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  Henry Heth, commander of one of the two Light Division brigades slated for the Third Corps’ new division, was promoted to major general and chief of the division. “Harry” Heth was a close friend of A. P. Hill’s and something of a protégé of General Lee’s, who in February had brought him into the Light Division from the western theater. Although Chancellorsville was only his first battle with the Army of Northern Virginia, Heth enjoyed General Lee’s full confidence to manage the new division. “I have a high estimate of Genl. Heth,” Lee assured the president. The makeup of Heth’s division, however, soon became entangled in the highly volatile subject of reinforcements for the Army of Northern Virginia.4

  GENERAL LEE SUPERVISED considerably more than just the Army (and Department) of Northern Virginia. He was responsible as well for operations throughout the Department of Virginia and North Carolina, focusing particularly on the possible enemy approaches to Richmond and on the defense of North Carolina’s coastal region. Early in 1863, in response to a barrage of Federal threats to these areas, Lee had dispatched two brigades of his North Carolina troops, under Robert Ransom and John R. Cooke, to their native state. They were followed south shortly thereafter by Hood’s and Pickett’s divisions, under Longstreet. This cut in strength of 18,600 men left Lee to face Hooker’s attacks at Chancellorsville with only 65,000 men of all arms. The battle’s casualties came to 13,500. Thus simply to return the Army of Northern Virginia to its numbers at the beginning of the year would require 32,100 men.5

  The first effort to meet this shortfall was imaginative, to say the least. On May 7, the day after the Chancellorsville fighting ended, a tired General Lee sent a somewhat rambling proposal to the president “to increase the strength of the Army.” It was his thought to collect reinforcements from the various military departments to the south, where they were likely to be inactive that summer. It would be better, he wrote, “to order Gen. Beauregard on with all the forces which can be spared, and to put him in command here, than to keep them there inactive and this army inefficient from paucity of numbers….” A month later Lee returned to the subject. He repeated to Davis that excess troops should be culled from these coastal areas, and “it would be well for Gen. Beauregard with the force made available … to be sent to reinforce Johnston in the West or be ordered to reinforce this army.” Lee must have also discussed his idea with Longstreet, for on June 3 Old Pete explained to a colleague a plan current in the army to “let Beauregard come here with a Corps. We want everybody here that we can get….”

  Assigning Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard to this scheme was an inspired choice. Lee counted on the fact that Beauregard was as well known to the Yankees as any general in the South. He had commanded the opening guns at Fort Sumter and won the field at First Manassas. He had led an army in the western theater. More than once in 1862 a nervous General McClellan had invoked the shade of Beauregard and his army sweeping out of the west to fall on him. As recently as April, in command at Charleston, Beauregard had driven off a fleet of Union ironclads, inflicting grievous damage. To form a corps under the celebrated “Great Creole” to operate in northern Virginia in connection with the Army of Northern Virginia, so Lee believed, would alarm the Yankees as nothing else could. For whatever reason, however, Lee did not sufficiently pursue this idea with Mr. Davis or Secretary Seddon, and in time he would have cause to regret his oversight.6

  In the meantime, preparing his army to march north and persuaded that the threats to southeastern Virginia and eastern North Carolina had abated, Lee called for the various pieces of his army to be returned to him. This move ran him squarely up against Major General Daniel Harvey Hill.

  In 1861 and 1862 D. H. Hill had served as a superb combat general in the Army of Northern Virginia, but he was so contrary and cross-grained an individual that when in January 1863 Governor Zebulon Vance of North Carolina called for native son Hill to lead the defenders of his state against the Yankee invaders, General Lee raised no objection. By spring, thanks to the infusion of troops from Lee’s army, the situation in North Carolina was stabilized. Then, during the Chancellorsville crisis, Hood’s and Pickett’s divisions were ordered back to the Rappahannock, and soon thereafter Lee sought the return of his other absent brigades. Harvey Hill began to grow very nervous.

