Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (17 page)

The assignment would go to Ewell’s men. Rodes’s division had been roughly handled, but Early’s division had enjoyed the happy chore of delivering the knockdown to a reeling enemy. They were unworn and eager to finish the job. Rodes’s people could reform for a reserve, and Allegheny Johnson was bringing Ewell’s third division to the field. That division had once been Old Jack’s, and it contained Jackson’s original command, the brigade that had petitioned the government after Jackson’s death to be officially designated as the “Stonewall Brigade.”

The whole corps had been trained and conditioned in the stern school of Stonewall Jackson. The men had thus far given every evidence of carrying on their tradition of almost inexhaustible mobility and a swift and terrible striking power. With two divisions on the ground that was to be attacked, and one fresh coming up, it would be a tribute to Stonewall’s memory to allow his Second Corps to complete the day’s triumph.

Lee turned to his young A.A.G, Walter Taylor, and gave him an oral order to be carried quickly to General Ewell. According to his own report, Lee told Taylor to tell Ewell “to carry the hill occupied by the enemy, if he found it practicable, but to avoid a general engagement until the arrival of the other divisions of the army. . . .”

As Taylor’s independent report used virtually identical language regarding his instructions to Ewell, there is no doubt that the Second Corps commander knew what was expected of him when Colonel Taylor delivered the message around five o’clock. Night would not fall until eight. Ewell had three hours in which to do the job.

8

While Taylor was receiving the instructions and mounting his horse, A. P. Hill joined Colonel Fremantle, of Her Majesty’s Coldstream Guards, and told him of the day’s fighting. From the sweeping action that had brought a victory, Hill’s mind retained most vividly the memory of a Federal color-bearer who had been the last man to quit the field. Even as he retreated, the soldier shook his fist at the oncoming Confederates, and Powell Hill said that he was very sorry to see “this gallant Yankee” finally fall. Hill’s training with Jackson could not affect his sensitive nature.

In a similar scene, when one of Jackson’s colonels captured three Federals instead of shooting them, because the colonel admired their bravery, Stonewall said: “Kill them all. I don’t want them to be brave.”

War never became that stern for Powell Hill. The year before, the Federals’ indomitable Phil Kearney, a one-armed general had been shot dead from his horse in the wet woods near a destroyed plantation. When Hill saw his body in the muck, he became very emotional and exclaimed: “Poor Kearney. He deserved a better death than this.”

Hill was instructed by General Lee to place some of his guns in a position to sweep Cemetery Ridge. He was to open a fire that would divert the Federals’ full attention from Ewell’s forthcoming attack and prevent reinforcements from moving to the Cemetery Hill—Culp’s Hill objective. Hill rode back to his own men who were lying along Seminary Ridge.

While Lee was waiting for Ewell to open his action, his group was joined by Longstreet. The burly commander of the First Corps had ridden well ahead of his troops, in order to see for himself the field of the sudden collision. After a brief survey of the terrain across from them, Longstreet surprisngly turned to the commanding general and began to advise him as to what course of action to follow.

According to Longstreet, he said: “All we have to do is to throw our army around by their left, and we shall interpose between the Federal army and Washington.” Following this statement, Longstreet began to develop the possibilities of his strategy. It would force Meade to attack them, and after they had beaten Meade (as he assumed they would), “ the possibilities are that the fruits of our success will be great.”

This curious advice in the midst of a battle came from the one corps commander who had taken no part in the day’s action, whose troops were not on the field, and who had glanced only briefly at the results of the fighting.

However, unknown to Lee, this suggestion of shifting to defense sprang from a long-held conviction of the way the invasion should be conducted, and Longstreet believed that he had imposed this conviction on the commanding general. Some days before, when the corps commander first offered his views, Lee had given a customarily courteous reply and dismissed the matter from his mind. He was not aware now that Longstreet on Seminary Ridge was speaking in terms of what he considered an agreement. As for the proposal that advised him to break off the completion of this successful action and shift around to the enemy’s left, Lee was too preoccupied even to answer it specifically. Having blundered into one fight without the mysteriously vanished cavalry, he certainly had no intention of starting out again blindfolded over rough terrain while his wagons and divisions were scattered all through South Mountain.

He replied simply: “If the enemy is there, we must attack him.”

Longstreet would not quit his argument. “If he is there, it will be because he is anxious that we attack him—a good reason, in my judgment, for not doing so.”

Lee did not answer that at all. He knew that the enemy was on the opposite ridge for the same reason that he was on Seminary Ridge: those were the positions to which the surprising fighting had led them. Concentrating on a study of the terrain, Lee apparently did not even listen when Longstreet went on with what amounted to an insubordinate harangue.

In Longstreet’s later apologies he attributed to himself some impassioned dialogue that no one close by on the field remembered him speaking. In fact, the staff officers and military observers were as intent on surveying the enemv’s ground as was Lee, and no one seems to have paid particular attention to the corps commander whom they regarded as “Lee’s Warhorse.” Whatever he actually said, Longstreet was in a strangely disturbed state of mind.

