Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Pickett’s survivors were pointing fingers at Pettigrew’s division even as they walked back in defeat, and Jedediah Hotchkiss wrote this accusation in his diary before the guns had cooled: Pickett’s men, he said, “drove the enemy from their works … but Pettigrew failed to sustain him.” (This was all the easier to believe because “the troops in the movement were mostly North Carolinians.”) But among Pettigrew’s survivors, it was “the failure of [Isaac] Trimble to support Pettigrew” which “resulted in disaster” on July 3rd. Alternately, claimed the Richmond Enquirer, it was the failure of “Brig. Gen. Posey, commanding a Mississippi brigade, and Brig. Gen. Mahone, commanding a Virginia brigade … to advance” in support of Wright’s Georgians on July 2nd which cost the Confederacy its victory. All of these units belonged to Powell Hill’s corps, and so Hill also came in for a share of brickbats.23

  None of the Army of Northern Virginia’s leaders received more concentrated abuse than J.E.B. Stuart and James Longstreet. Charles Marshall, Lee’s military secretary, played the principal role in condemning Stuart, bringing down on the would-be cavalier’s head the charge that Stuart had disobeyed Lee’s orders “to move … into Maryland, and take position on General Ewell’s right, place himself in communication with him, guard his flank, and keep him informed of the enemy’s movements.” Longstreet was denounced, not only for deliberately dragging out the launch of his flank march early on the morning of July 2nd, but for dragging out the launch of Pickett’s Charge as well, and then failing to commit Hood’s and McLaws’ divisions to Pickett’s support. This j’accuse was launched by Jubal Early and William Nelson Pendleton, but it was joined by Lafayette McLaws, who announced that “if the corps had moved boldly into position by eight or nine o’clock in the morning [on July 2nd], as it could have done beyond question … Round Top could have been occupied without any considerable degree of difficulty.” Of course, McLaws was writing long after he had quarreled with Longstreet over promotion and seniority; but even as early as July 7th, McLaws had concluded that Longstreet was “a humbug—a man of small capacity, very obstinate, not at all chivalrous, exceedingly conceited, and totally selfish.” Eventually, the catalog of Longstreet’s condemners expanded internationally, to include no one less than the model of a modern major general, Sir Garnet Wolseley.24

  The ultimate arbiter of blame for Gettysburg would be Robert E. Lee, and Lee’s original impulse was to blame himself, beginning with that moment of agonized realization that dawned on him as Pickett’s division was covered in defeat. “Our failure is to be charged to me,” he told one of Longstreet’s staffers as they crossed the pontoon bridge at Falling Waters, and during the retreat to the Potomac, Lee spoke at length to the Anglo-Austrian hussar Fitzgerald Ross with unusual candor about his responsibility. “Had he been aware that Meade had been able to concentrate his whole army … he certainly should not have attacked him,” but he had been “led away, partly by the success of the first day,” into the belief that “Meade had only a portion of his army in front of him, and seeing the enthusiasm of his own troops, he had thought that a successful battle would cut the knot so easily and satisfactorily, that he had determined to risk it.” His initial reports to Jefferson Davis mentioned no other culprits, and he sharply criticized the Charleston Mercury at the end of July for heaping “censure upon the operations of the army” and singling out Harry Heth for “the failure of the battle.” He had, he explained, “no complaints to make of any one but myself.” In August, Lee attempted to offer Davis his resignation, but Davis waved it away. “To ask me to substitute you with someone more fit to command,” said Davis, “is to demand an impossibility.”25

  But even during the retreat, Lee was already starting to shift that blame to other shoulders. He began with Stuart, since Lee’s “want of knowledge of the enemy’s movements” was “attributed to Stuart having got too far away from him with his cavalry.” In his first official report on July 31st (which was not published in the Richmond Enquirer until October 3rd), Lee began to hint that “the absence of the cavalry rendered it impossible to obtain accurate information” about Meade’s army and thus forced “the march toward Gettysburg” to be “conducted more slowly than it would have been had the movements of the Federal Army been known.” When Lee submitted a longer, more detailed report of operations in January 1864, there was a keener edge to the criticism of Stuart. “It was expected that as soon as the Federal Army should cross the Potomac, General Stuart would give notice of its movements,” Lee now decided and it was “absence of the cavalry” which forced him “to concentrate the army east of the mountains.” (It was not missed that, when Lee mandated the reorganization of his cavalry divisions as a single corps, he did not recommend that Stuart be promoted, like his other corps commanders, to the rank of lieutenant general.) Five years later, Lee had grown even more prickly about Stuart. “Stuart’s failure to carry out his instructions forced the battle of Gettysburg,” he informed William Allan, a onetime staffer for Stonewall Jackson.26

