Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  He also points out, “A dead silence reigned till 4:45 p.m., and no one would have imagined that such masses of men and such powerful artillery were about to commence the work of destruction at that hour.”

  The critical question of the historical controversy that still surrounds, and probably always will surround, Lee’s strategy at Gettysburg is why he allowed nearly eight hours to elapse between the moment when the bulk of Longstreet’s forces reached the field and the time the actual attack took place. It is certainly possible that if the attack had been made earlier it might have succeeded, and also certainly true that with each passing hour the Federal forces on Cemetery Ridge grew stronger and better entrenched; but the delay cannot be blamed entirely on Longstreet, much as he disliked the idea of making the attack in the first place. He may very well have been “in a bad humor,” as Freeman puts it, but that does not mean he would have refused to obey a direct order had he been given one.

  It is difficult, balancing the various accounts of what happened that morning, not to come away with the impression that the Confederate effort was marked by some ambivalence, doubt, and confusion. The Prussian observer would later remark that Lee looked “careworn” and “was not at his ease,” and Longstreet would comment that Lee had “lost the matchless equipoise that usually characterized him.” An army depends on the judgment and balance of its commander, and Lee did not show himself at his best in the early hours of July 2. Although he had had all night to think about it, he was still uncertain whether or not to bring about “a general engagement”—that is, to engage his whole army—and whether to make the main attack on his right or his left. It may be that the sight of the ground the enemy now occupied gave him pause, as it should have done, or perhaps he was feeling unwell—certainly he recognized that neither Ewell on his left nor A. P. Hill at his center had been as successful as he would have liked the day before, and that his third corps commander, Longstreet, was showing none of Stonewall Jackson’s eagerness for a daring flank march. All those writing about the battle—and not a few of those who commanded brigades and divisions during it—speculate about how different the outcome might have been had Jackson been there.

  Sometime before 9 a.m. Lee left Longstreet and rode off to his far left to talk to Ewell again. What he found there was enough to convince him that the main attack would have to be made on his far right, with Ewell in support. When Lee was riding back toward the center, Long has him saying, “What can detain Longstreet? He ought to be in position now.” But Lee had not in fact given Longstreet his orders yet; he did not actually meet with Longstreet again until 11 a.m. It is just over two miles from the southern end of Seminary Ridge to the center of Gettysburg, and there is nothing difficult or challenging about the landscape, so it seems strange that it took Lee more than two hours to ride into town, see for himself how strong the Federal position was in front of Ewell, confer with Ewell, then ride back to meet Longstreet. Up until that point Lee had not as yet decided to fight “a general engagement,” nor had he made the final decision that Longstreet’s corps should lead the attack.

  After giving Longstreet his oral instructions, Lee rode back to his left, leaving Longstreet to march his troops into position. This took an unconscionably long time. It seems odd that Lee had not urged Longstreet to move quickly, but that was not Lee’s way. By the early afternoon, on a day so hot that the troops “were suffering from the lack of water,” word was brought to Lee that the Federals were moving troops onto Round Top, which is to say extending their line as far as they could to prevent having their flank turned.

  Lee took this news philosophically, and even predicted that Round Top would be in his possession by nightfall; then he rode up a lane to the Pitzer Farm on Seminary Ridge, overlooking the town and the northernmost part of Cemetery Ridge, where he met A. P. Hill. This gave Lee a good view of the battlefield, but if he was concerned about Longstreet, or the passing time, it was a poor place to choose.

  Colonel Fremantle, who had made good use of the time by going for a swim and eating “quantities of cherries,” went back to the tree where he had been sitting in the early morning, and remarked that Lee would spend the next few hours talking to A. P. Hill and Colonel Long, but “generally sat quite alone on the stump of a tree,” and sent only “one message, and only received one report.” This is generally mentioned to Lee’s credit, since he was putting into practice his own view about what we would now call a hands-off style of command; however, General Fuller is not alone in criticizing it: “When things go wrong,” Fuller asks plaintively, “how can subordinates modify a plan? They can only muddle it.” What is worse, Lee had not issued any “written operations orders”; he was relying entirely on oral orders, which were open to misunderstanding, particularly when passed on by one of Lee’s aides instead of Lee himself.

