Posted on 09/10/2004 3:46:54 AM PDT by carton253
Oh, they did, I'm not contesting that -- they were engaged with the Union batteries on Cemetery Hill from before 5 a.m., and I think one of the eyewitness sources comments that there was still a battle going on late in the morning.
My point was, they were not enfilading Hancock at Pickett's point of attack, which would have been very useful work -- even more useful, if the bulk of Porter Alexander's 170 guns had been massed with those of the 2nd Corps in an effort to reduce the Union positions at the weak point in Hancock's line.
Your defense of General Longstreet is admirable. But, I noticed you didn't respond to what Colonel Alexander said. How he knew the night before about the attack.
I do like General Longstreet, but I read his book with one eye firmly on the truth. Longstreet had an agenda in writing. To defend himself against charges that he was responsible for the defeat at Gettysburg.
He said that the fault was Lee's, which caused Lee's aides to respond... This war of words and fault lying did much to muck up the truth. The truth lies somewhere in between.
I have a tendency to believe Lee over Longstreet because Lee took full responsibility for the failure. He also had his report smoothed over to avoid blame. Lee's report did not have an agenda behind it, which Longstreet's book does. That doesn't mean that are many things to glean from Longstreet's book...but one has to separate agenda from truth. And the same goes for those who responded to Longstreet in the defense of Lee. You have to separate their agenda from the truth.
Again...the most telling statement is Alexander's...
I think you and I will probably have a small disagreement over how much emphasis to put on what Longstreet wrote. Unfortunately, The Killer Angels is based on Longstreet's writing. Much spin has been put out as truth.
If Alexander knew about the attack on the evening of July 2nd...and if Longstreet continued to argue with his commanding general... if Longstreet had to "negotiate" the security of his right flank (as if Hood/McLaws weren't already there)... then I would have to ask what Longstreet was doing. Why keep arguing a point when the order had been given and your ideas had been shot down (Of course, Longstreet said there was no order.)
The statement of Porter Alexander is hard to account for. Is he supported by others' statements that the order went out on the evening of the 2nd, to resume the attack of the previous day? Lee says that "orders were given" to resume the previous day's work, but he doesn't say when the orders were given, and there is nothing in writing. Lee's staff officers knew and kept all his orders, and it would be interesting to see whether anyone has produced one to Longstreet dated the 2nd.
Lee definitely ordered Longstreet's advance the next morning "just after sunrise", when Lee visited Longstreet at his HQ and found Longstreet preparing a flank maneuver, which he cancelled. There is no doubt that the two men were at cross purposes -- and Longstreet's the better, by Lee's own admission, six months later -- but the timing of Lee's orders for the third day is the crux of the question, whether Longstreet's mulishness (justified under the circumstances) amounted to insubordination.
Accusations about Longstreet's slowness (Longstreet, in his memoir, repeats Lee's statement that Longstreet "is the hardest man to move in my army", then complains about it) were also levelled about his assault on the Second Day -- that may be where the "four o'clock" hour comes from that you quoted, because that is when Hood started his assault on the Second Day. Jubal Early started a canard that Longstreet had been ordered to "attack at dawn" on the Second Day, which Bonekemper exposes as a postwar fabrication.
I found a comment by Longstreet that may shed some light on the controversy over when Longstreet received his orders for the Third Day. Alexander may have heard "scuttlebutt" or "buzz" around Longstreet's HQ the night before, as he recollects, but did Longstreet have an order in hand? As we have often had occasion to observe in my industry, the oil industry, "that 'he said' shit will kill you". We mean it figuratively, but for armies it is literally true.
There has been for years (and I repeated it) a Gettysburg legend that General Ewell failed to make a critical attack on Culp's and Cemetery Hills on the evening of the First Day. What Longstreet says about that incident may shed light on what actually happened on the evening of the Second:
[Colonel Taylor] calls the message [emphasis added] of General Lee to General Ewell on the afternoon of the 1st an order. General Lee says, --
"The strong position which the enemy had assumed could not be attacked without danger of exposing the four divisions present, exhausted by a long and bloody struggle, to overwhelming numbers of fresh troops. General Ewell was thereupon instructed to carry the hill occupied by the enemy if he found it practicable."It is the custom of military service to accept instructions of a commander as orders, but when they are coupled with conditions that transfer the responsibility of battle and defeat to the subordinate, they are not orders [emphasis added], and General Ewell was justifiable in not making the attack that his commander would not order, and the censure of his failure is unjust and very ungenerous. [emphasis in original]
He adds that the critics overlooked a criticizable flaw in the First Division's actions during Gettysburg, to-wit, that the Division attacked too soon on the Second Day, since Gens. Meade and Sickles were discussing withdrawing Sickles's advanced position when Hood arrived and ended the conversation. Longstreet asserts that, had Sickles withdrawn, the First Division would have carried Little Round Top before the Unionists could have had time to realize their danger, which was retrieved by Hood's having had to tangle with Sickles in the Wheat Field. Longstreet, in support of his contention, quotes a postwar letter from his aide-de-camp, John Fairfax, who when carrying the attack order to Hood, spotted the defile betwen the two Round Tops and realized that Hood could get up that defile, out of sight of the federals, and carry Little Round Top to command III and VI Corps's left before they knew he was coming. Fairfax pointed it out to Hood, who immediately ordered Fairfax to bring Longstreet to see it for himself; but Longstreet told Fairfax that time was up, Lee's orders were black and white, and that he must go back to Hood with the word to start immediately.
