III
The Confederacy could not rest on Lee's laurels in Virginia or Beaure-gard's at Charleston. Although beaten, Hooker's army still bristled 90,000 strong along the Rappahannock. Grant was on the move in Mississippi. Rosecrans showed signs of motion in middle Tennessee. Pressed on all sides by invading forces, the South needed an offensive-defensive stroke to relieve the pressure. Longstreet thought he saw a way to accomplish this. Returning with his two detached divisions to rejoin Lee on the Rappahannock, Longstreet stopped in Richmond on May 6 for a meeting with Secretary of War James Seddon. Longstreet proposed that he take these two divisions to reinforce Bragg in Tennessee. With additional help from Johnston, they would drive Rosecrans back to the Ohio. This would compel Grant to break off his campaign against Vicksburg and go to the rescue of the shattered Army of the Cumberland. Seddon liked the idea, but suggested that Longstreet go instead to Mississippi to help Johnston and Pemberton smash Grant, after which they could turn their attention to Rosecrans. Jefferson Davis favored this proposal, for he was concerned about his home state and convinced that the retention of Vicksburg was crucial.
But Lee dashed cold water on the enterprise. It would take weeks for Longstreet's divisions to travel nearly a thousand miles to Mississippi over the Confederacy's mangled railroads. If Vicksburg could hold out that long, said Lee, it would be safe without reinforcements, for "the climate in June will force the enemy to retire." In the meantime a reinforced Army of the Potomac might return to the offensive against Lee's depleted forces. Although he had held off Hooker before without these two divisions, Lee now believed that he needed them—and additional troops as well. In sum, he concluded, "it becomes a question between Virginia and Mississippi."29
Lee's opinion carried so much weight that Davis felt compelled to concur. The president remained disquieted by news from Mississippi, however, and called Lee to Richmond for a strategy conference on May 15. This time the Virginian dazzled Davis and Seddon with a proposal to invade Pennsylvania with a reinforced army and inflict a crushing defeat on the Yankees in their own backyard. This would remove the enemy threat on the Rappahannock, take the armies out of war-ravaged Virginia, and enable Lee to feed his troops in the enemy's country. It would also strengthen Peace Democrats, discredit Republicans, reopen the question of foreign recognition, and perhaps even conquer peace and recognition from the Union government itself.
The cabinet was awed by this vision. Postmaster-General John Reagan was the sole dissenter. The only member of the cabinet from west of the Mississippi (Texas), Reagan still thought that preservation of Vicksburg as a link between the Confederacy's two halves should have top priority.30 But Lee convinced the others that even if the climate failed to drive the Yankees out of Mississippi, a successful invasion of Pennsylvania would draw them out. In the post-Chancellorsville aura of invincibility, anything seemed possible. "There never were such men in an army before," said Lee of his soldiers. "They will go anywhere and do anything if properly led." So great was the prestige of Lee, "whose fame," said a cabinet member, "now filled the world," that he carried the day. Even Longstreet came around. "When I agreed with [Seddon] and yourself about sending troops west," he wrote to Senator Wigfall of Texas, "it was under the impression that we would be obliged to remain on the defensive here. But the prospect of an advance changes the aspect of affairs."31
29. Lee to Seddon, telegram and letter both dated May 10, 1863, O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 25, pt. 2, p. 790. For an analysis of this issue, see Archer Jones, ConfederateStrategy from Shiloh to Vicksburg (Baton Rouge, 1961), 206–14.
30. John H. Reagan, Memoirs, with Special Reference to Secession and the Civil War (Austin, 1906), 120–22, 150–53.
31. Lee to John Bell Hood, May 21, 1863, in Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin, eds., The Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee (Boston, 1961), 490; cabinet member quoted in Foote, Civil War, II, 432; Longstreet to Louis Wigfall, May 13, quoted in Jones, Confederate Strategy, 208. After the war a controversy arose between Longstreet and several Virginia generals concerning responsibility for the defeat at Gettysburg. The Virginians criticized Longstreet for his half-hearted participation in an invasion he had opposed and especially for his alleged tardiness and inept leadership of the attacks on July 2 and 3. Such allegations were at worst false and at best distorted. Longstreet did support the invasion, as this letter indicates, though he later claimed that while endorsing a strategic offensive he had recommended defensive tactics once the Confederates reached northern soil. Longstreet asserted that Lee had concurred in this policy. No contemporary evidence supports such an unlikely commitment to defensive tactics by Lee. For a review of the controversy see Glenn Tucker, Lee and Longstreet at Gettysburg (Indianapolis, 1968), and Thomas L. Connelly, The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society (New York, 1977), chap. 3.
So Lee set about reorganizing his augmented army into an invasion force of three infantry corps and six cavalry brigades—a total of 75,000 men. A. P. Hill became commander of the new 3rd Corps while Jackson's old 2nd Corps went to Richard Ewell, now sporting a wooden leg as souvenir of Second Manassas. Having used the month after Chan-cellorsville to rest and refit, the Army of Northern Virginia was much better prepared for this invasion than it had been for the previous one in September 1862. Morale was high, most men had shoes, and few stragglers fell out as Lee edged westward in the first week of June to launch his invasion through the Shenandoah Valley. Ewell's corps led the way, adding to its laurels won in the Valley under Jackson the previous year by capturing 3,500 men in the Union garrisons at Winchester and Martinsburg.
