What the Artillery Colonel Knew (And Longstreet Refused to Say Out Loud)

Added: 2026-05-08

[00:00:01]On the afternoon of July 3rd, 1863, somewhere along a tree line in southern Pennsylvania, a 28-year-old colonel sat with a piece of paper in his hand and the weight of thousands of lives pressing down on his chest. His name was Edward Porter Alexander and in that moment, his commanding general had just done something extraordinary.

[00:00:25]Something almost unthinkable in the chain of command of any army.

[00:00:31]General James Longstreet, one of the most experienced corps commanders in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, had handed the decision to launch the most famous infantry assault in American history to a colonel of artillery.

[00:00:47]Not to a division commander, not to a fellow general. A colonel. Why would Longstreet do that?

[00:00:54]And what does it tell us about what the Confederate High Command actually believed in private about Pickett's Charge?

[00:01:02]Before we continue, be sure to like and subscribe to the channel.

[00:01:07]Question is at the center of what we're going to explore today.

[00:01:11]Because the story most people know about Pickett's Charge is a story of dramatic, almost romantic sacrifice.

[00:01:19]15,000 men stepping out of the tree line, flags flying, marching across nearly a mile of open ground into the guns of the Union Army.

[00:01:30]What that story leaves out is the internal argument happening on the Confederate side, the ammunition crisis no one talks about, and the striking possibility that the men who ordered the charge didn't actually believe it would work.

[00:01:45]We know all of this because one man wrote it down.

[00:01:50]14 years after the battle, Porter Alexander put his recollections on paper in a letter to a French historian. And the result is one of the most candid, self-aware, and analytically honest first-hand accounts to survive the entire Civil War.

[00:02:08]Stay with me because by the end of this video, you'll understand not just what happened on July 3rd, you'll understand why it happened the way it did, and why the man who pulled the trigger spent the rest of his life thinking about it.

[00:02:23]Before we can understand what Alexander did at Gettysburg, we need to understand who he was because his background matters enormously to how he processed the situation.

[00:02:34]Porter Alexander was born in Georgia in 1835.

[00:02:39]He graduated from West Point in 1857, finishing third in his class, and quickly proved himself to be one of those rare officers who combined technical brilliance with genuine battlefield instinct.

[00:02:54]In the years before the Civil War, he was involved in early experiments that would eventually give birth to the US Signal Corps.

[00:03:01]So, this was a man who understood communication, coordination, and the flow of information under pressure before most military officers even had a vocabulary for it.

[00:03:12]When the war came, Alexander went with his state. He joined the Confederacy and built a reputation battle by battle.

[00:03:20]First Manassas, the Peninsular Campaign, Second Manassas, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville.

[00:03:28]At each engagement, his artillery placements helped shape Confederate outcomes. He was meticulous. He was precise. And critically, he had served as chief of ordnance for the Army of Northern Virginia from August 1861 through November 1862, meaning he knew better than almost anyone else in that army exactly how much ammunition they had and exactly how fast they could burn through it.

[00:03:57]That background becomes crucial as our story unfolds.

[00:04:02]By the time the Army of Northern Virginia marched north into Pennsylvania in the summer of 1863, Alexander was commanding an artillery battalion under Longstreet's First Corps.

[00:04:14]He was 28 years old. He was, by every measure, excellent at his job. And he was about to be handed a responsibility that, as he later wrote, he felt very deeply.

[00:04:26]What Alexander represents in this story isn't just a military figure. He represents something rarer. An honest witness.

[00:04:34]He was not trying to protect his own legacy when he wrote his 1877 letter. He wasn't trying to blame Longstreet or defend Lee or rehabilitate Pickett. He was trying to explain what actually happened and why.

[00:04:48]That kind of candor is valuable precisely because it was so unusual in the postwar South, where the myth of the Lost Cause was being constructed in real time, and where the narrative of Gettysburg was already being shaped and reshaped by men with reputations to protect.

[00:05:05]Porter Alexander had a reputation, too.

[00:05:08]But he also had a conscience.

[00:05:10]Let's set the scene.

[00:05:12]It's before dawn on July 3rd, 1863.

[00:05:16]The Battle of Gettysburg is already 2 days old.

[00:05:19]The first day had ended with the Confederates driving Union forces back through the town and onto the high ground south of it. Cemetery Ridge, Cemetery Hill, Culp's Hill.

[00:05:30]The second day had seen brutal grinding assaults on both flanks of the Union line at places like Little Round Top, the Peach Orchard, and the Wheatfield.

[00:05:39]Those assaults had done real damage, but they hadn't broken the Union Army.

