Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  Alexander reported to Longstreet that he was running out of ammunition for his “batteries of position,” presumably his remaining howitzers. At this news, Longstreet attempted to stop the advance and ordered Alexander to “fill up his ammunition chests,” but Alexander explained that it would take at least an hour to do so, and by now the troops were already in motion. As with many great historical mistakes, it was too late for second thoughts; the mistake was already happening. Whether Longstreet actually told Alexander that he did not “want to make this charge,” is uncertain, but this would not have been news to Alexander, who already knew what Longstreet thought, and in any case shared his opinion.

  Alexander’s guns stopped firing, since the Confederate infantry had to “pass through the batteries” as they advanced over the crest of Seminary Ridge and deployed in the open, so there was a moment in which Longstreet, Alexander, and the gunners looked on as the “grand march moved bravely on.” Whatever Longstreet’s feelings, he returned “the salute of the officers as they passed, their stern smiles expressing confidence”—a confidence he did not share. As if they were on parade, they dressed their line, almost a mile in length at that point, each regiment behind its battle flag, advancing at a steady infantry pace. There was a momentary lull in the artillery fire—on the Confederate side to let the infantry pass, on the Union side because General Hunt was replacing those of his batteries that had exhausted their ammunition with fresh ones—and in this moment there must have been many men on both sides who could not take their eyes off perhaps the grandest spectacle of the Civil War, a mass of gray, nearly fifty battle flags lending color to the scene, everywhere the sun shining off polished metal.

  26. Objective of the Confederate assault of July 3, 1863, on the right center at Gettysburg, showing the contours (intervals of four feet) and the nature of the obstructions.

  {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.}

  Then the Federal artillery fire resumed, not only from the guns along Cemetery Ridge, but on both flanks of the Confederate advance, since as they approached Emmittsburg Road they formed a kind of moving salient, exposed to artillery fire from Cemetery Hill on their left and from Little Round Top on their right. Stout, solidly built post-and-rail fencing slowed the advance, since the troops either had to climb over it or knock it down, in either case making themselves a perfect target; and while there are swales and dips in the land—anyone walking over the ground today between the Virginia Memorial and the Angle can see them—none of them can have offered significant protection from artillery shells exploding overhead. In any case, even as holes were blown in the Confederate lines by case shot and shells, and soon by carefully aimed volleys of musketry, the gray formations concentrated at a steady pace as the survivors approached the stone wall, and it must have seemed to those watching from the eastern flank of Seminary Ridge that they would prevail.

  The indefatigable Colonel Fremantle, at any rate, thought so. He returned from Gettysburg along a road lined with “Yankee dead . . . [who] had been killed on the 1st, the poor fellows had already begun to be very offensive.” He noted this in the authentic deadpan, self-deprecating voice of the British military, but quickly realized that “to see the actual fighting, it was also absolutely necessary to go into the thick of the thing.” Never one to hesitate about going into “the thick of the thing,” Fremantle rode past Lee and his staff, then through the woods along Seminary Ridge in search of Longstreet. He therefore missed the triumphant but evanescent moment when General Armistead led what remained of his men over the wall, waving his hat on the point of his sword to urge them on, “his colors cut down by a volley against the bristling line of bayonets,” only to receive a mortal wound. As the Confederates approached the Angle the Federal gunners “switched to their final choice of ammunition—canister. At three hundred yards, the lanyards were jerked; and instantaneously the barrels spit out their contents to complete the slaughter . . . the tremendous flame spurting out of the blazing cannons, grazing the dead and wounded in its fiery path, scorching and igniting their clothes and flesh in the process.” The mass of Confederates who survived canister fired at point-blank range and made it over the wall—a scant handful of them—were enveloped and overwhelmed in moments.

  The Confederate tide ebbed; those men who could fell back in an orderly fashion down the field. “I soon began to meet many wounded men returning from the front,” Fremantle wrote. “At last I came to a perfect stream of them flocking through the woods in numbers as great as the crowds in Oxford Street in the middle of the day. Some were walking along on crutches composed of two rifles, others were supported by men less badly wounded than themselves. . . . They were still under heavy fire; the shells were continually bringing down great limbs of trees, and carrying further destruction among this melancholy procession.” The sight of a regiment in good order marching through the woods gave Fremantle the impression that he was in time to see the main attack, and he remarked breezily to General Longstreet, “I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.” Longstreet, who had dismounted and was sitting on “a snake fence,” looking “perfectly calm and imperturbed,” replied: “The devil you wouldn’t! I would like to have missed it very much; we’ve attacked and been repulsed; look there!”