This success and the apparently unimpeded advance of the fearsome rebels into Pennsylvania set off panic in the North and heightened southern euphoria. "From the very beginning the true policy of the South has been invasion," declared the Richmond Examiner as first reports arrived of a great victory in Pennsylvania:
The present movement of General Lee . . . will be of infinite value as disclosing the . . . easy susceptibility of the North to invasion. . . . Not even the Chinese are less prepared by previous habits of life and education for martial resistance than the Yankees. . . . We can . . . carry our armies far into the enemy's country, exacting peace by blows leveled at his vitals.
The date of this editorial was July 7, 1863.32
Only one untoward event had marred the invasion's success so far.
32. The irony of the date of this editorial will not escape the reader, for it came four days after the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg. Word of that outcome did not reach Richmond until July 9, and it took a day or two longer for this inversion of initially optimistic reports from Pennsylvania to sink in.
On June 9 the Union cavalry crossed the Rappahannock in force twenty-five miles above Fredericksburg to find out what Lee was up to. Catching Stuart napping, the blue troopers learned that the enemy had begun to move north. The rebel horsemen rallied and finally pushed the Yankees back after the biggest cavalry battle of the war at Brandy Station. The southern press criticized Stuart for the initial surprise of his "puffed up cavalry."33 His ego bruised, Stuart hoped to regain glory by some spectacular achievement in the invasion. His troopers efficiently screened the infantry's advance. But the improved northern cavalry also kept Stuart from learning of Hooker's movements. To break this stalemate, Stuart on June 25 took his three best brigades for another raid around the rear of the Union infantry slogging northward after Lee. In its initial stages this foray caused alarm in Washington and added to the scare in Pennsylvania. But Stuart became separated from the Army of Northern Virginia for a full week. This deprived Lee of intelligence about enemy movements at a crucial time.
Nevertheless these halcyon June days seemed to mark a pinnacle of Confederate success. Lee forbade pillaging of private property in Pennsylvania, to show the world that southern soldiers were superior to the Yankee vandals who had ravaged the South. But not all rebels refrained from plunder and arson. The army destroyed Thaddeus Stevens's ironworks near Chambersburg, wrecked a good deal of railroad property, levied forced requisitions of money from merchants and banks ($28,000 in York, for example), and seized all the shoes, clothing, horses, cattle, and food they could find—giving Confederate IOUs in return. Lee's invasion became a gigantic raid for supplies that stripped clean a large area of south-central Pennsylvania. In Chambersburg, Longstreet's quartermaster began to break open shops with axes until local merchants gave him the keys. To a farm woman who protested the seizure of all her hogs and cattle, Longstreet replied: "Yes, madam, it's very sad—very sad; and this sort of thing has been going on in Virginia more than two years—very sad." Southern soldiers also seized scores of black people in Pennsylvania and sent them south into slavery.34
33. Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee's Lieutenants: A Study in Command, 3 vols. (New York, 1942–44), III, 19.
34. Quotation from Walter Lord, ed., The Fremantle Diary: Being the Journal of Lieutenant Colonel James Arthur Lyon Fremantle, Coldstream Guards, on his Three Months in the Southern States (Boston, 1954), 224. See also Edwin B. Coddington, The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command (New York, 1968), 153–79. A Chambersburg woman described the seizure by Confederates of several black women and children in that town, who were "driven by just like we would drive cattle." James C. Mohr, ed., The Cormany Diaries: A Northern Family in the Civil War (Pittsburgh, 1982), 328–30.
One of Lee's purposes in ordering restraint toward (white) civilians was to cultivate the copperheads. He placed great faith in "the rising peace party of the North" as a "means of dividing and weakening our enemies." It was true, Lee wrote to Davis on June 10, that the copperheads professed to favor reunion as the object of peace negotiations while the South regarded independence as the goal. But it would do no harm, Lee advised Davis, to play along with this reunion sentiment to weaken northern support for the war, which "after all is what we are interested in bringing about. When peace is proposed to us it will be time enough to discuss its terms, and it is not the part of prudence to spurn the proposition in advance, merely because those who made it believe, or affect to believe, that it will result in bringing us back to the Union." If Davis agreed with these views, Lee concluded, "you will best know how to give effect to them."35
Davis did indeed think he saw a chance to carry peace proposals on the point of Lee's sword. In mid-June, Alexander Stephens suggested to Davis that in light of "the failure of Hooker and Grant," this might be the time to make peace overtures. Stephens offered to approach his old friend Lincoln under flag of truce to discuss prisoner-of-war exchanges, which had stopped because of Confederate refusal to exchange blacks. This issue could serve as an entering wedge for the introduction of peace proposals. Davis was intrigued by the idea. He gave Stephens formal instructions limiting his powers to negotiations on prisoner exchanges and other procedural matters. What additional informal powers Stephens carried with him are unknown. On July 3 the vice president boarded a flag-of-truce boat for a trip down the James to Union lines at Norfolk on the first leg of his hoped-for trip to Washington.36
Lee's invasion also sparked renewed Confederate hopes for diplomatic recognition. In the wake of Chancellorsville, John Slidell in Paris queried the French whether "the time had not arrived for reconsidering the question of recognition." Napoleon agreed, as usual, but would not act independently of Britain. In that country, news of Lee's success stirred
35. Dowdey and Manarin, eds., Wartime Papers of Lee, 507–9.
36. Alexander H. Stephens, A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1868–70), II, 557–68; Rowland, Davis, V, 513–19.
