Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (72 page)

That left, of course, Powell Hill, and Lee now rode over to Hill’s headquarters near the seminary to brief him. “I was directed,” wrote Hill, “to hold my line with Anderson’s division … and to order Heth’s division”—now commanded by Johnston Pettigrew as a result of Heth’s head wound on July 1st—“and [James H.] Lane’s and [Alfred] Scales’ brigades of Pender’s division, to report to Lieutenant General Longstreet as a support to his corps in the assault on the enemy’s lines.” Hill impulsively offered Lee “my whole Army corps,” but Lee declined, since “what remains of your corps will be my only reserve.” Hill would probably have been more content if he could have actually sent Dorsey Pender to join Pickett, but Pender had been wounded by an errant shell on the evening of July 2nd, and a ragged splinter “about two inches square” had cut into Pender’s left thigh. It did not seem life-threatening at the moment (in fact, once Pender was evacuated to Staunton after the battle his femoral artery burst; the surgeons tried to eliminate the threat by amputating the leg on July 18th, but Pender died). Still, Pender was certainly in no shape to direct an attack, so his division was given a new commander in the shape of the voluble—and conveniently available—
Isaac Trimble.
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And then there were arrangements for the artillery to be made, which Lee left in Longstreet’s hands as the officer responsible for directing the attack. Longstreet, in turn, called in his artillery chief,
James Walton, and his favorite, Porter Alexander, and told them “that we would renew the attack early in the morning.” Walton would continue to oversee the corps artillery, but Alexander was “an officer of unusual promptness, sagacity, and intelligence,” and Longstreet would use Alexander in a special staff role, not unlike the one Meade had devised for Hancock on July 1st. Alexander had already guessed
that the morning of July 3rd would bring some renewal of the fighting, and he had been requisitioning ammunition and positioning portions of Longstreet’s corps artillery reserve since midnight. In addition to the thirty-four guns of the corps reserve, he would be able to call on the division artillery battalions of Pickett and
Lafayette McLaws for another thirty-eight guns, and could expect support for the attack from Powell Hill’s batteries as well, including two deadly Whitworth rifles which had been run through the blockade from England, and which were the proud property of Powell Hill’s artillery reserve. Counting every gun which Alexander and the other corps artillery chiefs could bring to bear, there may have been as many as 171 muzzles pointed at
Cemetery Ridge.
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But bringing these forces to bear on Cemetery Ridge would take time. Lee’s word to Ewell was to expect an attack “at daylight of the third, by Longstreet,” and Porter Alexander likewise had the impression that Longstreet would have everything ready to begin by eight o’clock, “perhaps earlier.” But action by Longstreet depended on Pickett, and if there was one thing George Pickett could be relied upon for, it was unreliability. Born in 1825, Pickett was charming, talkative, self-confident—and indolent. He was the embodiment of
Henry Adams’ estimate of the
Virginia ruling class: “He had … the Virginian habit of command and took leadership as his natural habit,” and could be, for a while, “the most popular and prominent young man in his class.” The problem was that “no one knew enough to know how ignorant he was; how childlike … He was simply beyond analysis; so simple that even the simple New England student could not realize him.” Exasperated with their son’s lack of spark, Pickett’s parents wangled an appointment for him to West Point, where he graduated dead last in the class of 1846, and only five behavioral demerits shy of expulsion.

As a lieutenant in the
Mexican War, Pickett distinguished himself leading the charge that breached the defenses of Churubusco, and snatched up the colors of the 8th U.S. Infantry (from the hands of no less than a wounded James Longstreet) and planted them on the ramparts of Chapultepec. Apart from those moments, Pickett’s career was a blank. His wife died in childbirth in 1851, along with the child, and when he was posted to the Washington Territory he married a Yakima woman, fathered a son, triggered an international incident over an island in Puget Sound, and in 1861 abandoned them all to take up a commission as a captain of infantry in the new provisional army of the Confederacy. He proposed to a Virginia girl, LaSalle Corbell, who was eighteen years his junior (he married her in September 1863), and spent more time trying to play the part of “a Virginia slave-baron … proud in bearing, head lifted in arrogance” than in actual combat. Whatever moments he could spare from self-adornment were devoted to the neglect of his duties, and he was so little good as an officer that Longstreet had to assign staffers to Pickett
to explain things “very fully; indeed sometimes stay with him to make sure he did not get astray.” Longstreet, however, was also Pickett’s indulgent angel, and was “exceedingly fond” of him. Pickett (according to LaSalle Pickett) had stepped up to supervise the funeral arrangements for Longstreet’s children after their deaths in 1862, and generosity of that order, even if accompanied by a certain dimness of the intellect, is enough to cover a multitude of mediocrity. The only officer on record as praising Pickett as “the best infantry soldier developed on either side” seems to have been George McClellan.
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Robert E. Lee was not nearly so indulgent, even if Pickett was a
Virginian. When Pickett took over command of Longstreet’s old division in the fall of 1862, his performance made so little impression on Lee that Pickett was soon packed off (with his division) to fend off a Federal threat to Richmond from south of the James River “and there await further orders.” He unpleasantly impressed one of his colonels,
Eppa Hunton, who thought “his example to his soldiers was exceedingly bad.” The two brigades of the
Army of Northern Virginia which Lee grudgingly allowed Secretary of War Seddon to keep near Richmond during the invasion of Pennsylvania—
Micah Jenkins’ and
Montgomery Corse’s—were peeled away from Pickett’s division. This left Pickett with only three brigades—under
Lewis Armistead,
James L. Kemper, and
Richard Garnett—none of which had ever fought alongside one another.

