Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Robert E. Lee was not nearly so indulgent, even if Pickett was a Virginian. When Pickett took over command of Longstreet’s old division in the fall of 1862, his performance made so little impression on Lee that Pickett was soon packed off (with his division) to fend off a Federal threat to Richmond from south of the James River “and there await further orders.” He unpleasantly impressed one of his colonels, Eppa Hunton, who thought “his example to his soldiers was exceedingly bad.” The two brigades of the Army of Northern Virginia which Lee grudgingly allowed Secretary of War Seddon to keep near Richmond during the invasion of Pennsylvania—Micah Jenkins’ and Montgomery Corse’s—were peeled away from Pickett’s division. This left Pickett with only three brigades—under Lewis Armistead, James L. Kemper, and Richard Garnett—none of which had ever fought alongside one another.

  Each of the brigade commanders, in turn, had a question mark over their heads. Although all three were Virginians, Kemper was a politician, not a soldier; Garnett had been humiliated by accusations of cowardice by Stonewall Jackson in 1862; and Armistead may have been the weakest reed of all. Although raised in a military family (his father and four uncles fought in the War of 1812), Armistead was bounced out of West Point, not once but twice, and it took some political strong-arming to get him a commission as a second lieutenant in the 6th U.S. Infantry in 1839. His service in the Mexican War was undistinguished, and his parting from the army in 1861 to join the Confederacy was marred by the pain of having to bid farewell to his longtime friend Winfield Scott Hancock. “Hancock, good-bye,” Armistead lamented, “you can never know what this has cost me.” Armistead took command of the 57th Virginia, and rose to brigade command in time for the fighting on the Peninsula in 1862. But his performance was lackluster, and soldiers complained that he preferred “saying ‘Go on boys’ but has never said ‘come on’ when we are going into a fight.” During the Maryland Campaign in 1862, he was relegated to provost marshal duties, and missed both Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville.9

  When Longstreet’s corps marched east from Chambersburg on July 1st, Pickett’s division was left behind to complete the humdrum task of “the destruction of a railroad near Chambersburg by piling up the wooden ties and kindling them into huge fires, on which the iron rails were heated and bent.” All of this changed when Longstreet sent off orders to Pickett to “move up to Gettysburg as rapidly as possible” late in the afternoon of July 1st. The orders did not reach Pickett until one in the morning of July 2nd, and though Longstreet’s courier believed that “there was not ten minutes’ time consumed” by Pickett in rousing his staff and mounting up, the entire division could not have been in motion much before three o’clock. The distance to be covered between Chambersburg and Gettysburg was, unlike on July 1st, choked by backward-moving wagons, ambulances, and the general backwash of wounded men, supply clerks, prisoner details, and sutlers, and all under “a burning July sun.” But Pickett’s men were in fine fettle. “Officers and men were alike inspired with the greatest confidence in our ability to defeat the enemy anywhere … and never … in better fighting trim and spirit.” And the news from up ahead was exciting: a quartermaster passing Pickett’s men whooped, “Been fighting for two days—driving the Yankees all the time—got 6000 prisoners already—hurrah for Lee!”10

  The question was, How soon could they get there? “On the march over South Mountain” and “passing through the small hamlets of Cashtown and Seven Stars,” men in the 7th Virginia could “plainly” hear “the roar of Longstreet’s battle of that evening”—which meant that, since these Virginians were in the lead brigade of Pickett’s column, it is unlikely that the van of the division could have reached Gettysburg before darkness. Pickett himself may have ridden ahead and arrived at Gettysburg as early as three in the afternoon on July 2nd, but by nightfall the bulk of his division was still strung out for miles to the west. Lee might have believed, when he met Longstreet “at sunrise” that morning, “that General Pickett would soon report to me.” But portions of Pickett’s division were still arriving at Gettysburg “about sunrise morning of the 3rd.” Fitzgerald Ross, the Anglo-Austrian hussar and observer, had been up and “riding over the battlefield of yesterday … when Pickett’s division of three brigades … passed us,” which would put Pickett’s arrival much later than “sunrise.” Pickett himself did not report to Longstreet until “about seven o’clock,” with the as yet unfulfilled promise “that his troops would soon be upon the field.”11

  None of this prevented the postwar hyenas from asserting that Longstreet had once again indulged in self-centered foot-dragging, delaying another attack which would otherwise have succeeded, and sabotaging the possibilities for Confederate victory at Gettysburg. The first witness was Lee himself, in his official report, which noted obliquely that “General Longstreet’s disposition were not complete as early as expected.” Jubal Early was the next on the witness stand in 1872, just as obliquely suggesting that Longstreet had been fully as tardy in launching his attack on July 3rd as he had been on July 2nd, while John Brown Gordon was more explicit: “It now seems certain that impartial military critics, after thorough investigation, will consider … as established … that General Lee ordered Longstreet to attack at daybreak on the morning of the third day, and that he did not attack until two or three o’clock in the afternoon, the artillery opening at one.” In time, even men who made the attack would point their fingers at Longstreet. Eppa Hunton, the colonel of the 8th Virginia, thought “it is pretty well established that President Davis wanted to court-martial Longstreet” after Gettysburg, but was dissuaded by Lee because of the dissension which would be raised by the “large number of friends in the army” Longstreet had. “Pickett’s men could have gone into battle on the previous evening, when they reached Gettysburg,” reasoned a veteran of the 1st Virginia; but, added one of Pettigrew’s staffers, since Longstreet “had little heart for the second day’s fight,” it was not surprising that “he had none at all for the third day’s; and to this cause, without seeking any other, may be traced its failure.”12

