Gettysburg’s Peach Orchard: Longstreet, Sickles, and the Bloody Fight for the “Commanding Ground” Along the Emmitsburg Road. James A. Hessler and Britt C. Isenberg. El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beatie, 2019.

Many years ago, I had occasion to provide a meeting of the Richmond Civil War Roundtable with a summary of my dual biography of the lives of Confederate Colonel William Oates and Union Colonel Joshua Chamberlain. The attendees at the mini-forum greeted me amicably and seemed to enjoy what I had to say until I breached one of their club’s most important unwritten rules—I criticized General Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson. My comment was innocent enough: I simply noted that Jackson had fallen asleep, and so been late to battle at a crucial moment during the Seven Days Campaign of 1862. A noticeable and distinct chill settled over my audience after this offering, at which I wondered. The evening ended politely, but after nearly everyone had filed from the room, I turned to a colleague, my eyebrows arched. He laughed: “Here in Virginia,” he said, “people believe that Stonewall Jackson died for our sins.”

More than 150 years after its end, Jackson remains a constant if wispy presence in the annals of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, his ghost inhabiting the Lost Cause world of if-onlys. If only Jackson had been at Gettysburg in early July of 1863, it is said, Lee’s left wing—which Jackson, instead of the more tentative Dick Ewell, would have commanded—would have seized the dominating heights above the town and secured the victory. Or, better: If only Jackson had been present on July 2nd, on Lee’s right wing, the “sunrise attack order” would have rolled up the Union left flank and sent the Army of the Potomac scampering back to Washington.[1] Which is to say, if only Jackson had been at Gettysburg, there would have been no Little Round Top, no Pickett’s Charge, no Golgotha-like retreat to Virginia—and no Appomattox.

These are arch speculation, of course. The sainted Jackson was not only sixty days in his grave—felled by friendly fire at Chancellorsville—but, his attack on the heights above Gettysburg would have been contested by Union troops stationed or rushed there, and perhaps repulsed. Then too, it’s doubtful that Jackson, brilliant tactician that he was, would have obeyed Lee’s July 2nd sunrise attack order—a tenacious historical fabrication, reluctantly abandoned, because, manifestly, Lee never issued it.[2] Military historians, Civil War afficionados, battlefield traipsers, and Stonewall Jackson worshipers, must be satisfied with the battle as it was, and with historian Shelby Foote’s eloquent judgment: Jackson was not there.[3]

Yet, there’s good reason to include Jackson in a study of Lee’s Gettysburg decisions, for while the eccentric Virginian’s ghost might not have inhabited the rolling fields or rock-strewn eminences of the Gettysburg battlefield, it’s likely that in July of 1863 Lee was attempting to recreate in southern Pennsylvania what Jackson had done at Chancellorsville two months earlier. On May 2nd, at Chancellorsville, and after a twelve-mile all-day march, Jackson had set upon and crushed Union commander Joe Hooker’s exposed right flank, destroying the Army of the Potomac’s Eleventh Corps, who scattered like rabbits before the onslaught. The attack exposed a Union salient at Hazel Grove, a high open plateau that dominated the federal position and “the best artillery position on the battlefield.”[4] The Confederate capture of Hazel Grove, after Hooker’s still inexplicable decision to abandon it, exposed the Federal Army to nearly hub-to-hub artillery fire from some 31 cannon—and decided the battle.

