On the night of July 2nd, 1863, a Confederate artillery officer named Edward Porter Alexander sat in the darkness near Gettysburg, watching the distant lights of the Union army on Cemetery Hill. The day had been brutal, and the worst was yet to come. He knew the Army of Northern Virginia was in trouble, that mistakes had already been made on a scale he could barely comprehend. Robert E.
Lee had decided that tomorrow the Confederacy would stake everything on a massive infantry assault against the strongest position this war had ever produced, and Alexander had been given the task of preparing the way with his guns. As he looked at the federal position, he later wrote, he felt the Confederates were about to squander their last chance. The battles and campaign had already been lost, he concluded, and the war itself was about to turn against the South. What he did not know then was that he would live to write it all down, and that his own memoir would become the most damning indictment of Gettysburg ever written by a man who was there.
For 160 years, historians have debated a single question: could the Confederates have actually won at Gettysburg? Alexander, who served as Longstreet’s artillery chief and commanded the guns for the final charge, gave his own answer in the pages of his memoirs. He did not believe the battle was lost by fate or by Union superiority alone. He believed it was lost by five fatal blunders, a chain of command failures and missed opportunities that condemned Lee’s army before the fighting truly reached its climax.
And the first of those blunders began hundreds of miles away, weeks before the first shots were fired at Gettysburg. On June 22nd, 1863, as Confederate troops advanced north into Pennsylvania, General Robert E. Lee issued orders to his cavalry commander, J. E.
B. Stuart. The wording of that order is still debated by historians, but the consensus is that Lee instructed Stuart to divide his horsemen, sending part to guard the mountain passes and part to shield the flank of General Richard Ewell’s corps. It was a complex, delicate instruction, and Stuart chose to interpret it in a way that changed the course of the campaign.
Instead of staying close to the army and screening its movements, Stuart pushed farther east than Lee likely intended, riding off on a raid to capture Union supplies and disrupt Federal operations. He took his cavalry on a wide loop around the Union army, and as he did, Union forces moved into the gap between him and Lee’s main body. Stuart was forced to detour even farther north, and his cavalry did not rejoin the army until late on July 2nd, almost the entire battle having passed without him. Without Stuart’s cavalry, Lee was blind.
The horsemen were the army’s eyes, the men who tracked enemy positions and movements, who warned of approaching columns and scouted the terrain ahead. Without them, Lee marched into Pennsylvania operating on guesswork, and Alexander, looking back, had no doubt about the consequences. He condemned Stuart’s action as a grave error, a violation of the core military principle of concentrated force. These raids, he argued, rarely produced real battlefield gains, but they always invited severe risk.
They scattered the army’s strength on speculation. The unity of the army should have trumped everything else, Alexander insisted. Had Stuart been present from the outset, he contended, the outcome of the battle might have been different. Full Confederate strength early on could have unlocked opportunities that never materialized.
By permitting Stuart to separate, Lee had taken an unnecessary gamble, and Gettysburg would be paid for with the consequences. The second blunder came on June 30th, on the very outskirts of Gettysburg itself. A brigade from General Henry Heth’s division marched into the town on a simple errand. They were looking for shoes.
The Confederates believed that General George Meade’s Union army was still fifteen or twenty miles to the south, and they anticipated no resistance. But as Heth’s men approached Gettysburg, they ran straight into a line of entrenched Union cavalry. Rather than attack, Heth pulled back, and he returned on July 1st with his full division, supported by Dorsey Pender’s reserves, a force of about 12,000 men. Waiting for them were just 3,000 federal troopers under General John Buford.
Though badly outnumbered, Buford’s men held their ground long enough for Union reinforcements to arrive, and when the First and Eleventh Corps reached the field, Confederate numbers were suddenly overwhelmed. The two Confederate divisions, which had come for shoes, now faced 23,000 federal troops. Alexander saw this as a textbook example of how errors compound. Without Stuart’s scouts, Lee had no real intelligence on Union positions, and so Heth had advanced blind.
With proper reconnaissance, Alexander asserted, Lee would never have allowed two divisions to engage two Union corps and cavalry on ground of the enemy’s choosing. He also criticized Heth’s imprudence directly, comparing it to the cautious orders that Ewell had received about Cemetery Hill that same day. Heth should have been given similar restraint, Alexander argued. A limited reconnaissance should have been sent to probe the enemy’s strength, not a full division committed to battle for a supply of shoes.
The consequences were devastating. Alexander noted that Heth’s lead brigades suffered near total destruction, crippling his division for the rest of the campaign. Pender’s unit also took heavy losses, and its commander was wounded. Alexander lamented that so much Confederate strength had been sacrificed for an objective so trivial.
The attack had weakened the army without any strategic gain, and although reinforcements later stabilized the Confederate lines, the damage was done. Heth’s and Pender’s depleted divisions would be of little use in the fighting ahead, and Alexander would look back on this as a cautionary tale of what happens when an army fights without information and plans without purpose. The third blunder came the next day. After the first day’s fighting, the Union army held Cemetery Hill, a formidable defensive perch that dominated the ground around Gettysburg.
General Richard Ewell faced a choice: attack the hill on July 2nd, or withdraw to Seminary Ridge, where the Confederates had gathered their main force. Alexander later wrote that while the Confederate position on Seminary Ridge was strong, it paled next to the Union’s high ground advantage. The Confederate line, he argued, was defensible and could not have been overrun. He believed Meade should have been the one forced to attack, pressed by public opinion and the demands of Washington.
