Johnston Pettigrew was among the most deplored of the casualties. On the night of July 13, during a dash by Federal cavalry against the rear guard, a blue trooper inflicted a grievous abdominal wound on Pettigrew. On the long, agonizing journey into Virginia he was the inspiration of his soldiers. “Boys,” he said as he observed their sympathetic distress, “don’t be disheartened; maybe I will fool the doctors yet.” At Bunker Hill, on July 17, he expired. For none who fought so briefly in the Army of Northern Virginia was there more praise while living or more laments when dead.29
Curiously similar to Johnston Pettigrew’s was the fate of Dorsey Pender. He passed unscathed through the hard fighting of July 1, and on the afternoon of the second, while inspecting his divisional line on Seminary Ridge, he was struck on the leg by a fragment of shell. The wound manifestly was serious, but Pender had been hit so often that he could not believe this injury mortal. Regretfully he turned over the command to James H. Lane and undertook in an ambulance the long journey back to Virginia. At length he reached Staunton, but by that time infection had spread. Amputation became necessary on July 18. He never rallied from the operation. Pender’s death deepened the disappointments of Gettysburg. General Lee was quoted as saying that Dorsey Pender was the most promising of the younger officers in the army.30
Hood had been hit severely in the arm by a shrapnel shot. He realized that he could not keep the field and called immediately for his senior brigadier, E. M. Law, and for his surgeon. At first there was fear he would lose the arm, but safe in a Charlottesville hospital his comrade Wade Hampton was able to write: “He is doing well, and his arm will be saved. All he needs now is good nursing, together with cheerful company and generous living….” Although Hood’s wounded arm was never again to have its full strength, he was not to be counted with the dead or the invalided. Nor was Hampton, though his wounds, too, were severe. He had to admit that much: “… I have been handled pretty roughly, having received two saber cuts on the head—one of which cut through the table of my skull—and a shrapnel shot in my body, which is there yet. But I am doing well and hope in a few days to be able to go home.”31
If Hampton and Hood could be regarded as temporarily absent, the fate of Isaac Trimble was uncertain. In the charge on the afternoon of the third he fell with so severe a leg wound that amputation was necessary. He had to be left in the hands of enemies, some of whom had for him a vindictive hate as an alleged “bridge burner” of 1861 in Maryland.32 None could say when, if ever, he would resume his command. The same was true of J. J. Archer, though he had fewer personal enemies than Trimble delighted to count. James L. Kemper might hope for early exchange if he survived his injury. The remaining wounded general officers—Harry Heth, A. M. Scales, A. G. Jenkins, J. B. Robertson, G. T Anderson, and John M. Jones—would be back on duty before many weeks.
Field officers had been slaughtered. Seven of the nine colonels, lieutenant colonels, and majors of Davis’s brigade were killed or wounded in the first day’s battle; every field officer of Scales’s brigade, save one, fell in that action along with their general. Four of Wilcox’s colonels were wounded on the second day. When the charge of July 3 ended, Archer’s brigade had only two unwounded field officers, Pettigrew had one, Davis had none. Regimental command of Pickett’s division virtually was destroyed. Five colonels were killed, two mortally wounded, and five received injuries from which they recovered. Three lieutenant colonels were killed; four others, commanding regiments, were wounded. Of all the field officers in the fifteen regiments of Pickett’s men, one only, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph C. Cabell, escaped unhurt.
Many regiments marched back to Virginia under captains. Garnett’s brigade was commanded by a major, Tige Anderson’s and James Archer’s by lieutenant colonels. Some of these losses never were made good. As late as the autumn of 1864 regiments of the First Corps were suffering in discipline because so many field officers had been wounded and left on the field at Gettysburg.33
After the army rested a few days in Virginia, and the uncertainties regarding the fate of some of the missing officers was removed, a major general had to be named in succession to Dorsey Pender. It was not necessary to select another officer of like rank to take the place of Isaac Trimble because he might be exchanged, and was without a division anyway. New brigadiers had to be found, if possible, to take the places of Semmes, Barksdale, Armistead, Garnett, and Pettigrew. Decision might wait, for a time, as respected Archer and Kemper, both prisoners of war. In Extra Billy Smith’s place a competent man was imperative. Otherwise a once-splendid brigade might be ruined. That made six brigadiers. As it was manifest that O’Neal could not succeed to Rodes’s old brigade, a seventh brigadier was needed there. If an eighth could be found, Iverson might be given some other permanent duty. One division commander, then, and at least eight new brigadiers were needed.
