Gettysburg
Page 17
General Meade even approved a hasty cavalry reorganization. Hooker had managed to wrest the cavalry division of Julius Stahel away from the Department of Washington, and Alfred Pleasonton then managed to wrest the divisional command away from Stahel and give it to Judson Kilpatrick. At the same time, Meade agreed to Pleasonton’s stratagem of jump-promoting three youthful captains, Elon Farnsworth, Wesley Merritt, and George Armstrong Custer, to be brigadier generals and commanders of brigades in the newly revamped cavalry. The strength of the cavalry corps was now some 15,000.8
From Washington that day came a disturbing report that Confederate cavalry had been sighted across the Potomac not far from Washington in at least two-brigade strength. Then came worse—Rebel troopers said to be under Jeb Stuart had pounced on a 150-wagon supply train near Rockville, Maryland, bound for the Army of the Potomac. Washington lacked cavalry to meet this threat, and Meade quickly dispatched two cavalry brigades and a battery “to proceed at once in search and pursuit.” The news generated flickers of panic in the capital. Stuart himself, so it was reported, told one of his wagon-train prisoners at Rockville that were it not for his jaded horses “he would have marched down the 7th Street Road—took Abe & Cabinet prisoners….“In recording this, Elizabeth Blair Lee remarked, “For the life of me I cannot see that he would have failed had he tried it.”
Enemy cavalry between the Potomac army and Washington posed an obvious threat to Meade’s communications and his supply line, and indeed for a time the Rebels knocked out the telegraphic links between the army and the capital. They also damaged the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, and tore up the Baltimore & Ohio rail line leading to Frederick, but the resourceful railroader Herman Haupt soon had a new supply line in operation over the Western Maryland Railroad from Baltimore to Westminster. 9
By day’s end that Sunday, General Meade had marching orders in the hands of all his commanders. Starting at 4:00 A.M. the next day, June 29, the Army of the Potomac would press northward from the Frederick area in a fan-shaped advance toward the Pennsylvania line. The first day’s objectives stretched from Emmitsburg on the west through Taneytown to Westminster on the east, a span of 20 miles. That line, Meade thought, ought to confront the Rebels on any course they might take toward Baltimore or Washington from their reported positions in Pennsylvania. “Our new commander is determined not to let the grass grow under his feet,” artillerist Wainwright entered approvingly in his diary on the 29th, “and his dispositions would indicate that he has some pretty certain ideas as to where Lee is, and what he ought to do himself.“10
JEB STUART’S REMARK on June 28 that but for his jaded mounts he might have dashed into Washington and captured the president and his Cabinet was a typical bit of Stuart bravado. To be sure, just then the capital’s defenses were undermanned, but Stuart had no way of knowing that and he had to respect the ring of forts and their garrisons. In his report he spoke of surprise lost and the hazards of a night attack, and consequently he determined “to proceed directly north.” Washington was not in the danger it imagined.
In any case, the Confederate raiders found much to distract them in Maryland. “Pushed on to Rockville,” wrote the cavalryman-novelist John Esten Cooke, “where a female seminary was fairly running over, at doors and windows, with pretty girls, in fresh nice dresses—it was Sunday—low necks, bare arms and other pleasing devices, waving,…laughing, exclaiming and wild with joy….“The report of an approaching Yankee wagon train wrenched the troopers back to duty. “Scene magnificent,” Cooke noted when they charged the train. “Wagons smashing, crashing, rumbling, burning—the mules crazy, the drivers ‘crazy mad.’” When it was over Stuart found himself with 125 intact U.S. army wagons, all brand-new, complete with full harness and fresh teams, loaded mostly with fodder. He decided the train would be a godsend to Confederate quartermasters, and took his prize along. The wagon train, when added to the damaged Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, the severed telegraph lines, the torn-up Baltimore & Ohio tracks, was proof how effectively Stuart was carrying out key provisions in General Lee’s orders for the raid.
