Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

  In a postwar conversation Lee said he had hoped to maintain his army in the Cumberland Valley through the summer, although he anticipated he would have to give battle before returning to Virginia in the fall. Yet here it was not even July and battle was very likely on the horizon. Still, Lee cannot have been greatly surprised that the Yankees would make a fight for their home ground. Indeed he had good reason to welcome the battle now rather than later. A Federal army demoralized by recent defeat, disorganized by expired enlistments, and perhaps bewildered by this change of commanders ought to be better game than an army reinvigorated by time and training.

  Robert E. Lee’s problem on that June 30, as he pondered events in his Greenwood camp, was that he had only the most general idea of the whereabouts of the enemy’s forces. This did not bode well for his plan to wage a campaign of maneuver and to fight only on his own terms and only on his chosen ground. The answer seemed to be to mark time while continuing the concentration of his forces. That evening he sent a courier to meet Dick Ewell at Heidlersburg with orders for the next day “to proceed to Cashtown or Gettysburg, as circumstances might dictate.” His receipt of Powell Hill’s dispatch describing Pettigrew’s sortie, and Hill’s own intention of advancing to Gettysburg on July 1 “to discover what was in my front,” merely caused Lee to make Ewell’s orders discretionary.

  The other burning question on Lee’s mind was the whereabouts of Jeb Stuart. It had been the assumption, when Lee approved the plan for the cavalry raid, that Stuart would be across the Potomac and in contact with Ewell’s corps within three or at most four days—that is, by June 27 or 28. Lee had further assumed that during their separation the always resourceful Stuart would get word to him of any changes in the Federal dispositions. But there had been no word. The Federals had crossed the Potomac and advanced dangerously near before being discovered. The sole notice of Stuart had arrived just the day before, the 29th. A Second Corps’ staff man, James Power Smith, on his way from Richmond to join Ewell, told Lee that as of June 27 Stuart and his cavalry were still back in Virginia. According to Lieutenant Smith, “The General was evidently surprised and disturbed” by this report.18

  Stuart and Lee had taken care, in planning the “ride around Hooker,” not to leave the army without a force of cavalry during the anticipated three or four days of Stuart’s absence. The brigades of Beverly Robertson and Grumble Jones—2,700 troopers, with Robertson, the senior officer, in command—were carefully instructed in their assignments by Stuart. He made Robertson responsible for guarding Ashby’s and Snicker’s gaps in the Blue Ridge against Yankee intruders, and, among other things, Robertson was “to watch the enemy…. Be always on the alert; let nothing escape your observation….” Should he see the Federals moving “beyond your reach,” he was told, he too should move, staying on the right and rear of Lee’s infantry.

  Thus far in the war Beverly Robertson had not been a general to inspire confidence. In North Carolina D. H. Hill, otherwise stubbornly opposed to sending reinforcements to General Lee, gave up Robertson and his brigade without a murmur. At Brandy Station Robertson performed poorly, displaying a conspicuous lack of initiative. Longstreet had urged Stuart to leave the able and aggressive Wade Hampton with the army instead of Robertson, but Stuart elected to take his best and most trusted generals with him on the raid. He seems to have reasoned that Robertson would probably not have to fight, but only guard the Blue Ridge gaps and observe and report on the enemy—standard roles for any trained cavalryman. In any event, Grumble Jones was considered an excellent outpost officer, and on this occasion ought to set an example for Robertson.

  As it happened, however, Robertson (and Jones) simply stayed in their mountain gaps day after day, gazing across a Loudoun Valley landscape empty of Yankees. All during this time Lee’s headquarters was in frequent touch with Robertson, but if he was asked for intelligence on the enemy it is not on the record; certainly he delivered none. The entire Army of the Potomac crossed the Potomac without Beverly Robertson being the wiser. On June 29, when he realized Stuart was not going to be rejoining the army any time soon, General Lee called Robertson out of the Shenandoah. Even then Robertson moved sluggishly, and reported with his command only on July 3, far too late for any good purpose. “General Robertson was an excellent man in camp to train troops,” cavalryman William Blackford summed up, “but in the field, in the presence of the enemy, he lost all self-possession, and was perfectly unreliable.”

