To some degree the shape of the field, and the rail fence on the western side of it, would in any case force the Confederate infantry closer together as they advanced, like a funnel. In Lee’s plan—for it was Lee rather than Longstreet who shaped the plan of the attack—the center brigade (under Colonel B. D. Fry) would advance straight ahead, serving as the marker for the rest, while the brigades of Pickett’s division on the Confederate right moved obliquely toward their left, and the brigades of J. Johnston Pettigrew’s division moved obliquely toward the right, the forward elements of the formations massing into a single column as they reached the stone wall, their impetus breaking the Union line.
Those who have visited Gettysburg in the warmer months will perhaps have seen small bands of exuberant young men charge from the Virginia State Memorial (which bears the splendid bronze equestrian sculpture of Robert E. Lee on Traveller, looking straight ahead toward Cemetery Ridge with a deeply saddened expression) up the field to the Angle, which is to say reenacting on a small scale Pickett’s Charge. Sometimes they carry the Confederate battle flag and wave it, but invariably, however young and fit they are, they are winded and breathing hard when they reach the stone wall at the crest of Cemetery Ridge, although it is a fairly gentle slope. It is important to remember, however, that Pickett’s Charge (as it is now called, Pettigrew’s role having long since been left out in the interest of simplicity, to the chagrin of North Carolinians) was made at a slow, steady infantry pace, about 120 paces a minute. Doubtless men began to break ranks and run as they approached close enough to the stone wall to see the faces of the men shooting at them, but the whole long approach to it was conducted at the march. This was not just because every man was burdened by his rifle, bayonet, and ammunition in the July heat, but because order, discipline, and the correct alignment of each brigade can be maintained only by keeping to a steady pace—men who will run forward might just as easily break and run back. The intention of the infantry attack was to present the enemy with a steady, implacable, formidable mass of men advancing slowly but firmly toward him, not at a run but at a walk, conveying the impression that nothing could stop them. An infantry attack was meant to be imposing by its stolid discipline and determination, conveying to the enemy defenders not a ragged mob of armed men out of breath and running as if they were in a footrace, but men who, once they got within range, would bayonet every living soul in front of them.
Lee understood perfectly the shock effect on the enemy of 15,000 or so disciplined troops marching steadily toward them, immediately after a terrifying artillery barrage had sowed death and destruction among the defenders. Napoleon, himself an artilleryman, had called such a concentrated artillery barrage un feu d’enfer, or hellfire, and Lee counted on it to break the will of the Federal troops on Cemetery Ridge. It would be followed shortly by the long, steady lines of Confederate infantry advancing straight toward the point at which artillery fire had done the most damage.
The prospect convinced a great many of those around Lee, including the hitherto somewhat apathetic A. P. Hill, who offered to support the attack with his whole corps, a suggestion Lee rejected rather cautiously, since what remained of Hill’s corps would be his only reserve “if General Longstreet’s attack should fail.” One person it did not convince was Longstreet himself. At that point, he, Hill, and Lee were sitting together on a log looking at the map, but Longstreet was dismayed, and made no secret of it—so dismayed that he neglected to bring up the critical question of whether the artillery still had enough ammunition to prepare for and support the attack—a question that should have been asked the night before, and to which Lee’s staff should have had the answer at their fingertips.
Lee folded up his map and rode off, leaving the disconsolate Longstreet to carry out the attack he didn’t want to make, with troops two-thirds of which were not his own. Longstreet is often blamed for his hesitation to give the order, and even for delegating it to Brigadier General E. P. Alexander, the First Corps chief of artillery, but given the importance artillery would play in the coming attack, Longstreet’s messages to Alexander seem sensible, rather than any kind of dereliction of duty. He wrote: “If the artillery fire does not have the effect to drive off the enemy or greatly demoralize him, so as to make our effort pretty certain, I would prefer that you should not advise Pickett to make the charge.” Alexander was the person best qualified to judge whether his artillery barrage had been successful or not; what is more, he was closer to Pickett than Longstreet was, since the attacking troops were sheltered immediately behind Seminary Ridge and the Confederate artillery. But it is still a puzzling decision. Perhaps Longstreet felt that if the artillery produced the “desired effect” there would be only a brief moment for the attack to begin—certainly not enough time to send a written order.
Alexander’s reply was not encouraging. He would be able to judge the effect of his fire only by the enemy’s return fire, since the field would be obscured by smoke; moreover, he had only enough ammunition for one full bombardment (or “cannonade”) of the Union line, and predicted that even if the attack was “entirely successful, it can only be at very bloody cost.” This was exactly what Longstreet thought, but he sent a message to confirm that Alexander should proceed when ready. Alexander then reached Pickett, who was “calm and confident,” even eager, and then sent a short message to Longstreet that when his “fire was at its best,” he would “advise General Pickett to advance.” The element of conditionality perhaps inadvertently suggested in Longstreet’s initial message is now missing. Pickett would advance when Alexander’s fire was “at its best,” not when there was evidence that it had destroyed the Union line to the immediate left of Ziegler’s Grove.
