$34.95 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-2921-9

Published: Spring 2005

 Add to cart
 View cart
 Checkout

Copyright (c) 2005 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.




Prologue
This Has Been a Sad Day for Us

Gettysburg, 3 July 1863, approximately 3:50 P.M.[1]

Through the heavy smoke and enemy artillery fire, the tattered remnants of the commands of Major General George E. Pickett, Brigadier General James Johnston Pettigrew, and Major General Isaac R. Trimble streamed down the bloody slope of Cemetery Ridge. Their attack against the center of the Union Army of the Potomac had been a disaster. "The whole field," wrote a Confederate officer, "was dotted with our soldiers, singly and in small groups, coming back from the charge, many of them wounded, and the enemy were firing at them as you would a herd of game."[2]

Losses had been appalling. In the commands of Pickett, Pettigrew, and Trimble, more than 6,700 officers and men were casualties. Nearly 5,000 were killed or wounded. Along the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge the dead and wounded lay in "heaps." The bodies of many of those who fell near the Union lines were literally set on fire by the flames from the blasting artillery pieces.[3]

In Pickett's Division, the severe loss was told by the staggering number of casualties among general and field-grade officers. Brigadier General Lewis A. Armistead was mortally wounded and in enemy hands. Brigadier General Richard Brooke Garnett was dead and his body unrecovered. Only Garnett's frightened, wounded, and riderless horse had been seen cantering to the rear prior to the climax of the attack. Brigadier General James Lawson Kemper was savagely wounded; a musket ball had entered his groin and ranged up his spinal column. Thirteen regimental commanders were killed or wounded; three lieutenant colonels were killed and eight were wounded. Of nine majors, one was killed and seven were wounded.[4]

Not only Virginia but also North Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee had sent their sons into that maelstrom of death. In those fields, General Trimble was badly wounded and the remnants of nearly all of General Pettigrew's regiments returned without their field-grade officers or acting regimental commanders. More than 3,500 officers and men were killed, wounded, or missing in Pettigrew's and Trimble's commands.[5]

The brigades of twenty-two-year-old Colonel James Keith Marshall and Brigadier General Joseph R. Davis suffered a ghastly casualty rate of 74 percent; Marshall was killed after two bullets struck him in the head. Ten regimental commanders fell in Pettigrew's and Trimble's commands. Some companies lost over 90 percent of their effective strength, while two companies—the University Greys of the Eleventh Mississippi and the color company of the Thirty-eighth North Carolina—lost 100 percent of their officers and men. After the attack the Thirty-eighth North Carolina consisted of only forty soldiers commanded by a first lieutenant. The Eleventh Mississippi had lost 341 of its 394 officers and men, a staggering 87 percent. Company A of the Eleventh North Carolina consisted of only eight men and a single officer.[6]

Out near the Emmitsburg Road General Trimble stood next to his horse, badly wounded. His aide, Captain Charles Grogan, remarked: "General, the men were falling back, shall I rally them?" Trimble looked to his right and observed Pickett's columns reduced to "a few men in squads moving to the rear." He turned to Grogan and said: "No, Charley, the best thing these brave fellows can do is to get out of this." Trimble and his aide mounted up and followed the men to the rear. As Trimble neared Seminary Ridge, his horse, Jinny, collapsed and died, having been struck by the same shot that wounded the general.[7]

Along the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge, from the whitewashed house and barn of free African American Abraham Brian to below the clump of trees, the attacking columns lost thirty-three battle flags. Many of the flags had not been fought over by the contending sides but, rather, were picked up off the ground after the attack had been repulsed, mute testimony that in many of the attacking regiments the color companies had been so shredded by the horrendous gunfire that when the flags fell to the ground, no one remained to bear them farther.[8]

Observing the melancholy scene was the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, General Robert E. Lee. He had led the army only since the wounding of General Joseph E. Johnston at Seven Pines on 31 May 1862. On assuming the post, Lee turned the army into an offensive machine; the Seven Days, Second Manassas, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville were his battle honors thus far. Since he had taken charge, the Army of Northern Virginia had suffered more than sixty thousand casualties. Lee was all army; he reveled in command and was good at it. He was exacting and expected those around him to be the same. He lectured others constantly, and his orders, letters, and telegrams reveal a leader who, for some, had an irritating propensity to micromanage. Added to that, Lee was quick to lose his temper, and no one wanted to be near him when he did. Lee could drive an army; he was relentless. If his men were hungry or short of supplies, Lee would seize necessities from civilians. If he believed that he must take an enemy position, he would hurl all he had at it and not mourn the lost men if the attack failed. In addition to all of this, correspondents of the Southern press were "not tolerated" at his headquarters and he refused them permission to see any official reports. In a year, though, Lee had achieved more with the Army of Northern Virginia than one could have ever imagined given the army's terrible supply problems and its inferior numbers.[9]

