Gettysburg

  Gettysburg was a closely built-up town, with narrow lanes and alleyways and lots enclosed by board fences, and fugitive soldiers trying to evade capture were likely to run themselves into traps. One such was Brigadier General Alexander Schimmelfennig. Schimmelfennig had been bringing up the rear of his command, trying to prod it into an orderly retreat, when in the confusion he became separated and found himself in a dead-end alley with shouting Rebels close behind. The general was in casual military dress, his rank not apparent, and when he scaled a high fence and dropped into the kitchen garden of the Henry Garlach family, his would-be captors did not bother chasing him. Discovering that there were Confederates on every side, the general concealed himself behind a woodpile. There he elected to wait out the battle, nourished by bread and water slipped to him by Mrs. Garlach.43

  As bad as this Gettysburg scene was for the Federals that afternoon, it could have been even worse. The exceedingly high cost of the fighting for McPherson’s Ridge and Seminary Ridge blinded A. P. Hill to a bright opportunity to seal the day’s victory. In the brigades of James Lane, then lightly skirmishing with the Yankee cavalry, and Edward Thomas, which had yet to fire a shot, Dorsey Pender had 3,000 fresh troops with which he might have blocked the southern exits from Gettysburg. A prompt advance of only a mile by such a force would surely have swept up most of the First Corps’ survivors, and perhaps a number of Eleventh Corps stragglers as well. But Lane and Thomas were not called out, leaving the pursuit to two of Abner Perrin’s bloodied and exhausted South Carolina regiments.

  The 1st South Carolina would triumphantly raise its flag in Gettysburg’s town square, but by then most of the Yankees were gone. “If we had any support at all,” Perrin later insisted, “we could have taken every piece of artillery they had and thousands of prisoners.” General Hill displayed a surprisingly cautious turn of mind: “…myowntwodi-visions exhausted by some six hours’ hard fighting, prudence led me to be content with what had been gained, and not push forward troops exhausted and necessarily disordered, probably to encounter fresh troops of the enemy.“44

  When he finally gained Cemetery Hill with the few survivors of the 16th Maine, Major Abner Small encountered a welcome sight: “Directing the placing of troops where we turned up was Hancock, whose imperious and defiant bearing heartened us all.” “Imperious and defiant” nicely summed up Major General Winfield Scott Hancock that afternoon. The head of the Second Corps, dispatched by General Meade to assume overall command at Gettysburg, arrived on Cemetery Hill between 4:00 and 4:30, about the same time as the battered First and Eleventh corps, and he quickly made his presence felt. Winfield Hancock on horseback made a splendid martial figure, with his great booming voice and his command of profanity and his knack for inspiring troops to fight.

  Hancock came on Orland Smith’s brigade of von Steinwehr’s division—the sole infantry reserve on Cemetery Hill—in its posting overlooking Gettysburg, and Colonel Smith long remembered their brief conversation. “My corps is on the way but will not be here in time,” Hancock told him. “This position should be held at all hazards. Now, Colonel, can you hold it?” “I think I can,” Smith replied. Hancock said again, more sternly, “Will you hold it?” This time he got the answer he wanted: “I will!” Colonel Smith concluded his account, “And we did.“45

  Riding up to Howard’s headquarters, Hancock saluted and said he had been instructed by General Meade to take command on the field. Somewhat flustered, Howard protested that he was the senior officer. “I am aware of that, General,” Hancock said, “but I have written orders in my pocket from General Meade which I will show you if you wish to see them.” Howard seems to have taken his demotion with the best grace possible under the circumstances—there was little else he could do—and Carl Schurz, for one, was complimentary: “Howard, in spite of his heart-sore, cooperated so loyally with Hancock that it would have been hard to tell which of the two was the commander and which the subordinate.”

  For the most part, Howard set out to rally the Eleventh Corps and post it for defense, and Hancock did the same for the First Corps. Hancock, however, made it abundantly clear that he was in charge. When he ordered Doubleday to send a force to hold Culp’s Hill, on the right of the forming Union position, Doubleday objected that his men were fought out and short of ammunition. “General,” said Hancock sharply, “I want you to understand that I am in command here. Send every man you have.” The Iron Brigade was soon on its way to Culp’s Hill.

