Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (34 page)

Some estimates swell the number of Lee’s “total effectives” by counting the 12,000-plus troopers to get whom Lee had stripped Virginia of mounted forces. As the battle was fought, these numbers on the muster rolls had no practical effect on the relative strength of the opposing armies. Aside from Buford’s alert aggressiveness on the first day, the cavalry of neither side figured to any decisive extent. It would have been another story if Jeb Stuart had been present, with his command fit, even as late as June 30. The story might have had the same ending, but it would have been different.

On the night of the 2nd, Stuart and his three brigades were present to operate on the left flank that had so plagued Ewell. With Pickett’s division only a few miles away and having rested since their arrival in late afternoon, at last all of Lee’s men were “present or accounted for.”

While General Lee planned the fresh dispositions for the next day’s assault, there was about his tent little of the flurry that had characterized the first night. Neither A. P. Hill nor Ewell came. Various staff officers visited friends, but they did not approach the general. His own staff officers were kept working, writing out orders and delivering them. Perhaps because of their fatigue from the long day that had begun before daylight, none of the men left a personal report of those last waking hours of July 2.

The reasons for Lee’s decision to renew the attack were known only to him until he delivered his report in January of the following year. Based on the troops’ performance during the second day and with a possession of the high ground won along Emmitsburg road to provide advanced artillery support, he wrote that “with the proper concert of action … we should ultimately succeed.”

He made no reference to any of the alternatives that must have presented themselves nor to any of the intangible considerations that must have influenced him. Reduced to the bare, impersonal realities of tactics, he concluded his report of that night with: “Longstreet … was ordered to attack the next morning, and General Ewell was ordered to assail the enemy’s right at the same time.”

Orders were also sent to artillery officers to have their guns in the new positions by sunrise, ready to open in the early light. At midnight the cluster of Lee’s headquarters tents were dark. In the moonlight, picketed horses moved slowly, foraging for grass. By one o’clock the last soldier was rolled in his blanket on the ground. Beyond the rows of sleeping men, at the hospital tents in the valley on the western slope of Seminary Ridge and in barns and houses, doctors and orderlies worked on through the morning hours on the wounded who had come in. On the silent field the only men stirring were the personal servants who, wandering about since dark, could not find their masters.

“Picke’s Charge”

T
HE FIRST
light of Friday, July 3, showed a clear sky and promised another hot day. The night air had lifted the closeness of the day before, and the warm morning felt fresh, though little breeze stirred. The men awakening to reveille first heard birds singing, “the chirp and motion of winged insects,” and those west of Seminary Ridge heard a stream rippling. Sitting up under the trees, the men looked at the wild flowers and the fields of ripening grain, and, as one said, “never was sky or earth more serene—more harmonious—more aglow with light and life.”

Then, as they stood and stretched out the cramps from sleeping on the ground, the men looked at the ground of the fighting of the day before. All thoughts of the tranquillity that a summer morning suggested were jarred from their consciousness. From Devil’s Den north along Plum Run Valley, across the peach orchard they had captured, and on the slopes of the enemy-held Cemetery Ridge where Wright’s brigade had reached the top, the line of battle was marked by corpses. From this grisly outline to their bivouacs the ground was littered with exploded caissons, dismounted guns, scattered rifles, and dead artillery horses that looked, curiously, at once flat and bloated in their grotesque positions. Closer still, all among them, they saw and then heard the wounded of both sides who had not yet been moved to field hospitals or tents.

The survivors had been too tired to bury their dead or to help much with the wounded, and there had been too many wounded for the small medical corps and the stretcher-bearers attached to each regiment to handle. Many of the stretcher-bearers themselves had gone down, and wounded men had kept crawling in from the field all night, begging for water.

The unwounded had slept through it all. The fighting had gone on so late the day before, until full darkness, that many of the troops had not reached the lines where they formed for the night until ten o’clock or later. In their exhaustion and disappointment at having failed to carry the enemy positions, they grouped in messes and built their fires. The fine food confiscated on the march was all gone, and the men cooked “sloosh”—cornmeal in bacon fat fried into loose, meat-flavored cornpone. Some messes had the peculiarly distasteful Nassau bacon (a blockade-run import), a fat pork they called either “Nausea” bacon or “salt horse.”

Artillerists had worked still later under bright moonlight, feeding and watering their horses, bringing up replacements from the wagon teams for disabled animals, and changing harness to the new horses. Past midnight the officers continued to examine the ground in the eerie light and arrange battery positions for the morning.

By three o’clock the artillery officers and other officers were up again, an hour and a half before the drums rolled. By first fight, when the soldiers were stirring, General Lee and sleepy-looking staff officers rode out on Seminary Ridge. Dressed
neatly as always, and inspiring, as Pickett said, “a reverential adoration” by his presence, Robert E. Lee showed care-worn fatigue. His whitening beard and hair, fluffy below the gray planters’ hat, added a suggestion of age as well as dignity to the composure that seemed impervious to all collapses of the flesh.

