Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (15 page)

Caught behind in the initial contact, Harry Heth had taken every precaution against a counterattack by the enemy. His division also stood in strong line of battle for an advance if that became indicated. Beyond that he plainly did not know what to do. Anxiously he surveyed the scene, where sharp-shooters blazed away during the uncertain lull, and tried to reach a decision.

The shoes in Gettysburg forgotten, Heth concentrated on that part of his orders which (properly the function of Stuart’s cavalry) concerned reconnaissance. There was no doubt that he had found the enemy, though what proportion of the Army of the Potomac was there he could not even guess.

It would be reckless to push against those smoke-veiled woods again without the support of Pender, who was now hurrying his four brigades from A. P. Hill’s old division over the turnpike from Cashtown. Besides, there was the other part of Heth’s orders which cautioned against bringing on a general engagement. In his dilemma, Harry Heth, a brigadier one month before, became unhappily aware that he was commanding general on a strange field.

With what turned out to be the wisdom of discretion. General Heth did what he had done as a brigadier in Hill’s division: he waited for A. P. Hill and orders.

5

Hill had stayed in camp at Cashtown, through which Pender’s division had passed and where the men of Anderson’s division were streaming down from the mountain pass. The firing seven miles away came clearly to the sick man, and the roll of artillery seemed all out of proportion to a “feeling-out” of the enemy. Heth had sent back no information about what he had stirred up, and Hill was anxious as to how his corps would perform in its first encounter with the enemy.

In the midst of Hill’s pondering, General Lee and his staff galloped down the mountain road into the village. Lee had been proceeding leisurely with Longstreet in the direction of Cashtown, where he planned to establish headquarters, when the sound of heavy firing had sent him hastening through the mountain pass.

The commanding general, mounted on his gray horse, Traveler, was finding it difficult to keep his composure. While his outward calm was impressive, he was clearly suppressing anxiety and excitement as he reined in and asked A. P. Hill what the firing meant.

Hill could only say that he was wondering himself, for Heth had orders not to develop an action. He would go himself to find out. Weakly he mounted his horse and advanced along the turnpike, which became increasingly crowded with ambulances moving up, wounded and stragglers limping back, and Pender’s veteran brigades pushing ahead toward the sound of the firing.

Lee showed his desperation for information by summoning Dick Anderson, in whose competence he placed reliance. Anderson’s division was then passing over the street where, for a short space, the turnpike became Cashtown, and he confessed that he had no notion of what was going on. He knew only that General Hill had ordered him to hurry toward the scene of action.

In the mountain roads behind them, two of Longstreet’s divisions were held up by the passage of Ewell’s wagons. At Chambersburg, Pickett was just being relieved of rear-guard duty by the appearance of Imboden’s cavalry. These raiders had finished their personal foraging and flank duty, but the belatedness of their arrival prevented Pickett’s three brigades from figuring in whatever action was developing. On other roads Ewell’s three divisions were pushing toward Cashtown or Gettysburg without urgency. It was not a situation in which to open a battle. Yet plainly it was the volume of full-scale fighting that rolled back from the farmland to the east.

Sitting on his gray horse, General Lee at last admitted in words his apprehension over Stuart’s absence.“I cannot think what has become of Stuart,” he said to Anderson. “I ought to have heard from him long before now. He may have met with some disaster, but I hope not.”

Modest Anderson remained silent.

Lee, his dark eyes staring into the distance, spoke aloud his thoughts. “In the absence of any reports from him, I am in ignorance as to what we have in front of us here. It may be the whole Federal army, it may be only a detachment. If it is the whole Federal army, we must fight a battle here.”

He seemed to regard the prospect with foreboding, for his final remark sounded a defensive note unusual in Lee. He murmured: “If we do not gain a victory, those defiles and gorges which we passed this morning will shelter us from disaster.”

Then, as if to shake off his apprehensions by movement, Lee nudged his horse impatiently ahead, out of the village. Once on the turnpike, with his staff following, he urged Traveler into a gallop.

