The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  As the last of them laid the last flower on the bier and the coffin was again closed, a mutilated veteran from Jackson’s army appeared to see the general. Too late, they told him. But he pressed on as if he hadn’t heard them; Jackson would have approved. When one of the marshals stepped in to force him back, the soldier lifted the stump of his right arm and with tears running down his bearded face said through gritted teeth, “By this arm, which I lost for my country, I demand the privilege of seeing my General once more.”

  The governor stopped the proceedings and the soldier was permitted to look on his general one last time.46

  Sallie Putnam took comfort in another thought. “Though dead,” she sighed, “he yet lives—shall ever live.”47

  Jackson’s body started for home the next day, Wednesday, May 13. At every station along the tracks to Lynchburg, mourners brought flowers and silently watched. In Charlottesville all business was suspended and the church bells tolled as the train passed through the town. There were no speeches along the way, no ceremonies, just desolate grief. At Lynchburg the casket was put on the packet boat, the Marshall, to be borne the rest of the way to Lexington by the old James River and Kanawha Canal.48

  As they floated along the canal through the spring afternoon, Henry Douglas perhaps remembered that this was the first time since Jackson left two springs before that he had returned to Lexington. The general had not taken a day of leave in two years. Once when Douglas, wanting leave himself and perhaps having a tryst with a young lady in mind, had suggested tentatively that he had not had a single day off either since entering the army, Jackson had missed the point entirely. “Very good,” he had said, “I hope you will be able to say so after the war is over.”49

  It was the most beautiful time of the year in Lexington. The springtime flowers were abundant—lilacs, lilies of the valley, tuberoses, and calla lilies bloomed in profusion everywhere. At about 6:00 Thursday evening the corps of cadets met the packet, transferred the casket to an artillery caisson, and carried it to their old professor’s bare lecture room, which was just as he had left it, but draped now in mourning. Many of these cadets had listened there to his dull lectures and sniggered at his eccentricities and called him “Old Blue Light.” Now he was a fallen paladin, a military martyr, a saint, the first soldier of the Confederacy, the best of them all, and through the night they stood watches beside his bier and considered it the privilege of their lifetimes.50

  The next day he was carried on the caisson to the church, where he had so often fallen asleep during the sermons, and Reverend White commended him to his final rest. The weeping congregation sang “How Blest the Righteous When He Dies,” and his old minister read from First Corinthians 15, and preached the last sermon. The casket was then borne to the cemetery, to Jackson’s own plot, and the corps of cadets fired the farewell salute over his grave. Anna Jackson looked out over the peaceful Valley that in his day he had rendered so un-peaceable, and thought, How “beautiful for situation.” Her hero-husband was gone, and she must now go home alone.51

  A decade before, Jackson had visited Canada with his young first bride, Ellie, and his sister-in-law, Margaret. On an August evening they had gone up on the Plains of Abraham, and as Jackson approached the foot of the monument to British General James Wolfe he removed his cap, as if in the presence of a sacred shrine. He rose to his tiptoes and his eye flashed with a fiery light his own soldiers would one day see on other battlefields. Overcome with emotion, with his arm he swept the plain and he quoted Wolfe’s dying words.

  “ ‘I die content,’ ” he repeated. Then he said: “To die as he died, who would not die content.”52

  As so he had also died, “a death,” a resolution by the officers and men of the old Stonewall Brigade said, “worthy of his life.”53

  Soon verse would begin to pour out from the verse-ridden times, and one of the more stirring stanzas would key on his own death-bed prediction:

  And men shall tell their children,

  Tho’ all other memories fade,

  That they fought with Stonewall Jackson

  In the old “Stonewall Brigade!”54

  Old Jack’s classmates were amazed at what had become of him. William Montgomery Gardner, who had once considered him unprepossessing, admitted that his later career “was an astonishing revelation to me, and I doubt not it was the same to all of his classmates.”55

  Another fellow cadet of those West Point years shrugged and said he supposed he was “as Ephraim was, ‘like unto a cake unturned’ … a ‘diamond in the rough.’ …”56

  The unflinching cadet from the mountains may not have resolved to be an American phenomenon; he was only doing his duty. But thanks to an all-kind Providence, that is what he had become—in life, and now in death.