  If Lee’s main objective was for Longstreet to carry out a full-scale assault on the Union left, take Round Top and Little Round Top, and turn the Union flank, then he perhaps should have placed himself farther south, possibly on one of the low ridges opposite the Peach Orchard, where Longstreet himself took up his position. Instead, he chose a spot almost 3,000 yards away, with a poor view of Longstreet’s corps as it deployed. As for the fact that Lee sent only one message and received only one report, while it is often taken as an indication of his self-control and sangfroid, it does not seem like the best way to control a battle over a front extending for several miles, even allowing for Lee’s ideas about letting his corps commanders find their own way to solve their problems. Lee already knew, after all, that Longstreet was pessimistic and disgruntled, yet over the next five or six hours he left Longstreet alone to carry out perhaps the most critical assault in the history of the Confederacy. Lee’s presence alone—as well as his authority to shift troops from his center to his right at the moment of crisis—might have been enough to carry the Confederates to the summit of Little Round Top, rather than just halfway up it.

  The truth is that Lee had come to “expect the impossible” of his own troops. They had never failed him in the past and he relied on them now to succeed despite the absence of a tight command structure and a well-coordinated battle plan. Colonel Fremantle, had he not been awed by Lee’s bearing and gentlemanly qualities, might have recognized this as a manifestation of the British habit of “muddling through,” a familiar phrase in the British army right up to the end of World War II, with its implicit preference for the gifted amateur over the stodgy professional, its rejection of “Prussian” efficiency and elaborate staff work, and its reliance instead on courageous personal leadership (Cardigan at Balaclava) and the indomitable spirit of the British Tommy (as in the first day of the First Battle of the Somme) over careful planning.* Since Lee was in fact a consummate professional, whose reputation had been made by brilliant staff work for General Scott in Mexico, it is clear that he was improvising a major engagement. Without Stuart, he still had no precise idea of the enemy’s strength, but his view from the cupola in Gettysburg would have been enough to show him the strength of the Union position on Cemetery Ridge, and now, as the afternoon wore on, he could see through his field glasses still more enemy troops and artillery appearing farther south down the ridge, and even in the Peach Orchard opposite Longstreet, where the Union’s Major General Daniel Sickles had ordered part of his division, ignoring Meade’s orders and creating a salient that would give Longstreet an opening in the Federal line to exploit.

  Lee was about to fight a battle he had not wanted, in a place that offered him very little option but an attack over difficult ground on his far right. Unable to disengage, Lee had no choice but to fight, and worse still could assault the Federals with only less than one-third of his army, under a general who had already expressed strong doubts about Lee’s plan.

  Given all this, he may have preferred to observe the battle from closer to his left—when Longstreet’s brigades hit the enemy’s right hard and swung across the ridge, Lee would have to make sure that Ewell attacked hard
at Culp’s Hill in support, and that the ailing A. P. Hill’s corps struck at the “saddle” of the ridge, ensuring a three-pronged attack that would drive the Federals off Cemetery Ridge and send them in full retreat down Baltimore Pike.

  All the same, as the afternoon dragged on, everything was “profoundly still,” interrupted only by “occasional skirmishing.” In fact, Colonel Fremantle began to “doubt whether a fight was coming off today at all.” The heat was intense; there was not even the slightest breeze; men sought even the smallest patch of shade; both sides were motionless, except on Lee’s right, where Longstreet struggled to move up his corps and deploy it as he wanted it. He was slowed down by the “reconnoitering officer” who was leading him, then by the discovery that the enemy had placed a signal station on the summit of Little Round Top. His march was being made in full view of it so he was obliged to countermarch: that is, to stop the troops, turn them around, and march back. This inevitably took time and got his divisions mixed up with each other—in other words, it caused confusion, that most dangerous of military conditions—so it was not until 4:45 p.m. that Longstreet’s artillery was at last able to open fire in preparation for his attack,* “like the drums of a stirring overture,” in Freeman’s bravura description. It was accompanied, oddly, by a Confederate band playing “polkas and waltzes” from Gettysburg, to the left of where Lee was sitting on a stump.

