Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Whether it was prisoners or loot, the constant stopping and starting of Confederate regiments and individuals through the town made the possibility of a concerted advance by Hill’s corps vanish into the dusk. Like their commander, many of Hill’s men were inclined to believe that quite enough of a victory had already been obtained. “We thought the battle of Gettysburg was over,” wrote one soldier in the 16th North Carolina, and on the town diamond a Confederate band set up to play “Dixie.”

  And that, at the end of the day, may also have been Robert E. Lee’s conclusion. Thus far, a day which had begun so badly for the Army of Northern Virginia had ended miraculously close to what Lee was hoping for—two entire infantry corps of the Union Army had been wrecked, probably beyond repair, beginning the process whereby Lee hoped to defeat the strung-out Federal pursuers in isolated pieces. Plus, the overcast day really was losing light, and many of his men had marched and fought to the point of exhaustion. If the well-pummeled Yankees were still up on Cemetery Hill tomorrow morning, he had plenty of fresh troops to move in behind them and finish them off, then turn to face the next dribble of Union infantry who would be laid hurriedly and sacrificially in his path on the road to Baltimore or Washington. He would be sorry that Hill had not gone in for a final smash-up, and irked that he had needed to take so much charge of the fighting into his own hands, and he would also tell James Longstreet, when Longstreet rode up later in the afternoon, that he was disappointed that Longstreet’s corps was still “three or four miles in our rear.” But he would not press the matter now, when the conclusion could be grasped tomorrow anyway. Perhaps, in the end, it was the great mistake of Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg that, having had to reach past his corps commanders to direct operations that afternoon, he did not keep reaching past them. Whatever blame attaches to Ambrose Powell Hill in the twilight of July 1st also attaches to Robert E. Lee for not overriding him.6

  Lee would not press Dick Ewell, either, in what would soon become famous as the most sensational Confederate misjudgment of the war, and the next great controversy of the battle after Stuart’s ride, Meade and the Pipe Creek Circular, and Howard’s argument with Hancock. Unlike Hill, Dick Ewell closely followed his two victorious divisions into the town, and by five o’clock Ewell “sat in his saddle under the shade” of a large elm tree outside McClellan’s Tavern on “the town square of Gettysburg,” chatting “amiably” with the milling throng of jubilant Confederate soldiers in the diamond, and even with “the Federal prisoners gathered about him.” There was still some desultory sniping going on in the town, and “General Ewell was fired on from the houses.” But Jubal Early then joined Ewell and urged him to go forward and have a look at “the enemy’s position” on Cemetery Hill “while the troops were reformed & halted on the right & left of the town.” One more all-or-nothing attack against the hill seemed feasible to Ewell, and he ordered Early and Robert Rodes to prepare whatever parts of their divisions they could get sorted out for an attack.

  Two considerations pulled Ewell back. First, Extra Billy Smith, commanding Early’s reserve brigade, sent over an aide to tell Ewell that his pickets out to the east of Gettysburg were reporting that “a heavy force was … moving up in their rear,” and until Ewell could be sure of what this meant, he would be foolish to launch the bulk of his two divisions in the other direction. “I don’t much believe in this,” Ewell added, but he would “suspend [his] movements until I can send & inquire into it.” Ewell’s other second thought was about Powell Hill. Jubal Early reminded him that an attack on Cemetery Hill by his division would have to be funneled through the streets “by flank or in columns so narrow as to have been subjected to a destructive fire from the batteries on the crest of the hill,” and nothing was more fearsome in prospect than infantry, moving in column, heading straight into artillery fire. Perhaps it would be better if Ewell could “communicate with Hill” and see if Hill was also moving to the attack “on the right,” rather than trying to deal with the Federals on the hill all by himself, and he sent off an aide, James Power Smith, to find Lee and ask whether he “could go forward and take Cemetery hill.” In the meantime, Ewell and Early moved down Baltimore Street, then over to Stratton Street near the German Reformed Church, where Ewell could survey the milling Union forces on Cemetery Hill. He became less and less convinced as he moved about the wisdom of an attack on Cemetery Hill. But he did have Allegheny Johnson’s fresh division finally moving within reach, and even if he did nothing with Early’s and Rodes’ divisions, he could send Johnson’s division to “seize & hold the high peak”—Culp’s Hill—which he could see “to our left of Cemetery Hill.”7

  Click here to see a larger image.