A drawing by Adalbert Volck pictures Jeb Stuart, center, and his raiders with horses captured in Pennsylvania. (Library of Congress)
But with all these tasks Stuart had fallen further and further behind schedule, and the captured train continually held him up. Not until the morning of June 30 did he cross into Pennsylvania. Even then the entire Yankee army was on his left, squarely between his column and Lee’s. He had no communication with Lee or Ewell and no intelligence even on where to find Ewell—and as he approached Hanover he discovered a column of Yankee cavalry across his path. It was now the sixth day of the expedition, and it was evident that his “ride around Hooker,” conceived in such heady optimism, had become a nightmare.11
At Chambersburg, meanwhile, with the Federal army discovered to be much closer than he had supposed, and with only the spy Harrison’s report to go on, General Lee had to make rapid calculations. His first orders, sent by courier to Ewell the night of June 28, called for the army to reassemble at Chambersburg. Then by morning Lee had second thoughts. Harrison’s report put two Federal infantry corps approaching South Mountain, and that was a matter of concern. The army might live comfortably off the enemy’s country as to food and forage, but Lee needed the option of a supply line back to Virginia for at least ammunition resupply. With Ewell having cleared the Shenandoah, Lee thought if need be a cavalry escort ought to be sufficient to bring a wagon train safely through the Shenandoah and Cumberland valleys. That route was also required more immediately to carry off the booty being collected in Pennsylvania. However, should those two Federal corps in Harrison’s report proceed west through the South Mountain passes and into the Cumberland Valley, they would effectively intercept Lee’s communications with Virginia.
That in fact was exactly what Joe Hooker had had in mind for the Twelfth Corps and the Harper’s Ferry garrison, but Hooker’s idea was set aside along with his army command. Instead Meade was massing the Army of the Potomac to the east at Frederick, well away from South Mountain, and issuing orders to march from there north into Pennsylvania. Lee lacked any way to learn of this move by his opponent—“In the absence of the cavalry, it was impossible to ascertain his intentions,” he would say in his report. So he determined to counter the perceived threat to his communications with a threat of his own. He would shift his army out of the Cumberland Valley and move it east of the South Mountain range, thereby posing an apparent threat to Baltimore and Washington. To protect these cities the Federal army would surely have to collect itself and follow his lead. Unspoken but inherent in Lee’s decision to retain the initiative and to unite his army east of the mountains was his deliberate challenge to the enemy—ideally, of course, on a battlefield of his own choosing.
So it happened—thanks to an intelligence drought and a consequent miscalculation—that the two armies were set to marching on a collision course. The Army of the Potomac’s intelligence chief, Colonel George Sharpe, fixed the stakes for the contest when he wrote that day, “I hope our friends understand that in the great game that is now being played, everything in the way of advantage depends upon which side gets the best information.“12
EARLIER ON JUNE 28, before the arrival of the spy Harrison at his camp, General Lee had ordered a concerted movement across the Susquehanna and against Harrisburg. Dick Ewell was to lead the way, supported by Longstreet’s corps. A. P. Hill would follow in Jubal Early’s tracks toward York, cooperating with Ewell “as circumstances might require.” Their objective was to seize the Pennsylvania capital and complete the destruction of the railroad network supplying Baltimore and Washington and the Federal armies.
Lee’s dispatch sent that night canceled the Harrisburg movement, and his revised orders, written in the morning, reached Ewell at Carlisle late in the day on June 29. Rather than returning south by west through the Cumberland Valley to Chambersburg, as first ordered, Ewell was now to march due south “in the direction
of Gettysburg, via Heidlersburg….” Rodes’s division would follow this route, and Early, countermarching westward from York, would intersect his line of march. Allegheny Johnson’s division, in response to the earlier order, had already left that afternoon on the road to Chambersburg. Instead of recalling him, Ewell told Johnson to turn off eastward below Shippensburg and cross South Mountain at the Cashtown Gap.
