Gettysburg
Page 15
The invaders’ entry into York was peaceful and indeed novel. Brigadier General William “Extra Billy” Smith, sixty-five years old, at heart more politician than soldier, directed the column to halt in the town square. Extra Billy had served five terms in Congress and one term as governor of Virginia, and he could not resist an opportunity to address a crowd, whatever its sympathies might be. “My friends,” he began with good cheer, “how do you like this way of coming back into the Union?” He went on to explain that he and his fellow soldiers had felt the need of a summer outing, “and thought we would take it at the North.” They might be conquerors, he said—“this part of Pennsylvania is ours today; we’ve got it, we hold it, we can destroy it, or do what we please with it”—but they were also Christian gentlemen and would act accordingly. “You are quite welcome to remain here and to make yourselves entirely at home—so long as you behave yourselves pleasantly and agreeably as you are doing now. Are we not a fine set of fellows?”
With his honeyed words he had the crowd in the palm of his hand, only to be interrupted by a querulous, impatient Jubal Early. Old Jube forced his way through the onlookers to confront Extra Billy and snarled, “General Smith, what the devil are you about? Stopping the head of this column in this cursed town!” Not the least taken aback, Extra Billy replied, “Having a little fun, General, which is good for all of us, and at the same time teaching these people something that will be good for them and won’t do us any harm.”
Old Jube was not inclined toward a little fun, and he proceeded to levy a sizable tribute on York’s town fathers. Among his demands were 28,000 pounds of baked bread, 3,500 pounds of sugar, 1,650 pounds of coffee, 32,000 pounds of beef or 21,000 pounds of bacon, 2,000 pairs of shoes, and no less than $100,000 in cash. If these demands were not met, he announced, he would turn his men loose to sack the town. York complied to a considerable extent, although it could furnish only 1,500 pairs of shoes and just $28,000. Early was sufficiently mollified to let the town stand.
Captain William Seymour of Harry Hays’s Louisiana brigade marveled at how far these Pennsylvanians would go to conceal their animals. “Horses were found in bedrooms, parlours, lofts of barns and other out of the way places,” Seymour wrote. One day his brigade quartermaster was interrogating the owner of a large and finely furnished house when he heard a neigh from the next room. “The Major quietly opened the door and there in an elegant parlour, comfortably stalled in close proximity to a costly rosewood piano, stood a noble looking horse….” The quartermaster led his prize from its “novel stable,” paying for it in Confederate currency that was all but worthless to the owner.
General Early had thus far found so little opposition to his march that he determined to capture, rather than destroy, the Columbia Bridge over the Susquehanna at Wrightsville. His thought was to use the bridge as entry for capturing Harrisburg, and he assigned the task to John B. Gordon’s brigade of Georgians. In late afternoon of June 28 Gordon came in sight of Wrightsville, only to find the town barricaded and the mile-long bridge guarded by entrenchments, apparently fully manned. In expectation of stampeding the militia defenders, Gordon opened on the town with his artillery. His two most effective guns were 20-pounder Parrott rifles seized from Milroy in Winchester two weeks earlier. To the quiet satisfaction of many townsmen, one of the shells heavily damaged the rooms of the Sons of Temperance Association.
Among the defenders in the entrenchments was a local company of free blacks—volunteers protecting their homes—and one of these men was killed in the bombardment, the sole death in the fight for the Columbia Bridge. The shelling soon had the desired effect, and the militiamen scrambled back across the bridge. Gordon’s men rushed forward, but the Federals had carefully prepared the bridge for destruction, and it was soon spectacularly ablaze. “The scene was magnificent…,“a newspaper reported. “The moon was bright, and the blue clouds afforded the best contrast possible to the red glare of the conflagration. The light in the heavens must have been seen for many miles.” When the fire threatened to spread into Wrightsville, Gordon’s troops joined the townspeople in bringing it under control. The next day the citizenry with great relief watched the Rebels march away.33
In the meantime, Dick Ewell had marched northward from Chambersburg at a leisurely pace with Rodes’s and Johnson’s divisions. At each town he laid tribute. In Shippensburg, for example, the womenfolk were conscripted through the night to bake the required numbers of breads, pies, and cakes, to be delivered to the Rebel troops in the town square. General Ewell wrote his new wife that the march reminded him of the war with Mexico. “It is like a renewal of Mexican times to enter a captured town,” he told her. “The people look as sour as vinegar & I have no doubt would gladly send us all to kingdom come if they could.” On June 27 a diarist in the village of Newville noted, “The cavalry are raiding our corn cribs tonight.” The next day she wrote, “An exciting Sabbath. Johnny Reb left this morning with almost 300 cattle.”
