The Man Who Saved the Union

by H. W. Brands

  Meade’s strategy was simplicity itself: “to find and fight the enemy,” he said. Finding the Confederates wasn’t hard, for on the approach of Meade’s army Lee concentrated his troops for battle. Lee’s foragers could obtain food from the neighborhood, but his army required ammunition from Virginia. He couldn’t let Meade cut him off.

  When the battle began, at Gettysburg on July 1, most of the country concurred with Meade that its outcome would determine the fate of the Union. The first day’s fighting favored the Confederates but not decisively; Lee and Meade brought up their whole armies to settle the issue the next day. “The sun of the 2nd of July rose brightly upon these two armies marshalling for battle,” Carl Schurz remembered. Schurz was a German native who had fled his homeland after agitating unsuccessfully for democratic change during the abortive revolution of 1848. He became a Republican in the 1850s and an officer in the Union army after the outbreak of the war. He commanded a division of Meade’s army at Gettysburg. “Neither of them was ready,” he continued, regarding the two armies. “But as we could observe from Cemetery Hill, the Confederates were readier than we were.” Cemetery Hill was the strong point of the Union defenses, and Meade arrived on the morning of July 2 to examine the position. “His long-bearded, haggard face, shaded by a black military felt hat the rim of which was turned down, looked careworn and tired, as if he had not slept that night,” Schurz said. “The spectacles on his nose gave him a somewhat magisterial look. There was nothing in his appearance or his bearing—not a smile nor a sympathetic word addressed to those around him—that might have made the hearts of the soldiers warm up to him, or that called forth a cheer.… His mind was evidently absorbed by a hard problem.” Schurz nonetheless thought Meade inspired confidence. “The officers and men, as much as was permitted, crowded around and looked up to him with curious eyes, and then turned away, not enthusiastic but clearly satisfied.”

  Schurz asked Meade how many men he had for the battle. “In the course of the day I expect to have about 95,000,” Meade replied. “Enough, I guess, for this business.” He gazed across the battlefield and said quietly, as if to himself: “We may fight it out here just as well as anywhere else.”

  Lee thought so too, and he hurled his 70,000 against Meade’s force. His spearhead was a corps under James Longstreet, which attacked Schurz’s sector of the Union lines. “We heard a confused noise on our left,” Schurz remembered, “a continuous rattle of musketry, discharges of artillery now thundering with rapid vehemence, then slackening as if batteries were silenced, then breaking out again with renewed violence, and from time to time something like an echo of a Union cheer or a rebel yell.” A projection of Cemetery Ridge blocked Schurz’s view from Cemetery Hill; for a time he couldn’t tell whether the Union troops or the Confederates were gaining the advantage. “But looking to our rear we observed how regiment after regiment was taken from our right wing to be hurried as quickly as possible toward the left of the army as reinforcement. The fire grew more furious from minute to minute, and about half after six, the roar of the battle actually seemed to indicate that our line was yielding.” At that moment one of Schurz’s captains galloped up with word that the Union Third Corps had been routed and the enemy was closing in. Without help, Schurz and his division would be surrounded and forced to surrender. “It was a moment of most anxious suspense,” Schurz said. “But it did not last long. Loud and repeated Union cheers on our left, which could be heard above the din of battle, told us that relief had come in time and had rolled back the hostile wave.”

  The day ended in a bloody draw. “We had a great fight yesterday, the enemy attacking and we completely repulsing them,” Meade wrote his wife the next morning. “Both armies shattered.”

  But not shattered enough not to fight a third day. Lee awoke early and rode with James Longstreet to the highest point on Seminary Ridge, which overlooked most of the battlefield. George Edward Pickett had arrived with his division the day before, and he came upon Lee and Longstreet as the former was explaining his battle plan. Longstreet was loudly skeptical. “Great God!” he said. “Look, General Lee, at the insurmountable difficulties between our line and that of the Yankees: the steep hills, the tiers of artillery, the fences, the heavy skirmish line. And then we’ll have to fight our infantry against their batteries. Look at the ground we’ll have to charge over, nearly a mile of that open ground there under the rain of their canister and shrapnel.” Lee replied calmly: “The enemy is there, General Longstreet, and I am going to strike him.”

