Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (28 page)

Kershaw’s description accords with existing maps and places his brigade exactly where all battle reports place it in relation to the other troops of both sides, once they were on the field. He seems a reliable witness for the details of the march, of which Longstreet was determined to remember as little as possible.

McLaws was less concerned with the general direction of the march than with the details that delayed him—“the fences and ditches we had to cross.” But his’description of the deployment of his whole division to the positions where all battle reports placed the brigades confirms the course outlined by Kershaw. Only this countermarch could explain why the lead brigade of the two divisions required more than two hours to cover less than three miles.

It was passing three o’clock when Kershaw’s South Carolina regiments emerged from the stifling woods southwest of Seminary Ridge into an open field. There he headed for the Emmitsburg road, as Kershaw said, “in full view of the Union position.”

From the time of Kershaw’s first look at that Union position, there is no disagreement among the generals as to what they saw. They beheld a situation that required them, if they executed their assigned tasks, to commit their men to mass slaughter.

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McLaws, the first general above brigade command to view the enemy’s position, said: “One rapid glance showed them to be in force much greater than I had, and extending considerably beyond my right. … I rode forward, and getting off my horse, went to some trees in advance and took a good look at the situation. … The view presented astonished me, as the enemy was massed in my front, and extended to my right and left as far as I could see… .”

While McLaws was making his personal reconnaissance and trying to hurry his troops forward, Hood’s men passed southward beyond his division, going into position to open the assault on his right. McLaws wrote that “as his [Hood’s] troops appeared, the enemy opened on them, developing a long line even to his right… .”

That was supposed to be the open end of the Union line, north of the Round Tops, which the assaulting columns were to take in flank. Instead, the defensive lines overlapped their own flank. “Thus,” recounted McLaws, appalled at what he saw, “was presented a state of affairs certainly not contemplated when the original order of battle was given… .”

The plan of battle contemplated when Lee instructed McLaws that morning, tracing the course with his finger on the map, was for the attacking brigades to strike in echelon at a northeast angle from the southwestward road, with their left resting on the road. To move out in that order, their right must overlap the Federal left, or the line of attack would be suicidal. As it was, McLaws’s line would be crossing the enemy front at an angle to expose its own flank and rear.

McLaws’s personal responsibility in this “state of affairs” ended when he conveyed the grim intelligence to Longstreet. He assumed that Longstreet would appraise General Lee of the conditions that made his battle plan impossible. It was McLaws’s opinion that Lee, had he been informed of the true situation, would have called off the attack. Although it is nowhere stated that McLaws waited for countermanding orders, his actions indicate that he expected or at least hoped that the attack would be countermanded.

Even bold Kershaw halted after one glimpse of the rifles glistening in the peach orchard on the rise that Longstreet, in his agitation, had personally ordered the brigadier to attack. On his own initiative, Joe Kershaw sent his men straight ahead into a defensive position. He saw a stone wall running between the Flaherty house on his left and the Snyder house on his right. Sending forward a line of skirmishers as a screen, he hurried his brigade to the cover of the stone wall facing the peach orchard.

Closer, he observed that the infantry in the peach orchard was supported by artillery, with an entrenched line of battle in their rear, extending “far beyond the point at which their left had been supposed to rest.” As soon as his men were drawn in battle line in a relatively protected position, Kershaw sent back word to McLaws of what he had discovered in his front and what he had done about it.

McLaws, either forgetting or never having known that Longstreet had given a direct order over his head to one of his brigadiers, manifestly believed that Kershaw was acting with wisdom and discretion. His other brigades were strung out for more than a mile back on the narrow road, and as they came up in regiments, he began sending them north in a leftward extension of Kershaw’s defensive position, and in support in the rear.

While he was placing his troops, between three and four o’clock, a Longstreet staff officer, Major Latrobe, rode up and demanded to know why McLaws had not attacked. Latrobe said: “There’s no one in your front but a regiment of infantry and a battery of artillery.”

McLaws replied he would attack as soon as his whole division was formed, but explained that the enemy was in great force in his front, with artillery, and extended far to his right.

In a short time, or so it seemed to harried McLaws, the staff officer returned and repeated the order to open the attack. Again McLaws explained that the strength of the enemy in his front “required careful preparation for the assault.”

All too soon Latrobe was back again, with the order this time, McLaws said, “peremptorily for me to charge.”

Still he delayed giving the order. Without conscious intention, the major general was pulling a Longstreet on Long-street. But Old Pete, having finally reached the point of attack designated by Lee, had his mind set on sending those troops in precisely as Lee had ordered hours before. He acted as if the Union left were as lightly occupied as Lee believed and as if the Confederate right overlapped the Union flank instead of being themselves overlapped. No message was sent to Lee.

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About one air-mile away the commanding general was waiting for the opening of the attack on the impregnable position of a line he had never seen. The unusually careless reconnaissance was the result both of his normal system and of the special circumstances, but his reliance on troop action beyond his supervision reflected Lee’s more fundamental mistake of operating with separated columns on a wide front in a technique founded on Stonewall Jackson’s collaboration. The truth was that Lee, from the beginning placed under unnatural stress by having to grope without cavalry, did not react to evidence that the system of the Jackson era was unworkable without Old Jack.

Later he adapted himself to this absence. As the Prussian military observer Major Scheibert noted, Jackson’s place finally “was filled
by Lee himself,
who, like a father when the mother dies, seeks to fill both her place and his own in the house.” At Gettysburg, the first test by arms without Jackson, Lee had not assumed this dual role.

Trying to
supervise
everything, he actually
led
nowhere, and the army felt the lack of a strong hand at the controls. The overlong Confederate line consisted of three separate small armies mismanaging three separate battles.

