Cain at Gettysburg

by Ralph Peters

  “I am confident that the army can hold this position, General Meade,” Howard continued. Enthusiastically Christian, Howard was mannerly, narrow, and courageous. “As soon as Slocum arrived, we were all right.” The Eleventh Corps commander, who had been through a bitter day and had not slept, caught himself: “And General Sickles made a difference, of course. His presence.”

  “Slocum?” Meade asked. “What do you think?”

  “We can fight here. If we defend and let Lee come on.”

  Slocum’s appearance on the field had been unforgivably tardy, but Meade saw no use in admonishing him now. Slocum was a careful man, allergic to every risk, but assigned a position to hold, he’d cling to it stubbornly.

  “Sickles?” Meade asked the man’s opinion for courtesy’s sake.

  “Oh, my boys are up for a scrap. We’ll give Bobby Lee a time of it.”

  Disregarding the politician’s bravado, Meade straightened his back to stretch out the saddle pains. There would be more time on horseback before the dawn. And thereafter.

  “Well, I’m glad to hear you say so, gentlemen. I’ve already ordered the other corps to concentrate here, and it’s too late to change.” He stepped to the local county map spread upon a table. A treasure procured by Howard, the map was useless for terrain, but it laid out the roads in detail. “Look at this.”

  The corps commanders and Hunt crowded around.

  “There’s our problem.” Meade pointed to the black line of the Baltimore Pike. The road ran just in front of the gatehouse, then off to the southeast behind the army’s right flank. “That’s the only road to our rear that’s properly made. I just came up the Taneytown road. It’s too raw to support this army, should we be forced to withdraw. And all the other routes are in Lee’s hands or between our armies.” Ambushed by a yawn, he mastered himself and scanned the weary faces. “Were you General Lee, what would you do?”

  “Cut that damned road,” Slocum said. “I can hold him off, though. If he doesn’t swing wide to the east.”

  “He’d be a fool not to try to cut it,” Meade said. “That’s plain as day.”

  “There’s rough ground on that flank,” Howard put in. “All hills, trees, and rocks. It would break up an attacker’s formation. When they probed us, they didn’t get anywhere.”

  “They came through the woods at Chancellorsville well enough,” Meade said, and Howard was chastened. “Lee likes flanks.” He turned to Slocum. “At first light, I’ll have Warren join you for a scout. An attack by your corps and the Fifth—once it’s up—would correct our line. Push it out from the pike, give us some depth. I’ll expect your opinion promptly, John.”

  “What about my flank?” Sickles said. “The Taneytown road’s just behind me. It’s rough, but it ain’t useless. And there’s the Emmitsburg road to my front.”

  Meade shrugged. “Just relieve Geary when it’s light and take your assigned position. Hancock will fill in the line between you and Howard. When Win comes up, tighten your front.”

  Even as the chains of exhaustion tugged him, Meade almost smiled. “This doesn’t seem a bad position, gentlemen. We have the advantage of interior lines, and the rest of the army’s nearby.” He glanced at his chief of artillery. “Hunt’s reserve is in route, and I mean to let his gunners earn their keep. If Lee spares us till noon, he’ll have a fight on his hands.” Meade grunted. “And if he waits any longer, he’s a fool.”

  * * *

  Meade felt compelled to see more of the ground before he rested. Flanked by his son and Captain Paine, one of Warren’s engineers, he rode far enough to the east to mark the wall of high ground shielding the Baltimore road. The wooded crests could not be explored on horseback in the dark, so he turned and clopped through the graveyard again, then followed the southward decline of the ridge amid the embers of campfires left to themselves. Off to the west, across broad fields, the enemy’s fires smoldered in the moonglow.

  What if … what if he could defeat Robert E. Lee? Not just fend him off, but actually whip him? What if he really could do it? They all had gone in awe of the man, all of their careers, admiring the dashing hero of Cerro Gordo, then fearing the invincible figure in gray who beat every challenger. Even Antietam had been no more than a bloody, clumsy draw. Every real soldier knew it. But what if he were to be the one to defeat Lee? Might that not soothe his father’s ghost at last? Such a victory would mean more than a strengthened social position. It would be a triumph.