  Lee’s third-day attack began with an artillery barrage that lasted two hours. The Confederate guns gradually silenced the Union batteries, although Lee couldn’t tell whether the cessation was voluntary on Meade’s part or compelled by the pounding of the Southern bombardment. As the Union salvos started to ease, Pickett rode up to Longstreet. “I found him like a great lion at bay,” Pickett wrote his wife just moments later. “I have never seen him so grave and troubled. For several minutes after I had saluted him he looked at me without speaking. Then in an agonized voice, the reserve all gone, he said: ‘Pickett, I am being crucified at the thought of the sacrifice of life which this attack will make. I have instructed Alexander’—the Confederate artillery commander—‘to watch the effect of our fire upon the enemy, and when it begins to tell he must take the responsibility and give you your orders, for I can’t.’ ”

  Longstreet was still speaking when a messenger rode up with a note for Pickett from Alexander. “If you are coming at all, come at once,” the note said. Pickett read it, handed it to Longstreet and asked if he should obey it. “He looked at me for a moment, then held out his hand,” Pickett told his wife. “Presently, clasping his other hand over mine without speaking, he bowed his head upon his breast. I shall never forget the look in his face nor the clasp of his hand when I said: ‘Then, General, I shall lead my division on.’ ”

  Frank Haskell of the Union Second Corps observed Pickett’s division from across the valley. “Every eye could see his legions, an overwhelming, resistless tide of an ocean of armed men, sweeping upon us,” Haskell wrote. “Regiment after regiment, and brigade after brigade, move from the woods and rapidly take their places in the lines forming the assault.… More than half a mile their front extends, more than a thousand yards the dull gray masses deploy, man touching man, rank pressing rank, and line supporting line. Their red flags wave; their horsemen gallop up and down; the arms of eighteen thousand men, barrel and bayonet, gleam in the sun, a sloping forest of flashing steel. Right on they move, as with one soul, in perfect order, without impediment of ditch or wall or stream, over ridge and slope, through orchard and meadow and cornfield, magnificent, grim, irresistible.”

  Union skirmishers opened fire with muskets on the Confederate advance, then fell back. Union artillery cut gaping holes in the rebel ranks, but other troops stepped forward and filled the holes. “And so all across that broad open ground they have come,” Haskell wrote, “nearer and nearer, nearly half the way with our guns bellowing in their faces, until now a hundred yards, no more, divide our ready left from their advancing right.” As the distance diminished to almost nothing, the fighting intensified to a hellish pitch. “All along each hostile front, a thousand yards, with narrowest space between, the volleys blaze and roll, as thick the sound as when a summer hailstorm pelts the city roofs, as thick the fire as when the incessant lightning fringes a summer cloud.” Haskell wondered how long the rebels, fighting in the open, could stand the fury of the Union fire, when his own line suddenly weakened. “Great Heaven! Were my senses mad? The larger portion of Webb’s brigade—my God, it was true—there by the group of trees and the angles of the wall, was breaking from the cover of their works, and without orders or reason, with no hand lifted to check them, was falling back a fear-stricken flock of confusion! The fate of Gettysburg hung on a single spider’s thread!”

  Haskell and his fellow officers frantically attempted to rally the men. For a time their efforts appeared in vain.
“Those red flags were accumulating at the wall every moment.… Webb’s men are falling fast, and he is among them to direct and encourage; but however well they may now do, with that walled enemy in front, with more than a dozen flags to Webb’s three, it soon becomes apparent that in not many minutes they will be overpowered, or that there will be none alive for the enemy to overpower.”

