Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Despite the pleas of Winfield Scott, and an offer of high command from Abraham Lincoln, Lee resigned from the only professional world he had ever known. He was promptly commissioned as a brigadier general of Virginia state volunteers and adopted by Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, as his chief military adviser. But he was only too well aware of the likely consequences, both for himself and the South. Arlington was immediately occupied by Federal troops, rendering him homeless and penniless at the same time. Nor did he have much confidence that the Confederacy could summon enough military vigor to resist the pounding the industrial North was likely to give it. “When this war began, I was opposed to it, bitterly opposed to it,” Lee remarked to his son, “and I told these people that, unless every man should do whole duty, they would repent it.” But even if they did that duty, the odds remained long ones. If there was any chance for victory, it would come through invading the North and so demoralizing Northern public opinion that “a revolution among their people” would force the Lincoln government to give up.6

  But in 1861, invading the North was not the strategy preferred by Southerners who wanted to portray the Confederacy as the injured party in this war. Confederate troops instead stood inertly on the defensive in both the West, in Tennessee, and in the East, in northern Virginia, and field command of the Confederate troops in Virginia went instead to an old friend of Lee’s from West Point, Joseph E. Johnston, who likewise preferred to wait, defensively, for the Federal forces to act. When they did, Johnston merely fell back farther, ignoring Lee’s advice “to turn against Washington” and attack “with his whole force.” As a Federal invasion finally did appear, and crept closer to the Confederate capital at Richmond in the spring of 1862, Johnston was severely wounded at the battle of Seven Pines, and into his place Jefferson Davis thrust Lee.7

  From that moment, people saw another man, the aggressive, temperamental, almost reckless Lee, the long repressed son of Light-Horse Harry. Just after Lee’s appointment to field command, Porter Alexander remembered being brought up short by a colleague for wondering if Lee had the aggressiveness needed to drive back the Federal invaders. “Alexander,” he was told, “if there is one man in either army, Federal or Confederate, who is, head & shoulders, far above every other one in either army in audacity that man is Gen. Lee … Lee is audacity personified.” Jefferson Davis discovered the same thing—“Lee’s natural temper was combative”—and so did an English journalist who watched Lee prepare to take on the Federal hosts. “No man who, at the terrible moment, saw his flashing eyes and sternly-set lips, is ever like to forget them” or “the light of battle … flaming in his eyes.” Lee was, said John Mosby, the “most aggressive man I met in the war, and was always ready for any enterprise,” never happier than when he could cast his doubts and the scabbard away together.8

  The enterprise immediately at hand was to reshape the sprawling force he inherited from Joe Johnston and use it to save the threatened Confederate capital. Johnston had already found it necessary to begin sorting the multitude of Confederate volunteer regiments into brigades (of four or more regiments) and then divisions (of three or more brigades). Now, taking charge of an army which had grown to almost 92,000 men, Lee organized the force into two corps d’armée, and put these corps into the hands of the two most aggressive officers he could find, the South Carolina–born James Longstreet and a onetime Virginia Military Institute instructor, Thomas Jonathan Jackson, who had earned the first great nickname of the war—“Stonewall.” And he made official the name by which this army would be known until it surrendered its last banner—the Army of Northern Virginia.9

  On June 26, 1862, Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia uncoiled and struck. Over the course of one week, Lee crowded the Federal army back to the James River in a series of deadly battles in Richmond’s outlying towns—Mechanicsville, Gaines’ Mill, Savage’s Station, Frayser’s Farm, Malvern Hill—bounded aggressively up into northern Virginia to wallop another Federal force twenty miles outside Washington, and then bolted across the Potomac into Maryland, aimed at Pennsylvania. This miraculous reversal of fortune was carried along by Lee’s belief that only by shifting the fighting onto Northern soil and transferring “this campaign from the banks of the James to those of the Susquehanna” could the Confederacy hope to collapse Northern public confidence to the point of demanding a negotiated peace. But Lee’s invasion plans were thwarted when a copy of his campaign orders fell into Federal hands, and he was forced to fight an outnumbered battle at Antietam Creek in September 1862. He withdrew sullenly back to Virginia. But he never stopped hoping to carry the war northward. “If I could do so, I would again cross the Potomac and invade Pennsylvania,” Lee insisted. “I believe this to be our true policy.” Not only would an invasion of Pennsylvania in 1862 have given “our people an opportunity to collect supplies” in an untouched enemy granary, but “we would have been in a few days’ march of Philadelphia, and the occupation of that city would have given us peace.”

