Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (38 page)

Once, while standing back of Poague’s guns, he even delivered one of his customarily involved rebukes to a young officer.

Major Dearing, commander of the artillery battalion attached to Pickett’s division, followed the fashion set by his general and dressed in high Confederate style. Although an able cannoneer, Dearing was on the showy side, and during the morning preparations he went galloping along the line of batteries about seventy-five yards in front of them. He made a handsome figure out there alone, and also a handsome target for sharpshooters.

General Lee, pretending he did not know who the rider was, called: “My friend! This way, if you please.”

Major Dearing swung his horse around, guided him between the guns, and saluted smartly.

“Ah, major, excuse me,” Lee said. “I thought you might be some countryman who had lost his way. Let me say this to you and to these young officers, that I am an old reconnoitering officer and have always found it best to go afoot, and not expose oneself needlessly.”

Yet, despite his personal attention and the dragging hours of preparation, the formation of the assault force was the weakest arrangement for battle in the history of the Army of Northern Virginia. The details of arranging the assault Lee had turned over to Longstreet and A. P. Hill, and neither of these old enemies assumed responsibility for the combined force. Longstreet would not, and Hill, accepting Longstreet as commander of the attack, could not. As no one knew that Longstreet was not assuming responsibility, the assault force was formed without controlling supervision.

The sequence of orders involving the arrangement of the attack is not known. When Longstreet rode from his headquarters to Lee’s command post, the divisions of Hood and McLaws, who had been removed from the attack on Long-street’s suggestion, were left with orders to remain alertly in their positions. Their irregular lines from the peach orchard to the southern base of Little Round Top projected at something like a forty-five-degree angle from the troops on Seminary Ridge and those extending southward from it. No plans were made for employing those divisions. They were to protect the attacking flank from counterattack from the Federal left and, of course, repel any thrusts at themselves. For the purposes of the assault, they were no more involved than Rodes’s two brigades at the other end of the line, southward from the town.   

When Longstreet arrived at the informal general headquarters, he conferred first with Lee, then with Lee and Hill, and then with Hill alone. During these exchanges Longstreet made no further importunities, but his downcast gaze reflected an apathetic state. He himself said: “I was never so depressed as on that day.”

However, his mood went unnoticed, as everyone was absorbed in his own problem. Powell Hill was a shadowy figure on the second and third days. He was presumably not recovered from his illness of the first day, and the assignments he received were unsuited to his nature and training.

On the second day, on Hill’s right, Anderson’s division was partially detached from him, partially attached to Longstreet, by Lee’s most ambiguous order. On the left, Pender’s division was ordered to demonstrate, with discretion to exploit any opportunities. After Pender fell, the temporary commander became involved with Rodes’s proposed late attack on Cemetery Hill and did nothing. By the time Brigadier General Lane assured Rodes of support, the attack had been called off, and Ramseur and Doles went into bivouac a few hundred yards ahead of where Pender’s division had waited all day.

Following the futility of the second day and the loss of the two major generals who were his personal friends and military dependables, for the third day Hill was ordered to lend eight brigades to go in with and to support Pickett’s division in Longstreet’s attack. Two brigades from Pender’s division and all of Heth’s division, now under Pettigrew, were to join Pickett in the attack, and two brigades from Anderson’s division were to act in support.

Lee selected the units from the Third Corps according to their positions in the line. Pender’s came from the left of Seminary Ridge, leaving two brigades there in loose juncture with Ewell’s right, which curved from south of town to Culp’s Hill. Anderson’s brigades came from the right of Seminary Ridge, where his other three made juncture with McLaws. Heth’s division, which had been held in reserve since its rough time on the first day, went in as a unit from the center. The selection of brigades was eminently sound in relation to the disposition of troops over the whole line; but as the complement of an assault column the selection formed the basic weakness in the arrangement of the attack.

The six attacking and two supporting brigades were drawn from three separate divisions, a fact which, because of Long-street’s tacit refusal to assume supervision, caused eight of the eleven brigades to be without a directing leader. The one division that went in as a unit, Heth’s, was then the weakest in the army.

Heth’s division had two good brigades, Archer’s and Pettigrew’s. They could be depended upon even though colonels would take them in and though Archer’s was very low in numbers. But by the chance of their position in camp, these two brigades joined Garnett’s crack brigade at the center, and two undependable brigades were placed on the flank. In Field’s frequently orphaned Virginia brigade there was some unexplained dissatisfaction with its senior colonel, John Brockenbrough, who had twice assumed temporary command, and twice was passed over. Brigade morale was poor. The new Mississippi brigade that had been palmed off on Lee, combining green troops with the inexperienced leadership of Joe Davis, had not been improved by its disastrous Wednesday morning in the railroad cut.

Heth’s division was led by a brigadier new to the army. Despite the often mentioned “gallantry” of the scholarly and imposing Pettigrew, this thirty-five-year-old North Carolinian with limited experience and no formal military training needed more background to control the offensive movement of four such brigades in a severely taxing action.

All six of the brigades going in with Pickett had been badly cut up on the first day, and their numbers were less than Lee estimated. They would not count 10,000 rifles. With Pickett’s approximately 4,500 men, the combined force would muster something like 14,000 muskets-or roughly 15,000 officers and men, as usually estimated.

The responsibilitv for conveying this information to Lee was A. P. Hill’s. It is probable that no “present for duty” reports had been given Hill for July 3. With two division commanders and a brigadier lost in two days, attention was centered on the shifting around of field and general officer personnel. It is also probable, however, that Hill was aware in general of the reduced numbers in the six brigades, for he suggested to Lee that he be allowed to throw in his whole corps.

Lee replied that the Third Corps constituted his only reserve, and added: “It will be needed if General Longstreet’s attack should fail.”