  Over time, Lee extended blame to a variety of targets within the Army of Northern Virginia. Some of them were benign: Harry Heth maintained that Lee told him the real cause of the failure to take Cemetery Hill was the shell splinter that wounded Dorsey Pender on July 2nd. “I shall ever believe if General Pender had remained on his horse half an hour longer we would have carried the enemy’s position.” Some of them were not: “If I had had Stonewall Jackson with me”—and not Dick Ewell—“I should have won the battle of Gettysburg.” He did not doubt that Ewell was “a fine officer,” but Ewell “would never take the responsibility of exceeding his orders, and having been ordered to Gettysburg, he would not go farther and hold the heights beyond the town.” He also confided to John Imboden that he believed that Johnston Pettigrew had failed Pickett on July 3rd, “and if they had been supported as they were to have been … we would have held the position and the day would have been ours.” Even Longstreet had to endure some fault-finding from Lee for “dispositions” which “were not completed as early as was expected.” And he grew increasingly reluctant to speak of Gettysburg as a mistake, much less “all my fault.” He told Jefferson Davis that “I do not know what better course I could have pursued,” and he continued that line of thought with Heth in the spring of 1864, explaining that if he could “cross the Potomac and invade Pennsylvania” yet again, he would do it, because he believed that “an invasion of the enemy’s country” must be “our true policy.” In the largest sense—and perhaps the most shameless one, too—Lee blamed his men. The problem in 1863 was not poor planning or defective execution, but that “more may have been required of them than they were able to perform.” He had expected “too much” of his army’s “prowess and valour.” This allowed him to admit a mistake, but also to lay the origin of the mistake on others. After Appomattox, he would shift blame in the same direction, only this time he would characterize his soldiers’ resistance as “feeble.”27

  Others were not so sure that Lee could evade responsibility so ambiguously. The Richmond Enquirer was the first to ask, on July 21st, how “Gen. Lee was led to this by overweening confidence in his troops.” Lee’s unthinking overestimation of the Confederate soldier and the equally unthinking underestimation of his Yankee counterpart had been noticed by the British observer Fremantle, who was bothered by “the universal feeling in the army … of profound contempt for an enemy whom they had beaten so constantly, and under so many disadvantages.” This was a contempt which, according to both John Esten Cooke (who was an aide to Stuart) and James Dabney McCabe (a VMI graduate who interviewed Lee for a biography in 1866), Lee shared to the point where it impaired his judgment. “General Lee, it is said, shared the general confidence of his troops, and was carried away by it.” That hubris, in turn, played into a sensational letter Longstreet wrote on July 24th, claiming that Lee had been too full of himself to listen to Longstreet’s advice, and thus lost the great opportunity to “have destroyed the Federal army, marched into Washington, an
d dictated our terms; or, at least, held Washington, and marched over as much of Pennsylvania as we cared to.” But no one burned with more resentment over Lee’s cavalier assumption that the Confederate soldier could be asked to win it all without any consideration of cost than George Pickett. In 1870, John Mosby met Pickett in Richmond and persuaded him to “call and pay respects” to Lee, who was visiting the former Confederate capital with his daughter. “The interview was cold and formal,” Mosby remembered, “and evidently embarrassing to both.” And when they left, Pickett spoke “very bitterly of General Lee, calling him ‘that old man’ ” who “had my division massacred at Gettysburg.”28

  This means that, by a strange coincidence, both Meade the victor and Lee the vanquished spent a substantial amount of effort disclaiming personal responsibility for the outcome of what a member of the 24th Michigan called “the bloody water-mark of the rebellion.” So who was responsible for Gettysburg? And what difference did assigning responsibility make?

