Assuming their chances of survival to be slim, soldiers often pinned their names to the insides of their uniforms so if their bodies were found, they could be identified. They carried pocket Bibles inscribed with directions on how to notify next of kin. Even so, the bewildering number of men missing in action—so many thousands of them—prompted Clara Barton to open an Office of Correspondence with the Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army in the spring of 1865. In just a few months, she located as many as 20,000. By the time her bureau closed three years later, she’d received more than 60,000 letters from despairing men and women in search of their lost boys.
In 1862 Congress authorized the creation of national cemeteries for the men who died serving their country. Not churchyard burial plots, these secular cemeteries were to be located near the site of a battlefield. Though the national cemetery at Gettysburg would be no exception, there the interred soldiers were not to be divided by rank or status, as they had previously been, but to be buried with their regiment, row after row of them, as if in death—as in life—these men had been equals: equally brave, equally committed, equally frightened.
AFTER THE THREE days of carnage at Gettysburg, horses lay distended on the broad fields, and unrecognizable bodies putrefied in the summer sun. “The corpses seemed to be everywhere, for at times I could not put my foot to the ground without feeling some portion of a man’s body beneath it,” said one soldier. Thousands of bluebottle flies buzzed around them, and the stench was hard to believe; not even the kerosene-soaked fires burning the animals could block it. The smell rose right to the edge of the little college town, where the streets had been sprinkled with disinfecting lime to stave off disease and contagion. Private homes, as well as their barns and stables, and public spaces were filled with mortally wounded men—they numbered about ten times the 2,500 residents—for there was little or no provision for transporting them out of town by rail. The skies had opened, and it poured the day after the battle, but the surgeons, damp with rain and blood, performed amputations outdoors if they had to.
Members of the Sanitary Commission had come as quickly as they could to help tend the wounded. Alexander Gardner and his camera operators came too. Gardner believed the war to be a tragic waste. And so his pictures did not bury the dead—they revealed them to be grotesque and real. To heighten the effect of his grisly pictures, Gardner sometimes rearranged the bodies. Even today those photographs of mangled soldiers disturb the viewer. But already—in those images and elsewhere—there was a distancing at work, a detachment from a horror difficult, if not impossible, to understand. Regardless, the photos were for sale.
BRINGING THE WAR closer, keeping it at bay: had Lincoln not traveled to Gettysburg in November 1863 to commemorate the soldiers fallen there, we might remember the three-day battle as just another sickening site of Civil War slaughter, albeit one that afforded the Federals a much-needed victory after their defeats at Fredericksburg and then at Chancellorsville, where the new commander of the Army of the Potomac, General Joseph Hooker, had miscalculated, dallied, collapsed, and disgraced himself by falling back.
Or if Lincoln had not traveled to Gettysburg, we might remember how yet another new commanding general had been pushed into the Federal field right before a major battle: Burnside had replaced McClellan before Fredericksburg; Hooker had replaced Burnside before Chancellorsville; and now General George Gordon Meade was heading the Army of the Potomac less than a week before Gettysburg. One middling general after another, scoffed many a Confederate.
Lincoln had been disappointed with all of them, though disappointment is perhaps too mild a word. The president was baffled, frustrated, angered by the incompetence, paralysis, or whatever it was that transformed his top generals into reluctant warriors disinclined to fight (McClellan) or whatever it was that made them reckless (Burnside) or paralyzed them with last-minute battle fatigue (Hooker). Perhaps Meade would prove more capable. Tall and vitriolic—his nickname was “Old Snapping Turtle”—and another West Pointer (class of 1835) as well as a Mexican War veteran who had fought well at Second Manassas, Antietam, and Chancellorsville (where Hooker’s inaction had troubled him), the forty-seven-year-old Meade had been awakened in the middle of the night on June 28, and before he’d had time to dress, he had been told of his promotion. There he stood in his nightshirt, incredulous.
