Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  One of Lee's purposes in ordering restraint toward (white) civilians was to cultivate the copperheads. He placed great faith in "the rising peace party of the North" as a "means of dividing and weakening our enemies." It was true, Lee wrote to Davis on June 10, that the copperheads professed to favor reunion as the object of peace negotiations while the South regarded independence as the goal. But it would do no harm, Lee advised Davis, to play along with this reunion sentiment to weaken northern support for the war, which "after all is what we are interested in bringing about. When peace is proposed to us it will be time enough to discuss its terms, and it is not the part of prudence to spurn the proposition in advance, merely because those who made it believe, or affect to believe, that it will result in bringing us back to the Union." If Davis agreed with these views, Lee concluded, "you will best know how to give effect to them."35

  Davis did indeed think he saw a chance to carry peace proposals on the point of Lee's sword. In mid-June, Alexander Stephens suggested to Davis that in light of "the failure of Hooker and Grant," this might be the time to make peace overtures. Stephens offered to approach his old friend Lincoln under flag of truce to discuss prisoner-of-war exchanges, which had stopped because of Confederate refusal to exchange blacks. This issue could serve as an entering wedge for the introduction of peace proposals. Davis was intrigued by the idea. He gave Stephens formal instructions limiting his powers to negotiations on prisoner exchanges and other procedural matters. What additional informal powers Stephens carried with him are unknown. On July 3 the vice president boarded a flag-of-truce boat for a trip down the James to Union lines at Norfolk on the first leg of his hoped-for trip to Washington.36

  Lee's invasion also sparked renewed Confederate hopes for diplomatic recognition. In the wake of Chancellorsville, John Slidell in Paris queried the French whether "the time had not arrived for reconsidering the question of recognition." Napoleon agreed, as usual, but would not act independently of Britain. In that country, news of Lee's success stirred

  35. Dowdey and Manarin, eds., Wartime Papers of Lee, 507–9.

  36. Alexander H. Stephens, A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1868–70), II, 557–68; Rowland, Davis, V, 513–19.

  Confederate sympathizers into vigorous action. During June a flurry of meetings among southern diplomats and their supporters on both sides of the channel worked out a plan for a motion in the British Parliament favoring joint Anglo-French steps toward recognition. Napoleon gave his blessing to the enterprise. But the M. P. who presented the motion, a diminutive firebrand named John Roebuck whom Henry Adams described as "rather more than three-quarters mad," put his foot in his mouth with a speech on June 30 that indiscreetly disclosed all details of his conversation with the French emperor. The notion of allowing the Frogs to dictate British foreign policy was like a red flag to John Bull. The motion died of anti-French backlash, but British proponents of recognition eagerly awaited reports of Lee's triumph in Pennsylvania. "Diplomatic means can now no longer prevail," wrote Confederate publicist Henry Hotze from London on July 11, "and everybody looks to Lee to conquer recognition."37

  Northerners abroad understood only too well the stakes involved in military operations during June 1863. "The truth is," wrote Henry Adams, "all depends on the progress of our armies." In Washington, Lincoln was not pleased with the progress of Hooker's army. When Hooker first detected Lee's movement in early June, he wanted to cross the Rappahannock and pitch into the rebel rear. Lincoln disapproved and urged Hooker to fight the enemy's main force north of the river instead of crossing it at the risk of becoming "entangled upon the river, like an ox jumped half over a fence and liable to be torn by dogs front and rear without a fair chance to gore one way or kick the other." Hooker seemed unimpressed by this advice, for a few days later he proposed that since the Army of Northern Virginia was moving north, the Army of the Potomac should move south and march into Richmond! Lincoln began to suspect that Hooker was afraid to fight Lee again. "I think Lee's Army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point," he wired Hooker. "If he comes toward the Upper Potomac, follow on his flank, and on the inside track. . . . Fight him when opportunity offers." With the head of the enemy force at Winchester and the tail still back at Fredericks-

  37. Slidell quoted in Frank Lawrence Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy (Chicago, 1931), 465; Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., June 25, 1863, in Worthington, C. Ford, ed., A Cycle of Adams Letters 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), II, 40; Hotze quoted in Brian Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, 2 vols. (Montreal, 1974–80), II, 313.

