Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (18 page)

Although Ewell had never previously commanded more than a company of dragoons in the rough service on the Border, he rose rapidly on high competence, fearlessness, and selfless devotion. In the spring of 1862, as major general with an 8,500-man division, he distinguished himself in the fabled “Valley Campaign” as the dependable lieutenant of Stonewall Jackson, and in the hard summer fighting he emerged as one of the outstanding division commanders in the war. Then, at Second Manassas, he was badly wounded in his knee and was invalided out for more than eight months. It was during his absence from the army that a profound change, related to his early circumstances and personal ambitions, occurred in the formerly dependable soldier.

While Ewell was recovering from a leg amputation, he fulfilled a longtime romantic aspiration and married a childhood acquaintance, a widow named Mrs. Lizinka Brown—or “the Widow Brown,” as the general called his lady, long after she was Mrs. Ewell. There was a saying in the army to the effect that married men fought as well as single men, but rarely was a man who married during the war as good a soldier as he had been before. Along with this generality went the specific fact that the Widow Brown was a lady of considerable property, about which her bridegroom became very solicitous.

The inner change resulting from Ewell’s new estate was reflected in noticeable outward manifestations. From his years on frontier outposts Ewell had developed a rough exterior, and associates who were not aware of his essential gentleness and thoughtfulness had often cowered before his intemperate outbursts and epic rages. Even intimates had been impressed by his fanciful, awesome swearing. After his marriage, all that was gone. Ewell embraced the Episcopal Church, and one of his staff said that he became “an earnest and humble Christian.”

As to how this new Ewell would cope with his new responsibilities, there were two other questions: How would such a rugged physical type be affected by a wooden leg? How would he operate in the lonely sphere of corps command when all of his first-rate performances had been made under the firm guidance of Stonewall Jackson?

It is probable that this quaint and lovable character was not Lee’s choice for Jackson’s successor. Ewell’s standing in the Second Corps and the sentiment favoring him made his selection inevitable. And, unlike Hill, “Old Baldhead” inherited an established unit that had grown from the nucleus of the Stonewall Brigade. The staff and supporting services were the products of Old Jack’s stern demands, the soldiers were hard-tested veterans, and there was only one new brigade—which turned out to be a good one—in the organization. As in Hill’s corps, however, there were two new division commanders and several untried men in brigade command.

The corps’s original division, Jackson’s, which had suffered a high mortality in commanders, went to Major General Edward Johnson, a forty-seven-year-old career soldier from the plantation country near Richmond. Although not the first choice for the division and of brief association with Lee’s army, Johnson, who had been at West Point with Ewell and Jubal Early, was a solid and unspectacular soldier soundly trained in fundamentals and a hard fighter. He had been wounded out for a while and was without a command when the army was reorganized. A bachelor, Johnson was called “Allegheny” because of a detached force he had commanded in the mountain country of (then) western Virginia, and in any corps except Old Baldhead’s he would have won his own notoriety as an eccentric. In battle he was noticeable for wielding a big hickory club in preference to a sword.

His division, originally composed entirely of Virginians, had its losses replaced by a Louisiana brigade and two fine North Carolina regiments.

Ewell’s own division had gone, when he was wounded out the preceding summer, to dark, sardonic Jubal Early, and its quality of performance had been steadily maintained by “Old Jube.” He was a cold, uncompromising man of forty-seven, heavy-bearded and hard-eyed, very profane in his speech. He walked with a slight stoop and chewed tobacco incessantly. Never generally liked, and in some quarters actively hated, he was close to Ewell, his acquaintance at West Point, had some passionate partisans, and was always supported by Lee for his fighting qualities and profound loyalty.

Because of a loathing of regimentation, Early had resigned from the army within a year after graduating from West Point, and turned to law and politics. He had grown up in the Virginia farming country rolling east from the Blue Ridge, where the people were removed from the traditionalism of the older plantation regions of Tidewater. He became an active member of the western bloc that prevented Virginia’s secession until Lincoln called on the state for troops with which to invade her sister states. Going with his own people, he volunteered his services and, after the ravages of the Federal troops in his homeplace, the bitter man became as passionate in his hate for the Union as he had formerly been in its defense.

