Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (12 page)

Late in the afternoon of Wednesday, July 1, with no food and little ammunition, the creeping cavalry arrived in front of Carlisle. There they learned that Ewell’s infantry was gone. Instead, the town was fortified with Union militia and artillery under a major general. To get rations, Stuart demanded the surrender of the town. When this was refused, he opened a blast with his guns while the troopers slumped, aching, in their saddles.

“Weak and helpless as we now were,” Lieutenant Beale wrote, “our anxiety and uneasiness were painful indeed. Thoughts of saving the wagons now were gone, and we thought only how we, ourselves, might escape. …”

Young Beale indulged in no sentimental reflections about his father’s alma mater, Dickinson College, in the town where the shells fired by the dispirited gunners were bursting. He was too busy looking over his shoulder for enemies.

The troopers could not know that the Federals’ Kilpatrick, whom they had engaged at Hanover, had little stomach for the rough going and had not pursued them. Nor could the men have imagined that the whole Union army was rapidly converging thirty miles to the south of them, where the two armies had blundered into each other that morning. Indeed, while their horse guns were futilely shelling Carlisle, the first day’s fighting of the Battle of Gettysburg was drawing to a close.

Stuart learned about it that night, through the ignominious means of his searching staff officers having found their own army. Lee reported to his cavalry leader the where-abouts of his infantry.

At midnight the sleep-riders started out again, southward through Mt. Holly pass. So deep was their exhaustion that one man fell off his horse at a fence and, sprawled across the wooden rails, slept on. Daylight found the spent columns with miles yet to go. With no pause, on the morning of July 2 the troopers began the final lap across the long landswells to Gettysburg.

For Stuart’s cavalry the ride was an epic in heroism that went unheralded in the legends told to the tune of “If you want to have a good time, jine the cavalry.”

For the thirty-year-old cavalier seeking a new plume, his greatest personal adventure was the greatest anticlimax of his career. He
had
ridden clear around Hooker’s army, had on the way diverted Union cavalry and infantry forces, had caused vagrant alarums and collected fine captures, and his exploits were summed up by Lee, when Stuart reported to him that afternoon, with the coldly spoken words:

“Ah, General Stuart, at last you are here.”

“And Then A. P. Hill Came Up . . .”

W
HEN
Stuart moved north from Hanover on June 30, riding out of the campaign, two thirds of A. P. Hill’s corps had negotiated the tortuous passes through the South Mountain range and were going into camp outside Cashtown, the little village lying along the hilly turnpike eight miles west of Gettysburg.

They had not been so hard used as Stuart’s men. They had been eating well and were in fine spirits despite the drizzly weather. The division of Harry Heth (pronounced Heath) was in the van, and it was one of his brigades which had pushed on eastward and encountered Federal cavalry near the farming seat of Gettysburg.

This brigade was Pettigrew’s North Carolinians, one of the two new units that had filled out the new division in A. P. Hill’s freshly created corps. Although his brigade came to the army when President Davis insisted on sending the troops of his preference to Lee, Johnston Pettigrew himself had seen service in Virginia before Lee assumed command and had won deep respect both as an officer and as a gentleman. A scholarly North Carolina lawyer, Pettigrew was one of those natural leaders of a privileged background who, without military ambitions, had been advanced on the application of native intelligence and contagious courage. By the date of his promotion, the untrained Johnston Pettigrew was senior brigadier in the division that he was the last general to join. This fact, too, was to exert a profound effect on the campaign.

When his reconnoitering foot soldiers encountered enemy cavalry, Pettigrew discreetly fell back on his division and reported in detail to General Heth. Neither of the men was disturbed by the presence of blue horsemen among the undulations of the closely farmed country around Gettysburg. The only importance of the town, of 2,400 population, was its situation at the intersection of a number of roads. It was also a minor educational center: a small college, a theological seminary, and a seminary for young ladies were situated there. A railroad had been started westward from Gettysburg, but work had not progressed beyond a deep cut for the roadbed. There was, however, one item in the Gettysburg stores which Pettigrew coveted for his men: shoes.

Pettigrew mentioned to Heth his desire to get those shoes, and his superior officer approved. In one sense, the invasion was a commissary raid, and Heth had kept his men busy requisitioning supplies. In fact, the newly promoted major general had used the hours in Cashtown to obtain a hat for himself. The supplies in the village stores were too limited for Harry Heth to get a fair fit, but one of his headquarters clerks had stuffed folded paper into the sweatband to hold the new finery to his head. Having thus replenished his own wardrobe, General Heth was only too willing to look after his men’s raw feet. He told Pettigrew that he would take up the matter with the corps commander, A. P. Hill.

This minor item in the chain of command, from brigadier to lieutenant general, involved three men new to their positions—Pettigrew new to the army, Heth to division command, and Hill to corps command. All of an age (Pettigrew was thirty-five, Hill and Heth both thirty-eight), they typified the background common to general officers of the Army of Northern Virginia. Hill and Heth had been classmates at West Point, graduating a year behind Heth’s cousin George Pickett. Neither man possessed any considerable estate for the support of his family after relinquishing a career in the old army.