Scrutiny of the record of the colonels who passed through the red fury of the battles of July showed four infantrymen only who could be promoted confidently and at once. One of these was Eppa Hunton, colonel of the 8th Virginia, Garnett’s brigade. Hunton, in his fortieth year and by profession a lawyer, had been in the service since the outbreak of hostilities and, after Sharpsburg, had been recommended by the other colonels of the brigade as a successor to Pickett, in preference to Garnett, when Pickett was promoted. Now the advancement earned by Hunton could be given him without conflict or embarrassment. As of August 3 he was appointed.
Another automatic promotion, so to say, was that of Benjamin G. Humphreys, colonel of the 21st Mississippi, Barksdale’s brigade. Humphreys had been Barksdale’s mainstay and was well tested. He was fifty-four and therefore among the older colonels, but he had spent more than a year at West Point before he and other cadets were dismissed for pranks on Christmas Eve, 1826. As a planter and lawmaker he had shown capacity. His army record was clean. Promotion, which was as logical as it had been long delayed, was awarded him August 14.
In Rodes’s old brigade, once O’Neal was passed by, the man qualified for promotion by his fine conduct at Gettysburg was Colonel Cullen A. Battle of the 3rd Alabama. He and his regiment had been detached from O’Neal’s brigade before the advance of July 1, and at the crisis of the fighting he had joined Ramseur and fought fiercely. Battle’s previous record being on parity with his furious advance on Seminary Ridge, he was promoted brigadier general on August 25—a vigorous, hard-hitting man of thirty-eight, a lawyer and a politician but able and self-taught in the school of war.
The only other senior colonel who could be advanced to fill a vacancy was Goode Bryan of the 16th Georgia. In his case the vacancy was not in his brigade, Wofford’s, but in that of another Georgia brigade, Semmes’s of the same division, McLaws’s. There was apparently no complaint that the commanding general “went outside” the brigade in Bryan’s advancement. No doubt the reason was the fact that he was a graduate of West Point and accounted a regular. As far as Lee could, he applied the rule that professional soldiers could be appointed to command without consideration of the state of their birth and without regard to seniority. This rule never was formulated legally but it often was invoked.
When these four—Hunton, Humphreys, Battle, and Bryan—were named, the list of eligibles was exhausted. Several colonels of late commissions were abler soldiers than the ranking field officers of their brigades, perhaps, but law and regulations forbade their promotion over their seniors. It might be assumed, optimistically, that future battles would show merit that had not previously been displayed. Some captured officers might be exchanged. Wounded veterans might return. Until one or another of these things happened, the grim truth was written on the army roster. As of August 31, two of Pickett’s brigades, two of Hood’s, one of Rodes’s, one of Dick Anderson’s, and two of Heth’s, a total of eight infantry brigades, were without permanent commanders of appropriate rank.
Command of the Field-Brockenbrough-Mayo brigade was resolved by the promotion of Henry Harrison Walker, a West Pointer of the class of
1853 who as lieutenant colonel of the 40th Virginia had been wounded at Gaines’ Mill. Recovering from a long illness, Walker was sent to Lee and assigned to the command of Field’s, the brigade with which he was serving when wounded. The case of Alfred Iverson was handled in the most considerate manner. There must have been clamor against him in his North Carolina brigade and a demand for the appointment of a native of the state. He was transferred for a time to Nicholls’s brigade. Later in the year, Iverson quietly was ordered to Georgia to organize the cavalry there.
There could be no temporizing with the command of Pender’s division. None of the brigadiers of the division were available. McGowan was absent, wounded; Lane and Scales were recent appointees; Edward L. Thomas was a capable officer, but as he commanded the Georgia brigade in a division that included two North Carolina brigades and one South Carolina brigade, his advancement, said Lee, might “create dissatisfaction.”34 Trimble was wounded and a prisoner. One or another of the excellent young cavalrymen or artillerists might have been almost as vigorous as Pender, but the line between the infantry and the other arms was so sharply drawn that promotion from one to the other was rare and provocative of discontent.
