A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War

by Amanda Foreman

  The following day Lawley was too ill to be moved. Deciding that his friend required medical attention, Fremantle took Lawley’s horse, which seemed marginally less likely to collapse, and set off in search of Longstreet. He found him after only an hour. Longstreet immediately sent an ambulance to fetch Lawley, and invited Fremantle to join his mess during the campaign. He informed the surprised Englishman that they had already crossed into Pennsylvania, Maryland being only ten miles wide at that point. They were heading toward Chambersburg, a small town twenty miles from Hagerstown.

  After a couple of days’ observation, Fremantle realized that he was witnessing a rare event in military history: an invasion unaccompanied by mass rape and murder. Northern blacks were being robbed, assaulted, and in some cases forced at gunpoint into slavery. But since these crimes happened along the fringes of the army, Fremantle saw only minor infractions such as fence breaking or Northern whites being forced to accept worthless Confederate dollars for their goods. Fremantle thought they were remarkably ungrateful for the army’s restrained behavior “and really appear to be unaware that their own troops have been for two years treating Southern towns with ten times more harshness.”12 Francis Dawson felt proud to be riding in Longstreet’s corps. “The army behaved superbly in Pennsylvania,” he declared. “The orders against straggling and looting were strict.” He saw Lee dismount in front of a field of broken rails and tidy them up himself: “It was the best rebuke that he could have given to the offenders.” When the army entered Chambersburg, Dawson was surprised to see young men lolling on street corners. Suddenly Lee’s invading army of sixty thousand seemed small and vulnerable; there were no such “spare” men in Virginia. Dawson visited the prison where he had been held after the Battle of Antietam. There were Yankee prisoners in the yard, and for a brief moment he wanted to pelt them with stones, as had been done to him.

  To maintain order, Lee had decreed that only generals and their staff were allowed into Chambersburg without a special pass. But this official reassurance was not enough to calm the townspeople: all the shops and hotels were closed and shuttered. The commissary officers could not find anyone willing to sell provisions, though they threatened to seize them by force if necessary. Lawley was recuperating at the Franklin Hotel, which was kept locked to casual passersby. Fremantle had to hammer on the doors, shouting that he was an English traveler, until they were cautiously opened.

  Fremantle went to Lawley’s room to give him the latest news and discovered that the journalist was not alone. An Englishman dressed in the full uniform of the Hungarian hussars was sitting in the chair, recounting his journey through the lines. He had crossed into the South in late May, aided as usual by the Maryland journalist W. W. Glenn, in the hope of meeting the famous Robert E. Lee. Fremantle could not stop himself from smiling; the thirty-eight-year-old Captain Fitzgerald Ross had spent the past thirteen years in Austria and had succumbed to the country’s fondness for military pomp. He was dressed as though on parade, and brushed aside Fremantle’s warning that the Confederates would tease him mercilessly.

  All day during the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth, Fremantle walked quietly among the Confederates, observing their unhurried preparations to move farther north. The army corps was dispersed for miles around, employed in the unending search for food and water. The Confederate army had marched more than ninety miles from its base at Fredericksburg. Every bullet and shell had been brought with them in long wagon lines. Despite these difficulties, Longstreet’s headquarters had a relaxed air about it. The normally taciturn general passed the early part of the evening with Fremantle, reminiscing about his time in Texas. But shortly after the Englishman departed, Longstreet received another visitor, a scout, who brought devastating news. The Union army had crossed into Maryland and was only days, if not hours, behind them.

  Jeb Stuart was meant to be Lee’s eyes and ears, but at this moment the cavalryman was fifty-five miles away, his progress slowed by 125 captured wagons. He was rather pleased with his expedition; on June 28 he had come within six miles of Washington, sending tremors down Pennsylvania Avenue. Lord Lyons ordered his staff to pack their bags in case they needed to make a hasty departure. Since being hustled back into duty, Sir Percy Wyndham had succeeded in rounding up three thousand riders. But he had found horses for only two-thirds of them. (In his search for more, some of his actions had bordered on outright theft, earning him powerful enemies in the capital.)