  In addition to their foothold at the tip of the Virginia Peninsula, from which they might threaten Richmond, the Federals held Norfolk and Suffolk in southeastern Virginia and various points along the North Carolina coastline, from all of which they might target objectives in General Hill’s bailiwick. Hill’s intelligence on the Federals was sketchy at best, and unaware that he comfortably outnumbered the enemy, he found it easy to become alarmed at his prospects. He insisted that his forces were inadequate and spread too thin, and he determined to at least hold on to the best of them—which happened to be the veteran brigades sent to him from Lee’s army. What followed was an unseemly tug of war between an increasingly willful Harvey Hill and an increasingly angry Robert E. Lee.

  Hill first proposed a simple exchange—untested but fully recruited brigades from his command traded for veteran but depleted brigades from Lee’s. Lee was disapproving. Such a scheme, he pointed out to Hill, would mean “taking away tried troops under experienced officers & replacing them with fresh men & uninstructed commanders. I should therefore have more to feed but less to depend on.” In fact, there would be one such exchange—Junius Daniel’s largely untried North Carolina brigade for Alfred Colquitt’s Georgia brigade that had been bloodied at Chancellorsville, but Lee probably agreed to the trade as a convenient way to rid himself of the inept Colquitt. An essential point of difference remained: Lee was far less alarmed about the Federals’ threat than was Hill, arguing that the enemy was actually reducing his forces along the Atlantic seaboard. “It is of course our best policy to do the same & to endeavor to repel his advance into Virginia,” he observed.

  So far as General Lee was concerned, the central issue here was the return of four brigades he regarded as merely on loan to Hill. These contained some of the best fighting men in his army, commanded by four of his best generals—Robert Ransom and John R. Cooke, whose brigades were sent to North Carolina in January, and Montgomery Corse and Micah Jenkins, whose brigades had been attached to Pickett’s division when it went south but had since been detached for Hill’s purposes. In due course, enduring what he surely regarded as the cruelest of blows, General Lee would find himself crossing the Potomac without a single one of these brigades. And not long afterward, General George Pickett would find himself confronting the challenge of his life … and lacking two of his best brigades.

  How this transpired is a tale of misjudgment and misapprehension. General Lee might simply have ordered his subordinate D. H. Hill to return the four brigades and make the best defense he could with his own troops. As Lee read the intelligence, no great risk was involved. He told Hill he thought “the season has passed for making any movement in North Carolina more than raids of devastation or attempts to retain there our troops in idleness. I hope you will be able to frustrate & punish all such efforts.” But rather than issue direct orders, Lee was strangely indecisive in the matter. He sent Hill discretionary orders—every man not required to suppress such raids “I desire you to send to me & rely upon your good judgment to proportion the means to the object in view.” Considering Hill’s nervous state of mind, this polite instruction fairly begged to be evaded, and it was. 7

  Over the next days and weeks telegrams and letters flew back and forth between Fredericksburg and Goldsboro and Richmond. Troops were started this way and that and then back. President Davis and Secretary Seddon tried to judge and to mediate and to calm. At one point an alarmed Mr. Davis telegraphed Lee that “if last information be correct” from Goldsboro, to release Lee’s brigades now “is to abandon the country to the enemy.” A coldly angry General Lee replied with a stinging review of his dealings with General Hill: “He declined to act and requested positive orders. I gave such orde
rs as I could at this distance. Now he objects. I cannot operate in this manner.” Yet instead of taking a stand, he continued on his indecisive course. He asked to be relieved of command of the Department of Virginia and North Carolina, and thus all supervision over Hill, and suggested that the president issue “such orders to be given him as your judgment dictates.” In a long, conciliatory letter the president tried to smooth his general’s feathers, suggesting that rather than limiting his sphere of command “it would be better for you to control all the operations of the Atlantic slope….“8

  It was finally determined that the two brigades Lee required to fill out Harry Heth’s new division in the new Third Corps would indeed come from D. H. Hill’s command. But they would not be any of those Lee had sought. One was a brigade of North Carolina troops with no appreciable experience, led by Johnston Pettigrew, who was returning to the field after being wounded and captured on the Peninsula. The second brigade comprised one North Carolina and three Mississippi regiments with at least some combat experience, led by a nephew of President Davis, Joseph R. Davis, who had no command experience at all.