  The Dandy

  at the Foot

  of the Class

  It was a stunning midsummer morning, clear and bright, and “all nature in her luxuriant garb seemed wooing peace.”1 Nature was smiling on this July 3 in 1863, even if James Longstreet wasn’t. The time had come to take George Pickett to the crest of Seminary Ridge and show him the dirty job that he must do.

  Longstreet dreaded it. He in fact deplored Lee’s strategy entirely. He hadn’t liked it from the start. He had opposed it as forcibly and vocally as a corps commander dared, nearly to the point of insubordination. But Lee’s mind was made up. “The enemy is there,” he had said, “and I am going to strike him.”2

  Pickett and Longstreet stared across at the Union line on Cemetery Hill. Striking it was a cheerless prospect. The enemy was massed there, across that empty little valley, at the clump of trees where the attack must be made. A skirmish line nearly as heavy as a single line of battle was thrown out all along the federal front. On the acclivity behind, two tiers of artillery frowned and two lines of infantry waited. Beyond, on the crest of the ridge, heavy reserves of infantry were massed in double column.

  A low loose stone wall snaked along sections of the ridge, behind which the Union infantry crouched. In the bottomland between the two ridges, post and rail fences bordered the Emmitsburg road leading out of Gettysburg. It would have to be scaled on the way to the stone wall. From Seminary Ridge where the rebel army would emerge from the cover of the woods, to the Union position across the valley, lay half a mile of starkly open and exposed ground.

  Over this empty, treeless space, within shell and shrapnel range of enemy guns the entire distance, Pickett’s division must march. Even on this beautiful morning before a shot had been fired or a drop of blood spilled, it looked like “an open quêt apens for slaughter, a passage to the valley of death … like a truly ‘forlorn hope’ on an extensive scale.”3

  Longstreet knew that all the way across that valley Pickett’s men would be swept by enfilade fire from a Union battery on Little Round Top, the little mountain on the right. Sharpshooters, artillery, and infantry would pound them from in front, and from God knows where else. Longstreet had little hope for it. His heart was heavy. These brave men were about to be sacrificed in a hopeless charge.4

  It pained him that it had to be Pickett and his division. He and Pickett had served in the same infantry regiment in the old army. In Mexico they had groped together for the scaling ladders at Chapultepec, and when Longstreet was wounded, Pickett had snatched the falling colors and planted them on the castle heights for all to see and cheer. Longstreet was exceedingly fond of this elegant hell-for-leather officer who had graduated at the foot of the West Point class of 1846. In this war Pickett had commanded first a brigade and now a division in Longstreet’s corps, and Longstreet had always favored him. He had ordered his staff to give him all he needed for his division, and sometimes directed them to stay with him “to make sure he did not get astray.”5 Now Longstreet was sending his division to certain destruction—against his own better judgment.

  Pickett didn’t see it that way, however. As he stared across at Cemetery Ridge, he saw that the job would cost lives. He saw the undeniable strength
of the Union line. His division had seen little action at Fredericksburg and had not been at Chancellorsville. Although not at full strength, it was ready, and it was supported by the entire power of that great invincible Southern army led by Robert E. Lee. He was confident he could do it; he felt lucky to have the chance.6

  * * *

  Pickett had traveled far these seventeen years from the foot of the class to a major general’s stars in the Confederate army. From Mexico he had gone to the Indian wars in the Pacific Northwest, where he had built on his reputation as a fighter. A fellow Confederate officer said of him, “Give George Pickett an order and he will storm the gates of hell.”7 Or he would hold those gates if necessary.

  G. Moxley Sorrel, Longstreet’s chief of staff, thought Pickett one of the most singular figures in the Confederate army. He was ordinary enough in size, of medium height and well-built, erect in bearing, always dandily dressed—in ruffles often as not—distinguished and striking with his elegant riding whip.

