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hours afterward, at 4 P. M., McLaws formed in these same woods.
Longstreet admits that he was ordered at eleven to move to the right to attack with the portion of the command then up, but delayed, on his own responsibility, to await General Laws's brigade, which had been detached on picket.
His disobedience of orders in failing to march at once with his command then present, many believe, lost to Lee the battle of Gettysburg.
With a corps commander who knew the value of time, obeyed orders with promptness and without argument, Lee's movement on Meade's left could have commenced at seven or eight o'clock A. M., with all the chances for success, and there would probably have been no combat on the 3d.
The Third Federal Corps was not all up at the hour the attack should have been made, or a division of the Fifth, or the reserve artillery, or the Sixth Corps.
When McLaws and Hood advanced, eight or nine hours afterward, the conditions had changed; Meade, having relinquished his design to attack from his right, had been steadily strengthening his left, and his whole army was concentrated on a splendid defensive line, for Lee had waited, as if he did not purpose to take advantage of his being first prepared to fight.
The fine Federal position would have been useless to Meade had Longstreet attacked only a few hours earlier, as he might have done, for in that case he would have secured Round Top, six hundred and sixty-four feet high, and one hundred and sixteen feet higher than Little Round Top, one thousand yards north of it, and crowned it with artillery.
“Little Round Top would have been untenable, and Little Round Top was the key point of my whole position,” said Meade; “and if they” (his opponents) “had succeeded in occupying that, it would have prevented me from holding any of the ground I subsequently held to the last.”
Lee to the strong courage of the man united the loving heart of the woman.
His “nature was too epicene,” said an English critic, “to be purely a military man.”
He had a reluctance to oppose the wishes of others, or to order them to do anything that would be disagreeable and to which they would not consent.
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