[00:05:44]Robert E. Lee had a decision to make.

[00:05:46]And the decision he made was this, strike the center.

[00:05:50]The plan was to hit the Union line at a point roughly in the middle of Cemetery Ridge.

[00:05:57]The assault would be led by Major General George Pickett's division, fresh troops who had not yet fought at Gettysburg, supported by divisions from A.P. Hill's Corps.

[00:06:07]Before the infantry went forward, a massive artillery bombardment would soften the Union position, silence their guns, and hopefully demoralize their infantry. Porter Alexander received his orders before daylight. His job, post the artillery for the assault. He worked through the night and into the morning positioning his guns.

[00:06:29]By daylight, every battery available was in place.

[00:06:33]He described the morning as being consumed in waiting.

[00:06:36]Waiting for Pickett's division to complete its march and form up. Waiting for the infantry coordination to be finalized. Waiting for the signal that would begin one of the largest artillery bombardments in American military history.

[00:06:50]But here's the thing that doesn't make it into most retellings. While they waited, around 11:00 in the morning, a smaller engagement broke out.

[00:07:00]Skirmishers in A.P. Hill's sector got into a fight over a barn sitting between the lines, and the artillery on both sides gradually joined in.

[00:07:10]A.P. Hill's guns, about 63 of them, exchanged fire with an equal number of Union guns for over half an hour.

[00:07:19]Alexander watched, and he ordered his 75 guns, the guns positioned specifically for the coming assault, not to fire a single shot.

[00:07:29]Why?

[00:07:30]Because he knew something that the men pulling lanyards on Hill's guns may not have been thinking about.

[00:07:36]They had, at best, a very short supply of ammunition.

[00:07:40]Alexander calculated it carefully. Each gun carried roughly 130 to 150 rounds in its limber and caisson, which amounted to about 90 minutes of rapid fire.

[00:07:53]The ordnance trains that had come into Pennsylvania with the army, Alexander believed, carried no more than 60 to 100 additional rounds per gun in reserve.

[00:08:03]And he suspected it was closer to 60.

[00:08:07]Think about what that means. The most important artillery bombardment the Army of Northern Virginia had ever attempted was going to have to be completed on a shoestring. Every round fired unnecessarily before the signal guns went off was a round that couldn't support the infantry when they crossed that field.

[00:08:26]Alexander let Hill's guns burn their ammunition. He didn't touch his own.

[00:08:32]That discipline, born of his experience as chief of ordnance, his understanding of logistics, his knowledge that no supply train in the world was going to replenish them mid-battle, that discipline would define everything that came after.

[00:08:46]And here is something that most accounts of this battle get wrong.

[00:08:51]When you read popular histories of Pickett's Charge, the Confederate artillery bombardment is often described as having lasted for hours, beginning around 11:00 in the morning. But that confusion comes from the barn fight, the skirmisher engagement that pulled Hill's guns into action. Alexander's 75 guns, the ones that actually mattered for the assault, didn't open fire until 1:00 in the afternoon.

[00:09:17]The great cannonade that preceded Pickett's Charge was shorter and more constrained than legend suggests.

[00:09:24]The misunderstanding was baked in from the very beginning.

[00:09:28]Around noon, General Longstreet came to Alexander with instructions. The signal for the bombardment would be two guns fired from the Washington Artillery near the center of the Confederate line.

[00:09:40]When Pickett was ready, Longstreet would give that signal himself.

[00:09:45]In the meantime, he wanted Alexander to find a good observation position, take one of Pickett's staff officers with him, and, and here is the critical phrase, exercise his judgment in selecting the moment for Pickett's advance to begin.

[00:10:00]That's a significant delegation of authority. But, what came next went even further. Shortly after, while Alexander was standing at the edge of the woods with Brigadier General A. R. Wright, a Georgia Brigade commander who had actually fought over some of this same ground the previous afternoon, a courier arrived with a note from Longstreet.

[00:10:21]Alexander kept that note. He quotes it in his 1877 letter, and it reads, in part, "If the artillery fire does not have the effect to drive off the enemy or greatly demoralize him, so as to make our efforts pretty certain, I would prefer that you should not advise General Pickett to make the charge.

[00:10:40]I shall rely a great deal on your good judgment to determine the matter."

[00:10:45]Read that again.

[00:10:47]A lieutenant general, one of the senior commanders in the Confederate Army, was telling a colonel that if the artillery didn't work well enough, the colonel should advise against the charge. He was placing the go or no-go decision in the hands of someone four ranks below him.

[00:11:03]Alexander understood immediately what this meant. It suggested that there was some alternative to the attack.