  For the first time Fremantle saw the long field rising to Cemetery Ridge, covered now with Confederate dead and wounded, small parties of the walking wounded, still under heavy artillery fire, making their way slowly back to the woods where Longstreet sat. The magnitude of the Confederate defeat was clear at once to Fremantle, but he admired Longstreet’s “bulldog” tenacity in the face of disaster, and offered him a drink from his silver flask, which he then presented to Longstreet as a “memorial” of the occasion. Longstreet accepted it gravely.

  Fremantle then rode over to join Lee and his staff, and left perhaps the most vivid description of Lee at his best. “If Longstreet’s conduct was admirable,” he wrote, “that of General Lee was perfectly sublime. He was engaged in rallying and encouraging the broken troops, and was riding about a little in front of the wood, quite alone—the whole of his staff being engaged in a similar manner further to the rear. His face, which is always placid and cheerful, did not show any signs of the slightest disappointment, care or annoyance . . . and I saw many badly wounded men take off their hats and cheer him.” Lee paused to talk to Fremantle—they were still under heavy fire, and Lee suggested to the Englishman that he find a safer place—then said, “This has been a sad day for us, Colonel—a sad day; but we can’t expect always to gain victories.”

  Lee’s eye for detail, as well as his ever-present gentleness of manner, remained undiminished by the day’s tragedy. “When a mounted officer began licking his horse for shying at the bursting of a shell, [Lee] called out, ‘Don’t whip him, Captain, don’t whip him. I’ve got just such another foolish horse myself, and whipping does no good.’” Lee shook hands with soldiers as they passed by him and said over and over again, “All this has been my fault,” and then, “It is I that have lost this fight, and you must help me out of it in the best way you can.” If good behavior under fire in the most trying of circumstances is the measure of a man’s grandeur, then Lee was never grander than in the hours that followed Pickett’s Charge—indeed one of the reasons for the enduring admiration that still surrounds him, in the North as well as the South, is his dignity and self-control in defeat, his total lack of self-pity, and his willingness to accept responsibility. Rudyard Kipling was not yet born—he would be born in 1865, the year of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, Virginia—but two lines in his most famous poem might have been written with Lee in mind:

  If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

  And treat those two imposters just the same . . .

  Exhausted, unwell, heartbroken, Lee rode back and forth in the open on Traveller, an easy
target, unmindful of shot and shell bursting all around him: consoling his men; taking on all the blame for the failure—which was indeed largely his, but how many great commanders have ever said so to their troops?—telling the wounded Brigadier General Pettigrew to seek help in the rear; pausing to ask after the health of Brigadier General Kemper, who had risen in his stirrups, sword drawn, to urge his men on, shouting, “There are the guns, boys, go for them!” making a conspicuous target of himself, and had been shot in the groin; repeating again and again to one and all, “All will come right in the end,” until he was hoarse. Pressed by an immense sadness, Lee did not reach his headquarters and dismount until 1 a.m. on July 4, and stood for a moment, weary, beside Traveller, talking to one of his generals. Then, as he made for his tent, he was heard to whisper to himself, “Too bad! Too bad! Oh, too bad!”

  Although everyone, including Lee, had expected a Federal counterattack, it never came. Meade’s caution had reasserted itself; then too, both sides were taking full measures of their casualties over the last three days: over 23,000 on the Federal side, as many as 28,000 on the Confederate side, for a total between the two armies of over 50,000—the bloodiest three days in American history. Lee had already made the decision to retreat back across the Potomac. Even had he wished otherwise, Lee had no option but to withdraw; his usual practice had been to replenish his supply of ammunition with that captured from the enemy, but this time the army had captured none, and without it he could not fight. He would move back toward Winchester, where he could be resupplied from Richmond, taking with him his wounded, his prisoners, and the long train of supplies and animals captured by Ewell and Stuart in Pennsylvania—rich booty, but no compensation for his defeat, or for the fact that General Pemberton surrendered Vicksburg, with 30,000 men, to Grant on July 4, ceding to the Union control of the Mississippi from its source to the sea, and effectively splitting the Confederacy into two parts.

