Still webbed in personal disputes, Davis did his best to untangle. “In the last [letter] you inform me that you had learned after writing the first [letter] that I entertained personal enmity towards you,” the president wrote Senator William Yancey of Alabama, who frequently referred to Davis as “a military dictator.” “Will you have the goodness to inform me how you acquired that information? Not having made any declaration to that effect, I think I have a right to inquire. It is true that for some time past the impression has been made upon me that you were in opposition to my Administration.” 29 That was a major understatement, and the rift only would widen between the Alabaman and the president.
When Davis and his war secretary, Seddon, attempted to solve problems, as with asking Howell Cobb to replace the beleaguered quartermaster general, Abraham Myers, they often did not meet with success. “I beg to assure you that the offer you have tendered to me to take the head of the Q.M. General’s Department is received in the spirit in which it was offered,” Cobb replied to Seddon. “So far from regarding it as an unpleasant light, I receive it as an expression of confidence both on yours and the President’s part—to which I do not feel entitled. . . . I cannot accept it because I feel certain that I am not qualified for the place.” 30
During the spring of 1863, a lot seemed to be on the verge of being out of control for the Confederacy. Not all were surprised. “I do not know that events have taken a different turn from what I had contemplated in the beginning,” penned Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell, “& which I labored with all my energy to avert for the country.” 31 And yet perhaps one, grand campaign could turn it all around.
Chapter 13
Can’t We All Get Along?
THERE had been one preeminent battlefield hero in the minds of many Southerners. With Stonewall Jackson dead, where would the Confederacy turn?
Robert Edward Lee now had the supreme confidence of his men and of the Southern nation, and he believed his Army of Northern Virginia could do nearly anything he asked. He needed much from them, no doubt: the Confederacy was feeling the crunch of a war that had lasted two years, killing many of its young men, exhausting many of its resources, and destroying much of Lee’s beloved Virginia. As the summer of 1863 approached, Lee sought a plan that would strike fear into the Northern populace, accelerate Northern cries for peace, carry the burdens of the war away from Virginia, and perhaps gain foreign recognition for the Richmond government. It was a bold gamble, but such risks had worked in a tactical sense before, during the Peninsular campaign and at Chancellorsville. Lee needed to begin with a grand strategic victory, and Pennsylvania would be the target.
Meanwhile, the Army of the Potomac was in disarray. Haunted by the failures at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, the soldiers utterly lacked confidence in Joe Hooker. Lincoln had no choice but to change commanding generals once again, this time opting for the bookish and occasionally quick-tempered Maj. Gen. George Gordon Meade, reputedly only after the senior corps commander, Maj. Gen. John F. Reynolds, declined the assignment.
On June 9, as the armies began moving northward, a great cavalry battle erupted at Brandy Station, near Culpeper, Virginia. It would be the largest cavalry battle ever fought in North America, and the Yankees under Brig. Gen. Alfred Pleasonton held their own against the fabled Maj. Gen. Jeb Stuart’s troops. As the Confederates moved northward toward Pennsylvania, screened by the Blue Ridge Mountains, Hooker and then Meade groggily pursued. The Confederate movement was really a giant raid; Lee had no intention of attempting to occupy Pennsylvania. But while penetrating he could strike toward Harrisburg, York, or even Philadelphia, terrorizing the North’s sense of security and perhaps winning a pitched battle on Yankee soil.
By the last hours of June, the Confederate corps under Lt. Gen. A. P. Hill, and particularly the division under Maj. Gen. Henry Heth, was moving slowly eastward toward Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, having been ordered to scout for supplies. Also in the vicinity, where there was a major convergence of roads, was a brigade of Federal cavalry under Brig. Gen. John Buford. When the two forces first clashed, early in the morning of July 1, neither side anticipated a battle at that position or at that time, but piecemeal attacks and counterattacks escalated as Confederate reinforcements moved in from the west and, eventually, under Lt. Gen. Richard S. Ewell, from the north.