[00:11:10]If Longstreet was leaving the door open for the assault not to happen, then maybe maybe there was a way out.

[00:11:18]So, Alexander wrote back.

[00:11:20]He told Longstreet that he would only be able to judge the effect of the fire by watching the enemy's return fire and looking for visible signs of demoralization.

[00:11:31]He couldn't see the Union infantry clearly. Smoke would obscure the field.

[00:11:37]And then he said something even more pointed.

[00:11:39]"If there is any alternative to this attack, it should be considered before opening our fire, because firing the bombardment would consume essentially all their remaining artillery ammunition. If the bombardment failed and the charge didn't go, they would have nothing left for another effort."

[00:11:58]"And even if this is entirely successful," Alexander wrote, "it can only be so at a very bloody cost." That sentence tells you everything.

[00:12:07]A 28-year-old colonel of artillery, in a note to his commanding general, had just told Longstreet the truth.

[00:12:15]This plan has a very narrow window of success, and even success will be purchased in blood.

[00:12:21]Longstreet's reply came back quickly.

[00:12:24]And once again, it placed the decision on Alexander's shoulders.

[00:12:29]The infantry would advance if the artillery produced the desired effect.

[00:12:33]"When the moment arrives, advise General P." The letter P meant Pickett. Two notes, both from Longstreet, both deferring to Alexander.

[00:12:43]And as Alexander later wrote, he felt it very deeply, because the day was passing, the men were waiting, and whatever was going to happen had to happen soon.

[00:12:54]While waiting for his reply to reach Longstreet, Alexander had a conversation with General A. R. Wright that proved unexpectedly important. Wright had been one of the Confederate Brigade commanders who attacked Cemetery Ridge the previous afternoon. He and his Georgia Brigade had actually fought their way up onto the high ground. They had been on that ridge. They had seen what was there.

[00:13:19]And Wright told Alexander something that, by Alexander's own account, somewhat reassured him.

[00:13:26]"The difficulty," Wright said, "was not so much in reaching Cemetery Hill or even taking it. His men had done that.

[00:13:34]The problem was holding it."

[00:13:36]The Union Army was massed in a horseshoe shape around those heights.

[00:13:40]A compact interior position with short lines of communication and the ability to reinforce any threatened point very quickly.

[00:13:49]The Confederate line, by contrast, was a long curving arc over 4 mi wide.

[00:13:55]Communication across it was difficult.

[00:13:59]Reinforcing a breakthrough from one end to the other was slow. In other words, Wright was describing a structural problem that no amount of artillery preparation and infantry courage could fully solve. The Union Army's position was geometrically superior for defense.

[00:14:17]And yet Alexander also told himself something in that moment that he would later look back on with something like embarrassment.

[00:14:26]He had heard that morning that General Lee had ordered every brigade in the army to charge Cemetery Hill.

[00:14:33]If that was true, then the question of supports, whether the assault could be sustained after the initial breakthrough, had been given Lee's personal attention.

[00:14:43]Lee had thought about it. Lee had a plan.

[00:14:46]Whether that belief was accurate or whether it was a form of hopeful reasoning in a very stressful moment, Alexander couldn't fully say.

[00:14:55]But, it steadied him. He went to find Pickett. He found the general in the woods, his division forming up for the advance. Without telling Pickett about the questions weighing on him, without revealing the back and forth with Longstreet, Alexander simply gauged the man's mood.

[00:15:12]And Pickett was entirely confident. He was not just willing to make the charge, he was eager for it. He spoke of the opportunity as though the battle was already won, and he was thinking ahead to the celebration. That confidence, paradoxically, made the decision harder, not easier, because Alexander now understood that if the guns open fire, there was no realistic chance of stopping what came next. Pickett was committed.

[00:15:40]The momentum of the entire battle had built to this point. The army had been fighting for 2 days. Lee had staked his Pennsylvania campaign on this moment.

[00:15:50]Alexander made up his mind.

[00:15:53]When the artillery opened fire and was doing its best, would advise Pickett to advance.

[00:15:59]He sent Longstreet a note to that effect. And then he sent for Richardson and his seven reserve howitzers, the fresh guns he had borrowed specifically to accompany the infantry during the advance, to come up through the woods and be ready.

[00:16:14]That last detail matters more than it might seem.

[00:16:18]Alexander had planned ahead. He had thought through the tactical problem of supporting an infantry assault with artillery and had arranged a mobile reserve specifically to follow the infantry forward. It was careful, professional soldiering. And then the plan fell apart before a single gun had fired.

[00:16:38]At 1:00 in the afternoon, by Alexander's watch, the signal guns fired.

