Upon the first manifestation of Confederate movements on the right and left, we know that the Fifth Corps was immediately drawn in closer, and about nine o’clock massed at the bridge over Rock Creek on the Baltimore pike, ready for developments. Meade thought Lee intended to attack his right. That Lee contemplated it is quite certain. Colonel Venable, of his staff, was sent about sunrise to consult with Lieutenant-General Ewell upon the feasibility of a general attack from his front. Lee wanted Ewell’s views as to the advisability of moving all the available troops around to that front for such a purpose. Venable and Ewell rode from point to point to determine if this should be done. Finally, Venable says, Lee himself came to Ewell’s lines, and eventually the design for an attack on the Union right was abandoned.
Where the Fifth Corps was finally massed, it was only one and a half miles in the rear of General Sickles’s position. Moreover, it had an almost direct road to that point. This facility for reinforcing incidentally illustrates the advantages of the Union position. At the same hour General Longstreet’s troops were still massed near the Chambersburg pike, three miles on a straight line from the point of attack. That is to say, Longstreet had twice as far to march on an air-line to strike Sickles “up the Emmitsburg road” as Sykes had to reinforce the threatened point. But, in fact, Sykes’s advantage was far greater in point of time, because, by order of Lee, Longstreet was compelled to move by back roads and lanes, out of sight of the enemy’s signal officers on Round Top. His troops actually marched six or seven miles to reach the point of deployment.
Longstreet eventually attacked about 4 P.M., and the Fifth Corps was used very effectively against him. But no historian who esteems the truth, with the undisputed records before him, will deny that it could and would have been used just as effectively at seven or eight o’clock in the morning. The moment Longstreet’s movement was detected it was immediately hurried over to the left and occupied Round Top. If Longstreet had moved earlier, the Fifth Corps also would have moved earlier. It could have been on Sickles’s left and rear as early as seven o’clock A.M., had it been necessary. If Ewell and not Longstreet had delivered the general attack it would have been found in his front.
It is mathematically correct to say that the troops which met Longstreet on the afternoon of the 2d could have been brought against him in the morning. The reports of General Meade, General Sykes, the commander of the Fifth Corps of Sykes’s brigade, and regimental commanders, and various other documentary history bearing on the subject, are convincing upon this point.
General Sickles’s advance was made in consequence of the Confederate threatening, and would have been sooner or later according as that threatening was made. The critics ignore this fact.
General Longstreet says on this point:
“General Meade was with General Sickles discussing the feasibility of moving the Third Corps back to the line originally assigned for it; the discussion was cut short by the opening of the Confederate battle. If that opening had been delayed thirty or forty minutes, Sickles’s corps would have been drawn back to the general line, and my first deployment would have enveloped Little Round Top and carried it before it could have been strongly manned. The point should have been that the battle was opened too soon.”
So much for one part of Gordon’s assumption, based upon other assumptions founded upon an erroneous presumption, that if Longstreet had taken wings and flown on an air-line from his bivouac at Marsh Creek to the Federal left and attacked at sunrise he would have found no enemy near the Round Tops.
In another equally unwarranted assumption of what the “impartial” military critic will consider an “established fact,” Gordon declares:
“Secondly, that General Lee ordered Longstreet to attack at daylight on the morning of the third day, and that the latter did not attack until two or three o’clock in the afternoon, the artillery opening at one.”