  There was a moment late in May when it appeared that two of the brigades Lee sought might actually be released to join him on campaign, but then Federal movements on the Peninsula—tentative movements, as it turned out—so alarmed Richmond that they were recalled. So it happened that the veteran brigades of Ransom, Cooke, Corse, and Jenkins did not march with General Lee on his expedition north of the Potomac. Since the first of the year Lee had lost these four superior brigades and was now gaining but two considerably less than superior ones in return.

  The Federal command on the Atlantic coast supplied the irony in the case. Never known for its initiative, it had managed more by accident than by design to (in Lee’s words) “retain there our troops in idleness.” Harvey Hill expressed no regrets for his mulishness and no sympathy for what Lee was seeking to accomplish. “Genl. Lee is venturing upon a very hazardous movement,” he told his wife; “and one that must be fruitless, if not disastrous.”

  However badly this affair of reinforcements was handled, it was in the end a commentary on the severe manpower strains rending the Confederacy. “I readily perceive the disadvantage of standing still,” President Davis wrote Lee on May 31, “and sorely regret that I can not give you the means which would make it quite safe to attempt all that we desire.“9

  “I AGREE WITH YOU also in believing that our Army would be invincible if it could be properly organized and officered,” General Lee wrote on May 21, replying to a letter from John B. Hood, one of his divisional commanders. “There never were such men in an Army before. But there is the difficulty—proper commanders—where can they be obtained?” In his orders for the army’s reorganization, issued May 30, Lee had to be concerned that his new choices for proper commanders would be worthy of the men they led.10

  The First Corps was the least of his concerns, and the least affected by the reorganization. Longstreet was solid and capable and dependable, always an anchor on which to rely in a battlefield storm. Lafayette McLaws, square-built and burly, displayed many of Longstreet’s qualities, and his division was an experienced one. None of McLaws’s brigadiers—Joseph Kershaw, William Barksdale, Paul Semmes, and William Wofford—was a professional soldier, but each had made himself into a first-rate officer and combat leader.

  In an army of notable fighters, Hood and his division were unsurpassed in the heat of combat. On a battlefield Hood was a magnetic figure to his men, and his fights at Gaines’s Mill on the Peninsula and at Sharpsburg were pivotal actions in those battles. The Texas Brigade, once Hood’s and now under the martial Jerome Bonaparte Robertson, and the Alabamians of Evander Law had fought side by side since the Peninsula campaign. The other two brigades in Hood’s division were equally warlike Georgians, under Henry “Old Rock” Benning and George “Tige” Anderson, with fighting records also dating back to the Peninsula.

  Neither Hood’s division nor Longstreet’s third division, under George Pickett, had been at Chancellorsville, and Pickett himself was something of a latecomer to battle-leading. Wounded at Gaines’s Mill, he had not seen any sustained action since, and the Pennsylvania campaign would mark his first serious test in divisional command. He was a protégé of Longstreet’s, and celebrated for the dashing figure he cut. “Long ringlets flowed loosely over his shoulders, trimmed and highly perfumed,” wrote a Longstreet staff man of Pickett; “his beard likewise was curling and giving out the scents of Araby.“11

  The two brigades detached for D. H. Hill’s benefit left Pickett with but three brigades, all of Virginians. His brigadiers were strikingly varied. Lewis Armistead was a brusque, crusty veteran of the old army, where after twenty-two years he had reached the rank of captain. Richard Brooke Garnett, a West Pointer who served in California with Armistead before the war, had incurred the wrath (unjustly) of Stonewall Jackson while leading the Stonewall Brigade, and now was consumed by the need to regain his honor. The third brigadier, James Kemper, was of the species political general—he had been speaker in the Virginia legislature—but with a grounding in military affairs that had made him a quick study and an able leader.