  Beyond the immediate need to hold Cemetery Hill and to infuse fresh fighting spirit into the two beaten corps, Hancock’s instructions required him to cast his vote on the selection of a battlefield. “I think this the strongest position by nature upon which to fight a battle that I ever saw,” he observed, and when Howard agreed, Hancock made it official: “Very well, sir, I select this as the battlefield.” Gouverneur Warren, chief engineer of the Army of the Potomac, went over the ground with Hancock and concurred: “we came to the conclusion that … it would be the best place for the army to fight on if the army was attacked.” Hancock reported this finding to General Meade in a 5:25 P.M. dispatch—“we can fight here,” he reported, “as the ground appears not unfavorable with good troops.” The battle that had begun so haphazardly that day at Gettysburg would continue at Gettysburg—if the Federals had anything to say about it.46

  General Howard also reported to the general commanding, in the same uninformative manner as his earlier dispatches. In summarizing the day’s fighting, he reversed the order of the culminating events (“The First Corps fell back, when outflanked on its left, to a stronger position, when the Eleventh Corps was ordered back, also to a stronger position.”) and offered scarcely a hint of the dimensions of the defeat. Howard went even further in blackening the First Corps’ fighting record for the day—in truth incomparably superior to that of Howard’s own Eleventh Corps—by twisting the facts for Hancock’s benefit. Dutifully Hancock reported to Meade, “Howard says that Doubleday’s command gave way.” As a consequence, that evening General Meade reached into the Sixth Corps to find a general, John Newton, to replace Doubleday as head of the First Corps. Abner Doubleday never forgave Howard (and Meade) for this “unfounded accusation” against him and against the First Corps. 47

  After he had given all the orders he could, and seen all of the Cemetery Hill position he could, Winfield Hancock sat on a stone wall with Carl Schurz and watched and waited anxiously for the enemy’s next move. Around them the Federal defenses had fallen slowly but steadily into place. The core of the infantry defense was the intact 1,600-man brigade of Orland Smith, Eleventh Corps, posted there all afternoon in reserve. Around Smith’s brigade were arranged the broken pieces of the First and Eleventh corps. According to estimates by Generals Doubleday and Howard, there remained perhaps 7,000 men from the two corps. Regiments fell into line behind their flags with sadly diminished numbers. The 13th Massachusetts counted 99 men ready for action; the 121st Pennsylvania, 80; the 25th Ohio, 60; the 2nd Wisconsin, 45; the 24th Michigan, 27. (One of the 2nd Wisconsin’s killed in the retreat was Irishman Pat Maloney, who had personally captured General Archer that morning.) More threatening in appearance were the ranks of cannon. First Corps artillery chief Charles Wainwright and the Eleventh Corps’ Thomas Osborn had twenty guns covering the western front toward Seminary Ridge and twenty-three to the north overlooking the town.

  From their vantage point Hancock and Schurz scanned to the west and the north with their glasses, searching for signs of impending attack. Schurz, the self-taught soldier, would remember his nervousness, and was relieved to see that the warrior Hancock seemed nervous too. Rebel troops were sighted moving from place to place, especially in and about the town, but they could not detect any massing for an assault. Slowly the minutes passed and the hours and then it was dusk and still there was no enemy movement, and the two generals began to relax. Hancock said he was sure now that with the Twelfth Corps soon to be in place they would be able to hold Cemetery Hill. For whatev
er was to come, the Union would have the high ground.

  Finally it was dark and there was a full moon, and General Schurz would long remember the scene. “We of the Eleventh Corps,” he wrote, “occupying the cemetery, lay down, wrapt in cloaks, with the troops among the grave stones. There was profound stillness in the graveyard, broken by no sound but the breathing of the men and here and there the tramp of a horse’s foot; and sullen rumblings mysteriously floating on the air from a distance all around.“48

  9. We May As Well Fight It Out Here

  THE SILENT NIGHT of the 1st of July was a blessing for the Army of the Potomac, and indeed (as it proved) a blessing for the Union cause. In the battle that day that neither side expected or willed, the Federals had been soundly beaten. Yet it was not, in the end, a battle to the finish. Why it was not reveals a tale of misapprehension and misjudgment on the part of the high command of the Army of Northern Virginia.

