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NEITHER DETERMINATION NOR BRAVADO EVER QUITE PREPARED soldiers—elite officers and common soldiers alike—for the indescribable horror of actual battle, the chilling experience they universally called “seeing the elephant.” For those who escaped one furious engagement unscathed only to face another, the sensations became more routine but no less frightening—or potentially deadly.
The Gilder Lehrman Collection—long on deposit at the New-York Historical Society—boasts a unique series of personal letters written just before and just after the Battle of Gettysburg by one combat-tested Confederate officer who had previously fought at and survived the Peninsula Campaign and the Battle of Antietam and commanded the 2nd Georgia Infantry in defense of Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg—all in 1862. The Gettysburg Campaign would prove to be his last.
Forty-eight-year-old Paul Jones Semmes had been born and raised on a Georgia plantation and, after attending the University of Virginia, returned to his home state and established a plantation of his own in the town of Columbus, where he became a leading citizen. His was a military family. A celebrated cousin, Raphael Semmes, commanded the fabled Confederate commerce raider Alabama—something of an irony since Paul Jones, not Raphael, had been named for a naval hero. By the outbreak of the war, P.J., as he sometimes referred to himself, had already served for fourteen years as a captain in the Georgia state militia and had written a respected 1855 manual on infantry tactics. From 1860 to 1861 he worked as Georgia’s quartermaster general, but after war broke out, the governor named him a colonel in charge of the state’s newly organized 2nd Infantry Regiment. After serving in John Bankhead Magruder’s division at the Battle of Seven Pines, Semmes was reassigned to Lafayette McLaws’s division of James Longstreet’s 1st Corps. As the Civil War historian Stephen W. Sears has pointed out, not one of McLaws’s brigadiers—Semmes, Joseph Kershaw, William Barksdale, and William Wofford—“was a professional soldier, but each…made himself into a first-rate officer and combat leader.”
PLATE 28–1
In early May 1863, now a brigadier general, Semmes fought heroically once again in the astonishing Confederate victory at Chancellorsville. But in its aftermath, perhaps stunned by news of Stonewall Jackson’s death a few days later, he took to contemplating his own mortality. “If my life can be spared,” he poignantly wrote to his wife, Emily, from Culpeper, Virginia, on June 11, “we will have to return & live humbly & economically—If not spared, Oh! My Lord! What will become of my Dear, My Dear Family.” A few days earlier, Emily had sent him a snippet of poetry along with “some flowers such as I wore on my bridal hat,” perhaps as a birthday gift (Semmes was born on June 4). She assured her worried husband, “I spend nothing but what we are obliged to[;] we have now supplies to last until Christmas. Our garden is very good[;] we have had beans and squashes and Beets, we will very soon have an abundance of every thing and enough for you if you could get them.” More important, she reported, even though their daughters had become so “proud” she prayed for them “that they may see their sin,” their sons “go to Sunday school, and spend their Sunday better.…They study more at school and are improving.” Providence, she prayed, would continue to watch over P.J. “Oh my darling,” she wrote, “how grateful we ought to feel to the good Lord for your preservation through those terrible battles. It is in him I trust[;] he can do all things.”
General Semmes, who “wept like a child” when he received his wife’s letter and enclosure, accompanied his emotional reply with a frank admission that he feared his commanders no longer trusted him (“I believe that McLaws has attempted to poison Lee & Longstreet towards me,” he confided). In the midst of these laments, he offered his wife some practical, if morbid, advice: his future was now so uncertain that Emily would be wise to renew his life insurance coverage.
But the war also had given Semmes a greater respect for religion; in fact, like many soldiers exposed to combat, and death, he had experienced a conversion. “I do humbly trust & pray to be carried safely through battle[.] I commit myself to God,” he assured Emily. “I feel that though I have thus far escaped, the next Battlefield may be the last to me—the last of me.…The enemy confronts us with three times our force, & we are both to come in Conflict any day—indeed, a Battle I feel satisfied will not be postponed unless Hooker & his Army run away.”
Semmes proved providential on several counts. Hooker did in fact disappear—but not by running away. Rather, in the wake of the general’s humiliating defeat at Chancellorsville, Lincoln replaced him at the command of the Army of the Potomac with George G. Meade, and it was Robert E. Lee who made the next move, outnumbered though he was. Just weeks after his stunning victory in Virginia, Lee led his Army of Northern Virginia, Semmes included, into Pennsylvania, convinced that a second daring invasion of the North would extinguish Union morale and destroy its will to fight. What Semmes called the inevitable “next” battle would “be postponed” for only a few more weeks, and when fighting resumed, it would escalate to a level unknown before or since on this continent. The next encounter between Union and Confederate forces took place in the tiny town of Gettysburg.