Buford’s cavalry stubbornly resisted the Confederate infantry for a short time before Reynolds’s First Corps arrived and deployed west of town. Shortly thereafter, Reynolds was killed. “He had taken his troops into a heavy growth of timber on the slope of a hill-side, and, under their regimental and brigade commanders, the men did their work well promptly,” wrote Joseph Rosengarten, a major in the Union army. “Returning to join the expected divisions, he was struck by a Minié ball, fired by a sharpshooter hidden in the branches of a tree almost overhead, and killed at once; his horse bore him to the little clump of trees, where a cairn of stones and a rude mark on the bark, now almost overgrown, still tells the fatal spot.” 1
Pushed back through the town by superior Confederate forces, the Federals made a stand on Cemetery Hill, where Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, dispatched by Meade to command the field, assembled the men in order. By the end of the first day, Union corps were still marching toward the field, and Meade himself had not yet arrived. Hancock had analyzed the situation with foresight, however, and formed the basis for a fishhook-shaped battle line that would hold the high ground east and south of the town—Culp’s Hill, Cemetery Ridge, and the Round Tops, hills on the southern terminus of the Federal line of battle. Lee, desperately attempting to control a fight that had spiraled away too quickly, deployed Ewell to the north, assigning him the task of taking Cemetery Hill, with A. P. Hill and his most experienced corps commander, Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, forming a line of battle along a ridge running southward from the town’s Lutheran Theological Seminary into the countryside.
Early in the morning of July 2, major portions of the battle lines exploded, and intense fighting in various regions flared all through the day, multiple attacks and counterattacks capturing and recapturing the same parcels of ground. The fight for Culp’s Hill required several bloody Confederate assaults, the position having been attained by the Federals after dark. Cemetery Hill, with the town’s small plot, Evergreen Cemetery, erupted into a scene of terror. Gunshot victims were strewn around the grounds, as well as those who had been grotesquely wounded by artillery shells. A sign beside the small cemetery gatehouse warned that anyone using firearms on the premises would be prosecuted.
To the south huge attacks moved on spare words such as those of Hancock, who at one point snapped: “Do you see those colors? Take them!” Nothing more needed saying. Soon dead men and horses from both sides littered regions of the battleground.
It was now clear that one of the largest battles yet was well under way, and many soldiers felt the war would turn on this conflict. Maj. Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren, Meade’s chief engineer, realized that Little Round Top was the key position. Artillery posted on this hill could command the field. (Big Round Top, also known as Round Top, was too heavily wooded to serve usefully.) A scramble ensued, and elements of the Union Fifth Corps posted themselves along the ridge of Little Round Top, a craggy, rocky hill.
The attack would come from Maj. Gen. John Bell Hood’s division of Longstreet’s corps. Hood’s soldiers faced a long assault over a relatively open stretch, a slight elevation to the boulder field of the Devil’s Den, and then an uphill march through the draw between Round Top and Little Round Top. During the maneuver Hood himself would be wounded and lose the use of his left arm. “With this wound terminated my participation in this great battle,” Hood later wrote. “As I was borne off on a litter to the rear, I could but experience deep distress of mind and heart at the thought of the inevitable fate of my brave fellow-soldiers . . . and I shall ever believe that had I been permitted to turn Round Top mountain, we would not only have gained their position, but have be
en able to finally rout the enemy.” 2
The small regiment posted on the extreme left of Little Round Top on the warm afternoon was the Twentieth Maine Infantry, commanded by Col. Joshua L. Chamberlain, a former professor at Bowdoin College. As the repeated attacks struck along the lines from the woods, Chamberlain’s Twentieth Maine was running desperately low on ammunition. It was a moment of crisis for the Union cause at Gettysburg. “A critical moment has arrived, and we can remain as we are no longer,” wrote Theodore Gerrish, a private in the Twentieth Maine. “We must advance or retreat. It must not be the latter, but how can it be the former? Colonel Chamberlain understands how it can be done. The order is given ‘Fix bayonets!’ and the steel shanks of the bayonets rattle upon the rifle barrels. ‘Charge bayonets, charge!’” 3
Although Gerrish’s account is embellished (he was not present at the battle, and no such order was dispatched), the passage helped immortalize the legendary fight of the Twentieth Maine on Little Round Top, which sent Col. William Oates’s Alabamans downhill in a scramble. Other actions along the crest of Little Round Top held the position for the Federal army, and the many other concurrent fights slowly wound down into the silent campfires of the night.