Each of the brigade commanders, in turn, had a question mark over their heads. Although all three were Virginians, Kemper was a politician, not a soldier; Garnett had been humiliated by accusations of cowardice by Stonewall Jackson in 1862; and Armistead may have been the weakest reed of all. Although raised in a military family (his father and four uncles fought in the
War of 1812), Armistead was bounced out of West Point, not once but twice, and it took some political strong-arming to get him a commission as a second lieutenant in the 6th U.S. Infantry in 1839. His service in the
Mexican War was undistinguished, and his parting from the army in 1861 to join the Confederacy was marred by the pain of having to bid farewell to his longtime friend
Winfield Scott Hancock. “Hancock, good-bye,” Armistead lamented, “you can never know what this has cost me.” Armistead took command of the 57th Virginia, and rose to brigade command in time for the fighting on the Peninsula in 1862. But his performance was lackluster, and soldiers complained that he preferred “saying ‘Go on boys’ but has never said ‘come on’ when we are going into a fight.” During the
Maryland Campaign in 1862, he was relegated to provost marshal duties, and missed both Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville.
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When Longstreet’s corps marched east from Chambersburg on July 1st, Pickett’s division was left behind to complete the humdrum task of “the destruction of a
railroad near Chambersburg by piling up the wooden ties
and kindling them into huge fires, on which the iron rails were heated and bent.” All of this changed when Longstreet sent off orders to Pickett to “move up to Gettysburg as rapidly as possible” late in the afternoon of July 1st. The orders did not reach Pickett until one in the morning of July 2nd, and though Longstreet’s courier believed that “there was not ten minutes’ time consumed” by Pickett in rousing his staff and mounting up, the entire division could not have been in motion much before three o’clock. The distance to be covered between Chambersburg and Gettysburg was, unlike on July 1st, choked by backward-moving wagons, ambulances, and the general backwash of wounded men, supply clerks, prisoner details, and sutlers, and all under “a burning July sun.” But Pickett’s men were in fine fettle. “Officers and men were alike inspired with the greatest confidence in our ability to defeat the enemy anywhere … and never … in better fighting trim and spirit.” And the news from up ahead was exciting: a quartermaster passing Pickett’s men whooped, “Been fighting for two days—driving the Yankees all the time—got 6000 prisoners already—hurrah for Lee!”
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The question was,
How soon could they get there?
“On the march over
South Mountain” and “passing through the small hamlets of Cashtown and Seven Stars,” men in the 7th Virginia could “plainly” hear “the roar of Longstreet’s battle of that evening”—which meant that, since these Virginians were in the lead brigade of Pickett’s column, it is unlikely that the van of the division could have reached Gettysburg before darkness. Pickett himself may have ridden ahead and arrived at Gettysburg as early as three in the afternoon on July 2nd, but by nightfall the bulk of his division was still strung out for miles to the west. Lee might have believed, when he met Longstreet “at sunrise” that morning, “that General Pickett would soon report to me.” But portions of Pickett’s division were still arriving at Gettysburg “about sunrise morning of the 3rd.” Fitzgerald Ross, the Anglo-Austrian hussar and observer, had been up and “riding over the battlefield of yesterday … when Pickett’s division of three brigades … passed us,” which would put Pickett’s arrival much later than “sunrise.” Pickett himself did not report to Longstreet until “about seven o’clock,” with the as yet unfulfilled promise “that his troops would soon be upon the field.”
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None of this prevented the postwar hyenas from asserting that Longstreet had once again indulged in self-centered foot-dragging, delaying another attack which would otherwise have succeeded, and sabotaging the possibilities for Confederate victory at Gettysburg. The first witness was Lee himself, in his official report, which noted obliquely that “General Longstreet’s disposition were not complete as early as expected.”
Jubal Early was the next on the witness stand in 1872, just as obliquely suggesting that Longstreet had been fully as tardy in launching his attack on July 3rd as he had been on July
2nd, while
John Brown Gordon was more explicit: “It now seems certain that impartial military critics, after thorough investigation, will consider … as established … that General Lee ordered Longstreet to attack at daybreak on the morning of the third day, and that he did not attack until two or three o’clock in the afternoon, the artillery opening at one.” In time, even men who made the attack would point their fingers at Longstreet.
Eppa Hunton, the colonel of the 8th Virginia, thought “it is pretty well established that President Davis wanted to court-martial Longstreet” after Gettysburg, but was dissuaded by Lee because of the dissension which would be raised by the “large number of friends in the army” Longstreet had. “Pickett’s men could have gone into battle on the previous evening, when they reached Gettysburg,” reasoned a veteran of the 1st Virginia; but, added one of Pettigrew’s staffers, since Longstreet “had little heart for the second day’s fight,” it was not surprising that “he had none at all for the third day’s; and to this cause, without seeking any other, may be traced its failure.”
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Longstreet only fouled his own nest when he tried to defend his disagreement with Lee. “Never was I so depressed as upon that day,” he wrote in 1876. “I felt that my men were to be sacrificed, and that I should have to order them to make a hopeless charge.” People who were happy to take him at his word converted that admission into prima facie evidence that Longstreet had delayed the attack as long as he dared, somehow hoping that it could be canceled. Hence, by failing to move on Lee’s schedule, and coordinate his attack with a renewed assault on
Culp’s Hill, Longstreet had thrown away the best chance for its success.

