By the summer of 1863, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was at the height of its power, pressing north into Pennsylvania in a campaign designed to shift the Civil War’s momentum. The invasion came to a head on July 2, when Lee hurled his forces against the Union Army of the Potomac near Gettysburg. Over three days, the Confederates lost the battle, and with it the strategic initiative for the rest of the war.
In the years that followed, many officers and historians sought to explain the catastrophe. None did so more bluntly than Confederate artillery commander Edward Porter Alexander, whose postwar writings laid out a series of fatal choices that, in his view, doomed Lee’s army from the start. Alexander identified five decisive blunders, each compounding the last, until the Confederates had squandered their best chance to win the war. The first blow was struck before the battle even began.
On June 22, 1863, 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. The orders were vague, and Stuart interpreted them broadly. Instead of staying close to the army, he pushed far east, looking for supplies and hoping to disrupt Union operations. The result was that Union forces moved into the gap between Stuart and Lee’s main army, forcing Stuart on a long detour north.
He did not rejoin Lee until late on July 2, leaving the Confederates without their cavalry for the first two days of fighting. Horsemen were the army’s eyes, tracking enemy positions and movements. Without them, Lee was effectively operating blind, committing troops and making plans without reliable intelligence. Alexander condemned Stuart’s raid without hesitation.
It violated the fundamental principle of concentrating force, he argued, and such-dashing raids rarely produced meaningful gains while carrying outsize risk. Had Stuart been present when the guns opened, Alexander believed the outcome might well have been different. Whatever the share of blame between Stuart’s ambition and Lee’s ambiguous orders, the separation crippled Confederate reconnaissance at the exact moment the army most needed it. The absence of cavalry had immediate consequences on the first day of battle.
On June 30, a brigade from General Harry Heth’s division approached Gettysburg in search of shoes. The Confederates understood the Union army to be fifteen to twenty miles to the south, and they expected little resistance. Instead, they encountered entrenched Union cavalry under General John Buford. Heth withdrew rather than attack the dismounted troopers in line, but he returned the next morning with his division and Dorsey Pender’s reserves.
With roughly twelve thousand men, Heth and Pender moved on Gettysburg on July 1, expecting to brush aside a thin cavalry screen. What they found was Buford’s three thousand troopers, who held their ground stubbornly until fresh Union infantry came up. The arrival of the Union First and Eleventh Corps brought federal numbers to nearly twenty-three thousand, and Heth and Pender suddenly faced overwhelming opposition. Alexander saw this as a direct consequence of the lost cavalry.
Without Stuart’s scouts, Lee had no accurate picture of Union positions. With proper reconnaissance, Alexander insisted, Lee would never have allowed two divisions to collide with two corps and a cavalry force on unfavorable terms. He also faulted Heth’s advance itself. The situation called for caution, not aggression.
Alexander compared it to the orders Ewell received that same day to avoid a wholesale engagement at Cemetery Hill, arguing that the same restraint should have governed Heth’s mission. Instead, Heth’s lead brigades were nearly destroyed, and Pender’s command also took heavy losses. The two divisions were gutted in pursuit of a minor objective that yielded nothing strategically. Though Confederate reinforcements eventually stabilized the line, the damage was done.
Heth and Pender’s depleted units would be unable to fulfill their full role in the attacks that followed. By the end of the first day, the Union army occupied Cemetery Hill, a strong defensive position that would prove central to the battle. The Confederates held Seminary Ridge, a lesser elevation. General Richard Ewell faced a choice: attack on July 2 or withdraw and renew the fight from a better position.
Alexander argued that the Confederate line at Seminary Ridge, while not as strong as the Union’s, was perfectly defensible and could not have been overrun. He believed Lee should have remained on the defensive. Lee, however, attacked, fearing his army was too distant from its supplies for prolonged operations. Alexander dismissed that concern.
The Confederates stayed at Gettysburg for four days and later foraged effectively for over a week when stranded at the Potomac River. The supply fears were exaggerated, in his view. Far from compelled to attack, Lee could have forced Meade to come to him. Through careful maneuvering, Alexander argued, the Confederates could have made the Union attack an unfavorable position, turning the high ground against the Federals.