  But additional troops arrived to bolster the failing part of the Union line. The combat grew more desperate than ever. “The jostling, swaying lines on either side boil and roar and dash their flamy spray, two hostile billows of a fiery ocean. Thick flashes stream from the wall; thick volleys answer from the crest.” The men fought reflexively, savagely. “Individuality is drowned in a sea of clamor, and timid men, breathing the breath of the multitude, are brave. The frequent dead and wounded lie where they stagger and fall; there is no humanity for them now, and none can be spared to care for them. The men do not cheer or shout, they growl; and over that uneasy sea, heard with the roar of musketry, sweeps the muttered thunder of a storm of growls.” A Pennsylvania regiment, refusing to yield another foot of its home soil, charged toward the wall. “The line springs; the crest of the solid ground, with a great roar, heaves forward its maddened load: men, arms, smoke, fire, a fighting mass. It rolls to the wall. Flash meets flash. The wall is crossed. A moment ensues of thrusts, yells, blows, shots, and undistinguishable conflict, followed by a shout, universal, that makes the welkin ring again—and the last and bloodiest fight of the great battle of Gettysburg is ended and won.”

  It wasn’t as simple as that, but almost. The blunting of Pickett’s charge against Cemetery Ridge left the field at Gettysburg in the control of Meade and the Union. At staggering cost—some fifty thousand killed, wounded or missing, divided almost equally between the two sides—Lee and Meade had fought to a draw, but one that required Lee, the invader, to return south. “All this has been my fault,” Lee acknowledged grimly. “It is I who have lost this fight.”

  34

  AS LEE WITHDREW, WORD OF THE UNION’S TWIN VICTORIES—AT Vicksburg and Gettysburg—sparked celebrations in Washington. Revelers gathered at Lincoln’s White House window; the president responded as awkwardly as he often did when speaking extemporaneously. “How long ago is it?—eighty-odd years—since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal,’ ” he said. “And now, on this last Fourth of July just passed, when we have a gigantic rebellion, at the bottom of which is an effort to overthrow the principle that all men were created equal, we have the surrender of a most powerful position and army on that very day, and not only so, but in a succession of battles in Pennsylvania, near to us, through three days, so rapidly that they might be called one great battle on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd of the month of July; and on the 4th the cohorts of those who opposed the declaration that all men are created equal turned tail and run.” Lincoln realized he hadn’t done the moment justice. “This is a glorious theme, and the occasion for a speech, but I am not prepared to make one worthy of the occasion.”

  Lincoln would make his worthy speech in a few months; for the present he worried that the opportunity afforded by Meade’s victory was being lost. “If General Meade can complete his work, so gloriously prosecuted thus far, by the literal or substantial destruction of Lee’s army, the rebellion will be over,” he wrote Halleck. Heaven—or the heavens—appeared to favor this goal: summer rains had swollen the Potomac, preventing Lee from getting across. Meade merely had to pin Lee’s army against the river. But Meade declined to move until it was too late.

  Lincoln could scarcely contain his anger. “If I had gone up there I could have whipped them myself,” he declared. He wrote a blistering letter to Meade. “I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape,” the president said. “He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely.” Meade had pleaded concern for the safety of his force in not attacking Lee north of the Potomac; Lincoln now demanded: “If you could not safely attack Lee last Monday, how can you possibly do so south of the river, when you can take with you very few more than two-thirds of the force you then had in hand?…Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably by it.”

  Lincoln never sent this letter, realizing that until he had a replacement for Meade he couldn’t afford to alienate the general. But the missed chance still rankled. “I was deeply mortified by the escape of Lee across the Potomac,” he wrote General Oliver Howard, “because the substantial destruction of his army would have ended the war and because I believed such destruction was perfectly easy—believed that General Meade and his noble army had expended all the skill, and toil, and blood, up to the ripe harvest, and then let the crop go to waste.”

