General Ewell's Dilemma - NYTimes.com Gen. Richard S. Ewell of the Confederate Army was frustrated and angry on the afternoon of July 1, 1863, the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg. The cause of his grief was Robert E. Lee, who had just issued a confusing order that forced Ewell to reconsider whether he should carry out an important attack. What he did next may have arguably decided the battle, and certainly became one of the most controversial series of events of the entire war. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had unexpectedly encountered George Meade's Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg that morning, and a battle no one expected sucked in reinforcements from both sides. Ewell's corps, which consisted of two divisions under Robert Rodes and Jubal Early (a third was on its way), had rushed in from the north, smashing the Union's right flank and sending the enemy fleeing back through Gettysburg. At approximately 3:30 p.m., the Union survivors took refuge south of town on Cemetery Hill, where Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock boldly decided to make a stand. What happened next became one of the Civil War's most enduring controversies. Gettysburg's first day marked the third consecutive victory Ewell had enjoyed since taking over the corps from the fallen Stonewall Jackson. A West Point graduate, Mexican War veteran and seasoned frontier officer, Ewell was a bit eccentric, cursed liked a sailor and had recently married his first cousin (for whom he had pined for decades). He became one of the first Confederate officers wounded in the war when he got shot in the shoulder in an early skirmish, and he lost a leg at the Battle of Groveton after a minié ball shattered the bone. Ewell's promotion to corps command was popular with the men, for he was a competent officer, and on July 1 he acted as Stonewall Jackson reincarnated, making bold that left the enemy broken and bewildered. With Hancock digging in, Ewell had to consider a number of things before making his next move. Although victorious, his corps had suffered approximately 3,000 casualties, leaving him with about 8,000 men under arms. The charge into Gettysburg had also left Ewell's two divisions badly disorganized, and there were thousands of prisoners that had to be rounded up and secured. The third division, under Edward Johnson, was rushing to the scene, but no one knew when it would arrive. Weighing heavily on Ewell's mind were orders issued by Lee instructing his corps commanders not to bring on a general engagement in Pennsylvania until his army, which was scattered across south-central Pennsylvania, had concentrated. When Ewell arrived at Gettysburg, A. P. Hill's corps was already fighting desperately, so these orders were a moot point. But now the enemy was defeated and the battle was essentially over. Until he heard otherwise, Ewell had to assume Lee's original instructions were again in effect. As Ewell rode into Gettysburg, one of Lee's aides, Maj. Walter H. Taylor, arrived with orders to take the high ground south of town "if possible." Lee had seen the enemy reforming on Cemetery Hill and wanted them dispersed quickly before they fortified their position. This message relieved Ewell, because it seemed to supersede Lee's previous order not to bring on a general engagement. He met with Generals Rodes and Early to discuss the situation. Both officers urged an immediate attack, but only if Lee could provide infantry support on their right. Ewell agreed and dispatched Capt. James P. Smith to Lee with their request. While waiting for an answer, Ewell and Early rode out to get a closer look at Cemetery Hill. What they saw was sobering. At least one Union brigade and 40 cannons were visible, and there could be more infantry and artillery positioned out of sight behind the hill's crest. Smith shocked Ewell when he returned with Lee's reply to the request for help. Lee informed him that he had no troops with which to support an attack on Cemetery Hill, and that Ewell should use his own discretion. He was to attack the high ground if it "was practicable." But then, to add to the confusion, Lee reiterated his previous order not to bring on a general engagement until the rest of the army had arrived. This contradiction put Ewell in a dilemma. Based on what he had seen firsthand, Cemetery Hill could not be taken without serious fighting and a major commitment of troops. To follow Lee's first order to take the hill would require him to disobey the second not to bring on a general engagement. Frustrated, Ewell decided that Culp's Hill might be a more suitable target. Reportedly undefended and situated just to the east of Cemetery Hill, its occupation would threaten the Yankees" flank and might force them to abandon Cemetery Hill without reigniting a major battle. He decided to make the attempt as soon as Johnson's fresh division arrived. Before long, General Johnson rode into Gettysburg and informed Ewell that his men were only a mile away, but that it would take some time for them to reach town because a supply train was blocking the