Or had Lincoln not traveled to Gettysburg and spoken at the dedication of its national cemetery, we might remember the place principally as the site of General Robert E. Lee’s canny and risky commitment to invading Pennsylvania, of striking hard into enemy territory to undermine enemy morale by seizing Northern territory at last. Jefferson Davis too had been eager for the invasion. A victory on Northern soil, particularly coming after the victory at Chancellorsville, might bring the Confederacy the foreign intervention it so badly needed. However, General James Longstreet, the burly head of the First Corps, wanted instead to reinforce the Confederate army in the West rather than invade the North; he could take his men to Tennessee and link up with Generals Bragg, Johnston, and Buckner in Murfreesboro to stop the Union’s General William Rosecrans—and perhaps dislodge Grant from his stubborn position near Vicksburg. But Lee and Jefferson Davis were set.
Lee was marching his Army of Northern Virginia northward, across the Potomac River and into Pennsylvania, but before all his divided forces gathered—he couldn’t be ready for battle until they’d all arrived—General Henry Heth, on June 30, sent Brigadier General James Pettigrew and his 2,584 men to the small, prosperous town of Gettysburg for supplies, particularly the stash of shoes said to be there. When Pettigrew learned that Union troops were near, he asked Heth for instructions; assuming their numbers were negligible, Heth obtained permission from his corps commander, General A. P. Hill, to get those shoes anyway. Heth took four brigades into Gettysburg to get rid of the Union troops and secure the footwear, which was far more important than a skirmish with a detachment of Federal cavalry. But Hill miscalculated their strength. He did not know that Federal infantry was camped nearby. As Heth later recalled the battle the next day, “on July 1 was without order or system . . . [since] we accidentally stumbled into this fight.” Lee had been blindsided.
Lee was blindsided partly because he hadn’t heard from his trusted cavalryman and scout, the jaunty and vainglorious “Jeb” Stuart, with whom he’d captured John Brown. Stuart was delayed, missing, or dead. “Can you tell me where General Stuart is?” Lee’s officers heard him ask over and over. According to one of those men, with Stuart’s delay, Lee had no cavalry and poor reconnaissance in this unfamiliar terrain, two factors that led directly to his subsequent defeat at Gettysburg. So Lee did not know the size of the Federal army he would have to fight in this unexpected and horrid engagement. It was not what he’d had in mind.
Still, he trounced the Federals on July 1. But because he didn’t yet know how large the Union forces were, he couldn’t press his advantage far enough by day’s end. He then sent instructions to General Richard Ewell, the commander of what had been Jackson’s Second Corps, telling him “to carry the hill occupied by the enemy, if he found it practicable.” Ewell, who had lost his leg at Second Manassas, didn’t think it was practicable. Had he tried, however, the Confederates could very well have occupied Cemetery Hill, an impregnable position that the Federals secured that night. But it’s possible Lee’s gentlemanly and seemingly discretionary instructions had been unclear.
By daybreak on July 2, another hot day of furious fighting, Longstreet had again disagreed with Lee and suggested a defensive maneuver that would separate Meade from Washington and force Meade to attack. Or, if Lee insisted on continuing the Gettysburg battle, Longstreet wanted at least to wait for Pickett’s division to arrive; he said he did not want to go into battle with “one boot off.” Lee replied that “the enemy is here, and if we do not whip him, he will whip us.” Dressed in his worn black felt hat and his long gray jacket with its collar decorated simply with three stars, Lee paced ba
ck and forth, field glasses in hand. He stuck to his plan, and Longstreet had to go along, but to some observers and, years later, angry commentators, Longstreet seemed to dawdle; was he deliberately slow, lacking confidence in Lee’s orders? Critics later alleged that Longstreet’s reluctance to execute Lee’s plan had cost the Confederates a knockout victory on that second gruesome day, for despite their heavy losses the Union troops held on—and they had a strategic position on high ground at Little Round Top, which they defended against a brutal Confederate assault.
