Gettysburg

  First blood in this meeting engagement may have favored the Federals, but the issue promised to be decided finally by which side got the most fresh troops to the field. When Reynolds reached McPherson’s Ridge that morning and had met with Buford, he issued rapid-fire orders. He sent off Captain Weld of his staff to deliver a status report to army commander Meade. Sickles was ordered up from Emmitsburg. But the top priority was to bring forward the men of the First and Eleventh corps “as fast as possible.” He would see to the First Corps personally. As for the Eleventh Corps, Reynolds gave verbal instructions to Captain Daniel Hall, who had been sent ahead by Howard for orders. As one of his staff remembered it, Reynolds directed Howard to get his corps to Gettysburg with all speed, and he included “a direction to put a proper reserve of Infantry and Artillery on Cemetery Hill….” That was to secure the high ground south of Gettysburg that Reynolds had just told General Meade he would hold, if he had to fight street by street through Gettysburg to do it.

  General Howard, receiving this message at the head of his column on the Emmitsburg Road, ordered his corps to speed up its march and then hurried ahead himself to Gettysburg. His first act, in obedience to Reynolds’s order, was to reconnoiter Cemetery Hill. “This, Colonel, seems to be the military position,” he told his chief of staff, Charles Asmussen. “Yes, General,” Asmussen observed, “this is the only position.” Both Buford and Reynolds had earlier recognized that fact; now Howard was committed to holding the high ground with the Eleventh Corps.29

  Apparently deciding his task was to remain behind to secure the rear area until further orders, Howard sent aides to report his arrival to Reynolds and then went searching for the best place from which to view the battlefield. He eventually found it in Gettysburg itself. Atop the three-story Fahnestock Brothers dry-goods store on Baltimore Street was a sort of observation deck, and citizens guided Howard to this vantage point. “I was delighted with the open view,” Howard wrote. “With maps and field glasses we examined the apparent battlefield.” He had not been there long—Howard noted the time as 11:30 A.M. —when one of General Reynolds’s staff called up to him that the general had been killed and that he was ranking officer on the field. “My heart was heavy and the situation was grave indeed! but surely I did not hesitate a moment,” Howard recalled. “God helping us, we will stay here till the army comes. I assumed the command of the field….“30

  8. The God of Battles Smiles South

  AS JAMES LONGSTREET remembered it, General Lee set out that Wednesday morning “in his usual cheerful spirits.” Clearly Lee had anticipated July 1 would be a day of little event, for the night before he made camp with the rearmost elements of the army, at Greenwood, west of the Cashtown Gap. As had become his habit, his headquarters tents were pitched close by those of Longstreet. For the day’s march he asked Old Pete to ride with him. A short march was planned, just to Cashtown, eight miles to the east across South Mountain. Cashtown and perhaps Gettysburg (“as circumstances might dictate”) were to be the assembly area for the army. According to Colonel Charles Marshall of the headquarters staff, the pace of the army that day would be “very deliberate.”

  It was also to be a day for straightening out the army’s tangled order of battle. Each of the three corps was short one division. Richard Anderson’s division of A. P. Hill’s Third Corps was started early so as to catch up with the rest of the corps in the advance. Longstreet’s First Corps was set to follow Anderson along the Chambersburg Pike. Lee sent for Imboden’s brigade of irregular cavalry to occupy Chambersburg and relieve Pickett’s division, so that Pickett might rejoin the First Corps the next day. That would give Longstreet all his troops except one brigade of Hood’s division that, for want of a cavalry screen, was at New Guilford guarding the army’s southern flank. Shortly after the march from Greenwood started, Allegheny Johnson’s division, which had marched apart from Ewell, escorting the Second Corps trains, cut into the Chambersburg Pike from the northwest. Lee had Longstreet halt to let Johnson go ahead so that he might reunite with Ewell’s other two divisions coming down from the north. According to plan then, by the 2nd of July the Army of Northern Virginia ought to be properly organized and suitably massed to meet the Federals—as soon as Jeb Stuart reported on where the Federals were to be found.1

  At midmorning, as Lee and Longstreet rode together across the crest of the Cashtown Gap, they could hear faintly from the east the rumble of artillery fire. This might be coming from Powell Hill’s advance, or from Dick Ewell’s advance, or even from the long-absent Stuart, but no one really knew what it signified. Nor did any courier reach the party with an explanation. (In campaigns past, Jeb Stuart always had the explanation, often before Lee asked for it.) As staff man Armistead Long recalled, “This caused Lee some little uneasiness.” After a time uneasiness turned to impatience, and leaving Longstreet to direct the First Corps’ march, Lee hurried ahead to Cashtown and A. P. Hill’s headquarters.