  Comparatively few people understood that the principal figure in making the Gettysburg battle happen in the way it did was a man who wasn’t even there for most of the three days, and that was John Reynolds. The Army of Northern Virginia went into Pennsylvania in 1863 for approximately the same reasons it had tried to do so in the late summer of 1862. For Robert E. Lee there was an additional incentive imposed by the threat of Jefferson Davis and James Seddon to detach parts of the army and send them to prop up the Confederacy’s fortunes in the West. But Lee’s principal motivation remained logistical—mid-nineteenth century armies consumed such vast amounts of food and provender that the threadbare soils of northern Virginia were approaching a point of no return. If the opportunity permitted, Lee would engage the Army of the Potomac in battle. But he was not deceiving James Longstreet when he said that this would be a purely secondary aim. Lee would fight only if the Army of the Potomac obligingly proffered the right circumstances. What Lee allowed Longstreet to believe was that the only right circumstances would be those in which the Union army threw itself at a well-dug-in Confederate army. What Lee told Isaac Trimble was something different: that he would actually take the offensive if the Army of the Potomac could be enticed to pursue him, and in pursuing, string itself out into disconnected little pieces that Lee could turn on and rend one by one.

  Lee never specified what might happen after the Army of Northern Virginia won such an engagement, but the possibilities did not require too much imagination. One alternative would be the simple military collapse of the Army of the Potomac. “I do not hesitate to express the conviction,” wrote Augustus Buell (who was not at Gettysburg, but passed himself off as a soldier so effectively in the pages of the Union veterans’ newspaper, National Tribune, that one officer was sure Buell had been in his command), “that, had the Army of the Potomac been whipped at Gettysburg … it would have dissolved.” Doubtless “some of the other volunteer regiments would have held together and made some sort of retreat toward the Susquehanna,” but the others would simply have deserted en masse in much the same way Napoleon’s army disintegrated after Waterloo, leaving “the rebel chieftain … at liberty to go where and do what he pleased.” The other alternative scenario would be political collapse—the victory of a Clement Vallandigham or George Woodward in the fall 1863 gubernatorial elections, and a successful demand by them for the opening of peace talks. Or, had Lee seized Cemetery Hill and driven the Army of the Potomac off in disarray, he might have been witness to both kinds of collapse. “The Northern sympathizers with secession,” speculated one Union officer, “now taking their cue from the success of the rebel army, would have established mob rule over the whole chain of Atlantic cities … and thus paralyzed the whole machinery of our Government.” Almost at a signal, the New York City draft riots broke out on the day Lee crossed the Potomac at Williamsport. If Lee had been crossing the Susquehanna on that day instead, it might have been the Army of Northern Virginia which was called in to restore order, rather than units from Henry Slocum’s 12th Corps.29

  All of this was spoiled, however, by John Reynolds. By swinging well north into the Cumberland Valley and bypassing Harpers Ferry, Lee fooled Joe Hooker into staying too long at the Rappahannock, and then induced Hooker to rush headlong into pursuit in just the fashion Lee hoped for. Although George Meade planned to recall the Union army from its strung-out pursuit and concentrate it behind Pipe Creek, it is not likely that either Halleck or Lincoln would have permitted him to remain there for long. By that time Lee would have already turned and begun laying his trap along the Cashtown–Gettysburg line, so that any move Meade (or any other successor) made from Pipe Creek northward would fall straight into Lee’s embrace. Reynolds, however, disagreed with Meade’s defensive shrinking back into Maryland; instead, with the connivance of Oliver Otis Howard, Reynolds pushed ahead and sprang Lee’s trap prematurely, something which was made all the easier by the absence of Stuart and a cavalry screen. It cannot be repeated too often: Lee did not lack for intelligence—for strategic information about the location, strength, and movement of the enemy; what he lacked was screening—tactical concealment of his own movements from observation and contact by the enemy. The result for Lee was that, rather than having the luxury of concentrating all three of his infantry corps between Cashtown and Gettysburg, two of those corps stumbled into contact with Reynolds’ advance detachments on July 1st. They then wasted enough of their own leaderless momentum on Reynolds and Howard that even after Lee arrived and coordinated the drive that eviscerated the 1st and 11th Corps on the afternoon of July 1st, they fell just short of seizing the single most dominant feature of the landscape, the artillery plateau formed by Cemetery Hill.