The casualties totaled a monstrous 35,000. Lee, having attacked on the left and the right of the Union line, decided that on the next day, July 3, he would cannonade its center with a fierce artillery assault commencing at one o’clock. There were fire and smoke, horses bursting open, metal flying; the noise was so loud, so terrifying, that the crashing was heard, it was said, as far away as Pittsburgh. Cannon thunder aside, the firing had been inaccurate and the missiles—about 10,000 rounds of ammunition, calculated one soldier—flew above the Federal line, missing it. And when the artillery stopped, about forty minutes later, there, coming out of the woods, appeared the glinting rifles and battle flags of what would become famous as Pickett’s charge. General George Pickett’s division led, rushing into the breach, if a breach there was, screaming the terrifying “rebel yell” for which the graycoats had become famous as they ran over open ground. The Federals opened fire from Cemetery Ridge. Pickett, his long ringlets flowing down the back of his neck, his high boots highly polished, struck one observer as a “desperate-looking character.” He moved three brigades forward. They were joined by Hill’s division. Two thousand men were killed or wounded in a matter of thirty minutes, yet the shelling continued. We mowed them down, recalled one Union soldier. “The execution of the fire must have been terrible, as it was over a level plain, and the effect was plain to be seen. In a few minutes, instead of a well-ordered line of battle, there were broken and confused masses, and fugitives fleeing in every direction.” It was a massacre: more than 1,000 dead, 4,500 wounded.
The journalist Whitelaw Reid saw what happened: “The Rebels—three lines deep—came steadily up. They were in point-blank range. . . . At last, the order came! From thrice six thousand guns, there came a sheet of smoky flame, a crash, a rush of leaden death. . . . A storm of grape and canister tore its way from man to man, and marked its track with corpses straight down their line! They had exposed themselves to the enfilading fire of the guns on the western slope of Cemetery hill; that exposure sealed their fate.”
The sacrifice was futile, Reid concluded. “Death! death everywhere, in all its horrid, awful forms!” exclaimed another war correspondent. “The swift bullet and the cruel shell both had been at work: and I realized what a price is paid for victories.”
Longstreet had to agree. “That day at Gettysburg,” he later said, “was one of the saddest of my life.” Though he carried out Lee’s orders, he considered Pickett’s charge suicidal. “I thought it would not do,” Longstreet would write; “that the point had been fully tested the day before, by more men, when all were fresh; that the enemy was there, looking for us; . . . that the conditions were different from those in the days of Napoleon, when field batteries had a range of six hundred yards and musketry about sixty yards.” Longstreet had suggested that Lee go around Meade’s left and attack him from the side, but Lee was adamant about staying put.
There was some small solace. “The rebels behaved with as much pluck as any men in the world could,” noted a Union soldier; “they stood there, against the fence, until they were nearly all shot down.” Their bravery was faultless, and it was heartbreaking, and Lee assumed full responsibility for their defeat. One officer approached him, nearly in tears, to say that his brigade had been slaughtered. “Never mind, General,” Lee tried to console him. “All this has been my fault—it is I who have lost the fight and you must help me out of it in the best way you can.”
AND HAD IT not been for Lincoln’s speech almost four months later, we might remember Gettysburg as the site of other ceaselessly debated questions—not just about Lee and his strategy but about why the lantern-jawed, quick-tempered General Meade, the bags under his eyes deeper than they’d been just a few weeks earlier, had not pursued Lee and crushed the Army of Northern Virginia once and for all. Meade had not ordered his reserves forward to counterattack. If Meade had been aggressive, he would have prevented Lee and his remaining army (maybe 40,000) from crossing the river back to safety.
For one thing, Meade was wary of Lee. To the Federals, Lee was a magician who might reappear at any moment, his army refreshed, his terrifying calculus refurbished. Perhaps Lee’s retreat to the other side of the Potomac was just a ruse to retest the mettle of Meade’s army; perhaps the whole army had not retreated. What would happen then? But generals’ not finishing the job tormented Lincoln: McClellan at Antietam, Rosecrans at Corinth, and now Meade. (For that matter, the same could be said of the Confederate generals Joe Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard at the First Battle of Bull Run.) Did those men not want to push their luck and risk failure after succeeding? In sparing the soldier, as McClellan was apt to do, were they jeopardizing ultimate victory? Were they prolonging the war? Were they enacting some kind of strange, collective reluctance to defeat the army of their countrymen?
