Gettysburg
Page 30
Although this was General Lee’s sixth campaign in his one year of command, it was his first experience with recalcitrant subordinates. He seemed deeply troubled by this unexpected development, and initially uncertain how to handle it. To be sure, previous battles had not always gone just as they were planned—battles seldom do—but never before had his battlefield planning or his decisions been questioned or challenged. Stuart’s absence (and his silence) bordered on insubordination. Ewell and his generals appeared to have nothing positive in the way of ideas for the Second Corps after the July 1 fighting, yet they were uniformly negative toward Lee’s ideas. Longstreet was persistent in seeking a basic change in Lee’s scheme for the fighting, a change as fundamental as switching from offensive to defensive. It is not clear what, or even if, Lee may have argued in return, but it is obvious that he finally dug in his heels. In order to assert his authority, he would not—increasingly he could not—alter his plan.
Beyond anything else, Lee determined to keep the initiative. Throughout this Pennsylvania expedition he had considered it essential to make the Federals march to his drum, to be always in position to give or accept battle on his own terms. With the smaller army—his was always the smaller army—keeping the initiative was critical, yet Stuart’s continued absence severely limited Lee’s powers in this respect. The 1st of July was an example. The advance that morning—infantry forced to do the cavalry’s job—had stumbled into an encounter that Harry Heth was unwilling or unable to back out of. Ewell’s fortuitous arrival on the field turned the encounter into a battle and the battle into a victory. At the end of the day the initiative remained in Lee’s hands, but he believed he had to act promptly to hold on to it.
Time, he believed, was the other key factor. From prisoners it was clear that the Federals who fought at Gettysburg on July 1 were Buford’s cavalry division and the First and Eleventh corps of infantry. The dispatch captured by Allegheny Johnson’s reconnaissance party was put in Lee’s hands, revealing that the Twelfth Corps was already on or near the field and the Fifth Corps would be there shortly. That left three Federal infantry corps to be accounted for. Lee could calculate that by dawn on the 2nd, General Meade would have had as much as eighteen hours’ notice of the fighting at Gettysburg. If Meade elected to make a stand there, he would surely have the rest of his army on the march. If Lee was to attack with any advantage—his entire army against some fraction of Meade’s—he could not afford to wait for Stuart or anyone else. “A battle had, therefore, become in a measure unavoidable,” Lee would explain in his report, “and the success already gained gave hope of a favorable issue.”
It was Longstreet, in a letter written a month later, who confirmed how pivotal the factor of time was to Lee’s decision. Events at Gettysburg, Longstreet wrote his friend Senator Wigfall, were “due I think to our being under the impression that the enemy had not been able to get all his forces up. Being under this impression Gen. Lee thought it best to attack at once.“11
Colonel Fremantle spent that Wednesday evening at Longstreet’s headquarters, and was struck by the attitude of the general’s staff. “The Staff officers spoke of the battle as a certainty,” Fremantle entered in his journal, “and the universal feeling in the army was one of profound contempt for an enemy whom they have beaten so constantly, and under so many disadvantages.” Longstreet’s staff officers, to be sure, had witnessed none of the fighting on the 1st of July, while those who had witnessed it may not have shared their contempt for the foe. Powell Hill, in fact, had remarked to Fremantle of the July 1 battle “that the Yankees fought with a determination unusual to them.”