During the whole afternoon only one message came to the commanding general. His command post was more like an isolation post, and he had no notion of what was happening at Longstreet’s end of the line. There nature had outdone even the Cemetery Hill-Culp’s Hill end in natural defenses. The ground of Cemetery Ridge became rough and rocky at its southern end before terminating in the two huge columns of Round Top and Little Round Top. Their perpendicular faces were strewn with boulders and covered with almost impenetrable thickets. Five hundred yards to the west of Little Round Top, toward the Confederate side, rose a somber mass of huge boulders called Devil’s Den. When McLaws and Hood moved into position, these forbidding fortresses were still not occupied by Union troops.

Devil’s Den rose at an angle between two branches of Plum Run. North of the boulder formation, little Plum Run Valley was marshy and dotted with more stray boulders. To the west of Devil’s Den a ridge extended toward the Confederate side where Hood’s men were forming in concealment for their attack across the Emmitsburg road. This ridge, low and sloping, was important because at four o’clock in the afternoon there were no Federal units to the south of it-beyond the range of the projected attack.

Two divisions of Sickle’s III Corps were placed northward from the Plum Run terrain. Supposed to connect with Hancock’s II Corps, which were in the center on Cemetery Ridge, Sickles had placed his troops six hundred yards in advance of Hancock’s left. By four o’clock the V Corps of George Sykes were also hurrying toward the left.

Commanding General Meade had not particularly wanted to fight there, where an essentially defensive position offered little opportunity for counteroffensive. Certain, however, that Lee would follow up the first day, he had risked a race of troop concentration rather than risk demoralization by retreating to a preferable position. Longstreet allowed him to win the race.

Not expecting such collaboration, Meade had spent an anxious morning, expecting attack hourly, and he had not aligned his troops as he might have if he had known he would be allowed eleven hours of daylight to strengthen his position. Concomitantly with Meade’s hurried disposition of troops and guns from his headquarters house, the general at the southern end of the line had also taken some liberties.

This corps commander was Major General Daniel Sickles, an unsavory, showy, and pugnacious character from New York who went further on brassy self-confidence and politicking (in civilian life and in the army volunteers) than many a better man went on ability. Dan Sickles, in his egotism, decided to advance the Union line a half-mile westward from the rocky ground of Cemetery Ridge to a part of the Emmitsburg road that followed the crest of a rise. A large peach orchard there faced the high road that formed his front. His left reached toward the extension of the low ridge from Devil’s Den to the road, thus placing his lines at an angle between two ridges. Sickles perceived only the natural strength of his salient, and not the dangers to which such a projection exposed his flanks.

East of Sickles’s peach orchard, after some scattered fields of corn and oats, were a rocky stand of timber and, south of it, a large wheatfield—“The Wheatfield,” it became. South of this field a thick woods stretched down to the northern slope of the Devil’s Den ridge. The boulder-strewn marshes of Plum Run Valley spread between those woods and Cemetery Ridge near its termination in Little Round Top. In that rough terrain Birney’s division of Sickles’s corps formed a flank for Humphreys’s division in the peach orchard. It was Birney’s brigades that formed the line which overlapped the Confederates. In turn, behind Humphreys’s right, up on Cemetery Ridge there were Hancock’s guns to spray the road, as well as troops from Hancock’s left which could be used in support.

Without knowing the exact details of the ground or of the troops facing them, this alignment of Federals on commanding ground, bisected by stone fences, was the sight that greeted first McLaws and then Hood when he brought his division out on McLaws’s right.

There had never been a day when Hood, like McLaws at Chancellorsville, had hesitated to attack. The tawny-bearded giant liked to wade in, and the men he commanded suited his taste. His crack-shooting troops brought tremendous firepower to the target of assault; they were as tough as the legends represent plains Texans to be, and individually highly skillful and fiercely combative in action. But Hood took one look at the enemy’s position north of Little Round Top and reacted precisely as had McLaws.

He recognized that the battle order, written more than two miles away on the mistaken information brought back by Captain Johnston, did not fit the existing conditions. He saw that, as Joe Johnston once said, “it was not war, but murder.;”

His conclusion was the same as McLaws’s: Lee never contemplated an attack in echelon at a northward angle to envelop the enemy’s southern flank when that southern flank overlapped his own. Not only would his men present their backs to the enemy, but, attacking in echelon, they would present targets in successive waves, like ducks going across in a shooting gallery.

Hood, showing more initiative than McLaws, kept his men concealed in the cover of the woods and sent picked Texas scouts to reconnoiter the country south of the ridge that, projecting westward from Devil’s Den, marked the end of the Federal line. After a very quick, though wholly accurate, reconnaissance, the trained scouts reported to Hood that the country south of the Round Tops was open. Offering no more physical obstacles than the usual stone fences, it was then unoccupied by any enemy troops. At this southern end of the Round Tops, Hood could get on the Federal flank as contemplated by’ General Lee.

For the first and only time in his army career Hood suggested a change of orders to his commanding general. Turning to a staff officer, the Texas convert dictated a quick oral report to be made to Longstreet. In the existing conditions, it was Hood’s opinion that “it was unwise to attack up the Emmitsburg road, as ordered.” Instead, he pointed out the exposed southern end of the Round Tops and urged Long-street to allow him “to turn Round Top and attack the enemy in flank and rear.;”

Hood sent Captain Hamilton galloping off and began planning a movement that would fulfill the intent of Lee’s battle order. The commanding terminals of the enemy’s defense line would be in his hands before dark.

Two batteries of his guns were blasting away, developing the enemy’s position, when the staff officer returned with a reply from Longstreet. It consisted of a single, unequivocal sentence: “General Lee’s orders are to attack up the Emmitsburg road.;”