This text is part of:
[607] far as the Emmettsburg road. Sickles, having been summoned to Headquarters, has left the command of his troops to Birney. But at the very moment when the generals are about to assemble, the cannon's voice, which is heard on the left, calls each of them to his post. Sickles has had no time to dismount from his horse. Meade on this occasion does not hesitate to follow him. It is half-past 3 o'clock: the battle is at last about to commence. The interminable preparations of the Confederates are now completed. We have seen how much precious time has been lost up to noon. At this hour Law joins Hood and McLaws, who have stacked arms and are waiting for him on the right bank of Willoughby Run, between the roads to Chambersburg and Hagerstown, fronting the battlefield of the previous day. The two divisions take up the line of march. McLaws at the head, under the lead of Colonel Johnston of the general staff, proceeds toward the schoolhouse on Willoughby Run. Thence a road winding through the woods will lead him to the Emmettsburg road beyond the orchard, thus enabling him to surround the Federal left. But, having reached a halfway point, the Confederates perceive the summit of the Little Round Top between two hills, as also the flags that are being waved by the Federals on the lookout who occupy it. As Lee has given formal instructions to disguise the march of the First corps, McLaws is brought to a halt while waiting for orders; finally, the column makes a retrograde movement in the direction of the Hagerstown road, to follow it as far as the Black Horse Tavern, and there to take the Millerstown road, in order to reach the schoolhouse by a deviation of about five miles.1
1 Longstreet has blamed Colonel Johnston for having caused his first division to make this long and useless detour. McLaws and Johnston assert, on the contrary, that the direction of the Black Horse Tavern was given by Longstreet himself. We cannot reconcile these different allegations; but we will observe that, in either case, the responsibility belongs to the commander of the First corps, who should have been near the head of his column in order to direct its movements. Johnston adds that the detour imposed upon McLaws' division was an insignificant one, which did not cause him to lose much time. An examination of the map is sufficient to prove that this assertion is inadmissible. But the consequences of the delay in Longstreet's attack were so serious that we have not desired to withhold any of the excuses alleged by the various interested parties.
Philadelphia, Jos. H. Coates and co., 1883.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.