On the morning of June 22, 1863, General Robert E. Lee ordered his army northward from Virginia into Pennsylvania, and with it came the instructions for his cavalry commander, General J. E. B.
Stuart. The precise details of those orders are still debated, but the general consensus holds that Lee wanted Stuart to split his force, leaving part to guard the mountain passes and using the rest to screen the right flank of Richard Ewell’s Second Corps. Instead, Stuart chose a bolder course. He moved his cavalry far to the east, apparently seeking supplies and a chance to disrupt federal operations, and in doing so, he allowed the Union army to slip between his horsemen and the main Confederate force.
Forced to ride well north of his intended route, Stuart did not rejoin Lee until late on July 2, by which time the Battle of Gettysburg had already begun in earnest. For the first two critical days of the campaign, Lee operated without the eyes and ears of his army. Without Stuart’s cavalry, he had no reliable reconnaissance, no clear intelligence on Union troop movements or positions, and no way to make fully informed strategic decisions. It was a self-inflicted blindness in the most pivotal moment of the invasion.
Edward Porter Alexander, the Confederate artillery officer who later became one of the war’s most perceptive critics, had no doubt about the severity of the error. He argued that separating the cavalry from the main army violated the first principles of warfare, which demand that forces remain within supporting distance of one another. Such raids, he believed, rarely produced meaningful results and instead exposed the army to unnecessary risk. Had Stuart been present from the start, Alexander speculated, the opening of the battle might have unfolded differently.
By allowing his cavalry to become detached, Lee had taken an avoidable gambler’s risk, and the price was paid on the fields outside Gettysburg. Whether Stuart misjudged his orders or Lee’s instructions were too vague, the episode demonstrated how a breakdown in communication could unravel an entire campaign. The consequences of that absence became apparent almost immediately. On June 30, a brigade from Henry Heth’s division approached Gettysburg with a mission that seemed simple enough: secure a supply of shoes for Confederate troops.
The federals were believed to be fifteen to twenty miles to the south, so serious resistance was not expected. When the Confederates discovered that a strong federal cavalry force had taken up positions in the town, Heth chose not to press the issue that evening. Instead, he decided to return the next morning with his full division, supported by Dorsey Pender’s division held in reserve. At dawn on July 1, Heth and Pender moved forward with roughly 12,000 men.
They were met by John Buford’s federal cavalry division, numbering only about 3,000, but positioned on good ground and ready to fight. Buford’s troopers delayed the Confederate advance long enough for the Union First and Eleventh Corps to arrive, swelling federal strength to around 23,000 soldiers. Heth and Pender now faced a numerical disadvantage that made their attack near hopeless. Alexander later argued that Stuart’s absence lay at the heart of this disaster.
With proper cavalry reconnaissance, Lee would have known that two Confederate divisions were stumbling into the path of two Union corps and a cavalry division. He almost certainly would not have allowed it. Alexander also faulted the lack of caution attached to Heth’s mission itself. Later that same day, Lee gave orders to Ewell regarding Cemetery Hill, explicitly warning him not to provoke a general engagement unless circumstances were favorable.
Alexander believed a similar warning should have accompanied Heth’s advance on Gettysburg. Such cautions exist, he explained, to prevent an army from spending its strength on secondary objectives and to preserve its energy for decisive moments. The cost of ignoring that principle was brutal. Heth’s two leading brigades were nearly destroyed in the fighting, weakening his whole division for the remainder of the battle, and Pender’s division also suffered heavy losses.
All of it, Alexander lamented, was spent over what he considered a side issue, a mission that gained little while inflicting lasting damage on the army’s fighting capacity. By the end of the first day, the federals under George Meade had secured Cemetery Hill, high ground that gave them a formidable defensive position. Richard Ewell’s Confederates held Seminary Ridge, a strong line in its own right, but one that offered nothing comparable to what the Union occupied. Alexander was clear about the balance.
The Confederate position, he thought, was no bad one, and it could not have been successfully assaulted. The responsibility to attack, in his view, should have rested with Meade, whose public position would have pushed him toward aggressive action. Lee saw it differently. In his battle reports, he explained his decision to attack by noting that his army was too far from its supply base to sustain a long campaign.
Alexander did not accept that reasoning. The Confederates remained at Gettysburg for four days, he pointed out, and later foraged successfully for over a week while stalled at the Potomac. There was no pressing necessity to attack, he concluded, and the defensive was entirely possible on July 2. He even suggested that a careful defensive posture could have forced Meade into attacking under less favorable circumstances.