road. Unwilling to wait, Ewell turned to Early and asked if he could take Culp's Hill, but that usually combative general snapped that "his command had been doing all the hard marching and fighting and was not in condition to make the move." Johnson took offense at this remark - after all, his men had been marching for days - and the two bickered until Ewell told Johnson to halt when he reached Gettysburg and wait for further orders. After an exhausting 25-mile march, Johnson's division staggered into Gettysburg as the sun was setting. Instead of ordering Johnson immediately to Culp's Hill, Ewell asked Rodes" opinion of his plan. Rather oddly, Rodes simply shrugged and said that Johnson's men were "tired and footsore" and that "he did not think it would result in anything one way or the other." Early, who seemed to have regained his fighting spirit, disagreed and advised Ewell, "If you do not go up there tonight, it will cost you 10,000 lives to get up there tomorrow." Ewell then ordered Johnson to advance and take Culp's Hill if it was still unoccupied (rebel scouts somehow failed to discover that Union forces were already moving onto the hill). Sometime before daylight he sent an aide to Johnson to repeat the order. Ewell retired that night believing that he controlled Culp's Hill, but he found out in the morning that Johnson had stopped short and never occupied the crucial high ground. Fortune frowned on Ewell from the moment he rode into Gettysburg. While he could have cut the discussion short by ordering his reluctant generals to advance immediately upon Cemetery Hill, it is questionable whether his few thousand exhausted and disorganized men could have dislodged Hancock. Ewell realized the importance of the high ground, but he was not going to risk his men in a rash attack. Asking Lee to provide infantry support was the prudent thing to do, but Lee refused even though he had two divisions with him. This, and Lee's insistence that he not bring on a general engagement, forced Ewell to focus on Culp's Hill, instead. Ewell acted somewhat indecisive once Johnson arrived, but when neither Rodes nor Early seemed up to the task, he quickly sent Johnson forward. Inexplicably, that general failed to carry out his orders. None of these events received much attention during the war. In his report of the battle, Lee only briefly touched on the subject when he wrote, "General Ewell was ... instructed to carry the hill occupied by the enemy if he found it practicable, but to avoid a general engagement until the arrival of the other divisions of the army which were ordered to hasten forward. He decided to await Johnson's division [but it] did not reach Gettysburg until a late hour. It was not until after the war, and Lee's death, that Lost Cause supporters sought to explain how the infallible general could have been defeated at Gettysburg. Gettysburg was the largest battle of the war, and it came to be seen as the conflict's turning point. In the minds of many, if Lee had won at Gettysburg, the South would have won the war. Confederate veterans like John B. Gordon, Isaac Trimble and Randolph H. McKim insinuated in their postwar writings that it was Ewell's timidity that had cost Lee the victory. McKim's 1915 article in The Southern Historical Society Papers was particularly damning. "Here then we find still another of General Lee's lieutenants, the gallant and usually energetic Ewell, failing at a critical moment to recognize what ought to be done," he wrote. Had the advance on Cemetery Hill been pushed forward promptly that afternoon we now know beyond any possible question that the hill was feebly occupied, and could have been easily taken, and Meade would have been forced to retreat. Walter H. Taylor, Lee's former aide, sided with the anti-Ewell faction in his memoir "Four Years With General Lee." Taylor wrote that Ewell voiced no objection to the order he brought from Lee to take the high ground "if possible," and that he returned to Lee under the impression Ewell would attack. Taylor also claimed that he asked General Johnson after the war why Ewell didn't press his advantage that afternoon. Johnson "assured me there was no hinderance [sic] to his moving forward; but that, after getting his command in line of battle, and before it became seriously engaged or had advanced any great distance, for some unexplained reason, he had received orders to halt." Not everyone sided against Ewell. Maj. Campbell Brown, Ewell's stepson and aide, observed that the "discovery that this lost us the battle is one of those frequently-recurring but tardy strokes of military genius of which one hears long after the minute circumstances that rendered them at the time impracticable, are forgotten." And while Taylor's story became an important part of the controversy, Brown was adamant that he never brought such orders. In an 1885 letter to Gen. Henry Jackson Hunt, the former chief of artillery for the Army of the Potomac, Brown wrote, "I say broadly that Col. Taylor's account of this battle is utterly worthless - that he carried no such order to Gen. Ewell and had no such conversation with