At this point there was complete silence over the battlefield, the calm before the storm. The Confederate troops charged with making the attack had not at this point seen the field over which they would be advancing, since they were “under cover” behind the crest of Seminary Ridge, in the woods. This was by design—Lee saw no point in having them brood on the long, uphill, open field before them, rising to the crest of Cemetery Ridge. They would see it for the first time when the artillery in front of them had done its work, and when the excitement and the adrenaline created by the bombardment were still, hopefully, at their highest. The time spent by troops staring at no-man’s-land before going over the top in World War I was to be spared them. They would not see the objective until they emerged from the woods, crossed the crest of Seminary Ridge, and advanced toward Emmitsburg Road, deploying as they advanced, and even then it would be shrouded in smoke. Nor did they know that the heavy weight of history rested on their success. Not many of them may have guessed that a great victory here might, at last, bring about negotiations to end the war, as Lee hoped; still fewer that the Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, was actually waiting for an expected invitation to meet with President Lincoln to discuss prisoner exchange—a meeting that Stephens hoped might be extended, after a significant Confederate victory, to larger issues. In London, the news of Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania had rekindled flickering interest in the House of Commons for the recognition of the Confederacy. For the Confederacy much—perhaps everything—depended on the outcome of this third day of the battle.
It is the moment captured indelibly by William Faulkner in Intruder in the Dust, when the dream of independence, of victory, for the South flickered before the eyes of these tired, sweaty, thirsty, hungry men, as bright as the gunfire they would soon be marching toward:
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it has
n’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far and with too much at stake and that moment it doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.
We do not know what went on in Lee’s head—he was the most private of men; he never wrote his memoirs; he did not confide in his subordinates, or even in members of his own family. We may be sure that he was not moved by personal ambition or thirst for glory—both were completely absent from his character. But he had led his army into the North twice, once in Maryland, now in Pennsylvania; both times he had sought a decisive victory on northern soil and both times he had failed, by the narrowest of margins. He was determined to see the battle at Gettysburg through to the end; whatever Longstreet thought, he was counting on the fighting spirit—the élan, as it is called in the French army—of his officers and men to win the day. It would be tempting to describe the two men, Longstreet and Lee, as polar opposites, Sancho Panza and Don Quixote: the one gruff, curmudgeonly, practical; the other tall, polite to a flaw, courtly, and imaginative. But in fact both were serious, well-trained, and experienced professional officers, and neither had any illusions about the glory of war. At bottom, Lee’s was the more romantic personality; it shows up in his flowery, flirtatious relationships with women (always held under strict control) and his belief that his men had done and could still do the impossible, and what is more do it with a certain style and panache, that they were simply better soldiers than those of the Union, imbued with a better, a more just cause, and would therefore prevail. He was perhaps not altogether immune to the excitement of battle—it was his one intoxication—and however calm his famous marble face remained, he would have felt the thrill of seeing those long gray lines move out of the woods and into position, the glint of the sun piercing through the smoke on thousands of musket barrels, bayonets, and swords, obliterating at a distance the stained and shabby uniforms, the wide variety of hats and caps, the frayed trousers and occasional bare feet, as the battle flag of each regiment was carefully unfurled before it. Longstreet, who had weighed the odds, and as a practical man decided the assault would fail, may not have been moved by the immense spectacle, except to come as near to tears as a general can get; but Lee, we may be sure, was—he did not calculate the odds, and he had complete faith in these men. As a professional, he knew Longstreet may have been right in arguing that the invasion of Pennsylvania was a mistake. But it was wrong to believe the army could make its way around Meade’s left and seek better ground for a battle elsewhere; there wasn’t enough food, forage, ammunition, or time to do so once the two armies were engaged. Lee had no choice but to fight it out; he would have to whip Meade here, or Meade would whip him, as he put it—it was as simple as that.
In the end, as Lee always believed, it was all in God’s hands.
