Robert E. Lee was not at his clearest in ordering Longstreet on an unsupervised offensive movement with only the general type of orders which he had used with Jackson. The year before, at Second Manassas, Longstreet had delayed so long in delivering the heavy counterstroke designed by Lee that Jackson’s men were fought to the narrow edge of collapse and probably would have lost their pivotal position under more skillfully delivered Federal attacks. But at Gettysburg Lee, forced to use the only fresh troops at hand, depended on the only system he had perfected, even though the personalities involved no longer fitted that system.
In perspective, it would appear that in the beginning cautious Longstreet would have been a wiser choice than impetuous Hill to lead an advance force doing the work of cavalry. However, all post-facto reflections reveal that Lee was suffering from, and in a way reflecting, the strain that attrition was bringing to his whole country and its best army. As his command personnel was not what it had been at its Chancellorsville peak, so the overburdened general did not have on an invasion of vast consequence the self-command that had been his in a more limited and more strictly military situation.
He was trying to do too much himself. Solving the South’s problem of self-defense was properly the function of the government. Lee had assumed responsibilities beyond his normal capacities because he alone conceived in terms of the whole. Consequently, the failures in his command, beginning with Stuart’s mysterious absence, inevitably made a constant drain on his nervous energy, despite the face of calm strength he presented to his men.
Thinking of everything from Vicksburg to North Carolina ports, further distracted and enervated by having to struggle against the constituted authority to achieve even such compromise measures as the invasion represented, the aging Lee (like Heth and young Rodes on the first day) did not think of his generals’ suitability to the nature of their assignments.
Of course, once the battle was joined on July 1, he was allowed little choice. To him, “duty” was the “sublimest word” in the language, and he extemporized battle plans in the expectation that each officer would do his duty as he did his. The soldiers would do the rest. That his reasoning was fallacious is not the point: his reasoning reflected the mental condition created by a strain too great for a mortal to carry. A powerfully built man, always very fit (his son said: “I never remember his being sick in his life”), he aged more physically than any other commander on either side.
At Gettysburg, then, Lee perfectly represented the failing condition of his army and his country.
Having allowed impetuous Hill to make the reconnaissance, Lee “suggested” that congenitally slow Longstreet move up for an early attack on the morning of the 2nd.
With Pickett only that day released from rear-guard duty back at Chambersburg, Longstreet had with him only one division with a consistently glowing record in attack. That was Hood’s. In striking power the four brigades (two Georgia, one Alabama, and Hood’s former Texas Brigade) were more typical of Jackson’s old Second Corps than of Long-street’s reliables.
They all bore the imprint of Hood’s own native aggressiveness and absolute self-expression in combat. Many finely trained general officers in both armies excelled at those aspects of warfare which were necessary adjuncts to the actual commitment of men to the business of killing. John Bell Hood was among those who were at their best when armed forces came to the ultimate test of battle. As brigade commander and division commander, he never lost his head in action, and he handled his fierce units with a sure touch.
Hood’s reputation was marred later when he essayed strategy after he was unwisely promoted beyond his capacities to army command. He was a fighter, not a thinker, and on July 2 he was at the top of his potential as a division commander and at the fullness of his tremendous physical powers.
The tall, magnificently built Hood was then thirty-one, ten years out of West Point, though his hound-dog eyes and the drooping expression of his long tawny-bearded face gave the impression of a much older man. A native of Kentucky, he had fallen in love with Texas when he went there as a lieutenant with the Second Cavalry and it became his adopted state.
Hood first came to Virginia as a cavalry officer with “Prince John” Magruder’s forces on the Peninsula. In March of 1862 he was made brigadier in command of the Texas regiments, who were to make him as famous as he made them. In the bitterly fought battle of Gaines’ Mill, in the Seven Days Around Richmond, the blond giant led his Texans to the break in the Union line which marked the beginning of the first great Confederate victory since Bull Run, the year before.
“Hood’s Texans” became a synonym for an irresistible attacking force. When he was promoted to major general (October 1862) his brigade set the pace for a division as tough as the nucleus. In 1863 the brigade included the somewhat unsung 3rd Arkansas Regiment, whose hard fighting and uncomplaining endurance made the Arkansans indistinguishable from the original troops. The brigade was then well commanded by J. B. Robertson, originally colonel of the 5th Texas.
In 1863 Hood had not yet married, though he was later to become a great homebody.