[00:16:43]He described it memorably, "As suddenly as an organ strikes up in a church, the grand roar followed from all the guns of both sides."

[00:16:53]170 Confederate guns opened fire. The Union artillery replied in kind.

[00:17:00]The cannonade at Gettysburg on the afternoon of July 3rd was one of the most intense artillery exchanges in the history of North America.

[00:17:09]The sound could be heard in Pittsburgh, over 100 mi away.

[00:17:14]Alexander watched the enemy's return fire closely.

[00:17:18]The Union guns were strong. The fire was heavy.

[00:17:21]And his own guns, while numerous, were working with what he called very defective ammunition, rifle shells that were unreliable with fuses that didn't perform consistently.

[00:17:34]He had originally intended to give Pickett the order to advance within 10 to 15 minutes of the guns finding their range, but the Union fire was so severe that when that window passed, Alexander couldn't bring himself to send the infantry into it.

[00:17:48]He described the moment with painful honesty. He could not make up his mind to order the infantry out into a fire he did not believe they could face.

[00:17:58]So, he waited.

[00:17:59]15 more minutes passed. The fire on neither side slackened. He wrote Pickett a note, not an order. He couldn't quite bring himself to make it an order. It read roughly, "If you are coming at all, you must come immediately or I cannot give you proper support, but the enemy's fire has not slackened materially, and at least 18 guns are still firing from the cemetery itself."

[00:18:24]That note went off at 1:30 in the afternoon.

[00:18:27]What happened next, Alexander learned from Pickett's staff and Longstreet's staff after the battle.

[00:18:34]Pickett received the note, rode to Longstreet, and showed it to him.

[00:18:37]Longstreet read it and said nothing.

[00:18:40]Pickett asked, "General, shall I advance?"

[00:18:43]Longstreet turned in his saddle and could not answer. He simply could not give the order. He turned away. Pickett saluted.

[00:18:51]"I am going to lead my division forward, sir." And he rode off.

[00:18:55]5 minutes after Alexander sent that note to Pickett, 5 minutes, something happened on the Union line.

[00:19:02]The enemy's fire suddenly slackened. The batteries on Cemetery Hill began to limber up. They were withdrawing.

[00:19:09]Now, why did the Union artillery pull back?

[00:19:12]Not because the Confederate guns had destroyed them. The Union commanders had made a deliberate decision to conserve ammunition, knowing the infantry assault was coming and wanting full caissons for canister fire at close range.

[00:19:26]But, Alexander didn't know that in the moment. What he saw was Union guns going quiet and batteries pulling back.

[00:19:33]And he was elated. He waited 5 more minutes, watching through his glass, making sure this wasn't a repositioning rather than a withdrawal.

[00:19:44]Then he sent a courier galloping toward Pickett with a note, "For God's sake, come quick. The 18 guns are gone."

[00:19:51]And almost at that moment, Longstreet rode up alone. He had left his staff behind and come out to Alexander's position to see for himself.

[00:20:00]Alexander showed him the situation and then told him the problem. His ammunition was nearly gone.

[00:20:07]The seven howitzers under Richardson, the reserve he had planned to send forward with the infantry, had been taken away without his knowledge.

[00:20:16]General Pendleton had sent four of them elsewhere. The other three had simply wandered off.

[00:20:21]There was no mobile artillery reserve.

[00:20:24]Longstreet heard this and spoke immediately.

[00:20:28]"Go and stop Pickett right where he is and replenish your ammunition."

[00:20:33]Alexander replied that the ordnance wagons were nearly empty. There were perhaps 20 rounds per gun remaining, not enough to accomplish much.

[00:20:41]And while they were replenishing, the Union Army would be recovering. What Longstreet said next is one of the most remarkable statements to survive the entire battle.

[00:20:52]He looked at Alexander and said, "I don't want to make this charge. I don't believe it can succeed. I would stop Pickett now, but General Lee has ordered it and expects it." The man in command of the assault did not believe it would work.

[00:21:07]And as they stood there, Pickett's lines appeared out of the tree line sweeping forward.

[00:21:13]General Garnett's brigade passed directly over Alexander's position.

[00:21:17]Garnett in his old blue overcoat despite summer heat, riding in front of his men.

[00:21:22]He was sick. He should not have been on horseback. He rode anyway. He did not survive the afternoon.

[00:21:29]What followed is both well-known and almost impossible to fully comprehend.

[00:21:34]Approximately 12,000 to 15,000 Confederate soldiers crossed nearly a mile of open ground under concentrated artillery and musket fire.