The small cavalcade had covered five miles toward the deepening sound when they passed between the ranks of Pender’s troops deployed for action. Ahead Lee saw the mists of battle smoke hanging like ground fog over the ravine of Willoughby Run and spreading in an arc north of the turnpike.

Captain Smith, the former staff officer of Stonewall Jackson who had joined Lee’s headquarters at Chambersburg, had remained temporarily with Lee’s staff and was in the group riding along the Cashtown pike. Smith reported that Lee surveyed the size of the action with surprise, and that the developing engagement was “something spoken of with regret.”

Whatever his exact words may have been, when Lee pulled his horse off the road about three miles from Gettysburg, evidently his intention was to investigate the possibility of breaking off the action.

Harry Heth, writing later of blundering into the Army of the Potomac, said: “Without Stuart the army was like a blindfolded giant.” When Lee, with steady hands, brought his field glasses to his eyes, he was probably searching the strange terrain for ways to extricate this segment of his army and complete the convergence of his corps and wagons.

From his remarks to Anderson in Cashtown, it would seem that he was thinking of a defensive stand, as at Sharpsburg the year before. With the enemy coming at his own united army, he would be relieved of the embarrassment of Stuart’s absence.

Yet, even as Lee’s field glasses focused on the town of Gettysburg and the ranges of hills spreading out from it, messages coming in from subordinates brought the news that troops from Ewell’s corps had joined the action and were extending the size of the engagement.

Rodes’s and Johnson’s divisions of Ewell’s corps were the troops that, occupying Carlisle, had been preparing to take the state capital at Harrisburg when reached by Lee’s order to contract toward Gettysburg. These two divisions and Ju-bal Early’s division, hurrying southwestward from York, had, with A. P. Hill’s old division, composed Stonewall Jackson’s Second Corps—the mobile striking force. Under Old Jack the troops had been famed for their marching and their guile-fulness at evading Jackson’s discipline to forage for food and forbidden liquors. Under their new lieutenant general, Dick Ewell, the corps seemed to be carrying on the Jacksonian traditions.

In leaving Carlisle, the men of Rodes’s division, moving rapidly in a loose, shuffling gait, had marched southeast all day on June 30. On the warm morning of July 1, while some miles from Gettysburg, they heard the dueling guns of Heth and Doubleday. With soldierly instinct Rodes hurried his men to the sound of the firing. Knowing no more of what was happening than did anyone else, Rodes, by the chance direction of his march, brought his men into the rough, rolling country squarely on the flank of the Union troops facing Heth less than a mile west of Gettysburg.

Through the vigilance of Buford’s cavalry, the Federal infantry was warned of this threat developing on their right.

The Union force that Meade had rushed toward Gettysburg was composed of two corps of three divisions each. As the Army of the Potomac was not then formed into army groups of corps, Meade had given acting field command of the advance corps to Major General John F. Reynolds, commander of the first corps. Reynolds, a native Pennsylvanian and friend of many Southerners from the old army, was shot by a Confederate sharpshooter while directing the placing of the troops early in the day. Major General Abner Double-day commander of Reynolds’s first division had been handling the corps while Reynolds was supervising the whole action. In the absence of any other authority, he assumed command of the field on Reynolds’s death.

A regular army man in his mid-forties, Doubleday was not restrained by modesty. He seized the opportunity offered by the sudden responsibility. Perhaps made overconfident by his repulse of Heth’s two brigades, Doubleday handled the troops in detail with decisiveness, but he remained in what obviously was becoming a poor defensive position. As new Union divisions hurried to the field, Doubleday held a line facing Heth and, in some confusion of command between himself and a newly arriving corps commander, formed fresh troops at a right angle to his Willoughby Run position to meet the thrust of Rodes from the northwest.

With one force facing west and the other northwest, the Federals were fighting two battles under a single, if unclarified, control. At the same stage the Confederates were fighting two battles under no control. Rodes, also new to division command, was sending in his men too fast, and they were getting the same rough reception that Heth’s two separated brigades had encountered.