  At Chancellorsville, during the long hours in the saddle on his famous flanking march of May 2, Stonewall Jackson had been in a rare reflective mood. The problem for the Confederacy’s undermanned armies, he observed to one of his cavalry officers, was the lack of reserves to exploit their successes. “We have always had to put in all our forces, and never had enough at the time most needed,” Jackson insisted. Now, late on a hot July afternoon two months later, Jackson’s successor, Dick Ewell, was casting about for the reserves to exploit the latest Confederate success.1

  It was getting on toward 5 o’clock when Second Corps commander Ewell rode into Gettysburg’s town square behind his victorious troops. He found a tumultuous scene—Confederate infantrymen from various commands milling about, mounted officers rushing to and fro, Union prisoners by the hundreds being herded to the rear. Ewell called his generals together to discuss their next move. Amidst the elation of victory was urgency to complete the day’s success. Still, Ewell’s last order from General Lee had been to not provoke a general battle, which with his guns already firing he had felt obliged to ignore. Now fresh guidance from the general commanding would have been welcome.

  Ewell first called the roll of his own reserves. He had just been informed that his absent third division, Allegheny Johnson’s, was advancing over the Chambersburg Pike and was about an hour’s march away. When Robert Rodes was asked about his division, he was not optimistic. Rodes reported his command had suffered 2,500 casualties that afternoon, mostly in its bitter fight with the Union First Corps, and was much exhausted and disordered. As he later phrased it, to expect him to attack, unaided, the “formidable line of infantry and artillery immediately in my front … would have been absurd.” Jubal Early’s division, on the other hand, had suffered a good deal less in its assault on the Eleventh Corps, and Old Jube urged (as he later phrased it) “an immediate advance upon the enemy, before he could recover from his evident dismay and confusion.”

  Ewell rode with Early out Baltimore Street toward Cemetery Hill to see about such an advance. Yankee sharpshooters in buildings at the foot of the hill sent them ducking for cover, but they soon found a protected spot from which to study what an assault might encounter. Victory produces about as much disorder as defeat, and there had not been time enough to regroup Hays’s Louisianians and Avery’s North Carolinians to set them right on the heels of the retreating Yankees. Now the prospect was daunting. They could see a number of batteries in place on Cemetery Hill—in due course, if they counted them, forty-three cannon in all—supported by lines of infantry, facing north toward the town and west toward A. P. Hill’s corps. It was quickly apparent that mounting an assault on Cemetery Hill would require a major effort.

  To advance in column through Gettysburg’s narrow streets and deploy under the muzzles of those guns would invite a slaughter. Instead they would have to swing the troops around either or both sides of the town, and even then they would need support to mount at the least a diversion. Worse, Ewell could see no good locations for artillery with which to beat down the Federals’ fire. Early could muster but three brigades for an attack, Rodes’s help was questionable, and it was bound to be a race against darkness. Nevertheless, Dick Ewell was willing to make the effort—provided he could get help from Powell Hill.

  Ewell told Early and Rodes to get their troops ready, and turned to Lieutenant James Power Smith, who had just come from General Lee, and asked him to find the general again. “Please tell him what Generals Early and Rodes wish to say,” said Ewell. The two told Smith to say that it was their “earnest desire” to advance against Cemetery Hill “provided they were supported by troops on their right.” No sooner had Lieutenant Smith left to find Lee than Walter Taylor of Lee’s staff appeared with a message for General Ewell. Lee’s instructions were “to carry the hill occupied by the enemy, if he found it practicable, but to avoid a general engagement until the arrival of the other divisions of the army….” Here was another of Lee’s discretionary orders—and one with a seeming contradiction. The decision was left entirely in Ewell’s hands, and he was urged to start a fight but not to start a battle.2