On Saturday, the 27th, a deputation of leading citizens of Carlisle met Ewell’s outriders under a flag of truce and surrendered the town, giving assurances that all the militia units had departed for safer quarters. Fifteen-year-old James Sullivan, peeking from a second-story window, watched the first Rebel troopers enter Carlisle: “Big men, wearing broad-brimmed hats, and mounted on good horses, they had a picturesque air of confidence and readiness for action. Their carbines were carried butt resting at the knee and barrel pointed upright.” Soon afterward the infantry marched in singing “Dixie.”
General Ewell made his headquarters at Carlisle Barracks, the army post where he had been stationed as a second lieutenant of dragoons twenty years before. The post flagpole soon bore a Confederate banner, and speeches were offered by several of the generals. “Quite an animating scene,” Jed Hotchkiss, the staff cartographer, noted in his diary. On General Lee’s orders, Ewell refrained from burning the army barracks, but instead scoured them of their military accouterments. He then turned his attention to planning the capture of Harrisburg. 34
That Saturday, June 27, the day after Ewell set out from Chambersburg for the Susquehanna, Robert E. Lee rode into Chambersburg in company with A. P. Hill and the Third Corps. Longstreet’s First Corps was a short march behind. General Lee established headquarters outside town in a pleasant grove called Messersmith’s Woods, on the Chambersburg Pike leading to Gettysburg. Lee, along with two-thirds of his army, would pause three days at Chambersburg while events quite beyond his reach strikingly reshaped the campaign.35
In one change of plan, the Army of Northern Virginia would not be carrying with it a minister plenipotentiary to negotiate peace terms with the Yankees on some northern battlefield. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens had reached Richmond from Georgia on June 26, to discover to his horror that the diplomatic scheme he had proposed for discussing “a general adjustment” with Washington had been transposed by President Davis into something very different. Stephens balked at Davis’s idea of sending him to join Lee’s army—even if he could catch up with it in Pennsylvania—where he would be expected to parley with the enemy. Stephens eventually agreed to shifting the parley site to the Virginia Peninsula. From there, on July 4, he requested a meeting with the Lincoln administration. But by then any Confederate initiative for negotiating a peace had been overtaken by events. President Lincoln refused to meet with him, and Alexander Stephens returned home empty-handed and disillusioned.36
On June 25 Lee had written to Mr. Davis, calling once again for any available reinforcements, and returning to his scheme for either a real or an effigy army to be assembled under General Beauregard to threaten Washington. He explained that he had abandoned his communications with Virginia, and would live off the enemy’s country. He set as his most modest goal drawing Hooker’s army north across the Potomac, “embarrassing their plan of campaign in a measure, if I can do nothing more and have to return.” The truth of the matter, however, was that General Lee, as he had from the first, f
ully anticipated fighting a battle north of the Potomac.
At Dick Ewell’s headquarters on the evening of the next day, the 26th, Jed Hotchkiss closed his daily diary entry by noting, “Gen. Lee wrote to Gen. Ewell that he thought the battle would come off near Fredericks City or Gettysburg.” Although this dispatch to Ewell is not on record to elaborate the point, it is clear enough from Hotchkiss’s notation that General Lee believed he still controlled the initiative in the campaign, and, most important, that he still would be able to dictate where any battle was fought. That was certainly his mood when he greeted General Hood at the Messersmith’s Woods headquarters: “Ah! General, the enemy is a long time finding us; if he does not succeed soon, we must go in search of him.”