  Hill was wan and weak and just out of his sickbed, but already concerned enough about the artillery fire that he was preparing to ride out to the advance. He told Lee his only information was a dispatch from Harry Heth, sent early in the day, saying he had encountered Yankee cavalry in front of Gettysburg. No doubt there was an awkward moment when Hill explained to Lee that to reconnoiter Gettysburg he had sent two full divisions and two battalions of artillery, but he sought to reassure the commanding general by affirming that Heth had been instructed not to bring on a general engagement. Nevertheless, the volume of fire was disturbing, and Hill rode off eastward to find out about it.2

  Deciding he should not be thought of as looking over his subordinate’s shoulder, Lee waited at Cashtown while Hill acted on the matter. At noon, his patience waning, Lee called in Dick Anderson, of Hill’s corps, to discuss the situation. Anderson would remember the commanding general being “very much disturbed and depressed.” What seemed to disturb Lee the most was not having Stuart on the scene. “In the absence of reports from him,” Lee said, “I am in ignorance as to what we have in front of us here.” It might be the whole Federal army; it might be only a detachment. “If it is the whole Federal force,” Lee said, “we must fight a battle here.”

  Shortly afterward, Major Campbell Brown of the Second Corps staff found Lee and delivered a message from Dick Ewell. At 9 o’clock that morning, Ewell reported, he had received A. P. Hill’s notice that he was advancing on Gettysburg. Ewell had immediately redirected Rodes’s and Early’s divisions, then marching in the direction of Cashtown, to roads leading south toward Gettysburg. He acted in response to Lee’s discretionary order of the day before to direct the Second Corps to either place, according to circumstances.

  After he had reported this “change in our movement,” Brown recalled, General Lee “asked me with a peculiar searching, almost querulous, impatience which I never saw in him before,…whether Genl. Ewell had heard anything from Genl. Jeb Stuart….” When Brown replied in the negative, Lee was uncharacteristically blunt, saying he “had heard nothing from or of him for three days, and that Genl. Stuart had not complied with his instructions.” Instead of keeping in constant communication, Lee complained, “he has gone off clear around Genl. Meade’s army and I see by a Northern paper that he is near Washington. A scout reports Meade’s whole army marching this way, but that is all I know about his position.” Major Brown was greatly surprised by this outburst, this departure from Lee’s “habitual reserve.” Looking back on the episode, he wrote, “I now appreciate that he was really uneasy & irritated by Stuart’s conduct….”

  His irritation at Stuart and the report of Ewell’s change of direction seem to have crystallized Lee’s thinking. He determined to ride ahead to take control of what every minute was sounding more and more like a battlefield. He ordered Anderson to follow with his division. He instructed Major Brown to tell Ewell to make every effort to get in touch with Stuart, and he delivered an emphatic order to the commander of the Second Corps. “General Lee,” Brown wrote, “then i
mpressed on me very strongly that a general engagement was to be avoided until the arrival of the rest of the army.“3

  AT HIS HEADQUARTERS at Taneytown, 14 miles south of Gettysburg, George Gordon Meade began that 1st of July much better informed about the whereabouts of the enemy’s army than did Robert E. Lee. Early that morning Meade finally received intelligence from Harrisburg—relayed to him from Washington over the newly repaired telegraph circuit—that Ewell’s force threatening the Pennsylvania capital had turned back, presumably to unite with Lee’s main force. He had intelligence from cavalryman Buford in Gettysburg that placed A. P. Hill’s corps at Cashtown, pointing eastward, with Longstreet’s corps behind Hill—to which Buford added, “Rumor says Ewell is coming over the mountains from Carlisle.” At midday Meade telegraphed General-in-Chief Halleck, “The news proves my advance has answered its purpose. I shall not advance any, but prepare to receive an attack in case Lee makes one. A battlefield is being selected to the rear….“4