In the eyes of Lee, the best man available for the vacancy was Cadmus Wilcox of Anderson’s division, who was recommended a fortnight after Pender died of his wound. Davis’s acceptance of the recommendation was prompt and unqualified, and on August 13, Wilcox was appointed major general. Among his associates the choice was a popular one. Every officer of rank knew of Wilcox’s fight at Salem Church. He had been for twenty-one years a cadet and then an officer in the United States and Confederate armies. Off duty he was genial and informal, on duty precise and insistent on precision. He might not rise above the rank of major general; he might not be brilliant as a divisional chief; but he had earned that promotion at Salem Church. In all the army’s battles he had been dependable and by every campfire he had been a gentleman.
Such was the reorganization of the infantry, best described as incomplete, partial—grim proof that attrition of command now exceeded renewal through the school of experience. The Army of Northern Virginia recrossed the Potomac one year to the day from the date of Jackson’s movement toward Gordonsville after the battles around Richmond. One year earlier the great offensive in the direction of the enemy’s country was beginning; now it was ending. Run the eye down the roster of the army that marched toward Second Manassas and as it came wearily back from Gettysburg:
Of Longstreet’s former Right Wing, the commander now was lieutenant general and next in rank to Lee.
Dick Anderson’s division: Armistead, dead; Mahone and Wright, on duty with the army.
McLaws’s division: Its commander still on duty; Kershaw, present; Howell Cobb, transferred; Semmes, dead; Barksdale, dead.
David Jones’s division: The division no longer in existence; Jones, dead; Toombs, resigned; Drayton, sent elsewhere; Tige Anderson, wounded.
Longstreet’s own division: Wilcox, promoted; Pryor, deprived of troops; Featherston, transferred; Kemper, wounded and a prisoner; Micah Jenkins, detached; Pickett, promoted.
Whiting’s division: Its commander on coast defense duty at Wilmington; Hood, promoted but wounded; Law, with his brigade; Shanks Evans, back in the Carolinas.
Of Jackson’s Left Wing, the great commander dead.
Jackson’s own division: Winder, dead; Taliaferro, on other duty; Colonel W. S. H. Baylor, dead; Starke, dead.
Powell Hill’s division: Its leader a lieutenant general. His brigadiers: Branch, dead; Pender, dead; Gregg, dead; Archer, captured; Field, still incapacitated; Thomas, with the troops.
Harvey Hill’s division: Its commander transferred to North Carolina; Ripley, returned to South Carolina; Rodes, promoted; Garland, dead; George B. Anderson, dead; Colquitt, sent elsewhere.
Ewell’s division: Maimed Dick Ewell, corps commander; Lawton, transferred; senior colonel Marcellus Douglass, dead; Trimble, twice wounded, promoted, now a prisoner; Early, a major general; Harry Hays, at his usual post.
In short, of the general officers of infantry during that year, one had died of disease and ten of wounds. In addition, Tom Cobb and Franklin Paxton, promoted, had been killed before the advance into Pennsylvania. Of the ten transfers and two resignations, nine and possibly ten had been welcome to the commanding general because the men were found incompetent or mediocre or troublesome.35 Two other promoted general officers, Iverson and Colston, had been tried and found wanting. One, John R. Jones, had left the army under charges. Another, Francis Nicholls, probably had been incapacitated permanently for duty in the field.
In July 1863 six of the nine infantry divisions were under officers who had not commanded them in July 1862. Five—five only—of the thirty-eight infantry brigades were led by men who had held the rank of brigadier general twelve months previously. The surviving commanders of Gettysburg were a new army, without a Jackson. Lee’s words of May, after the death of Stonewall, had grayer, somber meaning: “We must all do more than formerly.”