  Meade felt a new confidence, an emotion so strong he worried it might be lunatic, born of sleeplessness. He had resolved not to make mistakes in confronting Lee. But that was not enough. Not losing didn’t mean winning. He wouldn’t have another Chancellorsville, but he didn’t want a second Antietam, either. He wanted to win.

  Lee would take the aggressive, that was clear. Fredericksburg notwithstanding, he always did. Lee would strive to land early blows, to stun him, then punch through while he was reeling. The trick would be to keep his lines snug, with deep reserves behind them. Let Lee punch through one line and meet another.

  So deeply did he sink into his thoughts that the cries of the wounded might have been nightbirds calling. As Old Baldy threaded his hooves between the lines of sleeping men and slumping sentinels, the ground sought to trick the commanding general’s eyes. But Meade understood the secrets of the earth. An engineer’s mind was good for that, at least. Ahead, to the south, the black bulk of the smaller and greater hills, first glimpsed on his ride from the rear, anchored not only his proposed line, but the entire landscape. The moonlight made dark, earthbound clouds of groves, but the wide grain fields and water meadows shone silver, their patina deep where the land folded down and rose again, bright along the crests of the low ridges between the armies. He would need to see it all again, in the merciless light of day, but this stretch of his line appeared made for concentrations of artillery and volleys at maximum ranges.

  “George?” he called.

  His son rode up beside him. “Sir?”

  “What would you do, if you occupied this ground?”

  Captain Meade hesitated. The general sensed the boy’s reluctance to be caught out in some elementary error. In the distance, a sentry fired at a spook. But neither army was willing to be roused. Not yet.

  At last, his son told him, “I’d wait and hope the enemy attacked me.”

  “Exactly.”

  * * *

  The hand shook him again. Hard.

  “General Meade … Father…”

  “What is it? Is Lee attacking?” Lifting his head from the tabletop, he registered the dread in his own voice.

  “No, sir. Everything’s quiet. You wanted to be awakened.”

  Meade shifted his bones in the chair. “What time is it?”

  “Three thirty. As you asked.”

  Meade remembered something. “George? I thought I ordered you to get some sleep?”

  The guttering candle sparked. Through bleary eyes, he read his son’s amusement.

  “They were all afraid to wake you, sir. They asked me to do it.” George held out a steaming tin cup. Coffee.

  Meade smiled, too. Despite the fierceness of his hour of sleep, he had roused sufficiently to see the humor. “Old Snapping Turtle” indeed.

  Acrid, the coffee pierced him. “Thank you, George.”

  “Sir? Your party’s ready. General Hunt and Captain Paine. General Howard wants to ride along, too, if that’s all right.”

  Meade grunted. “I thought the man would be dead to the world. After yesterday.”

  “And Cadwalader’s found a shanty just behind the lines that we can use for your headquarters. It’s close to the center and right, and not far from the left flank, either.”

  Brilliant quicksilver, the coffee shot through his body to his soul. “Good, good. Fine.” He was astonished to find that his buoyant mood endured. He had half-expected to wake and discover that his confidence had been a hallucination.

  What if he could beat Lee?

&nb
sp; He rose and felt the old saddle-bite in his loins and along his thighs. More riding ahead. He needed to see if the ground looked as fine at first light as it had in the darkness. He didn’t want to be carried along on other men’s enthusiasm.

  Emerging to join his reconnaissance party, he visited the outhouse at the yard’s end. Overused by the soldiers, it was vile.

  Liberated from the filthy enclosure, he gulped mild air. The darkness had already softened to Quaker gray. Old Baldy nickered as Meade approached and he stroked the animal back along the jawline, then down the neck. “You miss your rest, too. Don’t you, boy?”

  Meade hauled himself into the saddle, suffering the awful impact of groin on hard leather. War demanded a seasoned mind, but wanted a youthful body.

  “Shall we, gentlemen?”

  They rode first to the nearby guns, whose muzzles pointed northward. An alert sergeant snapped to attention and opened his maw to wake his fellow gunners. Meade hushed him.