[00:21:44]They reached the Union line. Some of them breached it at a point later called the high-water mark of the Confederacy.

[00:21:52]A brief, violent penetration of the Union position near a cops of trees on Cemetery Ridge.

[00:21:58]And then the Union closed around them and Pickett's division was destroyed as a fighting force. Alexander watched it happen. He had ordered every gun with more than 20 rounds remaining to limber up and follow the infantry. He had done what he could.

[00:22:14]But what he could do was not enough and he knew it.

[00:22:19]He wrote afterward that Pickett's division just seemed to melt away in the blue musketry smoke which now covered the hill.

[00:22:27]Nothing but stragglers came back.

[00:22:29]He ceased firing to conserve the last of his ammunition in case the Union Army chose to advance.

[00:22:36]Shortly after, Robert E. Lee arrived at the gun line alone.

[00:22:41]He remained there for half an hour or more, speaking to Pickett's survivors as they straggled back, encouraging them to reform in any cover that they could find.

[00:22:51]The commanding general of the Army of Northern Virginia, who had designed this assault, who had believed it was the right strategic decision, now sat on his horse near Alexander's guns, watching the wreckage of his plan walk back toward him.

[00:23:07]Lee, by all accounts, was calm. He told the men it was his fault, not theirs.

[00:23:12]Meanwhile, Pettigrew's division, meant to support Pickett's right flank, had also been sent forward.

[00:23:19]Alexander saw them pass and felt something close to horror.

[00:23:24]He wrote that the charge might surely be some misapprehension of orders as the circumstances at the moment were making it utterly impossible that it could accomplish anything.

[00:23:34]He thought, "What a pity it is that so many of them are about to be sacrificed in vain."

[00:23:41]And then he shared something he had believed for the rest of his life, that after Pickett's charge failed and the Confederate center had been ground up, the Union Army missed the single greatest opportunity of the entire war.

[00:23:56]Think about what Alexander was describing. The Confederate line had just absorbed a catastrophic loss in its center.

[00:24:04]The survivors were disorganized and exhausted. The artillery had burned through almost every round it had.

[00:24:11]If the Army of the Potomac had launched a coordinated counterattack in those moments, pushed forward aggressively into a mile-wide gap in the Confederate position, Lee's army might not have survived to fight another day.

[00:24:25]It didn't happen. The Union Army was battered, too, and its commanders were cautious.

[00:24:31]Lee retreated across the Potomac, but Alexander never forgot what might have been.

[00:24:37]And he never stopped wondering what would have happened if the seven reserve howitzers had been where he put them, or if Longstreet's note had never arrived, or if he himself had made a different decision in those critical hours when the weight of the thing sat entirely on his 28-year-old shoulders.

[00:24:55]That is the mystery this video began with, not whether Pickett's charge would succeed or fail. History answered that.

[00:25:03]The real mystery is why it was ever ordered in the first place, given that the man in command of it, a lieutenant general with years of battlefield experience, didn't believe it would work. And why was the decision to launch it delegated, however briefly, to a colonel of artillery?

[00:25:20]The most honest answer may be the one Longstreet himself gave, standing next to Alexander's guns while Pickett's men were already in motion.

[00:25:29]"General Lee has ordered it and expects it."

[00:25:33]That was the consequence, not just of the charge itself, but of the culture of command in the Army of Northern Virginia, where Lee's authority and Lee's faith in aggressive offensive action had rarely been questioned.

[00:25:46]Longstreet had argued against the assault. He had said so privately, and he said so to Alexander in those extraordinary moments beside the guns.

[00:25:55]But he could not say no, and so the order passed downward to Alexander, who passed it to Pickett, who saluted and rode forward.

[00:26:05]The guns fell silent. The field filled with smoke, and 14 years later, a man sat down and wrote it all out as carefully and honestly as he could, not to excuse himself, not to blame anyone, but because the Count of Paris had asked, and because the truth, even when it is painful, is worth preserving.

[00:26:28]Porter Alexander lived until 1910.

[00:26:31]After the war, he became a railroad president, a professor at the University of Georgia, and eventually wrote his full memoirs, published posthumously, which historians have long considered one of the finest first-hand accounts of the Civil War ever written.

[00:26:49]What makes him remarkable isn't just what he remembered, but how he remembered it.

[00:26:54]He didn't hide his uncertainty. He didn't pretend his decisions were obvious or inevitable.

[00:27:00]He wrote about the moment he couldn't order Pickett forward with a candor that is almost painful to read.

[00:27:06]He wrote about the missing howitzers, those seven guns that might have supported the infantry advance, with what he called something like an apology.