  Official Washington was watching events in Pennsylvania intently, hanging on General Meade’s every telegraphed word. “This is an anxious day,” Treasury Secretary Chase entered in his diary on July 1. “Meade’s army seems to be drawing right to the rebel positions. Is he not too far to the right? May not Lee turn his left and so get between him and Washington? These are questions much discussed. Gen. Halleck and the President both seem uneasy.” Chase had obviously been listening when Halleck fussed at Meade, “Do not let him draw you too far to the east.” Navy Secretary Gideon Welles also sought the latest news at the War Department, and was convinced that the general-in-chief was entirely too cautious in his directions to Meade and the Army of the Potomac. Like the president, Welles regarded Lee’s invasion as a great opportunity—and feared the opportunity might not be seized. “Halleck’s prayers and efforts, especially his prayers, are to keep the Rebels back,” Welles wrote, “—drive them back across the ‘frontiers’ instead of intercepting and annihilating them.” Still, Welles had hopes for the new general commanding: “Meade will I trust keep closer to them than some others have done.” 5

  Gettysburg was too distant for the sound of the guns to carry as far as Taneytown, so Meade only learned of the fighting there at about 11:30 A.M., from Reynolds’s hard-riding aide Stephen Weld. Meade cannot have been overly surprised by the news, considering the intelligence he had already received on the enemy’s movements, but it left him in a quandary. He was not, on July 1, any more prepared or anxious to fight at Gettysburg than was Lee. On the contrary, Meade’s favored plan for the day was to mount a defense of his chosen ground behind Pipe Creek, just below the Pennsylvania-Maryland line.

  Earlier that morning Winfield Scott Hancock had brought his Second Corps to Taneytown as ordered, and upon reporting to headquarters he received a briefing from Meade on the plan. The two men shared friendship as well as mutual respect, and Meade seemed eager (unlike Joe Hooker) to share his thinking with his lieutenants. As Meade remembered their conversation, he expressed his willingness “to fight in front if practical; if not, then to the rear, or to the right or the left, as circumstances might require.” Hancock remembered the general commanding expressing a definite preference about where he wanted to fight: “He said he had made up his mind to fight a battle on what was known as Pipe Creek…, which presented more favorable features than any other position he could see.” It was what Meade termed a “contingent plan.” The essential contingency was for Reynolds with the First and Eleventh corps to “hold the enemy in check sufficiently long” at or near Gettysburg to bait the Rebels into following as he fell back on the rest of the army at Pipe Creek. In expectation of this sequence, Meade had spent the morning refining the plan for Slocum and Sedgwick, his senior generals.

  Meade’s high hopes began to erode with the arrival of Captain Weld and his report that Reynolds was committing his forces to try and beat the enemy to the high ground at Gettysburg, “and keep them back as long as possible.” From what Weld said of Reynolds’s stated determination to fight street by street through the town, Meade concluded that Reynolds had not received the Pipe Creek circular, nor even the explanatory dispatch asking him simply to evaluate the scene when he reached Gettysburg. The Pipe Creek plan appeared in jeopardy, and Weld heard the general curse Chief of Staff Butterfield for not sending out the orders sooner. After making all the arrangements for a plan of battle, Meade said bitterly, “now it was all useless.” Everything lay in the hands of his chief lieutenant on the spot—the right man for the job, certainly, but as it happened, acting without the latest guidance from the general commanding. 6

  Here was a moment for decision, and General Meade was less than decisive in meeting it. In the verbal message delivered by Captain Weld, Reynolds implied but could not state unequivocally that he wanted to stake the army to a stand at Gettysburg—that, after all, should be General Meade’s decision—but Meade misinterpreted Reynolds’s intent. For lack of any later instructions, Reynolds (so Meade believed) must be acting on yesterday’s instructions—that is, should the Confederates gain Gettysburg before he did, or in spite of him, he was to fall back to Emmitsburg. Meade’s immediate concern with this was Reynolds’s route of withdrawal. If he fell back by the Emmitsburg Road rather than by the Taneytown Road, as called for in the Pipe Creek plan, it would leave a gap in the middle of the Army of the Potomac for the Rebels to exploit. Meade therefore ordered Hancock to advance the Second Corps some way up the Taneytown Road to fill the gap.