  As Lincoln sought Meade’s replacement, his gaze turned west. Grant’s capture of Vicksburg prompted the Confederate commander of Port Hudson to surrender that fortress; Lincoln lauded the regaining of the Mississippi with the words: “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.” The president knew whom to thank. “Look at his campaign since May 1,” he told a visitor regarding Grant. “Where is anything in the Old World that equals it? It stamps him as the greatest general of the age, if not of the world.”

  Lincoln wrote to Grant directly. “I do not remember that you and I ever met personally,” he said. “I write this now as a grateful acknowledgment for the almost inestimable service you have done the country.” Lincoln admitted he had doubted the wisdom of Grant’s strategy in approaching Vicksburg. “I thought it was a mistake.” But the outcome of the campaign had revealed where wisdom truly lay. “I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right and I was wrong.”

  Lincoln’s need for a general grew more pressing two weeks after Vicksburg and Gettysburg. The war had never been popular in New York City, where the Democrats who controlled city politics had tried to declare neutrality in the conflict for the Union. They failed, but their efforts encouraged resentment against Republican policies. The Emancipation Proclamation, by converting the struggle to preserve the Union into a crusade to free the slaves, antagonized many New Yorkers, especially Irish immigrants who feared a flood of low-wage labor that would render their currently tenuous position even more so. The deployment of black strikebreakers against Irish dockworkers in a strike in the early summer of 1863 intensified the fear and distrust.

  More immediately threatening than the Emancipation Proclamation was the Enrollment Act of March 1863. The measure aimed to induce voluntary enlistment but did so by requiring compulsory enlistment—a draft—if congressional districts didn’t achieve their quotas. Loopholes allowed individuals to avoid service; of these the most noticed were the options of hiring a substitute and of paying a three-hundred-dollar commutation fee. Both evoked anger among the working class for permitting the gentry to buy their way out of serving; the latter became the more notorious for seeming to place a monetary value on the lives of conscripts.

  The anger erupted in New York that summer. Papers on July 12 carried the names of potential conscripts chosen by the local draft board; the victims—for so they accounted themselves—and their friends had that day and night to consider their response. Many plotted together, as became evident the next morning. Just as the local draft administrator finished calling the names, a rock crashed through the window of his office; this proved the signal for a mob to sack the building housing the draft office and set it alight. The fire spread, as did the violence. Initial targets bore some relation to the draft: other federal facilities, the offices of the pro-war New York Tribune, gentlemen presumed to have purchased exemption. But the mob soon branched out, assaulting Protestant churches (most of the rioters were Irish Catholics), factories unfriendly to unions, the Colored Orphan Asylum. The police attempted to
quell the rioting but lacked the tools or training to do so effectively. The police fired on the rioters, who fired back, until the streets of New York assumed the appearance of a war zone. A reporter recounted the hand-to-hand combat within one building: “On every floor were the ruffians busy at their work; and on every floor were they met and attacked; they fought desperately but were driven from rooms and hallways, from windows and roof-top; those who were not knocked senseless inside or killed themselves by jumping to the ground rushed down stairs and into the street.… Not one man, it is thought, escaped.” As in a war zone, medics dealt with the casualties. The reporter described a makeshift treatment center: “The room had all the appearance of an army hospital after a battle—the floor covered with blood, bandages, lint, surgical instruments, pails of bloody water, with Surgeon Kennedy, his shirt-sleeves rolled up, examining, dressing, and ordering.… There were wounds of all descriptions—the incised, contused, lacerated, punctured, and pistol-shot.”

  The rioting raged for a week. Only after the War Department rushed troops from Meade’s camp at Gettysburg to the city did the authorities manage to bring the violence under control. The episode shocked New York, where initial estimates placed the body count above a thousand. Even after this figure was corrected downward—to a few more than a hundred, finally—the riot made plain that the North was far from united and that if Lincoln didn’t find his general soon, the effort to save the Union might implode.