In projecting one probable battle site as Frederick, Maryland, some two days’ march south of his present position at Chambersburg, Lee took it for granted that the Federal army had not yet crossed the Potomac and was still in Virginia, guarding Washington. According to the last intelligence, dated June 23, Hooker “was prepared to cross the Potomac” and had a pontoon bridge across the river at Edwards Ferry, near Leesburg, Virginia. Yet nothing about any actual Potomac crossing by the enemy had been reported by Jeb Stuart. Surely, Lee believed, such intelligence could not have escaped his ever vigilant cavalryman. Talking to General Isaac Trimble at this time, Lee explained that when the enemy finally did come up, “probably through Frederick,” he would throw what he described as “an overwhelming force on their advance,” then follow up that initial success by driving one corps back upon another to gain the victory. Lee told General Trimble, as he had told Dick Ewell, that one probable site for the coming battle was the Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg.37
ON MONDAY, June 22, the day after the big cavalry fight at Upperville—and the day Dick Ewell started his raiding columns across Maryland into Pennsylvania—the Army of the Potomac was massed to protect Washington and poised to push across the Potomac on command. Solid intelligence about the Rebel army was at last beginning to come in. The decision to start Jeb Stuart on his “ride around Hooker” would prove a boon to Federal intelligence-gathering. Without Stuart’s tight cavalry screen, Lee’s hidden army became visible. To be sure, Stuart had left two cavalry brigades, under Beverly Robertson and Grumble Jones, with the army, but Lee put them to guarding the Blue Ridge gaps rather than furnishing security during the army’s advance. Albert Jenkins’s troopers, out front with Ewell’s corps, were too busy raiding Pennsylvania barns and smokehouses to perform cavalry functions. The same was true of John Imboden’s irregulars, foraging and slave-catching on the western flank of Lee’s advance.
As a consequence, information began to funnel into General Hooker’s headquarters from no fewer than fifteen organized intelligence-gathering groups. The Potomac army’s Bureau of Military Information ran several spying operations, as did General Couch in Harrisburg. The Signal Corps established observation posts. The railroads in the region directed scouting parties that reported over the lines’ telegraph facilities. On-the-scene scouting parties, such as that of David McConaughy, a leading citizen of Gettysburg, supplied eyewitness testimony. Gradually the hazy picture of the invading army began to clear.
The B.M.I.‘s Sergeant Milton Cline, for example, used the cavalry fight at Aldie to slip his espionage party behind enemy lines. They slipped back during the Upperville battle to report on the location of Longstreet’s divisions and to confirm that A. P. Hill was also in the Valley. The passage of Jubal Early’s division through Gettysburg and on toward York was detailed by David McConaughy and his citizen-scouts. The arrival of Ewell’s outriders in Chambersburg and Carlisle, and their requisitions, was promptly passed on to Couch’s headquarters in Harrisburg. By all reports, it was evident that Ewell’s corps, as soon as it crossed into Pennsylvania, was embarking on a giant raiding expedition. Of immediate concern was the exact whereabouts and intentions of the remaining two-thirds of the Rebel army—the corps of Longstreet and Hill. Would they follow Ewell into Pennsylvania, or would they await his return to the Potomac with his booty and then strike eastward toward Washington or Baltimore?38
On June 24 the answer came from the B.M.I.‘s third-in-command, John Babcock, posted at Frederick in Maryland. The “main body” of Lee’s army was crossing the Potomac at Shepherdstown, he reported, and “large bodies of troops can be seen” from vantage points in Maryland. Ewell’s corps had passed that way two days earlier and was now in Pennsylvania. Babcock closed by saying, “All of which may be considered as reliable.” In a second telegram that day, he confirmed from additional “reliable sources” that “Longstreet and A. P. Hill are crossing rapidly.” Equally important, no Rebel forces had been sighted in the direction of Frederick and the South Mountain passes, indicating that the Army of Northern Virginia was marching not eastward but northward toward Pennsylvania. Fighting Joe Hooker now had the intelligence he needed. That night orders went out for the Army of the Potomac to begin crossing the Potomac at Edwards Ferry the next day, Thursday, June 25.