Lee’s reports show that he chose to attack instead, fearing that his army was too distant from its supplies to sustain a prolonged operation. Alexander dismissed this concern outright. The Confederates remained at Gettysburg for four days, he pointed out, and later they foraged successfully when stranded at the Potomac River for over a week without resupply. The supply fears, in his view, were exaggerated.
There was no real difficulty whatever in taking the defensive the next day, Alexander wrote. Every other reason for attacking was weak. By choosing to attack, Lee sacrificed, in Alexander’s estimate, sixty percent of the Confederate chance of victory at Gettysburg. He called this the battle’s decisive turning point, the moment when the campaign began to slip away.
Lee’s audacity had inspired his troops for two years of war, but at Gettysburg, Alexander believed that same audacity was a costly miscalculation. Caution might have preserved Confederate strength and forced Meade to make the mistakes instead. But even given the decision to attack, the fourth blunder was in the planning. Alexander conceded that Seminary Ridge was defensible, but he insisted it was nothing compared to Cemetery Hill, which he called the strongest position of the entire war.
The federal defenses were effectively increased by fifty percent because of the elevation alone. The Union fielded ninety-four thousand men against the Confederates’ seventy-two thousand, and they enjoyed superior artillery as well. Combined with the high ground, Alexander considered the Union position virtually impregnable, and it was the Confederates’ own failings that made it worse. No reconnaissance of the Union lines was conducted on the night of July 2nd.
No preparations for the next day’s attack were made. No proper reconnaissance happened at all, Alexander noted, and this allowed Meade to reinforce his defenses without interference. Verily, Alexander wrote, that night it was pie for Meade. Alexander also faulted Ewell’s corps deployment.
After relocating near Gettysburg, Ewell had requested permission to seize Culp’s Hill, a key height on the Union right. Lee agreed, but Ewell failed to take it, and his corps remained stranded in an ineffective position near Cemetery Hill for the rest of the battle. Alexander believed Culp’s Hill was unassailable, yet he protested that Ewell’s men and guns were squandered there, immobilized during the climax of the battle. A major Confederate force had been rendered useless at the exact moment it was most needed.
Alexander blamed these failures on inadequate planning and reconnaissance. The oversight enabled Meade to cement his dominant position, and the Confederates were left to attack the strongest point on the strongest line they had ever faced. Which brought the Confederates to July 3rd, and to the fifth blunder. General James Longstreet appointed Alexander to command the First Corps artillery for what would become known as Pickett’s Charge.
His mission was clear: unleash a tremendous barrage to shatter the Union lines, break the morale of the infantry, and clear a path for the Confederate foot soldiers to advance. As Alexander himself stated, the goal was to tear the enemy limbless before the infantry stepped off. But the Confederate artillery was a tangle of competing commands. Alexander led the main bombardment, but the other corps’ batteries operated independently of him.
Each chief artillery officer worked alone, Alexander wrote, and this diluting of command destroyed their effectiveness. The first failure involved General William Pendleton, Lee’s artillery chief, who had assigned Alexander nine howitzers to support the infantry charge. When the assault began, however, four or five of those guns were simply missing. Alexander later discovered that Pendleton had redirected them without informing anyone.
Those guns might have aided the attack, Alexander lamented, and they were gone without a word. Another shortfall came from Lieutenant General A. P. Hill.
He deployed sixty-five guns on Seminary Ridge, but when the infantry advanced, he employed none of them to support Pickett’s men, even as the troops passed directly beneath his batteries. Worse still, Hill had wasted ammunition earlier that morning in fruitless skirmishing, leaving his guns unable to provide the support they were positioned to give. But Alexander reserved his sharpest criticism for Ewell’s artillery. The Confederate line arced around the Union’s fishhook formation, which should have offered opportunities for enfilading fire.
Ewell’s guns missed this chance entirely. Only one of his five artillery battalions joined the bombardment at all. Alexander blamed this disarray on the absence of centralized command. A competent artillery chief would have coordinated every battery on the field, concentrating their fire for maximum impact.
Instead, Pendleton’s weak leadership allowed each commander to operate on his own, forfeiting a critical advantage at the decisive moment. The disorganization allowed Union Major General Henry Hunt to endure the barrage, conserve his own ammunition, and prepare his defenses for the infantry assault without serious interference. The flaws in the Confederate artillery doomed the charge before a single man stepped into the open field. And so, on the evening of July 3rd, as the survivors of Pickett’s Charge stumbled back toward Seminary Ridge, Alexander’s warnings were proven correct.
The assault had been broken, the army was shattered, and the Confederate cause in the eastern theater was broken with it. Edward Porter Alexander had identified five fatal flaws that sank the southern hopes. Was defeat inevitable, he asked, or was it a cascade of blunders, squandered chances, and failed coordination that doomed the army from the outset? He had his own answer, written in the pages of his memoir, and the question has haunted historians ever since.
What if one clearer order, one wiser choice, tighter coordination among the guns, a cavalry commander who stayed close to his army, a reconnaissance that had done its work, had changed the outcome? The what ifs of Gettysburg still linger, and Alexander’s own words offer the clearest answer anyone has ever found.