  John S. Mosby, who might have helped to fill this intelligence void, had lost touch with Stuart soon after the cavalry raid began. Lacking an assignment, Mosby drifted off to the west. Operating out of the Shenandoah Valley, he and his partisans raided into Pennsylvania and collected booty.19

  General Lee had been strangely passive (or perhaps supremely self-confident) ever since entering Pennsylvania, particularly in this matter of keeping track of the opposing army. Over the past year he had become totally dependent on Stuart to deliver intelligence on the Yankees, or to arrange for its delivery. Now, at this critical moment, Stuart was not there. “It was the absence of Stuart himself that he felt so keenly,” Major Henry McClellan wrote of Lee. “…It seemed as if his cavalry were concentrated in one person, and from him alone could information be expected.” Should any delay or mischance befall Stuart’s bold scheme—surely distinct possibilities—Lee had no contingency plan, no one else on whom he could or would rely. The partisan Mosby was ignored. Beverly Robertson was well known as a weak reed, yet neither Lee nor anyone else at headquarters seems to have made any effort to find out what he and Grumble Jones were actually doing while Stuart was absent. This is all the more surprising since, as early as June 23, Lee knew the Federals had a pontoon bridge across the Potomac and were poised to cross. Earlier Joe Hooker had been accused by one of his generals of being a Mr. Micawber, “waiting for something to turn up.” During this last week of June General Lee seemed to better fit the characterization.

  Stuart’s now much-delayed march around the Federal army had left Lee not only without timely notice of the Yankees’ passage of the Potomac, but also without intelligence on the march routes of their various corps since then. By the same token, Lee was entirely in the dark as to the terrain and features of any likely battlegrounds. Had Stuart remained with the army on its march north, or had he linked up with Ewell on schedule in Pennsylvania, he would currently be in position to reconnoiter most of the ground between the converging armies.

  Thus all that Lee could assume on this last day of June, from his map and from what the spy Harrison had told him, was that the Army of the Potomac, reported by Harrison to be at Frederick in Maryland, was now probably one or two days’ march closer to the forthcoming concentration of his own army in the Cashtown-Gettysburg area. “A scout reports Meade’s whole army marching this way,” Lee would complain to a staff man, “but that is all I know about his position.” Fast approaching a probable collision with the enemy, Lee was figuratively blindfolded.20

  IF GENERAL LEE’S intelligence on the Army of the Potomac was sparse, the bag of intelligence on the Army of Northern Virginia was filled to overflowing. Without Jeb Stuart’s cavalry patrolling between the two armies, much important information on Lee’s forces was collected without hindrance by the Federals’ wide-ranging intelligence network. The location and movements of A. P. Hill’s and Longstreet’s corps soon became known to Meade, thanks to the efforts of such citizen-spies as David McConaughy’s group in Gettysburg and similar agents in Chambersburg. “The General directs me to thank you…,” the B.M.I.‘s Colonel Sharpe wrote McConaughy on June 29. “You have grasped the information so well in its directness & minuteness, that it is very valuable.”

  The one important disruption Stuart achieved—perhaps the one real accomplishment of his raid—was to cut off Meade’s telegraphic connections with Washington during the 29th and part of the 30th. Most of the intelligence gathered on Ewell’s Second Corps, especially during its stay in Carlisle and York, was promptly funne
led to General Couch in Harrisburg, who transmitted it by telegraph to Washington for retransmission to the Army of the Potomac. Much information of this sort was directed to Harrisburg by observant Northern Central and Pennsylvania Central railroad agents. When on June 30, in response to Lee’s order, Ewell started the divisions of Johnson and Rodes south from Carlisle, and had Jubal Early countermarch from York, reports of these departures were not long in reaching Couch. But with Stuart’s troopers tearing down the wires in Maryland, word of these key changes in the enemy’s dispositions did not reach Meade until he had already made significant decisions about where to march his army. 21

  General-in-Chief Halleck’s June 27 instructions gave Meade two not necessarily complementary objectives: to protect Washington and Baltimore while at the same time operating “against the invading forces of the rebels.” Should Lee strike boldly for Baltimore, say, Meade’s decision would be obvious. But should Lee position his forces in an arc from Chambersburg in the Cumberland Valley to Harrisburg and beyond on the Susquehanna (as it appeared he was doing), Meade’s decision became complicated. Should he mass his army and march challengingly toward Lee’s center, he risked leaving Baltimore uncovered and having his flanks turned, especially his eastern flank. Jubal Early’s division reported at York certainly appeared to be a threat to Baltimore, less than 50 miles to the south.

