Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  Lee was no happier than Longstreet at having to fight at Gettysburg. Indeed, in his report on the battle Lee wrote: “It had not been intended to fight a general battle at such a distance from our base . . . but, finding ourselves unexpectedly confronted by the Federal Army, it became a matter of difficulty to withdraw through the mountains with our large trains. . . . At the same time the country was unfavorable for collecting supplies while in the presence of the enemy’s main body. . . . A battle thus became, in a measure, unavoidable.”

  The word “unavoidable” is exactly the one that Longstreet would have rejected—he wanted to avoid the battle at all costs—but behind all the decisions, misfortunes, and surprises at Gettysburg, and for that matter behind the disagreement between Lee and Longstreet about tactics, lies the simple reality that the Army of Northern Virginia had to keep moving to find food and forage. Lee could not retreat and risk having to abandon his wagon trains, which contained his ammunition; he could not make a long flank march through country his army had already picked clean; he could not look for a better place to fight, where Meade would have to attack him, since Lee’s line of communications to Winchester, and from there by railway back to Richmond, was already in jeopardy. Lee was in enemy territory; he could not let his men and his animals starve; and thanks to Stuart, Meade had surprised him, so he had no option but to fight it out where he was.

  Longstreet was right to grumble that it was the wrong ground to fight on, but Lee had no other choice from the moment that Harrison brought the news that Meade was only a two-day march behind him. Fremantle, who was temperamentally inclined to see the sunny side of things (no bad quality in a soldier), writes on June 30: “I had a long talk with many officers [including Longstreet, in whose mess Fremantle was a guest] about the approaching battle, which cannot now be delayed long, and which will take place on this road instead of the direction of Harrisburg, as we had supposed. Ewell, who had laid York as well as Carlisle under contribution,* has been ordered to reunite. Everyone, of course, speaks with confidence.”

  If everybody felt confident (Longstreet may have felt otherwise, but if so he kept his doubts to himself around Fremantle), it was largely due to Lee. First of all, Lee’s own presence was an inspiration to those around him, whatever their rank; second, he had total confidence in his own soldiers, who had never failed him even in the most difficult of situations. Ultimately, he believed that his men were unbeatable, and that once he had moved them to the right position, his generals would know what to do. The outcome would be in the hands of God, and would depend on the fighting spirit of the Confederate soldier, in which Lee had almost as profound a belief, though he would have considered it irreligious if not blasphemous to compare the two. Faith can, of course, move mountains, but it is a bad thing to stake a battle on it, which is what Lee did.

  On June 30 the whole army was on the move toward Cashtown, which was just over six miles from Gettysburg. Lee still fretted about his lack of cavalry. Stuart’s whereabouts were still unknown; Brigadier General John D. Imboden’s cavalry brigade, which could certainly have provided enough troopers for a reconnaissance in force, was still to the southwest of Chambersburg, guarding the rear of the army; Brigadier General Albert G. Jenkins’s cavalry brigade was with Ewell’s corps, making a forced march toward Cashtown. In the absence of Imboden’s cavalry, Lee had left Major General George E. Pickett’s division of Longstreet’s corps behind to guard Chambersburg—decision that was to have serious repercussions over the next three days. Although Pickett was something of a dandy, who wore his hair “in long ringlets,” Colonel Fremantle judged him to be “a desperate character,” and he had a reputation as a determined fighter. He was also high-spirited and “mischievous,” and this may have been one of the reasons why Longstreet, a taciturn and serious man not given much to humor, enjoyed his company.

  Heavy rain slowed the army’s march—although it must have come as a relief to men and horses in the sultry heat—and for the moment Lee had no plan except that of “going over and see what General Meade is after.” Lee himself spent the night in Greenwood, about fourteen miles from Gettysburg, conscious of the fact that his whole army was on the move now, filling the roads over South Mountain, and that he had not a single cavalryman to scout what was ahead of him. Even the most self-confident of generals might have been dismayed, but Lee seems to have kept his self-composure; at any rate, of his staff, neither Long nor Marshall records anything unusual, though Longstreet notes that “there is no doubt” the absence of the cavalry disturbed Lee’s mind. It must have been further disturbed that evening, when A. P. Hill sent word that Brigadier General James Pettigrew, who had heard there was a large supply of shoes in Gettysburg,* had received permission from the commander of his division, Henry Heth, to enter the town and requisition them—acquiring shoes was always a major priority for the Army of Northern Virginia—and was surprised to find Federal cavalry to the southwest of the town, and also to hear the sound of infantry drums from beyond it. Lee does not seem to have shown any concern—this was no doubt partly a result of his firm self-control, but his remark of the previous day about going over to Gettysburg to see what “General Meade is after” would seem to indicate that he had already guessed he might find some of Meade’s army there. What he hoped was to get there while most of that Union army was still strung out along the roads from Westminster, Maryland, to Gettysburg.

