Phillip Thomas Tucker’s most recent book Pickett’s Charge – A New Look at Gettysburg’s Final Attack offers a vastly (and intriguingly) different spin on your average assessment of the presumed futility of the attack Robert E. Lee ordered on the final day at Gettysburg.
The traditional view of Pickett’s Charge is that it was doomed to fail from the onset and that, in ordering same, Lee blundered into his worst decision of the war. At Gettysburg, Lee is most often portrayed as weak, indecisive and stubborn to a fault while Lieutenant General James Longstreet is seen to be correctly distraught at the prospect of directing an attack he feels has no chance of success and which will merely result in a loss from which the Confederacy will never recover.
Tucker advances the view that Lee’s plan, had it been executed as ordered, would have split the Union line and sent the two resulting unsupported wings of Meade’s Army of the Potomac staggering back towards Washington in potentially war-ending disarray. Though few dispute such as Lee’s goal, most conclude that Pickett’s Charge was never realistically going to achieve that goal and was, therefore, a needless carnage that pointlessly wasted vital manpower and talent.
It is that actual plan that Tucker says must be examined in detail to see if it was viable. The author goes into a 375-page explanation of the conception of the plan, the potential (if not probable) success of the plan if executed as designed, the actual execution of the plan and why the plan as executed failed so dramatically.
In a nutshell, the plan called for an intensive artillery barrage focusing on a relatively small impact area to wreck havoc on the targeted Union defenders, said bombardment to precede an attack by the divisions of Pickett and Pettigrew (and a much smaller force under Isaac Trimble) advancing across the nearly one-mile front from Seminary Ridge all the while maneuvering the brigades and regiments therein so that the total force would eventually concentrate on a small and weakly defended front on Cemetery Ridge at and near the now infamous copse of trees. This advance was to be supported on both flanks by adjacent divisions from the remainder of both Hill and Longstreet’s Corps as well as batteries of “flying artillery” advancing on the flanks of and behind the Pickett’s Charge attackers. In coordination with the infantry attack, Lee sent a large force of Jeb Stuart’s cavalry corps to circle around the right flank of the entire Union army with the mission to simultaneously unleash a cavalry charge to the immediate rear of the Union line directly behind the exact apex of Pickett’s Charge. The supporting divisions (previously mentioned) were to expand the anticipated penetration of Pickett’s advance and exploit the resulting breakthrough by attacking to the left and/or right of the breakthrough to complete the rout of the now-retreating and disorganized Union forces.
Tucker makes an excellent case for why this plan, had it been executed as conceived, may very well have been the successful (and potentially war-ending) masterstroke Lee anticipated it to be. He initially points out that Lee was proved correct in his assessment that the right-center of Meade’s line (which was to be the focal point of the attack) was, in fact, thinly defended and was the most vulnerable part of the Union line as Meade had siphoned off many units to strengthen his right and left flanks (the
target of the two previous day’s assaults by Lee). He then explains in detail how the plan was NOT executed as conceived and goes on to lay the blame for same on many individuals – not just Lee.
As with most plans, the devil is in the details and the fault for the failure of such details fell on many culprits. First off, the “greatest artillery bombardment which ever took place on the North American continent” was supposed to last no more than 40-50 minutes and cease once Longstreet gave the order to advance. It lasted more than an hour and a half before that order was finally delivered by a reluctant nod of Longstreet’s head. This lengthy bombardment expended much more ammunition than anticipated. These countless volleys, while neutralizing many of the opposing Union artillery near the copse of trees, failed to inflict the hoped-for casualties amongst the infantry crouched behind the relative safety of the stone wall running parallel to and just below the crest of Cemetery Ridge.
In reaction to Union counter-battery fire, much-needed Confederate artillery ammunition was needlessly withdrawn too far to the rear to be able to be utilized later for counter-battery fire and by the flying artillery. Even those “flying artillery” batteries that did manage to retain sufficient ammunition were (with the exception of one battery) never ordered forward by anyone in the Confederate chain of command – a failure that virtually assured that Union artillery fire would needlessly decimate the advancing Confederate attackers (not to mention that none of Longstreet’s artillery were ordered to advance forward to provide necessary counter-battery fire on the extremely effective Union batteries producing long-range fire on Pickett’s right from Little Round Top).
