Books: American Heroes

LEE’S LIEUTENANTS. VOLUME III. GETTYSBURG TO APPOMATTOX—Douglas Southall Freeman—Scribner ($5).

Under the warm June sunlight the rich Pennsylvania farmlands unrolled in a vision of wealth that staggered the triumphant, barefoot Army of Northern Virginia. The invasion was a picnic. It was a combination of all the entertainments of rustic America—a horse race, a chicken fry (with requisitioned chickens), a parade—and the prizes were everything that the nation could offer.

The hungry soldiers enjoyed the 25 barrels of sauerkraut they requisitioned at Chambersburg and the cherries that were ripening everywhere. They marched 15 to 20 miles a day without straggling, whooping and yelling as they went. The horses, well fed at last, carried their heads higher and pulled with a firmer step. There was “acid in the air” and mean looks from the townspeople, but the jaunty invaders laughed them off. At York, General “Extra Billy” Smith changed the bands’ tune from Dixie to Yankee Doodle, and even won smiles and cheers from the citizens when he made them a comical speech: the weather was too warm in Virginia, he said, so the Army had moved North.

Happily Lee’s men moved on toward the little town that was to be the greatest battlefield of the Western Hemisphere: Gettysburg. There had never been an invasion in history like this one. There has never been such another.

Officers and Gentlemen. This third volume of Lee’s Lieutenants completes Douglas Southall Freeman’s studies of the men around the Confederacy’s commander. In 1915, Dr. Freeman, then 29, and editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, as he still is, began collecting material on the Army of Northern Virginia. By 1926 he was ready to begin writing his four-volume, authoritative biography, R. E. Lee. It made him famous and virtually ended arguments about the General. Dr. Freeman reputedly knew where Lee had been each hour through the 35,000 hours between the firing on Sumter and the surrender at Appomattox (TIME, Oct. 26, 1942).

When he finished R. E. Lee, Dr. Freeman seemed to have exhausted his subject. But not so: he began the series of sketches of Lee’s corps and divisional commanders that grew into the volumes of Lee’s Lieutenants.

The distinction of Lee’s Lieutenants is its clarity. Dr. Freeman has written some of the most lucid accounts of military action in U.S. literature. Only the Civil War generals themselves have surpassed him. Readers baffled by technical military language can follow his descriptions of complex engagements without trouble. In the process they will become acquainted with (if they never get to know well) some friendly, simple, good-hearted and courageous officers and gentlemen.

To Gettysburg for Shoes. Brigadier General Johnston Pettigrew led the way to Gettysburg because he had heard that he could get shoes for his men there. Major General Harry Heth, his divisional commander, remained .in nearby Cashtown. He wanted to buy a hat.

In the late afternoon of June 30, as Pettigrew’s men approached Gettysburg, they ran into Union cavalry outposts. Some of the officers thought they heard the roll of Union drums on the other side of town. Pettigrew reported back to Heth. The two officers reported together to Lieut. General Ambrose Powell Hill, commanding the III Corps. Hill, who had just come from Lee, believed the Federals were in Maryland, 16 miles away. “If there is no objection,” said Heth, “I will take my division and go into Gettysburg tomorrow and get those shoes.”

“None in the world,” said General Hill. To Death with Boots. In the battle that followed, a third of Lee’s 52 officers above the rank of colonel were casualties. The eleven general officers lost would have been an excessive price to pay for a victory. Johnston Pettigrew was killed. Heth was wounded. General Dorsey Pender, of whom great things were expected, and who had cleared Seminary Ridge when Rodes was stopped, was killed. He had been wounded so often before that he refused to believe the two-inch shell fragment that had struck him would be enough to kill him. General Hood was wounded. General Wade Hampton got two sabercuts in the head and a shrapnel shot in his body. General Isaac Trimble was captured. General Paul Semmes, brother of Raphael Semmes of the Alabama, was killed. Eleven colonels were killed and seven captured.

There were 15 regiments in Pickett’s command. Only one field officer escaped unhurt. Lee did not even attempt to replace the dead officers. The regiments marched back to Virginia under captains.

The End. Jonathan Daniels once observed that as a model hero Robert E. Lee was too good. The purity and nobility of his life made his example discouraging to later generations. They knew they fell so far short of him that they did not even try to live up to his standard of conduct. Lee’s Lieutenants goes a long way toward overcoming this obstacle. It does not make Lee any less great, but it reveals, among the simpler and less venerated men around him, the superb support he had.

In the last pages of this book, after the slow detail on the reorganization of the Army after Gettysburg, and the tragic record of the Wilderness, it is not Lee’s surrender that is memorable, but the spirit of the men who survived. “Go home, boys,” one of them said to Rodes’s veterans, “and act like men, as you always have during the war.”

Flawlessly dressed, mounted on Traveller, Lee rode back alone from Appomattox Courthouse. A cheer began, but it was stifled, as he came through the long lines of exhausted Confederate soldiers. They blanched when they saw him, or stopped suddenly as if in response to a command. Dignity and loftiness remained on Lee’s features, but he battled with his tears, and anguish was cut deep in the angles of his mouth. He made disjointed answers to the men. They followed him, thronged around him, tried to touch him. “At his tent in the woods, all who could do so grasped his hand and made their soldierly avowals and then slowly went away to rage, to ponder, to weep or to lie feebly down and to pray for food and rest.”

One of them wrote: “And was this to be the end of all our marching and fighting for the past four years? I could not keep back the tears that came to my eyes.” Neither, at last, could Lee.