This situation was gradually revealed to General Lee as he studied the field and received reports from officers. Harry Heth, who had been waiting uncertainly for several hours while he continued desultory firing, saw Lee’s group beside the road and went over to the commanding general.

“Rodes is heavily engaged,” he said to Lee. “Had I not better attack?”

“No,” Lee said slowly, studying the confused, extemporized action. Then he said more decisively: “No, I am not prepared to bring on a general engagement today. Longstreet is not up.”

It was now three o’clock in the afternoon. The only heavy fighting was Rodes’s action to the left of the turnpike and northwest of the town. There the Confederate troops, unable to gain the position, were in greater difficulties than was apparent to Lee’s group. While Lee was pondering resolutions, Powell Hill rode up, his looks reflecting his illness. Hill had been with Pender while his own old division deployed for action. Little Powell, sick or well, always wanted to carry any action to a conclusion, and his mind was on attack.

Suddenly a fresh action developed to the northeast. Lee soon learned that the firing had been opened by Jubal Early’s division of Ewell’s corps. Early, moving southward from Heidlersburg, had been attracted by the sound of the firing and hurried toward it. His march brought his division onto the field on the left of Rodes’s heavily engaged men. Naturally aggressive and a well-trained soldier, Early threw in his brigades on the Federal’s right flank, overlapping it.

The Union right angle of defense now stretched from west of Gettysburg (facing Heth), to north and west (facing Rodes), to north and east of the town, where Early’s fresh men came yelling onto the field. Although General Lee had never seen the country before and was still in doubt as to the size of the Union force against him, the Federals’ defense situation became too vulnerable for Lee to allow the opportunity of attack to pass.

An opportunist, like all great generals, he had watched the chance of march unfold a battle precisely of the nature he would have planned, and instantly he acted as if he had planned it. Most of his successful offensive maneuvers involved large troop movements to get on or behind an exposed flank of the enemy. Once he had observed that the extemporized troop movements had achieved the same end as his planned maneuvers, he was ready to send in the whole line with all he had.

After Jackson’s death, the usually gentle Lee was the most combative general officer in the army, and attack always sent his adrenalin soaring. His rigid self-control relaxed, his handsome face grew animated, the burdening years rolled away, and his eyes flashed like a young man’s. All uncertainty fled, and he knew precisely what he wanted each unit to do.

With no time to write orders, he sent his staff officers galloping off. Captain Smith was sent to Lieutenant General Ewell, reporting for staff duty as he delivered a message. Lee’s commands for A. P. Hill’s Third Corps were given directly to Little Powell.

Pale though Hill might be, direct action sustained him too, and there was nothing of a sick man about the new corps commander as he rode to his own men with the orders for assault. Maybe General Lee had not wanted a general engagement, but, now that it had come, Powell Hill was freed of his unnatural restraint. He was going to send in his troops as they had always gone in—and nothing would stop them.

6

Harry Heth was eager to wipe out the morning’s mistakes of carelessness. When he urged three of his brigades forward over the ground where they had been turned back earlier, there were no elements of surprise or tactical outmaneuvering to throw his men off stride. They advanced in a solid line, spraying bullets ahead of them in sheets. The blue line they struck was equally solid. It became a soldiers’ fight there on the hilly ground—some open land, some wheatfields, some woods, with fences running everywhere.

The’Confederates had the psychological advantage of the initiative, the Federals the disadvantage of awareness of heavy pressure on their distant flank. The Federals fought with a cold determination to hold the ground. The Confederates attacked with a hot determination to drive everything before them.

In savagely reckless thrusts, not counting the toll of dead and wounded who fell among them, the Confederates nudged back the defensive line. The Union units gave ground grudgingly, forced back step by step. The Iron Brigade left neat rows of dead lined up on the ground. But the Federals were not breaking. At one point, it was the waves coming at them which were on the verge of breaking against their stubborn line. Casualties among Heth’s troops were passing the proportion beyond which attacking units cannot remain effective.