  It is worth bearing in mind that in the mid-nineteenth century most maps were neither topographically accurate nor easily available. Lee had very little idea of what the country ahead of him looked like; even Meade, a Pennsylvanian with Pennsylvanian regiments in his army, had almost no idea of what the country was like around the little town. The average citizen today, with a road map or, more likely, a cell phone and a GPS navigation device in his or her car, would be better informed than was either commanding general. Many of Lee’s officers and men knew northern Virginia well, of course, and south of the Potomac local residents would in any case have been eager to point out roads, shortcuts, and important landmarks to the Confederate army; but in Pennsylvania, enemy territory, Lee was on his own: he had little idea of what was in front of him as he and Longstreet’s First Corps began to emerge through a gap in South Mountain, “a continuation of the Blue Ridge Mountains,” as Fremantle, who wrote admiringly of the scenery, observes. Fremantle was now in the company of the official Austro-Hungarian military observer, Captain Fitzgerald Ross, who gave great amusement to the Confederate soldiers by his carefully waxed moustache tips and elaborate hussar uniform with all the embroidered frogs and trimmings.*

  Gettysburg: The First Day

  July 1 broke as a clear, hot day with a gentle breeze, and by all accounts Lee was “cheerful and composed” as he rode forward and called out to “Old Pete” Longstreet to ride with him. We owe to Fremantle a description of Lee on the day. “He wore a long gray jacket, a high black felt hat, and blue trousers tucked into his Wellington boots,” the short ankle length black boots favored by the Duke of Wellington, and carried no sword or pistol, just binoculars in a leather case fastened to the belt of his tunic. “He rides a handsome horse, which is extremely well groomed. He is himself very neat in his dress and his person, and in the most arduous marches he always looks smart and clean.”

  There were no fewer than five roads leading into Gettysburg from the north and the west—it was a market town, after all—and all of them were packed with Confederate troops from early morning on. Too tightly packed, in fact; more than half of Lee’s army and a good part of his artillery were on them, and moving none too fast, for that matter. One senses a certain lack of urgency, perhaps because Lee was not yet aware he was going to have to fight a major battle that day, perhaps because of the absence of Stonewall Jackson scowling from under the brim of his battered cap and growling out, “Press on, press on!” to the troops. In fact, Lee and Longstreet were no sooner on Chambersburg Pike riding toward Gettysburg than Lee had to pause and straighten out what amou
nted to a traffic jam because a division of Ewell’s with all its supply train had “cut in front” of the first elements of Longstreet’s corps. Lee had to halt Longstreet’s corps and pass on Ewell’s supply train, which took long enough for Longstreet to dismount and let his horse Hero graze. Of course a supply train, with its lumbering wagonloads full of ammunition and rations drawn by horses or mules, moved at a slower pace than trained infantry, but one has to observe first of all that it should have been somebody’s job to make sure that the infantry’s advance was not blocked by wagons, and second that it should not have been up to the commander in chief to sort these matters out on the road. On maps of the battle all these movements are indicated by neat, bold arrows, but one has to picture in one’s mind thousands of men and horses—every gun, and every caisson, was drawn by six horses; and most officers above the rank of lieutenant rode a horse—proceeding down narrow roads that were still muddy from yesterday’s rain, with stragglers, as always, falling behind, and the pace held down to that of the slowest vehicle. Most of Lee’s army was still widely spread out from Chambersburg on the right to Heidelsburg on the left and in motion by several roads toward Cashtown when two brigades of Heth’s division made contact on the outskirts of Gettysburg at 7:30 a.m. with the “vedettes” (the cavalry equivalent of pickets) of Union Brigadier General John Buford’s First Division, U.S. Cavalry, Army of the Potomac.

  Buford was the steadiest of generals, and almost half of his division consisted of regulars, experienced troopers. He had arrived in Gettysburg the day before, sent by General Meade to scout out the approaches to the town, and it had been his troopers whose presence discouraged General Pettigrew from entering the town to requisition shoes, and whom generals Heth and A.P. Hill had optimistically decided were probably Pennsylvania militiamen.

  Buford had seen instantly that the three low, gently sloping ridges to the west of Gettysburg, of which the principal one, called Seminary Ridge after the large Lutheran seminary at its northern end, would be essential to defending the town, and placed his dismounted troopers to hold them. Except for the advantage of good ground it was not a formidable force—Buford had only 1,200 men and a battery of horse artillery deployed behind post-and-rail fences, and while his troopers were armed with breech-loading carbines, giving them a much faster rate of fire than infantry, one in every four of his men was designated a “horse holder,”* as was always the case with dismounted cavalry, and could play no active role in the fight. Still, these were mostly seasoned troops, not the part-time militiamen General Heth had expected to find before him.