With the division of predictable Hood was the well-seasoned division of Lafayette McLaws, who was to have his troubles with Longstreet. Forty-two years old and a native of Augusta, Georgia, McLaws had been graduated from West Point in the same class with Longstreet, Richard Anderson, the Union’s Abner Doubleday, whose troops the army had fought on the first day, and George Sykes, whose troops McLaws would fight on the second.
In the old army he had fought in the Mexican War, served in the Southwest and, married to a niece of his army commander and later President, Zachary Taylor, held the rank of captain—average for his class. Coming into the Confederate army with Georgia volunteers, McLaws began as a major, advanced to brigadier after First Manassas, and in May of 1862—when the badgered Rebel forces were preparing for what seemed a last-ditch defense of Richmond—was promoted to major general on proven capabilities.
McLaws looked what he was, a solid sort of man. He was broad of face, wore a thick, wide beard, and had a heavy head of hair. His gaze was forthright, reflecting determination and intelligence but, like Hood’s, no humor. His record of personal relations in the army was good, and he was generally well liked, though he had no passionate partisans.
As a soldier he was sound rather than brilliant. His good troops were not associated with spectacular episodes such as Hood’s breakthrough in the Seven Days and the attacks of Rodes and Pender at Chancellorsville, and there would never be a line about him like “And then A. P. Hill came up.” Yet, on seniority and steady performance, McLaws merited consideration for corps command in the army’s reorganization in May, after Jackson’s death.
At Chancellorsville, however, he had not enjoyed a good day. There, with Longstreet and two divisions away, the capable Georgian had fought directly under Lee, and Uncle Robert was critical of McLaws’s failure to make an attack. In a touch-and-go situation McLaws had counted the costs, hesitated, and decided against the thrust. He may have been right, but Lee did not want his leaders to compute the casualties in advance.
Despite his disappointment at being passed over, McLaws was a dedicated Confederate. He kept fine control of his brigades (two from Georgia, one from South Carolina, and one from Mississippi), who had worked together since before the Seven Days. His division had been fortunate in having few casualties among the general officers: Kershaw, Semmes, and Barksdale had been with him from the beginning—though Paul Semmes and William Barksdale were in the last days of their life.
McLaws’s division was a typical Longstreet outfit. Not such good marchers as Hood’s men, but outstanding on defense, and led by a competent soldier, they were thoroughly dependable. With the self-reliance of old pro’s, they did what they were told, stood up under heavy casualties, and produced tremendous firepower. Their unit spirit was high, their self-confidence complete. There was never an army in the world which would not have welcomed them.
On McLaws’s and Hood’s divisions the second day would depend—on them and their commanding officer, General James Longstreet.
The men of the two divisions, around 15,000 or less, had marched into Pennsylvania, sharing the unaccustomed banqueting with the other corps, and reached Gettysburg without having seen a live enemy soldier. On the morning of July 1, fighting was so remote from their thoughts that the camps of the Texans—the most accomplished foragers in the corps, perhaps in the army—resembled a country poultry exchange opening for the day’s business. When the two divisions were started on the road to Gettysburg in the early afternoon, “the Texans moved lazily and plethorically into line.” Climbing the pass across South Mountain, they were “too heavily burdened, inside and out … to make active exercise a pleasure”
Along the road they were delayed by a tedious halt to allow the passage of the miles of wagons belonging to Ewell’s Second Corps, and it was full night when the van moved down the steep road toward the Cashtown village. Crossing the mountain, the troops had heard the distant firing of Hill’s men and had recognized the high-pitched yells of their own people, and, despite their lethargy, they had lifted a spontaneous cheer. When darkness settled over the hilly countryside however the only human sounds were wheezes and puffing as the men trudged over the narrow road in the comfortless aftermath of their gormandizing
As was habitual in Longstreet’s command, the two divisions had made a late start. The march was not one of their more inspired troop movements, and it was around midnight when the head of the column—Kershaw’s brigade of McLaws’s division—turned off the road two miles from Gettysburg. The rest of the division stretched back to Marsh Creek, two miles farther west. Without making camp, the men sprawled out on the ground and fell into stupefied slumber.
Those in the rear of the strung-out column reached all the way back to Cashtown, and they kept shuffling for another hour or so. Then Hood’s division were allowed to fall out with their van at Marsh Creek, four miles from Gettysburg. His men simply dropped beside the road where they halted.
After two hours’sleep, Hood’s troops were aroused around three in the morning, and within ten minutes the half-awake men were again shuffling along the dark-shadowed road under the stars. They had not been ordered to hurry.