Lee was a family man. He deeply loved his wife, the former Mary Custis, a victim of rheumatoid arthritis, and his three sons and four daughters, one of whom, Annie Carter Lee, lay buried in North Carolina, a victim of typhoid in the fall of 1862. All of his sons were in the army. One of them, General William Henry Fitzhugh Lee, one of Major General J. E. B. Stuart's brigade commanders, had been wounded near Richmond and captured on 26 June. General Lee had become religious about ten years earlier, and his faith now deeply affected the way he viewed success and tragedy.[10]

At fifty-six years of age, Lee was well built and rather robust; he stood just under six feet tall, although his feet were rather small. His dark brown—almost black—penetrating eyes and finely chiseled features made him exceedingly handsome. But the burden of command had taken its toll; his once pitch-black hair and beard had turned snow-white, and he showed signs of stress and fatigue. In early April Lee had complained of "a good deal of pain" in his "chest, back and arms." He had been suffering from a heavy cold and fever, but the pain seemed different. Lee had experienced a heart attack. Although he was able to return to duty, Lee remarked how "differently" he had felt since his "attack last spring"; he felt that he had never really recovered.[11]

Beyond enduring the slow constriction of his coronary arteries, Lee had complained of another malady that was of more immediate concern, diarrhea. He had been stricken with it like virtually everyone in the army. The previous evening, Major William W. Blackford of General Stuart's staff rode to Lee's headquarters to present Stuart's report of his operations. While Blackford waited for him to read it, Lee hurried to the rear of his tent at least three times. Finally, Lee's staff officers admitted that the commander had a bad case of diarrhea. Indeed, Blackford noticed that Lee "walked … as if he was weak and in pain." Lieutenant Colonel Moxley G. Sorrel, of Lieutenant General James Longstreet's staff, who had a close view of General Lee, later wrote of his "extreme agitation" on the afternoon of 3 July.[12]

Dressed in a long gray coat bearing only the three stars on the collar and wearing a black felt hat, Lee looked more like a civilian than a commander. He always carried a red bandana. From a position near Spangler Woods, Lee, seated on a large oak stump and holding the reins of his horse, Traveler, in one hand and his head resting in the other with his elbow supported by his knee, had observed the last great disaster at Gettysburg unfold along the fields in front of the distant Cemetery Ridge.[13]

Lee and his "old war horse," General Longstreet, feared that the enemy would counterattack while the center of the Army of Northern Virginia appeared to be in a state of collapse. From their vantage point in the Spangler Woods, they ordered their staff officers to ride ahead into the fields west of the Emmitsburg Road and rally the broken survivors of the attack along a ridgeline east of Seminary Ridge, marked by the massed artillery batteries of Longstreet's Corps and Lieutenant General Ambrose Powell Hill's Corps.[14]

Union cannoneers continued to pour galling salvos into the retreating butternut-and-gray soldiers, killing and wounding many. Some bloodied Confederates turned around to fire back, but Union artillery and small arms fire became so heavy that many of the wounded who littered the ground begged their comrades to stop shooting for fear of being killed in the crossfire, out of which they were helpless to extricate themselves. Such appeals were rarely heeded.[15]

The fields in front of Seminary Ridge were filled with battered veterans of the attack. Private Robert W. Morgan of Company C, Eleventh Virginia, had been wounded in both feet. Unable to walk, Morgan used his own musket and one he picked up on the battlefield as crutches and began hobbling back to Seminary Ridge.[16]

Farther to the rear was Colonel William R. Aylett of the Fifty-third Virginia. Blood poured from his mouth. He had been hit in the chest by a shell fragment during the bombardment that preceded the attack. Like most regimental officers, he had entered the attack wearing not only his frock coat and vest but also a blanket roll across his right shoulder. Aylett always wore a blanket roll into battle, believing that if he were wounded he could wrap himself in it and the warmth would ward off shock. On inspection, he discovered that the shell fragment had failed to penetrate the folds of the blanket roll, coat, vest, and shirt. It left him with a terrible hematoma, internal bleeding, and intense pain, but nothing more serious.[17]

