Lee and Longstreet at High Tide: Gettysburg in the Light of the Official Records. Helen Dortch Longstreet
all. This is a significant commentary on the anti-Longstreet assumption of how easy it was to win at Gettysburg if only Longstreet had obeyed orders!
At sunrise on the 2d, the hour at which Longstreet’s critics would have had this attack delivered, the Federal Fifth Corps was as near the battle-ground of that day as Longstreet’s troops. Longstreet’s troops were bivouacked the night previous at Marsh Creek, four miles west of Gettysburg. They began to arrive near Lee’s head-quarters on Seminary Ridge not earlier than 7 A.M. of the 2d, and the last of the column did not get in until near noon. Then they were still five miles by the route pursued from the chosen point of attack.
The Union Fifth Corps was bivouacked five miles east of Gettysburg about the same hour on the 1st that Longstreet’s tired infantry reached Marsh Creek. At four o’clock A.M. of the 2d they marched on Gettysburg, arriving about the same hour that Longstreet’s troops were being massed near Lee’s head-quarters, and were thereupon posted upon the extreme Federal right.
Upon the first manifestation of Confederate movements on the right and left, we know that the Fifth Corps was immediately drawn in closer, and about nine o’clock massed at the bridge over Rock Creek on the Baltimore pike, ready for developments. Meade thought Lee intended to attack his right. That Lee contemplated it is quite certain. Colonel Venable, of his staff, was sent about sunrise to consult with Lieutenant-General Ewell upon the feasibility of a general attack from his front. Lee wanted Ewell’s views as to the advisability of moving all the available troops around to that front for such a purpose. Venable and Ewell rode from point to point to determine if this should be done. Finally, Venable says, Lee himself came to Ewell’s lines, and eventually the design for an attack on the Union right was abandoned.
Where the Fifth Corps was finally massed, it was only one and a half miles in the rear of General Sickles’s position. Moreover, it had an almost direct road to that point. This facility for reinforcing incidentally illustrates the advantages of the Union position. At the same hour General Longstreet’s troops were still massed near the Chambersburg pike, three miles on a straight line from the point of attack. That is to say, Longstreet had twice as far to march on an air-line to strike Sickles “up the Emmitsburg road” as Sykes had to reinforce the threatened point. But, in fact, Sykes’s advantage was far greater in point of time, because, by order of Lee, Longstreet was compelled to move by back roads and lanes, out of sight of the enemy’s signal officers on Round Top. His troops actually marched six or seven miles to reach the point of deployment.
Longstreet eventually attacked about 4 P.M., and the Fifth Corps was used very effectively against him. But no historian who esteems the truth, with the undisputed records before him, will deny that it could and would have been used just as effectively at seven or eight o’clock in the morning. The moment Longstreet’s movement was detected it was immediately hurried over to the left and occupied Round Top. If Longstreet had moved earlier, the Fifth Corps also would have moved earlier. It could have been on Sickles’s left and rear as early as seven o’clock A.M., had it been necessary. If Ewell and not Longstreet had delivered the general attack it would have been found in his front.
It is mathematically correct to say that the troops which met Longstreet on the afternoon of the 2d could have been brought against him in the morning. The reports of General Meade, General Sykes, the commander of the Fifth Corps of Sykes’s brigade, and regimental commanders, and various other documentary history bearing on the subject, are convincing upon this point.
General Sickles’s advance was made in consequence of the Confederate threatening, and would have been sooner or later according as that threatening was made. The critics ignore this fact.
General Longstreet says on this point:
“General Meade was with General Sickles discussing the feasibility of moving the Third Corps back to the line originally assigned for it; the discussion was cut short by the opening of the Confederate battle. If that opening had been delayed thirty or forty minutes, Sickles’s corps would have been drawn back to the general line, and my first deployment would have enveloped Little Round Top and carried it before it could have been strongly manned. The point should have been that the battle was opened too soon.”
So much for one part of Gordon’s assumption, based upon other assumptions founded upon an erroneous presumption, that if Longstreet had taken wings and flown on an air-line from his bivouac at Marsh Creek to the Federal left and attacked at sunrise he would have found no enemy near the Round Tops.
In another equally unwarranted assumption of what the “impartial” military critic will consider an “established fact,” Gordon declares:
“Secondly, that General Lee ordered Longstreet to attack at daylight on the morning of the third day, and that the latter did not attack until two or three o’clock in the afternoon, the artillery opening at one.”
Lee himself mentions no such order. In his final report, penned six months afterwards, he merely mentions that the “general plan was unchanged,” and Longstreet, reinforced, ordered to attack “next morning,” no definite hour being fixed. It is significant, however, that in his letter to Jefferson Davis from the field, dated July 4, Lee uses this language:
“Next day (July 3), the third division of General Longstreet’s corps having come up, a more extensive attack was made,” etc.
The “third division” was Pickett’s, which did not arrive from Chambersburg until 9 A.M. of the 3d. In the same report, Lee himself states that “Pickett, with three of his brigades, joined Longstreet the following morning.” There is no dispute, however, about the hour of Pickett’s arrival.
So that, as Pickett was selected by Lee to lead the charge, and as Lee knew exactly where Pickett was, it is morally impossible that it was fixed for daylight, five hours before Pickett’s troops were up.
In one place Lee remarks in his report: “The morning was occupied in necessary preparations, and the battle recommenced in the afternoon of the 3d.” Time was not an essential element in the problem of the 3d. The Federal army was then all up, whereas Pickett’s Confederate division was still absent. The delay of a few hours was therefore a distinct gain for the Confederates, and not prejudicial, as Gordon would have the world believe.
But Longstreet’s official report is decisive of the whole question. He says,—
“On the following morning (that is, after the fight of the 2d) our arrangements were made for renewing the attack by my right, with a view to pass round the hill occupied by the enemy’s left, and gain it by flank and reverse attack. A few moments after my orders for the execution of this plan were given, the commanding general joined me, and ordered a column of attack to be formed of Pickett’s, Heth’s, and part of Pender’s divisions, the assault to be made directly at the enemy’s main position, the Cemetery Hill.”
Clearly this shows that Longstreet had no orders for the morning of July 3. As Longstreet’s report passed through Lee’s hands, the superior would most certainly have returned it to the subordinate for correction if there were errors in it. This he did not do, neither did Lee indorse upon the document itself any dissent from its tenor.
As Pickett did not come up until 9 A.M., and as General Lee says “the morning was occupied in necessary preparations,” it was logistically and morally impossible to make an attack at daylight, and General Longstreet states that it could not have been delivered sooner than it was.
Finally, Longstreet emphatically denies that Lee ordered him to attack at daylight on the 3d. He says that he had no orders of any kind on that morning until Lee personally came over to his front and ordered the Pickett charge. No early attack was possible under the conditions imposed by Lee to use Pickett’s, Pettigrew’s, and Pender’s troops, widely separated.
But without any orders from Lee, as is quite apparent, Longstreet had already given orders for a flank attack by the southern face of Big Round Top, as an alternative to directly attacking again the impregnable heights from which he had been repulsed the night before. That would have been “simple madness,” to quote the language of the Confederate General Law. But such an act of “simple