All this made Old Bald Head most unhappy. He had carefully worked out his plan for taking Harrisburg, and in fact earlier in the day Jenkins’s cavalry had shelled the enemy works there. According to Jed Hotchkiss, “The General was quite testy and hard to please, because disappointed, and had every one flying around.” There was disappointment in the ranks as well. A man in Maryland Steuart’s brigade recalled the “ill-concealed dissatisfaction” of the men, who “found the movement to be, as they supposed, one of retreat.” But obedient soldier that he was, Dick Ewell had Rodes’s troops on the road south at first light on Tuesday, June 30.
While Ewell was prompt enough responding to these new orders, General Lee had not communicated any particular sense of crisis to the case, and the Second Corps’ march proceeded at the usual pace. At Papertown Ewell found time to tour the Kempton & Mullen paper mill, which, he discovered, supplied military forms of various sorts to the Union army. The Confederacy being perpetually short of such items, Ewell announced to the mill owner that he was making a $5,000 purchase. He had his quartermaster load up the wagons with a generous selection of boxed forms, after which he presented the hapless owner with a Confederate government voucher—worth about as much as the form it was written on.
Allegheny Johnson also made a brief stop on his way south. His column encountered a party of Pennsylvania militiamen that Jubal Early had captured, then paroled and sent on their way home. Johnson halted the column, looked the scared militiamen over, and ordered them to take off their shoes. That was inhumane, someone said. Nonsense, said Allegheny. They were on their way home, and his troops needed those shoes far more than they did, “as he had work for his men to do.“13
At the same time, General Lee started the rest of his army eastward
from Chambersburg and across South Mountain for the rendezvous with Ewell. A. P. Hill’s Third Corps led the way on the 29th, Harry Heth’s division gaining Cashtown, east of the mountains, by day’s end. Eight miles ahead to the southeast, reached by the Chambersburg Pike, was Gettysburg. At the hub of a network of good roads, nearly equidistant from
Carlisle and Chambersburg, Gettysburg looked on the map to be a natural assembly point for Lee’s divided forces. Hill’s other two divisions camped that night short of the Cashtown Gap.
On Tuesday, the 30th, Longstreet’s First Corps followed Hill as far as Greenwood, west of the mountains, with Pickett’s division remaining behind to secure Chambersburg. Pickett’s infantry was doing the cavalry’s job, made necessary by Stuart’s continued absence. For the same reason, Evander Law’s brigade of Hood’s division was detached to guard the army’s right at the village of New Guilford. Having some two-thirds of his army crowded onto the Chambersburg Pike, and in considerable disorder, did not seem to bother General Lee.
First Corps artillerist Porter Alexander remembered the Chambersburg Pike being quite muddy that day from recent rains, and therefore the infantry marched in the fields alongside the road. Alexander took note of a Pennsylvania-German farmer in visible distress as he watched the Rebel soldiers tramp a path in his wheat and pump his well dry trying to fill their canteens and track mud all over his front porch. “De well is done pump dry!” the farmer exclaimed to Alexander. “And just look at dis porch vere dey been! And see dere vere dey trampled down dat wheat! Mine Gott! Mine Gott! I’se heard of de horrors of war before but I never see what dey was till now!” Alexander admitted this sounded “like a made up anecdote, but it is verbatim & literatim as I saw & heard it myself.“14
The sharp point of the army’s advance on June 30 was the village of Cashtown, where Harry Heth’s lead division had camped. Heth determined to make use of the day by sending a foraging party eight miles ahead to Gettysburg, to “search the town for army supplies (shoes especially), and return the same day.” He selected for the task Johnston Pettigrew, whose North Carolina brigade had been pried away from D. H. Hill to fill out Heth’s new division. While the expedition was undertaken on Heth’s initiative—rumor had it that in Gettysburg there was a plentiful stock of shoes to be found, something much needed by his division—he had strict instructions for Pettigrew. It was thought only Sunday-soldier militiamen might be in Gettysburg, but should Pettigrew encounter any “organized troops” of the Army of the Potomac, he was not to engage them. As Pettigrew’s aide, Lieutenant Louis Young, remembered it, “The orders to him were peremptory, not to precipitate a fight.” Harry Heth was here surely expressing standing orders for the day from higher authority—from corps commander A. P. Hill, perhaps from General Lee himself—for just then there were no other troops within supporting distance of Heth’s division.
