“I was wounded about the time I suppose the enemy’s second line got into our batteries,—probably a little before that. As described to me afterwards, the result, I think, will carry out my idea in regard to it, because the enemy broke through, forced back my weakest brigade under General Webb, got into our batteries, and the men were so close that the officers on each side were using their pistols on each other, and the men frequently clubbed their muskets, and the clothes of men on both sides were burned by the powder of exploding cartridges. An officer of my staff, Lieutenant Haskell, had been sent by me, just previously to the attack, to General Meade with a message that the enemy were coming. He got back on the top of the hill hunting for me, and was there when this brigade was forced back, and, without waiting orders from me, he rode off to the left and ordered all the troops of the division there to the right. As they came up helter-skelter, everybody for himself, with their officers among them, they commenced firing upon these rebels as they were coming into our lines.”
Had the column been augmented by the divisions of my right, it is probable that its brave men would have penetrated far enough to reach Johnson’s Island as prisoners; hardly possible that it could have returned to General Lee by any other route.
When engaged collecting the broken files after the repulse, General Lee said to an officer who was assisting, “It is all my fault.”
A letter from Colonel W. M. Owen assures me that General Lee repeated this remark at a roadside fire of the Washington Artillery on the 5th of July. A letter from General Lee during the winter of 1863-64 repeated it in substance.
And here is what Colonel T. J. Goree, of Texas, has to say upon the subject:
“I was present, however, just after Pickett’s repulse, when General Lee so magnanimously took all the blame of the disaster upon himself. Another important circumstance, which I distinctly remember, was in the winter of 1863-64, when you sent me from East Tennessee to Orange Court-House with some despatches to General Lee. Upon my arrival there, General Lee asked me into his tent, where he was alone, with two or three Northern papers on the table. He remarked that he had just been reading the Northern reports of the battle of Gettysburg; that he had become satisfied from reading those reports that if he had permitted you to carry out your plan, instead of making the attack on Cemetery Hill, he would have been successful.”
Further testimony to this effect comes from another source:
“In East Tennessee, during the winter of 1863-64, you called me into your quarters, and asked me to read a letter just received from General Lee in which he used the following words: ‘Oh, general, had I but followed your advice, instead of pursuing the course that I did, how different all would have been!’ You wished me to bear this language in mind as your correspondence might be lost.
“Erasmus Taylor.
“Orange County, Va.”