  James Power Smith crossed paths with Lee’s adjutant, Walter Taylor. The report Lee had from Lindsay Long was that “an attack at that time by the troops then at hand would have been hazardous.” If a movement by Powell Hill was “of very doubtful success,” then perhaps Ewell could “secure possession of the heights,” since Lee “could see the enemy retreating over those hills, without organization and in great confusion. Press the enemy, Lee instructed Taylor to tell Ewell, and secure the heights if possible. No written order to this effect has survived, if it was ever written at all. But Lee referred to more or less the same directive in his official report when he described sending instructions to 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.” Practicable. This was an odd word to use (if indeed Lee actually used it). It resembles practical, and so it carries some sense of describing a course of action which is useful, direct, or down-to-earth. But practicable is actually more specific. It has the connotation of looking for the most economical way of accomplishing what is (presumably) a practical end—the method easiest to put in play or most likely to achieve the result in mind. If practicable. If there is an easy or efficient way of doing this, you may do it; if Ewell is sure this will not entangle him with Federal forces he has not anticipated, and thus will not bring on a “general engagement” from which the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia would have to extricate him, then let the attack proceed.

  Once James Power Smith “found General Lee quite well to the right, in an open field, with General Longstreet, dismounted, and with glasses inspecting the position of the south of Cemetery Hill,” Lee agreed that “the elevated position in front was … the commanding position” of the field. But Hill was not ready to help, nor was Longstreet within striking distance, and so “he had no force on the field with which to take that position.” He only “wished him to take Cemetery hill if it were possible,” and he was just as interested to know whether Ewell could “send out a party to open communications with Stuart.” That was enough for Dick Ewell. Without any distraction provided by Powell Hill, Early was right about the suicidal results of an attack on Cemetery Hill through the town. And since Lee seemed in no urgent hurry, and had left the matter, apparently, “to Gen’l Ewell’s discretion,” that was the end of that.8

  This was not the conclusion Jubal Early had been hoping for, or at least not the one he would promote years later. “Unless we go up the hills to night the Yankees will be down upon us in the morning,” Early objected. He had already bolted ahead and sent a reconnoitering party up to Culp’s Hill, and found it safely deserted. If not an attack on Cemetery Hill, would Ewell at least authorize the occupation of Culp’s Hill? But Robert Rodes chose this moment to correct Early: “the men were tired & footsore & he did not think it would do any thing ‘one way or the other’ ” to occupy Culp’s Hill. Early turned away in irked disbelief. “If you do not go up there to-night,” he warned, “it will cost you ten thousand to get up there to-morrow.” Isaac Trimble, who had been tagging along with Ewell as a sort of supernumerary general, also chimed in: “Well, General, we have had a grand success; are you not going to follow it up and push our advantage.” Ewell demurred. “General Lee had instructed him not to bring on
a general engagement without orders.” Trimble noticed that Ewell “was far from composure” in saying this, and the Marylander unwisely assumed that what Ewell was hoping for was a polite nudge from a subordinate in the direction of what Ewell wanted to do anyway.

  Trimble was wrong. When he volunteered to lead “a division” to “take that hill,” Ewell ignored him. Give me a brigade, Trimble begged, even “a good regiment and I will engage to take that hill!” At that moment, Ewell turned on Trimble and snapped, “When I need advice from a junior officer, I generally ask it.” Trimble was just as rude. “Gen’l Ewell I am sorry you don’t appreciate my suggestions, you will regret it as long as you live.” Ewell might indeed have been suffering from “indecision” (as Trimble thought), but if Lee was not going to commit Hill to an attack on Cemetery Hill, then Ewell would “make no direct attack” of his own. As an afterthought, he conceded that, if Allegheny Johnson got into position in time, Johnson could occupy Culp’s Hill. But by the time Johnson sent out his own scouting party to Culp’s Hill, Winfield Scott Hancock had finally planted Wadsworth’s thinned-out 1st Corps division to the hill, and night was upon them.9