The divisions of Harry Heth and Dorsey Pender could attest to that. Between them they could count almost 4,000 casualties. Two of Heth’s brigades, Archer’s and Davis’s, had been routed, and it was only the superior weight of Pender’s division that had finally pushed the Yankee First Corps off Seminary Ridge. Robert Rodes of Ewell’s corps also had cause to be respectful, having launched four brigades against those First Corps Yankees, seen two of them smashed back, and suffered in the bargain some 2,300 casualties. If the battle was resumed on July 2—if there was a Day Two at Gettysburg—it promised, from these experiences, to be no less fierce and costly. 12
GEORGE GORDON MEADE spent a tense afternoon on July 1 at army headquarters in Taneytown awaiting word from Gettysburg. His newly appointed field commander, Winfield Scott Hancock, sent back a situation report about 4:30, shortly after reaching Gettysburg, but by that time Meade had already determined on his course. Dispatches received earlier from Howard and relayed through Dan Sickles firmly identified two Confederate corps, Hill’s and Ewell’s, as fighting at Gettysburg, and that was enough for Meade. He put his Pipe Creek plan aside and crisply made his decision—he would make his fight at Gettysburg. Indeed, in a mirror image of Lee’s plan, Meade hoped the next day to mass the whole of the Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg to attack some fraction of the enemy’s army. “A. P. Hill and Ewell are certainly concentrating,” Meade telegraphed General-in-Chief Halleck at 6 o’clock that evening; “Longstreet’s whereabouts I do not know. If he is not up tomorrow, I hope with the force I have concentrated to defeat Hill and Ewell; at any rate, I see no other course than to hazard a general battle.“13
Meade went about assembling his army swiftly but carefully. His orders to Dan Sickles of the Third Corps and to John Gibbon, temporarily commanding Hancock’s Second Corps, were designed to continue to guard the army’s left, between Emmitsburg and Gettysburg, against being turned—the very move Longstreet was then urging on Lee. The march orders for Sykes’s Fifth Corps and Slocum’s Twelfth were confirmed. Two brigades from the artillery reserve were sent forward. Meade’s greatest concern was bringing up John Sedgwick’s Sixth Corps in time. It was the largest of the army’s corps and one of the most reliable, and it was the farthest away. On July 1 Sedgwick was at Manchester, well to the southeast in Maryland, and his orders to march to Gettysburg did not reach him until 8 o’clock that night; he had the vanguard of his corps on the road within the hour. He had 35 miles to march.
Winfield Hancock, when he had done all he could for the night at Gettysburg, rode back to headquarters at Taneytown to report to the general commanding. Hancock’s dispatches and now his personal report served to ratify Meade’s decision to take his stand at Gettysburg. Finally, with everyone and everything well started, General Meade himself set out for Gettysburg. 14
Henry Slocum’s Twelfth Corps, the closest reinforcement to Gettysburg when the fighting started that morning, had only begun reaching the scene about 5:30 P.M., thanks to its belated start. General Slocum, the senior among the corps commanders, continued acting the pinched army bureaucrat. He had paid no attention to the pleas for help from his junior, Howard, nor had he displayed soldierly initiative by hurrying to the sound of the guns; he was waiting instead for orders from headquarters. At 4 o’clock, with the battle falling to pieces around him, General Howard sent his brother Charles to urge Slocum to speed his troops and to come himself to Cemetery Hill. Major Howard recorded Slocum’s response: “In fact refused to come up in person saying he would not assume the responsibility of that day’s fighting and of those two corps.” General Slocum was not going to dirty his uniform cleaning up other generals’ messes. Another of Howard’s aides, also getting no response from Slocum, said he considered the general’s conduct on that occasion “anything but honorable, soldierly or patriotic.”
In due course Slocum had to accept temporary command of the field—Hancock turned it over to him and told him it was by Meade’s order—but by then the messes were cleaned up and everything had been done that needed doing, and Slocum’s duties were mostly placing newly arriving troops. These were coming in a rush. Among the first were odd regiments of the Eleventh Corps released from special duties, and the First Corps’ 7th Indiana that was hurried over to Culp’s Hill. The 2,000-man Vermont brigade under George Stannard, fresh from the Department of Washington, was a welcome reinfor
cement for Rowley’s First Corps division.
