Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation by Clifford Dowdey Page A

admirers, however, there was one notable exception: the army’s senior lieutenant general, James Longstreet.
    Antithetical types, Hill and Longstreet had come to an open clash primarily over the difference in their characters and attitudes. While courtly Hill was very punctilious about the forms of the code of personal honor which characterized his class, Longstreet was a bluff man, physically powerful and self-assertive, with little sensitivity to the nuances of human relationships. Although only in his early forties, he had graduated from West Point before the Hill-Heth-Pickett class entered, and he seemed of an older generation. He was slightly deaf, and there was about him the stolid heaviness of a settled man. Forthright in his likes and dislikes, Longstreet was capable of both lasting enmities and lasting affections. He was also more jealous-minded than was known, and jealousy provoked his clash with Hill.
    During the Seven Days a temporary staff officer of Hill’s wrote a newspaper article in which, to add to his own luster, he overpraised Hill. Longstreet, at that time nominally Hill’s superior, felt slighted and had his chief of staff, Moxley Sorrel, write an answer to the paper. Although it was published anonymously, its authorship was no secret in the army, and the next time Colonel Sorrel brought a routine communication from Longstreet, Powell Hill refused to accept it. Long-street, ignoring Hill’s personal motives for refusing the communication, placed him under arrest. Hill, adhering to the personal element, challenged Longstreet to a duel.
    At this point General Lee intervened. Stonewall Jackson had been sent on a semi-independent assignment, and Lee permanently attached Hill’s large division to what was evolving into Jackson’s Second Corps. A. P. Hill also became involved in a dispute with Old Jack, as did many another, but their differences concerned strictly military matters and were smoothed over. Longstreet, however, was a grudge-holder. During his army career he locked horns with four of his subordinate generals—Lafayette McLaws, Evander Law, John B. Hood, and Robert Toombs; he carried his hatred for Jubal Early to the grave; and he wrote vindictively of A. P. Hill and spitefully of Stonewall Jackson long after they were dead.
    What Hill felt about Longstreet is unknown. Killed before the end of the war, he wrote nothing about the period, and his private papers were either destroyed or secreted. With all his affability, Hill revealed nothing intimate about himself in any exchanges that have been recorded, and his carelessness about administrative details made his reports sketchy and impersonal. But Hill was naturally courteous, and by the time the army marched north he and Longstreet were on what might be called speaking terms. There was definitely no more than surface civility between them.
    Their relations presented another incalculable element in Lee’s new organization. The informal command system and discretionary orders favored by Lee presupposed co-operation among his subordinates. Once a battle was joined, communication by courier presented almost insuperable time hazards on a field of any size. Because no sort of communication system from general headquarters was possible, Lee depended on generals who used their own initiative. Some first-class fighting men had been transferrred out of Lee’s army because of their inability to work well with brother officers, and an officer’s ability to make decisions was a primary consideration in Lee’s appraisal of him.
    Powell Hill’s decisiveness amounted almost to impetuosity. He was inclined to make decisions too quickly, too independently. He was one of the men really excited by battle action.
    In addition to his impulsiveness and his uncordial relations with the First Corps commander, there was one other doubtful element in the general of the newly created Third Corps. His casual administrative methods would be taxed by a new