The second day at Gettysburg may have decided the outcome of the battle, but the next day, July 3, would offer its greatest spectacle. Dissatisfied with the prospect of pulling away without a decisive victory, Lee ordered a desperate charge toward the one area that had not been struck forcefully the previous day—the Union center, held by none other than Hancock’s Second Corps. In hindsight it was a foolish move, and some commanders—most notably Longstreet—chafed at the idea on the spot. But the Confederate commander believed the Federal guns were running low on ammunition, and he reasoned that if he could split the Union center, he could drive a wedge through the army and rout the Yankees yet. The frontal attack came on the afternoon of July 3 and consisted of divisions under Maj. Gen. George E. Pickett and Brig. Gens. James J. Pettigrew and Isaac R. Trimble. All together more than twelve thousand men would march more than a mile across the plain toward a copse of trees and an angle in the stone wall, beyond which Union blue coated the landscape, rifles and ordnance ready.
The relative silence at noontime on July 3 didn’t last long. “The cannonade in the center soon began, and presented one of the most magnificent battle-scenes witnessed during the war,” wrote Evander M. Law, the Confederate brigadier general who inherited Hood’s division. “Looking up the valley toward Gettysburg, the hills on either side were capped with crowns of flame and smoke, as 300 guns, about equally divided between the two ridges, vomited their iron hail upon each other.” 4
The artillery barrage, designed to prepare the Union center for the assault, carried on in full force as the assembled Southerners readied to move out of the woods. In Longstreet’s words, “Pickett said, ‘General, shall I advance?’ The effort to speak the order failed, and I could only indicate it by an affirmative bow.” 5 Pickett scurried to the assembled troops, blaring, “Up, men, and to your posts! Don’t forget today that you are from old Virginia.”
The attack proceeded, the Union soldiers momentarily stunned at the vision of such a long line of gray moving toward them. The Federal artillery belched long-range shell, shot, and finally short-range canister, and waves of bluecoats poured lines of fire into the approaching Rebels. It was a desperate moment of the war. As Edmund Rice, lieutenant colonel of the Nineteenth Massachusetts Infantry, recalled, “Voices were lost in the uproar; so I turned partly toward them, raised my sword to attract their attention, and motioned to advance. They surged forward, and just then, as I was stepping backward with my face toward the men, urging them on, I felt a sharp blow as a shot struck me, then another; I whirled round, my sword torn from my hand by a bullet or shell splinter. My visor saved my face, but the shock stunned me.” Rice won the Medal of Honor for his action that afternoon. Another Federal officer, Col. Frank Haskell, remembered the chaos: “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 indistinguishable 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.” 6
Gettysburg indeed had ended. Lee’s spectacular attack was a failure, most of those who marched toward the Union line dead, wounded, or captured. The following day Lee marched his army southward, back toward Virginia, Meade’s battered force too depleted of energy, ammunition, and supplies to pursue with any meaning. To make matters worse, however, on the same day the siege at Vicksburg came to a close, Pemberton and his remaining Confederates surrendered to Grant. The double victory marked a major turning point of the war and the beginning of the end for the Confederate nation.