  “Let them sleep,” he told the man. “Until your captain calls.”

  The artillerymen had dug out positions for their cannon, then improved the entrenchments with planks and firewood. To the north, the ground dropped steeply into the shadows, toward the Confederates. The height on which Meade paused was the keystone of the defense, but only the brave and foolish would assault it.

  By the time the party reached the hill to the east, the troops were stirring. A first bugle blared, then another. Drums responded. The terrain grew rugged, challenging the horses. The soldiers in position along the crest and above the ravines had done what they could to make their front formidable.

  “You,” Meade called to an unbuttoned major. “Have your men deepen those earthworks. And those firing pits.”

  Surprised at his business, the major saluted above a dangling pink pennant. Thereafter, Meade led the way back across the low interior ground to the ridge that ran south from the cemetery. He was gaining a sense of how the position fit together and wasn’t displeased. In oyster-shell light, the party trotted past grumpy rows of regiments standing to. The moonlight had not deceived him the night before: Even allowing for dips and swales, the ridge that would form the center of his line offered commanding positions for massed artillery.

  “Not bad for your guns, Henry,” Meade called over his shoulder to General Hunt.

  “Best damned ground I’ve seen,” the artilleryman answered. “Sweep the damned place clean.” Hunt sounded almost jolly.

  As if insulted by the gunner’s words, a section of enemy cannon blasted the morning. Distant and invisible, they seemed to be firing at nothing.

  “Twelve-pounders,” Hunt remarked. No Union guns replied.

  As they rode along the lowering ridge, Captain Paine sketched a map of the terrain, marking the positions Meade chose for each of his corps. It was the captain’s one remarkable ability, that gift of wielding pencil and paper in the saddle as ably as if at a draftsman’s table.

  Weary and worn though he knew himself to be, Meade felt invigorated. The morning offered up a marvelous spectacle, if one with a deadly purpose: this good ground; his soldiers waking upon it; the rest of his army hurrying toward him; the bugle-bitten morning air; the restoked campfires and busy men around them; and the metal snap of stacked arms retrieved by those who would wield them this day. He felt thousands of souls emerging, one by one, from the sullenness of the soldier’s dawn, through blade-sharp coffee that sliced down the throat, and into the confidence of men massed, armed, and ready. Those romantic fellows with their poetry never grasped the seductive force of routine.

  Ahead lay low ground, the position’s weakest stretch, marshy and tree-addled. The lines of fire were limited here, but if it was a challenge to defend, it would be equally hard to attack. And it had to be held, for beyond it lay the two hills. Even in the still-poor light, Meade saw that only the nearer, lower height mattered. Its western slope had been timbered, scalped raw, and it begged for a battery to be wrestled to its crest to face the enemy. He assumed Hunt saw it, too. As for the farther, higher hill, it was thick with trees and worthless. His left flank depended on that first, sugarloaf-shaped promontory. Sickles just had to sit on it and not budge.

  It was enough. Meade had seen what he needed to see. He pulled up his horse and began to turn about.

  “Have all that, Paine?” he asked the sketching captain.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Let’s go.”

  “General Meade?” Howard asked. “Would you care to call on Sickles? While we’re here?”

  Meade did not wish to have his good mood spoiled. “Sickles has his instructions. He just needs to do what he’s told.”

  Ascending the ridge again, they had no trouble finding the shack selected for Meade’s headquarters. A squat white-painted building not a quarter-mile behind the line of troops, it bustled with orderlies hurrying to unload the headquarters wagons and put up the staff’s work tents. A picket fence had been knocked down along half its length, a small garden looted and trampled. The headquarters guard, a troop from the 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry, lazed in a roadside meadow, brewing coffee. Meade smelled frying ham.

  Behind the busy road, a red sun rose. Its rays turned the mists in the low ground to bloody gauze. The sight stopped Meade and held him. He felt a power, an essence, for which he possessed no words. A page had turned in the heavens, but he could not read the script.

  Mastering himself, the commanding general turned back to his duty, calling for coffee as he marched into the shack.

  Butterfield, his chief of staff, and the adjutant, Seth Williams, were at work in the cabin’s main room. Meade took the sketched map from the engineer captain and laid it on a table.