On the hellish second day of fighting there, July 2, 1863, one Union officer observed shells exploding amid a terrified herd of cattle, “tearing” one cow “to pieces,” with “others…torn and wounded. All were stampeded and were bellowing and rushing in their terror, first to one side and then to the other, to escape the shells that were bursting over them and among them.” The officer admitted to terror of his own amid the unholy din, confessing: “Luckily the poor beasts were as much frightened as I was.” At the peak of the enemy charge, the Union general Gouverneur Warren heard Longstreet’s men “shouting in the most confident tones” as they attacked federal forces, while another remembered the whir of the bullets flying in “among the men” like swarms of deadly insects. Paul Jones Semmes was part of the attack these Union defenders so vividly described. At 4:00 p.m. on July 2, Longstreet ordered a charge toward the left flank of the Union line. In support of Kershaw’s brigade, Semmes led his command through Rose’s Woods and the wheat field and beyond it into the valley of Plum Run below Little Round Top.
There, Paul Jones Semmes’s good luck came to an end. General Kershaw remembered that the federals “opened on these doomed regiments a raking fire of grape and canister, at short distance, which proved most disastrous.” As Kershaw recalled, “General Semmes promptly responded to my call, and put his brigade in motion toward the right, preparatory to moving to the front. While his troops were moving he fell, mortally wounded.” After the gruesome fighting finally subsided that evening, an ambulance conveyed the injured Confederate brigadier all the way to Martinsburg, West Virginia, ahead of the overall Confederate retreat that began when Pickett’s Charge failed on the third, and final, day of battle. His leg no doubt throbbing, Semmes must have found the sixty-mile excursion unbearably excruciating. Nonetheless, from Martinsburg a week later he gamely wrote again to his beloved Emily, hopeful that the worst was behind him and he would soon be home to recover further. This is what he said—in handwriting so uneven and nearly indecipherable it is reasonable to assume he was already consumed by fever:
My Dearest Wife:
I telegraphed you today: “Severely wounded. Main danger over. Stay at home. Will write.” I was wounded on the 2 inst. at Gettysburg Penn—I arrived there in an ambulance yesterday, a distance of 60 miles—Abner, Tom Cleveland & Cody are with me—Will write soon again[.] The wound has done remarkably well though I traveled 4 days in an ambulance—which was very uncomfortable not having it after being placed in it at the Hospital until I got here. I now am flat on my Back in a Comfortable room in a [residence of?] family, who treat me with every Kindness.
I was wounded in the leg but stopped the flow of blood in the field by a Tournequet [sic] applied by myself & drawn by one of my men & lost but little blood—Col Harm—Ltt Chamber Hd—Killd—Jack Jones Kill—& a long list—My Brigade suffered severely & behaved well—Much love to all Yr affect Hd
Paul J Semmes
Ellis escaped—God mercifully spared my life. We all have Cause to be thankful to Him.
In the end, God did not spare Paul Jones Semmes after all. Infection evidently overtook him, and his life ebbed away. His final words came not in another letter to his wife but purportedly in a whispered statement of patriotic defiance to a war correspondent: “I consider it a privilege to die for my country.” He breathed his last in a Martinsburg hospital on July 10. In a terse letter to Jefferson Davis on July 7, General Lee reported his successful retreat, unmolested, back into Virginia and added almost as a postscript: “In addition to the general officers killed or wounded, of whom I sent you a list in my former letter, I have to mention General Semmes” and others.
But the martyred brigadier need not have worried that Lee no longer appreciated him. Paul Jones Semmes may have died believing he had lost Lee’s confidence and respect, but after his death the Confederate commander wrote that Semmes and the other important officers who fell at Gettysburg had “died as they had lived, discharging the highest duty of patriots with devotion that never faltered and courage that shrank from no danger.…I cannot speak of these brave men as their merits and exploits deserve.”
Paul Jones Semmes was one of 3,903 Confederates killed at the Battle of Gettysburg. The Union lost nearly as many: 3,515. Some 43,000 more were either wounded, missing, or captured on both sides. With total casualties exceeding an almost unimaginable 50,000, Gettysburg proved the most costly battle yet in American history. “I am gradually losing my best men,” Lee mournfully wrote to President Davis. He would never again venture an offensive into the North. A South Carolina colonel reflected the shift in strategy when he wrote home the day after Semmes’s death to explain: “Genl. Lee can whip with this army double as many Yankees in Virginia as he can in Penn. Better prolong the war by defending then [sic] ruin ourselves by failures at invasion.”
Gen. Paul J. Semmes (1815–1863), engraving, n.d.
PLATE 28–2
Northerners immediately heralded Meade’s victory and Lee’s retreat as “the turning point in the war.” Making that bold prediction, the New York Times, which often accompanied news reports of Union victories with predictions that they heralded imminent Confederate surrender, headlined its exuberant report “Splendid Triumph of the Army of the Potomac” and ventured to suggest that “it might seem that the rebellion would come to a speedy end, and without further effort on the part of the North.” In fact, the war was only halfway over.
The Battle of Gettysburg—Union Position Near the Centre—
Gettysburg in the Distance—Cemetery on the Hill,
wood engravings, 1863
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