Confederate sympathizers into vigorous action. During June a flurry of meetings among southern diplomats and their supporters on both sides of the channel worked out a plan for a motion in the British Parliament favoring joint Anglo-French steps toward recognition. Napoleon gave his blessing to the enterprise. But the M. P. who presented the motion, a diminutive firebrand named John Roebuck whom Henry Adams described as "rather more than three-quarters mad," put his foot in his mouth with a speech on June 30 that indiscreetly disclosed all details of his conversation with the French emperor. The notion of allowing the Frogs to dictate British foreign policy was like a red flag to John Bull. The motion died of anti-French backlash, but British proponents of recognition eagerly awaited reports of Lee's triumph in Pennsylvania. "Diplomatic means can now no longer prevail," wrote Confederate publicist Henry Hotze from London on July 11, "and everybody looks to Lee to conquer recognition."37
Northerners abroad understood only too well the stakes involved in military operations during June 1863. "The truth is," wrote Henry Adams, "all depends on the progress of our armies." In Washington, Lincoln was not pleased with the progress of Hooker's army. When Hooker first detected Lee's movement in early June, he wanted to cross the Rappahannock and pitch into the rebel rear. Lincoln disapproved and urged Hooker to fight the enemy's main force north of the river instead of crossing it at the risk of becoming "entangled upon the river, like an ox jumped half over a fence and liable to be torn by dogs front and rear without a fair chance to gore one way or kick the other." Hooker seemed unimpressed by this advice, for a few days later he proposed that since the Army of Northern Virginia was moving north, the Army of the Potomac should move south and march into Richmond! Lincoln began to suspect that Hooker was afraid to fight Lee again. "I think Lee's Army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point," he wired Hooker. "If he comes toward the Upper Potomac, follow on his flank, and on the inside track. . . . Fight him when opportunity offers." With the head of the enemy force at Winchester and the tail still back at Fredericks-
37. Slidell quoted in Frank Lawrence Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy (Chicago, 1931), 465; Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., June 25, 1863, in Worthington, C. Ford, ed., A Cycle of Adams Letters 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), II, 40; Hotze quoted in Brian Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, 2 vols. (Montreal, 1974–80), II, 313.
burg, "the animal must be very slim somewhere. Could you not break him?"38
Although Hooker finally lurched the Army of the Potomac into motion, he moved too late to prevent Lee's whole force from crossing the Potomac. But this actually encouraged Lincoln. To Hooker he sent word that this "gives you back the chance [to destroy the enemy far from his base] that I thought McClellan lost last fall." To Secretary of the Navy Welles, Lincoln said that "we cannot help beating them, if we have the man." But Lincoln became convinced that Hooker was not the man. The general began to fret that Lee outnumbered him, that he needed more troops, that the government was not supporting him. Looking "sad and careworn," the president told his cabinet that Hooker had turned out to be another McClellan. On June 28 he relieved Hooker from command and named George Gordon Meade in his place.39
If the men in the ranks had been consulted, most of them probably would have preferred the return of McClellan. Although Meade had worked his way up from brigade to corps command with a good combat record, he was an unknown quantity to men outside his corps. By now, though, their training in the school of hard knocks under fumbling leaders had toughened the soldiers to a flinty self-reliance that left many of them indifferent to the identity of their commander. The men "have something of the English bull-dog in them," wrote one officer. "You can whip them time and again, but the next fight they go into, they are . . . as full of pluck as ever. They are used to being whipped, and no longer mind it. Some day or other we shall have our turn."40 As the army headed north into Pennsylvania, civilians along the way began to cheer them as friends instead of reviling them as foes. Their morale rose with the latitude. "Our men are three times as Enthusiastic as they have been in Virginia," wrote a Union surgeon. "The idea that Pennsylvania is invaded and that we are fighting on our own soil proper, influences them strongly. They are more determined than I have ever before seen them."41
38. Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., June 25, 1863, in Ford, Cycle of Adams Letters, II, 40–41; CWL, VI, 249, 257, 273.
39. CWL, VI, 281; Beale, ed., Diary of Gideon Welles, I, 340, 344, 348.
40. Stephen M. Weld to his mother, June 10, 1863, in War Diary and Letters of Stephen Minot Weld 1861–1865 (Boston, 1912), 213. Weld was a captain in the 18th Massachusetts Infantry.
41. Wiley, Billy Yank, 283.
When Meade took over the army, its 90,000 effectives were concentrated in the vicinity of Frederick, Maryland. Longstreet's and Hill's Confederate corps were forty miles to the north near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Part of Ewell's corps was at York, threatening a railroad bridge over the Susquehanna, while the remainder was at Carlisle preparing to move on Harrisburg to sever the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad and capture the state capital. Lee had cut himself off from his faraway Virginia base, as Lincoln had hoped, but he had done so purposely. Like Grant's army in Mississippi, Lee's invaders took enough ammunition for their needs and lived off the country as they moved. Lee's greatest worry was not supplies, but rather the absence of Stuart with information about the whereabouts of the enemy. By contrast, Meade obtained accurate intelligence of the rebels' location and moved quickly to confront them.