  Lee should have obeyed his first instinct—avoid a general engagement. At the end of the day on July 1st, an entire third of the Army of Northern Virginia was still in transit from Chambersburg, and at least a third of that would not be within easy call for another thirty-six hours. But how does a hunter repair a bent trap? Especially when some of his prey is already snared there? And what explanation does he give his fellow hunters? It was here that Lee felt most keenly the absence of screening and scouting, because those functions would have warned Powell Hill’s corps away from Gettysburg on July 1st, and would have signaled to Lee on July 2nd that the other pieces of the Army of the Potomac were a lot closer to Gettysburg than he supposed. By the time the 12th Corps, then the 3rd Corps, and then the 2nd and 5th Corps arrived on July 2nd, any real hope that Lee’s destroy-them-by-pieces plan would work was mostly gone.

  Lee did not know that, and the routine intelligence-gathering mission on which he sent Captain Johnston on the morning of the 2nd gave him the false confidence that the Army of Northern Virginia would, in fact, only be facing the ruined remnants of the 1st and 11th Corps on Cemetery Hill. Johnston’s staggeringly inaccurate assessment worked far more damage to the Army of Northern Virginia than Stuart’s vacancy, even though, once Johnston’s error became apparent, the great flanking arc Lee planned for James Longstreet came marvelously close to success. Johnston’s mistake notwithstanding, Longstreet immolated both the 3rd and 5th Corps, plus a substantial amount of the 2nd Corps, all of which was, by any standard, a greater achievement than Stonewall Jackson’s more famous flank march at Chancellorsville two months before.

  Longstreet’s attack fell so narrowly short of its goal that it gave Lee hope that he had regained control of his trap. Unfortunately, that regained control was an illusion. To the contrary, Lee experienced an unusually difficult time prodding his staff and other corps commanders to act. This was not because Powell Hill or Dick Ewell were incompetents—Ewell had certainly demonstrated an unusual amount of tactical skill in the Valley Campaign of 1862 and in capturing Winchester—but because they were too new at corps command to have shaken the smaller-scale habits of brigade and division command, and no longer operating on ground that gave them the confidence to act aggressively. (Powell Hill, in particular, is the mystery man of Gettysburg, a famously v
igorous fighter who makes only the most infrequent and pallid appearances at Gettysburg.) For them, Pennsylvania’s endless barns and wheat fields, the tiny cross-check of farm boundaries, the everlasting and immovable fences created a landscape of uncertainty. “Our men are better satisfied on this side of the Potomac,” wrote Lee’s adjutant, Walter Taylor, on July 17th. “They are not accustomed to operating in a country where the people are inimical to them.” Even for those like Ewell, who had briefly been stationed in Pennsylvania, the unfamiliar expanse of a free state induced paralysis. Only a few of Lee’s subordinates acted at Gettysburg, and when they did so it was often (as in the case of Stuart) in erratic and uncontrollable fashion.30

  It can be said, then, that Lee lost a battle he should have won, and lost it because (a) he began the battle without completely concentrating his forces, (b) he proved unable to coordinate the attacks of the forces he did have available, and (c) he failed to reckon with how tenaciously the Army of the Potomac, in contrast to the Russians in 1854 and the Austrians in 1859, would hold its ground under direct infantry attack on July 3rd. Perhaps, if a cavalry screen could have brushed away Buford from outside Gettysburg on June 30th, or cushioned Hill from walking into a “general engagement” until that concentration had taken place … perhaps, if Dick Ewell had asked just a little more from his corps or taken greater care in getting them into place so that they could move together … perhaps, if Powell Hill had done likewise, and brought Wright, Posey, and Mahone banging with their full weight against Cemetery Ridge that evening of July 2nd … perhaps, if those fences had not been the way small-scale farmers kept their livestock from wandering into the Emmitsburg Road … it might all have been different. But Stuart’s presence would only have averted an unscheduled contact; it would not have guaranteed victory in some subsequent, larger collision. As for Ewell and Hill, no one could have known from their brief time in corps command how far short of Stonewall Jackson’s mark they were going to fall, or how cruelly inadequate Lee’s minuscule staff would prove in directing them. And the fences were merely the mute resistance of free men and free soil to the invasion of slavery, which few people would heed until it was too late. “I noticed after the battle,” recalled one Virginian, that “there were more dead and wounded by the fences than elsewhere,” probably because “the men came more directly in the range of the enemy’s guns while on the fence.”31