  During all this, General Meade made no provision for a quite different contingency—that Gettysburg would be the battlefield of choice or chance. If that was indeed the case, Reynolds and his forces on the scene, confronting what was understood to be two-thirds of the Rebel army, could greatly profit from immediate reinforcement. Before noon that day, for example, the Third Corps had arrived north of Emmitsburg, some eight miles from Gettysburg. The Twelfth Corps had marched to Two Taverns, on the Baltimore Pike, only five miles distant. If ordered immediately, one or both corps could reach the battlefield by midafternoon. Meade, however, was reading John Reynolds as fighting only a temporary holding action at Gettysburg—and Reynolds’s death precluded any clarification.

  Meade did make one effort at least to harass the enemy closing on Gettysburg by telegraphing General Couch in Harrisburg “to throw a force in Ewell’s rear” as the Rebel column marched southward. Since Couch had only militia under his command, this was easier asked than accomplished. Couch dutifully sent some of his Sunday soldiers across the Susquehanna toward Carlisle, where they tangled with Albert Jenkins’s cavalry. “Just now,” Couch admitted, “things do not look well.” 7

  Meade’s hopes for fighting a battle on ground of his own choosing were further eroded by the first report, delivered about 1:00 P.M., that John Reynolds was dead or severely wounded and that Otis Howard was in command on the field. Howard was no more likely to have received the Pipe Creek circular than had Reynolds, and in any event Meade did not think highly enough of Howard to want him making such fundamental decisions as where the army would give battle.

  Still, Meade clung stubbornly to the tatters of hope that remained. At the same time that General Lee was riding toward the battlefield to take personal command, General Meade elected to remain where he was, at Taneytown, 14 miles from the fighting. Here he would be better poised to manage a stand on the Pipe Creek line should it come to that. In the meantime, he would continue commanding by proxy. He rode over to Hancock’s headquarters with a letter to that general ordering him to Gettysburg, and authorizing him to decide whether and where the army should fight.

  Lieutenant Colonel Charles Morgan, Hancock’s chief of staff, recorded that in the conversation, “General Meade’s attention was called to the fact that General Howard, commanding the Eleventh Corps, was senior to General Hancock, to which he replied, in effect, that he could not help it; that he knew General Hancock, but did not know General Howard so well, and at this crisis he must have a man he knew and could tru
st.” If Hancock thought the ground and the position at Gettysburg “a better one on which to fight a battle,” he should so advise the general commanding, “and he will order all the troops up.” Furthermore, having just finished reviewing the whole strategic and tactical situation with Hancock, Meade was satisfied that he had picked not only the best man for the job, but the best informed one as well. By 1:30 P.M. Hancock was off for Gettysburg.

  In selecting Hancock to take Reynolds’s place in command on the field, Meade was exercising the special appointment powers granted him by General-in-Chief Halleck under authority of Secretary of War Stanton (“You are authorized … to appoint to command as you may deem expedient”). At this time and in this place, seniority could be and would be trumped by perceived ability, and George Meade did not hesitate to act on that basis. Indeed, in the same letter that put Hancock in field command, Meade ordered John Gibbon, not the senior among Hancock’s divisional commanders, to take over the Second Corps. And by day’s end, Meade would name John Newton, a division commander in the Sixth Corps, to head the First Corps rather than Abner Doubleday, the corps’ senior officer. 8

  OLIVER OTIS HOWARD was a West Pointer who lacked both a martial bearing and a warrior’s inspiration. While his personal courage was never in question—he had lost his right arm leading his brigade at Seven Pines on the Peninsula—he often appeared more interested in religious orthodoxy and abolitionism than in generalship. He had pressed a claim of seniority with Hooker to wrangle command of the Eleventh Corps, but at Chancellorsville his negligence exposed the corps to Stonewall Jackson’s merciless flank attack. Two months later morale was still a tender issue in the Eleventh Corps, and the men’s contempt for Howard was best expressed in their nickname for him, “Old Prayer Book.” In this new campaign what the Eleventh Corps needed to resurrect itself was driving, hands-on leadership … precisely what Otis Howard was ill equipped to provide.