On the night of June 28, one of Longstreet's scouts brought word that the Army of the Potomac was north of its namesake river. Alarmed by the proximity of a concentrated enemy while his own forces remained scattered, Lee sent couriers to recall Ewell's divisions from York and Carlisle. Meanwhile one of A. P. Hill's divisions learned of a reported supply of shoes at Gettysburg, a prosperous town served by a dozen roads that converged from every point on the compass. Since Lee intended to reunite his army near Gettysburg, Hill authorized this division to go there on July 1 to "get those shoes."
When Hill's would-be Crispins approached Gettysburg that morning, however, they found something more than the pickets and militia they had expected. Two brigades of Union cavalry had arrived in town the previous day. Their commander was weather-beaten, battle-wise John Buford, who like Lincoln had been born in Kentucky and raised in Illinois. Buford had noted the strategic importance of this crossroads village flanked by defensible ridges and hills. Expecting the rebels to come this way, he had posted his brigades with their breech-loading carbines on high ground northwest of town. Buford sent word to John Reynolds, a Pennsylvanian who commanded the nearest infantry corps, to hurry forward to Gettysburg. If there was to be a battle, he said, this was the place to fight it. When A. P. Hill's lead division came marching out of the west next morning, Buford's horse soldiers were ready for them. Fighting dismounted behind fences and trees, they held off three times their number for two hours while couriers on both sides galloped up the roads to summon reinforcements. Lee had told his subordinates not to bring on a general engagement until the army was concentrated. But the engagement became general of its own accord as the infantry of both armies marched toward the sound of guns at Gettysburg.
As Buford's tired troopers were beginning to give way in mid-morning, the lead division of Reynolds's 1st Corps double-timed across the fields and brought the rebel assault to a standstill. One unit in this division was the Iron Brigade, five midwestern regiments with distinctive black hats who confirmed here their reputation as the hardest-fighting outfit in the Army of the Potomac. They also lost two-thirds of the men they took into the battle. The most crucial Union casualty on this first morning of July was John Reynolds—considered by many the best general in the army—drilled through the head by a sharpshooter. About noon, General Howard's "Dutch" 11th Corps arrived and deployed north of town to meet the advance units of Ewell's Confederate 2nd Corps coming fast after a brisk march from the Susquehanna. By early afternoon some 24,000 Confederates confronted 19,000 bluecoats along a three-mile semicircle west and north of Gettysburg. Neither commanding general had yet reached the field; neither had intended to fight there; but independently of their intentions a battle destined to become the largest and most important of the war had already started.
As Ewell's leading divisions swept forward against Howard, Lee rode in from the west. Quickly grasping the situation, he changed his mind about waiting for Longstreet's corps, still miles away, and authorized Hill and Ewell to send in everything they had. With a yell, four southern divisions went forward with the irresistible power that seemed to have become routine. The right flank of Howard's corps collapsed here as it had done at Chancellorsville. When the 11th Corps retreated in disorder through town to Cemetery Hill a half-mile to the south, the right flank of the Union 1st Corps was uncovered and these tough fighters, too, were forced back yard by yard to the hill, where Union artillery and a reserve division that Howard had posted there caused the rebel onslaught to hesitate in late afternoon. The battle so far appeared to be another great Confederate victory.
But Lee could see that so long as the enemy held the high ground south of town, the battle was not over. He knew that the rest of the Army of the Potomac must be hurrying toward Gettysburg; his best chance to clinch the victory was to seize those hills and ridges before they arrived. So Lee gave Ewell discretionary orders to attack Cemetery Hill "if practicable." Had Jackson still lived, he undoubtedly would have found it practicable. But Ewell was not Jackson. Thinking the enemy position too strong, he did not attack—thereby creating one of the controversial "ifs" of Gettysburg that have echoed down the years. By the time dusk approached, General Winfield Scott Hancock of the 2nd Corps had arrived and laid out a defense line curling around Culps and Cemetery hills and extending two miles south along Cemetery Ridge to a hill called Little Round Top. As three more Union corps arrived during the night—along with Meade himself—the bluecoats turned this line into a formidable position. Not only did it command high ground, but its convex interior lines also allowed troops to be shifted quickly from one point to another while forcing the enemy into concave exterior lines that made communication between right and left wings slow and difficult.
Studying the Union defenses through his field glasses on the evening of July 1 and again next morning, Longstreet concluded that this line was too strong for an attack to succeed. He urged Lee to turn its south flank and get between the Union army and Washington. This would compel Meade to attack the Army of Northern Virginia in its chosen position. Longstreet liked best the tactical defensive; the model he had in mind was Fredericksburg where Yankee divisions had battered themselves to pieces while the Confederates had suffered minimal casualties. Longstreet had not been present at Chancellorsville nor had he arrived at Gettysburg on July 1 until after the whooping rebels had driven the enemy pell-mell through the town. These were the models that Lee had in mind. He had not accomplished the hoped-for "destruction" of the enemy in the Seven Days' or at Chancellorsville. Gettysburg presented him with a third chance.42 The morale of his veteran troops had never been higher; they would regard such a maneuver as Longstreet suggested as a retreat, Lee thought, and lose their fighting edge. According to a British military observer accompanying the Confederates, the men were eager to attack an enemy "they had beaten so constantly" and for whose fighting capacity they felt "profound contempt." Lee intended to unleash
42. Twenty years later Isaac Trimble, one of Lee's division commanders at Gettysburg, wrote from memory an "almost verbatim" account of a conversation with Lee on June 27, four days before the battle began. When the Army of the Potomac came up into Pennsylvania seeking him, Lee told Trimble, "I shall throw an overwhelming force on their advance, crush it, follow up the success, drive one corps back on another, and by successive repulses and surprises . . . create a panic and virtually destroy the army. . . . [Then] the war will be over and we shall achieve the recognition of our independence." Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography, 4 vols. (New York, 1934–35), III, 58—59.