For the second successive morning he silently surveyed the ramparts of Cemetery Ridge nearly a mile distant. No sounds came to him from the enemy’s lines. North of the border of yesterday’s battle, the hill and the farmland under the early morning sun presented a pleasing scene of country life. Probably he did not reflect on the contrasts. He studied instead the ground his men had won along the rise of the Emmitsburg road northward from the peach orchard.

Colonel Alexander had the First Corps batteries posted along the road when Lee viewed the ground at first light. Where the road bent east in front of the Spangler farm, the guns were posted back from the road, on the edge of a cornfield and northward in an orchard. At the end of the line the sixteen guns of Cabell’s battalion were almost directly in front of General Lee’s command post on Seminary Ridge and less than half a mile away.

Cabell’s batteries stood in the line of march taken by Wright’s Georgians late in the afternoon of the 2nd, when Lee had watched this unsupported brigade of Anderson’s division reach the crest of Cemetery Ridge. The approximate mile covered by Alexander’s batteries represented the front of the attack Lee designed for Longstreet’s corps. According to Lee’s plan at this early hour, the area of the objective would run from the point of Wright’s breach in the center to the northern edge of the Federal flank of the day before.

In the locale of Sickles’s break on the second day’s flank, from the wheatfield east of the Emmitsburg road southward to the Devil’s Den terrain, the front was as irregular as the ground. Both armies had bivouacked where their fierce and fragmentary action broke off in the dusk, and a regular line of front had not been formed. Lee was inclined to dismiss the possibility of counterthrusts from the Federal units bent back in that rough country, and to mass his men and artillery for one concentrated assault at what might be called the enemy’s left-center.

The commanding general’s post, in the clearing at the top of the gentle rise from the road to Seminary Ridge, was alongside Spangler’s Woods. This heavy growth covered the ridge for about a quarter of a mile southward from Lee. From those woods the Third Corps batteries, except Poague’s, were posted northward along Seminary Ridge to the Cashtown road. In that mile covered by Hill’s guns, the men of Pender’s division, brooding over the loss of their major general, and Heth’s troops, with their leader still incapacitated by his first day’s head wound, lounged in groups around mess fires and stacked arms. They lay well back on the ridge, beyond the range of any enemy battery that might be seized by an urge for target practice. Only their skirmishers were advanced-ragged, hungry-looking fellows, alert of posture and spry of movement, cradling rifles that glinted in the sun’s rays.

In the town there was more movement. Citizens in bold curiosity hovered around the mess fires in the streets, recording in their minds the carelessly spoken words of the Alabama troops in Rodes’s division. There was to be no more fighting in this town.

East of the town, beyond Lee’s view, at the back door to the Federals’ position, Allegheny Johnson’s division held enemy lines on the slopes of Culp’s Hill. Even if unable to carry the crest, these stout troops could exert enough pressure to divert troops from the main attack. If the enemy was not sharp, the men could carry that hill which commanded the Union rear. To strengthen their attack, Lee moved over two
brigades of Rodes’s division which had been idle the day before. Also, Extra Billy Smith, the political general of Early’s division, was finally freed from his vigil against the phantom enemy on the York road and moved up to the front.

For guarding the flank, the army had Jeb Stuart and his three favorite brigades. They had arrived during the afternoon and early evening of July 2, with men and beasts exhausted from Stuart’s futile ride for fame. However, their mere presence brought reassurance, and they could move enough to threaten the Federals’ line of communication on the Baltimore pike. The other missing cavalry was also up—Imboden’s raiders and the two regular brigades that had spent the idle summer days gazing through the empty passes of the Blue Ridge after the Union army had moved out of Virginia.

To complete the army’s concentration and to spearhead the attack, the division of George Pickett was expected momentarily. Because of Jefferson Davis’s manipulation of Lee’s troops for the invasion, the division was at 4,700 effectives instead of 8,000. However, the all-Virginia division was composed entirely of tested veterans, and in the past six months Pickett’s men had fought less and marched more than any of the other troops with Lee. They were the only units that had not seen heavy action since Fredericksburg, and, from Pickett to privates, the soldiers were eager to have at the enemy again.

But as the sun rose over the stirring camps around Lee, there was neither sign nor word of Pickett’s three brigades. On the day before, Lee had ordered Pickett to halt his troops a few miles from the field around three in the afternoon, so that the army’s one unused division might be rested for any action required on the third day. On the night of the 2nd, Lee had sent Longstreet orders for early action involving those fresh troops.

There was nothing discretionary about the orders. Lee’s relatively simple and untypical battle plan required no waiting for reconnaissance reports nor shifting of units. The troops were all in position, except Pickett’s, who by five in the morning had had fourteen hours to move from three to five miles. Yet not even their van was reported in sight, and Pickett had sent no report to the commanding general. If Pickett had reported to his corps commander, Lee did not know it.

Longstreet still remained at the temporary headquarters he had established the night before at the shack in a meadow a mile or more southwest of Lee’s post on Seminary Ridge. Except for the generalized verbal report Longstreet sent during the evening, Lee had heard nothing from him since they parted sometime after one o’clock the previous afternoon.