25. Parts of a hook. Drawing from flytyinginstruction.com.
{Robert E. Lee, Volumes 1, 2, and 3, by Douglas Southall Freeman, copyright © 1934, 1935, by Charles Scribner’s Sons, copyright renewed 1962, 1963, by Inez Godden Freeman. All rights reserved.}
It is certainly true that the first day of Gettysburg was shaped in part by Stuart’s absence, and the fact that Lee did not know where the enemy was and what his strength was. But by late afternoon of the second day this was no longer true—it was clear enough, even without Stuart’s cavalry, that the bulk of the Army of the Potomac was present, concentrated, and firmly positioned on Cemetery Ridge, and had been given the time to entrench or fortify itself, thanks to Longstreet’s slow deployment of his corps. The sheer ferocity of the fighting on the second day should have brought with it a warning of what might be expected the next. Although that battle lasted only a few hours—it started, after all, late in the day—one estimate is that the Union had 10,000 casualties and the Confederates nearly 7,000, in addition to approximately “9,000 Union and 6,000 Confederate casualties” the day before, which in the case of Lee’s army amounts to the loss of over 20 percent in two days of fighting without any significant gain. There was no sign that Meade planned to retreat.
Stuart reappeared late on the second day—Lee may or may not have greeted him by saying, “Well, General, you are here at last,” with a pained expression—and Pickett’s division arrived, winded but intact, from its guard duties at Chambersburg, but Lee did not expect and would not receive any further reinforcements. He did not need to be told that the army’s supply of artillery ammunition was running dangerously low—the Confederate armies had always relied on capturing large quantities of ammunition from the enemy, but this time they had not overrun Federal supply trains or ammunition dumps. A third day’s fighting on the same scale as the first two days would exhaust their supply.
In the hot, sultry night, once the firing had died down, the only sound came from the cries and groans of the wounded, while the moonlight picked out in the darkness the uncounted corpses that covered the fields, where they would lie untouched for several days. In the air was the stench of death, not just of men but of horses—as many as 5,000 horses would be killed in the three days of the battle.
Meade, true to the cautious nature that would deprive him of the fruits of victory, held a council of war late that night and asked his generals whether he should retire or stay, and the majority of them urged staying. Lee does not seem to have sought the opinions of his principal officers, no doubt because he had already made up his mind what he intended to do. He would renew the attack in the morning—would make, as Freeman puts it, “the supreme effort” tomorrow, relying once again on the fighting spirit of his troops rather than on any unexpected or brilliant maneuver.
Longstreet had sent a message to Lee by signal at 7 p.m. that he “was doing well,” which was technically true—he would bivouac for the night on ground that had been held by the enemy—but was overoptimistic. In fact, Longstreet remarked to the Austrian observer Captain Ross, “We have not been as successful as we wished.” Freeman notes critically that Longstreet did not ride over to confer with Lee that night, but this criticism fails to take into account that Longstreet’s corps had received heavy casualties, and that he was bringing Pickett’s division forward in anticipation of the next morning’s battle.
Lee’s staff found him a house in which to spend the night—perhaps an indication that he was not feeling well, since he normally insisted on sleeping in his tent—but it is remarkable, given the events of the day, that he did not send for Longstreet, A. P. Hill, and Ewell. Lee was hardly more inclined toward holding councils of war than Jackson had been, but if ever there was a time to gather his corps commanders in one place and explain exactly what he intended to do in the morning, this was it. He was only two miles away from Longstreet, and a mile or less away from Ewell. Hill was a short ride away. Nothing, one would have thought, could be easier; he had only to order them to join him. If he had differences with Longstreet, and felt that Ewell had not done his part on the first and the second day of the battle, now was the moment to confront these issues, and urge his corps commanders to make the “supreme effort,” as well as to demand better coordination of the attacks. Long complains that “still there was a lack of accord and cooperation in the different columns of attack, and [therefore] no decisive result,” which is exactly right; but assuming that Lee agreed—and as his aide, Long would have known his opinion—then why not point this out forcefully to his commanders, while there was still time to draw up a plan of attack with coordinated timing, and urge on them the importance of adhering to it at all costs? Wellington would certainly have done so, as would Lee’s role model General Scott. Thirty-three years later in his memoirs, Longstreet made a detailed and highly critical assessment of Ewell’s behavior on the Confederate left at Gettysburg, which he viewed as the critical failure of the battle; but would it not have made more sense to sort out the shortcomings of Confederate command on the second day of battle, before plunging ahead to the third and last day?
