Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (84 page)

Halleck read through the same lines: “You are strong enough to attack and defeat the enemy before he can effect a crossing,” he frantically wired Meade late on July 13th. “Act upon your own judgment and make your generals execute your orders. Call no council of war.” Above all, “do not let the enemy escape.” But by the time Meade received Halleck’s telegram, the escape was already in progress. Although still more rain began to fall and Longstreet darkly warned that it might be better to wait for the next day, Lee’s “anxiety was intense” to get away, and so the evacuation proceeded. “And a crazy affair it was, too,” remembered
Moxley Sorrel. The rain came down in “blinding sheets,” and wagons stalled in mud on the approaches to the pontoon bridge, and Lee’s men could only risk keeping “three or four torches alight, and those were dimmed at times when heavy rains came.” But “our father, Lee, was scarcely ever out of sight,” and by morning, only the last of Harry Heth’s division was still crossing at Falling Waters. The last regiment to pass was the ghostly 26th North Carolina, without its colonel, its colors, and without almost three-quarters of the men who had crossed the river so happily less than a month before. And then the ropes sustaining the jury-rigged bridge were cut and the retaining cables were pulled to bring the pontoon boats over to the Virginia shore. Except for some 1,500 stragglers and the skirmishers of the 4th Alabama (who had to swim for it), the Army of Northern Virginia was safe.
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  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE  

T
HE ARMY
R
OBERT
E. L
EE
brought back to Virginia had been hideously, cruelly damaged. “You have all heard all the particulars of the terrible battles around Gettysburg,” wrote a demoralized lieutenant in the 10th Virginia. “It had all the bad results of a defeat.” George Pickett, to begin with, was only slightly exaggerating when he claimed that his division had been destroyed at Gettysburg. As in any Civil War military numerations, there are different sets of numbers claiming to be the official calculation, so the most important of them for Pickett’s division might as well be spelled out here:

Within Pickett’s command,
Richard Garnett’s brigade was particularly hard hit. Of the more than 1,400 men who marched with him down the
Cashtown Pike to join the battle, about 950 of them never came back. Within each regiment, the impact was even greater: the regiment was the soldier’s home neighborhood, and the numbers have a keener edge. The 18th Virginia lost at least 50 dead, 77 wounded, and 104 otherwise unaccounted for; only 50 men returned from the great charge unharmed. The 8th Virginia went into action with anywhere from 205 men (according to its colonel,
Eppa Hunton) to 189 men (according to a private,
Randolph Shotwell), but in the overall effect, it hardly mattered. Hunton counted only 10 men after the charge, Shotwell 15. The returns of the other two brigades in Pickett’s division are only a little less dreary: Armistead’s approximately 2,000 men left just over half of their numbers behind; of Kemper’s 1,600, 700 or so were missing by the time they returned to
Seminary Ridge. Put it all in rough but denatured percentages, and Pickett’s division hemorrhaged two-thirds of its listed strength in that one afternoon.
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Johnston Pettigrew’s division hardly fared better. “Our troops are badly cut up,” wrote an officer in the 55th North Carolina. “Brigades now are not larger than Regts were befor[e] the fight.” Pettigrew’s old brigade lost 1,573 men out of the 2,584 who were ready for duty on July 1st. On the regimental level, it hurt even more. The 26th North Carolina sustained 172 dead, 443 wounded, 72 missing; by the end of the battle, the 800 or so men who had been on the regiment’s rolls had been reduced to nothing more than “a very good skirmish line” of 67 enlisted men and 3 officers (not counting “cooks and extra duty men,” who were probably slaves). In the 11th
Mississippi, 32 men were killed and 170 wounded. This translated, within separate companies, to wholesale decimation. Company K “took thirty-eight into the charge” and “at roll call that evening seven answered”; Company D had 10 survivors out of 50; Company E “took in thirty-eight men, of whom fifteen were killed and twenty-one wounded,” including its captain and all three lieutenants; Company A, the
“University Grays” (which had back in 1861
numbered 135 and comprised almost the entire student body of the University of Mississippi), had the unwelcome distinction of being wiped out.
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But numbers, no matter how added or multiplied, are still anodyne. “The reality of war is largely obscured by descriptions that tell of movements and maneuvers of armies, of the attack and repulse, of victory and defeat, and then pass on to new operations,” complained
Charles Augustus Fuller of the 61st New York. “All this leaves out of sight the fellows, stretched out with holes through them, or with legs and arms off.” It was not merely that men were dead or wounded or captured; it was who they were and what they meant to one another and to their homes.
John Oates, the brother of the
William Oates who had led the Alabamians up the slopes of
Little Round Top, was shot seven times on July 2nd, and lingered till July 23rd, dying slowly from blood poisoning. The battered 26th North Carolina lost a pair of twin brothers, Joseph and
W. E. Phillips, in Company F on July 1st; two of the four
Kirkman brothers in Company G also were killed on July 1st, and the other two died in Union captivity. Others defiantly dodged the neat categories.
Thomas Jolly of the Phillips
Georgia Legion was shot, bayoneted, and reported dead at Gettysburg, and his wife filed a death claim on August 14th; but a year later he turned up at his Dalton, Georgia, home, having managed to recover from his wounds and be released from the Union prison at
Point Lookout.
William Gaskins of the 8th Virginia survived wounding and capture at Pickett’s Charge, only to die in captivity four months later of “obstinate” diarrhea. (On the other hand, a sergeant in the 3rd
South Carolina,
Young Pope, was hit three times, in the thigh, hip, and arm, but survived to become a lawyer, state attorney general, and chief justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court.)
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The casualty numbers also fail to explain the damage done to the command infrastructure of the army. In the 18th Virginia, twenty-nine of the regiment’s thirty-one officers were killed or wounded; in the 8th Virginia, the colonel, lieutenant colonel, and major were all wounded, and three company captains killed, and two captured.
John Bell Hood’s division also lost the colonels of the 2nd, 9th, and 20th Georgia, while in
Joseph Kershaw’s South Carolina brigade two more regimental commanders were killed.
Jubal Early’s division lost a brigade commander,
Isaac Avery, who was mortally wounded and died in the farmhouse of
Henry Culp, plus the colonels of the 8th Louisiana and 38th Georgia. Robert Rodes’ hapless division saw three colonels killed and seven wounded (two of whom were also captured). Powell Hill’s corps reeled from the worst hits to its regimental commanders: four of the five colonels in Cadmus Wilcox’s
Alabama brigade were wounded, alongside two in the angry Ambrose Wright’s brigade. And worst of all, every one of Johnston Pettigrew’s colonels was killed, wounded, or captured, as were all of Joe Davis’.