  “But the head, the hair,” marveled Sorrel, “were extraordinary. Long ringlets flowed loosely over his shoulders, trimmed and highly perfumed; his beard likewise was curling and giving out the scents of Araby.”8

  Looking this way, with his auburn hair cascading in corkscrew ringlets and his entire persona bathed in the headiest of aromas, it was all or nothing, elegance or disaster, with Pickett; for caught in the rain the hair went lank, and the scents of Araby went with the storm.9

  Arthur Freemantle, an officer of the British Coldstream Guards observing the Confederate army about this time, thought him “altogether rather a desperate looking character.”10

  On this morning in early July 1863 when his division was to charge the Union position on Cemetery Hill, Pickett, a widower, was in love. He had fallen “with all the ardor of youth” for the young LaSalle Corbell of Suffolk, a breathtaking beauty half his own age. In their passionate courtship he had made long, often unauthorized night rides to woo her, with galloping returns to duty the next morning. “Carpet-knight doings,” snuffed Sorrel, who didn’t believe they much benefited his division. LaSalle, as much in love as he, called him her soldier and they were to marry in the fall.11

  Socially, this aromatic dandy had always been the soul of courtesy, cheer, and gallantry. He believed that to fight like a gentleman, a man must eat and drink like a gentleman—and presumably love like one. He courted LaSalle with charm and grace, and must have sung her love songs as she had never heard them sung. One friend remembered him from an earlier time when Pickett led his enchanting sister to the piano, there “to flood the house with melody like that of the mocking-bird.”12

  Unlike his tone-deaf friend U. S. Grant, of the Union army, who knew only two tunes—“one was Yankee Doodle. The other wasn’t”13—Pickett was a nightingale. His richly timbred voice soared and resonated. After helping subjugate the northwestern Indians, he learned their languages, translated hymns and national airs, including the Lord’s Prayer, into their dialects and led them in soulful renditions. If LaSalle was to be believed, the Indians loved him, and called him “Hyas Tyee,” “Hyas Kloshe Tyee,” and “Nesika Tyee”—Great Chief, Great Good Chief, and Our Chief.14 He had “married” an Indian woman while in the Pacific Northwest and fathered a son.

  In this present war, so full of irregularities, Pickett was a partner to perhaps one of the choicest ironies of all. The man partly responsible for getting him into West Point, LaSalle would later claim, was Abraham Lincoln, the present president of the United States and commander in chief of the Union armies. Although a Virginian, Pickett was living in Illinois in 1842 with his uncle, Lincoln’s friend and fellow lawyer, Andrew Johnston. It was from there that he had been appointed to the academy by Congressman John G. Stuart, largely, LaSalle insists, at Lincoln’s urging.15

  But now Pickett was on Seminary Ridge, about to lead an epic charge against his benefactor’s army at the little Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg.

  Pickett had left Virginia and LaSalle in June, his division comprising the rear guard of Lee’s army as it invaded Pennsylvania. With him were the brigades of Lewis Armistead, Richard Garnett, and James Kemper. His two other brigades, under Montgomery Corse and Micah Jenkins, had been detained, over his ardent objections, for duty around Richmond and Petersburg. He arrived in Chambersburg on June 27 with 4,700 men, little more than half his full strength.

  When Lee moved the Army of Northern Virginia’s vanguard to Cashtown and then toward Gettysburg on the last day of June, Pickett’s division was left in Chambersburg, with orders to destroy rail depots, workshops, and machinery. He was to follow the rest of the army when Brigadier General John Imboden came up from western Virginia to relieve him as the army’s rear guard. The time in Chambersburg was uneventful, the work was routine, the streets of the city were deserted, and all the liquor was locked in the courthouse under guard. But it wasn’t unpleasant duty. As Sergeant Levin Gayle said, it was summer, he was in a land of milk and honey, and he could “finde cherries a plenty.”16

  Imboden arrived on July 1, and in the late hours of the night Pickett got orders from Longstreet. The battle had been joined at Gettysburg and Lee needed him. So he put his division in motion in the early morning hours of the second, through slumbering Chambersburg and onto the Baltimore Pike. “And away we go againe,” sighed Levin Gayle.17 They marched that day under a vertical and broiling summer sun, over twenty-three long, hot, dusty miles “not conducive to enthusiasm in a pedestrian.”18 As they tramped down the eastern slope of South Mountain they heard ahead the thunder-roll of battle.