  Lee had no means of sending a message to Stuart, but he dispatched hurried instructions to his generals, who were spread out in a forty-five-mile radius, to collect their scattered corps and meet outside the village of Cashtown, eight miles west of Gettysburg. On June 30, Lee heard that “Fighting Joe” Hooker had resigned after a petty quarrel with General-in-Chief Henry Halleck and been replaced by George Gordon Meade. Lee was not happy with the change: Hooker would have been a far weaker opponent. Meade was a Mexican War veteran, a no-nonsense professional soldier whose hair-trigger temper had earned him the nickname “the Old Snapping Turtle.” Fremantle traveled with Longstreet to join Lee, who was in the midst of moving his headquarters closer to Gettysburg. Ten different roads went through the town, making it a useful launch site for a confrontation with the Federal army. The general betrayed no sign of anxiety to Fremantle, who thought him “the handsomest man of his age I ever saw.” He was wearing his customary long gray jacket and Wellington boots, both of which were surprisingly clean.

  One of the Confederate brigades had spotted Union cavalrymen lurking around Gettysburg. When Lee received the news, all knew that a battle was imminent. Still elated by the recent victory at Chancellorsville, Lee’s officers had no doubt about the outcome. Lawley was equally optimistic. Though weak, he had managed to eat breakfast in the hotel dining room in Chambersburg with Captain Ross on July 1. The complaints and anti-Southern comments of the other diners, all locals, so irritated Lawley that, to Ross’s acute embarrassment, he held a twenty-dollar Confederate bill aloft and declared “in a month it would be worth more than all their greenbacks in the North put together.”13

  As Lawley and Ross were eating their breakfast, four Confederate infantry brigades set off in search of a warehouse reported to be full of shoes. Three miles from Gettysburg they stumbled into the 1st Cavalry Division of the Union army. Thus began the Battle of Gettysburg, without the orders or knowledge of the two commanders. It was eleven o’clock when the faint echoes of artillery fire alerted Lee to the battle taking place. He was furious at this unexpected development, which added to the difficulties forced upon him by not knowing where his enemy lay or how many he faced. At this moment there were in fact more Confederates than Federals at Gettysburg—a massed attack by the Southerners could have captured the town.

  An hour later, at noon, Longstreet was marching at the head of his corps toward Gettysburg. Fremantle followed on horseback while Lawley and Captain Ross traveled at the back of the wagon line. “At 2 P.M. firing became distinctly audible in our front,” wrote Fremantle. Soon they passed a ghastly parade of stretchers and the walking wounded coming the other way. The soldiers were so accustomed to such scenes that they barely glanced at them. Finally, at 4:30 P.M., the travelers found General Lee on the top of Seminary Ridge, observing the battle below.

  Fremantle climbed to the top of an oak tree in order to obtain a better view of the Federal defense. The town lay within an undulating basin, surrounded by ridges and boulder-strewn hills. Lee had realized that control of these ridges was paramount; as at Fredericksburg, whoever held the high ground outside the town had the advantage. General Ewell’s orders were to drive the Federals from Cemetery Ridge “if possible.” Fatally for Lee’s plans, as the next two days would prove, Ewell decided it was not possible, and remained where he was.14 Nevertheless, when the firing dwindled away at dusk, the Confederates appeared to have won the day. They had lost six thousand men compared to the almost nine thousand casualties suffered by the Federals, and Gettysburg was theirs.

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bsp; Map.16 Gettysburg, July 1–3, 1863

  Click here to view a larger image.

  The Union army, however, had seized the best defensive positions around the perimeter of hills and ridges south of town, near the local cemetery. That evening Fremantle and Lawley witnessed a tense debate between the Confederate generals. “The enemy’s new position,” reported Lawley later, made Longstreet fear that a direct assault would be too dangerous. He wanted Lee to move the army to a better location and force Meade to come after them. But Lee disagreed. “The enemy is here,” he argued; “if we do not whip him, he will whip us.” They would renew the attack the following day. Lawley thought Longstreet was right, ignorant as he was of the risk. The Confederates had no intelligence of Meade’s numbers or position other than what they could see with their own eyes.