  While Ewell attempted to parse the commanding general’s latest wishes, a new complication arose. Early’s fourth brigade, under “Extra Billy” Smith, had been held back to guard the division’s flank and rear. Now came an excited Lieutenant Frederick Smith, Extra Billy’s son and aide, with a report that his father had sighted a heavy enemy column approaching from the northeast along the York Pike. Campbell Brown of the corps staff heard Early say to Ewell, “General, I don’t much believe in this, but prefer to suspend my movements until I can send & inquire into it.” He inquired by sending Gordon’s brigade out the York Pike, thereby reducing his available force for a move against Cemetery Hill to just two brigades, Hays’s and Avery’s.

  Ewell agreed to this diversion because a sighting like Smith’s could not be ignored. Due to the dearth of Confederate intelligence-gathering, and in the absence of Stuart’s cavalry screen, the Yankees might surprise by approaching Gettysburg from practically any point of the compass. Ewell took the threat seriously enough to ride out the York Pike with Early and Rodes to set the matter straight. All they could see was a distant line of Smith’s pickets. No one seems to have asked General Smith exactly what it was that alarmed him (one of his men thought it might have been a far-off line of fence posts that deceived Extra Billy’s sixty-five-year-old eyes), but in any event, Ewell left both Smith’s and Gordon’s brigades on guard in the army’s rear.

  James Power Smith, meanwhile, had ridden west and found Generals Lee and Longstreet on Seminary Ridge studying the enemy’s position. Smith delivered his message: General Ewell would move against Cemetery Hill if supported by troops from Lee’s side of the field. Lee inquired of Longstreet and was told that the closest First Corps division was six miles distant. (Longstreet was, said Smith, “indefinite and noncommittal.”) With that, Lee instructed the lieutenant to tell General Ewell that “he regretted that his people were not up to support him on the right, but he wished him to take the Cemetery hill if it were possible; and that he would ride over and see him very soon.”

  If Lieutenant Smith’s recollection of this meeting is accurate—his is the only account—Lee’s statement was curiously incomplete. Longstreet’s First Corps, to be sure, was “not up,” but Powell Hill’s entire Third Corps was already there at the front. Hill might be chary about calling on Heth’s and Pender’s divisions after their bloody struggle with the Yankee First Corps, but the corps’ artillery was comparatively undamaged and available for further use. And Richard Anderson’s 7,100-man division was certainly available. When Lee rode toward the nascent battlefield from Cashtown, he had told Anderson to follow. By Anderson’s recollection, a message came to halt and bivouac behind the front. Hearing the sounds of battle, Anderson rode ahead to find Lee to be certain the message was correct. It was indeed correct, Lee told him. Anderson’s division was the only uncommitted Third Corps unit, and “a reserve, in case of disaster, was necessary.” 3

  Clearly, Ge
neral Lee had not yet decided, despite the favorable outcome of the day’s fighting, whether Gettysburg was to be the scene of his showdown battle on Northern soil. Lee was also revealing his dependence on James Longstreet—“my old warhorse,” as he had said affectionately of Longstreet at Sharpsburg. He appeared reluctant to either initiate or accept battle without having the First Corps and its trustworthy commander at hand. Finally, his injunction to Dick Ewell to take Cemetery Hill “if it were possible”—but using only his own men—demonstrated anew Lee’s day-long uneasiness concerning this unwanted confrontation with an unknown fraction of General Meade’s army.

  Even before Lieutenant Smith delivered Lee’s rejection of Ewell’s request for help, Ewell had begun to shift his attention to a secondary but possibly more promising objective, the “high peak” some 800 yards to the east of Cemetery Hill known as Culp’s Hill. If he could occupy this high ground, Ewell would command Cemetery Hill and perhaps force its evacuation almost without a fight. He sent two staff officers, Thomas Turner and Robert Early, to reconnoiter Culp’s Hill. Should they find it free of Yankees, he could use Allegheny Johnson’s division, whose arrival was promised at any moment, to occupy it. Storming Cemetery Hill and its guns would no longer be an issue, and Ewell would be honoring Lee’s wish to avoid a general battle.