At Vicksburg the celebration of the weary Union troops was vigorous, the terms offered by Grant typically magnanimous. “As soon as our troops took possession of the city, guards were established along the whole line of parapet, from the river above to the river below,” wrote Grant. “The prisoners were allowed to occupy their old camps behind the intrenchments. No restraint was put upon them, except by their own commanders.” 7
In Washington, although he was disturbed by Meade’s lethargic pursuit of Lee, Lincoln finally had a major event to celebrate. He had found not only a victory at Vicksburg but also a reliable and forceful commander.
As the major war news was unfolding at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the summer of 1863 also brought action along the Atlantic coast and at the gateway into the Deep South. In Charleston, South Carolina, a hotbed of rebellion, the Federal navy and army made slow progress by a series of movements on land and water. A naval attack in April by Rear Adm. Samuel F. Du Pont failed, but by July the Federal army initiated another set of engagements designed to disable the forts protecting Charleston Harbor. The troops would assault James Island and Morris Island, capture Fort Wagner and Battery Gregg, and place guns to concentrate fire on Fort Sumter.
Leading the attack through a thin strip of sand on Fort Wagner was Col. Robert Gould Shaw’s Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, a national regiment of African American soldiers, one of the first deployed in combat. The attack on Wagner became a test of whether black American troops could fight effectively. An account of the attack of July 18 published in the New York Tribune records the outcome: “In the midst of this terrible shower of shot and shell they pushed their way, reached the Fort, portions of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, the Sixth Connecticut, and the Forty-eighth New York dashed through the ditches, gained the parapet, and engaged in a hand-to-hand fight with the enemy, and for nearly half an hour held their ground, and did not fall back until nearly every commissioned officer was shot down.” 8 The attack failed, but the gallant efforts of Shaw’s regiment strongly supported the emerging role of black Americans in the crucial first summer of emancipation.
BACK in Richmond political squabbles continued at a frenzied pace despite the fact that the third session of Congress had ended on May 1 and the fourth session would not begin until December. With battles east and west raging, every politician on hiatus and officers in the capital city or in the field speculated on where the whole war was headed. Greatly upset at the loss of Vicksburg, Jefferson Davis asked Joe Johnston how he possibly could have allowed it to happen, having been in the area (though not the commanding general holding the city). “Painfully anxious as to the result,” Davis wrote, “I have remained without information from you as to any plans proposed or attempted to raise the siege. Equally uninformed as to your plans in relation to Port Hudson, I have to request such information in relation thereto as the Government has a right to expect from one of its commanding Generals in the field.” 9 Davis was further irritated with Johnston over the latter’s seemingly cavalier grasp of authority to do what he wished. “After a full examination of all the corresp
ondence between you and myself and the War Office, including the despatches referred to in your telegrams of the 20th inst., I am still at a loss to account for your strange error in stating to the Secretary of War that your right to withdraw reinforcements from Bragg’s Army had been restricted by the Executive, or that your command over the Army of Tennessee had been withdrawn.” 10 For weeks Davis and Johnston continued to bicker over the responsibility and authority of the Mississippi theater and who was responsible for the loss of Vicksburg.
Former South Carolina governor Francis Pickens, still fuming over the loss of Vicksburg and John Pemberton’s alleged incompetence while stationed at Charleston, could not resist playing “I told you so” to his confidant in Richmond, Louis Wigfall. “You know I wrote you three months ago, that we would lose Vicksburg & the S. West from the incompetency of Pemberton,” Pickens wrote, “and now the facts . . . have no room to doubt in any man’s head, and if Pemberton is put in responsible command again, I assure you it will be a great public calamity. It will produce deep seated disaffection, & endanger any army. I know him well.” 11 This provided still more authority to rail against Davis, who was Pemberton’s friend.
On August 1 Davis wrote again to Johnston, sending a newspaper clipping critical of Davis and pointing out that it clearly had been written by “someone having access to your correspondence.” Moreover, a staff member of Johnston’s had been found showing similar material around Richmond. “A copy of a letter written by one of your staff has been exhibited in this city which contains passages so identical with the published communication as to leave little room for doubt as to its origin,” Davis fumed. He asked Johnston to “take the proper action.” 12
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