  burg, "the animal must be very slim somewhere. Could you not break him?"38

  Although Hooker finally lurched the Army of the Potomac into motion, he moved too late to prevent Lee's whole force from crossing the Potomac. But this actually encouraged Lincoln. To Hooker he sent word that this "gives you back the chance [to destroy the enemy far from his base] that I thought McClellan lost last fall." To Secretary of the Navy Welles, Lincoln said that "we cannot help beating them, if we have the man." But Lincoln became convinced that Hooker was not the man. The general began to fret that Lee outnumbered him, that he needed more troops, that the government was not supporting him. Looking "sad and careworn," the president told his cabinet that Hooker had turned out to be another McClellan. On June 28 he relieved Hooker from command and named George Gordon Meade in his place.39

  If the men in the ranks had been consulted, most of them probably would have preferred the return of McClellan. Although Meade had worked his way up from brigade to corps command with a good combat record, he was an unknown quantity to men outside his corps. By now, though, their training in the school of hard knocks under fumbling leaders had toughened the soldiers to a flinty self-reliance that left many of them indifferent to the identity of their commander. The men "have something of the English bull-dog in them," wrote one officer. "You can whip them time and again, but the next fight they go into, they are . . . as full of pluck as ever. They are used to being whipped, and no longer mind it. Some day or other we shall have our turn."40 As the army headed north into Pennsylvania, civilians along the way began to cheer them as friends instead of reviling them as foes. Their morale rose with the latitude. "Our men are three times as Enthusiastic as they have been in Virginia," wrote a Union surgeon. "The idea that Pennsylvania is invaded and that we are fighting on our own soil proper, influences them strongly. They are more determined than I have ever before seen them."41

  38. Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., June 25, 1863, in Ford, Cycle of Adams Letters, II, 40–41; CWL, VI, 249, 257, 273.

  39. CWL, VI, 281; Beale, ed., Diary of Gideon Welles, I, 340, 344, 348.

  40. Stephen M. Weld to his mother, June 10, 1863, in War Diary and Letters of Stephen Minot Weld 1861–1865 (Boston, 1912), 213. Weld was a captain in the 18th Massachusetts Infantry.

  41. Wiley, Billy Yank, 283.

  When Meade took over the army, its 90,000 effectives were concentrated in the vicinity of Frederick, Maryland. Longstreet's and Hill's Confederate corps were forty miles to the north near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Part of Ewell's corps was at York, threatening a railroad bridge over the Susquehanna, while the remainder was at Carlisle preparing to move on Harrisburg to sever the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad and capture the state capital. Lee had cut himself off from his faraway Virginia base, as Lincoln had hoped, but he had done so purposely. Like Grant's army in Mississippi, Lee's invaders took enough ammunition for their needs and lived off the country as they moved. Lee's greatest worry was not supplies, but rather the absence of Stuart with information about the whereabouts of the enemy. By contrast, Meade obtained accurate intelligence of the rebels' location and moved quickly to confront them.

  On the night of June 28, one of Longstreet's scouts brought word that the Army of the Potomac was north of its namesake river. Alarmed by the proximity of a concentrated enemy while his own forces remained scattered,
Lee sent couriers to recall Ewell's divisions from York and Carlisle. Meanwhile one of A. P. Hill's divisions learned of a reported supply of shoes at Gettysburg, a prosperous town served by a dozen roads that converged from every point on the compass. Since Lee intended to reunite his army near Gettysburg, Hill authorized this division to go there on July 1 to "get those shoes."

  When Hill's would-be Crispins approached Gettysburg that morning, however, they found something more than the pickets and militia they had expected. Two brigades of Union cavalry had arrived in town the previous day. Their commander was weather-beaten, battle-wise John Buford, who like Lincoln had been born in Kentucky and raised in Illinois. Buford had noted the strategic importance of this crossroads village flanked by defensible ridges and hills. Expecting the rebels to come this way, he had posted his brigades with their breech-loading carbines on high ground northwest of town. Buford sent word to John Reynolds, a Pennsylvanian who commanded the nearest infantry corps, to hurry forward to Gettysburg. If there was to be a battle, he said, this was the place to fight it. When A. P. Hill's lead division came marching out of the west next morning, Buford's horse soldiers were ready for them. Fighting dismounted behind fences and trees, they held off three times their number for two hours while couriers on both sides galloped up the roads to summon reinforcements. Lee had told his subordinates not to bring on a general engagement until the army was concentrated. But the engagement became general of its own accord as the infantry of both armies marched toward the sound of guns at Gettysburg.

