Colonel Walter Herren Taylor had spent four years at the side of Robert E. Lee, from the moment Lee assumed command of Confederate forces until the final surrender at Appomattox. A native of Norfolk, Virginia, and an 1857 graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, Taylor had proven himself a steadfast and tireless aide throughout the war. When he published his assessment of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1877, first in a paper for the Southern Historical Society and then in a deeper analysis for the Philadelphia Weekly Times, his words carried unusual weight.
Few men had been closer to the commanding general or more loyal to him, and few accounts would do more to shape how the defeat at Gettysburg was remembered. The subject Taylor took up was the assault of July 3, 1863, the attack known to history as Pickett’s Charge. In Taylor’s telling, the plan agreed upon that morning was not the attack that actually unfolded. As he understood it, the movement was never intended to rest on the shoulders of a single division.
Pickett’s division of Longstreet’s corps was fresh and available. Heth’s division of Hill’s corps had largely recovered from its heavy engagement on the first day. The brigades of Lane and Scales, from Pender’s division of Hill’s corps, were also available. And because the Confederate right was comparatively safe, well posted and not threatened, one of the divisions of Hood and McLaws, and the greater portion of the other, could be moved out of the lines and made to take part in the attack.
Indeed, Taylor maintained, it had originally been designed that Hood’s and McLaws’s divisions, reinforced by Pickett, should make the assault. It was only because of General Longstreet’s apprehensions that his corps was not strong enough for the movement that Hill was called upon to reinforce him. Orders were sent to Hill to place Heth’s division and two brigades of Pender’s at Longstreet’s disposal, and to be prepared to give further assistance if requested. The assault was to have been made with a column of not less than two divisions, with the remaining divisions moved forward in support of those in advance.
Taylor was not alone in this understanding. Lieutenant General A. P. Hill recorded the same impression in his report of his corps’ operations at the time.
He stated that he was directed to hold his line with Anderson’s division and half of Pender’s, now commanded by General Lane, and to order Heth’s division, commanded by Pettigrew, and Lane’s and Scales’s brigades of Pender’s division, to report to Longstreet as a support to his corps in the assault on the enemy’s lines. Longstreet proceeded at once to make his dispositions, and Lee rode along the portion of the line held by Hill’s corps, finally taking position near the Confederate center on an elevated point from which he could survey the field and watch the results of the movement. After a heavy artillery fire along the entire line, and at a given signal, the movement began. But the plan agreed upon was not carried out.
The only troops that participated in the attack were the divisions of Pickett from the First Corps and Heth from the Third Corps, the latter commanded by General Pettigrew after Heth was wounded, along with the brigades of Lane, Scales, and Wilcox. The two divisions were formed in advance, with the three brigades as their supports. The divisions of Hood and McLaws from the First Corps stood by as passive spectators of the movement. To one who observed the charge, it appeared that Pettigrew’s line was not a continuation of Pickett’s, but that it advanced in echelon.
There had evidently been confusion in forming the troops. Captain Lewis G. Young, of General Pettigrew’s staff, recalled that on the morning of July 3, Pettigrew was instructed to report to Longstreet, who directed him to form in the rear of Pickett’s division and support his advance upon Cemetery Hill, which would commence as soon as the artillery fire had driven the enemy from his guns. Young presumed that it was because of this first plan being settled upon that the erroneous report circulated that Heth’s division was assigned to support Pickett.
But the order was countermanded almost as soon as given, and Pettigrew was instructed to advance on the same line with Pickett, with Pender’s division acting as supports. Wilcox’s brigade was ordered to support Pickett’s right flank, and the brigades of Lane and Scales acted as supports to Heth’s division. General Lane’s report described the problem plainly. He was ordered to form in the rear of the right of Heth’s division, commanded by Pettigrew.
Soon after he executed the order, putting Lane on the right, he was relieved of command of the division by Major General Trimble, who acted under the same orders. Heth’s division was much longer than Lane’s brigade and his own, which constituted its only supports, and there was consequently no second line in the rear of its left. The assaulting column, therefore, really consisted of Pickett’s division, two brigades in front and one in the second line as a support, with Wilcox’s brigade in the rear of its right to protect that flank. Heth’s division moved forward on Pickett’s left in echelon, or with an alignment so imperfect and so drooping on the left as to appear in echelon, with Lane’s and Scales’s brigades in the rear of its right.
Its left was without reserve or support, entirely exposed. Taylor had no need to say anything of the heroic conduct of Pickett’s division. That charge had already passed into history as one of the world’s great deeds of arms. But he pressed the question of why the attack unfolded with so little support.
