The High Ground and the Hesitation: Ewell’s Failure at Cemetery Hill
There is a question Civil War historians have been arguing about for over 160 years, and it is one of the first things any serious student of Gettysburg eventually has to sit with: why didn’t Ewell take Cemetery Hill?
The historical debate has produced answers over the decades, most of them centered on Ewell’s personality, his inexperience with corps command, the ambiguity of Lee’s orders, the fatigue of his men. All of those arguments have merit. None of them fully satisfied me upon this reexamination.
Working through the Adversity Nexus and Epistemic Rigidity as analytical tools has changed that. What I want to do in this article is answer that question as best as I can, because I think Ewell’s hesitation on the afternoon of July 1, 1863, is one of the clearest example of leadership paralysis I have encountered in any context. Military, corporate, or otherwise.
The Situation as Ewell Saw It
By approximately 4:00 in the afternoon, the Union position north and west of Gettysburg had collapsed. Richard Ewell’s Second Corps, driving from the north, had broken through the Union Eleventh Corps and sent it streaming back through the streets of Gettysburg in what looked very much like a rout. A.P. Hill’s Corps was pressing from the west simultaneously. The Union First and Eleventh Corps, fighting desperately since morning, were overwhelmed and falling apart.
It was, by almost any military measure, a Confederate success. The question was what came next.
South of town rises a piece of ground called Cemetery Hill. It sits sharply at Gettysburg’s southern edge and commands the surrounding terrain in every direction. Anyone who has stood on that hill and looked north across the fields toward town understands immediately why it mattered. Artillery placed there covers almost every approach. Infantry defending it holds an enormous positional advantage. Whoever controlled Cemetery Hill controlled the battlefield, and by extension, whatever battle was about to happen on the following days.
Winfield Scott Hancock understood this the moment he arrived on the field. Sent by Meade to take command after Reynolds was killed, Hancock rode hard to Cemetery Hill and immediately began doing the only thing available to him: projecting a confidence he did not fully have the troops to back up, buying time minute by minute while he positioned what little he had and waited for reinforcements. He later said he was essentially bluffing. The hill was thin, the men on it were shaken, and for a window of roughly ninety minutes in the late afternoon, the Confederates could have taken it.
Ewell chose not to try.
Lee’s Role in the Decision
Before I get into Ewell specifically, Lee deserves attention here, because the order Ewell received from Lee is itself a leadership example worth examining.
Lee, watching the battle develop from Seminary Ridge, could see the Union collapse. He could see the retreating Federals moving south through town toward the high ground. He recognized the opportunity. He sent word to Ewell to pursue the retreating Union forces and take Cemetery Hill “if practicable,” meaning if it could be done without too great a risk.
Two words. “If practicable.”
Lee’s order was discretionary, and the historians have debated endlessly whether it should have been. Stonewall Jackson, under whom Ewell had served brilliantly as a division commander, was known for giving clear, direct orders. Lee operated differently, preferring to give his corps commanders latitude to exercise judgment based on local conditions. That approach had worked well with Jackson, who had an exceptional ability to read situations independently and act on them decisively. But Jackson was dead, killed at Chancellorsville six weeks earlier, and Ewell was not Jackson.
The “if practicable” order is, through the Epistemic Rigidity lens, a product of the Einstein Effect working on Lee himself. Lee had built a command culture around his own authority and his army’s record of success. Within that culture, his subordinates had learned to execute his vision brilliantly. What the culture had not systematically built was the capacity for independent initiative at the corps level when the commanding general’s guidance was ambiguous. Lee’s Motivated Reasoning told him Ewell would read the situation and act. His Confirmation Bias filtered out the signals that Ewell, in his first major independent action as a corps commander, might need clearer direction to overcome his own hesitation. Lee gave a vague order to a man who needed a direct one, and then left the outcome to a decision-making process he had not adequately prepared his subordinate to execute.
This is a pattern worth noting because it will appear again across Days 2 and 3 in more consequential form. Lee’s command style, so effective when his subordinates had the cognitive flexibility and experience to exercise bold initiative, became a liability when those subordinates were in stages of the Adversity Nexus where the familiar solution was already doing the work before the deliberation began.