But if Longstreet was somehow in violation of Lee’s wishes, Lee certainly showed no evidence of it at the time. Men up and down the line saw “Gens. Lee and Longstreet on foot, no aids, orderlies or couriers, fifteen or twenty steps apart, field glasses in hand … stopping now and then to take observations … arranging, as we soon found out, for the famous charge of Pickett’s division”—and all without any sign of impatience or bad feeling. Others saw “Gen’l Lee and Col. W. H. Taylor” ride “near our lines” and “spread out a map on a stump and were looking over it when Gen’l Longstreet joined them and … appeared to be holding a council of war as they had sentinels thrown around the group of officers.”

Longstreet might have been reluctant to initiate an attack on July 3rd, but that is far from being the same thing as deliberately refusing to implement it. “It is all wrong,” he told the chief of Hood’s division artillery, “but we will have [to do] it.” Longstreet frankly told Lee that “his command would do what any body of men on earth dared do,” even if it was still true that “no troops could dislodge the enemy from their strong position.” In fact, what impressed Porter Alexander was the care with which Longstreet gave orders for the preliminary
artillery bombardment. “It was not meant simply to make a noise, but to try & cripple” the opposing Federal artillery, “to tear him limbless, as it were.” And only if we fly in the face of repeated testimony which puts the arrival of Pickett’s division well after sunup on the 3rd can we imagine that it was James Longstreet who made an early morning attack out of the question.
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This does not necessarily mean that Longstreet’s objections were correct, or that some kind of extended flanking movement would necessarily have succeeded. In retrospect, the kind of head-down, full-in-front attack which became Pickett’s Charge wears all the appearance of folly that over-the-top assaults acquired on the Western Front half a century later. But 1863 was closer on the clock of war technology to Waterloo than the Somme, and even though Robert E. Lee was not a man to offer arcane precedents from military history to justify the straight-on frontal infantry attack, he had several lying easily to hand over the previous decade. At the Alma in September 1854, Lord Raglan sent forward four divisions of infantry, numbering about 20,000 men, in an enormous double line of battle two miles long. They were compelled to attack across 4,000 yards of uneven terrain, including the knee-deep moat formed by the sluggish river Alma, ascend the steep slopes of Kourgan Hill and Telegraph Hill, drive off 14,000
Russian infantry on the top, and capture a series of “earthwork batteries, containing 24 and 32-pounders … supported by field-pieces and howitzers.” It cost Raglan 353 dead and 1,612 wounded out of his attacking force, but the Russians were not only driven back, but driven away in “such a confusion as no person ever saw.” The same tactics had won the day for the French at Magenta and Solferino in 1859, to the point where the defeated
Austrians dropped rifle training from their drill regimen and concentrated on
stosstaktik
—storming forward with the
bayonet. If Lee needed a rationale for the attack on July 3rd, he did not have far to look for it, Longstreet’s objections notwithstanding.
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