them. Pointing to Cemetery Hill, he said to Longstreet: "The enemy is there, and I am going to attack him there." Longstreet replied: "If he is there, it will be because he is anxious that we should attack him; a good reason, in my judgment, for not doing so." But Lee had made up his mind, and Longstreet turned away sadly with a conviction of impending disaster.43
Although aware of Longstreet's reluctance, Lee assigned to him the principal attack duty on July 2. Two of Hill's three divisions had suffered heavy casualties the previous day and could not fight today. Ewell still regarded the Union defenses on Cemetery and Culp's hills as too strong for a successful assault. Lee grudgingly agreed. He therefore ordered Longstreet's two fresh divisions (the third, under George Pickett, had been posted as rear guard and could not arrive in time) to attack the Union left holding the southern end of Cemetery Ridge. The assault would be supported by Hill's one fresh division, while Ewell was to demonstrate against the Union right and convert this demonstration into an attack when Meade weakened his right to reinforce his left. If this plan worked, both enemy flanks would crumble and Lee would have the war-winning Cannae that he sought.44
Longstreet's state of mind as he prepared for this attack is hard to fathom. The only non-Virginian holding high command in the Army of Northern Virginia (and the only prominent Confederate general to join the postwar Republican party), Longstreet became the target of withering criticism from Virginians after the war for insubordination and tardiness at Gettysburg. They held him responsible for losing the battle—and by implication the war. Some of this criticism was self-serving, intended to shield Lee and other Virginians (mainly Stuart and Ewell) from blame. But Longstreet did seem to move slowly at Gettysburg. Although Lee wanted him to attack as early in the day as possible, he did not get his troops into position until 4:00 p.m. There were extenuating
43. Lord, ed., The Fremantle Diary, 205; Longstreet's account of his conversation with Lee was contained in two articles written years later: "Lee in Pennsylvania," Annalsof the War (Philadelphia, 1879), 421; and "Lee's Right Wing at Gettysburg," Battles and Leaders, III, 339–40.
44. Cannae was a battle in 216 B.C. in which Hannibal of Carthage defeated and virtually annihilated a Roman army—which by coincidence almost equaled the size of the Union force at Gettysburg—with a double envelopment that crushed both flanks. Cannae became a byword in military history for a total, annihilative tactical victory.
reasons for this delay: his two divisions had made night marches to reach the vicinity of Gettysburg and were then compelled to countermarch by a circuitous route to reach the attack position because Lee's guide led them initially on a road in sight of an enemy signal post on Little Round Top, a high hill at the south end of the Union line. Yet Longstreet may have been piqued by Lee's rejection of his flanking suggestion, and he did not believe in the attack he was ordered to make. He therefore may not have put as much energy and speed into its preparation as the situation required.
To compound the problem, Longstreet did not find the Yankee left on Cemetery Ridge where Lee's scout had reported it to be. It was not there because of an unauthorized move by Dan Sickles, commander of the 3rd Corps holding the Union left. Distressed by the exposed nature of the low ground at the south end of Cemetery Ridge before it thrust upward at Little Round Top, Sickles had moved his two divisions a half-mile forward to occupy slightly higher ground along a road running southwest from Gettysburg. There his troops held a salient with its apex in a peach orchard and its left anchored in a maze of boulders locally called Devil's Den, just below Little Round Top. Although this gave Sickles high ground to defend, it left his men unconnected to the rest of the Union line and vulnerable to attack on both flanks. When Meade learned what Sickles had done, it was too late to order him back to the original line. Longstreet had launched his attack.
Sickles's unwise move may have unwittingly foiled Lee's hopes. Finding the Union left in an unexpected position, Longstreet probably should have notified Lee. Scouts reported that the Round Tops were unoccupied, opening the way for a flanking move around to the Union rear. Longstreet's division commanders urged a change of attack plans to take advantage of this opportunity. But Longstreet had already tried at least twice to change Lee's mind. He did not want to risk another rebuff. Lee had repeatedly ordered him to attack here, and here he meant to attack. At 4:00 p.m. his brigades started forward in echelon from right to left.
During the next few hours some of the war's bloodiest fighting took place in the peach orchard, in a wheat field to the east of the orchard, at Devil's Den, and on Little Round Top. Longstreet's 15,000 yelling veterans punched through the salient with attacks that shattered Sickles's leg and crushed his undersize corps. But with skillful tactics, Meade and his subordinates rushed reinforcements from three other corps to plug the breaks. Part of Hill's fresh division finally joined Longstreet's
assault, while at the other end of the line Ewell's men belatedly went forward but achieved only limited gains before Union counterattacks and darkness halted them.