  George Meade was by nature a careful, cautious general, yet the moment called for boldness and decisiveness … which he clearly understood. Here he was, newly appointed to the command and abruptly so, leading a recently twice-beaten army of possibly doubtful morale, confronting a recently twice-victorious army led by a daring opponent. Meade refused to be intimidated. “We are marching as fast as we can to relieve Harrisburg,” he wrote Mrs. Meade on June 29, “but have to keep a sharp lookout that the rebels don’t turn around us and get at Washington and Baltimore in our rear…. I am going straight at them, and will settle this thing one way or the other. The men are in good spirits; we have been reinforced so as to have equal numbers with the enemy, and with God’s blessing I hope to be successful. Good-by!“22

  With two of the three Rebel corps reliably reported to be advancing eastward between Chambersburg and Gettysburg, Meade in response pointed the main weight of the Army of the Potomac in the direction of Gettysburg. He retained Joe Hooker’s innovation of giving John Reynolds the advance in command of the army’s left wing—now consisting of Reynolds’s own First Corps, Dan Sickles’s Third Corps, and Otis Howard’s Eleventh Corps. Slocum’s Twelfth and Hancock’s Second Corps formed a second tier behind Reynolds. But needing to guard against having his flank turned on the east, Meade ordered the Fifth Corps, now under George Sykes, and John Sedgwick’s Sixth Corps, largest in the army, to shift eastward to Union Mills and Manchester in Maryland. Had Stuart not severed the army’s telegraph connections with Washington, Meade would have learned of Ewell’s and Early’s countermarches southward soon after they began, and redirected Sykes and Sedgwick accordingly. So it happened that on June 30 something over a quarter of the Potomac army’s infantry strength was marching obliquely away from what seemed a likely confrontation at Gettysburg. 23

  As June ended and the two great armies steadily closed on each other, their intelligence needs changed from the strategic to the tactical. Here again the Federals maintained their decisive edge in the intelligence war. Tactical field intelligence was primarily a function of cavalry, of which at the moment Lee had none and Meade had the better part of a corps.

  As one of his last acts, Joe Hooker had ordered his cavalry to reconnoiter Gettysburg, and in due course the task was assigned to John Buford. In cavalryman Buford General Meade had probably the best intelligence gatherer in the Potomac army. At 11 o’clock on the morning of June 30 Buford rode into Gettysburg with two brigades of his cavalry division. His orders from headquarters were to “cover and protect the front, and communicate all information of the enemy rapidly and surely.” Buford reported the townspeople in Gettysburg “in a terrible state of excitement on account of the enemy’s advance upon this place.”

  Buford hurried troopers out west of the town to investigate this enemy force—it was Johnston Pettigrew’s North Carolina brigade—but it withdrew before they could get an identification. By day’s end, however, Buford had gathered identifications aplenty. From the reports of the scouting parties he sent out in all directions, and with the assistance of Colonel Sharpe’s B.M.I. men riding with the troopers, an increasingly clear picture began forming of the Confederate army closing in on Gettysburg.

  As Buford reported in a 10:30 P.M. dispatch to wing commander Reynolds, whose three infantry corps were closest to the scene, A. P. Hill’s corps—its divisions correctly identified as commanded by Heth, Pender, and Anderson—was “massed just back of Cashtown, about nine miles from this place.” Rebel infantry pickets on the Chambersburg Pike west of town were within sight of Buford’s own picket line. “Longstreet, from all I can learn, is still behind Hill.” To the north of Gettysburg, near Heidlersburg, a Confederate courier had been captured that day and was full of talk. He told of Ewell’s corps coming south from Carlisle, with Rodes’s division “being at Petersburg in advance.” Buford added, “I have many rumors and reports of the enemy advancing upon me from toward York.” Buford sent the same intelligence to Pleasonton, who passed it to General Meade at Taneytown.

  Buford’s report could be accepted as reliable not only because it was the work of the respected Buford, but because it confirmed and expanded on the picture of the enemy carefully assembled over recent days by Colonel Sharpe’s B.M.I. intelligence network. The one uncertainty in the picture was the exact location of Ewell’s corps, but Buford’s findings strongly suggested a threat was building from north of Gettysburg as well as from the west.

