before nine o’clock in the morning, since Longstreet’s artillery commander Colonel Edward Porter Alexander did not have his fifty-four guns on the field until that hour. As for Longstreet’s infantry, much of it was beginning to be deployed as early as 7 a.m. Colonel Fremantle, having exchanged his tree branch temporarily for a borrowed horse, accompanied Longstreet “over part of the ground,” and watched him position General McLaws’s division. Fremantle gave as good a description of the battlefield of July 2 as can be found anywhere:
The enemy occupied a series of high ridges, the tops of which were covered with trees, but the intervening valleys these ridges and ours were mostly open, and partly under cultivation. The cemetery was on their right, and their left appeared to rest upon a rocky hill. The enemy’s forces, which were supposed to comprise nearly the whole Potomac army, were concentrated into a space apparently not more than a couple of miles in length.
The Confederates inclosed them in a sort of semicircle, and the extreme extent of our position must have been from five to six miles at least. Ewell was on our left, his headquarters in a church* (with a high cupola) at Gettysburg; Hill in the centre; and Longstreet on the right.
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