The most desperate struggle occurred on Longstreet's front, where two Union regiments at separated points of this combat zone, the 20th Maine and the 1st Minnesota, achieved lasting fame by throwing back Confederate attacks that came dangerously close to breakthroughs. Rising above the surrounding countryside, the two Round Tops dominated the south end of Cemetery Ridge. If the rebels had gotten artillery up there, they could have enfiladed the Union left. Sickles's advance had uncovered these hills. A brigade of Alabamians advanced to seize Little Round Top. Minutes earlier nothing but a Union signal station had stood in their way. But Meade's chief of engineers, General Gouverneur K. Warren, discovered this appalling situation as enemy troops were approaching. Galloping down the hill, Warren persuaded the 5th Corps commander to send a brigade double-timing to the crest of Little Round Top just in time to meet the charging rebels.
Posted at the far left of this brigade was the 20th Maine, commanded by Colonel Joshua L. Chamberlain. A year earlier Chamberlain had been a professor of rhetoric and modern languages at Bowdoin College. Taking a leave of absence ostensibly to study in Europe, he joined the army instead and now found himself responsible for preventing the rebels from rolling up the Union left. The fighting professor and his down-easterners proved equal to the occasion. For nearly two hours they stood off repeated assaults by portions of several Confederate regiments along the rocky, wooded slope filled with smoke, noise, and terror. But their valor seemed in vain. With more than a third of his men down and the remainder out of ammunition—and with the Johnnies forming for another assault—Chamberlain was in a tight spot. But cool and quickwitted—perhaps a legacy of dealing with fractious students—he ordered his men to fix bayonets on their empty rifles and charge. With a yell, these smoke-grimed Yanks lurched downhill against the surprised rebels. Exhausted by their uphill fighting following a twenty-five mile march that day to reach the battlefield, and shocked by the audacity of this bayonet assault, the Alabamians surrendered by scores to the jubilant boys from Maine. Little Round Top remained in northern hands. Although Sickles's corps was driven back yard by yard through the peach orchard, the wheat field, and Devil's Den, the Union left on Little Round Top was secure.
A mile to the north, however, another Alabama brigade threatened to puncture the Cemetery Ridge line near its center. Their attack hit a gap in the Union line created by the earlier advance of Sickles's corps to the peach orchard. Winfield Scott Hancock's 2nd Corps occupied this sector, but until Hancock could shift reinforcements to stop the assault he had only eight companies of one regiment on hand to meet the oncoming brigade. The regiment was the 1st Minnesota, veterans of all the army's battles since the beginning at Bull Run. Hancock ordered these 262 men to charge the 1,600 Alabamians and slow them down long enough for reinforcements to arrive. The Minnesotans did the job, but only forty-seven of them came back. Hancock plugged the gap, and the Confederate attack all along the southern half of the battlefield flickered out in the twilight.
To the north the shift of Union troops from Cemetery and Culp's hills to meet Longstreet's assault gave Ewell's corps the opportunity Lee had hoped for to convert its demonstration into an attack. But the opportunity slipped away. Several of Ewell's brigades did finally advance as dusk descended. One of them seized some trenches on Culp's Hill left unoccupied by a Federal unit sent to the other end of the battlefield, but could advance no farther against determined opposition. Two other gray brigades scored a temporary lodgement against the hapless 11th Corps at Cemetery Hill, but a 2nd Corps brigade counterattacked in the gathering darkness and drove them back.
The Confederate assaults on July 2 were uncoordinated and disjointed. The usual skill of generalship in the Army of Northern Virginia was lacking this day. On the Union side, by contrast, officers from Meade down to regimental colonels acted with initiative and coolness. They moved troops to the right spots and counterattacked at the right times. As a result, when night fell the Union line remained firm except for the loss of Sickles's salient. Each side had suffered 9,000 or more casualties, bringing the two-day totals for both armies to nearly 35,000.
It was the heaviest single-battle toll in the war thus far, but the fighting was not over. Despite stout resistance by the Yankees, Lee believed that his indomitable veterans had almost achieved victory. One more push, he thought, and "those people" would break. Lee seemed unusually excited by the supposed success of the past two days. At the same time, however, he was weakened by a bout with diarrhea and irritated by Stuart's prolonged absence (Jeb's tired troopers had finally rejoined the army during the day). In any case, Lee's judgment was not at its best. He had come to Pennsylvania in quest of a decisive victory and he was determined not to leave without it. He had attacked both enemy flanks, causing Meade (he believed) to weaken his center. With Pickett's fresh division as a spearhead, therefore, Lee would send three divisions preceded by an artillery barrage against that weakened center on July 3. Stuart would circle around the Union rear and Ewell would assail the right flank to clamp the pincers when Pickett broke through the front. With proper coordination and leadership, his invincible troops could not fail.
Across the way a midnight council of Union generals resolved to stay and fight it out. With prescience, Meade told the general commanding his center that "if Lee attacks to-morrow, it will be in your front." 45 At first light, however, fighting broke out at the extreme right of the Union line along the base of Culp's Hill. Units of the Federal 12th Corps, which had been shifted to the left the previous day, came back during the night and attacked at dawn to regain their abandoned trenches now occupied by the rebels. In a seven-hour firefight they succeeded, and thus dimmed Lee's chances for turning the Union right simultaneously with the planned piercing of the center.