  He would have moved sooner in that direction but for two more determined Federal thrusts toward Richmond. Lee stopped them both, at Fredericksburg in December 1862, and at Chancellorsville in May 1863. But he knew that defensive victories won on Virginia’s soil would only end up wearing down Confederate resistance. “At Fredericksburg,” Lee admitted, “our people were greatly elated” but “I was much depressed. We had really accomplished nothing; we had not gained a foot of ground, and I knew the enemy could easily replace the men he had lost.” The same thing happened after Chancellorsville. “Our people were wild with delight—I, on the contrary, was more depressed than after Fredericksburg; our loss was severe, and again we had gained not an inch of ground and the enemy could not be pursued.” Sitting on the defensive in Virginia also spelled deterioration for his army’s discipline. Northern Virginia was “so cleaned out that one can forage to no purpose now,” and as commissary officers and ordinary men in the ranks scavenged the Old Dominion’s depleted fields and pastures ever more desperately, they would gradually disintegrate into what one Alabama officer described as “little better than an armed mob.”10

  But the ultimate proof of the folly of a defensive war was the death of Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville. Accidentally wounded by fire from his own corps, Jackson lingered for eight days until he died on May 10, 1863. With this awkward, blue-eyed, relentlessly devout Presbyterian from the western Virginia mountains, Lee had developed an almost intuitive rapport. His death was “a terrible loss … Such an executive officer the sun never shone on. I have but to show him my design, and I know that if it can be done it will be done.” Jackson’s death was also a warning that the attrition of war would only keep grinding up the Confederacy’s best officers and men unless the torch was made to burn on Northern soil and Northerners became disheartened enough to quit. “As far as I can judge,” Lee wrote to Confederate secretary of war James A. Seddon, “there is nothing to be gained by this army remaining quietly on the defensive … I am aware that there is difficulty & hazard in taking the aggressive with so large an army in its front,” but a new offensive aimed at the North was “worth a trial” rather than sitting and waiting to be overwhelmed. “All our military preparations and organizations should now be pressed forward with the greatest vigor.” If so, then “next fall there will be a great change in public opinion in the North” and “the friends of peace will become so strong” that a “distinct and independent national existence” would finally be conceded to the Confederacy.11

  The death of Stonewall Jackson had one silver opportunity concealed within its black folds, and that was a further reorganization of the command structure of the Army of Northern Virginia “to simplify the mechanism … as much as possible.” Under Jackson and Longstreet, Lee had created two corps large enough (with 30,000 to 35,000 men each, in four or five divisions) for both men to use their own discretion and judgment without requiring Lee to overseeing the tactical details of battles. As Lee himself explained to the Prussian
engineer and military observer Justus Scheibert, “I plan and work with all my might to bring the troops to the right place at the right time; with that I have done my duty.” From that point on, it was his corps commanders who must take charge: “It is my generals’ turn to perform their duty.” Happily, in Jackson and Longstreet, Lee had officers who could fill that bill. But in anyone else’s hands, a corps the size of Jackson’s or Longstreet’s might prove so big as to become clumsy, or worse, might call for a degree of micromanagement that Lee and his diminutive staff might not be able to deliver. “Some of our divisions exceed the army Genl Scott entered the city of Mexico with, & our brigades are larger than his divisions,” Lee explained, and that created stupendous headaches in “causing orders & req[uisitio]ns to be obeyed.”12

  Rather than merely appoint a successor to Jackson, Lee peeled off brigades from Jackson’s and Longstreet’s old commands, and together with the addition of new levies from North Carolina, created an entirely new third corps in the Army of Northern Virginia. Each corps in the Army of Northern Virginia would now contain three divisions, or about 25,000 to 30,000 infantrymen, and each division between three and five brigades. There would necessarily be a good deal of shuffling and reshuffling—new staffs would have to be created, old ones redistributed, colonels in command of regiments would find themselves scratching heads over the manner and personalities of new brigade commanders, and so on up the ladder—but Lee felt no unease over the ordinary soldiers’ ability to adjust. “There were never such men in an army before,” Lee believed. “They will go anywhere and do anything if properly led.”13