CHAPTER 28
Challenges for Longstreet, Hill, and Stuart
1
THE CAVALRY ARE RESHUFFLED
By the third of August, all the Confederate infantry were south of the Rapidan. This withdrawal, as always, was covered by the cavalry. Their absence during the Pennsylvania campaign had been much discussed. Among those officers who realized how the army had groped in the dark while Stuart was riding to the Susquehanna there was disappointment over his conduct “and a disposition to hold him strictly to account.”
To the charge that he should have been in front of the army on July 1, Stuart replied in his report that Albert Jenkins’s men had been selected as the advance guard of the army and numerically were adequate for the mission. If, said Stuart, “the peculiar functions of cavalry with the army were not satisfactorily performed in the absence of my command, it should rather be attributed to the fact that Jenkins’s brigade was not as efficient as it ought to have been, and as its numbers (3,800) on leaving Virginia warranted us in expecting.”
In Lee’s report the statement was made that Stuart’s crossing of the Potomac between the Federal army and Washington was “in the exercise of the discretion given him.” With equal candor, Lee recorded that Stuart was “instructed to lose no time in placing his command on the right of our column as soon as he should perceive the enemy moving northward.” Lee wrote further, “The movements of the army preceding the battle of Gettysburg had been much embarrassed by the absence of the cavalry.” This was the measure of official criticism visited on Stuart. The full measure of historical criticism did not come in time to hurt his pride, though it impaired his fame. Jeb’s worst shortcoming, ignored at the time, was his absence on the morning of July 2 when the adoption of a sound battle plan depended on careful reconnaissance of the Federal left.1
Stuart was busy with a reorganization of his forces. The task was different this time. Imboden had angered Lee by remaining in Maryland. Albert Jenkins’s men had shown their inexperience in fighting of the sort familiar to the veterans of Jeb’s command. Beverly Robertson had been slow in moving from the positions he had been left to defend in the Blue Ridge; not until July 3 did he join Lee. During the retreat from Pennsylvania, Robertson had aroused Stuart’s wrath by not holding a pass entrusted to him.
In contrast, all the brigadiers who had accompanied Stuart had done admirably. Colonel John R. Chambliss, Jr., leading the brigade of the wounded Rooney Lee, showed well enough to remain temporarily in that place. In late June, recuperating at Hickory Hill, Rooney had been swept up by a Federal raiding party and was awaiting exchange. Calbraith Butler, Williams Wickham, Tom Rosser, Pierce Young, Lawrence Baker—all these colonels deserved promotion. Lunsford L. Lomax, a West Pointer and a former officer in East Tennessee, had been brought back to Virginia and assigned to the 11th Virginia as colonel. He evidently was of the material of higher command.
When Jeb decided to get men promoted he usuall
y found a way. He convinced the commanding general that the existing brigades were too large. Fitz Lee had five regiments and one battalion; Rooney Lee, five regiments; Hampton, three regiments and three legions; Jones, four regiments and one battalion; Jenkins, three regiments and two battalions. Lee wrote President Davis on August 1 to express his belief that three full regiments or four, if weak, were as large a cavalry command as one man could direct. On this basis, he explained, the cavalry would include seven brigades. These should be divided into two divisions, at the head of which should be major generals.
For the command of one of these newly organized divisions Lee recommended Wade Hampton, who “deserves [promotion] both from his service and his gallantry.” Fitz Lee was recommended for the other division. Of him the commanding general said, “I do not know of any other officer in the cavalry who has done better service.” Two vacancies would thus be created. By relieving Robertson a third man could be advanced. Reduction of the size of the brigades would make possible the selection of a fourth brigadier. Lee proposed that Calbraith Butler succeed Hampton, that Williams Wickham take Fitz Lee’s command, that Lawrence Baker have a brigade built on Robertson’s command, and that another of the reorganized brigades go to Lunsford Lomax. These were appointed as Lee recommended. The average age of all these men was thirty-three. Two of the brigadiers and one of the major generals were twenty-seven.2
The real triumph of this reshuffle was that the promotion of Hampton and Fitz Lee had been arranged in a manner that did not aggravate the rivalry that always was suspected but never was avowed. Stuart, knowing the fine qualities of both men, sought by praising them in his report to avoid offense to either. The commanding general had put their names in the same sentence proposing their promotion to major general. All this care had been repaid. Both men were satisfied.
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