  After explaining how he wanted the arriving corps positioned, he told Butterfield, “The ground’s good enough, but I’m concerned about our right. The Baltimore Pike’s crucial. I’ve ordered Slocum and Warren to weigh an attack to shield the road. Two corps, I’d think. If an attack’s practicable. The rest of the line would remain on the defensive.”

  “That’s Ewell’s corps in front of Slocum. Jackson’s men,” Howard explained, telling Meade what he already knew. Howard always had a note of the schoolmaster in his voice. Meade wondered if the man had delayed rejoining his corps because he awaited praise for yesterday’s work. Given the losses, laurels were hardly in order.

  “Better Ewell than Longstreet,” Meade said. “Changing the subject, gentlemen: Hill and Ewell were in yesterday’s fight, so we may assume that Longstreet’s corps will lead Lee’s attack today. And Lee will attack. He didn’t march all this way to watch a parade.” He drew out his watch, but didn’t really look at it. “We just need a few more hours.” He looked around. “Where’s Pleasanton?” He wanted his chief of cavalry.

  “He was here when we arrived,” Butterfield said.

  “I want to see him.” Meade spotted an idle lieutenant. “Find General Pleasanton. Tell him I want him immediately. Then fetch Colonel Sharpe.” He turned back to his chief of staff. “Get tracings of Paine’s artistic masterpiece out to all the corps. Sign them for me. As soon as that’s done, draw up a plan for an orderly withdrawal of the army, as a contingency. If things don’t go our way, I’m not going to have another shambles like Chancellorsville. I want every corps, division, reserve element, trains—all of them—to know which route they’re to follow and their order of march. Designate alternate rear guards, depending on whether we have trouble on the right, left, or in the center. Make sure Patrick and his provost men understand the plan in detail.”

  Before Butterfield could pose any questions, an artillery captain—one of Hunt’s men—plunged in through the doorway. Undaunted by the assembly of generals, he touched the brim of his kepi without breaking stride. When he spoke to Hunt, his voice was too guarded for Meade to hear.

  “Speak up, man,” Meade snapped. “What’s the problem?”

  General Hunt answered for the captain. “Sickles left his artillery ammunition in the rear. Th
e train hasn’t even reached Emmitsburg.”

  “That son—”

  Meade caught himself. It would not do to damn a corps commander in front of so many subordinates. But Sickles was going to catch Hell after the battle.

  “It’s all right,” Hunt said. “I keep an extra reserve for times like this. We’ll get him through the day.” Hunt looked annoyed, though.

  Meade regained his composure, if not the full flush of his earlier mood. What the men around him needed now was confidence. In him, in themselves. Whippings could wait.

  The morning grew up around them, its hours and minutes crowded with decisions great and small. General Newton came in, stinking of horse and bleary-eyed. But willing. Meade had ordered him up from the still-distant Sixth Corps to command the battered First. Doubleday’s pride would be wounded and Meade knew he would make another enemy by not sustaining the man in Reynolds’ position. But it could not be allowed to matter. He needed the strongest generals he had in command of his corps this day. Newton was a fighter. And a fellow engineer.

  Glad for the excuse to flee the cigar smoke and regain the morning air, Meade led Newton up the ridge to explain the army’s position and his role. The sun already had weight.

  “Doubleday outranks me, you know,” Newton said as they strode toward the cemetery.

  “My worry, not yours,” Meade told him. “Abner will sulk, but he’ll lead his division well enough. The man simply isn’t meant for higher command.”

  “Not completely sure I am,” Newton mused.

  “You’ll have to be.”

  A bullet passed between them with the sound of tearing silk. Meade glanced about angrily. “Somebody’s being damned careless.”

  But a newspaperman—worse, a New York newspaperman—rose from behind a tombstone and dashed toward them. “General, General!” he cried. “There’s a sharpshooter down in that steeple! Down in the town!”

  Meade and Newton withdrew. Quickly.

  “Well, that’s a first,” Newton declared as they put the crest behind them. “Saved by a newspaper fellow. Who risked his own neck.”