While this was going on, Longstreet once more urged Lee to maneuver around Meade's left. Again Lee refused, and ordered Longstreet to attack the Union center with Pickett's division and two of Hill's—fewer than 15,000 men to advance three-quarters of a mile across open fields and assault dug-in infantry supported by ample artillery. "General Lee," Longstreet later reported himself to have said, "there never was a body of fifteen thousand men who could make that attack successfully." Lee impatiently replied that his magnificent army had done it before and could do it again. "My heart was heavy," wrote Longstreet subsequently. "I could see the desperate and hopeless nature of the charge and the hopeless slaughter it would cause. . . . That day at Gettysburg was one of the saddest of my life."46
In this mood Longstreet ordered a concentration of Confederate artillery—some 150 guns—for the largest southern bombardment of the war, to soften up the enemy at the point of attack. At 1:07 p.m. Longstreet's guns shattered the uneasy silence that had followed the morning's fight on the Union right. For almost two hours an artillery duel among nearly 300 guns filled the Pennsylvania countryside with an ear-splitting roar heard as far away as Pittsburgh. Despite this sound and fury, the Union
45. John Gibbon, "The Council of War on the Second Day," Battles and Leaders, III, 314.
46. Longstreet, "Lee's Right Wing at Gettysburg," ibid., 343, 345.
infantry lying behind stone walls and breastworks suffered little, for the rebel aim was high.
Pickett's all-Virginia division waited with nervous impatience to go in and get it over with. Thirty-eight years old, George Pickett had graduated last in the same West Point class as George McClellan (who graduated second). Pickett did well in the Mexican War, but in the present conflict he had enjoyed few chances to distinguish himself. His division did not fight at Chancellorsville and marked time guarding supply wagons during the first two days at Gettysburg. With his long hair worn in ringlets and his face adorned by a drooping mustache and goatee, Pickett looked like a cross between a Cavalier dandy and a riverboat gambler. He affected the romantic style of Sir Walter Scott's heroes and was eager to win everlasting glory at Gettysburg.
Finally, about 3:00 p.m., Longstreet reluctantly ordered the attack. The Confederate bombardment seemed to have disabled the enemy's artillery; it was now or never. With parade-ground precision, Pickett's three brigades moved out joined by six more from Hill's division on their left and two others in reserve. It was a magnificent mile-wide spectacle, a picture-book view of war that participants on both sides remembered with awe until their dying moment—which for many came within the next hour. Pickett's charge represented the Confederate war effort in microcosm: matchless valor, apparent initial success, and ultimate disaster. As the gray infantry poured across the gently undulating farmland with seemingly irresistible force, northern artillery suddenly erupted in a savage cascade, sending shot and shell among the southern regiments and changing to canister as they kept coming. The Union guns had not been knocked out after all; their canny chief of artillery, General Henry J. Hunt, had ordered them to cease firing to lure on the rebels and conserve ammunition to welcome them. Yankee infantry behind stone walls opened up at 200 yards while Vermont, Ohio, and New York regiments on the left and right swung out to rake both flanks of the attacking force. The southern assault collapsed under this unbearable pressure from front and flanks. Two or three hundred Virginians and Tennesseeans with General Lewis A. Armistead breached the first Union line, where Armistead was mortally wounded with his hand on a Yankee cannon and his followers fell like leaves in an autumn wind. In half an hour it was all over. Of the 14,000 Confederates who had gone forward, scarcely half returned. Pickett's own division lost two-thirds of its men; his three brigadiers and all thirteen colonels were killed or wounded.
As the dazed survivors stumbled back to their starting point, they met Lee and Longstreet working to form a defensive line against Meade's expected counterattack. "It's all my fault," said Lee as he rode among his men. "It is I who have lost this fight, and you must help me out of it the best way you can. All good men must rally."47 Rally they did—some of them, at least. But Meade did not counterattack. For this he has been criticized down the years. Hancock, despite being wounded in the repulse of Pickett's assault, urged Meade to launch the 20,000 fresh reserves of the 5th and 6th Corps in pursuit of Lee's broken brigades. But a heavy load of responsibility weighed on Meade's shoulders. He had been in command only six days. For three of them his army had been fighting for the nation's life, as he saw the matter, and had narrowly saved it. Meade could not yet know how badly the enemy was hurt, or that their artillery was low on ammunition. He did know that Stuart was loose in his rear, but had not yet learned that a division of blue troopers had stopped the southern cavalry three miles east of Gettysburg—thus foiling the third part of Lee's three-pronged plan for Meade's undoing. Meanwhile two Union cavalry regiments on the left flank south of the Round Tops charged the rebel infantry in anticipation of orders for a counterattack, but were badly shot up by the alert enemy. In late afternoon a few units from the 5th and 6th Corps advanced over the scene of the previous day's carnage in Devil's Den and the wheat field. They flushed out the rear guard of Longstreet's two divisions, which were pulling back to a new line. Meade apparently did have some idea of attacking in this vicinity next day—the Fourth of July—but a heavy rainstorm that began shortly after noon halted the move.