  This decision may have appeared reasonable to Dick Ewell, but not to the ordinary men in his corps. “It was very difficult to restrain the men from just pitching forward … without waiting for orders.” So, once again, critical tongues began to flap. “There was not an officer, not even a man, who did not expect that the war would be closed upon that hill that evening,” raged an officer in the 57th North Carolina. Winchester vanished from their memory, and the old veterans of Jackson’s corps now decided that “If Stonewall had been there he would not have waited for orders, nor until the morrow.” William Seymour spoke for his Louisiana Tigers when he said that “Here we all felt the loss of Gen. Jackson most sensibly; had he been alive and in command when we charged through the town, I am sure that he would have given his usual orders … ‘push on the infantry.’ ”10

  But was this really Ewell’s fault? In some ways, yes: at Winchester, Ewell had been on his own, and he had acted in precisely the independent fashion a corps commander should. On July 1st, with Robert E. Lee nearby, Ewell reverted to the habits of a division commander—waiting, alert and ready, for specific orders which would send him in specific directions—which was exactly what Lee had been most concerned about when appointing Ewell to corps command. And Ewell (and Powell Hill) had a point, too, about exhaustion: these men had been on the march and in the fight since sunup, and there were limits to the endurance of even the Army of Northern Virginia. “It was an excessively hot day & we were going through wheat fields & ploughed ground & over fences, it almost killed us,” complained a soldier in the 5th Alabama. “I was perfectly exhausted & never suffered so much from heat & fatigue in my life.”11

  Press the attack, and in the oncoming darkness the result might indeed resemble Chancellorsville—not the shattering of the Federal infantry under Stonewall Jackson’s relentless hammer, but the confusion and disarray in the darkness which had cost Jackson his life and left his corps too disorganized to act the next morning. Stop now, sang the voice of reason, smarten things up in the twilight, and an early morning jump-off would be far more likely to succeed. Ultimately, though, the decision was neither Hill’s nor Ewell’s—if Robert E. Lee had thirsted to drive the Yankees off Cemetery Hill or Culp’s Hill, he certainly knew how to give the orders for it. But this day, which had started so poorly, had ended with almost all the results for which Lee had been hoping. He would finish the job on the morrow, just as he had done at Second Bull Run and Chancellorsville, and he would do no more than suggest to Ewell that if the circumstances seemed favorable, the victor of Winchester could move ahead and occupy the hills.

  The legion of postwar Lee worshippers would, in the decades to come, try to shield Lee from the consequences of this decision, arguing that he was too much of a Virginia gentleman to issue thunderbolt instructions to his subordinates. But neither Lee nor Ewell really misunderstood each other that night, nor did the situation at nightfall on July 1st seem to require much in the way of urgency. The chances that the other Union corps were closer than a full day’s march were unlikely, and even if two or three of them did make it up to Gettysburg in the night, the 1st and 11th Corps would be in no shape to help them, while Lee would have added Longstreet’s corps to his own striking power. God had been gracious. He had moved in a mysterious way his wonders to perform, and the enemy had been delivered up. “If the enemy is there to-morrow, we must attack him,” Lee announced. Tomorrow, “he intended to make the Yankees that day (Thursday) dance.”12

  The commander rode over to the college, which had been transformed from a seat of learning into a bedlam of wounded and dying men, and climbed up to the cupola and “surveyed the surroundings … a little before sunset.” Satisfied that nothing more could be done in the fading light, Lee rode to Ewell’s improvised headquarters in the superintendent’s home at the almshouse, arriving around nine o’clock. He rebuffed one more effort by Isaac Trimble to get some sort of movement on Culp’s Hill authorized, but he did inform Ewell, Robert Rodes, and Jubal Early that he was planning to attack somewhere “on the enemy’s left” the next day if Longstreet’s corps “could be got up.” In any case, Ewell should make whatever preparations he needed to launch a diversionary attack of his own “upon Cemetery Hill when a favorable opportunity should offer.”13

