Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (42 page)

F
OR AN EVENT
which has been the subject of so much relentless historical study, professional and amateur alike, there remain surprisingly large gaps in the record of the Gettysburg battle, and none of them is more peculiar at this juncture than the invisibility of Robert E. Lee on the afternoon of July 1st. Once Lee joined Harry Heth on
Herr Ridge around two o’clock, almost all mention of Lee evaporates.
George Henry Mills of the 16th North Carolina (in Dorsey Pender’s division) saw “Gens. Lee, A.P. Hill, Longstreet and others watching the fighting with their glasses” near the
Cashtown Pike. Just as Pettigrew launched his attack on the
Iron Brigade in
Herbst’s Woods, a soldier in the 52nd North Carolina crossed
Willoughby Run and saw “General Lee … sitting on his horse just across the Run, and we boys cheered him. He raised his hat. It was about 3:15 in the afternoon.”
Willie Pegram, who commanded an artillery battalion in Hill’s corps, was rewarded with a compliment from Lee, which also locates Lee on the west side of the fighting.
Coleman Anderson, acting as a courier for Ewell, found Lee around “4:30 o’clock that afternoon … standing alone on an eminence in an open field, some distance to the right of Heth’s division, with the bridle rein of Traveler thrown over his right arm and looking anxiously through his field glasses at … Cemetery Ridge.”
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Still, even in the absence of a trail of witnesses, it is hard to survey the resounding success and coordination of the late afternoon attack that swept the 1st and
11th Corps off their feet without seeing the hand of Robert E. Lee at work. The first set of attacks that day, by Heth and then by Rodes, had been
thoughtless impulses, embarrassingly uncoordinated, and easily rebuffed by hastily deployed Union forces. Three hours later, after Lee’s arrival, a second series of attacks (beginning with the arrival of
Jubal Early’s division) steps off in perfectly timed harmony and support, and rolls over two Union corps with almost no hindrance. If this does not bear Lee’s thumbprint, there is no knowing what does. Once having driven the Federal infantry off
Seminary Ridge, Lee seems to have expected Powell Hill to keep moving, and to drive the broken refugees through the town and off the flat-topped eminence Lee could see on the horizon. He even sent one of his staffers, Lindsay Long, “to make a reconnaissance of the Federal position,” and we know that at least one order Lee gave was to the chief of his artillery reserve to find “positions on the right” along Seminary Ridge which could “enfilade the valley between our position and the town and the enemy’s batteries next the town” and begin “a flank movement against the enemy in his new position.”

But this was not, after all, the way Lee liked to do business. Instead of allowing his corps commanders to take charge on the field, Lee had been required to take charge
of
them and get them moving properly, and this was not his preferred modus operandi. Hill, who had started the day being surprised by the presence of Federal troops in his path, was now wary of making any more such unanticipated discoveries, and his notion of pressing the fleeing enemy was to allow
Abner Perrin’s brigade to move into the town, “taking position after position of the enemy” until Hill was satisfied they had gone as far forward as they could go with safety. “The want of cavalry had been and was again seriously felt,” Hill later explained. But what he really meant was that he was determined not to make that morning’s mistake a second time in the afternoon, with Lee watching: “Prudence led me to be content with what had been gained.” And after adding that the two divisions of his corps that had borne the brunt of the fighting—Heth’s and Dorsey Pender’s—were “exhausted and necessarily disordered,” Hill allowed the momentum which had carried him over Seminary Ridge to leak away. That Hill had an entire, unengaged division under
Richard Heron Anderson and two uncommitted brigades from Pender’s division, halted back at
Herr Ridge, went unnoticed in Hill’s battle report that fall.
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Not unnoticed, however, by officers in his command. David McIntosh, who commanded an artillery battalion in Hill’s corps, thought it was “almost incomprehensible” that “the Seminary Ridge should not then have been occupied with Confederate artillery to play upon the opposing heights” and give it enough pounding to “have led to an abandonment” of
Cemetery Hill. A surgeon in the 13th South Carolina, writing home to his wife, was sure that “If ‘Old Stonewall’ had been alive and there, it no doubt would have been
done.” Dorsey Pender begged Hill to bring up Anderson’s division, “but neither Anderson nor his Division were anywhere to be found.”