As historians James Hessler and Britt Isenberg suggest in their brilliantly cast and elegantly written Gettysburg’s Peach Orchard, Lee’s July 2nd order to First Corps commander James Longstreet—that two of his divisions should attack “up the Emmitsburg Road” and occupy the high ground of the orchard that borders it—was given with Chancellorsville in mind.[5] After much debate, and the dispatch of scouting parties, Lee supposed the federal position on the Emmitsburg Road was as exposed at Gettysburg as Hooker’s was at Chancellorsville and that, as crucially, the high ground of the Sherfy Peach Orchard was a second Hazel Grove. Overrunning the orchard “would destroy Federal resistance and thereby compel enemy troops to retreat. If not withdrawn, the Union defenders might be so demoralized that Longstreet’s infantry might sweep them from the field,” Hessler and Isenberg note. “If [rebel artillery Colonel E.P.] Alexander then rolled his guns into the captured orchard, and unleashed hell on Cemetery Ridge beyond, the tactical situation would resemble a replay of Hazel Grove.”[6] As it turns out, Robert E. Lee wasn’t the only commander who viewed the Peach Orchard as a second Hazel Grove. Union Third Corps commander Daniel Sickles—who had his own vivid memories of Chancellorsville—took the same view and so, a short time before Longstreet’s attack, deployed his divisions to occupy it, thereby creating a nearly indefensible salient in the Union line in the shape, from the Union Army’s perspective, of an inverted V—and seeding a debate on his generalship that lasts to this day.[7]

Hessler and Isenberg’s point, that Chancellorsville served as a template explaining Lee’s orders at Gettysburg, is more than an unraveling of mundane battlefield minutia or an “oh-isn’t-that-interesting” footnote for wacky reenactors consumed with Civil War trivia. What Hessler and Isenberg provide is an elegant explication of Lee’s intentions on the afternoon of July 2nd that has eluded historians for more than 150 years—while providing a series of strategic insights that remain a substantive addition to the literature on military strategy. At the center of Hessler and Isenberg’s focused account is a precise and insightful analysis that accomplishes, in some 300 pages, what it has taken other historians a lifetime to attempt, and with far less success. This is compelling read for students of history, strategy, and leadership.

At the center of Hessler and Isenberg’s analysis is the Emmitsburg Road, which, after weighing the two armies in the balance, provides a kind of third force on the battlefield. For generations of military historians, the Emmitsburg Road, the highway that runs from Emmitsburg in Maryland into southern Pennsylvania—and that, over the course of a single mile, bisects the Gettysburg battlefield—has served as a kind of festering gash in America’s historiographic landscape. The road’s importance is at the heart of Lee’s attack plan on the battle’s second day, when he directed Longstreet to use it as the geographic centerpiece of his assault. Longstreet, Lee said, was to attack “up the Emmitsburg Road.” The problem is that while Lee had an apparently clear vision of what he meant, at least some of his subordinates, and generations of historians, did not.

Edwin Coddington’s exhaustive The Gettysburg Campaign calls Lee’s instructions “obscure.”[1] Historian Harry Pfanz in Gettysburg, The Second Day characterizes them as irrational. Shelby Foote, in The Civil War, A Narrative, says Lee’s decision reflected a “crippling lack of direction.”[2] Historian James McPherson in an interview about the battle, calls Lee’s directive “poorly informed.” Stephen Sears in Gettysburg describes them as “reflexive.”[3] The inimitable Glenn Tucker in Lee and Longstreet at Gettysburg, labels them as “loose and subject to interpretations.”[4] The descriptions are charitable, though Lee might be excused on this single count: his instructions were puzzling because he was influenced as much by the absence of J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry—off, somewhere, riding willy nilly around the federal army—as he was by his obsession with replicating the victory at Hazel Grove. The problem for Lee on the second day at Gettysburg wasn’t that Jackson wasn’t there, it was that Stuart wasn’t there, and with entirely predictable results. Lee didn’t have a clue.

Historians now agree that Lee intended that Longstreet deploy his two divisions perpendicular to the Emmitsburg Road and sweep forward along it. The goal was to take the federal position on Cemetery Ridge in reverse. But if Longstreet had launched the attack even one hour before he did, he would have been attacking air—and exposing the far right of his line to plunging fire from Union troops stationed on Little Round Top. It was Sickles who negated this possibility; “he stuck out like a sore thumb,” one of his fellow commanders noted, so that by the time Longstreet deployed, his men were facing 10,000 men of Sickles’ two divisions, a distinct surprise to Longstreet’s division commanders.[5] “The view presented astonished me,” Major General Lafayette McLaws, who commanded one of Longstreet’s divisions, later recalled, “as the enemy was massed on my front, and extended to my right and left as far as I could see.”[6] It is a testament to Lee’s obsession with Hazel Grove—or, as Lee’s acolytes might describe it, his tenacity—that the attack went forward anyway, despite the protests of Major General John Bell Hood. Commanding the other division in Longstreet’s attack, Hood proposed a further flanking maneuver to get in behind the Union army. Longstreet shook him off: “Lee’s orders,” he said, “are to attack up the Emmitsburg Road.”[7] What followed was, according to Longstreet, “the best three hours fighting ever done by any troops on any battlefield.”[8]

