Lee and Longstreet at High Tide: Gettysburg in the Light of the Official Records. Helen Dortch Longstreet
J. William Jones, of Richmond, the self-appointed conservator of General Lee’s fair fame, also quickly added his testimony to the reliability of the Rev. Dr. Pendleton’s discovery and dramatic disclosure. Those who approved generally fortified Pendleton with additional statements of their own.
Pendleton’s statement is characteristic of the whole, but it was for a time the more effective because it was more definite, in that it purported to recite a positive statement by Lee of an alleged order to Longstreet. If Pendleton’s statement falls, the whole falls.
General Longstreet was astounded when Pendleton’s Lexington story was brought to his attention. He had previously paid but little attention to indefinite gossip of a certain coterie that he had been “slow” and even “obstructive” at Gettysburg, and had never heard before that he was accused of having disobeyed a positive order to attack at any given hour. That false accusation aroused him to action. He categorically denied Pendleton’s absurd allegations, and at once appealed to several living members of Lee’s staff and to others in a position to know the facts, to exonerate him from the charge of having disobeyed his chief, thereby causing disaster.
Colonel Walter H. Taylor, a Virginian, and General Lee’s adjutant-general, promptly responded as follows:
“Norfolk, Virginia, April 28, 1875.
“Dear General,—I have received your letter of the 20th inst. I have not read the article of which you speak, nor have I ever seen any copy of General Pendleton’s address; indeed, I have read little or nothing of what has been written since the war. In the first place, because I could not spare the time, and in the second, of those of whose writings I have heard I deem but very few entitled to any attention whatever. I can only say that I never before heard of ‘the sunrise attack’ you were to have made as charged by General Pendleton. If such an order was given you I never knew of it, or it has strangely escaped my memory. I think it more than probable that if General Lee had had your troops available the evening previous to the day of which you speak he would have ordered an early attack, but this does not touch the point at issue. I regard it as a great mistake on the part of those who, perhaps because of political differences, now undertake to criticise and attack your war record. Such conduct is most ungenerous, and I am sure meets the disapprobation of all good Confederates with whom I have had the pleasure of associating in the daily walks of life.
“Yours very respectfully,
“W. H. Taylor.
“To General Longstreet.”
Two years afterwards Colonel Taylor published an article strongly criticising General Longstreet’s operations at Gettysburg, but in that article was this candid admission:
“Indeed, great injustice has been done him [Longstreet] in the charge that he had orders from the commanding general to attack the enemy at sunrise on the 2d of July, and that he disobeyed these orders. This would imply that he was in position to attack, whereas General Lee but anticipated his early arrival on the 2d, and based his calculations upon it. I have shown how he was disappointed, and I need hardly add that the delay was fatal.”
The fact that Colonel Taylor was himself a somewhat severe critic of General Longstreet, through a misapprehension of certain facts and conditions, gives additional force and value to this statement.
Colonel Charles Marshall, then an aide on Lee’s staff, who succeeded Long as Military Secretary and subsequently had charge of all the papers left by General Lee, wrote as follows:
“Baltimore, Maryland, May 7, 1875.
“Dear General,—Your letter of the 20th ult. was received and should have had an earlier reply but for my engagements preventing me from looking at my papers to find what I could on the subject. I have no personal recollection of the order to which you refer. It certainly was not conveyed by me, nor is there anything in General Lee’s official report to show the attack on the 2d was expected by him to begin earlier, except that he notices that there was not proper concert of action on that day. …
“Respectfully,
“Charles Marshall.
“To General Longstreet, New Orleans.”
Colonel Charles S. Venable, another of Lee’s aides and after the war one of his firmest partisans, made the following detailed statement, which not only refutes Pendleton’s Lexington story, but bears luminously upon every other point at issue concerning the alleged early attack order of the 2d:
“University of Virginia, May 11, 1875.
“General James Longstreet:
“Dear General,—Your letter of the 25th ultimo, with regard to General Lee’s battle order on the 1st and 2d of July at Gettysburg, was duly received. I did not know of any order for an attack on the enemy at sunrise on the 2d, nor can I believe any such order was issued by General Lee. About sunrise on the 2d of July I was sent by General Lee to General Ewell to ask him what he thought of the advantages of an attack on the enemy from his position. (Colonel Marshall had been sent with a similar order on the night of the 1st.) General Ewell made me ride with him from point to point of his lines, so as to see with him the exact position of things. Before he got through the examination of the enemy’s position General Lee came himself to General Ewell’s lines. In sending the message to General Ewell, General Lee was explicit in saying that the question was whether he should move all the troops around on the right and attack on that side. I do not think that the errand on which I was sent by the commanding general is consistent with the idea of an attack at sunrise by any portion of the army.
“Yours very truly,
“Chas. S. Venable.”
General A. L. Long, a Virginian, was General Lee’s Military Secretary and aide at Gettysburg. After the war he wrote a book,—“Memoirs of General Lee,”—in which he endeavored to hold Longstreet largely responsible for the Gettysburg disaster. But in it he made no assertion that Longstreet had disobeyed an order for a sunrise attack on the 2d, or at any other specific hour on that or the next day. He wrote as follows:
“Big Island, Bedford, Virginia, May 31, 1875.
“Dear General,—Your letter of the 20th ult., referring to an assertion of General Pendleton’s, made in a lecture delivered several years ago, which was recently published in the Southern Historical Society Magazine substantially as follows: ‘That General Lee ordered General Longstreet to attack General Meade at sunrise on the morning of the 2d of July,’ has been received. I do not recollect of hearing of an order to attack at sunrise, or at any other designated hour, pending the operations at Gettysburg during the first three days of July, 1863. …
“Yours truly,
“A. L. Long,
“To General Longstreet.”
The foregoing letters, all written by members of General Lee’s military family, all his close friends and personal partisans, are worth a careful study. They not only negative General Pendleton’s “sunrise” story, but as a whole they go to prove that it was not expected by Lee, Longstreet, Pendleton, nor any other high officer, that an early attack was to have been delivered on the 2d of July. Both Generals McLaws and Hood, Longstreet’s division commanders, made statements disclosing that they were totally unaware at Gettysburg of any order for a sunrise attack on that day. No officer in a position to know anything about the matter confirmed Pendleton’s statement, while everybody who should have been aware of such an important order, directly contradicted it, as do all the records.
The statement of General McLaws appeared in a narrative of Gettysburg published in a Savannah paper nearly thirty years ago. Besides its direct bearing on the Pendleton story, it furnishes valuable information as to some of the causes of delay encountered by Longstreet’s troops in their long march from Chambersburg on the 1st of July:
“On the 30th of June I had been directed to have my division in readiness to follow General Ewell’s corps. Marching towards Gettysburg, which it was intimated we would have passed