As a division commander, Jubal Early was characterized by a tight control of his troops, steely skill, and a resourceful energy in action which he communicated to all his brigadiers save one. This was “Extra Billy” Smith, the only political general who had survived Lee’s weeding out, and he was to prove a costly survivor. Early’s brigades were entirely state units—Virginia, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Georgia—and all well commanded except Smith’s Virginians. The Georgia brigade was commanded by one of the three most promising young officers in the army, John B. Gordon.

Ewell’s third division was commanded by one of the younger military generation, thirty-four-year-old Robert E. Rodes. A non-West Pointer, Rodes was another of the developing officers of great promise, and at that stage was ahead of the other two. Born of a seventeenth-century Virginia family, he had graduated from the Virginia Military Institute at the age of nineteen and remained for three years as an assistant professor. When a professor’s job he sought went to Stonewall Jackson (then called “Fool Tom”), young Rodes resigned to enter the popular field of civil engineering. When Virginia seceded, he was chief engineer of an Alabama railroad and had just received his coveted appointment as professor of engineering at his alma mater. He volunteered where he was, and reached his home state as colonel of a volunteer Alabama regiment.

He showed his fine gifts for war in the first big battle, First Manassas, and came on fast in Jackson’s corps. As a brigadier, Rodes was placed in charge of a division at Chancellorsville and was one of the dominant figures on the field. A magnificent-looking blond, he led his troops mounted on a black horse and fought with the headlong courage that also characterized Pender and others of the younger leaders. In what amounted to field promotion, Rodes was upped to major general and given permanently the division he had handled with such distinction.

The five-brigade division—three of North Carolina, one of Georgia, and Rodes’s former Alabama brigade—contained two weak commanders, two good men, and in twenty-six-year-old Ramseur the third of the younger officers of outstanding promise.

Despite the newness of Robert Rodes to division command, the newness of Allegheny Johnson to the army, and a spotting of doubtful talent, the proud Second Corps, with its Stonewall traditions, seemed more a known quantity than Hill’s makeshift command—except in its top leadership.

Evidence would indicate that officers and men expected General Ewell to perform capably in the techniques of Jackson, and Lee, as if to assure Old Baldhead of his confidence, gave the Second Corps its customary assignment of striking out alone.

2

Leading the way north, Ewell acted with a decisive efficiency that gave his veterans the assurance of being in good hands. In defeating the Federals’ Milroy at Winchester, he acted with a Jacksonian dispatch, and the firmness of his movements scattered Union detachments and opened the Valley as a safe line of communication into Pennsylvania. Ewell had reached the Potomac before Lee irrevocably committed himself to the invasion. Perhaps Ewell’s fine performance caused the commanding general on June 23, before Jeb Stuart’s disappearance, to give the final halfhearted order: “If you are ready to move [north], you can do so.”

Marching through the enemy’s country, Dick Ewell was undiverted either by vagrant alarms or by the misbehavior of Jenkins’s poorly disciplined raiders, who acted as his cavalry. His attention centered on the supply aspects of the invasion. He victualed his own people and animals in unaccustomed bounteousness, while sending back to Lee’s commissary five thousand barrels of flour and more than three thousand cattle on the hoof.

With casual boldness Ewell detached Jubal Early’s division with only a battalion of cavalry (“Lige” White’s Partisan Rangers) to move on via Gettysburg to York and the Susquehanna, while he led Rodes’s and Johnson’s divisions into Carlisle on Saturday, June 27. Jenkins’s raffish troopers, somewhat settled down with the infantry moving close behind them, pushed on twenty miles to Harrisburg. Some blasts from their horse guns revealed that Pennsylvania’s state capital was not to be defended. To Dick Ewell would fall the honor of taking the first Northern capital to fall to the Confederates.