In a curious twist, this intelligence put Longstreet’s corps marching ahead of A. P. Hill’s, when just the reverse was true. But the solid central fact, on the authority of one of the B.M.I.‘s best officers, was undeniable—the two-thirds of the Confederate army not previously fully accounted for was in fact crossing, or about to cross, the Potomac and marching on northward. As it happened, the whole of Hooker’s army would be across the river some hours before the whole of Lee’s. Joe Hooker still held the inside track.39
On the 23rd Hooker had made a flying visit to Washington to confer with the War Department and the president. There is no record of what was discussed, but surely it included the subject of reinforcements. General-in-Chief Halleck was then in Baltimore, forestalling an opportunity for the two men to sort out their differences, had they been so inclined. It appears that neither Hooker nor the president gained much from their meeting that day. Mr. Lincoln appeared afterward at a Cabinet meeting, and Gideon Welles noted in his diary, “His countenance was sad and careworn, and impressed me painfully.” According to another Cabinet member, Montgomery Blair, the president remarked that he had dismissed McClellan the previous fall because he let Lee “get the better of him in the race to Richmond.” Now Lincoln seemed to have it in mind that if Hooker was beaten in the present race, he “would make short work of him.” The president’s confidence in his general was clearly waning. In another conversation, Welles quoted Lincoln as saying that General Hooker “may commit the same fault as McClellan and lose his chance.” Still, he tried to be hopeful: “We shall soon see, but it appears to me he can’t help but win.”
The next day Hooker sent his chief of staff, Dan Butterfield, to Washington and Baltimore to pin down just what reinforcements the Potomac army might expect from the garrisons there. The latest intelligence, now arriving from observers in Hagerstown, through which most of the Rebel army was passing, put Lee’s infantry strength at 91,000. This was not an unreasonable surmise, considering all the reports of Rebel reinforcements coming up from Richmond and the Carolinas since Chancellorsville, and all the difficulty of confirming the accuracy of those reports. (Soon enough the B.M.I. would have more clearly defined reports from Hagerstown, producing a more realistic figure of 80,000 for Lee’s army.) The count of the Potomac army, reflecting the two-year and nine-month regiments so far sent home, was down to some 90,000.
Halleck agreed to surrender but four brigades of replacements from the Department of Washington—two brigades of Pennsylvania Reserves on loan from the Army of the Potomac, a small brigade of New Yorkers, and a Vermont brigade of nine-month men, 8,400 troops all told—but only after he judged the immediate threat to the capital was past. Not until June 25, when Lee was seen to be crossing the Potomac, did these troops set out to try and catch up with the Potomac army. Butterfield could obtain no further troops in Washington, and just one small brigade in Baltimore. How much easier “for your plans and purposes,” he told Hooker, had all the department
al forces likely to confront Lee’s army been “concentrated under one commander.“40
There remained the nagging issue of Harper’s Ferry. Hooker was now determined to gain the 10,000-man garrison there for the manpower edge he felt he had to have. As he later put it, “with all the additions I could receive” the two armies would be essentially equal in strength. He might go on to win the coming battle, but to prevent his opponent from escaping afterward “required, in my judgment, a little superiority of one over the other.”
Hooker formulated a plan for using these Harper’s Ferry troops. On June 25 he ordered the garrison commander, William French, to prepare “to march at a moment’s notice.” Henry Slocum’s Twelfth Corps would move up the Potomac, combine with French’s force, cut Lee’s communications by destroying his Potomac bridges, and finally take up a blocking position in the rear of the Rebel army. Should Lee turn back to strike at Slocum’s blocking force, John Reynolds, advancing to Middletown in Maryland with the First, Third, and Eleventh corps, would be in position to launch a flank attack.
Orders went out to French and Slocum and Reynolds, yet Hooker told Washington nothing of his plan. This had to be deliberate. He had decided to challenge General Halleck over the question of exercising command as he believed the situation warranted; or, as he later put it, the question was whether the army was “to be maneuvered from Washington.” His was a bold and aggressive plan, and certainly one easy enough to justify. Instead, on the evening of June 26, he telegraphed Halleck and asked, “Is there any reason Maryland Heights”—the main defensive position overlooking Harper’s Ferry—“should not be abandoned….” He said nothing of how he intended to use the garrison, only that he would go to Harper’s Ferry the next day to inspect the place. He reminded Halleck that he “must have every available man to use on the field.“41