  The contrast between the long silence and the sudden noise of the cannonade impressed everybody. Ewell’s artillery joined in from the left, and the Union artillery soon replied “with at least equal fury.” As was always the case in the age of black powder when there was no wind, “dense smoke” covered the whole area of the battlefield, as the guns thundered, projectiles of different types and sizes made their own distinctive noise, shells burst, and an occasional caisson loaded with ammunition was hit and exploded. This was one of the most intense artillery exchanges of the war—even to this day shards of shells and shot from the battle are still being found in the area around what was then a flourishing peach orchard.

  Longstreet, whose mood that day was uncertain, was still moving slowly; indeed one of his own aides was puzzled by his “apathy” on the second day of Gettysburg. As Lee himself had remarked earlier, Longstreet was “slow” and wanted every detail to be correct before he ordered an attack—besides, however much he admired Lee, Longstreet believed he was wrong—not the best frame of mind in which to approach a battle.

  Stuart’s absence also meant that the terrain on Meade’s left was poorly understood, both by Longstreet and, more critically, by Lee. From a modest distance Little Round Top looks like a small, wooded, gentle little hill with a rounded summit, but to approach it from Emmitsburg Road was to realize that its western flank is steeper than it looks and is anchored on a massive, tangled, steep jumble of huge boulders; these, known locally as Devil’s Den, were a favorite spot for daring picnickers and for courting couples, difficult to scale, and full of nooks and crannies that would help the defenders. Any attack that involved climbing over the boulders of Devil’s Den in order to reach the western slope of Little Round Top was bound to be hazardous unless the objective was undefended—and by the time Longstreet was deployed, he could see with his own eyes that Meade had extended his left much farther than Lee had assumed, and that the Federal line now extended beyond his own right.

  The attack Lee had wanted Longstreet to make was to have McLaws’s division approach Emmitsburg Road unseen, then advance straight up it like a knife thrust behind the flank of the Union left, supported by Hood’s division to the right of McLaws. The assault was intended to drive in the Union left in the midpoint of Cemetery Ridge; that would be followed by Ewell attacking the Union right, and Hill the center, thus collapsing the Federal army before it could be further reinforced.

  Lee had been very emphatic about this to Longstreet in the early morning, and McLaws described Longstreet’s reaction then as “irritated and annoyed,” but whatever the truth of this by the late afternoon it was no longer a practical plan. The Union left was no longer in the center, or “saddle,” of Cemetery Ridge; it was on Little Round Top. McLaws would have been advancing with a substantial Federal force on his right; and attacking straight up Emmitsburg Road would bring him directly to the Peach Orchard where Sickles had moved part of his corps. There could be no thrust that would take McLaws behind the Union line on Cemetery Ridge; he would have to fight his way there.

  General Hood saw this clearly at once. Lee had assumed that Hood could take Little Round Top without any resistance, then take the Union line in reverse on Cemetery Ridge, but Hood now realized that he would have to fight his way over Devil’s Den, then up the slope of Little Round Top—an attack that would be costly, slow, and by no means sure. Three times he tried to persuade Longstreet to let him go around Little Round Top and Round Top, but Longstreet refused.

  Longstreet gets blamed for what amounts to (in the age-old British Army phrase) “dumb insolence,” the equivalent of “silent insolence” in the U. S. Army—which is to say that he was determined now to follow Lee’s orders scrupulously, even blindly, although he knew they were no longer relevant and did not correspond to the reality on the ground, rather than use his own initiative to modify them. He did not send an aide to Lee, even though Lee was only two miles* away and easy enough to reach, but Longstreet, always a practical soldier, could see that Hood’s plea, while it made sense, was also dangerous. Hood would have a long march around the two hills, all of it observed by Federal troops on Little Round Top, and it was already late afternoon; by the time Hood reached the Union line on Cemetery Ridge it would be growing dark, and during all that time McLaws would be unsupported. Putting Confederate artillery onto Round Top might help, but to do that Hood’s gunners would have to chop down woods, make a trail, and haul the guns up by hand to get them into any position where they would be useful, and by that time it would be night. Longstreet was therefore trapped not only by Lee’s orders of the morning, but also by the passage of time, partly caused by his own slowness in moving his troops earlier in the day. If he was going to succeed, he needed Hood to take Little Round Top quickly—there was no time to improvise an alternative strategy, which Lee had in any case already dismissed.