Pettigrew dutifully set off that morning with three regiments and a wagon train to carry off the shoes and the supplies. As the expedition approached Gettysburg, he was warned by what Lieutenant Young described as “General Longstreet’s spy” (apparently the enterprising Harrison), and also by a local Confederate sympathizer, that Federal cavalry in force was approaching the town. Pettigrew halted and sent back to General Heth for further orders. Heth’s reply repeated his earlier instructions, and expressed doubt there was anything more than home guards in Gettysburg.
Johnston Pettigrew was not a professional soldier and he had had only limited command experience before being severely wounded on the Peninsula, but he was highly intelligent and fully confident that he knew real enemy cavalry when he saw it. These Yankee troopers were in plain sight now and by-the-book aggressively probing toward his advanced skirmishers. Obeying his orders not to precipitate a fight, Pettigrew withdrew and marched empty-handed back to Cashtown.
While Pettigrew was making his report that evening to General Heth, corps commander A. P. Hill rode up. Perhaps because Pettigrew was a self-taught soldier and not well known to either general, they both cast doubt on his story. As Heth remembered the conversation, Hill insisted that any cavalry seen in Gettysburg was nothing more than what he termed a detachment of observation: “I am just from General Lee, and the information he has from his scouts corroborates what I have received from mine—that is, the enemy is still at Middleburg and have not yet struck their tents.” Middleburg was 20 miles to the south, in Maryland. An exasperated Pettigrew called in Lieutenant Young, who had served under Hill and was known to him, in the hope that Young’s report “might have some weight with him.” Young testified that all the movements of the Yankee cavalry he had observed “were undoubtedly those of well-trained troops and not those of a home guard.”
Powell Hill remained emphatic in his disbelief, but with a bravura flourish said that he hoped the Potomac army was up, “as this was the place he wanted it to be.” In his report, Hill said that he forwarded Pettigrew’s Gettysburg sightings—or his own version of them—to General Lee, and also to Dick Ewell, and announced “that I intended to advance the next morning and discover what was in my front.” At Cashtown that night Harry Heth said he still wanted to get those shoes he believed to be in Gettysburg, and did General Hill have any objections? “None in the world,” said Hill. 15
At Greenwood the night of June 30, Lee made his headquarters camp near Longstreet’s, and Porter Alexander took the opportunity to pay a visit to friends on the commanding general’s staff. “I recall the conversation as unusually careless & jolly,” Alexander wrote, with no one expressing any premonition of fighting to come. He remembered writing to his wife from Greenwood and “telling her that of course we would have to have a battle before very long, but, as yet, there was no prospect of it.” General Dorsey Pender, commanding a division in Hill’s corps, had much the same feeling. He wrote his wife, “Everything seems
to be going on finely. We might get to Phila. without a fight, I believe, if we should choose to go…. Confidence and good spirits seem to possess everyone.“16
The British observer Colonel Fremantle was traveling with Longstreet’s headquarters, and in the Greenwood camp on the 30th he recorded in his journal important news of the enemy: “In the evening General Longstreet told me that he had just received intelligence that Hooker had been disrated, and that Meade was appointed in his place.” Fremantle went on to note Longstreet’s reaction: “Of course he knew both of them in the old army, and he says that Meade is an honorable and respectable man, though not, perhaps, as bold as Hooker.”
There is no contemporaneous record of Lee’s reaction to this news. Some years later Armistead Long of his staff recalled the general mentioning the difficulties Meade would face in taking command at this advanced stage of the campaign: “He was therefore rather satisfied than otherwise by the change.” It is more probable that, at least privately, General Lee was disappointed at missing the opportunity to face Mr. F. J. Hooker a second time.17