  But this, of course, was the catch. “Nothing prevented my proposing to you to reduce” the size of the army’s corps as far back as the winter, he told Davis, “but my inability to recommend commanders.” At least in the case of James Longstreet, the senior corps commander, he had “a Capital soldier” who was already “the Staff of my right hand.” Longstreet was forty-two years old that summer, an imposing six-feet, two-inches tall and a bulky 220 pounds, with a heavy brown beard, and a short Austrian-style gray officer’s jacket “on the collar of which the devices indicating his rank were scarcely distinguishable.” He had pig’s-eyes, vigilant and inspecting, was grudgingly deferential, and “a man of very few words.” But he had the knack, rare in the Civil War armies, of knowing how to “handle and arrange large numbers of troops … and he seems to manage a division of eight or ten thousand men with as much ease as he would a company of fifty men.” His weakness was a streak of “obstinacy and self-assertion,” and his “jealousy of advice was so great that really at times it seemed as if he preferred that of the enemy rather than to take it from one of his subordinates.” But even if he could not take advice, Longstreet could certainly take orders, and along with that, he had a slugger’s instinct for knowing how to drive into an enemy where it hurt most. In 1862, it was Longstreet who urged Lee to keep attacking the Federal army at Malvern Hill, despite the superior position the Federals had on the hilltop, and at Antietam, Lee hailed him as “my old war-horse!” His soldiers regarded him as “a bully general” and “real bulldog fighter” who “drives the Yankees whenever he meets them,” and they loaded him with nicknames—“Old Peter” and the “Bull of the Woods.” In the estimate of the Austro-Hungarian soldier-of-fortune Bela Estvàn, Longstreet was simply “one of the ablest generals of the Confederate army.”14

  Filling the slots for the other two corps was a dicier affair. Richard Stoddert Ewell and Ambrose Powell Hill were next in seniority among the Army of Northern Virginia’s generals, and both had served as division commanders under Stonewall Jackson. But Powell Hill, a nervous, wiry man with a persistent chip of underappreciation on his shoulder and a bevy of chronic illnesses when under stress, had managed to antagonize nearly everyone else in Jackson’s corps, including Jackson himself, whom Hill denounced as “that crazy old Presbyterian fool.” The pity was that Powell Hill was precisely the kind of cantankerous, combative officer that Lee wanted in command; at Antietam, Hill had driven his division unmercifully on the roads up from Harpers Ferry, hit the Federals by surprise, and saved the Army of Northern Virginia from destruction. Lee thought Powell Hill was “upon the whole … the best soldier of his grade with me.” But Jackson’s staff neither forgot nor forgave Hill’s “very hot-headed and badly disciplined temper,” and so it was easier, both in terms of seniority and personalities, to let Jackson’s old corps go to Richard Ewell, and assign Hill to command the newly minted third corps.15

  Not that Dick Ewell was everyone’s first choice, either. Ewell was another West Pointer, two years ahead of Longstreet and seven ahead of Powell Hill, who had served in Mexico and in Arizona, chasing Apaches, and who was accounted on all hands to be “a superb rider” and “upright, brave and devoted.” But he was also “a queer character, very eccentric,” with a peculiar pop-eyed look and a bald, domelike head which gave him something of the appearance of a nervous pigeon. Under Jackson (who took all prizes for eccentricity), Ewell developed into a first-rate division commander, and during Jackson’s lightning campaign in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862, Ewell showed a commendable willingness to take matters into his own hands by attacking the Federal defenders of Winchester “without instructions” from Stonewall. But Jackson could be a quixotic master. (Ewell once complained that he never knew when his next orders would be for a march on the North Pole.) What this taught Ewell was to use his own judgment when he was on his own, but to wait for point-by-point orders when his superiors were close at hand and he could determine whether or not “his advice will be ungraciously received & perhaps his interference rebuked.” It did not help Ewell’s sense of self-reliance that he had been out of action for ten months, after a Federal bullet crushed his left kneecap and splintered the bone below at the second battle of Bull Run. All of the leg from thigh downward had to be amputated, and he now got around mostly on crutches or with an “ill-contrived” wooden prosthesis.16

