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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?'"