  Lee rode back over to his headquarters, in a half-dozen tents pitched for him and his staff on the Cashtown Pike, near the one-and-a-half-story stone cottage owned by the Widow Thompson. “All night long ossifers was comin’ and goin’, getting ready to fight in the mornin’,” complained the widow. The men in Rodes’ division spread out and camped in a long straight line in Middle Street, extending all the way out from the town along the Cashtown Pike and the railroad embankment, while Early’s brigades sidled out to the east beyond the Hanover Road, and “struck camp in a deep ravine” facing Cemetery Hill. By ten o’clock, an uneasy quiet settled over the embattled town. “At every corner, and dotted all along the streets, could be seen little groups of ‘Johnnies,’ ” remembered one Confederate staff officer, “freely conversing and disputing with the citizens, male and female, on the merits of their respective armies, and especially of their officers,” as though a political convention instead of an army had taken up residence in the town. Professor Jacobs ventured out of his house at Washington and Middle streets to chat with the rebels there, who were boiling coffee, going out on picket, trying to sleep, a few “plundering the houses and cellars of citizens.” They told the curious mathematician that “the Yankees have a good position,” but “to-morrow, Longstreet, who just arrived this evening, and has not yet been in the fight, will give the Yankees something to do.” On the east side of town, Early’s division could hear “the Federals … chopping away and working like beavers” up on Culp’s Hill “all that night.”14

  George Gordon Meade was not having a quiet evening, either. Sending off Hancock to observe effectively immobilized Meade at Taneytown. It was not until “shortly after six o’clock” that Hancock’s first report arrived, a brief verbal description of “the situation of affairs” carried by William Mitchell and advising Meade that they could certainly “hold the ground until dark.” A second (and written) report followed in less than an hour, assuring Meade that “we will be all right till night,” but still holding off on a final recommendation until Slocum arrived and “it can be told better what had best be done.” Meade’s mind, however, had evidently been inclining more and more in the Gettysburg direction anyway. He dismissed Mitchell with the decisive comment, “I will send up the troops.” And even before Hancock’s written assessment was brought in, Meade had dashed off a note to Hancock and Doubleday that “it seems that we have so concentrated that a battle at Gettysburg is now forced on us.” Hancock departed Gettysburg “about dark,” leaving Slocum in overall charge, and when he finally arrived back in Taneytown, he found that Meade “h
ad already given orders … to advance at once to Gettysburg, and was about proceeding there in person.”15

  Every energy now was turned “to advance his converging corps,” and Meade proceeded to fire off orders to Sykes and the 5th Corps (at seven o’clock) and the reserve brigades of the 3rd Corps at Emmitsburg to get to Gettysburg “with the greatest dispatch.” He also needed to compose a report on his decisions for Henry Wager Halleck in Washington, and since the nearest reliable telegraph station was in Frederick, there would be considerable delay in the delivery, not to mention the receipt of any helpful directive from Halleck. Meade wanted the ever-reliable John Sedgwick to “report here in person” in Taneytown with the 6th Corps, and Meade had to give him time to do this. He waited, while all the sprawling equipage of a headquarters was taken down (and all this took till ten o’clock), and then when he could delay no longer, Meade sent Sedgwick one more set of orders to meet him instead in Gettysburg, and “proceeded to the field.”16

  The clouds which had overcast the entire day at Gettysburg now dissipated, giving Meade the unlooked-for aid of a brilliant full moon to light the long road between Taneytown and Gettysburg. This was no jubilant cavalcade: the army’s intelligence chief, George Sharpe, recalled “with distinctness the solemnity of our reflections and discussions.” Throughout the day—only his fourth full day in command of the Army of the Potomac—Meade had been going without intermission since early in the morning, and when he cantered up the slope of Cemetery Hill around one in the morning, Carl Schurz was taken aback to see that “his long-bearded, haggard face, shaded by a black military felt hat the rim of which was turned down, looked careworn and tried, as if he had not slept the night.” He showed up accompanied by only a single staff officer and an orderly, and without the sort of whoop-ti-do fanfare that McClellan and Hooker liked to indulge. Meade had “nothing in his appearance or his bearing—not a smile not a sympathetic word addressed to those around him—that might have made the hearts of the soldiers warm up to him.”17