  In any great battle there is sometimes a moment when doing one’s duty and obeying one’s orders to the letter may prove fatal to the cause. Longstreet might have reached for a moment of glory as lasting and brilliant as Jackson’s flanking attack at Chancellorsville, but he was not Jackson, and in any case he was not about to disobey Lee. Fatally for the Confederates, he told McLaws and Hood to do as they had been ordered—no doubt with a heavy heart because he had never wanted to make this attack in the first place, and he could already see that it was very likely to fail.

  The result was that rather than making an angled attack toward the left, McLaws had to fight through Sherfy’s Peach Orchard and a wheat field, which were furiously defended by part of Sickles’s corps; meanwhile Hood, instead of supporting McLaws and aiming the thrust of his attack toward the Union center, as Lee had envisaged, had to make a grim, head-on, bloody attack straight over Devil’s Den and then up the slope of Little Round Top, which was held firmly by Union troops. There was no fancy maneuvering involved here, no element of surprise, no flanking movement—for both divisions it was sheer face-to-face carnage at close range against an enemy that held higher ground. The crest of Cemetery Ridge was reached, briefly, but a fierce counterattack drove the Confederates back, and as darkness fell the major objectives on the Union far left were still in enemy hands—no breakthrough was effected that threatened Meade’s position on Cemetery Hill, despite terrible casualties on both sides, which included Hood, who was severely wounded, and on the Federal side, Sickles, who lost a leg to a cannonball.

  Ewell’s attack, which should have supported Longstreet’s, was made late—in some accounts as late as 7 p.m.—and despite heavy fighting in the darkness, failed to dislodge the Federal forces from their
positions on Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill. Ewell’s attacks were poorly coordinated and were not made with his full forces, and Meade benefited from the well-known advantages of short interior lines—he was able to move troops quickly to check Longstreet on his left or Ewell on his right, whereas it was nearly six miles from Ewell’s position to that of Longstreet, a good part of it in full view of the enemy.

  The attack in the center, from A. P. Hill’s corps, was gallant and bloody but equally inconclusive, and weakened by confusion about orders. By the end of the day, as firing on both sides died out in the darkness, both Hill and Longstreet had gained some ground, Ewell none. But the Union hold on Cemetery Ridge had not been broken—Meade still held the significant high ground, and benefited from short interior lines and an unbroken line of communication. Lee’s army was still scattered from Culp’s Hill to Little Round Top. The Federal position on Little Round Top has been described, almost from the time of the battle, as a “fishhook,” with the point of the hook to the south of Culp’s Hill, the bend of the hook curving around Culp’s and Cemetery hills, the shank along the western edge of Cemetery Ridge, and the eye of the hook at Little Round Top; and there is no reason to search for a better or more apt description. Freeman devotes nearly thirteen pages to what might have been had one event or another occurred or not occurred, and gives the impression that the second day of Gettysburg was at least a partial Confederate victory, or might have been one, but for Longstreet and Ewell. But anybody who has looked at the ground and studied a map can see that no significant gains had been made, and that there was at the very least a lack of impulsion and leadership on the Confederate side on July 2, for which the blame must rest on Lee’s shoulders. Far from galloping from one part of the battlefield to another in order to urge his commanders forward and coordinate their attacks, he stayed in the geographical center of the Confederate line and, as we know, received only one message and sent only one. It is possible that he had come to rely too much on Stonewall Jackson, and assumed that his three corps commanders would demonstrate the same genius and daring, but if so he was guilty of misreading their character.