On the afternoon of July 2, 1863, Major General John Bell Hood stood at the Emmitsburg Road and saw the end of the Army of Northern Virginia. He had spent the morning watching the Federal position at Gettysburg, and what he saw had convinced him that the order he was about to obey would destroy his division. Three times he sent word to his corps commander, James Longstreet, asking to change the attack. Three times the answer came back with the same words: General Lee’s orders are to attack up the Emmitsburg Road.
Hood was not a man given to protest. Born in Kentucky in 1831, he had graduated from West Point in 1853 and spent the first years of the Civil War building his Texas Brigade into the most feared shock troops in the Confederate Army. Robert E. Lee called them his grenadier guards.
At Gaines’ Mill they broke the Union line, and at Second Bull Run they smashed through positions that had held for hours. By the summer of 1863 Hood commanded a full division of roughly seven thousand men, and he had never once formally objected to an order. Until Gettysburg. His division arrived south of the town shortly after dawn on July 2.
The men stacked arms and rested in an open field while Hood went forward to observe the Federal line with Lee, Longstreet, and A. P. Hill. Lee was anxious.
The day before, two Federal corps had been driven back through Gettysburg to the high ground at Cemetery Hill, Culp’s Hill, and Cemetery Ridge, but the Union army was still there, organized and dangerous. Lee’s plan for the day was to strike the Federal left flank. Longstreet’s corps, including Hood’s division, would march to the right, swing up the Emmitsburg Road, and crush the exposed end of the Union line. Longstreet was uneasy.
He wanted Pickett’s division, which had not yet arrived, before he launched the assault. As the morning wore on he told Hood that the general was nervous and that he never liked to go into battle with one boot off. Around three in the afternoon the order came to move. Hood’s division began marching toward the Emmitsburg Road, and Hood sent his picked scouts ahead to locate the true end of the Federal left flank.
What they found stopped him cold. The Union left rested on Round Top Mountain, and beyond that mountain the country was open. Woodland and pasture, held by no significant force. And behind the Federal lines, poorly guarded, sat the Union wagon trains, the supply lifeline of the entire Army of the Potomac.
Hood saw in an instant what the scouts were telling him. The back door was open. A force that swung wide around Round Top could march through open ground and come up behind the Union line from the direction it was not watching. Cut off the wagons, roll up the flank, and the army on that ridge would have been isolated.
Hood placed his artillery and opened fire to develop the Federal position, and what he saw confirmed the scouts. The Union line was concave as approached from the Emmitsburg Road, curved inward, meaning a straight attack would be hit from the front and both flanks at once. Before the main line even came into reach, his men would have to fight through an advanced Union force near a peach orchard and then climb a slope covered with boulders the size of houses, their ranks broken and scattered under crossfire from three directions. He judged it almost an impossibility to clamber up that steep, rugged mountain and put the enemy to flight, and he knew that if it was accomplished it would cost the lives of as brave a body of soldiers as ever took the field.
Hood sent his first message to Longstreet, explaining what the scouts had found and asking permission to swing wide around Round Top. The reply came back quickly. General Lee’s orders are to attack up the Emmitsburg Road. He sent a second officer with the same request, emphasizing the danger.
The answer was unchanged. He continued his bombardment, studying the position, and the more he looked the more certain he became. The enemy held ground so strong he called it nearly impregnable. The boulders along the slope were so massive that the defenders could have repelled an attack merely by rolling rocks down the mountainside.
Hood sent a third message, this time with his adjutant general, Colonel Harry Sellers, a senior officer of demonstrated courage. Sellers was told to lay out the full situation and to urge Longstreet to come and see for himself. Longstreet’s reply was delivered in person by a staff officer. General Lee’s orders are to attack up the Emmitsburg Road.
Three requests, three refusals, the same six words every time. Hood gave the order to advance. As the line moved forward, Longstreet rode up and Hood expressed his fears one final time. Longstreet said simply that they must obey the orders of General Lee, and Hood rode forward with his men into the assault he already knew was coming.
The hour that followed was among the most brutal in American military history. Hood’s division crossed the Emmitsburg Road under artillery fire, fought through the advanced Union line near the Peach Orchard, and pushed toward the boulders of the Devil’s Den and Little Round Top. The fighting was close and vicious, soldiers firing at each other from ten feet, wrestling over rocks, officers falling one after another. Union Colonel Strong Vincent had arrived at Little Round Top only minutes before Hood’s men by a sheer accident of timing and threw his brigade along the crest just in time.
The 20th Maine, under Joshua Chamberlain, fixed bayonets and charged downhill when its ammunition ran out. The 4th and 5th Texas nearly reached the top before being thrown back. The 15th Alabama climbed so high that its commander said his men could look down at the Federal artillery, but they could not hold the ground. The crossfire Hood had predicted tore into the Confederates from front and flank, and the boulders shattered their formations into isolated groups fighting stone to stone.
Roughly twenty minutes after his line crossed the road, a shell fragment tore into Hood’s left arm. He was lifted from his horse and carried from the field on a stretcher. As he was borne to the rear, away from the battle he had known would cost him everything, he wrote later that he could only experience deep distress of mind and heart at the thought of the inevitable fate of his brave fellow soldiers, one of the grandest divisions of that world-renowned army. He already knew how it would end.
Twelve years later, in 1875, Hood wrote a letter to Longstreet recounting what he had seen that afternoon. He wrote that the Federal left rested on or near Round Top, forming a concave line, and that he deemed it almost an impossibility to clamber along the boulders under crossfires. He recalled that he had possession of these important facts soon after reaching the Emmitsburg Road and had time to report them and propose a different course. He noted that his protest was the first and only one he ever made during his entire military career.
And he wrote that he would always believe that had he been permitted to turn Round Top Mountain, the Confederates would not only have gained that position but might have routed the enemy. Historians have debated that claim for more than a century and a half. Some argue the Union flank was stronger than Hood believed. Some argue Federal reserves would have contained a flank attack.
Some argue the time needed to swing so many men around the mountain would have closed the window. What is not in dispute is that every tactical objection Hood raised proved accurate within the next twenty minutes of fighting. He read the battlefield correctly, reported what he saw, and was overruled by the machinery of command. The information existed at the right level at the right moment, and the system was built to transmit orders downward, not intelligence upward.
Hood survived the war, though barely. He lost the use of his left arm at Gettysburg and his right leg at Chickamauga. He moved to New Orleans, married, raised a family, and died in 1879, four years after writing his letter to Longstreet, at the age of forty-eight. History has judged him harshly for his later campaigns, particularly the catastrophic Franklin and Nashville campaign of 1864.
But Gettysburg shows him at his clearest, a commander who saw the truth of the battlefield and said so loudly and repeatedly while the order stood. The tragedy of that afternoon was not a lack of valor, there was valor in abundance on both sides. It was the gap between what was known and what was acted upon. The thing Hood realized in the seconds before his line went forward was not simply that the attack would fail.
It was that knowing it would fail, and saying so, had made no difference at all.