First light came shortly after four thirty, and they began to see the countryside where Hill’s divisions had fought the day before. They passed farmhouses and Herr Tavern, a schoolhouse and a tollgate, and then they reached the wooded western slope of Seminary Ridge, where the cupola of the Lutheran Seminary rose above them. There the van turned off the road and moved across country until the last regiment had reached the point of the turn-off from the Chambersburg pike. It was then around seven o’clock, with two and a half hours of daylight gone.
Hood’s good marchers had taken more than four hours to move from four to six miles. The true capacity of these marchers was shown by the division’s fourth brigade, under Evander Law, which had also started out at three o’clock from its rear-guard position twenty-two miles west. Before noon they had come up and moved two miles southward, covering twenty-four largely mountainous miles in nine hours. It was the best marching of any unit in either army during the campaign.
Not only had these troops, directly under Longstreet’s own supervision, received no hurrying orders, but Longstreet personally gave a curious order whose significance was unnoted at the time. Lafayette McLaws, whose division had been nearer Seminary Ridge and had bivouacked at least an hour sooner than Hood’s, had his marching orders changed from four a.m. to “early in the morning.” Thus, the nearest and most rested troops moved last, at full daylight, after Hood’s men had passed. Then they passed Hood’s division, behind Seminary Ridge, and halted farther south around eight o’clock. McLaws’s division had used three hours to move from three to five miles.
The men in these doomed divisions were innocent of any failure in celerity. No one had urged them forward, and the unseen enemy was silent. Although the sun was growing warm, as if the day might turn into a scorcher, the countryside offered a scene of bucolic tranquillity. In fact, the Texans were thinking of food again.
They had moved into “a little valley where water and fuel were easily accessible,” and soldiers began building fires when the skillet wagon drove up and unloaded each regiment’s share of cooking utensils. It had been rumored that the commissary wagons were going to issue some of the flour gathered in Cumberland Valley. The men were greasing their skillets and hauling water when, on the edge of the low hill on the other side of their little valley, they saw Generals Lee, Longstreet, and Hood, with their staffs, pause and look toward the east. The three generals were talking earnestly in low voices.
It happened that Private Ferdinand Hahn had served all three as a clerk in the Menger Hotel in San Antonio, and enjoyed what might be called a speaking acquaintance with the generals.
“Go on up there, Hahn,” his companions urged him, “and hear what they’re saying.”
Hahn nonchalantly climbed the slope at a respectful distance from the group, and gradually edged closer. Suddenly he came scrambling back down the slope.
“You might as well quit bothering with those skillets, boys —it’ll not be twenty minutes before we’re on the move again.”
His messmates crowded around the eavesdropper, and Hahn said he had heard General Lee tell Hood that Meade’s people were already up there “and if we do not whip him, he will whip us.”
Being veteran soldiers, the men put the skillets back in the wagon and readied themselves for going in.
Fatalistic about casualties, each man hoped, as before each battle, that he was to be among the spared. None suspected that their dependable-looking corps commander was in such a disturbed state that he was to send them to their doom.
By the time Longstreet’s last troops came up, their general had spent three daylight hours with Lee and had reached a point of total frustration. General Lee, intent on learning the extent to which his old friend Meade had occupied Cemetery Ridge, scarcely listened to Longstreet’s harangues about changing his battle plans.
With his collaboration rejected a second time in twelve hours, Longstreet began to grow surly. Sometime in the early morning he made the—probably unconscious—decision to shift from words to action to get his own way. He began to procrastinate as a means of obstructing the execution of Lee’s strategy.
His loyal chief of staff made a guarded reference to Longstreet’s antagonistic attitude and deliberate slowness. Colonel Moxley Sorrel, observant and thoughtful, reported that: “As Longstreet was not to be made willing, and Lee refused to change or could not change, the former failed to conceal some anger. There was apparent apathy in his movements.”
As this procrastination did not jibe with his post-war interpretation of the battle, Longstreet subsequently tried to prove that he had not delayed in getting his troops into action. He stated that Lee had not ordered him the night before to attack at daylight, as some of his enemies claimed. In this contention Longstreet was technically sound. Lee never gave such direct orders to corps commanders. But the knowledge of Lee’s desire for an attack as early as possible after sunrise was general throughout the army at staff and command level. Even if it were possible that the commander of the First Corps had been ignorant of the plan the night before, he knew it at five a.m. when he reached Seminary Ridge in the area of Hill’s troops.