  As Buford's tired troopers were beginning to give way in mid-morning, the lead division of Reynolds's 1st Corps double-timed across the fields and brought the rebel assault to a standstill. One unit in this division was the Iron Brigade, five midwestern regiments with distinctive black hats who confirmed here their reputation as the hardest-fighting outfit in the Army of the Potomac. They also lost two-thirds of the men they took into the battle. The most crucial Union casualty on this first morning of July was John Reynolds—considered by many the best general in the army—drilled through the head by a sharpshooter. About noon, General Howard's "Dutch" 11th Corps arrived and deployed north of town to meet the advance units of Ewell's Confederate 2nd Corps coming fast after a brisk march from the Susquehanna. By early afternoon some 24,000 Confederates confronted 19,000 bluecoats along a three-mile semicircle west and north of Gettysburg. Neither commanding general had yet reached the field; neither had intended to fight there; but independently of their intentions a battle destined to become the largest and most important of the war had already started.

  As Ewell's leading divisions swept forward against Howard, Lee rode in from the west. Quickly grasping the situation, he changed his mind about waiting for Longstreet's corps, still miles away, and authorized Hill and Ewell to send in everything they had. With a yell, four southern divisions went forward with the irresistible power that seemed to have become routine. The right flank of Howard's corps collapsed here as it had done at Chancellorsville. When the 11th Corps retreated in disorder through town to Cemetery Hill a half-mile to the south, the right flank of the Union 1st Corps was uncovered and these tough fighters, too, were forced back yard by yard to the hill, where Union artillery and a reserve division that Howard had posted there caused the rebel onslaught to hesitate in late afternoon. The battle so far appeared to be another great Confederate victory.

  But Lee could see that so long as the enemy held the high ground south of town, the battle was not over. He knew that the rest of the Army of the Potomac must be hurrying toward Gettysburg; his best chance to clinch the victory was to seize those hills and ridges before they arrived. So Lee gave Ewell discretionary orders to attack Cemetery Hill "if practicable." Had Jackson still lived, he undoubtedly would have found it practicable. But Ewell was not Jackson. Thinking the enemy position too strong, he did not attack—thereby creating one of the controversial "ifs" of Gettysburg that have echoed down the years. By the time dusk approached, General Winfield Scott Hancock of the 2nd Corps had arrived and laid out a defense line curling around Culps and Cemetery hills and extending two miles south along Cemetery Ridge to a hill called Little Round Top. As three more Union corps arrived during the night—along with Meade himself—the bluecoats turned this line into a formidable position. Not only did it command high ground, but its convex interior lines also allowed troops to be shifted quickly from one point to another while forcing the enemy into concave exterior lines that made communication between right and left wings slow and difficult.

  Studying the Union defenses through his field glasses on the evening of July 1 and again next morning, Longstreet concluded that this line was too strong for an attack to succeed. He urged Lee to turn its south flank and get between the Union army and Washington. This would compel Meade to attack the Army of Northern Virginia in its chosen position. Longstreet liked best the tactical defensive; the model he had in mind was Fredericksburg where Yankee divisions had battered themselves to pieces while the Confederates had suffered minimal casualties. Longstreet had not been present at Chancellorsville nor had he arrived at Gettysburg on July 1 until after the whooping rebels had driven the enemy pell-mell through the town. These were the models that Lee had in mind. He had not accomplished the hoped-for "destruction" of the enemy in the Seven Days' or at Chancellorsville. Gettysburg presented him with a third chance.42 The morale of his veteran troops had never been higher; they would regard such a maneuver as Longstreet suggested as a retreat, Lee thought, and lose their fighting edge. According to a British military observer accompanying the Confederates, the men were eager to attack an enemy "they had beaten so constantly" and for whose fighting capacity they felt "profound contempt." Lee intended to unleash