The two divisions of Slocum’s Twelfth Corps arrived by different routes to the left and right of Cemetery Hill. John Geary’s division marched up the Baltimore Pike and formed along Cemetery Ridge, extending the army’s line southward. Alpheus Williams’s division swung off to the right on a country road and made for what Williams described as “a high, bald hill,” seeking to get there before the Rebels, “who, it was reported to me, were advancing in that direction in heavy column.” General Williams was just ordering the storming of this high ground—Benner’s Hill, a thousand yards northeast of Culp’s Hill—when a messenger from Slocum reached him and explained that the army had been driven back from Gettysburg and that he was in danger of being cut off. Williams recalled his troops and bivouacked in safety along the Baltimore Pike. “I put out strong pickets in all directions, as it was dark and I literally knew nothing of the topography or geography of the country,” he wrote, “…rolled myself in an india-rubber poncho and slept most splendidly until daylight.” 15
It was dusk when Dan Sickles and the first elements of his Third Corps reached Gettysburg. To satisfy Meade’s earlier directive, Sickles had left one brigade from each of his two divisions to hold Emmitsburg, and the first to arrive on the battlefield were troops of David Birney’s division. They had made a wearing but uneventful march over the Emmitsburg Road and were posted on Cemetery Ridge. The march of the other Third Corps division, under Andrew Humphreys, proved to be something of an adventure.
To avoid crowding on the Emmitsburg Road, Sickles had directed Humphreys north by west to strike the Hagerstown Road between Fairfield and Gettysburg, and proceed to the battlefield from there. During the march, however, there came several warnings that any troops they might encounter on their left would be Confederate. Reaching a fork in the road, and with those warnings in mind, Humphreys thought discretion the better part of valor and they should take the right fork leading back to the Emmitsburg Road. In charge of the march was Lieutenant Colonel Julius Haydon of Sickles’s staff, who according to one of Humphreys’s colonels was “more noted for froth and foam than for common sense.” Haydon insisted they follow Sickles’s directions to proceed via the left fork to the Black Horse Tavern on the Hagerstown Road.
Humphreys obeyed but with reservations, and as they approached the tavern in the darkness he had the column halted in “perfect silence” and went ahead on foot with a small party to reconnoiter. He returned and announced that the place was full of Rebels. In well-ordered haste and “majestic silence” he had the column reversed and they made their way back to Union ground. It was 2 o’clock in the morning when they finally reached their place on Cemetery Ridge. Humphreys’s disgust had not evaporated when he wrote a friend a month later, “You see how things were managed in the Third Corps!“16
In the small hours of the morning on July 2 General Meade and his party reined up at the gatehouse of Evergreen Cemetery, on Cemetery Hill, after a wearying ride from Taneytown. Corps commanders Slocum, Howard, and Sickles and chief engineer Gouverneur Warren were there to greet him. He asked their opinion about the ground the army was defending. There was general agreement that it was good ground. “I am glad to hear you say so,” Meade remarked, “for it is too late to leave it.”
The gateway to Evergreen Cemetery, on Cemetery Hill, photographed four days after the battle by Timothy O’Sullivan. (Library of Congress)
Carl Schurz saw Meade a few hours later as he was inspecting the Cemetery Hill positions. The general commanding, Schurz thought, looked haggard and careworn and tired; apparently he had not slept that night. “There was nothing in his appearance or his bearing … that might have made the hearts of the soldiers warm up to him,…nothing of pose, nothing stagey, about him. His mind was evidently absorbed by a hard problem. But this simple, cold, serious soldier with his business-like air did inspire confidence.” The curious who crowded around, Schurz wrote, “turned away, not enthusiastic, but clearly satisfied.” In answer to Schurz’s question about the forces available, Meade said, “in the course of the day I expect to have about 95,000—enough I guess, for this business.” Then, with a sweeping glance across the field, he added, “Well, we may as well fight it out here just as well as anywhere else.” 17
PRIVATE ISAAC TAYLOR, 1st Minnesota, John Gibbon’s division, entered in his diary for July 2, 1863, “Arroused at 3 A.M. & ordered to pack up & at 4 A.M. move towards the battle field where we arrive at 5–40 A.M. Order from Gen. Gibbon read to us in which he says this is to be the great battle of the war & that any soldier leaving the ranks without leave will be instantly put to death.” The Army of the Potomac was on notice as to where its duty lay.18
One of General Meade’s first tasks was to reckon the cost of the previous day’s fighting. The First Corps was in ruins. It had taken just over 9,000 men into action on July 1, and lost some 5,600 of them—more than 62 percent. Included in this toll were some 2,000 missing or captured, a consequence of the chaotic last minutes of the retreat from Seminary Ridge to Cemetery Hill. Corps commander John Reynolds was dead, and of the six brigade commanders, three were wounded, one was wounded and captured, and one, Thomas Rowley, was in arrest for being drunk. (Rowley would be tried by court-martial and found guilty, reinstated by Secretary of War Stanton, and finally resign from the service.) In what lay ahead, Stannard’s newly arrived vermont brigade would have a role to play, as would Colonel Wainwright’s artillery and some of General Wadsworth’s men on Culp’s Hill, but for the rest of the First Corps, after Wednesday’s epic stand, it seemed that no more could be asked. It was put on reserve status.