He points out that Stannard’s Vermont brigade flanking Kemper’s brigade on the Confederate right and the 8th Ohio and the 126th New York doing the same on the Confederate left provided devastating, indeed, decisive enfilade fire on both sides of Pickett’s Charge – an eventuality which would have been prevented had Longstreet (or Hill) ordered the timely advance of the Confederate forces intended by the plan to advance on the flanks of and in support of Pickett’s Charge.
Herein, Longstreet (who had been placed in command of all forces involved in the attack -including those from Hill’s corps), failed miserably by not coordinating with Hill in any way or laying out what Hill’s responsibilities might otherwise be (thus allowing Hill to literally take a back seat and involve himself in the attack in no manner whatsoever – even though the majority of the attacking forces involved were from his corps). Further, he provided precious little guidance to the on-site commander of the supporting artillery forces (Colonel Edward Porter Alexander) – a misstep which was compounded by Longstreet never properly or promptly reacting to Alexander’s frequent and desperate entreaties to him to commence the attack before the artillery ran too low on ammunition to be able to properly support the ensuing attack (an unheeded warning that proved all too prescient). Finally, if an on-site commander’s role is to effectively and enthusiastically execute the orders he’s given, rally his subordinates to greater heights and painstakingly and effectively monitor the progress of the attack he’s leading, then James Longstreet failed miserably by anyone’s standard.
A similar standard would also find George Pickett similarly lacking. While rather full of a “guts and glory” élan at the attack’s outset, its waning and most critical moment found him safely ensconced behind the Codori farm’s barn – nearly 450 yards from where Lewis Armistead was leading the final
throes of the Confederacy’s high tide to its immortal demise. The standard defense of Pickett lies in the explanation that it was not a division commander’s normal responsibility to advance at the forefront of his troops. This defense falls short immediately when one looks at how Pettigrew (the other division commander) advanced further than any other Confederate general (except the forever-gallant Armistead) and, indeed, how many Civil War division commanders did lead to the front and rally their troops to greater heights by their conspicuous example.
One must also necessarily find significant fault with Lee himself. While Tucker does so, he obviously does it grudgingly and in little detail. While it was Lee’s normal practice to issue orders and then allow his subordinates the latitude to execute those orders without interference from him, he was in a position to observe the same shortcomings in the execution of the attack that Longstreet so sullenly ignored and did virtually nothing about. He had a command responsibility to intervene as necessary and did not. To his credit, he learned his lesson because, for the remainder of the war, he consistently exercised significantly greater control over his subordinates’ execution of his orders than he did prior to Gettysburg.
A final and potentially the greatest failure of the “plan” being effectively executed was the total inability of Stuart to get his cavalry force anywhere near the rear of the Union line behind where Pickett’s Charge was directed. It would seem that this was an aspect of the plan singularly crucial to its success and yet Tucker devotes less than a handful of paragraphs to this failure. Was it reasonable for Lee to expect that Stuart’s exhausted cavalry would circle around the Union rear undetected and unopposed so that it might unleash the attack that would have created the total mayhem anticipated? Could Stuart have more effectively deployed his forces at East Cavalry Field against Custer and Gregg and pressed on through to Gettysburg to fulfill his assigned mission or was his failure fated to be? Was this aspect of the battle plan a practical one from the onset and, if not, was Lee’s “plan” a seriously flawed one from the beginning? Tucker leaves these obvious questions unanswered.
Tucker’s book puts forth an intriguing and fascinating hypothesis and, with the exception of a sufficiently detailed analysis of the cavalry aspect of the battle plan, he defends it adequately. He could have done so just as well in a forty-page term paper, but he seemed obsessed with incessantly re-stating (and re-explaining) the same arguments ad nauseum and highlighting at length portions of seemingly every ever letter written home by anyone within forty miles of Gettysburg on July 3, 1863. I await the abridged version with great anticipation.