Abner Perrin was unsure whether this was “Gen Hill’s fault” or whether “it may have been the fault of Anderson himself,” but either way, it gave “the enemy during this eventful time” the opportunity to gain “their new position at the Cemetery Hill.” If Hill had added Anderson to the pursuit, “it is more than probable that the whole Yankee force would have been captured.” And so, almost spontaneously, the tongues in Hill’s corps began to wag in criticism. “Hill was a good division commander,” the wise heads were already concluding before the campfires had even been lit, “but he is not a superior corps commander. He lacks the mind and sagacity of Jackson.”
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It has to be said, however, that it was not just “prudence” that led Hill to balk at rushing after the shattered Federal infantry. Between 4:30 and 6:00, the streets and alleys of Gettysburg were filled with a paralyzing accumulation of small gun battles. As the French had learned to their sorrow at Magenta in 1859, the tacticians of the nineteenth century had no workable doctrine that governed street fighting, which is why both attackers and defenders in the Civil War did their best to avoid it. No Confederates moving through Gettysburg were eager to pass by potential knots of Union soldiers hiding in cellars and garrets, lest they find enough courage again to start sniping at Confederates from behind, and so still more rebel soldiers had to be detailed to clear Gettysburg’s houses and shops of concealed Federals.
Albertus McCreary’s family had finally taken refuge in their cellar as the fighting moved down
Baltimore Street, and the cloud had hardly passed over before “the outer cellar doors were pulled open and five Confederate soldiers jumped down among us,” announcing that “we are looking for Union soldiers.” Sure enough, the rebels found “thirteen of our men” in the upper floors of the McCreary house, “some under beds, and one under the piano, and others in closets.” A lieutenant in the 6th Louisiana wrote his brother to describe how “we shot them, bayonetted them, & captured more prisoners than we had men in the brigade.” Three Union officers (one of them from the
Iron Brigade) tried to hide in the pile of store goods and firewood in the
Stoever family’s home on the town diamond, only to be rousted out “after a diligent search.” Even if the Federals surrendered, time was required to round up and disarm them, and then men were needed to escort them to temporary holding pens. As much as Dorsey Pender might have wanted to keep moving through the town, even he had to order the 1st South Carolina “to halt, and go back and take the prisoners out.” Chaplain
J. Marshall Meredith, in Brockenbrough’s Virginia brigade, could hardly move forward into Gettysburg because of the “long and large force of Federal prisoners marching back on the Cashtown road westward.”
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Confederates who could not find hidden Yankees soon turned their attention to other prizes of war.
Liberty Hollinger, on the east side of Gettysburg, remembered that rebels who had satisfied themselves that no Union soldiers were hiding in the Hollinger home proceeded to help “themselves to anything they could find,” and “forced the locks” on her father’s storehouse “and took what they wanted and then ruined everything else.”
Nellie Auginbaugh, who was twenty years old and living with her parents on Carlisle Street near the railroad station, saw a “Union soldier … shot down right in front of Mother’s home.” In a few minutes, “a Confederate came along, and he searched the dead man’s clothes,” only to find “nothing of value” but a “small picture of the dead man and apparently his wife and two little children.” Auginbaugh’s grandfather carefully slipped out the door and rolled the body up in a blanket—only to have another Confederate come along a few minutes later, unroll the blanket, and go “through the pockets, as the other had done.”
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Whether it was prisoners or loot, the constant stopping and starting of Confederate regiments and individuals through the town made the possibility of a concerted advance by Hill’s corps vanish into the dusk. Like their commander, many of Hill’s men were inclined to believe that quite enough of a victory had already been obtained. “We thought the battle of Gettysburg was over,” wrote one soldier in the 16th North Carolina, and on the town diamond a Confederate band set up to play “Dixie.”