The Eleventh Corps was not granted such relief, and had not earned it. The Eleventh put five of its six brigades, 7,000 men, into a mere hour’s action that Wednesday afternoon and lost 3,200 of them. Almost half that number were prisoners. In its fight north of Gettysburg the corps had made a better stand than at Chancellorsville, certainly, but nevertheless it was again roundly defeated. It suffered four-plus casualties for every one it inflicted. Poor morale hastened and deepened its defeat, and the rest of the army continued to scorn the poor Dutchmen. Even Major Charles Howard, the general’s brother and aide, admitted privately that Barlow’s division “did not fight very well the first day.” The corps lost division commander Barlow, wounded and a prisoner, and brigade commander Schimmelfennig, missing and presumed captured. That evening General Howard resumed command of the Eleventh Corps, posted in the main line on Cemetery Hill.
In view of the Confederates’ advantage in men and position, the day’s outcome was predictable, yet the final retreat to Cemetery Hill need not have been so disorderly and costly. The problem started at the top, where Otis Howard failed to rise to his emergency command. Howard was tardy in making the case for a stand at Gettysburg, and inflexible in directing the defenses there. The generalship in the First Corps, on the other hand, was expert. Abner Doubleday, although unappreciated, ably rose to the occasion, as did divisional commanders James Wadsworth and John Robinson. The Third Division’s officers worked around the drunken Rowley and rendered him harmless. At the brigade level, Solomon Meredith, Lysander Cutler, Henry Baxter, Chapman Biddle, and Roy Stone all excelled. The Iron Brigade’s fight on July 1 would be remembered as a true epic—but an epic the brigade never recovered from.
In the case of the Eleventh Corps, it had been posted on such poor defensive ground that its officers, however able they may have been, were helpless to meet the Rebels’ relentless flanking attacks. As one of the Eleventh’s company commanders put it, “We officers redoubled our exertions, shouted, waved our swords, swore, struck the men most inclined to give way, went to almost every extreme, but with no avail…. There was no disguising the fact that we were fairly driven off the field.“19
Before the first streaks of dawn on Thursday, July 2, General Meade, with a party including Howard, artillery chief Henry Hunt, and engineer William H. Paine, set out to survey the battlefield that John Reynolds had lef
t as his legacy. The vista was ominous, with campfires of the enemy visible to the west, to the north, and to the northeast. From Cemetery Hill they rode southward along the length of Cemetery Ridge—the long shank of the fishhook—as far as the dip in the ridge at the base of Little Round Top. The party then circled back around to the east and north, crossing the Taneytown Road and the Baltimore Pike, inspecting Culp’s Hill and the ground on the army’s right, and finally returning to Cemetery Hill. Henry Hunt made note of positions for his batteries, and on Captain Paine’s sketch of the ground Meade indicated the positions he wanted for the infantry. He also approved the selection of army headquarters, a little white farmhouse on the east slope of Cemetery Ridge, just south of Cemetery Hill, that belonged to the widow Lydia Leister.
Meade told Hunt that ideally he would have preferred defending a straighter line along a ridge about a half-mile to the east, behind Rock Creek, anchored on an eminence called Wolf’s Hill. As Hunt explained it to his artillerists, “it had been determined to hold our present position, but if driven from it we should then take up the other.” Meade also took the precaution of having his chief of staff, Dan Butterfield, draw up a contingency plan for an orderly retreat should the battle finally go against them.