Ewell: Stage 5 to Stage 6 in Real Time
Ewell’s position in the Adversity Nexus on the afternoon of July 1 is the most important analytical question this article has to answer, and I want to be precise about it because I think it is often misread.
His hesitation was not the behavior of a man in Stage 5, operating from the confidence of the army’s accumulated success. Heth’s advance that morning had been Stage 5, pressing forward on assumption and inherited confidence. Ewell, by the time Lee’s order reached him in the late afternoon, had already crossed into Stage 6. His focus had shifted entirely from seizing the opportunity ahead to protecting what had already been gained that day.
The Stage 6 description from the Adversity Nexus is precise about what this looks like: safety refers to the state of stability and security that individuals seek to protect themselves from potential harm, uncertainty, or disruption. An excessive emphasis on safety can inadvertently slow progress and hinder innovation. The vision is lost, and most efforts refocus on maintaining the status quo. Fear of losing this status drives bias, leading to distorted responses and decisions.
Read that and then read what Ewell was doing in those ninety minutes. He had won the afternoon. His men had performed brilliantly. The tactical victory was real and substantial. And he did not want to risk it on an attack that might fail, that might expose a flank he was uncertain about, that might turn a successful day into a costly overreach. His mental energy in those ninety minutes was organized almost entirely around what he might lose rather than what he might gain.
The vision, taking the high ground that would determine the entire battle’s outcome, had been subordinated to preserving the status quo of the afternoon’s success. That is a textbook Stage 6 transition, and it happened not because Ewell was a coward or a poor general in any fundamental sense, but because the Adversity Nexus predicts exactly this kind of cognitive shift when leaders have moved from the urgency of adversity into the comfort of achieved success.
The Epistemic Rigidity at Work: Einstellung Effect as Primary Driver
The Einstellung Effect is the tendency to rely on familiar solutions even when better options are available. It is especially powerful in experts with deeply ingrained knowledge and practices. In leadership contexts it manifests as applying yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems, creating cognitive blindness to novel approaches.
Ewell’s entire military career, including his distinguished service as a division commander under Jackson, had been built on a set of tactical principles that had served him well: read the flanks, verify intelligence, do not overextend, wait for clarity before committing to an assault. These were not bad principles. They had worked brilliantly across multiple campaigns and had made him one of the more respected division commanders in the Confederate army.
But Cemetery Hill on the afternoon of July 1 was not a situation where those principles applied cleanly. It was a moment that required improvised, aggressive pursuit into uncertain conditions precisely because the window was fleeting and the stakes were total. The Einstellung Effect prevented Ewell from generating that option as a serious possibility. The familiar solution, assess the flanks, weigh the risks, wait for more information, was already selected before the deliberation formally began. He never arrived at “push Early’s division south immediately, accept the disorder, take the hill before Hancock fills it” as a genuine option. The bias had already done its filtering.
Dunning-Kruger is worth noting as a secondary driver here, and I want to apply it precisely rather than lazily. Ewell was not incompetent. The standard Dunning-Kruger reading, the novice who doesn’t know what they don’t know, does not fit him. What fits him is a more specific version of the effect: the recently promoted expert who is exceptionally well-calibrated at their previous level and has not yet fully calibrated their competence at the new one. Ewell had been extraordinary as a division commander executing Jackson’s orders. Corps command, particularly the kind of independent initiative that an ambiguous discretionary order at a decisive moment demands, was a genuinely different cognitive challenge. He knew what he knew brilliantly, and what he did not yet fully know was how to override his own deliberative instincts when the situation demanded it.
Motivated Reasoning rounds out the picture as a third contributor. Ewell received reports of Union forces at Culp’s Hill to his east that might threaten his flank if he advanced south. Later analysis suggests those forces were far less substantial than he feared in the moment. But Motivated Reasoning, the tendency to fit new information into preexisting frameworks based on emotional or motivational factors, caused him to weight those reports heavily. He was already oriented toward caution. The flank reports gave him a rational-sounding justification for what his Stage 6 security instinct had already decided. That is how Motivated Reasoning works at its most insidious: it does not create the conclusion. It constructs the argument that makes the conclusion feel like deliberation.
