Edward Porter Alexander, Military memoirs of a Confederate: a critical narrative

[75] if only we could succeed in bringing our fighting strength to bear in the right places and at the right times. But just there lay our greatest difficulty and weakness. Our army was not yet organized into corps, our divisions were often too large, and our staff service, by which information and orders were disseminated, was insufficient in amount and deficient in technical training and experience. Johnston was endeavoring to remedy some of these evils by assigning his ranking officers, G. W. Smith, Longstreet, and Magruder, to command two or more divisions each, which he called wings and centre, but such temporary arrangements are always more apt to mar than to promote unity of action. And our general himself was impatient and unmindful of small detail. Let us now have the story of what happened.

To use the slang expression, it was ‘up to’ Johnston to play, and in a conference with Longstreet during the afternoon of May 30, the battle for the next day was planned in accordance with the intimation given D. H. Hill about noon.

The conference was prolonged by the coming up of a violent rain-storm, scarcely second to any in violence, according to my recollection, that I saw during the war. Over three inches of rain must have fallen in the first two hours, and it kept up, more or less, until late at night. It was hoped that this rain would make our task easier by rendering the Chickahominy impassable for reenforcements to the enemy. Indeed, it did have this effect, but not until the night of the day after the rain. The immediate effect was only to make all of our marchings and manoeuvres slower and more difficult, and the flat, swampy country of much of the battle-field was entirely inundated.

During this afternoon — prolonged by the rain-storm — Johnston gave verbal instructions to Longstreet as to the battle of the next day, and it is hard to imagine how any serious misunderstanding of such a simple movement could have taken place in a conversation prolonged for hours. One would need to have heard the whole of it to tell how it arose. But Johnston afterward recognized the fact that it had occurred, and wrote to G. W. Smith that the misunderstanding ‘may be my fault, as I told you at the time.’ Smith, however, denies recollection of any such telling.