Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (13 page)

In addition to his impulsiveness and his uncordial relations with the First Corps commander, there was one other doubtful element in the general of the newly created Third Corps. His casual administrative methods would be taxed by a new organization in the artillery which placed more responsibility on the corps commanders and at the same time obscured the lines of authority in artillery command.

In the reorganization, Lee abandoned the old system in which each corps had its artillery and the army a general reserve commanded by Brigadier General William Nelson Pendleton. The reserve artillery was abolished. Each corps, with an artillery battalion attached to each of its divisions, was given its own reserve of two battalions. In turn, the colonel commanding a corps reserve supervised the artillery of his own corps. This change, designed for simplification, resulted in more confusion when vastly dignified General Pendleton was upped in title to Chief of Artillery with no guns to command.

This anomalous command was given Pendleton as a mistaken gesture of consideration for a loyal Confederate whom Lee respected personally. A Virginia contemporary of Lee, fellow West Pointer and fellow Episcopalian, the rather slow-thinking Pendleton had early resigned from the old army to enter the ministry. At secession he had been rector of a church in Lexington, Virginia. There he formed the fourgun Rockbridge battery of neighborhood college students and named the guns (instead of numbering them) Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. His rise was due largely to his administrative work, in which he was very fussy about details. At Chancellorsville he mishandled the guns under his immediate direction so badly that Lee did not include the Reverend General in the commendations in his report.

Lee’s reports were very carefully written, with the assistance of his staff (especially Marshall), and his omissions conveyed as much as what he said. He was fair and studiedly specific in his praise, and, unless writing about an officer killed in action, he seldom used terms of eulogy. Only once did he apply an adjective to an officer below general rank, and that immortalized the young artillerist as “the gallant Pelham.” Hence, in his Chancellorsville report, when he listed specific artillerists for citation and described their accomplishments, his omission of Pendleton was clearly a rebuke.

Because of the respect that the sometimes bumbling Pendleton commanded as a person, he was continued in a position of nominal authority without having any specific batteries on which to impose it. Pendleton assumed that he exercised a supervisory control over all artillery, and seemed to feel in no way ousted from command. In turn, the commanders of the corps artillery alternately deferred to him and forgot about him.

A. P. Hill assumed the unaccustomed command of artillery in a confusing and untried situation. However, when he received his promotion to lieutenant general, he foresaw no difficulties with the new arrangement in artillery and received his larger responsibilities without—at least, without revealing—any self-doubt. While not one of the Confederates in whom personal ambition burned, he was gratified by his advancement and happily accepted the congratulations of his friends and comrades.

In assuming command, he showed no effects of having operated under Stonewall Jackson’s tight control. In his first assignment he acted with sound judgment, discretion, and decisiveness, vindicating the confidence Lee placed in him.

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A. P. Hill’s first assignment was one of real responsibility for a new corps commander. As if aware of his excitable nature, Hill acted with tensely alert caution when Lee’s two corps moved north from Fredericksburg and left Hill to guard the Rappahannock River against thrusts from Hooker.

The country was brushy there, and in June the thick vines in the woods and along the winding roads made concealed movements easy for bodies of infantry. It was up to Hill to guard some twenty miles against surprise from an enemy that outnumbered him five to one, and, equally important, he must not be imposed upon by feints and demonstrations that might hide other purposes of Hooker’s army. With Lee beginning the first tentative movements away from his base, it devolved on Hill to discover the enemy’s intentions concerning a long-desired objective, the Confederate capital. Actually Hooker wanted to take advantage of Lee’s audacious movement and drive on to Richmond, but he was overruled from Washington.

In this assignment Hill was not working with a well-organized corps that had its own systems already established. He was obliged to complete the organizational details of staff work and supply services and experiment with them in the face of a powerful, aggressive enemy. In Hill’s three divisions, half of the brigades had never worked with the other half. In a newly formed division, two of the brigades had never before seen the Army of Northern Virginia. And the thirteen brigades, two of them under strength, represented a wide cross-section of the South: there were regiments from eight states.

The one tried division with which Hill was familiar was composed of four brigades from his own old Light Division. This was commanded by dark-bearded Dorsey Pender, a twenty-nine-year-old North Carolinian who, although he hoped that independence for the South would result from the invasion, wrote from Pennsylvania of his personal distaste for invading another people’s land.

Only seven years out of West Point and the father of three sons (whom he was never to see again), combative Pender had risen on first-rate ability, steadfast ambition, and a headlong personal leadership in battle which gave a driving force to his brigade. Pender had been wounded four times, and at Chancellorsville he grabbed up the colors and rode at the head of his troops to the Federal works (he did not write his wife about this). In recommending him for promotion to major general, Hill said that he was “the best brigadier in the division.”

Pender had hoped eagerly for Hill’s promotion to corps command, for he expected his own advancement to follow, and he was troubled by no self-doubts at all. As a division commander he did not immediately win the liking of all his subordinates, and he soon admitted that he found his new responsibility “a heavy burden.” An intelligent, reflective man, deeply religious and guided by a strong sense of duty, Dorsey Pender saw his division command essentially as opportunity to help win his country’s independence and to establish his family in a good position in peacetime.

Of Pender’s four proved brigades, all well led, two came from his native North Carolina, one from South Carolina, and one from Georgia.

The other veteran division, new to Hill, had been removed from Longstreet’s corps—a fact that did not endear Powell Hill to Old Pete. This was commanded by efficient Richard Anderson, a forty-two-year-old regular-army man from South Carolina. In the old army he had distinguished himself in the Mexican War, and in the Confederacy, early in 1862, he was given a brigade in the division of Longstreet, his classmate at West Point. The Federals’ Abner Doubleday, with whom the Confederates were to have some trouble on July 1, had been in the same class.