Hancock: What Stage 1 Looks Like Under the Same Pressure
The contrast Hancock provides is worth examining not as a simple “good leader versus bad leader” comparison, but as an illustration of what the Adversity Nexus predicts about cognitive clarity at different stages.
Hancock arrived on Cemetery Hill in genuine crisis. The position was thin, the men were shaken, the situation was about as close to Stage 1 adversity as a military commander can experience without being in full retreat himself. Everything was uncertain. Nothing was comfortable. And Stage 1 of the Adversity Nexus is precisely where authentic desire for transformational change emerges, and where leaders step forward to navigate uncharted waters with the audacity to challenge existing norms.
Hancock did not wait for complete information. He did not catalog the risks before acting. He rode along the crest of the hill projecting command authority, positioning units where they needed to be, and manufacturing the appearance of a far stronger defense than he actually had. He was improvising aggressively in a fluid situation, doing cognitively the opposite of what Ewell was doing half a mile away.
The reason is not that Hancock was inherently braver or more talented than Ewell, though he was a genuinely excellent officer. It is that his Epistemic Rigidity was not controlling his decisions in the same way. When you are in genuine Stage 1 adversity, the survival imperative cuts through the noise that builds during periods of abundance. You cannot reach for familiar solutions because nothing about the situation is familiar. The Einstellung Effect loses its grip when there is no accumulated comfort to anchor it. Paradoxically, the desperation of Stage 1 can be a corrective for the cognitive paralysis that Stage 6 produces.
Ewell had no such corrective available to him. His success earlier in the day had insulated him from the urgency that might have broken through his own framework. That is the cruel irony of the Safety Paradox in real time: the very success that validated his caution was the thing that prevented him from seeing clearly enough to act.
What a Different Decision Looks Like
The Reasoned Leadership framework asks us to go beyond identifying the failure and work backward through the bias to understand what recognition of the pattern might have produced.
For Ewell, the Einstellung Effect is best addressed through what the framework calls forced novel approach generation, requiring multiple solutions before selecting any. If someone on his staff had asked, “General, before we hold, what are the two other things we could do right now?”, that single prompt might have surfaced the option he never generated on his own: push Early’s division south immediately, accept the disorder and the flank uncertainty, and take the hill before it is filled. He never arrived at that option because the bias had already done its filtering before the deliberation started.
For Lee, the correction sits a level higher. His vague discretionary order reflected a command culture that had not built the structural capacity for subordinates to exercise bold independent initiative when the commanding general’s guidance was ambiguous. A Contrastive Inquiry approach at the command level would have required Lee to ask himself: does Ewell have what he needs to make this decision correctly, or does this moment require a direct order? That question would have forced a genuine assessment of his subordinate’s readiness rather than an assumption built on the army’s collective record.
The deeper issue for both men connects to the Adversity Nexus transition from Stage 5 into Stage 6. When leaders cross that threshold, their decisions begin to be organized around loss avoidance rather than vision pursuit. Ewell’s calculation that afternoon was fundamentally about what he might lose. Lee’s failure to intervene was built on an assumption about what his army had already secured. Neither calculation was oriented toward the question the framework insists is the right one: does this decision move us closer to or further from the vision?
The vision was Cemetery Hill. The vision was winning the battle. The vision was the campaign’s strategic purpose. And in the ninety minutes when that vision was actually within reach, two leaders at two different levels of the same command structure were both, for different reasons and from different stages of the same cycle, thinking about everything except the vision.
The hill sat undefended long enough to be taken. It was not taken. And the Army of Northern Virginia spent the next two days paying for that decision in blood.
Next in the series: Article 3, “How a Battle That Shouldn’t Have Started Almost Ended the War in an Afternoon” pulls the full arc of July 1 together and examines what the Adversity Nexus and Epistemic Rigidity reveal when an entire command structure is running the same biases simultaneously.
This article is part 2 of the 6-part series Three Days at Gettysburg: A Reasoned Leadership Analysis
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