  It took some time for the news that Heth had stumbled on opposition more formidable than local yokels to make its way back up the crowded Chambersburg Pike to Cashtown, where Lee, who could hear the firing of artillery and the rattle of musketry ahead of him, at last expressed his feelings to Major General Richard Anderson, whose division was waiting there. “I cannot think what has become of Stuart,” Lee said to Anderson, as they listened to the sound of firing. “I ought to have heard from him long before now. He may have met with disaster, but I hope not. In the absence of reports from him, I am in ignorance as to what we have in front of us here. It may be the whole Federal army, it may be only a detachment. If it is the whole Federal force, we must fight a battle here. If we do not gain a victory, those defiles and gorges which we passed will shelter us from disaster.”

  Anderson, in his account of this conversation, written in a letter to Longstreet, also described Lee as “disturbed and depressed,” and speaking more to himself than to Anderson, although Lee’s state of mind may have been caused by the fact that A. P. Hill had halted Anderson’s division and his reserve artillery at Cashtown, instead of pushing them forward. Anderson does not seem to have been a particularly imaginative man, but Lee had enough confidence in him to consider promoting him to corps commander, so one must assume Anderson was quoting Lee as accurately as he could years after the event.

  If the quote is accurate—and it is worth keeping in mind that the two people who make the most of it are Freeman, who was determined to exonerate Lee from any blame for his defeat at Gettysburg; and Longstreet, who was anxious to shift as much of the blame as he could from himself to Stuart—then it is a remarkable thing for a commander in chief to have told one of his own division commanders immediately before a battle. Nobody could have summed up the position he was in better than Lee himself did, or given a more accurate forecast of what was about to happen, although the wisdom of sharing this with General Anderson seems doubtful; nor does it seem likely that Lee, if he was contemplating the possibility of defeat, would have told Anderson so. But Lee was human, after all, so he may have been doing just what most of us do as we approach a moment of crisis, which is to question whether we made the right decision—to have second thoughts, or doubts, as ordinary human beings call them—though it was a rare phenomenon for Lee. Whatever Lee may have said to Anderson, it would be more typical of him to blame himself rather than Stuart, particularly since the scenario before him was exactly what Longstreet had warned against—Lee had marched his army into enemy territory, put his own line of communication at risk, and was about to collide with the Army of the Potomac in a place he did not know, and with no reliable intelligence about its strength.

  In any case, Lee ordered Anderson to resume his march, then rode on himself toward Gettysburg. He seems to have cheered up on the way, perhaps because the prospect of battle always brought out in him a certain excitement beneath the calm exterior—he was a soldier, after all—and perhaps because he preferred to be in the thick of things, rather than stuck on Chambersburg Pike with his staff. Lee was not a commander who was at ease in his headquarters looking at maps and dealing with messages from the front; he preferred to see what was happening for himself; he was like the warhorse in the Book of Job who “saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and . . . smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.”

  It was not that Lee enjoyed battle—no professional soldier enjoys it—but it was his natural element, as it had been his father’s (Light-Horse Harry Lee’s political touch was never half as sure as his skill and daring as a soldier); it was what he had been bred for, what he had been trained for, and what he excelled at. Whatever he felt as he approached Gettysburg—perhaps he had been “disturbed and depressed” when talking to Anderson; perhaps even he had felt behind that marble facade the sharp pang of anxiety—we may be sure that the rolling clouds of pungent gun smoke, the deep fiery crash of artillery, the unmistakable sharp crack of musketry cleared his mind and renewed his energy. He had not wanted this fight, not yet, not here, but now that it was before him his tenacity and his will to win took over. Those who saw Robert E. Lee ride out of the woods on Chambersburg Pike and bring Traveller to a stop on a grassy knoll overlooking the battlefield would have felt the sharp anticipation of victory. His very presence was an assurance that this was no skirmish, that a great event would take place here in the gently rolling countryside, with its neat farms, green fields, and carefully tended fencing, under a bright, hot midday summer sky. Those who were near enough cheered him, but Lee was as indifferent to cheers as he was to danger—he and Traveller simply halted there, a tall man in gray on a handsome gray horse, while he unbuckled his binocular case and brought his field glasses to his eyes.

  The morning had gone well for the Confederates, despite the brave delaying action of Buford’s dismounted troopers, which held off two brigades of Heth’s division for nearly three hours, until Major General John F. Reynolds’s I Corps infantry began to arrive on the scene. The fighting grew in intensity and numbers—A. P. Hill fed brigade after brigade into the battle as they emerged from Chambersburg Pike into the open and deployed against ever larger numbers of Union troops. Before noon General Reynolds, one of the best Union generals, was dead, replaced by Major General Abner Doubleday; and by the early afternoon Federal troops were being pushed back from the grounds of the Lutheran Seminary into the streets of Gett
ysburg itself. This was satisfactory, but in a larger sense it was also exactly what Lee had wanted to avoid. Confederate units had been fed into the battle piecemeal as they arrived on the scene, and had taken heavy casualties without any hope of winning a decisive victory, since three-quarters of the Army of the Potomac was still on the march toward Gettysburg and Lee had less than one-third of his own army present.