Having thus made the point, that it was Lee who had ordered the hour of the assault on the Second Day, Longstreet coolly assigns the burden of his confessional to Lee. Lee calls Longstreet slow and hard to move, and Longstreet calls Lee impetuous, and quotes Lee's own repentance at leisure to prove his point. At least they agree on what they disagree about.
My proposed "solution" to the problem of "he said/he said", then, posed by Porter Alexander's memoir, is that some staff officer had ridden over in the evening on the Second Day with some word about Lee's intentions, or possibly bearing another of Lee's vaguely worded, highly conditional messages like the one he had given Ewell, and Longstreet decided that "I'm not going to play that game, he's going to have to give me a written order, or give me explicit orders in person after we have thoroughly discussed this operation".
Longstreet's two right-flank divisions, which had fought during the Second Day, were facing the Sixth Corps, which had moved over to cover the Round Tops (at this point it would be helpful to consult a map), and during the night he had refused his right -- Robertson's Brigade, who were now facing south on the Emmitsburg Road and Kern's Farm next to it as a blocking force, Longstreet knowing full well from the scout Harrison that that would be the direction from which corps-sized Union reinforcements could be expected to come. The rest of Hood's Division (now under Evander Law) and McLaws's Division was preoccupied with keeping V and VI Corps out of Longstreet's rear.
In their sunrise conference on the Third Day, Lee gave Longstreet a pass on maintaining his two already-fought divisions in place, and he replaced them with divisions from A.P. Hill's Corps. He nevertheless still stuck Longstreet with the responsibility for the assault, Longstreet noted sourly, even though 2/3's of the force was Hill's. Longstreet noted even more sourly that the only real enthusiasts for Lee's orders were Alexander, who trusted Lee absolutely even though he didn't like the ground, and Gen. Early, who was calling fearlessly for the attack from the other end of the line. Longstreet wondered on paper, 30 years later, why Lee didn't appoint a more enthusiastic assault team leader -- like, say, Jubal Early.
I haven't read Shaara's book, Killer Angels. I recognized many vignettes in Gettysburg as having been taken from Longstreet's memoirs. It's understandable that Shaara would rely on Longstreet: he was the man on the scene, he foresaw the Greek tragedy that was unfolding, and he left a detailed memoir and an article or two (he also wrote an article about Gettysburg in an 1870's anthology on the war which Bonekemper refers to).
Certainly Longstreet has the burden of defending himself, but a large portion of that burden was assumed 1) when Longstreet, in accordance with the terms of his parole, endorsed by solicited comments in a New Orleans newspaper Congress's decision to deliberate Negro suffrage, which caused the paper (without elaborating or quoting Longstreet's actual views) to attack Longstreet furiously as a collaborator, turncoat, scalawag, etc., and many of his former associates to drop him -- including, apparently, Lee, who ceased to communicate with him after 1867, and 2) when Early and others began circulating the "dawn attack" story among "Lost Cause" enthusiasts, despite contradictions from Lee's surviving staff, among others. He continued under a cloud, however, until revisionist William Connelly, a century later, discovered how Jubal Early and Southern Historical Society lion Rev. J. William Jones had falsified documents and solicited cooperation from other writers in their campaign to exalt Lee and denigrate Longstreet and Thomas Jackson. It was never noticed, however, until the revisionists began to point it out, that the critics of Longstreet's performance at Gettysburg never included Robert E. Lee.
I think I'm capable of absorbing the effects of Longstreet's dyspepsia, but I'm unable to see through the fog of direct contradiction, when the participants were few and a paper trail lacking. I've offered my best guess above, and if Longstreet bridled, as any honor-driven Virginia gentlemen would do, at being placed at the salient of what was shaping up rapidly to be a watershed disaster for his People and their cause, I think I can see through that issue, too.
Lee has left too many evidences of his rashness scattered around: the Maryland and Pennsylvania campaigns were of a piece, both seemingly without an objective on the ground and calculated only to bring the larger Army of the Potomac to battle somewhere in the capital district's rear. Lee was 0 for 1 in that sort of campaign objective on the eve of Gettysburg, and Longstreet was already becoming rapidly disillusioned in the late afternoon of the First Day, when he saw Ewell's refusal to move on Culp's Hill as Lee's own failure, and commented to someone (who wrote him a letter memorializing the moment, after the war) that a corps of the ANV had just failed by an easy exertion to take an objective which it would now require the whole army to take, and at great price.