  “The universal feeling in the army was one of profound contempt for an enemy whom they have beaten so constantly, and under so many disadvantages,” wrote Fremantle. But never before had the disadvantage been one of terrain or information. When General Meade arrived at Cemetery Hill that night, he was relieved to find that his army held the high ground. The ridge occupied by the Federals was several miles long and in some parts more than 140 feet high. Lee’s army was spread out in a thin semicircle below.

  The four European observers nevertheless shared the Confederates’ optimism. Lawley’s malady had returned, but he insisted on breakfasting at 3:30 A.M. with the Prussian observer Scheibert, Fremantle, and Captain Ross, who had shaved his beard and waxed his mustache in anticipation of the day’s battle. He made silly comments about Mars calling, which the others accepted in good humor.

  They returned to Fremantle’s oak tree on Seminary Ridge and there found Lee and his generals discussing the plan of attack. Longstreet was still trying to persuade Lee to retire from Gettysburg. Fremantle was amused to see Generals Longstreet and John B. Hood whittle at sticks while they talked. The habit struck him as peculiarly American. Ross soon lost interest in the Confederates’ conversation and stared at the Federal positions through his field glasses. He experienced a jolt when he saw them looking straight back at him through their own.15

  In the morning, despite being ordered to move his troops into attack formation, Longstreet procrastinated for several hours, giving Meade more time to prepare. Federal reinforcements had been arriving throughout the night, including the 7th Maine Infantry (and the English runaway Frederick Farr), which was sent to shore up the extreme end of the Union line. “Order from General Gibbon read to us,” recorded a private in one of the Minnesota regiments occupying Cemetery Ridge. “He says this is to be the great battle of the war and that any soldier leaving the ranks without leave will be instantly put to death.”16

  The concentration of troops now numbered 60,000 Confederates and 85,000 Federals, yet all was quiet during July 2 until late afternoon. Bored with waiting, Ross and Fremantle left the other two by the tree and went exploring. They bumped into two members of Longstreet’s staff. One of them, Colonel James B. Walton, was in charge of the reserve artillery. The Confederates shared their cherries with them, and afterward they all went for a dip in the stream. When the Englishmen returned to the oak tree, Jeb Stuart had at last reappeared with the missing cavalry. Lee was so angry he could barely acknowledge him.

  “No one would have imagined that such masses of men and such a powerful artillery were about to commence the work of destruction,” wrote Fremantle. “We began to doubt whether a fight was off to-day at all.” The sudden explosion of Confederate artillery at 4:45 P.M. gave the answer. An hour later, Longstreet ordered his corps to storm the Federal defenses. Fremantle was amazed by Lee’s behavior once the fighting began. The general sat by himself on a tree stump. No one spoke to him. He received only one report and sent just one message. He had become an observer in his own battle. “I know not whether I am mistaken,” Lawley wrote later; “Lee struck me as more anxious and ruffled than I had ever seen him before, though it required close observation to detect it.”17 In previous battles, Lee had encouraged his subordinates to use their initiative, but at Gettysburg the practice allowed for increased confusion. Without a leader to coordinate its movements, the Confederate assault was like a random firecracker display. To add to the strangeness of the scene, a Confederate marching band “began to play polkas and waltzes, which sounded very curious, accompanied by the hissing and bursting of shells.”18

  The cannonade sounded “one deep prolonged bellowing roar,” wrote Lawley. “A thick canopy of smoke, constantly rent by bright darting flashes of flame, cast its dense pall over the struggling, bleeding thousands who toiled and died in its centre.”19 Lee’s plan called for a specific type of attack known as “en echelon,” meaning that the divisions were to attack in sequence, parallel to one another—first hitting the south side of Meade’s line, which held Little Round Top hill, and then the north side, which overlooked the cemetery near the town. En echelon assaults were complicated, requiring precision timing and execution; it would have been a risky maneuver for Lee under the best of circumstances, and to attempt one now, when two of his three corps commanders were new and untried, was asking a great deal. The Federals had orders to hold Little Round Top “at all hazards”; Father William Corby, one of the chaplains of the Irish Brigade, climbed to the top of a boulder and called out that any soldier killed on the battlefield would be given a full Christian burial, but God help those who ran away.22.3 20 Almost half the brigade was killed or wounded that day, shot to pieces in the infamous Wheat Field, which lay near the bottom of Little Round Top. Meanwhile, General Ewell’s attacks against Meade’s northern lines along Cemetery Hill teetered on the brink of victory, but fierce Federal counterattacks drove the Confederates back to the town. When the sun went down, each army had suffered almost ten thousand casualties.