Longstreet had reason to be proud, though only to a point. While his two divisions had gained the high ground of the Peach Orchard, the attack—en echelon, from right to left—had broken down when the battle shifted to Richard H. Anderson’s division of A.P. Hill’s corps. During the early evening of July 2nd, as the sun was beginning to set on the battlefield, and shortly after Longstreet’s final brigade had made their attack, two of Anderson’s brigades went forward while two others—those of Generals Carnot Posey and William Mahone—hung back. Their commander, A.P. Hill, failed to urge them on, as he was nowhere to be found. Lee was puzzled, then and later, by the lack of inaction, believing the battle might be won if only there had been “proper concert of action” that would have resulted in “one determined and mighty blow.”[9] Even so, at the end of the July 2nd fighting, the scene was set. With the Peach Orchard captured, Lee could now mount his army’s artillery for a grand bombardment of the federal position on July 3rd, as they had done at Hazel Grove.

While commanders are often criticized for being captured by history, and properly criticized for  fighting the last war, Hessler and Isenberg make a strong case that the tendency to fight the last battle can be just as dangerous—as Lee’s actions at Gettysburg show. The difficulty for Lee was that Gettysburg was fought against a different army, and under a new commander, than the one present at Chancellorsville. While it is fitting, perhaps, that George Gordon Meade’s generalship in southern Pennsylvania remains a footnote, as it was Lee who made the battle, Meade at Gettysburg was not Hooker at Chancellorsville. With two of his corps crushed by Lee on the day’s first battle and another entire corps all but destroyed on the second, a lesser general (like Hooker) might have panicked. Meade did not. “He’ll make no blunder on my front,” Lee had commented to his staff when he learned that Meade had taken command. He was right.[10]

Mark Perry is the author of Conceived In Liberty, Joshua Chamberlain, William Oates and the American Civil War, and nine other books.

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Header Image: “Collapse of the Peach Orchard Line” (Bradley Schmehl)

Notes:

[1] Harrison Florence, “James Longstreet and the ‘Famous Order to Attack,’” Gettysburg Magazine, July 2016.

[2] Mark Perry, “Dick Cheney, Jubal Early and the Truth About Gettysburg.” POLITICO Magazine, July 2, 2014. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/07/longstreet-controversy-gettysburg-108538.

[3] Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, Vol. II, (New York: Random House, 1963), pp. 486-487.

[4] Tyler McGraw, “Reflections on Hazel Grove.” Crossroads and Crossfire, August 17, 2016. https://crossroadsandcrossfire.wordpress.com/2016/06/24/reflections-on-hazel-grove/.

[5] James A. Hessler and Britt C. Isenberg, Gettysburg’s Peach Orchard, (California: Savas Beatie,  2019), p. 92-96.

[6] Ibid., p. 96.

[7] Ibid., pp. 82-86.

[8] Edwin Coddington, The Gettysburg Campaign, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968), p. 377.

[9] Foote, p. 514.

[10] Stephen W. Sears, Gettysburg, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), p. 504.

[11] Glenn Tucker, Lee and Longstreet at Gettysburg, (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), p. 34.

[12] Glenn Tucker, High Tide At Gettysburg, (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), p. 245.

[13] Sears, p. 260.

[14] High Tide At Gettysburg, p. 247.

[15] Garry Adelman, “Gettysburg.” Essential Civil War Curriculum. Accessed June 1, 2020. https://www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com/gettysburg.html.

[16] William W. Coventry, “Lee At Gettysburg: A Critical Analysis of Aggressive Tactics.” Accessed June 1, 2020. http://wcoventry0.tripod.com/id23.htm.

[17] Foote, p. 464.