Longstreet's Lesson

If you stand on Seminary Ridge at Gettysburg and look across the valley at the slope of Little Round Top, you can see why General Longstreet thought it was hopeless to try to take that hill. Now the scene is quiet; the bronze generals stare sightlessly at each other in the forest of statues; the cannons are now cannons in a park. But at dawn on July 2, 1863, when General Longstreet looked across at the ridge occupied by General Meade, the woods were alive with Union soldiers, 339 Union cannons were in the field; and Little Round Top on the Union left looked like the strongest point in the three-mile Union line.

Lee, who had decided to do things the hard way, perhaps the unnecessarily hard way, by making a frontal assault on the Union position, expected Longstreet to advance at dawn. At 10 o'clock the front was still quiet, and Lee cried out: "What can detain Longstreet? He ought to be in position now." Noon passed, and Longstreet did not feel ready to undertake his seemingly tough assignment. Not until 3:30 did the advance begin; it was 6 when the Confederates actually got a brief foothold on Little Round Top, only to be driven back. Had Longstreet won that bastion in the Union line, the full assault on the main Union position the next day--Pickett's charge--might not have been a disastrous failure. It might never have been necessary.

What Longstreet had not known was that at dawn Little Round Top was defended by only a few men of the Union Signal Corps, that it was then a weak point in the Union line. Late in the morning a Union officer discovered that this most important spot had been overlooked; Union troops arrived to defend it only a few minutes before Longstreet's Texans stormed up its slopes.

Longstreet was still defending himself when he died in 1904. Last week on Seminary Ridge, on the site of his indecision, ground was broken for a monument to him. U.S. Army officers, his widow, Mary Pickford, a Confederate veteran took part in the ceremony; thunder crashed and lightning slashed the sky; troops re-enacted Pickett's famed charge. Southerners shook their heads. The Baltimore Sun mourned: Why could the monument not have been put up at Manassas, or Antietam, or the Wilderness, scenes of Longstreet's undoubted generalship?

But the symbol of Longstreet on Seminary Ridge was by a sort of pathetic fallacy a neat lesson for the U.S. in 1941. Whether or not he was right by the book, he was, at Gettysburg, a classic American figure of the cost of delay.

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