  Lee was hemorrhaging men, yet he still believed that one more assault would dislodge the Federals and allow him to pick off the fleeing divisions one by one. He wanted all 65 batteries and 282 guns ready and primed for action for the next day, July 3. Longstreet had argued against fighting the Federals at Gettysburg, and he now vehemently protested against Lee’s proposal to attack the Union center, which, as far as he could tell, would simply be a repeat of Fredericksburg, only this time with the Confederates on the plain and the Federals firing at them from above. Lee was confident that if he sent Jeb Stuart to attack Meade from behind at the same time as the assault in the front, the Federals would be too confused to repel both.

  General Meade sensed that Lee was going to throw at him everything within his grasp. Conscious that he was the sixth general to lead the Army of the Potomac, he invited all the generals to a war council at the little white farmhouse that served as his headquarters. The dozen or so commanders discussed whether to retire or continue the battle and then took a vote: they would remain at Gettysburg for one more day and, since they held the higher ground, allow Lee to launch another attack.21

  The Confederate reserve artillery was ordered into position, facing the center of Meade’s line. One of the English volunteers who had run the blockade in the spring, Captain Stephen Winthrop, was assigned a battery and told to take it to Captain Charles W. Squires of the Washington Artillery. Although he had been appointed to Longstreet’s staff in late April, Winthrop had arrived at his headquarters only a day or so before the battle, and the order flummoxed him. He tried to memorize the directions, but it proved impossible to navigate the country roads without a map. He became lost and did not arrive until midnight. Squires was so angry that he had Winthrop placed under arrest. The unlucky Englishman was held under arms until the morning, when Colonel Walton came to his rescue.22

  Early in the morning the four observers joined Lee’s and Longstreet’s staff as they reconnoitered the battleground, the first time the Confederates had done so since the battle erupted. It was unnerving for Fremantle to walk past the bodies of fallen soldiers, some of whom turned out to be still alive, opening their eyes as they heard him ap
proach. The conspicuous party attracted the attention of a sharpshooter, which led to an encounter with a hidden battery. A few shells whizzed over their heads. One landed on a Federal field hospital, trapping the wounded inside when the building went up in flames.

  Although Lee had wanted simultaneous artillery and infantry attacks, Longstreet was inordinately slow in placing his men. As a result, all the fighting that morning took place in one location around Cemetery Hill. By noon, there were 3,500 casualties. Hundred of horses were dead or dying, including sixteen killed by a shell in the yard next to Meade’s farmhouse. Then the battlefield went silent for a while, which allowed the midday sun to clear the enveloping smoke, and the next stage of Lee’s mangled plan went into motion. Francis Dawson was recovering from dysentery, but even in his weakened state he worked feverishly to transport ordnance to the 164 artillery crews facing the Federal center line: “Every arrangement was made to shell the enemy’s position, on Cemetery Hill, and follow this up by an attack in force,” he wrote. “Three or four hundred pieces of artillery were being fired as rapidly as the cannoneers could load them. Being in the centre of the front line, I had an excellent view of the fight.”23

  Leaving Lawley and Scheibert at their post by the oak tree, Fremantle and Ross went down into the town, thinking that the view from the cupola above Ewell’s headquarters would offer a spectacular panorama. The idea became less attractive as shells began bursting from all directions. They had managed to reach the tollgate when flying shrapnel sliced into their guide. A little boy who had latched on to them began screaming and laughing hysterically each time another shell burst. Fremantle realized they had to get away as quickly as possible. But at the next explosion the child darted off before they could stop him. “I never saw this boy again, or found out who he was,” wrote Fremantle sadly.24