Nor were general officers exempt, beginning at the top with Hood. Of Lee’s fifty-two generals at Gettysburg, a third of them were casualties of some sort, starting with the wounding of Alfred Scales and the capture of James Archer (and two of his colonels) on July 1st.
Lafayette McLaws lost two of his brigadiers, the ebullient
William Barksdale but also Paul Semmes, who was wounded by a shell fragment in the leg on July 2nd and was expected to recover, but died on July 10th. Dick Ewell lost only one brigadier to wounding,
John Marshall Jones, but Pickett lost Armistead and Garnett (though not James Kemper, despite nearly everyone’s prediction that his wound was fatal). Old
Isaac Trimble was also wounded during Pickett’s Charge, and at age sixty-one managed to survive both the
amputation of his leg
and
Union imprisonment, and lived for twenty-five more cantankerous years. Keenest of all were the two losses no one expected. The first was Dorsey Pender. The other was Johnston Pettigrew, who survived both the battle for
Herbst’s Woods on July 1st and the great charge on July 3rd, only to be shot in the abdomen by a Federal cavalryman while covering the tail end of Hill’s corps as it crossed the
pontoon bridge at Williamsport. “The noble Pettigrew” was carried across the bridge and died three days later in Martinsburg. All of these casualties reduced or eliminated months and years of experience, familiarity, networking, and confidence which could not be replaced merely by promotion of the next in line.
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Surveying the army’s survivors, Lee reported 2,592 killed, 12,700 wounded and 4,150 “captured or missing” after Gettysburg—20,451 casualties in all, based on data collected by the army’s chief medical officer,
Lafayette Guild. Each of these numbers has a blurred boundary, since those
missing
might have been killed without leaving any record, or be deserters who might, or might not, at some point rejoin the army.
Wounded
included anything from a minor gunshot wound (like Harry Heth’s) to a blast to the head which caused the victim to linger for days or weeks before succumbing. In the 2nd South Carolina,
James Casson, a twenty-three-year-old private, “had a portion of his skull shot away above one eye” by an artillery round from Federal artillery in the peach orchard on July 2nd; he lived for five days, but “was out of his mind instantly.” Would Casson, or would
William Gaskins, who survived his wound but then died of disease in a Union prison, be best defined as merely
wounded
? Any way the numbers are piled, though, the results were equivalent to a historic catastrophe. Even if one takes the lowest mark, the Army of Northern Virginia suffered something comparable to two sinkings of the
Titanic
, the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, ten repetitions of the Great Blizzard of 1888, and two Pearl Harbors. Or, if percentages provide more clarity, the Confederates at Gettysburg sustained two and a half times the losses taken by the Allied armies in Normandy
from D-Day through August 1944. And anyone who had any doubts about the impact needed only to consult the officer who wrote to his sister on July 17th, “The campaign is a failure and the worst failure that the South has ever made … and no blow since the fall of
New Orleans has been so telling against us.”
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