Although not a man marked by undue pride, Dick Ewell took satisfaction in showing the army that he was worthy of the Second Corps command despite the physical handicap of his wooden leg. On the long stretches he rode in a carriage like the patriarchal planter of his aspiration, but when necessary he mounted his horse unassisted and rode as well as the next man who had grown up in a horse country. He was certainly going to ride when his troops completed their triumphant march by swinging down the streets of the Pennsylvania state capital, as so many enemy troops had marched through the streets of Southern towns.

On the Sunday night of June 28, in preparing his move, Old Baldhead rested his troops in Carlisle, some on the campus of Dickinson College and some in the barracks where he had once served. On Monday he was ready to give the marching orders when a courier rode up to headquarters on a lathered horse. The courier was from Lee’s headquarters in Chambersburg, and he delivered an urgent written message from the general. Ewell read the words with a mixture of outrage and disappointment. He was to return to Chambersburg in a sudden contraction of the army.

Humanly enough, the army’s great eccentric did not think of the total problems that might be confronting the commanding general in the enemy’s country. He thought only of the crushing blow to his expectations of winning the greatest Confederate prize of the war. The newly converted Christian found no solace in the thought that he was submitting to the will of God. This was Lee’s will, and Old Baldhead did not like it a bit.

With his high humor turned suddenly sour by this disruption of his charted course, Ewell lost his self-control when a second messenger from Lee arrived late on Monday afternoon revising the new orders. Worst of all, an element of discretion was inserted.

General Lee, having had time to think out the details of his army’s convergence, redirected Ewell to bear southeastward to the village of Heidlersberg, on the eastern side of the mountain, from where he could proceed
either
to Cashtown or to Gettysburg. Only eight miles separated these places, but no such a thing as a choice had ever confronted Ewell in
all
his experience with Stonewall Jackson, and his extreme agitation became at once apparent.

He grew testy with his staff, his high voice piped more shrilly and nothing could please him. After sending orders back and forth, Ewell finally decided on a course by nightfall. As Allegheny Johnson’s division, with the long wagon train, had started for Chambersburg before Lee’s revised order reached headquarters, Ewell permitted him to continue southward with directions to turn east at a point farther south. Jubal Early’s division would abandon York and start westward for Heidlersburg on Tuesday morning. At the same time, Ewell would personally accompany Rodes’s division to the same destination.

Outwardly, the arrangements for his part in Lee’s convergence were made in soldierly enough fashion. Inwardly, the army’s eccentric was seething when he bade farewell to Carlisle and glory.

3

On the clear, warm Tuesday of the last day of June, General Ewell rode in his carriage on Rodes’s routine march to Heidlersberg. When camp was made in the dusk outside the small village of seven or eight houses, a third courier from Lee found Ewell. This message confirmed the second: from Heidlersberg proceed either to Cashtown or to Gettysburg. Ewell exploded. This was like the early days with Stonewall Jackson when cryptic messages had fluttered in like falling eaves: “Stay there”—“Move out”—“Don’t move for any rea son”—“Be here tomorrow at earliest light.”

His flare of temper had hardly faded when at nightfall still another courier came, this one from A. P. Hill. He brought the message Hill had sent from Cashtown after Pettigrew’s people had encountered the Federal cavalry at Gettysburg. To promote co-operation between the corps Hill simply advised Ewell that he was moving out from Cashtown toward Gettysburg to discover what was in his front. This was too much for Ewell.

At
Cashtown,
toward
Gettysburg—where would Hill be when he, Ewell, got there? And how did what Hill was doing equate with Lee’s purposes? Would Lee want him where Hill was headed or where Hill was heading from? In his mind this decision took on the proportions of an insoluble dilemma. He did not brood over which might be the right choice, only which would be the wrong one. Ewell was afraid of making a mistake.

There in the strange, dark countryside Ewell revealed that possession of the initiative paralyzed him. A. P. Hill, a few black ridges away, had reacted with characteristic impulsiveness, but at least he had seized the initiative without hesitation. Ewell needed someone to tell him precisely what to do.