  In contrast to the First Corps, the Second had to absorb and adjust to many changes after Chancellorsville. The new corps commander, Dick Ewell, appeared to have the confidence of everyone in the corps—everyone except perhaps himself. Ewell would write that he was “provoked excessively with myself at times at my depression of spirits & dismal way of looking at every thing, present & future & may be next day considering the same things as all ‘Couleur de rose.’” The appointment seems to have caused General Lee some unease. In a postwar conversation, Lee said he had been aware of a certain “want of decision” that sometimes affected Ewell, and that before the Pennsylvania campaign he “talked long and earnestly with him” about it.12

  Ewell’s old division had been led since his wounding at Second Manassas by Jubal Early, widely acknowledged to be the most ill-tempered officer in the Army of Northern Virginia. Stooped by rheumatism and careless of appearances, Early was snarling and aggressive on the battlefield and off. General Lee called him “my bad old man” and trusted him with independent commands, but how Early might fare under Ewell’s direction rather than Jackson’s was less clear. Early’s four brigades were led by an uncertain mix of officers. Harry Hays was fully up to the challenge of managing his rough-hewn brigade of “Louisiana Tigers,” and John B. Gordon had earned the devotion of his Georgians. Before a charge Gordon assured them, “I ask you to go no farther than I am willing to lead!” and he was as good as his word. But there were questions about Early’s other two brigades. Robert Hoke had gone down with a wound at Chancellorsville, and his brigade was now in the hands of Isaac Avery, a colonel exercising his first high command. Sixty-five-year-old William “Extra Billy” Smith—his sobriquet came from the extra fees he had collected as a mail contractor during Andrew Jackson’s administration—was a former governor (and now governor-elect) of Virginia and the oldest general in the army. In commanding a brigade Extra Billy was straining the limits of his martial abilities. 13

  Robert Rodes had risen from captaining the company of “Warrior Guards” in Alabama in 1861 to earning the equivalent of a battlefield promotion to major general for the fight he made at Chancellorsville. A graduate of the Virginia Military Institute—he was the only non-West Pointer among Lee’s division commanders—Rodes had the visage of a Viking warrior and was considered one of the rising stars in the army. His brigade leaders were, like Early’s, a mixed lot. George Doles and Stephen Dodson Ramseur were highly rated leaders who most recently had spearheaded Jackson’s flank attack at Chancellorsville. Alfred Iverson, however, was embroiled in bitter turmoil with his North Carolinians, and Edward O’Neal, a lawyer and politician in civilian life, had brought not a shred of military experience when he joined up—and it showed at Chancellorsville in his first brigade command. Rodes’s fifth brigade was Junius Daniel’s, br
ought up from North Carolina in trade for Alfred Colquitt’s brigade. Daniel’s men were inexperienced, but there were almost 2,200 of them, and Daniel himself was a West Pointer with considerably more leadership promise than the departed Colquitt.

  Ewell’s third division, once Stonewall Jackson’s old division, underwent a complete change in its high command as a consequence of Chancellorsville. Raleigh Colston had led it poorly there, and Lee took the unusual step (for him) of unceremoniously relieving him. Colston’s replacement was Edward Johnson, known as “Allegheny” for the mountains in western Virginia he had defended early in the war, and to distinguish him from the three other General Johnsons in Confederate service. He had been wounded in the Valley campaign, where he attracted the attention of Jackson, who bid for his services when he would be fit for duty. That proved only in time for the Pennsylvania campaign. Allegheny was rough-edged and something less than a gentleman, and it was a question how he would take to the new command—his first in a year—and especially to four new heads of brigade.

  The Stonewall Brigade mourned its commander, E. F. Paxton, killed at Chancellorsville, but his replacement was the quite capable James A. Walker. George H. Steuart took over the brigade of Edward Warren, wounded at Chancellorsville. “Maryland” Steuart he was called, a hard-bitten regular who Lee hoped would bring harmony to a bickering brigade made up of Marylanders, Virginians, and North Carolinians. The division’s Louisiana brigade had also seen its general, Francis Nicholls, wounded in the late battle; the senior colonel, Jesse M. Williams, replaced him.