  As a result, all that Robert E. Lee saw in Ewell was a “want of decision.” But he could not vault Powell Hill over Ewell’s place on the army list, and he quieted his reservations with the reflection that Ewell was “an honest, brave soldier, who has always done his duty well.” It would not have given Lee more ease if he had known that Ewell had reservations of his own about both the war and his aptness for corps command. “I don’t feel up to a separate command,” he wrote, with more humility than his record under Jackson justified, and after the trauma of the amputation Ewell had no desire to “see the carnage and shocking sights of another field of battle.” Still, Ewell was “the choice of all the soldiers as well as the officers” of Jackson’s corps. And Lee did not have a large pool of experienced division commanders from which to choose. Jubal Early, who had also commanded a division under Jackson and who now became the senior division commander under Ewell, was “active, enterprising, and diligent,” but also “never blessed with popular or captivating manners” and generally regarded as sarcastic, brusque, and irascible. (It was probably Early who, “looking at the Yankees with a dark scowl on his face, exclaimed most emphatically, ‘I wish they were all dead,’ ” only to earn the rebuke from Lee, “I wish they were all at home, attending to their own business, leaving us to do the same.”)17

  The reorganization of the Army of Northern Virginia would eventually boost more (and better) up-and-coming officers from brigade to division command, but it would take time for them to prove themselves equal to their new rank, much less one beyond it, and it would sometimes make for serious misjudgments. Harry Heth was a particular example of this. Heth’s grandfather and father had fought in the Revolution and the War of 1812, and the family’s coal-mining business gave the young Harry expensive tastes. But when his father’s death spelled the end of the Heth family’s good living, Harry was packed off for an education to West Point, where he enjoyed the reputation of a “gay reveler” and an abominable student. He managed only two promotions between graduating in 1847 and the outbreak of
the Civil War and then spent most of his time in garrison duties and in the West. But Heth had a certain aristocratic dash and charm that took the notice of Jefferson Davis and he became a particular protégé of Lee’s. In February 1863, Heth was given a brigade to command in Powell Hill’s division, and then promoted again to division command in Hill’s new corps.

  This was a mistake. Heth had little experience under fire, and an earlier petition for Heth’s promotion had been turned down by the Confederate Senate. His primary strength, apart from Lee’s sponsorship, was that he was one of the few people who could call Powell Hill a friend. William Dorsey Pender, a serious, pious North Carolinian who had only graduated from West Point in 1854, was also given one of Hill’s divisions, and also partly because Pender and Hill got along. But much as Pender was recommended by Lee “on account of valour & skill displayed on many fields, & particularly at the battle of Chancellorsville,” Lee had also erupted at Pender after Chancellorsville for failing to pursue the retreating Federals. “That is what you young men always do,” Lee upbraided him. “You allow these people to get away. I tell you what to do, but you don’t do it.”18

  It did nothing to ease the friction between the army’s personalities to discover that the Army of Northern Virginia was a divided house in political respects, as well. Its name made it a Virginia army, and its commanding general was a Virginian, and so were the commanding general’s personal and general staff. (Even Lee’s personal military escort were two companies from the 39th Virginia Cavalry Battalion.) But Virginia’s forty-three regiments amounted to less than a quarter of the Confederate infantry on the march up to Gettysburg in 1863; Georgia contributed thirty-six regiments, Mississippi eleven, distant Louisiana ten, and North Carolina outstripped them all (including Virginia) with forty-four. Nevertheless, the two new corps appointments went to Virginians, which made for “no little discontent” and a “serious feeling” of what James Longstreet called “too much Virginia” on the part of the rest of the army. “Do you know,” asked one of Longstreet’s division commanders, a Georgian, that “there is a strong feeling growing among the Southern troops against Virginia, caused by the jealousy of her own people for those from every other state? … No matter how trifling the deed may be which a Virginian performs it is heralded at once as the most glorious of modern times.”19