  The weather turned bad on July 4, preventing Meade from making any attempt to pursue, but turning Lee’s retreat into an ordeal almost as terrible as the fighting had been.

  The next day, refuting the notion that there was any bad feeling between Lee and Longstreet, Lee paused in the pouring rain at Longstreet’s bivouac and told him, “It’s all my fault, I thought my men were invincible.” It was, and remains the most truthful and convincing explanation for his defeat at Gettysburg, and perhaps the most moving.

  CHAPTER 11

  Lee and Grant

  “If I had had Stonewall Jackson with me, so far as man can see, I should have won the battle of Gettysburg.”

  —Robert E. Lee*

  The retreat across the Potomac in torrential rain was an epic story of suffering equal to the battle itself. The Potomac flooded, a rickety bridge across it had to be improvised, and the agonies of the wounded were beyond description. Even the horses, most of them lame for want of shoes and with little feed and forage, were in pitiable condition. Throughout this painful march Lee not only led his army, but set his men an example of resilience, confidence, and devotion to duty. Had he taken control of the battle on the second day in the same spirit, he might well have won it. Faced with defeat, he held the army together and inspired it with his own spirit. A defeated army in full retreat can very easily degenerate into an armed mob, but in the two weeks that followed Gettysburg Lee was praised by North and South. He did not ride ahead, or issue misleading reports, or place the blame on his generals. “I hope,” he wrote to President Davis, “Your Excellency will understand that I am not in the least discouraged, or that my faith . . . in the fortitude of this army, is at all shaken.” Far from bickering with Longstreet, or criticizing Ewell for having failed to take Culp’s Hill, or blaming Stuart for having failed to inform him that Meade had his whole army, not just a portion of it, on Lee’s heels, Lee firmly squelched all attempts to blame anyone but himself, and just as firmly ensured that discipline was maintained and orders were obeyed throughout the ranks. He brought a depleted, ragged, defeated army home, but it was an army still, its fighting spirit unbroken.

  Whatever he may have thought about Longstreet’s performance on July 2, Lee continued to call him “my Old War-Horse,” and once Meade had crossed the Potomac, placed Longstreet and his corps around Culpeper in case Meade mounted an attack on Richmond. He never forgot that his family was also suffering. He was particularly worried about Rooney, his middle son (Brigadier General William Henry Fitzhugh Lee), who had been seriously wounded in the Battle of Brandy Station on June 9. Rooney had been taken to Hickory Hill, the estate of W. F. Wickham, to recuperate, looked after by his wife, Charlotte; his brother Robert Jr., who was on leave; his mother; and two of his sisters, Agnes and Mildred. With a view over the Pamunkey River, Hickory Hill, a plantation of more than 3,000 acres, had been the home of Robert E. Lee’s aunt. Now it was perilously close to the Union lines. Lee, who was usually quick to caution his family against this kind of risk, for once does not seem to have been concerned. He sent no warning, perhaps because he assumed that Rooney, as a wounded officer, would be left alone. If so, he was mistaken. On June 26 the family heard shots from the hickory grove beyond the gates. Robert Jr. ran down to investigate, only to see a Federal cavalry patrol galloping toward the mansion. He ran back to the house to warn his brother, but Rooney was in no condition to move quickly, and since he always paroled wounded Federal officers he believed he was in no danger.

  He was wrong. Having been informed of Rooney’s presence the Federals had come specifically to capture Lee’s son. The Union soldiers carried Rooney out of the house on a mattress as his family watched. He was driven under armed guard “in the ‘Hickory Hill’ carriage,” pulled by Mr. Wickham’s horses, to a cell at Fort Monroe. His brother Rob managed to escape, hiding behind a box hedge in the formal garden; but Rooney would remain a prisoner of war for nine months, first at Fort Monroe and later in New York state. Finally he was exchanged for a Union officer of equal rank held by the Confederates. “I can appreciate your distress at Fitzhugh’s situation,” Lee wrote to his daughter-in-law Charlotte. “I deeply sympathize with it, and in the lone hours of the night I groan in sorrow at his captivity and separation from you. . . . You may think of Fitzhugh and love him as much as you please, but do not grieve over him or grow sad.” Although Rooney was, as his father predicted, well looked after “in the hands of old army officers and surgeons, most of whom, are men of principle and humanity,” Rooney’s children died of scarlet fever during his captivity, and his wife, Charlotte, “wasted away” and died “of a broken heart.”