After the Seven Days, Anderson’s highly capable performance was rewarded by promotion to major general. Judging solely on his performance, Lee regarded Dick Anderson as “a capital officer,”high praise for him, and had him marked for future higher command. PersonaUy courteous, Anderson lacked the color of those officers around whom legends grew. In an army with many prima donnas, he was a self-effacing man, neither seeking praise for himself nor winning supporters by bestowing it on others.

Married to the daughter of a Chief Justice of Pennsylvania, Anderson lived a private life that was remote from the circle of “cousins” in Lee’s army. He had been well liked in the First Corps, where he had grown accustomed to operating under the close supervision of his friend and former classmate Longstreet.

Anderson was a stranger to A. P. Hill’s personality and to his methods of operation—which, indeed, Hill as a corps commander had not yet established. After Longstreet’s methodical insistence that everything must be just so before he would venture into action, Hill’s tendency to leap before he looked would probably offer a disturbing contrast. Certainly Hill would not exercise so strong a control as Longstreet, and the unassertive Anderson’s reaction to the new command was another incalculable of the reshuffled army.

Anderson’s five brigades came from Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida.

Hill’s third division, commanded by Harry Heth, was newly formed of two brigades from Hill’s old division and the two new brigades that Jefferson Davis had forced on the already disrupted army organization. The North Carolina brigade was ably commanded by Johnston Pettigrew, but the newly organized Mississippi brigade was commanded by the president’s inexperienced thirty-eight-year-old nephew, Joe Davis. He had never led in battle, and the best that seemed to be said of him was that he was unpretentious and, unlike his uncle, of agreeable personality.

The two veteran brigades from the Light Division were much reduced in numbers from the hard fighting at Chancellorsville. Even more serious was the fact that, while Archer’s Alabama-Tennessee brigade was well led and had a fine combat reputation, the Virginia brigade had suffered from changes in leadership. Under Field the brigade had been one of the best in the army, but after wounds took Field out of action indefinitely, its regiments had deteriorated until Heth took them over. On his promotion to major general, the brigade had again come under its senior colonel, John Brocken-brough, and the men lacked the group spirit that characterized a crack brigade.

Harry Heth himself was an instance of the soundly trained soldier of perennial promise. Always seemingly on the verge of becoming truly outstanding, he never—for a variety of obscure reasons, including the luck of the game—lived up to the army’s expectations.

He came of a Virginia family prominent in the Revolution and intimate with the Lees, and he was the only officer in the army whom General Lee called by his first name. Eschewing the impressive beards of fashion, Harry Heth was cleanshaven except for a full mustache, and his pleasant face was dominated by a fine, broad brow. An honest man of charming personality, Heth, like A. P. Hill, was well liked for his social graces, and Powell Hill personally held him in great respect. Militarily, Hill thought Pender the better soldier.

It was hard to define the quality Heth lacked in battle, for he was brave, intelligent, and absolutely devoted to his duty. Hill and Lee still had expectations of him when he was promoted to major general, and friendly Heth, not at all assertive, seemed confident enough.

This new corps illustrates the makeshift nature of the reorganization of the whole army. The four best brigades from Hill’s own division were kept intact, under the best division commander. The two weakest brigades numerically, one under dubious leadership, were joined to the new brigades to form a division under the second-best division commander, who was himself still unproved.

For practical purposes, the new divisions should have been formed with three brigades each from Hill’s old division, and only one each of the new brigades. All the divisions in the army were allotted equal amounts of work and equal shares in responsibility. Confederate military organizations, however, were formed on many non-practical considerations. Political consideration for the several states influenced Jefferson Davis, who, in his mania for troop manipulation, was not aware of the intangibles that built morale necessary for team efforts.

Of Hill’s new Third Corps it could at least be said that all seventeen of the general officers had demonstrated devotion to their country and all but two had been disciplined in the service of its best army. On the surface they operated at least adequately as a unit while confronted with no duty more taxing than guarding river-crossings. Hill was responsible for the only decisions to be made there, and these he made confidently and correctly.

Deciding that Hooker’s noisy thrusts on the Confederate side of the river were no more than feints designed to feel him out, Hill kept up a bristly front of his own and, without calling for help, permitted Lee to complete the northward movement of his other two corps. This required no great sagacity on Hill’s part. Even the battle-wise enlisted men in his command recognized Hooker’s demonstrations for what they were. Hill did, however, reveal that sole responsibility for making crucial decisions when faced with a potential threat did not panic him, as it had many other officers. With his three divisions well contained, he waited without apprehension until the morning when the temporary city that was the Union camp (twenty times larger than century-old Fredericksburg) had vanished.

Then, duplicating Lee’s piecemeal move, he put his three divisions into motion on successive days. Once on the march, Hill showed the effects of having served with Stonewall’s fabled “foot cavalry.” His men, well closed up, with colors flying, tramped mile after monotonous mile over the dusty roads, day after day, out of their familiar homeland into the strange country of the enemy, through heat and through rain, with the smallest number of stragglers the Army of Northern Virginia had ever had.

They were lean men in proudly worn tatters, with no more water weight than a prizefighter. Physically and morally toughened by hunger, exposure, hardship, and danger, they were welded together, despite the newness of the corps organization, by the single emotional bond of a common cause. In handling these citizens-into-soldiers on their grueling journey into a hostile land, A. P. Hill acquitted himself admirably. Officers and men of the only new corps in the army were developing a special pride by the time Heth’s division went into camp outside Cashtown on June 30, with Pender’s division close by and Anderson’s a few miles away in the mountains.