The minutes ticked away as senior officers consulted their pocket watches, and at almost exactly 1 p.m., as had been prearranged, two shots were fired one right after the other, the signal for the beginning of the Confederate artillery barrage. The first salvo from a grand total of 159 guns made a roar that shook the ground, made windows tremble, and could be heard as far away as Pittsburgh. On Cemetery Ridge, outside Meade’s headquarters, one Union officer saw “a shell go through six horses standing broadside.” Another wrote, “Army headquarters were visited with such a shower of projectiles that sixteen horses belonging to the staff and escort were killed before the officers could get away and ‘they stood not upon the order of their going.’” “Shells burst in the air. . . . There was no place of safety. In one regiment twenty-seven were killed or wounded by one shell.” The entire length of Cemetery Ridge was a mass of dust, smoke, and explosions, as salvo after salvo of Confederate gunfire hit the Union line from Cemetery Hill to Little Round Top. A reporter from the New York Tribune wrote that the shelling “made a very hell of fire that amazed the oldest officers.” Soon, the Federals replied, with a line of artillery that stretched along the ridge for two miles, eighteen of the guns firing from around the small grove that was the objective of the Confederate attack. The federal counterfire was less intense than might have been expected—Brigadier General Henry W. Hunt, Meade’s artillery commander, was determined to save his ammunition for the Confederate infantry attack to which he knew this was the prelude.
And yet, despite the intensity of the Confederate barrage, it failed to break or scatter the defenders along the crest of Cemetery Ridge. Several reasons are given for this, ranging from defective fuses to Confederate gunners using “too much elevation,” so that they “overshot”: that is to say their shells fell behind the crest, rather than on the men and guns behind the wall—a narrow space, as anyone who has ever visited Gettysburg can attest. One Union officer called it “a waste of powder”; another dismissed it as “a display of fireworks” and “humbug.” A Confederate survivor, long after the event, noted that the effect of the “grand cannonade” on the Federal line was “a delusion,” since both sides had by then learned that “sheltered lines of infantry cannot be shattered or dislodged when behind breastworks, by field artillery, at the distance of one thousand yards and upwards,” which is to say that so long as the infantry lay prone behind a stone wall and didn’t try to run, most of them were likely to survive, however terrified they might be by the noise and the blasts directly behind them.
By two o’clock in the afternoon, after he had been firing for the best part of an hour, Colonel Alexander realized that he had used up more than half his ammunition, and that at the rate he was firing he would have nothing left with which to support the Confederate infantry assault when it began; nor did he observe any significant slackening of the Union fire. He sent a hasty note to Pickett, telling him that if he was going to advance at all, he must come at once. The Federal line was wreathed in smoke now, but a few minutes later it lifted enough that Alexander was able to observe that the eighteen guns placed around the grove of trees were being withdrawn. He quickly scribbled another urgent message to Pickett: “For God’s sake come quick. The 18 guns have gone. Come quick or my ammunition will not let me support you properly.” This is as close to panic as one general is likely to get when communicating to another.
Although Brigadier General Hunt was trying to save his ammunition for the Confederate assault, the Federal fire was still strong enough so that many of Lee’s men were more eager to begin the advance than to stay put on the far side of Seminary Ridge under a hail of shell splinters. The fact that what was to come would be known afterward as Pickett’s Charge gives the impression of rapidity, a brief moment when the fate of the Confederacy was decided, but in fact events took place at a fairly stately pace. Before Alexander’s second message had reached Pickett, the latter was already showing Alexander’s first message to Longstreet, behind the crest of Seminary Ridge. Longstreet, as Freeman notes, was dismounted—there was no reason for him to ride over the crest of the ridge for a better look at the field tapering gently uphill toward Cemetery Ridge, since it was a mass of smoke, lit from time to time by bright explosions when a Confederate round set off a Union caisson full of ammunition. Pickett passed Alexander’s first message to Longstreet, who read it carefully and stood silently for a moment as if in mourning, unable to give the order. It was by now shortly before three o’clock in the afternoon.
“General, shall I advance?” Pickett asked.
“The effort to speak the order failed, and I could only indicate it by an affirmative bow,” Longstreet wrote later. The “affirmative bow” was enough. Pickett galloped off to order the troops forward, while Longstreet mounted his h
orse and rode away to talk to General Alexander, who was even more disturbed by the prospects for the charge than was Longstreet himself. Lee’s artillery chief, General Pendleton, had ordered the wagons of Alexander’s ammunition train farther to the rear, fearing for their safety, and withdrew some of the howitzers that Alexander had intended to use “in following up the advance.” This seems to have been more of a matter of Pendleton’s pulling rank on Alexander than of some deeper tactical plan, and possibly Lee had no idea that Alexander’s ammunition was “nearly exhausted.” Freeman blames Longstreet for not informing Lee of this, but by then it was too late for Lee to have done anything about it, and it is in any case exactly the kind of question that Lee’s staff should have been asking the night before—this is the old problem of the small size of Lee’s staff, and the lack of anybody serving as a real, tough-minded chief of staff.
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