Gen. Edw'd Johnson. I do not impugn his veracity but his memory has been trusted and has deceived him. Brown's claim to the contrary, Taylor probably did deliver the order, but Johnson's known activities that day contradict what he supposedly told Taylor. It was after dark when Johnson moved toward Culp's Hill. In his Gettysburg report he simply said that he advanced northeast of town late that night, formed a line of battle and had the men sleep on their arms. Ewell did not order him to halt; in fact, Ewell went to bed thinking Johnson had taken the hill. For whatever reason, it was Johnson who made the decision to stop short of his goal. In his letter to Hunt, Brown also raised the most important question that no one wanted to consider: if Taylor was correct about Lee urging Ewell to take Cemetery Hill as soon as Ewell rode into Gettysburg, why didn't Lee take action when Ewell failed to do so? Lee was with A. P. Hill's corps a short distance away and was within sight of the hill. "Is it credible," Brown asked, "that Lee would (if he attached the importance that Taylor seems to intimate, to the possession of Cemetery Hill) halt the troops under his own eyes & wait two or three hours in full sight of the troops of Ewell & Hill both, while the former was disobeying a vital order, without taking steps to have himself obeyed? NO - Taylor carried no such order, Ewell disobeyed none and evaded none. Brown asked Hunt, "Is it not plain that if it was a mistake not to attempt Cemetery Hill that afternoon, the mistake was Lee's rather than Ewell's? Ewell was assuredly right not to try it with his command alone. Whether Lee ought to have ordered all forward at once, is another question entirely, and one on which I do not feel competent to offer an opinion worth your reading. While most of Ewell's former colleagues were critical of him after the war, some officers left accounts of Gettysburg that supported his decisions. Armistead L. Long, Lee's military secretary, was one who believed Ewell acted correctly. Lee sent Long on a personal reconnaissance, and Long claimed that he "found Cemetery Hill occupied by a considerable force. ... In my opinion, an attack at that time, with the troops then at hand, would have been hazardous and of very doubtful success. After making my report, no mention was made of a renewal of the attack that evening. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, who commanded the Union troops on Cemetery Hill, also believed his defenses would have held against any rebel attack. That afternoon, he sat with Gen. Carl Schurz on a stone fence on Cemetery Hill watching the enemy through binoculars. Hancock told Schurz that with the artillery he had on hand he was confident he could hold out until more help arrived. He seemed even more confident when he sent a report to General Meade at 5:25 p.m. "We have now taken up a position in the cemetery," he wrote, "and cannot well be taken." Whenever the Ewell controversy is discussed today, it is popular to ponder the intriguing thought of Stonewall Jackson surviving Chancellorsville and leading his corps at Gettysburg. Some officers and men even speculated on it at the time. It has been argued that the great Stonewall would have stormed up Cemetery Hill, defeated the Yankees and won Confederate independence. The problem with this scenario is that no one can predict which Jackson would have ridden into Gettysburg. It is always assumed it would have been the brilliant Stonewall of the Shenandoah Valley, but it could very well have been the Jackson of Kernstown. In that battle, he rashly attacked a superior enemy force without proper reconnaissance and was defeated. Or it could have been the Stonewall of the Seven Days, where he twice failed to carry out his orders and caused Lee to miss opportunities to strike a decisive blow against the enemy. It might even have been the Jackson of Fredericksburg, where he scouted out the enemy's position in preparation for a counterattack. When Jackson saw the large number of Union cannons across the Rappahannock on Stafford Heights, he changed his mind. The sight of thousands of Yankees and dozens of cannons on Cemetery Hill might well have led him to make the same decision at Gettysburg. If so, would Jackson have been made a scapegoat for Lee's defeat, instead of Ewell? Sources: Douglas Southall Freeman, "Lee's Lieutenants," vol. 3; John B. Gordon, "Reminiscences of the Civil War"; Terry L. Jones, ed., "Campbell Brown's Civil War"; Terry L. Jones, "Cemetery Hill"; Dr. Randolph H. McKim, "The Gettysburg Campaign," Southern Historical Society Papers, vol. 40; Walter H. Taylor, "Four Years With General Lee"; Donald C. Pfanz, "Richard S. Ewell"; Harry W. Pfanz, "Gettysburg: Culp's Hill and Cemetery Hill" and "Gettysburg: The First Day"; Isaac R. Trimble, "The Battle and Campaign of Gettysburg," Southern Historical Society Papers, vol. 26; the United States Government, "The War of the Rebellion: The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies." Terry L. Jones is a professor of history at the University of Louisiana, Monroe and the author of six books on the Civil War.