  Longstreet only fouled his own nest when he tried to defend his disagreement with Lee. “Never was I so depressed as upon that day,” he wrote in 1876. “I felt that my men were to be sacrificed, and that I should have to order them to make a hopeless charge.” People who were happy to take him at his word converted that admission into prima facie evidence that Longstreet had delayed the attack as long as he dared, somehow hoping that it could be canceled. Hence, by failing to move on Lee’s schedule, and coordinate his attack with a renewed assault on Culp’s Hill, Longstreet had thrown away the best chance for its success.

  But if Longstreet was somehow in violation of Lee’s wishes, Lee certainly showed no evidence of it at the time. Men up and down the line saw “Gens. Lee and Longstreet on foot, no aids, orderlies or couriers, fifteen or twenty steps apart, field glasses in hand … stopping now and then to take observations … arranging, as we soon found out, for the famous charge of Pickett’s division”—and all without any sign of impatience or bad feeling. Others saw “Gen’l Lee and Col. W. H. Taylor” ride “near our lines” and “spread out a map on a stump and were looking over it when Gen’l Longstreet joined them and … appeared to be holding a council of war as they had sentinels thrown around the group of officers.”

  Longstreet might have been reluctant to initiate an attack on July 3rd, but that is far from being the same thing as deliberately refusing to implement it. “It is all wrong,” he told the chief of Hood’s division artillery, “but we will have [to do] it.” Longstreet frankly told Lee that “his command would do what any body of men on earth dared do,” even if it was still true that “no troops could dislodge the enemy from their strong position.” In fact, what impressed Porter Alexander was the care with which Longstreet gave orders for the preliminary artillery bombardment. “It was not meant simply to make a noise, but to try & cripple” the opposing Federal artillery, “to tear him limbless, as it were.” And only if
we fly in the face of repeated testimony which puts the arrival of Pickett’s division well after sunup on the 3rd can we imagine that it was James Longstreet who made an early morning attack out of the question.13

  This does not necessarily mean that Longstreet’s objections were correct, or that some kind of extended flanking movement would necessarily have succeeded. In retrospect, the kind of head-down, full-in-front attack which became Pickett’s Charge wears all the appearance of folly that over-the-top assaults acquired on the Western Front half a century later. But 1863 was closer on the clock of war technology to Waterloo than the Somme, and even though Robert E. Lee was not a man to offer arcane precedents from military history to justify the straight-on frontal infantry attack, he had several lying easily to hand over the previous decade. At the Alma in September 1854, Lord Raglan sent forward four divisions of infantry, numbering about 20,000 men, in an enormous double line of battle two miles long. They were compelled to attack across 4,000 yards of uneven terrain, including the knee-deep moat formed by the sluggish river Alma, ascend the steep slopes of Kourgan Hill and Telegraph Hill, drive off 14,000 Russian infantry on the top, and capture a series of “earthwork batteries, containing 24 and 32-pounders … supported by field-pieces and howitzers.” It cost Raglan 353 dead and 1,612 wounded out of his attacking force, but the Russians were not only driven back, but driven away in “such a confusion as no person ever saw.” The same tactics had won the day for the French at Magenta and Solferino in 1859, to the point where the defeated Austrians dropped rifle training from their drill regimen and concentrated on stosstaktik—storming forward with the bayonet. If Lee needed a rationale for the attack on July 3rd, he did not have far to look for it, Longstreet’s objections notwithstanding.14

  The one significant difference from the Alma and Solferino was the artillery bombardment Lee wished to hurl as the overture to the attack. The purpose of a preliminary artillery bombardment, at Gettysburg as it had been at Waterloo, was to silence enemy artillery, to “try & cripple” it. Silencing the enemy’s artillery was so important at Waterloo because Napoleon proposed to make his final grand attack there in column, and needed to close down the British artillery so that they would not make havoc of the large blocks of French attackers. His nephew, Napoleon III, proposed doing much the same thing at Solferino in 1859 when he used a concentrated grand battery to soften up the Austrian center, prior to a headlong infantry assault. “No column could withstand a well-directed fire of shrapnel shells for twenty minutes,” was the dictum born of British experience. “It would have to deploy.” The only alternative was to smother the defenders’ artillery.15

  But Raglan’s attack at the Alma dispensed with any artillery bombardment, for the simple reason that he intended to advance in line of battle from the start. Just as an advance in line was slower than a swiftly moving column, it also presented a much thinner and more modest target for artillery to disrupt at long range (with shell) or medium range (with solid shot). There is no surviving evidence whether Lee expressed a tactical preference for the shape of Longstreet’s attack, and it would have been unlike him in any event to have reached that far down into what were, after all, Longstreet’s prerogatives as a corps commander. But Lee’s insistence on a bombardment massive enough to tear the Yankee artillery “limbless” does raise the interesting question of whether Lee intended not only to make an attack in stosstaktic style, but in column. For why else would such a bombardment be necessary, especially when (as Alexander was already beginning to realize) the ammunition supplies for the artillery were dangerously low after two days of battle? This may not be the image of Pickett’s Charge which finally emerged on the pages of many of the histories of Gettysburg, but it would place Robert E. Lee in some very good nineteenth-century company.

