If the South Won Gettysburg

If the South Won Gettysburg

by

Mark Nesbitt

Published by Second Chance Publications at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Mark V. Nesbitt

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Original illustrations by Duffy.

Front cover design by Ryan C. Stouch.

Cover photo courtesy of NASA and Pomegranate Publications, Petaluma, CA.

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To My Mother and Father

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1 - List of Maps

Chapter 2 - Introduction

Chapter 3 - Introduction to the Second Edition

Chapter 4 - The Seeds of Sectionalism

Chapter 5 - Invasion

Chapter 6 - The Battle of Mistakes

Chapter 7 - The Perfect Battle

Chapter 8 - The Consequences

Chapter 9 - Appendix A: Tactics in the Civil War

Chapter 10 - Appendix B: Tactics versus Technology

Chapter 11 - Appendix C: The Confederate Constitution

Chapter 12 - Appendix D

Chapter 13 - Suggested Reading List

Chapter 14 - About the Author

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Chapter 1: List of Maps

March Routes to Gettysburg June 1863

Concentration

Battle of Gettysburg: July 1, 1863

Battle of Gettysburg: July 2, 1863

Battle of Gettysburg: July 3, 1863

Battle of Gettysburg: July 4, 1863

Cavalry Movements: July 4, 1863

Defenses of Washington: July 1863

Battle of Gettysburg Union Assaults: July 4 & 5, 1863

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Chapter 2: Introduction

In my years of working for the National Park Service as an historical interpreter at Gettysburg, one question visitors to the battlefield often posed stands out in my mind, if not by virtue of frequency asked, then by its impact upon the imagination: What if the South had won here?

To many it is a moot question. History is history—it is past, a progression of events cast in the bronze of time. The best historians can do is piece together the events in the most accurate order existing evidence will allow, and analyze them from there.

But I approached this somewhat rhetorical question not as an historian but as a writer. Historians, because of the delicate filigree of accuracy and the inherent dubiousness of documentation, are bound to say as little about an event as is needed to avoid inaccuracies; the writer can elaborate on what is known about the event. Historians provide the sketch—writers, the oil paints.

This is no apology to historians for the somewhat radical approach of this book. It needs none. The first half of the work, up to the point where Robert E. Lee changes his battle plan, is an historical piece. Primary sources, such as the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion—reports done within weeks after the battle—The Southern Historical Society Papers—written after the war by the participants—accounts from Battles and Leaders—also postwar accounts—were used whenever the text needed words from the horses’ mouths. If the quotes sometimes do not concur or seem contradictory, it is because the men who fought the war were human: they had a particular point to make, or a reputation to defend, or, they simply forgot exactly what had happened in the fury of battle years before they sat down to write.

The second half of the book is conjecture. In analyzing the question, How could the South have won at Gettysburg? I tried to think like a Civil War commander dealing with the knowledge and people available at the time. I leaned heavily on Henri Antoine Jomini’s Summary of the Art of War, published in 1838. This textbook, it is said, was all but carried into battle by officers, both Northern and Southern. I relied only on original maps available to Lee: Jed Hotchkiss’ map, drawn by order of Stonewall Jackson just a few months before the Battle of Gettysburg, and the 1858 map of Adams County, Pennsylvania (Gettysburg being the county seat), from which much of the Hotchkiss Map was copied. The theories that win the battle for the South come from original post-war accounts of individuals within whose power it was to change the events. Whenever an officer, in his post-war writings, made the statement, If we had only done this or that, the victory would have been ours, I noted it and analyzed it with reference to logistics, tactics of the day, terrain factors, troop strengths and conditions, time considerations vis a vis troops movements, and so on. I used no deus ex machina in rewriting the battle. If I say troops marched to an area and arrived at a certain hour, it is because that is how long it would have taken according to the marching speed of a Civil War unit.

Personalities were the most difficult to capture. Battles were not—and, possibly, are still not—won or lost by numbers of men and the application of textbook tactics, but by the personalities involved. In war men are nothing, said Napoleon, but a man is everything. Personalities presented in the first half of the book are authentic. If eyewitnesses said General Lee looked irritated, that is how I have painted him. In the second half of the book, I attempted to keep the personalities congruent with their states of mind in the first half: Ewell still needed more specific orders; Longstreet, a little looser rein, to achieve their respective command potentials.

It was an exciting book to do, but I didn’t do it alone. First, I must thank Paul S. Witt. This is as much his book as it is mine. It was his idea to approach the battle from this standpoint and he believed in it enough to see it through to its final production. His points of view as a non-historian (but a highly critical reader) were invaluable in making this not just another dry book on the battle, but something that will spark the imagination of historian and layman alike.

