Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation by Clifford Dowdey
Authors: Clifford Dowdey
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Lee’s soldiers, and his chivalric code decreed that they should fight only armed men. It was a code that would soon belong to the past. Not knowing that, the soldiers took simple enjoyment in the victuals of a countryside which had not been fought over.
With the lowest percentage of stragglers in the army’s history, the men marched over the hard Northern roads well closed up in columns of four, in brigade units, which numbered usually from 1,200 to 2,000 men. Officers rode ahead and especially trusted men marched out as flankers. Behind each regiment, averaging around 350, marched a group of personal body servants and a group of stretcher-bearers, and last came the brigade wagons, each drawn by four horses or mules. There were a few bands to play “Dixie” and “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” South Carolina’s secession song, but there was little singing.
As a Chambersburg citizen saw them, “The Confederate infantry … presented a solid front. They came in close marching order … [and] … their dress consisted of every imaginable color and style, the [government-issue] butternut predominating. … Hats, or the skeletons of what once had been hats, surmounted their partly covered heads. Many were ragged, shoeless, and filthy …” but all were “well armed and under perfact discipline. They seemed to move as one vast machine.”
The men were not, as Northern observers insisted, “trying to overthrow the government.” The men had volunteered to defend their land, and now they were taking the war to the invaders. They were really very simple people who loved their own ways and were fighting for the right to preserve them.
The issue of slavery was remote to most of them. Something over ten per cent of the Southern white population were slaveowners, while as many as twenty-five per cent of Southern white families were associated with the institution of slavery. The large slave-operated plantations were mostly in the Tidewater regions, and many of the mountaineers had never seen Negroes until they saw the body servants of the young bloods in their regiments.
George Wills, the North Carolina preacher’s son, had one of these personal servants, who acted as chef, valet, and forager. This Wash was one of the Negroes whom well-intentioned Pennsylvania housewives tried to induce to steal away from their masters. One woman, trying to get at Wash’s loyalties, asked him if he were treated well. “I live as I wish,” he replied politely, “and if I did not, I think I couldn’t better myself by stopping here. This is a beautiful country, but it doesn’t come up to home in my eyes.” Wash spoke fairly accurately for all the men who followed Lee into Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley, west of the northern extension of the Blue Ridge.
With pauses here and there, the troops had been on the road for twenty-four days when on Saturday, June 27, the two corps, Longstreet’s and Hill’s, forming the middle and rear columns, concentrated at Chambersburg. Communication lines were established with Ewell farther north at Carlisle and with his division under Early at York. The spirit and the condition of the troops, the casualness with which the men accepted their fine march and safe arrival in the enemy’s country, should have gladdened the heart of any commander.
But General Lee was burdened by responsibility for the life of every man who made camp in the strange countryside, and he knew their lives were endangered by the mysterious absence of the cavalry that should be covering the mountain passes on their flank.
5
On Sunday, June 28, while Lee at his camp outside Chambersburg was trying to conceal his apprehension over Stuart’s absence, a young staff officer rode northward alone through the enemy’s country. He was Captain James Power Smith, once an aide to Stonewall Jackson. When Jackson died, his staff officers selected Captain Smith to escort Mrs. Jackson and her seven-month-old baby to the home of her father in
With the lowest percentage of stragglers in the army’s history, the men marched over the hard Northern roads well closed up in columns of four, in brigade units, which numbered usually from 1,200 to 2,000 men. Officers rode ahead and especially trusted men marched out as flankers. Behind each regiment, averaging around 350, marched a group of personal body servants and a group of stretcher-bearers, and last came the brigade wagons, each drawn by four horses or mules. There were a few bands to play “Dixie” and “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” South Carolina’s secession song, but there was little singing.
As a Chambersburg citizen saw them, “The Confederate infantry … presented a solid front. They came in close marching order … [and] … their dress consisted of every imaginable color and style, the [government-issue] butternut predominating. … Hats, or the skeletons of what once had been hats, surmounted their partly covered heads. Many were ragged, shoeless, and filthy …” but all were “well armed and under perfact discipline. They seemed to move as one vast machine.”
The men were not, as Northern observers insisted, “trying to overthrow the government.” The men had volunteered to defend their land, and now they were taking the war to the invaders. They were really very simple people who loved their own ways and were fighting for the right to preserve them.
The issue of slavery was remote to most of them. Something over ten per cent of the Southern white population were slaveowners, while as many as twenty-five per cent of Southern white families were associated with the institution of slavery. The large slave-operated plantations were mostly in the Tidewater regions, and many of the mountaineers had never seen Negroes until they saw the body servants of the young bloods in their regiments.
George Wills, the North Carolina preacher’s son, had one of these personal servants, who acted as chef, valet, and forager. This Wash was one of the Negroes whom well-intentioned Pennsylvania housewives tried to induce to steal away from their masters. One woman, trying to get at Wash’s loyalties, asked him if he were treated well. “I live as I wish,” he replied politely, “and if I did not, I think I couldn’t better myself by stopping here. This is a beautiful country, but it doesn’t come up to home in my eyes.” Wash spoke fairly accurately for all the men who followed Lee into Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley, west of the northern extension of the Blue Ridge.
With pauses here and there, the troops had been on the road for twenty-four days when on Saturday, June 27, the two corps, Longstreet’s and Hill’s, forming the middle and rear columns, concentrated at Chambersburg. Communication lines were established with Ewell farther north at Carlisle and with his division under Early at York. The spirit and the condition of the troops, the casualness with which the men accepted their fine march and safe arrival in the enemy’s country, should have gladdened the heart of any commander.
But General Lee was burdened by responsibility for the life of every man who made camp in the strange countryside, and he knew their lives were endangered by the mysterious absence of the cavalry that should be covering the mountain passes on their flank.
5
On Sunday, June 28, while Lee at his camp outside Chambersburg was trying to conceal his apprehension over Stuart’s absence, a young staff officer rode northward alone through the enemy’s country. He was Captain James Power Smith, once an aide to Stonewall Jackson. When Jackson died, his staff officers selected Captain Smith to escort Mrs. Jackson and her seven-month-old baby to the home of her father in
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