  It was only when Henry Slocum and Alpheus Williams returned to Culp’s Hill after Meade’s war council that they learned how much advantage the Confederates had taken of the 12th Corps’ absence. “We had heard none of the tumult of Ewell’s attack,” wrote a captain in Slocum’s command; when they began fumbling their way back to their “old position on the right,” many of them found their positions on the south peak of Culp’s Hill occupied by Confederates from Allegheny Johnson’s division. In the darkness, Slocum’s men imagined that these occupiers were somehow Pap Greene’s men. “They mistook each other for friends” and “mingled and talked freely,” until some remark revealed that they were not among friends at all. A Connecticut soldier thought he was conveying welcome information when he shouted to a shadowy figure, “The Rebs have caught Hail Columbia on the left.” The figure erupted, “Hell! These are Yanks!” and “a general mêlêe took place.” There was a spring at the base of the south peak of Culp’s Hill known as Spangler’s Spring, from the farmer on whose property it sat, and a detail was sent out from the 46th Pennsylvania to fill up canteens. They collided with Confederates “also there filling their canteens,” but the captain in charge of the detail could not convince the colonel of the regiment that these were really Confederates. The 123rd New York was ready to shuffle back into its place between the two peaks of Culp’s Hill when it was greeted with a who-goes-there. “Come on, it’s all right,” called out a lieutenant on the skirmish line, and walked right into the arms of the rebels.

  This surprise was aggravated by a smarting sense of resentment, especially in units which had spent some time and effort imitating Pap Greene and building up little entrenchments. “It was exasperating to see them benefitting by our labors,” although the men of the 3rd Wisconsin “were somewhat consoled by the capture of a picket of twenty Confederates.” Little firefights broke out as other 12th Corps regiments blundered into Confederate squatters, and presently “orders were at once issued for” Geary to get his division back up to the north peak of Culp’s Hill, while Slocum’s other division, under Williams and Thomas Ruger, was readied for “an attack at daybreak” to take back control of the south peak.16

  By first light, Slocum and Williams had not only repositioned Greene’s brigade and Geary’s division, and gotten three brigades drawn up in the open fields between the Baltimore Pike and the lower peak, but had planted two of the 12th Corps’ batteries on a small rise beside the Baltimore Pike, “within 600 to 800 yards of the woods” on the lower peak that the men of Steuart and Allegheny Johnson occupied. Together with the last-ditch batteries planted on Powers Hill, Williams could hit the Confederates with twenty-six guns, and he confidently predicted that “from these hills back of us we will shell hell out of them.” The light strengthened in the east, accompanied by “the jostle of soldiers, followed by the clatter of canteens and other utensils … in addition to that of their arms as these clashed together in the efforts of the men to get into ranks.” Pap Greene’s brigade, “now pretty well exhausted with constant fighting,” and their rifles “foul from constant use,” were relieved by Geary’s brigades and other portions of the 1st Corps sent over by James Wadsworth from the saddle joining Culp’s Hill and east Cemetery Hill. Greene’s grateful New Yorkers fell back “to the foot of the hill, replenished their [cartridge] boxes, cleaned their guns and got their coffee.”17

  Finally, the sun rose, dull and indifferent behind the translucent clouds, and the artillery Alpheus Williams had so carefully assembled broke out in a chorus of crashes, aimed at “Johnson’s troops, who were within the cover of the woods.” Skirmish fire on both sides spurted, and after fifteen minutes of shelling, the six regiments of Archibald MacDougall’s brigade “pressed forward” to clear the Confederates out of their precarious lodgment on the south peak. For their part, the Confederates had not exactly been inert during the night. Dick Ewell was convinced that Robert Rodes had mishandled his role in what was supposed to be a joint attack on Cemetery Hill with Jubal Early, an attack which “had it been otherwise, I have every reason to believe … that the enemy’s lines would have been carried.” If Rodes did not know how to use his division properly, Ewell did, and under cover of darkness he transferre
d two of Rodes’ brigades around the semicircle of Cemetery Hill and planted them on the right of Allegheny Johnson’s division. For good measure, Ewell added Jubal Early’s reserve brigade under Extra Billy Smith. “At daylight Friday morning,” Ewell received orders from Lee “to renew my attack.” But “before the time fixed for General Johnson to advance,” Ewell wrote, “the enemy attacked him, to regain the works captured by [Maryland] Steuart the evening before.” Or, as Johnson himself snorted, “the enemy had saved him the trouble of deciding whether to attack.”18