He saw no real difficulty in taking the defensive the next day. By attacking instead, Alexander estimated, Lee sacrificed sixty percent of the Confederate chances of winning at Gettysburg. He called this decision the turning point of the battle and the campaign, a costly error that put the army on a path toward defeat. The Union position itself made Lee’s decision to attack all the more reckless.
Cemetery Hill, and the line running south to Cemetery Ridge and Culp’s Hill, formed what Alexander called the strongest position held by any army during the war. He calculated that the elevation effectively increased Union strength by fifty percent, multiplying the effectiveness of their ninety-four thousand men against roughly seventy-two thousand Confederates. Combined with superior federal artillery, the position was, in Alexander’s judgment, virtually impregnable. Yet the Confederates did little to prepare for the assault against it.
Alexander criticized the planning for July 2 with particular bitterness. No reconnaissance was conducted, and no nighttime preparations were made before the attack. He wrote that the Union commander, General George Meade, was allowed to reinforce his defenses without challenge. In Alexander’s blunt phrasing, it was easy work for Meade that night.
Alexander also faulted Ewell’s corps. After the first day, Ewell had permission to seize Culp’s Hill, key high ground on the Union flank, but he failed to take it. Alexander believed Culp’s Hill ought to have been unassailable if occupied in time. Instead, Ewell’s corps remained stranded in an ineffective position near Cemetery Hill, its men and guns wasted while the battle reached its climax.
The absence of proper reconnaissance and planning allowed Meade to cement his advantage and left the Confederates to attack against impossible odds. The flaws in Confederate command were nowhere more visible than on July 3, the day of Pickett’s Charge. Lee placed Alexander in command of the First Corps artillery, giving him the mission of softening the Union line and clearing the way for the infantry. Alexander’s guns were meant to tear the enemy line to pieces before the foot soldiers advanced.
But the Confederate artillery suffered from fragmented leadership. Although Alexander directed the main bombardment, the batteries of other corps operated without coordination. Each chief artillery officer acted on his own, Alexander wrote, and the result was wasted fire. One glaring failure involved General William Pendleton, Lee’s chief of artillery.
Pendleton assigned Alexander nine howitzers to support the infantry assault, but when the charge began, four or five of them were missing. Alexander later learned that Pendleton had redirected the guns without informing him. Those guns might have aided the attack, Alexander lamented. There were more failures.
Lieutenant General A. P. Hill had deployed sixty-five artillery pieces on Seminary Ridge but did not use a single gun to support Pickett’s advance, even as the infantry passed beneath his position. Hill had also wasted ammunition in fruitless skirmishing hours before the main assault.
Alexander reserved his sharpest criticism for Richard Ewell’s artillery. The Confederate line formed a great arc around the Union position, shaped like a fish hook, which offered superb opportunities for flanking fire. But Ewell’s guns missed the chance entirely. Only one of his five artillery battalions took part in the bombardment.
Alexander blamed the disarray on the absence of central command. A competent artillery chief would have coordinated every battery for maximum effect, but Pendleton’s weak leadership allowed the guns to operate disjointedly, squandering a critical advantage. The disorganized fire allowed Union artillery commander Henry Hunt to ride out the barrage and prepare his defenses for the infantry assault. When Pickett’s infantry stepped off, they advanced into a Union line that had been left largely intact.
The charge failed, and with it, the Confederate cause at Gettysburg. In Alexander’s account, defeat was not the product of fate. It was the accumulated result of clear errors: a lost cavalry, a reckless advance, a decision to attack when defense was wiser, a failure to prepare, and an artillery plan that never came together. Each blunder fed the next, stripping the Confederates of intelligence, strength, and opportunity until the attack on July 3 became a desperate gamble with no chance of success.
Edward Porter Alexander’s analysis does not claim the battle could have been easily won, but it insists that the Confederates had better options than the ones they took. The clearer orders, wiser choices, and tighter coordination that might have preserved their strength were never made. And so Gettysburg turned against the Confederacy, leaving the army shattered and the war itself turned toward its final outcome.