Much could be said in excuse for the failure of the other commands to fulfill their assigned task. As a general rule, the peculiarly rough and wooded character of the country in which the army was accustomed to operate had been a decided advantage. Moving upon the enemy through woods or broken, rolling country, the enemy could not accurately estimate Confederate strength, and Confederate soldiers were not impressed with that sense of insecurity which must have resulted from a thorough knowledge of their own weakness. It was different at Gettysburg.
The charge was made down a gentle slope and then up to the enemy’s lines, a distance of over half a mile, denuded of forests, in full sight of the enemy and in perfect range of their artillery. These combined causes produced their natural effect upon Pettigrew’s division and the brigades supporting it. They caused them to falter and finally retire. Then Pickett’s division, continuing the charge without supports and in sight of the enemy, was not half so formidable or effective as it would have been had trees or hills prevented the enemy from so correctly estimating the strength of the attacking column, and prevented Confederate troops from experiencing that sense of weakness which the known absence of support necessarily produced.
In spite of all this, Pickett’s division steadily and gallantly advanced to its allotted task. As the three brigades under Garnett, Armistead, and Kemper approached the enemy’s lines, a most terrific fire of artillery and small arms concentrated upon them, but they did not swerve. There was no faltering. Steadily moving forward, they rapidly reduced the intervening space and closed with their adversaries.
Leaping the breastworks, they drove back the enemy and planted their standards on the captured guns amid shouts of victory, dearly won and short-lived victory. Taylor’s central question was blunt: where were the supports to reap the benefit of their heroic efforts and gather the fruits of a victory so nobly won? Was this a forlorn hope on whose success an entire army was to wait in quiet observation, while full half a mile away the remainder of the army watched in breathless suspense, in ardent admiration and fearful anxiety, but moved not? Taylor maintained that such was not the design of the commanding general.
Had the veteran divisions of Hood and McLaws moved forward as planned, in support of those of Pickett and Pettigrew, not only would the latter division in all probability have gained the enemy’s works, as Pickett’s did, but the two would have been enabled, with the aid of Hood and McLaws, to resist all efforts of the enemy to dislodge them. Instead, the enemy closed in on Pickett’s brigades, concentrating upon the small band of heroes the fire of every gun that could be brought to bear. The brigades were soon disintegrated and overpowered. Such as were not killed, disabled, and made captive fell back to their own lines.
It appeared that Longstreet deemed it necessary to defend his right flank and rear with the divisions of McLaws and Hood. These divisions, as Taylor noted, constituted all of the Confederate line held by Longstreet’s troops, and it was not apparent how they were necessary to defend his flank and rear. The nearest infantry force of the enemy to the Confederate right occupied the hills, Little Round Top and Big Round Top. The only force that could be said to have threatened the flank and rear consisted of two brigades of cavalry so posted as to protect the enemy’s left.
Taylor did not propose to undertake the wisdom of the attack on the enemy’s position on the third day, which Longstreet contended was opposed by his judgment and of which he said he would have stayed the execution had he felt he had the privilege to do so. Nor did he propose to discuss the necessities of Longstreet’s position, which Longstreet represented as forbidding the employment of McLaws’s and Hood’s divisions in the attack. Taylor sought only a just explanation of the causes of the failure. But he recorded his surprise and disappointment when it was ascertained that only Pickett’s division and the troops from Hill’s corps had taken part in the movement.
With his distinct impressions of the occurrences, he deemed it proper to record them for confirmation or refutation, as the undisputed facts of the case and the testimony of others might determine. After the assault on July 3, there was no serious fighting at Gettysburg. The fourth passed in comparative quiet. Neither army evinced any disposition to assail the other.
Notwithstanding the brilliant achievements of Ewell and Hill on the first day and the decided advantage gained by Longstreet on the second, the failure of the operations of the third day, involving as they did but two divisions of the army, deprived the Confederates of the prestige of their previous successes and gave a shadow of right to their adversaries’ claim of having gained a victory. Their exaltation, however, should be tempered with moderation, Taylor argued, when one considered that after one day of absolute quiet, the Confederates withdrew from their front without serious molestation, and with bridges swept away and an impassable river in their rear, stood in an attitude of defiance until their line of retreat could be rendered practicable, after which they safely recrossed into Virginia. In Taylor’s account, Pickett’s division had been left effectively isolated, advancing without the support that the original plan had promised, while the rest of the army watched from the ridges.
The blame for the loss, in his telling, fell on Longstreet’s failure to execute Lee’s plan, tempered though it was by an acknowledgment of the broader conditions that had worked against the assault.