As Alexander put it, there was no real difficulty whatever in taking the defensive that next day. By choosing to remain on the offensive, Lee threw away much of his army’s chance for success. Alexander estimated that roughly sixty percent of the Confederacy’s chances for a major victory at Gettysburg were lost in that decision. He called it the turning point, not just of the battle but of the entire campaign.
Alexander’s assessment of the ground only strengthened his conviction. He described the Union position on Cemetery Hill as unique among all the battlefields of the war, estimating that it added fifty percent to the federal army’s already superior numbers and firepower. The Union had roughly 94,000 men against the Confederate 72,000, and the federal artillery was superior in both quantity and quality. Combined with the strength of the high ground, Alexander believed the Union defenses were nearly unassailable.
Yet the Confederate plan for July 2 showed almost no awareness of that reality. There had been, he noted, no systematic examination of the federal position, no preparations made through the night to address these challenges, and no proper reconnaissance of the Union defenses. It was, he exclaimed, a perfect gift to Meade, who was left to strengthen his defenses without serious interference. Alexander also saw needless waste in the placement of Ewell’s Second Corps.
Ewell had been moved from his original position northeast of Gettysburg to a spot closer to town, and he asked Lee for permission to occupy nearby high ground, likely Culp’s Hill, which he believed could be taken. Lee consented, but Ewell failed to secure the position. In hindsight, Alexander believed Culp’s Hill was almost unassailable because of its defensive advantages, but he was far more critical of the fact that Ewell’s corps was never ordered to abandon its awkward position near Cemetery Hill once the opportunity had passed. The troops and artillery there, he wrote, were rendered nearly useless for the remainder of the battle.
There was no reasonable probability of Ewell achieving anything significant from that location, and a substantial portion of the Confederate force was effectively paralyzed during the critical final days of the fight. By July 3, Lee had settled on the great assault that would become known as Pickett’s Charge. Longstreet placed Alexander in command of the First Corps’ artillery for the attack, instructing him to unleash an intense bombardment that would cripple the Union forces, demoralize them, and prepare the way for the infantry. Alexander understood the mission clearly.
The guns were meant to tear the enemy limb from limb, to render them incapable of effective resistance. But the artillery effort was never truly coordinated. Alexander controlled the main bombardment, yet each corps’ chief of artillery operated independently, producing a fragmented strategy that undermined the operation from the start. Problems appeared almost immediately.
William Pendleton, Lee’s chief of artillery, had assigned Alexander nine howitzers to support the infantry during the charge, but several of those guns were missing when the attack began. Alexander later discovered that Pendleton had redirected four or five of them elsewhere without informing him. He believed those guns could have made a real difference. A.
P. Hill’s artillery on Seminary Ridge had sixty-five guns in action but never used them effectively, even though part of Pickett’s attacking column advanced directly in front of Hill’s position. Hill’s guns had also wasted valuable ammunition earlier in a morning duel with Union artillery that gained nothing. Alexander reserved his sharpest criticism for Ewell’s corps.
The Confederate battle line formed an exterior arc around the Union’s interior fishhook position, a disadvantage in most respects, but one that offered a rare opportunity to enfilade parts of the Union line with flanking fire. Ewell’s guns could have inflicted severe damage if properly employed, but only one of his five battalions participated in the bombardment. Alexander traced these failures to the absence of an effective central command over Confederate artillery. A capable chief of artillery, he argued, would have surveyed the entire battlefield and coordinated all the corps’ guns to maximize their power.
Instead, each corps operated in isolation, and the Confederates threw away a rare opportunity during the very assault that carried their final hopes. Union artillery commander Henry Hunt, meanwhile, was able to withstand the bombardment and prepare his forces for the infantry attack with minimal disruption. In the end, Alexander’s reflections describe a Confederate army undone by its own decisions. Stuart’s absence blinded Lee at the campaign’s most critical hour.
The advance on Gettysburg by Heth and Pender became a needless disaster that drained two divisions before the battle had truly begun. Lee’s choice to remain on the offensive on July 2 squandered what opportunities the Confederates had, and the army’s failure to reconnoiter the Union position left it attacking ground that added half again to the enemy’s strength. And on July 3, the artillery that should have paved the way for the final assault was fragmented, poorly directed, and wasted. Alexander’s verdict was not that the Confederacy had no chance, but that it had thrown away its chances one by one.
Gettysburg was lost not because the Union was unbeatable, but because the Confederacy’s greatest hope was undermined by the very errors Alexander so sharply described.