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could see in the fading light that the Union position on Cemetery Hill was formidable. He suspected correctly that newly arriving Union troops were within reinforcing distance. So he decided it was not practicable to attack.
    Because the Confederates failed to take Cemeteryand Culp's Hills on July 1, Union troops were able to consolidate their position there and on the ridge extending south from Cemetery Hill during the night. General Meade arrived after midnight and decided to stay and fight from this strong defensive position. Ewell's failure to attack has thus been one of the biggest of many ifs concerning the battle of Gettysburg over the years, if Jackson had still been alive and in command of this corps, would he have attacked? And
if
he—or Ewell—had done so, would the Confederates have carried the position? Would the battle—and perhaps the war—then have come out differently?
    No one can know. Ewell could probably have sent no more than ten or twelve thousand men of his own corps into such an attack, and Lee had told him he could expect no support from any other part of the army. Union forces defending the hills were almost as numerous, dug in and less disorganized than critics of Ewell assume them to have been. General Howard perhaps deserved those Thanks of Congress after all. The best historians of the battle believe that Ewell made the right decision. And as one of those historians put it, “responsibility for the failure of the Confederates to make an all-out assault on Cemetery Hill on July 1 must rest with Lee.” He was the commanding general. He was present on the ground. If he wanted an attack, he should have organized and ordered it.
    Night fell on a field made hideous by three thousand dead and dying soldiers and the moans of many of the additional seven or eight thousand wounded. The exhausted survivors slept fitfully unsure of what the morrow might bring.



Day Two: July 2, 1863
    B Y DAWN OP July 2, all of the Army of Northern Virginia had reached Gettysburg except Stuart's cavalry and Major General George Pickett's division plus Brigadier General Evander Law's brigade, both in Longstreet's corps. On the Union side, the large Sixth Corps was still many miles away while the Fifth Corps was nearing the battlefield after an all-night march.
    Lee was eager to renew the attack, believing that momentum and morale were with his army. From their observation post near the Lutheran Seminary, Lee and Longstreet peered through their binoculars at the Union lines a mile or more away. These lines occupied the high ground south of town in a shape that resembled an upside-down fishhook with its barbed end curving from Culp's Hill through Cemetery Hill and the shank running south along Cemetery Ridge to the eye of the hook on the rockyprominence of Little Round Top. This was a strong position. It followed high ground except for a half-mile just north of Little Round Top, where the ridge dipped into a swale commanded by higher ground in a peach orchard along the Emmitsburg Road nearly a mile to the west. The convex shape of the Union line, with its flanks only two miles apart, enabled troops to be shifted quickly from one place to another to reinforce weak spots. By contrast, the much longer concave exterior lines held by the Confederates made communication between the widely separated flanks slow and difficult.
    A master of defensive tactics, Longstreet recognized the strength of the Union position. Some Southern officers considered Longstreet ponderous, stubborn, and phlegmatic. But in reality he was reflective and sagacious. He recognized better than some of his colleagues that courage and dash could not overcome determined defenders armed with rifled muskets. These weapons had an accurate range three times greater than the smoothbore muskets of the Napoleonic Wars or the Mexican War, in which many senior Civil War commanders (including Longstreet) had fought.
    After studying the Union position on the morning of