  The problem with this excellent collation of intelligence was the impossibility of everyone concerned receiving it in timely fashion. Gettysburg was some 14 miles by road from army headquarters at Taneytown. Buford’s courier delivered the dispatch to General Reynolds around midnight of June 30, but it was morning before Meade saw it. The army commander had, in the meantime, sent out marching orders for July 1. The objectives for the day included: “First Corps to Gettysburg; Eleventh Corps to Gettysburg (or supporting distance)….“24

  ON THE LAST DAY of June New Englander Samuel Fiske, a soldier-correspondent in the Second Corps, wrote to the Springfield Republican from Uniontown, Maryland, about what lay ahead for the oft-maligned Army of the Potomac: “We of the unfortunate ‘grand army,’ to be sure, haven’t much reason to make large promises; but we are going to put ourselves again in the way of the butternuts, and have great hopes of retrieving, on our own ground, our ill fortune in the last two engagements, and, by another and still more successful Antietam conflict, deserve well of our country.” Captain Fiske looked back, and then ahead: “Our troops are making tremendous marches some of these days just past; and, if the enemy is anywhere, we shall be likely to find him and feel of him pretty soon.”

  “Tremendous marches” was not an exaggeration. Abner Small of the 16th Maine, in Reynolds’s First Corps, recorded that his regiment set out from Middletown in Maryland at 7:30 Sunday evening, June 28, and reached Frederick at 3:00 A.M. Monday morning. “We left at five o’clock, and marched through Lewistown, Catoctin Furnace, and Mechanicstown to Emmitsburg, arriving at Emmitsburg at a quarter to six Monday evening.” Small calculated that to be 36 miles in just over twenty-two hours, “with a two-hour stop!”

  On June 29 the Second Corps, delayed initially by a misdirected order, was pushed by the hard-driving Winfield Scott Hancock 32 miles in eighteen hours. High humidity and bursts of drenching rain added to the misery. In trying to make up for the lost time that day, General Hancock resorted to forced marching. One of his men defined the term: “To see men fall from exhaustion, clothes wet, faces and teeth black with dust, lips parched, eyes sunken, feet blistered, and then driven on at the point of the bayonet. This is a forc
ed march.” Pennsylvanian Francis Donaldson remarked that all this “extreme haste” to reach what he called the “rebellious” might gratify the high command, but it was “extremely ruffling to the temper of us dough bellies as we poor infantrymen are called by those chicken thieves, the cavalry….” 25

  Bugler Charles W. Reed, 9th Massachusetts battery, did this sketch of Union troops on the march to Pennsylvania. (Library of Congress)

  For the most part, however, the army’s first marches under its new commander were highly organized and efficiently managed. Start times and routes were carefully plotted by Dan Butterfield and the headquarters staff. Where terrain permitted, artillery and supply trains were doubled up in the roadway and the troops marched in the fields on either side. Pioneer parties in advance removed obstructions and bridged streams. General Meade watched over all this with a cold and demanding eye. After Sickles’s Third Corps had made only 12 miles by 6:00 P.M. on June 29, and with his trains holding up other troops behind, headquarters dealt a rebuke to General Sickles. “The commanding general noticed with regret the very slow movement of your corps yesterday,” it began. There followed a listing of Sickles’s various failings during the march, which “was far from meeting the expectation of the commanding general….” Dan Sickles, political general, was no favorite of professional soldier Meade to begin with, and this reprimand suggested further conflicts to come. 26

  In general, the troops marched in good enough spirits. In part this was simply a matter of leaving northern Virginia, where they had been campaigning since the previous fall. “We have marched through some of the most beautiful country I ever saw,” the 6th Wisconsin’s Rufus Dawes wrote on June 30. “It is very refreshing to get out of the brown desert of Virginia into this land of thrift and beauty.” Morale took a further leap upward as a consequence of their welcome from the citizenry of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Major Alexander Biddle, commanding the 121st Pennsylvania in Reynolds’s corps, wrote his wife on the 29th, “In all the towns people came out and waved handkerchiefs and showed very cheering signs of friendship.” In Frederick the welcome got out of hand after the provost guard neglected to close down the taverns. The next day’s march witnessed any number of hung-over stragglers.