The next day, July 4, it rained. Torrential pounding rain, rain in sheets. Moving a huge army with wagon trains and heavy cannon off the high ground was difficult in the soppy mud. Heavy rains not only made roads impassable, they also caused the river to rise, which made it harder to cross. On July 6 Meade promised Henry Halleck, the general in chief of the Federal forces, that he would “proceed in search of the enemy,” but the search was halfhearted if conducted at all. The rain stopped, the roads were drying, but the Federals moved slowly. By July 10, Lee was way ahead of Meade. Meade said he would pursue and attack but he never did. Lincoln wrung his hands. “They will be ready to fight a magnificent battle,” he said of Meade and his men, “when there is no enemy to fight.” On July 12, Meade took council with his corps commanders and Halleck, in frustration, sent a telegram to Meade, telling him to “act upon your own judgment and make your generals execute your orders. Call no council of war. It is proverbial that councils of war never fight.” As Shelby Foote derisively noted, the council of war amounted “to an attempt to lock the stable after the pony had been stolen.”
“We have certain information that Vicksburg surrendered to General Grant on the 4th of July,” President Lincoln informed Halleck, who in turn forwarded the president’s message to the dilatory Meade. “Now, 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.” Nothing happened. Halleck was peeved, Lincoln was incensed, Lee had departed. “The substantial destruction of his [Lee’s] army would have ended the war,” Lincoln complained, and “such destruction was perfectly easy.”
“Your golden opportunity is gone,” Lincoln upbraided Meade on July 14, “and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.” Though Lincoln didn’t send the letter, Meade, knowing Lincoln was angry, tendered his resignation. But Lincoln needed Meade, who was now widely applauded, and couldn’t accept it. Meade withdrew it in any case.
As for Lee, he escaped but had lost seventeen generals and eighteen colonels. Anguished, he repeated over and over again, “It’s all my fault.”
THOUGH MEADE DID not complete his work, Grant had completed his. The soldier from Illinois who had been the best man at Longstreet’s wedding back in 1848, the man who had smelled of failure and cigars and whose foreclosed home had been called “Hardscrabble,” the general who had already tried once and failed to pry the strategically located city of Vicksburg from Confederate hands, in the summer of 1863, that man succeeded in raising the Stars and Stripes over the graceful Mississippi city on Independence Day. With the western states of the Confederacy finally severed from the east, the fall of Vicksburg sea
led the “fate of the Confederacy,” or so Grant would claim in an uncharacteristic display of pride.
Having failed to take Vicksburg earlier in the year, the dogged general had come up with a line of attack, one that depended on skill, luck, and the deft coordination of his forces with those of the naval fleet. Admiral David Dixon Porter would have to send his gunboats and transports down the river, south of Vicksburg, and past the batteries in order to meet with Grant’s troops on the west bank of the river and haul them to the other shore so that they could march northward, up toward Vicksburg, and assault the city from the southeast. At the same time, Colonel Benjamin Grierson, a former music teacher from Illinois, and General William Tecumseh Sherman would be distracting the Confederates and letting them think that Grant’s forces were even larger than they already were. The plan involved so many moving parts that even Grant’s friend Sherman initially doubted its viability.
Once on the east side of the river in April—Porter had succeeded—Grant was able to deceive Confederate general John C. Pemberton, who assumed that Grant would attack from the north. Grant managed to get between Pemberton, near Vicksburg, and Joe Johnston, who was near Jackson, Mississippi. By the end of May, Pemberton had retreated to Vicksburg. Church bells rang, and, after the morning services, the women of the town were entreated to make bandages for the groups of dusty soldiers who soon appeared, “wan, hollow-eyed, ragged, footsore, bloody.” “We are whipped,” the soldiers said, “and the Federals are after us.”
For the next several days, the Confederates pushed the Federals back while Grant kept up the assault, flinging his entire army at the enemy. Pemberton, who still had no reinforcements, resisted gallantly. If reinforcements did not come, he would be trapped in Vicksburg along with its 3,000 inhabitants, many of whom had initially rushed to the city for protection because the Federal cavalry, under Grierson’s command, had been raiding the outlying towns. Meanwhile, in town, a band played “Dixie” while mortar shells, smaller so-called Parrott shells, and shrapnel fell on the city, crushing buildings, killing animals. The very air seemed dead.
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