  Lee was shocked that Rooney had in effect been kidnapped while recovering from his wound. Harsh as the war was, general officers were seldom singled out for such treatment. Lee was also distressed that the capture had been carried out in front of Rooney’s wife and children, and appalled to learn that the Federals had savagely beaten an old family servant, “Uncle William,” in an attempt to find out where the horses were. “I am very sorry for the injuries done the family at Hickory Hill, and particularly that our dear old Uncle William, in his eightieth year, should be subjected to such treatment,” Lee wrote to Mary, urging her “to submit to [God’s] almighty will, whatever that may be,” though Mary was more inclined to blame the Federal government than accept the situation as God’s will.

  This was not the only tragedy to touch Lee’s family. One of the people who played a long and important role in Robert E. Lee’s life was Martha Custis Williams Carter, a cousin of his wife Mary’s, and a distant cousin of his. Markie, as she was called, had lived for long periods of time at Arlington and cared for Mary’s father, George Washington Parke Custis, after the death of his wife. Indeed Markie thought of Arlington as a second home, though she was a northerner and deeply shocked by southern slave keeping and attitudes toward slave keeping—something which even her affection for Lee could not erase. She was serious-minded and deeply religious, but a portrait of her painted at Arlington shows a buxom, smiling, raven-haired young woman, with a mischie
vous expression and beguiling eyes. In the picture she wears a glamorous gown, which bares her shoulders, and a straw hat with a ribbon that matches the pink of her sash, and is shown against a background that is clearly the gardens of Arlington, stretching down to the Potomac River. It is, sadly, a portrait of a world that is about to be destroyed, right down to the sailboat in the distance, soon to be replaced by steamboats belching black smoke. Markie corresponded with Lee from 1844 to his death, but although Lee’s letters to her were mildly flirtatious, as were his letters to all young women, there was nothing even remotely improper about them—the whole Lee family corresponded with Markie, and her letters to him were read aloud. She was a beloved member of the family.

  This correspondence began in 1844 and continued even after the outbreak of war, though Markie and Robert E. Lee were on different sides. Two of her brothers served in the war. One of them, Laurence (“Lolo”), commanded a Union regiment under General McClellan, and in 1862 was briefly placed under arrest, allegedly for displaying too much concern over Mrs. Lee, who at the time found herself living behind Union lines. McClellan quickly released Lolo and wrote to Markie praising his “gallantry and skill,” adding that “Mrs. General Lee,” her daughter Mary, and her daughter-in-law Charlotte were all in Federal hands, but that “they are well & of course will be kindly taken care of.” (It may have been this generosity of spirit that the Lees were counting on when they brought Rooney to Hickory Hill to recuperate, but times had changed by then.)

  Another brother, William Orton Williams, called Orton, was dashing, handsome, and rash. Determined to follow a military career—and very impressed by his distant kinsman Robert E. Lee—Orton managed to secure a commission in the U.S. Army, largely by Markie’s relentlessly lobbying everybody from the president down. Robert E. Lee, still a colonel in the U.S. Army in 1860, also gave the boy a strong recommendation that obtained for Orton a coveted position on General Winfield Scott’s staff in Washington. It was Orton who had ridden to Arlington in May 1861 to warn Mary Lee that the Federal Army intended to occupy her home. Shortly afterward, Orton was placed under arrest for expressing his sympathy for the South, and he was kept under arrest for over a month for fear that he would divulge General Scott’s plans. Having fallen “in love with his jailer’s daughter,” who regarded herself as “engaged” to him, Orton was paroled and after another month allowed to go south, where Lee firmly but tactfully sent him to Tennessee to serve as an aide to General Leonidas Polk.