Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (35 page)

For what every soldier in both armies recognized would be the climactic assault of the three-day battle, the commanding general did not send officers from his staff to discover where Pickett was and what Longstreet was doing. He went himself.

Mounting his gray horse, Lee rode down the western slope of the ridge, along the valley where hospital tents were pitched, through the woods jutting east from Pitzer’s Run, and out onto the meadow. There he saw Longstreet and his staff gathered in an idle group.

2

The early-morning encounter between Lee and Longstreet was a decisive event of the third day at Gettysburg, but very little is known about it. The only full reports were written by Longstreet years after the war. His later versions, published after Lee’s death, not only contradict his official report (written one month after the battle and subject to Lee’s review) but contain some improbable speeches of the sort one wishes one had made at the time. As these successive speeches increasingly rounded out the military rationale he developed after the war, in support of his opposition to Lee during the battle, it can be presumed that his various accounts reflected more his state of mind than what transpired. The one certainty is that Longstreet had not executed the orders Lee sent him the night before.

According to Longstreet, he spoke first, before Lee asked him anything. He opened the conversation with fresh arguments for changing Lee’s battle plan, and it was in the arguments that Longstreet revealed he had never intended to execute the orders received earlier. At this point he was neither would-be collaborator nor resentful subordinate; indeed, his attitude reflected no accountable military relationship with Lee. He announced, in effect, that he had organized a movement of his own-a movement that would have been unrelated to what the rest of the army was doing or to what Lee expected of him.

It has been said that Stonewall Jackson would have placed him under arrest on the spot and that Napoleon would have had him shot, and many have been the reasons advanced for Lee’s putting up with the insubordination. The simplest explanation is that Lee had no one with whom to replace him. Hood was wounded, Pickett not on the field, McLaws manifestly inadequate for corps command. The effect of Long-street’s dismissal at the hour of his corps’s assault would have been disastrous to the morale of his troops.

Lee’s mistake was not in retaining Longstreet in command; for that he had no alternative. It was in entrusting, for the second successive day, an unsupervised offensive movement to a normally defensive fighter whose opposition made it apparent that he had placed himself outside the control of the command system. In making this mistake, Lee, distracted and in an exhausted condition, failed to appraise the extent of Longstreet’s intransigence and agitation. Yet it was not that simple.

This failure of judgment was not influenced by any such high-blown dramatic scene as Longstreet later described. Nor did Longstreet then propose to Lee the larger strategy that he later attributed to himself in what has usually been accepted as an accurate version of the morning meeting.

No officer of either staff mentioned any exchange at all between the two generals, and Lee dismissed Longstreet’s reasons for delay in executing his orders with: “General Long-street’s dispositions were not completed as early as expected.” Although Longstreet had not executed his orders and did offer a counterplan, Lee, after three days of Longstreet’s countersuggestions and delays, thought of nothing beyond getting his one trusted corps commander into action as soon as possible.

What Longstreet proposed to Lee, as an explanation for not having put his troops in movement, was undoubtedly what he wrote in the official report that Lee approved. “Our arrangements,” he said, meaning those of his staff, “were made for renewing the attack by my right, with a view to pass around the hill [Little Round Top] occupied by the enemy on his left, and to gain it by a flank and reverse attack. This would have been a slow process, probably, but I think not very difficult.”

In a post-war account, however, Longstreet wrote: “I sent to our extreme right to make a little reconnaissance in that direction, thinking that General Lee might yet conclude to
move around
the Federal left [and] I stated to General Lee that I ... was much inclined to think that the best thing was to
move to
the Federal left.”

“Move around”
and
“move to”
have been italicized to stress the difference in meaning between these words and
“gain it

[the enemy’s flank]
by
… attack”
in the report submitted through Lee.

In another version he went further and wrote: “Fearing that he [Lee] was still in his disposition to attack”—Long-street had
orders
to attack—“I tried to anticipate him by saying, ‘General, I have had my scouts out all night, and I find that you will have an excellent opportunity to move around to the right of Meade’s army and
maneuver him into attacking us.’”
(Not his italics.)

Thus, with slight changes in wording, Longstreet progressively altered his account of what he had said from a suggestion for attacking Meade to a suggestion that Meade attack them. This fundamental difference between his official report, which Lee approved, and the version later developed has usually been ignored.

His suggested move, as recorded in his official report, would have been a tactical change in the battle, a reversion to the urgently offered plan of Hood and Law which he had overruled the day before. But the move outlined in the often quoted version of the reminiscences would have broken off the battle; reverting to the plan he had introduced to Lee the first day, it would have been a continuation of his purpose to fight a defensive battle elsewhere.

Even without this basic contradiction between the memories and the official report, it would seem unlikely that Long-street would have proposed that the Confederate army, poised for attack with 140-odd guns in position—half of them far advanced—should disengage itself, cross the enemy’s front, and, presumably at its leisure, select a new position that Meade would be forced to attack. There was nothing to reduce energetic Meade to the role of spectator while this cumbersome withdrawal took place in front of him. Ewell alone, five miles away from Longstreet and without a good road between them, had some fifteen miles of wagons; and Buford, then refitting his hard-worked Federal cavalry, would be ready again to take up the pressing work he had abandoned after the first day. In every respect the proposal is too illogical to have been advanced by an experienced soldier at that stage of the army’s commitment.

It is probable that somewhere back in Longstreet’s mind lurked a hopeful, unarticulated scheme that would have enlarged his corps’s movement to the Federal flank into a total movement of the army away from Gettysburg. When he said in his official report that “our arrangements were made” for, in effect, evading Lee’s battle plan, he was motivated by the same determination to shift to the defensive which had caused his procrastination on the 2nd. But, though all that was a part of his immovable opposition to attack, it was not a part of what he said to Lee.