I must also acknowledge the insightful comments of Bob Prosperi of the National Park Service, as well as Dr. Robert Bloom, Professor of History at Gettysburg College, and John Patterson, Associate Professor of American Studies and History, Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg Campus. I thank Kathy Carberry for her research assistance. Thanks go to Mr. George Kackley, Superintendent of Oak Hill Cemetery, Georgetown and Paula Burns, Washington, D. C. for their help in locating theoretical artillery positions for Jeb Stuart’s Horse Artillery. I must also mention Donna Trapani for her idea for the cover of the book.

There are also hundreds of others whom I have spoken to, argued with, and received encouragement from during the writing of this book. To them, as well, go special thanks.

Mark Nesbitt

May 1980

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Chapter 3: Introduction to the Second Edition

The fascination with the American Civil War continues. More books, newsletters, magazines and videos on the war are available now than ever before. We analyze and re-analyze, reconstruct, revise and re-fight the battles to gain either a simpler or more detailed understanding of the most calamitous period our nation has ever lived through. Occasionally someone will yowl, Oh, no! Not another book on the Civil War! Hasn’t it all been written? Of course, the answer lies in the continuing, ravenous demand for new books on the war or the battles or the personalities or the issues that once nearly brought us to the point of national suicide.

Why the Civil War? Why does that era draw more serious students and weekend buffs than any other in our history?

For one thing, it is because the war was the great moral conflict of the 19th century. The American Civil War dealt with—some reductionists say was caused by—the last vestige of the greatest scourge of humankind leading back to Biblical days—human bondage. John Brown, pre-war spokesman for the Abolitionists, and a character right from the Old Testament himself, wrote it best, unknowingly summing up the tenor of the two sections just before he went to the gallows: I John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never be purged away; but with Blood…. Picking up the national theme, writers and editors in the North called him a saint, one who would make the gallows as glorious as the cross. Before the war—which is always the case in short-memoried humans—we were sure that it would take a blood sacrifice to cleanse us, and make us white in the blood of the Lamb.

And because human evolution takes millions of years (and even social evolution takes decades) we cannot expect ourselves to have changed much in just the few generations since the war. Hence, we’re still dealing with the same problems that caused the Civil War and remain unresolved nearly a century and a third after the greatest blood-letting this nation has ever known.

So it makes frustrating sense that the issues have never been fully resolved. State’s rights versus federal powers. Slavery versus true emancipation. Witness the recent Supreme Court rulings that have thrown many volatile issues back to the individual states to determine; or observe the neighborhoods still filled with the descendants of former slaves, some becoming slaves to a new master; or drive near the small, poor farms in Virginia or North Carolina, many within earshot of Route 95, which haven’t changed perceptibly since 1866. You don’t have to go to a National Historical Park to see a century into the past. And until these problems are resolved, the Civil War goes on.

And a true blood-letting it was, not just in scope, but in spirit. Like an Old Testament story or Greek Mythology or Shakespearean play, the American Civil War has all the earmarks of an ancient myth that any student of the classics might appreciate.

You read it from both sides throughout the early literature of the war, that there were martyrs and saviors and angels of the battlefields; there was unequalled bravery and valor, loyalty to home and hearth, devotion to a cause unto death; there was great noble sacrifice, and later, ignoble cowardice and savage violence too. There, in our own Iliad, our own epic right out of Genesis, were Cains and Abels, Jasons and Homers, Hamlets and Lears and Falstaffs and Othellos, Joshuas, Ruths, Solomons, Mary Magdalenes, Judases and Christs. (Note that in St. James Episcopal Church, in Richmond, where Jeb Stuart lay before his burial in Hollywood Cemetery, there are stained glass windows alternating between Jesus and Moses and the disciples, and Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and John Pelham. Northerners have done the same with Lincoln—who rose from humble beginnings to lead the nation to salvation—proclaiming him martyred after seeing the Union preserved and slavery abolished.) The Civil War was a history, a comedy, a tragedy all rolled into one. The story of the Civil War is nearly always told through innumerable and unavoidable parables. It was the sad archetype, straight from Genesis through the book of Revelation, of all wars, of all human conflict.

But why the fascination with Gettysburg?

Keeping metaphors un-mixed and by logical allegorical extension, the roads that 620,000 American martyrs marched over four years were their own Via Dolorosas, and the American battlefields they fought and were slain upon, their Calvarys. And Gettysburg, the most high, most horrible, most costly in blood sacrifice becomes the Golgotha of the New World.

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A lot has happened in the time between the first publication of If the South Won Gettysburg and this second edition. On a personal level, I’ve had five more books published (and written several others, soon to be published) and so have had a chance to continue to study even more deeply, the Battle and Campaign of Gettysburg. I’ve had the opportunity to farther analyze military tactics—both Civil War era and modern. Since 1980, we’ve all seen—literally watched on television—several military invasions and a full-scale war in which the United States was engaged,