But this was not Lee’s way—he faced the enemy fearlessly, he had no concern for his own safety, but he recoiled from personal confrontation. He was a gentleman first and foremost, and good manners at some level mattered more to him than victory. Admittedly, the briefest of frowns from that otherwise marble face was reproof enough for most of those around him, but their number did not include Longstreet or Ewell, and A. P. Hill may have been too ill to realize that he too had disappointed the commanding general.
Lee’s veiled, polite rebuke of Jeb Stuart, who more than anybody else was responsible for the difficult position of the Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg, is typical of the man. It would have done Stuart no harm to “tear a strip off him,” in private if not in front of his peers, but Lee was not able to do so, not even later in his official report of the battle. He did not have Napoleon’s temper or sardonic cutting edge, but mild irony hardly seems to have been the appropriate way of dealing with his bumptious, glory-seeking cavalry commander.
It was Lee’s job, at this critical moment, to knock heads together and produce a perfectly coordinated attack the next day—the spirit of his army was still “superb,” “much ground had been taken,” and “admirable artillery positions had been won.” Pickett’s division was now close to the field; there remained enough artillery ammunition for one more day of fighting; but victory would depend on perfect timing between his three commanders, and on an early start to the day while Meade’s army was still licking its wounds. Boldness and concerted action might carry the day, over a field still strewn with the dead and dying, against an army still holding higher ground. But it was at just this point when Lee’s noble character failed him—he had everything a great commander needs except the willingness to overbear his reluctant commanders and mold them to his will.
Gettysburg: The Third Day
At first light on another scorching day that would torture men and beasts with thirst, Lee mounted Traveller in the dawn to the sound of Ewell’s cannons opening fire to his far left—Ewell at least showed signs of obeying his orders—and rode to his right to meet Longstreet. To Lee’s disappointment, he saw no signs of Pickett’s division, which he had hoped to find deployed and ready for battle. Longstreet he found in a “depressed” and disputatious mood—he had had scouts out all night searching for a way to turn the Union left, and had already begun to move his troops to the right in anticipation of such a move. Whether or not Lee was “weary” of hearing Longstreet’s opinion again, as Freeman alleges, he made it very clear that he intended to attack the Union center with the three divisions of Longstreet’s corps. It is at this point, in the early morning, that Longstreet looked up from Emmittsburg Road toward the low stone wall at the crest of Cemetery Ridge—just over a mile away across bare, gently rolling ground, offering no cover but shallow swales and bisected only by a post-and-rail fence that would slow the troops d
own as they scrambled over it—and said, “General, I have been a soldier all my life. I have been with soldiers engaged in fights by couples, by squads, companies, regiments, divisions, and armies, and should know, as well as any one, what soldiers can do. It is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arranged for battle can take that position.” Or words to that effect*—Longstreet may have been less eloquent than he remembered later on when he came to write about it—but however he expressed himself, he made his doubts about the proposed attack clear to Lee, no doubt politely, since both of them were gentlemen, and Longstreet never failed in his respect for Lee. As the man on the spot, however, he had a practical objection to Lee’s plan as well. The divisions of McLaws and Hood had been badly mauled during the previous day’s fighting, and were facing superior enemy forces. If they were withdrawn and moved leftward to attack the Union center there would be nothing to prevent the Federals from advancing to attack Longstreet’s right flank as he moved forward—his right flank would be “in the air.”
This, as it happens, was not a querulous complaint on Longstreet’s part; it was a simple statement of fact, as anybody can see who has looked at a map or walked over the Gettysburg battlefield, and it was exactly the kind of thing that should have been thrashed out the night before, had Lee called his corps commanders together.