  Pickett rode on in advance of his division to report to Longstreet. He sent Colonel Walter Harrison, his inspector general, to inform Lee that they had arrived, and that with two hours’ rest his division would be at his service. Lee thanked Harrison and said, “Tell Gen. Pickett I shall not want him this evening, to let his men rest, and I will send him word when I want them.”19

  The division bivouacked that night four miles from Gettysburg, falling asleep, one soldier said, “to the lullaby of deep reverberations from the battle front”; “little dreaming,” another said, “that upon such lovely eve, such awful morn should rise.”20

  As Pickett’s men slept, Colonel Edward Porter Alexander, acting as Longstreet’s chief of artillery, began rolling guns into line along Seminary Ridge under the light of a glorious moon. By daybreak, 140 cannon pointed from the heights toward the Union position on Cemetery Ridge across the way. A major piece of the awful day was in place.21

  Early in the morning—it was now the third—“while the round red sun was yet balancing atop the mountains toward the east,” Pickett brought his division to Seminary Ridge.22 There, shielded from enemy view by the woods, two to three hundred yards behind Alexander’s line of artillery, Pickett halted his men and waited. His own guns, commanded by James W. Dearing, of whom it was said that the whir of the bullet was the sweetest of all martial music, shouldered into Alexander’s line of artillery opposite the Union left-center.23

  As day broke, the sun lit Seminary Ridge, and the Union soldiers across the valley saw for the first time what the faint and distant rumbling of wagon wheels had signified in the night. One hundred forty pieces of artillery were in place and pointed at them. What did it mean? A cannonade certainly. But when? Followed by what? All they could do as the morning wore on was wait with a quickening sense of disquiet.24

  That’s all anybody on either side could do. On Seminary Ridge the Confederate soldiers knew as well as their Union counterparts that something terrible was about to happen. As Longstreet said, “strong battle was in the air.”25 Colonel Joseph May, Jr., of the Third Virginia, noticed that his troops, generally so merry and fun-loving, had become “as still and thoughtful as Quakers at a love feast.”

  “This news has brought about an awful seriousness with our fellows, Taz,” he said to Colonel Tazwell Patton of the Seventh Virginia.

  “Yes,” Patton agreed, “and well they may be serious if they really k
now what is in store for them. I have been up yonder where Dearing is, and looked across at the Yankees.”26

  Some of the more carefree Confederates found diversion in pelting one another with green apples.27 But Erasmus Williams of the Fourteenth Virginia looked at the long line of Alexander’s massed artillery and took out his case knife and began digging a hole and piling the dirt in front of it. A lieutenant in his regiment leaned against a nearby sapling and watched him dig and laughed.

  “Why Williams, you are a coward,” he said.

  “You may call me what you please,” Williams said, “but when the time comes I will show up all right, and when the artillery begins the hole I am digging will be a good place for me to be in.”

  Williams settled into his makeshift fortification and the lieutenant said, “I am going to stand right up here and witness the whole proceeding.”28

  In places far more exalted than Williams’s little dirt entrenchment, Lee and Longstreet were having a difference of opinion. Lee’s intent was clear. He would hurl Pickett’s division and eight brigades from A. P. Hill’s corps—some twelve thousand men altogether—against the left-center of the Union army on Cemetery Hill, turn its position, and roll up its line. But first he would pound the Federals at the intended point of attack—a clump of trees beyond the stone wall—with his 140 guns. Under the thunder of this fire, he would send his infantry to Cemetery Hill.

  Longstreet had argued instead for throwing the Confederate force between the Union army and Washington, selecting a strong defensive position, and forcing the enemy to attack them. Longstreet’s distaste for assuming the offensive in this invasion had colored his late-starting attack on the Union left the day before—the second day at Gettysburg—which had ended with both armies battered and nothing decided. He entertained even less enthusiasm for the charge on the Union center that Lee contemplated for this third day.29