Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861-1865

2. “An Hour Too Late”: The Confederate Defeat at Gettysburg

2 “AN HOUR TOO LATE” The Confederate Defeat at Gettysburg “From the first to the last, each move was made just an hour too late and this is the story of Gettysburg.” confederate lieutenant john cheves haskell By July 1863, public hopes in both the United States and the Confederacy for a short war had dissipated. The mighty offensive victory thought so easily attainable in 1861 remained elusive. With thousands dead, wounded, and imprisoned, public support for war was wavering, and peace organizations gained momentum. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln attempted to counter such movements by introducing the Emancipation Proclamation, an order designed to garner favor with foreign nations and to inject moral purpose into the Union cause rather than to free the slaves. Southern belles schooled in the arts of domesticity, demureness, and delicacy rioted for bread in the streets of Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. Civilians, once so anxious to enlist for the glory of the cause, were now conscripted into an inadequately supplied and morally dejected Confederate army that lacked shoes, uniforms, and food but more importantly had lost the mighty Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville. In light of these events, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and General Robert E. Lee desperately needed a decisive offensive victory to reinvigorate the war effort, possibly gain European recognition, and ideally secure the independence of the Confederacy. Gettysburg almost became that battle, but, as Confederate Lieutenant John 34 “An Hour Too Late” 35 Cheves Haskell put it, “from the first to the last, each move was made just an hour too late.”1 As Bull Run illustrated, offensive drives require coordination, accuracy, and temporal unity of action. At Gettysburg, such harmony was essential for Confederate victory but unnecessary for the Union to prevail. Although Union forces certainly suffered from temporal dislocations, they were of minimal importance because the Union did not initiate the attacks but instead responded to them. As a result, promptness, clock-dependent time consciousness, and temporal coordination were less important to Union forces at Gettysburg than to the Confederate troops, for whom these temporal issues were vital. The Confederates’ offensive victory hinged on coordination , punctuality, precision, and ultimately a hegemonic or unified sense of time. The Confederacy lacked all four as what should have been unified action was instead conducted within multiple parameters set by nature, humans, and the clock. Commanders lost control of the clock, causing clock time to lose its authority to order action. The military precision and coordination essential for a Confederate victory fragmented into multiple and often conflicting times, yet out of this temporal chaos emerged a new time. On the home front, battle time accomplished what it could not on the battlefields. At Gettysburg, battle time rippled out to disrupt the antebellum schedules of Gettysburg’s residents and became the ultimate arbiter of time. On the Confederate side, Lee largely manufactured the temporal conflicts that plagued his forces at Gettysburg. He assumed that his commanders perceived and applied time in the same fashion as he did. According to Prussian military strategist Carl Von Clausewitz, “there are no hard and fast rules that govern the conduct of war; it is the presence of the commander that decisively influences the course of events.” Lee was responsible for orchestrating “the actions of a large and complex organization under the most difficult circumstances and . . . impos[ing] his will on people with whom he ha[d] little or no direct contact. . . . [H]e must get them to act as he would wish even though he cannot know all the situations they will face.” Lee needed to know where all parts of his army were or were supposed to be, but at Gettysburg, he lacked this knowledge. Instead of coordinating his military, he left the matters “up to God and the subordinate officers” and as a result failed to synchronize his army.2 36 Chapter Two Ill suited to the situation, Lee’s attack strategy illustrated the “dissonance betweenwhatheknewtobetheproperstrategy”andwhathedid.“Intenton keeping the details of his plans secret from the Richmond authorities,” Lee “was reluctant to share them with his principal subordinate commanders.” Despite “an engineer’s love of precision,” Lee rarely issued exact or detailed written orders but instead provided his field commanders with cryptic, vague, and poorly defined instructions that lacked strict time sequences or deadlines. He often refused to issue direct orders specifying times of attack but instead left the timing...