Lee’s intention to attack the Union center using Longstreet’s corps carried with it certain risks, and it was even more dangerous because Lee had spent the previous day with A. P. Hill’s corps at the center of the Confederate line, and had therefore seen the ground on his far right only through his field glasses. Now that he had seen it with his unaided eyes, he accepted, with whatever reluctance, Longstreet’s view. He decided to leave Hood and McLaws where they were, as Longstreet had suggested, and replace them with Heth’s division and two brigades of Pender’s division, both from A. P. Hill’s corps, perhaps as much to humor Longstreet as because it made good sense. This decision had three disadvantages, however. The first was that placing a divisional or brigade commander under a new corps commander at the last moment is always risky—officers and their men are used to what they know, and to fighting alongside units they are familiar with. They cannot be moved around like chess pieces. The second was that it moved the direction of Longstreet’s attack slightly toward the Confederate left, thus exposing it to Union artillery fire on both flanks. The third was that sending out the necessary orders and shuffling units around could only cause delay in an attack that Lee had wished to make as early in the morning as possible. He knew Longstreet was “slow” and that he liked to have everything in order before attacking; now he had given Longstreet a perfectly sound reason for more delay.
Even while these changes were being ordered, Longstreet still fretted about the Union artillery, and particularly the batteries on Little Round Top. Although Colonel Long tried to reassure him, Longstreet was—correctly as it turned out—not convinced that Confederate artillery could suppress the fire from the Union guns ahead of him, and was perhaps also unwilling to accept the word of a staff officer on the subject. Colonel E. P. Alexander, in command of Longstreet’s artillery, was less sanguine than Long. All together, Lee had 125 guns to train on Cemetery Ridge for the attack, a formidable number; but only Alexander’s 75 guns had been placed well forward of the infantry, where Longstreet wanted them to be. The rest were scattered far behind, most of them along Seminary Ridge at a distance of at least 1,300 yards from the enemy; nor were they placed for the kind of converging fire in which all the guns were aimed at the same point, to create a hole in the enemy’s line where the infantry attack should be concentrated. Nobody had understood this kind of thing better than Jackson, the former artillery professor at VMI, but Longstreet too had a thorough knowledge of artillery, and what he saw to the left of him did not give him confidence.
All these things take time and forethought, but since the previous day’s battle had been fought late in the day and gone on well into the night, none of these meticulous preparations had been made. It was not an auspicious beginning.
Lee himself seems to have been fretful, perhaps because Longstreet was obstinate. As Longstreet reckoned it, he would be making the attack with about 13,000 men, “the divisions having lost a third of their number the day before,” not the 15,000 that Lee was promising him—in any case, his own estimate was that he would need at least 30,000 men to have a chance of succeeding, and even then success was doubtful: “[The] column,” he wrote later, “would have to march a mile under concentrating artillery fire, and a thousand yards under long-range musketry.”
According to Freeman, Lee rode the entire length of the Confederate line with Longstreet, and then once more without him—the morning was almost gone; a fierce noonday sun was shining down brutally on men who were already thirsty and weary. In the meantime, the consequences of hasty and slipshod staff work were making themselves felt. Lee had sent a message to Ewell that Longstreet’s attack had been delayed, and that it would not begin before 10 a.m., an optimistic guess. One of Ewell’s division commanders, the fiery Major General Edward Johnson, attacked Culp’s Hill before this message was received, and his division was badly cut up—this would inevitably weaken Ewell’s corps when he made his attack. One cannot help feeling that Lee’s control over his army was not what it should have been on July 3, and that he was allowing the day to slip out of his hands.
Geographically, Lee was in the worst position for a commander: the three corps of his army were spread out loosely over six miles, with Ewell at the bend and the point of the “fishhook” unable to see or guess what might be happening at the center and the left of the line, where Longstreet was preparing his attack very slowly indeed, perhaps, as many of his critics have alleged, in the hope that Lee might still change his mind.
