Evolution of Love 2

Meditation on responsibility

At 28, he commanded the artillery for Pickett's Charge. His general made him decide whether 12,000 men should attack. He gave the order. Most of them died.
On July 3, 1863—the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg—Colonel Edward Porter Alexander commanded the massed Confederate artillery that was about to pound Union lines before the infantry assault.
He was 28 years old, and he was about to be handed one of the war's most terrible responsibilities.
Just before the bombardment began, Alexander received a note from General James Longstreet, his commanding officer. It read:
"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. I shall rely a great deal on your good judgment to determine the matter."
Alexander was stunned. Longstreet was making him—a 28-year-old colonel—decide whether to launch one of the war's most massive infantry assaults.
It should have been Longstreet's decision. Or Lee's. But Longstreet, who opposed the attack and had argued against it, was passing the burden to Alexander.
If Alexander ordered the charge and it failed, the blood of thousands would be on his hands.
He sent a hurried reply: If there was any alternative to the attack, it should be carefully considered before he began using his limited ammunition.
Longstreet responded, essentially repeating himself: the infantry would advance if the artillery created the right conditions. Alexander should advise when that moment arrived.
The weight was still on Alexander's shoulders.
He ordered the bombardment to begin.
For two hours, approximately 75 Confederate cannons pounded Union positions along Cemetery Ridge. The noise was deafening. Smoke covered the battlefield. It was the largest artillery bombardment of the war.
But Alexander knew something was wrong. The Confederate guns were overshooting—shells were landing behind Union lines, not on them. And worse, the Union artillery was firing back effectively.
Still, around 1:30 PM, Alexander noticed some Union guns being pulled back. Maybe they were running out of ammunition. Maybe the bombardment had worked.
He had to make a decision. Now.
Alexander sent an urgent message to General George Pickett: "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."
It wasn't a confident recommendation. It was a desperate calculation—go now or don't go at all, because the artillery support was running out.
Pickett showed the message to Longstreet and asked if he should advance. Longstreet, still opposed to the attack, couldn't bring himself to say yes. He just nodded.
Pickett saluted and said, "I am going to move forward, sir."
Twelve thousand Confederate soldiers—Pickett's division and supporting units—stepped out of the woods and began marching across open ground toward Union lines.
It was magnificent and doomed.
Union artillery tore into the advancing lines. Then rifles opened up. The Confederate soldiers kept coming, closing ranks as men fell.
A few hundred made it to the Union lines—the "High Water Mark of the Confederacy"—before being killed or captured.
Over half the attacking force was killed, wounded, or captured. Pickett's division was destroyed.
And Alexander had given the order that launched them.
To understand the weight Porter Alexander carried that day, you need to understand who he was.
Born in Georgia in 1835, Alexander graduated third in his class from West Point in 1857. He was brilliant—particularly in mathematics and engineering.
When Georgia seceded, Alexander resigned his commission and joined the Confederate Army as an artillery officer.
He quickly proved himself exceptional. He pioneered the use of signal flags for battlefield communication. He experimented with observation balloons. At Chancellorsville, his artillery deployment was crucial to Lee's victory.
By Gettysburg, at age 28, he was the chief of artillery for Longstreet's Corps—one of the most important artillery positions in the Confederate Army.
But at Gettysburg, that position came with an impossible burden.
After Pickett's Charge failed, Alexander had to live with his role in ordering it. He'd known the conditions weren't ideal. He'd warned that Union fire hadn't slackened. But he'd given the signal anyway.
For the rest of his life, he analyzed that decision. Could he have refused? Should he have? What if he'd waited longer?
There were no good answers. He'd been given an impossible choice and made the best decision he could with imperfect information.
The war continued for Alexander. In August 1864, during the Siege of Petersburg, he was shot through the shoulder. He survived and returned to duty.
At Appomattox, when Lee was preparing to surrender, Alexander made one final recommendation. He suggested Lee disperse the army—send soldiers home to continue guerrilla resistance rather than formally surrender.
Lee's response was devastating in its moral clarity:
"If I took your advice, the men would be without rations and under no control of officers. They would be compelled to rob and steal in order to live. They would become mere bands of marauders... We would bring on a state of affairs it would take the country years to recover from."
Lee continued: "You young fellows might go bushwhacking, but the only dignified course for me would be to go to General Grant and surrender myself and take the consequences of my acts."
Alexander later wrote: "I had not a single word to say in reply. He had answered my suggestion from a plane so far above it, that I was ashamed of having made it."
It was a lesson in leadership and responsibility that Alexander never forgot.
After the war, Alexander rebuilt his life. He became a mathematics professor. He worked as a railroad executive, eventually becoming president of several railroad companies.
In 1897, President Grover Cleveland appointed him to an international commission resolving a boundary dispute between Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
But Alexander is remembered primarily for his writing. In 1907, at age 72, he published Military Memoirs of a Confederate—widely regarded as the best and most objective memoir written by any Confederate officer.
Unlike many Confederate veterans who romanticized the war or made excuses for defeat, Alexander analyzed battles with brutal honesty. He criticized Confederate mistakes. He acknowledged Union skill. He assessed decisions—including his own—with clear-eyed judgment.
His personal memoirs, unpublished during his lifetime, were finally released in 1989 as Fighting for the Confederacy. They're even more candid, offering unvarnished observations about Confederate leadership, strategy, and the war's conduct.
Historians treasure these memoirs because Alexander wrote without ego or agenda. He was a trained engineer analyzing military operations the way he'd analyze a bridge design—objectively, looking for what worked and what failed.
Edward Porter Alexander died in Savannah, Georgia on April 28, 1910, at age 74.
His legacy is complex. He fought for the Confederacy, defending slavery. That's an inescapable part of his story.
But his military contributions—particularly in artillery tactics and his written analysis—remain studied at military academies today.
And his role at Gettysburg stands as one of the war's most dramatic moments: a 28-year-old colonel forced to decide whether thousands of men should march to probable death.
He gave the order. He lived with that decision for 47 years. And he never stopped analyzing whether he could have chosen differently.
Porter Alexander commanded the artillery for Pickett's Charge. His general made him decide when to attack. He gave the signal.
Over 6,000 men were killed, wounded, or captured in the assault that followed.
He spent the rest of his life trying to understand if he'd made the right call.
That's not just a war story. That's a meditation on responsibility, decision-making under impossible pressure, and living with the consequences of choices that cost lives.