A. P. Hill, though of a plantation background in Virginia’s horse country, was one of the army’s intense disbelievers in slavery. But, then, Powell Hill was intense about everything. Slightly built and of middle height, he had a lean, mobile face that, even with the full beard of convention, reflected his high-strung nature. He was more sensitive than the average professional soldier, courtly in his manner, genial, easily approachable. His personal warmth made him well liked in the army and a social favorite in Richmond. He was particularly liked by ladies, though sharing none of Stuart’s tendencies to squander his favors.

He had courted the girl who married the Union’s General McClellan—whom Hill had known pleasantly at West Point—and he was married to the sister of John Morgan, the Kentucky cavalry raider. Contemporary comments about Powell Hill and the ladies all concerned his quite lovely wife: she stayed too long, too close to the lines, in order to be with him.

After a good record in the old army, Hill started with the Confederate armies as colonel of a volunteer Virginia regiment. His troops belonged to the brigade that first gave the Rebel Yell, going in on the Federal flank late in the afternoon at First Manassas. Promoted to brigadier after the battle, he was soon advanced to major general and at the Seven Days commanded the army’s largest division, six brigades, which was inversely called the “Light Division.”

He was an indifferent administrator, but, as he was extremely attentive and even indulgent to his troops, the men loved “Little Powell,”as they called him, and he handled them superbly in battle. Some of his own intensity was communicated to his soldiers, and the Light Division built one of the most notable combat records in the army. At the Battle of Sharpsburg the previous summer the division had reflected lasting glory on their leader and a curious distinction.

“And then A. P. Hill came up,” said the report of his movement that saved the day, and, remembering, both Lee and Jackson called for him in their dying deliriums. “Tell A. P. Hill he must come up,” the Old Man murmured on his deathbed in Lexington, Virginia, years after Hill had been killed and his fierce brigades were ghosts in men’s memories.

At the army’s reorganization in May 1863 it was accepted that one of the new corps would go to Powell Hill on the record of his performance and the general liking with which he was regarded. To his admirers, however, there was one notable exception: the army’s senior lieutenant general, James Longstreet.

Antithetical types, Hill and Longstreet had come to an open clash primarily over the difference in their characters and attitudes. While courtly Hill was very punctilious about the forms of the code of personal honor which characterized his class, Longstreet was a bluff man, physically powerful and self-assertive, with little sensitivity to the nuances of human relationships. Although only in his early forties, he had graduated from West Point before the Hill-Heth-Pickett class entered, and he seemed of an older generation. He was slightly deaf, and there was about him the stolid heaviness of a settled man. Forthright in his likes and dislikes, Longstreet was capable of both lasting enmities and lasting affections. He was also more jealous-minded than was known, and jealousy provoked his clash with Hill.

During the Seven Days a temporary staff officer of Hill’s wrote a newspaper article in which, to add to his own luster, he overpraised Hill. Longstreet, at that time nominally Hill’s superior, felt slighted and had his chief of staff, Moxley Sorrel, write an answer to the paper. Although it was published anonymously, its authorship was no secret in the army, and the next time Colonel Sorrel brought a routine communication from Longstreet, Powell Hill refused to accept it. Long-street, ignoring Hill’s personal motives for refusing the communication, placed him under arrest. Hill, adhering to the personal element, challenged Longstreet to a duel.

At this point General Lee intervened. Stonewall Jackson had been sent on a semi-independent assignment, and Lee permanently attached Hill’s large division to what was evolving into Jackson’s Second Corps. A. P. Hill also became involved in a dispute with Old Jack, as did many another, but their differences concerned strictly military matters and were smoothed over. Longstreet, however, was a grudge-holder. During his army career he locked horns with four of his subordinate generals—Lafayette McLaws, Evander Law, John B. Hood, and Robert Toombs; he carried his hatred for Jubal Early to the grave; and he wrote vindictively of A. P. Hill and spitefully of Stonewall Jackson long after they were dead.

What Hill felt about Longstreet is unknown. Killed before the end of the war, he wrote nothing about the period, and his private papers were either destroyed or secreted. With all his affability, Hill revealed nothing intimate about himself in any exchanges that have been recorded, and his carelessness about administrative details made his reports sketchy and impersonal. But Hill was naturally courteous, and by the time the army marched north he and Longstreet were on what might be called speaking terms. There was definitely no more than surface civility between them.

Their relations presented another incalculable element in Lee’s new organization. The informal command system and discretionary orders favored by Lee presupposed co-operation among his subordinates. Once a battle was joined, communication by courier presented almost insuperable time hazards on a field of any size. Because no sort of communication system from general headquarters was possible, Lee depended on generals who used their own initiative. Some first-class fighting men had been transferrred out of Lee’s army because of their inability to work well with brother officers, and an officer’s ability to make decisions was a primary consideration in Lee’s appraisal of him.

Powell Hill’s decisiveness amounted almost to impetuosity. He was inclined to make decisions too quickly, too independently. He was one of the men really excited by battle action.