For 160 years, historians have debated whether the Confederates could have won at Gettysburg. Buried in the memoirs of General Edward Porter Alexander, the Confederate artillerist who commanded the bombardment that preceded Pickett’s Charge, is a damning analysis of the battle. Alexander believed the defeat was not inevitable. He identified five fatal blunders that not only cost Lee the battle, but doomed the Confederate war effort in the East.
The campaign began in June 1863, as Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia advanced north into Pennsylvania. On June 22, Lee ordered his cavalry commander, J. E.
B. Stuart, to divide his horsemen. Some were to guard the mountain passes while others shielded the flank of General Richard Ewell’s corps. Stuart instead pushed further east than Lee likely intended, swinging wide in search of supplies and to disrupt Union operations.
The maneuver backfired. Union forces slipped between Stuart’s cavalry and Lee’s main army, forcing Stuart on a long detour that kept him away from the army until late on July 2. Lee fought the first two days of Gettysburg without his cavalry, the eyes of his army. He had no reliable intelligence on Union positions or movements, and he operated blind at the campaign’s most critical moment.
Alexander condemned Stuart’s raid as a grave error. He argued that detaching cavalry violated the basic military principle of concentrated force. Such raids rarely produced meaningful gains and invited severe risk. The unity of the army should have trumped speculative maneuver.
Had Stuart been present from the start, Alexander contended, the battle might have unfolded differently. Lee took an unnecessary gamble, and the loss of Stuart’s cavalry deprived him of information that might have given the Confederates a decisive edge. On June 30, a brigade from General Henry Heth’s division entered Gettysburg in search of shoes. Heth believed General George Meade’s Union army lay fifteen to twenty miles to the south, and he expected no resistance.
Instead, his men encountered entrenched Union cavalry under General John Buford. Heth withdrew and returned the next morning with his full division and Dorsey Pender’s reserves, roughly 12,000 men. They faced Buford’s 3,000 troopers, who held their ground until reinforcements arrived. The Union First and Eleventh Corps swelled the federal force to 23,000, and Heth and Pender suddenly found themselves outnumbered nearly two to one.
Alexander pointed to this as a compounding disaster. Without Stuart’s scouts, Lee lacked intelligence on Union positions. With proper reconnaissance, Alexander argued, Lee would never have allowed two divisions to stumble into the teeth of two Union corps and cavalry. He also criticized Heth’s imprudent advance.
The same day, Ewell had received cautious orders regarding Cemetery Hill, and Alexander believed similar restraint should have governed Heth’s mission. Instead, Heth pressed forward and paid a terrible price. His lead brigades suffered near total destruction, crippling his division. Pender’s unit also took heavy losses.
Alexander lamented that these sacrifices were made for a trivial objective, weakening Confederate strength with no strategic gain. Though the Confederate line was eventually stabilized, Heth and Pender’s depleted divisions would be of little use for the rest of the battle. At the end of the first day, the Union army held Cemetery Hill, a formidable defensive position. General Richard Ewell faced a choice: attack on July 2 or withdraw to the relative safety of Seminary Ridge.
Alexander later wrote that while the Confederate position was strong, it was nothing compared to the federal high ground. He believed the Union line was defensible and could not be overrun, but he also insisted that Lee had no reason to attack. Lee feared his army was too far from its supply lines to sustain a prolonged operation. Alexander dismissed that concern outright.
The Confederates remained at Gettysburg for four days, and later, when stranded at the Potomac River for over a week, they foraged successfully. Lee’s supply fears were exaggerated. Alexander saw no need to attack on July 2. A defensive posture was wiser.
Through skillful maneuvering, the Confederates could have forced Meade to attack under unfavorable conditions. Alexander wrote that there was no real difficulty in taking the defensive the next day. By choosing to attack, he estimated, Lee sacrificed sixty percent of his chance of victory at Gettysburg. He considered this the decisive turning point of the battle and the campaign, a mistake that sealed Confederate defeat.
Alexander also condemned the Confederate planning for July 2. No proper reconnaissance was conducted, and no nighttime preparations were made. This allowed Meade to reinforce his defenses without interference. Alexander noted that the Union position on Cemetery Hill was the strongest defensive ground of the war, effectively increasing the federal numerical and firepower advantage by fifty percent.
The Union fielded 94,000 men against 72,000 Confederates, with superior artillery to boot. Combined with the elevation, Alexander deemed the Union position impregnable. He also faulted Ewell’s corps deployment. After relocating near Gettysburg, Ewell requested and received permission to seize Culp’s Hill, but he failed to do so.
Alexander believed the hill was unassailable, yet Ewell’s corps remained stranded near Cemetery Hill in an ineffective position. His men and guns were squandered, immobilizing a major Confederate force during the battle’s climax. Poor planning and inadequate reconnaissance enabled Meade to cement his dominant position and doom Confederate hopes. On the morning of July 3, General James Longstreet appointed Alexander to command the artillery of the First Corps for the assault that would become known as Pickett’s Charge.
His mission was to unleash a barrage that would shatter the Union lines, break morale, and clear the path for the infantry. Alexander aimed to tear the enemy to pieces before the advance began. But the Confederate artillery suffered from a fragmented command structure. While Alexander led the main bombardment, batteries from other corps operated independently.
Each chief artillery officer worked alone, diluting the effectiveness of the entire effort. One failure came from General William Pendleton, Lee’s artillery chief. Pendleton assigned Alexander nine howitzers to support the infantry charge, but when the assault began, four or five of those guns were missing. Alexander later discovered that Pendleton had redirected them without notice, guns that might have aided the attack.
Another shortfall came from Lieutenant General A. P. Hill, who deployed sixty-five guns on Seminary Ridge but employed none of them to assist Pickett’s advance, even as the infantry passed directly beneath their position. Hill had also wasted ammunition earlier that morning in fruitless skirmishing.
Alexander reserved his sharpest criticism for the artillery under Richard Ewell. The Confederate line arced around the Union’s fishhook formation, offering superb opportunities for flanking fire. Ewell’s guns never exploited that advantage. Only one of his five artillery battalions joined the bombardment at all.
Alexander blamed the disarray on the absence of centralized command. A competent artillery chief would have coordinated all batteries for maximum impact. Instead, Pendleton’s weak leadership permitted disjointed operations, forfeiting a critical advantage. The disorganization allowed Union Major General Henry Hunt to weather the barrage and prepare his defenses for Pickett’s Charge unhindered.
Those flaws doomed the assault, and with it the battle. In Alexander’s judgment, five fatal flaws sank southern hopes at Gettysburg: the loss of Stuart’s cavalry, Heth’s reckless advance, Lee’s decision to attack on July 2, the failure of reconnaissance and coordination that followed, and the fragmented artillery command on July 3. Was defeat inevitable, or did a cascade of blunders and squandered chances doom the Confederacy from the outset?
Alexander believed the answers lay in those failures of command, discipline, and coordination that turned a battle the South might have won into the turning point that cost them the war.