Skirmishing and artillery fire from A. P. Hill’s guns on Seminary Ridge sputtered on until noon—for what purpose it is hard to see, particularly since ammunition was scarce, and there was no way of replenishing it. Colonel Fremantle joined Lee and Longstreet and their staffs while they were inspecting the Confederate line together, and was in time to see a random “Yankee” shell hit a building between the two armies. The building was set instantly ablaze, though “filled with wounded, principally Yankee, who, I am afraid, must have perished miserably in the flames,” a sinister prelude of what was to come. Fremantle, a good—and, as a noncombatant foreign guest, objective—judge of ground, remarked that “the range of heights to be gained was still most formidable, and evidently strongly intrenched,” which is pretty much what Longstreet thought, as well as several other officers for whose opinion Lee asked. Fremantle estimated that “the distance between the Confederate guns and the Yankee position—i.e. between the woods crowning the opposite ridges—was at least a mile—quite open, gently undulating, and exposed to artillery the whole distance.” This is a pretty good description of what was about to become the most famous field of battle in American history. He saw that Longstreet’s troops were “lying down in the woods,” presumably seeking the shade, and remarked that Longstreet himself “dismounted and went to sleep for a short time,” (Longstreet writes that he was not asleep, but simply lay down to think of some way of improving the coming attack). Then Fremantle and his Austrian fellow observer rode off into Gettysburg to find a better place from which to view the attack, possibly the cupola of the seminary, and got caught up in the cross fire of the artillery barrage once it began.
At around noon Lee rode out to the crest of Seminary Ridge to look at the field that rose to the crest of Cemetery Ridge, and chose as the center of the coming attack a “little clump of trees” known to the townspeople of Gettysburg as Ziegler’s Grove, more or less at the middle of Cemetery Ridge, facing almost directly west. The grove was compact, highly visible, and situated behind a low, rough, uneven wall of piled stones, typical of the Northeast, where every field had to be cleared of stones before it could be plowed and the easiest way to get rid of them was to pile them up
around the edges of the field to prevent cattle from wandering. In the winter these walls tended to collapse, while the frost pushed up more stones, and in the early spring farmers removed the freshly risen stones and added them to the walls more or less piecemeal—an endless process, which Robert Frost described in his famous poem “Mending Wall.”
The stone wall on Cemetery Ridge was not a formidable obstacle and varied from two to three feet in height, but for soldiers any wall is better than none—it not only offers some protection but serves as a boundary marker, a more substantial equivalent of a “line drawn in the sand.” A company or a regiment can draw up behind a wall and men can say to themselves (or be told) as the enemy approaches, “This far, and no farther.” Troops in the mid-nineteenth century were not encouraged to lie prone behind a wall, partly because for a man lying down the long, muzzle-loading musket of the day was almost impossible to reload rapidly; but still a wall, however modest and makeshift, offered at once a line to defend and an illusion of safety. This unimposing wall, which formed a ninety-degree angle enclosing the grove of trees, was to be a far more substantial obstacle than it may have looked from nearly a mile away, as Lee and Longstreet stared at it with their field glasses, the one filled with fierce determination, the other with blackest pessimism.
The portion of the Union line at which Lee intended to direct his attack was less than 1,500 feet long, with a rail fence on the Federal left, the Bryan house and barn on the right, and Ziegler’s Grove roughly halfway between. Since the line of Confederate attackers would be roughly a mile in length when it formed, the elements in it would need to converge as they advanced across the open ground toward their objective. Considerable thought had to be given to compressing this long line of troops as it advanced, the object being to deliver a compact, orderly mass of men at “the Angle” of the stone wall to the north side of the grove of trees, but to do so as late as possible, since compressing the line too soon would offer a perfect target for converging Federal artillery fire. Once infantrymen were massed closely together, each round of solid shot, shell, or canister would cause multiple casualties, disabling or killing many men instead of two or three. One Confederate survivor of Second Manassas described the effect: “I heard a thud on my right, as if one had been struck with a heavy fist. Looking around I saw a man at my side standing erect with his head off. . . . As I turned farther around, I saw three others lying on the ground, all killed by this cannon shot.” Solid shot would bounce, hitting man after man; an explosive shell was deadly to groups of men clustered close together, each jagged fragment of shell casing sure to find a target; and at close range canister was like a giant shotgun blast.
Clouds of Glory Page 70