  42. Twenty years later Isaac Trimble, one of Lee's division commanders at Gettysburg, wrote from memory an "almost verbatim" account of a conversation with Lee on June 27, four days before the battle began. When the Army of the Potomac came up into Pennsylvania seeking him, Lee told Trimble, "I shall throw an overwhelming force on their advance, crush it, follow up the success, drive one corps back on another, and by successive repulses and surprises . . . create a panic and virtually destroy the army. . . . [Then] the war will be over and we shall achieve the recognition of our independence." Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography, 4 vols. (New York, 1934–35), III, 58—59.

  them. Pointing to Cemetery Hill, he said to Longstreet: "The enemy is there, and I am going to attack him there." Longstreet replied: "If he is there, it will be because he is anxious that we should attack him; a good reason, in my judgment, for not doing so." But Lee had made up his mind, and Longstreet turned away sadly with a conviction of impending disaster.43

  Although aware of Longstreet's reluctance, Lee assigned to him the principal attack duty on July 2. Two of Hill's three divisions had suffered heavy casualties the previous day and could not fight today. Ewell still regarded the Union defenses on Cemetery and Culp's hills as too strong for a successful assault. Lee grudgingly agreed. He therefore ordered Longstreet's two fresh divisions (the third, under George Pickett, had been posted as rear guard and could not arrive in time) to attack the Union left holding the southern end of Cemetery Ridge. The assault would be supported by Hill's one fresh division, while Ewell was to demonstrate against the Union right and convert this demonstration into an attack when Meade weakened his right to reinforce his left. If this plan worked, both enemy flanks would crumble and Lee would have the war-winning Cannae that he sought.44

  Longstreet's state of mind as he prepared for this attack is hard to fathom. The only non-Virginian holding high command in the Army of Northern Virginia (and the only prominent Confederate general to join the postwar Republican party), Longstreet became the target of withering criticism from Virginians after the war for insubordination and tardiness at Gettysburg. They held him responsible for losing the battle—and by implication the war. Some of this criticism was self-serving, intended to shield Lee and other Virginians (mainly Stu
art and Ewell) from blame. But Longstreet did seem to move slowly at Gettysburg. Although Lee wanted him to attack as early in the day as possible, he did not get his troops into position until 4:00 p.m. There were extenuating

  43. Lord, ed., The Fremantle Diary, 205; Longstreet's account of his conversation with Lee was contained in two articles written years later: "Lee in Pennsylvania," Annalsof the War (Philadelphia, 1879), 421; and "Lee's Right Wing at Gettysburg," Battles and Leaders, III, 339–40.

  44. Cannae was a battle in 216 B.C. in which Hannibal of Carthage defeated and virtually annihilated a Roman army—which by coincidence almost equaled the size of the Union force at Gettysburg—with a double envelopment that crushed both flanks. Cannae became a byword in military history for a total, annihilative tactical victory.

  reasons for this delay: his two divisions had made night marches to reach the vicinity of Gettysburg and were then compelled to countermarch by a circuitous route to reach the attack position because Lee's guide led them initially on a road in sight of an enemy signal post on Little Round Top, a high hill at the south end of the Union line. Yet Longstreet may have been piqued by Lee's rejection of his flanking suggestion, and he did not believe in the attack he was ordered to make. He therefore may not have put as much energy and speed into its preparation as the situation required.

  To compound the problem, Longstreet did not find the Yankee left on Cemetery Ridge where Lee's scout had reported it to be. It was not there because of an unauthorized move by Dan Sickles, commander of the 3rd Corps holding the Union left. Distressed by the exposed nature of the low ground at the south end of Cemetery Ridge before it thrust upward at Little Round Top, Sickles had moved his two divisions a half-mile forward to occupy slightly higher ground along a road running southwest from Gettysburg. There his troops held a salient with its apex in a peach orchard and its left anchored in a maze of boulders locally called Devil's Den, just below Little Round Top. Although this gave Sickles high ground to defend, it left his men unconnected to the rest of the Union line and vulnerable to attack on both flanks. When Meade learned what Sickles had done, it was too late to order him back to the original line. Longstreet had launched his attack.