And that, at the end of the day, may also have been Robert E. Lee’s conclusion. Thus far, a day which had begun so badly for the Army of Northern Virginia had ended miraculously close to what Lee was hoping for—two entire infantry corps of the Union Army had been wrecked, probably beyond repair, beginning the process whereby Lee hoped to defeat the strung-out Federal pursuers in isolated pieces. Plus, the overcast day really was losing light, and many of his men had marched and fought to the point of exhaustion. If the well-pummeled Yankees were still up on
Cemetery Hill tomorrow morning, he had plenty of fresh troops to move in behind them and finish them off, then turn to face the next dribble of Union infantry who would be laid hurriedly and sacrificially in his path on the road to Baltimore or Washington. He would be sorry that Hill had not gone in for a final smash-up, and irked that he had needed to take so much charge of the fighting into his own hands, and he would also tell
James Longstreet, when Longstreet rode up later in the afternoon, that he was disappointed that Longstreet’s corps was still “three or four miles in our rear.” But he would not press the matter now, when the conclusion could be grasped tomorrow anyway. Perhaps, in the end, it was the great mistake of Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg that, having had to reach past his corps commanders to direct operations that afternoon, he did not
keep reaching past them. Whatever blame attaches to
Ambrose Powell Hill in the twilight of July 1st also attaches to Robert E. Lee for not overriding him.
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Lee would not press Dick Ewell, either, in what would soon become famous as the most sensational Confederate misjudgment of the war, and the next great controversy of the battle after Stuart’s ride, Meade and the Pipe Creek Circular, and Howard’s argument with Hancock. Unlike Hill, Dick Ewell closely followed his two victorious divisions into the town, and by five o’clock Ewell “sat in his saddle under the shade” of a large elm tree outside
McClellan’s Tavern on “the town square of Gettysburg,” chatting “amiably” with the milling throng of jubilant Confederate soldiers in the diamond, and even with “the Federal prisoners gathered about him.” There was still some desultory sniping going on in the town, and “General Ewell was fired on from the houses.” But
Jubal Early then joined Ewell and urged him to go forward and have a look at “the enemy’s position” on
Cemetery Hill “while the troops were reformed & halted on the right & left of the town.” One more all-or-nothing attack against the hill seemed feasible to Ewell, and he ordered Early and
Robert Rodes to prepare whatever parts of their divisions they could get sorted out for an attack.

Two considerations pulled Ewell back. First, Extra Billy Smith, commanding Early’s reserve brigade, sent over an aide to tell Ewell that his pickets out to the east of Gettysburg were reporting that “a heavy force was … moving up in their rear,” and until Ewell could be sure of what this meant, he would be foolish to launch the bulk of his two divisions in the other direction. “I don’t much believe in this,” Ewell added, but he would “suspend [his] movements until I can send & inquire into it.” Ewell’s other second thought was about Powell Hill. Jubal Early reminded him that an attack on Cemetery Hill by his division would have to be funneled through the streets “by flank or in columns so narrow as to have been subjected to a destructive fire from the batteries on the crest of the hill,” and nothing was more fearsome in prospect than infantry, moving in column, heading straight into artillery fire. Perhaps it would be better if Ewell could “communicate with Hill” and see if Hill was also moving to the attack “on the right,” rather than trying to deal with the Federals on the hill all by himself, and he sent off an aide,
James Power Smith, to find Lee and ask whether he “could go forward and take Cemetery hill.” In the meantime, Ewell and Early moved down
Baltimore Street, then over to Stratton Street near the
German Reformed Church, where Ewell could survey the milling Union forces on Cemetery Hill. He became less and less convinced as he moved about the wisdom of an attack on Cemetery Hill. But he did have Allegheny Johnson’s fresh division finally moving within reach, and even if he did nothing with Early’s and Rodes’ divisions, he could send Johnson’s division to “seize & hold the high peak”—Culp’s Hill—which he could see “to our left of Cemetery Hill.”
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