Longstreet was allergic to casual casualties -- and he sensed that Lee was much more sanguine, even reckless, and it bothered him. That is what is at the bottom of his "agenda" or POV, I would prefer to say, since he expressed himself honestly, directly, and to the man in charge, on the spot and at the appropriate time. Some revisionists have taken Longstreet's memoir as a starting text and gone on, like Bonekemper, Connelly, and B.H. Liddell Hart, to push beyond the "marble man" psychology and Lee's image as "a symbol of victory in a defeated region" (thus Connelly), to count the cost of Lee's limitations, and to measure the results in terms of casualties absorbed and inflicted and ratios of the same, and of western-theater battles lost, in order to try to assess the value of Lee's leadership to the only outcome that mattered, which was Southern independence.
Still in all, even after they have redressed the scales, the residuary judgment of Lee must be that he was a very great American soldier and the champion of the People against the pretensions of Government and the sort of people who like to gorge on power and discover other people's laws in their own mouths. As one revisionist historian recounts, there will always be Southerners "like the little girl in Richmond who came home from Sunay school and said, 'Mama, I can never remember. Was General Lee in the Old Testament or the New Testament?'"
In the paragraph beginning "He adds that the critics overlooked ..." correct "First Division" to read "First Corps", throughout.
Too bad we don't have "on-edit" capabilities. I don't know how many times I looked at that mistake in composition before finally putting it up.
So, when it comes to Longstreet's word versus Alexander's word, you seem to need backup for Alexander's word where as you take Longstreet's word without the same proof. So, it comes down to he said/he said. You are splitting some mighty fine hairs. But, that's the fun of the great debates. I'm probably splitting some fine hairs of my own.
This has been one of the best conversations that I have had on Free Republic. We should do it again.
For me, when I think about the Battle of Gettysburg and having been there... I don't come away with Lee versus Longstreet... I come away with such noble heroism that it makes me proud to be an American.
Buford's stand on the first day... Chamberlain's stand on Little Round Top. Those brave soldiers who stepped off from Seminary Ridge... were beaten and wanted to reform to hit them again. Longstreet, thinking that Meade would come after the repulse, practically moved out to meet them alone. What of Hancock? What of Lee meeting his soldiers with the words, "It's all my fault."
With ancestors like these... I wonder how this could this country ever be defeated. Then I see the Kerry/Edwards campaign yard signs popping up like dandelions, I have my doubts.
I don't read Civil War books for the politics. I do read them because I like to read about battles and such... But I read them because I admire the men so. Grant, Lee, Chamberlain, Longstreet... and especially Stonewall Jackson.
I'm writing a what if book. And your taking the time to converse with me just adds to my knowledge. Thank you again.
Re Col. Alexander's words versus Longstreet's, I was simply pointing out that there was enough vagueness in Alexander's account (he doesn't say who told him about the next day's assault, for example) to allow one to credit Longstreet, if one interprets Longstreet's meaning to be, that he didn't get anything in person or in writing until the next morning. And drawing his words in the poorer light, does it reflect all that badly on him, if having received word of Lee's desires, he demanded six extra hours in exchange for the lives of his men?
There may, as I posted before, exist some comment or letter or aide-memoir that I haven't heard about (and I've only scratched the surface, myself -- most of Lee's aides wrote memoirs) that refers to a note (order) sent around to Longstreet that evening, that would put Old Pete on the hook for retrogradation and untimeliness. I'd just like to see it first. But we know what to think of Early.
I've never imagined that I knew enough about the Civil War and its leading personalities to join in the handicapping of its great marshals. I see that you're a Jackson fan. Of course all these generals have something of the prima donna about them, and I noticed that Longstreet took the occasional shot at Jackson, mostly over the Seven Days, but I think also at Second Manassas. So few of them were immune, except for Lee who largely refrained from criticizing commanders, except when it was time to court-martial General LaFayette McLaws.
Lee and Longstreet, I think, missed their proper relationship. Overall, I think Longstreet was an adequate corps commander, and he pretty much proved to people's satisfaction that he had shortcomings in independent command during the Chattanooga campaign. Where I think he could have contributed far more than he was asked to do would have been in Richmond, balancing the needs of the armies against the stinginess of the Confederate commissariat and directing field commanders like Lee and Polk and Kirby Smith in great, oscillating sweeps back and forth, now confronting Rosecrans, now descending on Grant, now rushing back to Virginia to stop Hooker or McClellan, keeping all the Union field armies just enough off balance and sufficiently frustrated and retarded by constant moderate-intensity battles of maneuver that 1863 and 1864 would have come and gone without the great victory that the adversary needed to sell his revolution, finally, to the electorate of the Northern States.
Fewer battles like Gettysburg and Antietam -- big setpiece slugging matches -- and a lot more of the more fluid battles like South Mountain and Monocacy were what the Southern cause needed, until it was time to send the big message to the Northern voters: Let Us Go.
Just as John Bell Hood and Patrick Cleburne were born to be division commanders, and Bragg to be an aide-de-camp in some colonial service, I think Lee and Jackson were great field generals who found their niche, and Longstreet was the great field marshal and army chief of staff who never did.
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