Thousands who fell along Cemetery Ridge could not follow their comrades back to Seminary Ridge; they were too badly wounded. One of them was Lieutenant John E. Dooley of the First Virginia. He was shot through both thighs about thirty yards from the Union batteries. His eyes and face were slathered with the blood of those on either side of him who had been hit by shellfire and canister as they marched toward the Union lines. Dooley was in "excessive pain"; he feared that he was bleeding to death. As he was immobile and blinded by the blood, smoke, and dust, only the shouts of jubilant Union soldiers told him the result of the attack. He was left behind, ten yards from his colonel, Lewis B. Williams, who had been shot in the neck and was in "intense agony"; the bullet, after it hit the colonel, had ranged down his spinal column. Nearby were two of Williams's classmates from the Virginia Military Institute, Colonel Robert C. Allen, of the Twenty-eighth Virginia, who had been shot in the head, and Williams's first cousin, Colonel Waller Tazewell Patton, of the Seventh Virginia, whose jaw had been ripped away by artillery fire.[18]

All around the dismal fields, appeals for assistance and cries of "water, water" from the wounded joined the chorus of blasting guns and bursting shells. The smoke was dense, canister whirred about, shells shrieked through the acrid air and exploded above the confused and terrified returning soldiers. Efforts at rallying them failed; the scant line, which began to take form east of Seminary Ridge in the face of the hideous artillery fire, collapsed, and a general "stampede" commenced. The situation along Seminary Ridge became tense and precarious. Save for some units in Trimble's demidivision, virtually all distinction of regiments had disappeared.[19]

Countless ambulances, with brigade names stenciled across their canvas covers, clattered along bearing the wounded from temporary aid stations to the division hospitals in the rear. Litter bearers and ambulance drivers, most of whom were detailed soldiers, others slaves who also served as cooks and laborers, scurried about, their hats and caps "conspicuously displaying the badge of red cloth with white letters, reading 'Ambulance Corps.'" The aid stations were chaotic; they were overflowing with wounded. Each station consisted of little more than an assistant surgeon, a "knapsack toter," and some nurses (usually musicians or convalescent soldiers) with "a large collection of apple butter pots filled with water to be used for the wounded"; they were marked by a red flag attached to a stick planted in the ground.[20]

Standing on Seminary Ridge not far from General Lee was the Reverend Dr. Francis Milton Kennedy, a Methodist minister and chaplain of the Twenty-eighth North Carolina. Kennedy was appalled at the losses. He mounted up and rode across the fields west of Seminary Ridge to try to locate his brigade hospital but was unsuccessful. All he witnessed was agony and confusion. "By some means," Kennedy wrote in his diary, "the Medical Department was badly managed today causing a good deal of unnecessary pain and trouble to the wounded."[21]

Lieutenant Colonel Arthur J. L. Fremantle of Her Majesty's Coldstream Guards, an observer traveling with the Army of Northern Virginia, recalled:

I soon began to meet many wounded men returning from the front. Many of them asked in piteous tones the way to a doctor or an ambulance. The further I got, the greater became the number of the wounded. At last I came to a perfect stream of them flocking through the woods … some were walking alone on crutches composed of two rifles, others were supported by men less badly wounded than themselves, and others were carried on stretchers by the ambulance corps; but in no case did I see a sound man helping the wounded to the rear, unless he carried the red badge of the ambulance corps. They were still under a heavy fire; the shells were continually bringing down great limbs of trees, and carrying further destruction amongst this melancholy procession.[22]

For Lee, the only remaining option was to withdraw his army; he had to return to Virginia. Lee had done this once before—in September 1862—but then his army was only three miles from the Potomac River. The present retreat would call upon him to muster not only all of his talents but also all of his nerve. The army's quartermaster and subsistence trains carrying stores seized in Maryland and Pennsylvania were very long; they had to be safely returned to the army's base of supply in the lower Shenandoah Valley along with the vast herds of seized horses, mules, cattle, sheep, and hogs. If this could not be done, the invasion of Pennsylvania would become a complete strategic loss. The large number of wounded also posed a major challenge; those who could stand the journey had to be taken back with the army; others would have to be left behind. Then there was the geography to contend with. The battle at Gettysburg had lured Lee away from the security of the South Mountain range; those 700-foot peaks stood between him and the Potomac River, forty-five difficult miles south. His enemy had just tasted victory. Over the last three days it had proved to be a formidable force; it would not remain idle. Moreover, two more Union armies were moving toward Lee's left flank from the north and toward his rear from the west. Only rain and mud could make the operation Lee faced more challenging than it already appeared to be.