Other references in Longstreet’s writings indicate distortions of what happened there in the morning. Years after the war he composed a declamation in which he supposedly told Lee that “no 15,000 men” could carry “that position.” At the time of their scene in the meadow no one knew that only 15,000 were going to make the assault, and the position finally assailed was not Lee’s point of objective when he talked to Longstreet.

Aside from the apparent lapses in Longstreet’s reconstruction of the morning encounter, the probability is against Lee standing there as an audience to Shakespearean speeches and suggestions of grand strategy when he was so anxious to begin an early action that he had ridden from general headquarters in person. Longstreet reported that Lee “was impatient of listening and tired of talking.” The commanding general very likely showed his impatience as soon as Long-street revealed that, instead of following orders, he was trying to change them.

In ignoring the exchange in his reports, Lee showed that the discovery of Longstreet’s inaction immediately diverted his thoughts to Culp’s Hill, where Ewell had orders to attack at early light in conjunction with Longstreet’s move. He had to send a message advising General Ewell that Longstreet would not open the action until ten o’clock.

Longstreet, magnifying his status in retrospect, saw the point of the exchange to be that Lee “knew I did not believe success was possible.”

Lee was not even thinking of what his subordinate believed.

The real significance of the disparity between the reactions of the two men was that Lee failed to recognize the balky defeatism implicit in Longstreet’s behavior and attitude.

On the ragged edge of his own self-control, Lee completely missed the disturbed state that rendered his senior corps commander unfit to direct the assault. In some excitement, General Lee brushed aside the arguments and told Longstreet that the attack was going to be made where he wanted it and that the First Corps was going to make it.

Impatient and distracted, expecting every man to do his duty, Lee attached no such importance to the encounter as Longstreet did. As a commanding general who expected his orders to be carried out, there was no reason why he should —
if
the exchange had ended there.

As all the to-do about Longstreet’s delays on the second day missed the fundamental reasons for the failure of the assault, so all the analyses of the supposed clash of opinions on the third morning missed the point of why the battle was fought as it was. Whether or not Lee should have dismissed Longstreet for offering counterplans instead of following orders was not the decisive element. The nature of the attack was determined
after
Longstreet was overruled, and it was then that Lee showed himself to be no longer in possession of his full faculties as a military commander.

When Lee gave Longstreet the flat orders to prepare for action, the corps commander suggested a change in the details of the battle plan.

He pointed out that McLaws’s and Hood’s divisions, in the irregular battle line from the peach orchard to the boulders of the Round Top area, would be exposed to enfilade fire from their right flank. That was the same objection that McLaws, Hood, and Evander Law had advanced to Long-street the day before. It was not that he had come around to the reasoning he had rejected on the 2nd. He was seeking a means of shifting the responsibility for the assault from his unit of command. As a countersuggestion, he proposed that McLaws and Hood remain where they were to immobilize the Federal flank, and that the assault force be formed of Pickett’s fresh troops and brigades from A. P. Hill’s corps.

The decisive element in the Lee-Longstreet meeting was the commanding general’s agreement to this change in his battle plan.

For not only was the complement of the assault force changed from a single corps into a loose collection of units, but the objective of the attack was shifted from the Federal left-center to the exact center. The point of Wright’s breech of the day before would more nearly represent the southern end of the attacking front than, as Lee had planned when he studied the terrain, approximately the northern end.

In the strange, undeclared conflict of wills that had begun thirty-six hours before, neither general was thinking clearly. As Longstreet would by now do anything to avoid assuming responsibility for a full-scale attack, Lee would do anything to get him to move out.

Facing each other in the early morning sunlight, neither read the outward evidences of the other’s state of mind. Erect and massive, fifty-six-year-old, half-sick Lee showed the strain by what Longstreet called the loss of “his matchless equipoise.” Powerful Longstreet at forty-two, his face reflecting the vigorous health that, despite heavy wounds, was to extend his span of life into the eighty-third year, showed his inner turmoil by a surliness unwonted in a naturally hearty man. He was never reconciled to delivering an attack even after Lee agreed to his conditions; but General Lee made the mistaken assumption that the recalcitrant subordinate had been brought into line by the compromise plan.

The compromise they reached was as fateful for the final action as the compromise with Jefferson Davis was for the whole campaign.

By the arrangement Lee and Longstreet made for the attacking force, the eleven brigades selected were like men who drew the short straw where the losers were picked to die.

3

Lee had ridden back to his clearing beside Spangler’s Woods when Pickett’s van was reported approaching Seminary Ridge sometime before seven in the morning. As the other divisions of the First Corps were not going in with Pickett, his three brigades were ordered to the western side of Seminary Ridge behind Dick Anderson’s division, immediately to the south of Lee’s command post.

Pickett had not moved his men out early or hurried them on their march across country lanes because he had received no orders to do so. As far as officers and men knew, they came up with the army when they were expected. Between seven and nine on a morning already uncomfortably warm, the regiments broke ranks in a valley below the western slope of the ridge. Arms were inspected, men who had not already thrown away their blankets dropped them on the grass, and the more prudent wandered about in search of water for their canteens.

Unknown at that time to the commanding general, the first part of his two-pronged attack was collapsing even as his army was completed. Ewell had been ordered to deliver his attack on Culp’s Hill at dawn, in conjunction with the attack Longstreet had been ordered to make on the Federal left-center. Old Baldhead, as if resolved to make amends for his failures, was very alert during the early morning hours of July 3. Daniel’s and O’Neal’s brigades, shifted from Rodes’s division to support Allegheny Johnson, were up at one thirty and moved eastward through the streets of the sleeping town. In the moonlight they approached the ghostly figures of Johnson’s men stirring in their camp around Culp’s Hill.