There is no evidence that Hill said anything more about the attacking force, and the likelihood is that he never told Lee—certainly he did not stress—the condition of his troops, in quantity and quality.

Of what passed between Hill and Longstreet, nothing at all is known. Hill wrote sparse, undetailed reports, and Longstreet in all his voluminous writings never mentioned his part in arranging the attacking force with A. P. Hill. In fact, Longstreet was always extremely reticent about the deployment of the combined force that was formed at his suggestion.

After he and Hill had received general orders from Lee on the merger of the corps, the lieutenant generals strolled away together for a short distance and sat on a fallen log. They were seen talking for a while, and it must be presumed that they agreed on the positions where the brigades would form and the direction the men would follow on moving out. Hill conveyed the instructions to his men, with orders to get their specific assignments from Longstreet. The heavy cannonade of the two corps’ artillery, which was to precede the infantry advance, had been arranged by Lee, and presumably Longstreet informed Hill that he would give the order for the two signal guns that would mean “commence firing.” No arrangement at all was made for liaison with Longstreet, and aeain Dick Anderson was left dangling between his corps commander and the general commanding the attack.

Hill and Longstreet arose from the log, parted without shaking hands, and evidently communicated with each other no more that day. From what followed, it is evident that Hill assumed he had turned his brigades over to Longstreet, and that Longstreet did not accept responsibility for them. Old Pete acted as if some of Hill’s troops were employed in conjunction with some of his, but not under him.

Pickett and other First Corps officers had the impression, both before and after the battle, that Hill’s men were either independently employed or in support, or both. Pickett clearly regarded his division as the main force of the attack. When he heard the heavy firing in the fight over the barn, he wrote in his letter to Sallie that it “brought a wail of regret” that “went up from my very soul that the two brigades of my division had been left behind. Oh, God, if only I had them … a surety for the honor of Virginia, for I can depend on them.”

This undefined command situation was not suspected by General Lee. Believing that Longstreet was supervising the charge, he assumed that the passing hours were being spent in preparation. Other instances of neglect in the arrangements—the most crucial were in the artillery—were also unknown to Lee. As the hour passed noon, however, and there had been no activity since Pickett’s men had moved up onto the ridge, he began to show anxiety.

Lee rarely gave field orders to his subordinates once they had expressed understanding of his battle plan, and the order to commit the troops to the attack must come from Long-street. But the suspense bore as heavily on the commanding general as on the men, and he kept moving from one place to another, as if seeking reassurance that all was ready, Finally he turned Traveler into the woods along the old trace and walked his horse past the lines where Pickett’s men were enduring the long wait. The silent ride seemed a sort of informal farewell inspection. The men, ordered not to cheer, raised their tattered hats as he passed.

7

From the time of Lee’s ride, the nervous impatience for Longstreet to open the attack began to mount, and toward one o’clock tension became acute. The waiting men were sweating heavily, as the woods became an oven, and Pickett wrote in his running letter: “The suffering and waiting are almost unbearable.”

No one had then, or has had since, any explanation for this second wait after the troops were in position. Pickett’s men have held the center of interest, but the suspense was equally hard on Hill’s men.

Below the wooded ridge where Garnett’s brigade waited, Wilcox’s brigade of Anderson’s division was deployed in an advanced position about two hundred yards west of the Emmitsburg road, immediately behind the First Corps batteries. Wilcox had the dual assignment of supporting the guns when they opened and then supporting Pickett’s movement after his division cleared the guns on their way in.

General Wilcox had established temporary headquarters by the Spangler house and barn, near a small orchard. As no immediate orders had come to Wilcox and nothing seemed to be happening, the old army hand thought of some cold mutton he had on hand and generously invited his friend Dick Garnett to share a lunch with him.

Cadmus Marcellus Wilcox, thirty-nine, was another professional soldier, having graduated in the same West Point class as George Pickett and Stonewall Jackson. Commissioned brigadier of Alabama troops in October 1861, he was among the earliest leaders to build high morale in his troops; during the Seven Days his brigade sustained fifty-seven-per-cent casualties without breaking. Sound in tactics and judgment rather than spectacular, he was a brigadier marked by Lee for future division command.

Punctilious in military matters, very old-army in his manner of speaking, Cadmus Wilcox was affable and unaffected and extremely well liked. His closest friend was Harry Heth, and Grant, at whose wedding he had served as groomsman, was one of his friends from the U.S. army. When relaxed, Wilcox did not present a very warlike figure. His broad, plain face was decorated by bushy sidelocks of the Burnside variety, and on that hot Friday at Gettysburg he wore an old, floppy straw hat.

On July 2 it had been Wilcox whose advance toward Cemetery Ridge, in support of Wright on the crest, was halted by the failure of Anderson’s other brigades to move out, and he had sent back the staff officer who had found Dick Anderson lolling with his division staff in apparent indifference to the urgent need for reinforcements. Regular soldier Wilcox resented this behavior of his division commander, and during the long wait on Friday morning there seemed to be scant communication between the two men. From Longstreet, Wilcox had heard nothing for hours.

His good Alabama brigade, unsupported in a critical movement the day before, seemed in a fair way to be totally forgotten in its assignment to cover Pickett’s right in the most crucial movement of the campaign.

After waiting until noon for specific orders, when Garnett hobbled over to share his cold mutton Wilcox was past worrying about what might happen later. The lunching officers were distressed by the immediate problem of the hardness and coldness of some Gettysburg well water that seemed to shrivel their insides. Fortunately, a staff officer still had some of the whisky confiscated in Chambersburg on the Sunday before, and the men used the whisky as a chaser for the water. They were discussing such matters as the Confederates’ difficulties in victualing when they noticed activities that, to their experienced eyes, foretold the beginning of the long-awaited action.