Actually, he had convinced himself that since Jackson’s death he had replaced Stonewall as Lee’s collaborator. But he conceived of the collaboration in a way that Old Jack never had—as something of an equal partnership. What Longstreet was suffering on that open field on Seminary Ridge was the shock of discovering that the partnership existed only in his mind. Instead of accepting his collaboration, Lee was dismissing his strategy as he would that of any subordinate officer. Bewildered and incredulous, Longstreet simply could not accept the repudiation of the relationship as he had conceived it.

Everybody had talked about the whispered night conference of Lee and Jackson before Chancellorsville. In his intense jealousy of Jackson’s fame, Longstreet had always belittled Stonewall’s accomplishments, and to his unreflective mind it must have followed naturally that it would be “Lee and Longstreet” with their heads together on the invasion. But General Lee was not even listening to him: he was listening for the guns that would announce the opening of Ewell’s attack.

While Longstreet was glumly brooding, Captain Smith rode up on his first assignment since joining Ewell’s staff. Like Taylor, whom he had passed without seeing on the way over, Smith brought an oral message.

Ewell had instructed him to say that Early and Rodes believed they could take Cemetery Hill if other troops would support them with an attack on Cemetery Ridge. Oddly, division commanders Early and Rodes, and not corps commander Ewell, had independently decided on the same course of action as had Lee for concluding the day’s success.

Lee told Captain Smith that he had no troops on hand for taking Cemetery Ridge. Then, turning to Longstreet, he asked where his First Corps troops were. It was a question the commanding general would have directed to any troop commander. Longstreet, puzzled and agitated, took no interest at all in the field before them. Muttering that one division was about six miles away, he became evasive about the others and dissociated himself from the pressing present.

Lee told Captain Smith that Ewell must attack without supporting action on the ridge, though A. P. Hill’s guns would provide some distraction. The commanding general instructed the staff officer to tell General Ewell to take the hill—again adding: “if practicable.”

James Power Smith, who had been doing a lot of riding in the past few days, galloped off, and again Lee waited to hear Ewell’s guns. Instead, as his watch showed the hour to have passed six, even the scattered firing began to dwindle. Gradually the booming of heavy guns ceased. The farm country took on an eerie aspect of peacefulness as shadows gathered over the valley between the two ridges where armies were forming.

Then Walter Taylor returned and said that since delivering the instructions to Ewell he had observed no indications of any activity from the Second Corps. The complete silence that settled over the countryside more than confirmed Lee’s young A.A.G.

General Lee said nothing for a while. He had started this emergency convergence of his three corps because of Stuart’s unexplained absence. This morning he had been startled by unexplained heavy action, when Hill’s troops stumbled into an engagement. Now that Hill’s fighting qualities and the sound instinct of Ewell’s division commanders had turned a blunder into a victory, he was confronted in the evening with an unexplained silence in the quarter from which the success was to be solidified.

He would have to discover for himself the reason for the silence, just as earlier he had discovered the reason for the action. He said to Colonel Taylor that they would ride to Ewell’s headquarters to see what was going on.

What had happened to Dick Ewell?

“The Good Soldier”

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armies there were many “characters,” natural and self-made, and Lieutenant General Richard Stoddert Ewell combined both varieties to flourish as the favorite eccentric of the Army of Northern Virginia. His contemporaries gilded the lily with stories about him, and Ewell himself possessed an aptitude for spontaneous utterances which contributed to his quaintness.

When the two divisions of his corps occupied Carlisle, they held the northernmost position of any Confederate force, but his men did not remember their curious distinction in the war so much as what Ewell said to a local Episcopalian minister. In Virginia, Union officers always forbade communicants to pray for the president of the Confederacy, according to the rubric of their Prayer Book. In Carlisle, where the situation was reversed, the rector asked General Ewell if his parishioners might pray for the president of the United States. “Certainly,” General Ewell said, “pray for him. I’m sure he needs it.”

In telling the latest Ewell anecdote the men always elaborated on his unique appearance—the fringe of hair decorating his bald pate, the absurd mustachios that emphasized his strange assortment of features, the bulging eyes of a defiant bird. Yet in Chambersburg, whose citizens knew nothing of his legend as an eccentric, an observer saw him as a distinguished-looking gentleman of fine deportment. Both descriptions could apply, depending on the viewpoint. There was nothing one-dimensional in the complex of parts which constituted the strange character called “Old Baldhead” or “Bald Dick” or, most often, simply Dick Ewell.

Born forty-four years before of a well-established planter family in northern Virginia, Ewell came along when the family fortunes were in a state of decline, and this circumstance affected his military career—especially as Jackson’s successor with the Second Corps—more than has been recognized.

Prepared for West Point on the earnings of his mother and sisters as schoolteachers in the Manassas area, Dick Ewell went into the regular army with an ambition to become a planter and restore his family’s estate. He was a shrewd, practical-minded man, but, before he was ready to establish a plantation, his state seceded and he was soon a Confederate general operating in the neighborhood where he had grown up.