Meade's lack of aggressiveness was caused by his respect for the enemy. He could scarcely believe that he had beaten the victors of Chan-cellorsville. Meade also explained later that he had not wanted to follow "the bad example [Lee] had set me, in ruining himself attacking a strong position." "We have done well enough," he said to a cavalry officer eager to do more. In a congratulatory telegram, a former corps commander expressed a widely felt astonishment that the long-suffering Army of the Potomac had actually won a big victory: "The glorious success of the Army of the Potomac has electrified all. I did not believe the enemy could be whipped."48
The news did indeed electrify the North. "VICTORY! WATERLOO
47. Clifford Dowdey, Death of a Nation: The Story of Lee and His Men at Gettysburg (New York, 1958), 341; Foote, Civil War, II, 567–68.
48. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 27, pt. 3, p. 539; Foote, Civil War, II, 575; Freeman Cleaves, Meade of Gettysburg (Norman, Okla., 1960), 172.
ECLIPSED!" shouted a headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The glad tidings reached Washington the day after Pickett's repulse, making this the capital's most glorious Fourth ever. "I never knew such excitement in Washington," wrote one observer. When word arrived three days later of the surrender at Vicksburg, the excitement doubled. Lincoln appeared at a White House balcony to tell a crowd of serenaders that this "gigantic Rebellion" whose purpose was to "overthrow the principle that all men are created equal" had been dealt a crippling blow.49 In New York the diarist George Templeton Strong rejoiced that
the results of this victory are priceless. . . . The charm of Robert Lee's invincibility is broken. The Army of the Potomac has at last found a general that can handle it, and has stood nobly up to its terrible work in spite of its long disheartening list of hard-fought failures. . . . Copperheads are palsied and dumb for the moment at least. . . . Government is strengthened four-fold at home and abroad.50
Strong's final sentence was truer than he could know. Confederate Vice-President Stephens was on his way under flag of truce to Union lines at Norfolk as the battle of Gettysburg reached its climax. Jefferson Davis had hoped that Stephens would reach Washington from the south while Lee's victorious army was marching toward it from the north. Reports of Stephens's mission and of Gettysburg's outcome reached the White House at the same time. Lincoln thereupon sent a curt refusal to Stephens's request for a pass through the lines.51 In London the news of Gettysburg and Vicksburg gave the coup de grace to Confederate hopes for recognition. "The disasters of the rebels are unredeemed by even any hope of success," crowed Henry Adams. "It is now conceded that all idea of intervention is at an end."52
The victory at Gettysburg was purchased at high human cost: 23,000 Union casualties, more than one-quarter of the army's effectives. Yet the cost to the South was greater: 28,000 men killed, wounded, or missing, more than a third of Lee's army. As the survivors began their sad retreat to Virginia in the rain on July 4, thousands of wounded men suffered torture as ambulances and commandeered farm wagons bounced
49. Cleaves, Meade of Gettysburg, 171; CWL, VI, 319–20.
50. Strong, Diary, 330.
51. Beale, ed., Diary of Gideon Welles, I, 358–62.
52. Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., July 23, 1863, in Ford, ed., Cycle of Adams Letters, II, 59–60.
along rutted roads. Seven thousand rebel wounded were left behind to be attended by Union surgeons and volunteer nurses who flocked to Gettysburg. Lee was profoundly depressed by the outcome of his campaign to conquer a peace. A month later he offered his resignation to Jefferson Davis. "No one," wrote Lee, "is more aware than myself of my inability for the duties of my position. I cannot even accomplish what I myself desire. How can I fulfill the expectations of others?"53 Thus said a man whose stunning achievements during the year before Gettysburg had won the admiration of the Western world. Of course Davis refused to accept his resignation. Lee and his men would go on to earn further laurels. But they never again possessed the power and reputation they carried into Pennsylvania those palmy midsummer days of 1863. Though the war was destined to continue for almost two more bloody years, Gettysburg and Vicksburg proved to have been its crucial turning point.
Perceptive southerners sadly recognized this. The fall of Vicksburg "is a terrible blow, and has produced much despondency," wrote War Department clerk John Jones when he heard the news on July 8. Next day his spirits sank lower, for "the news from Lee's army is appalling. . . . This [is] the darkest day of the war." The fire-eater Edmund Ruffin "never before felt so despondent as to our struggle." And the usually indefatigable Josiah Gorgas, chief of Confederate ordnance, sat down on July 28 and wrote a diary entry whose anguish echoes across the years:
Events have succeeded one another with disastrous rapidity. One brief month ago we were apparently at the point of success. Lee was in Pennsylvania, threatening Harrisburgh, and even Philadelphia. Vicksburgh seemed to laugh all Grant's efforts to scorn. . . . Port Hudson had beaten off Banks' force. . . . Now the picture is just as sombre as it was bright then. . . . It seems incredible that human power could effect such a change in so brief a space. Yesterday we rode on the pinnacle of success—today absolute ruin seems to be our portion. The Confederacy totters to its destruction.54
53. Lee to Davis, Aug. 8, 1863, in Dowdey and Manarin, eds., Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee, 589–90.
54. Jones, War Clerk's Diary (Miers), 238, 239; Betty L. Mitchell, Edmund Ruffin: A Biography (Bloomington, 1981), 231; Vandiver, ed., Diary of Gorgas, 55.