Gettysburg

  With daylight, General Meade’s primary concern, naturally enough, was for the front immediately facing Ewell’s corps in and around Gettysburg. A brisk exchange of picket-line firing at dawn heightened his concern. (One of the killed in this exchange, close by Culp’s Hill, was Private Wesley Culp, 2nd Virginia, Stonewall Brigade, of the family Culp of Gettysburg.) The Eleventh Corps, with plentiful artillery, was established on Cemetery Hill, but the position on Culp’s Hill needed strengthening. Meade chose Slocum’s Twelfth Corps for that purpose. John Geary’s division, which the night before had occupied the far left of the Union position, at Little Round Top, was now called all the way over to the far right. By about 6:00 A.M. Geary’s two brigades were taking position next to Wadsworth of the First Corps, extending the line from the west slope of Culp’s Hill and across the crest, facing to the east. Next came Alpheus Williams’s division, carrying the line—the barb of the fishhook—down the south slope of Culp’s Hill to Rock Creek. At 8:00 A.M. General Williams greeted Henry Lockwood’s brigade, just sent up from Baltimore as a reinforcement for the Twelfth Corps. Slocum’s men took advantage of the wooded, rocky terrain to throw up breastworks and turn Culp’s Hill into a citadel.

  Meade concluded that since Lee appeared to be concentrating here, so must he concentrate as well. He called up the two brigades Dan Sickles had left the day before at Emmitsburg, and brought forward the Second Corps from its guarding position on the Taneytown Road to the south. The Second Corps, with Hancock back in command, was posted at the center of the line on Cemetery Ridge, tied to the Eleventh Corps on its right. Sickles was told to post his Third Corps on Hancock’s left, taking the place of Geary’s division that had been called to Culp’s Hill, and to extend the line to Little Round Top. Henry Hunt posted his five brigades of the reserve artillery centrally behind the front.

  George Sykes’s Fifth Corps, meanwhile, was arriving on the ground after a brutal two days’ march. The Fifth Corps, along with the Sixth, had formed the right wing of the Federal advance, and late on June 30 it reached Union Mills, Maryland, after 23 hard miles. On the 1st of July orders called for only a 12-mile advance to Hanover in Pennsylvania. The men were peacefully bivouacked at Hanover late in the afternoon when word came of the fighting at Gettysburg. Sykes put them on the road again for an additional 8 miles, halting at midnight. By 4:00 A.M. on the 2nd they were on the road again, for the final 4 miles to Gettysburg. Meade posted the tired Fifth Corps in reserve behind the center of the line.

  Samuel Crawford’s Pennsylvania Reserves, another of the Department of Washington reinforcements that General-in-Chief Halleck had belatedly released to Meade, had been marching frantically to catch up to the army. After an all-night march on June 30, the two brigades of Reserves covered 25 more miles on July 1. On the morning of the 2nd they marched the last 10 miles and took their posting as the Third Division of the Fifth Corps.20

  Thus by noon that Thursday, Meade had all of the Army of the Potomac gathered on the battlefield, with all of his reinforcements, except “Uncle John” Sedgwick’s Sixth Corps. The big Sixth contained about one-fifth of the army’s infantry, and Meade regarded it as his ultimate equalizer against Lee’s legions. His orders, reaching Sedgwick on the evening of July 1, were to hasten to Gettysburg by forced marches. “Tell General Sedgwick,” Meade instructed the courier, “that I expect to put him in on the right, and hope he will be up in time to decide the victory for us.” Sedgwick had the last of his corps on the road from Manchester, in Maryland, by 10 o’clock that night. It proved fortunate for the men of the Sixth that July 1 had been a day of rest after days of arduous marching, for now Uncle John would demand of them nineteen hours of almost continuous marching.

  Meade’s first thought had been to bring the Sixth Corps to army headquarters at Taneytown and on to Gettysburg from there, but after he learned the dimensions of the fighting on the 1st, he had Sedgwick change his route to the more direct Baltimore Pike. This required a certain amount of backtracking in the darkness which, as the historian of the 5th Maine put it, “caused much strong language.” Men remembered the night march as a strange and eerie experience. James L. Bowen, 37th Massachusetts, wrote that “the step which has been light becomes heavy and mechanical, and the soldiers are transformed into mere machines, to plod on as steadily as possible all the interminable night,…the men as they walk are like those moving in a dream.” In Horatio Wright’s division, inspiration was furnished by a band that struck up “John Brown’s Body.” Soon marchers in great numbers were singing, and choruses of the stirring battle hymn echoed across the dark and silent countryside. “Whoever was responsible for it, had a happy inspiration,” wrote a man in the 5th Wisconsin. “It helped the men wonderfully.”

  At daybreak on July 2 there was a brief halt, and some men had time to boil coffee; most did not. Then the march resumed. The blazing sunweighed cruelly on the marchers. As Robert Orr of the 61st Pennsylvania described it, “Toward noon the radiating heat could be observed in waves, like colorless clouds, floating from the earth and mingling with the fine dust created by the moving columns.” In the village of Littlestown citizens put out buckets of cold water on the horse blocks along the road, and the marchers dipped in their tin cups as they passed. Almost every house bore a flag, almost every citizen raised a cheer. In the afternoon, half a dozen miles from Gettysburg, there was another brief rest, and then the final push to the battlefield. By 5 o’clock the Sixth Corps was filing across Rock Creek, 35 miles and nineteen hours from its starting point. As shells burst above the trees and “the familiar roar of battle” was heard, Uncle John’s veterans quickened their step. 21

  The Union corps of George Sykes, left, and John Sedgwick were the last to reach the field, on July 2. (Library of Congress-National Archives)

  From first light onward, General Meade had been alert for an attack against some point in his lines. Of particular concern was an assault aimed at his extreme right, curling around the ground south of Culp’s Hill and driving into the army’s rear. Should the Rebels get astride the Baltimore Pike they would cut Meade’s direct access to his base at Westminster, in Maryland. Westminster was the terminus of the Western Maryland Railroad, a dilapidated little road that the Union’s railroad genius, Herman Haupt, was just then in the process of resurrecting to supply the army. To forestall any threat to the right, in midmorning Meade asked Slocum and chief engineer Warren to survey the ground there for a spoiling attack of his own. Both recommended against it because (said Warren) “of the character of the ground.” Meade’s mind was soon eased by the arrival of the Fifth Corps as a reserve in this area, and the anticipated arrival of the Sixth Corps during the afternoon. With that he elected to stand on the defensive for the rest of the day.

  “I have to-day,” Meade telegraphed General-in-Chief Halleck at 3 o’clock, “up to this hour, awaited the attack of the enemy, I having a strong position for defensive. I am not determined, as yet, on attacking him till his position is more developed. He has been moving on both my flanks, apparently, but it is difficult to tell exactly his movements…. If not attacked, and I can get any positive information on the position of the enemy which will justify me in so doing, I shall attack.” This promise of aggression was for Washington’s benefit. General Meade, in just his fifth day of army command, in a “strong position for defensive,” was more than willing to see Robert E. Lee do the attacking.22

  Early that morning, John Buford had applied to cavalry chief Pleasonton for relief. He said his troopers, just then guarding the army’s left, had fought the day before and were tired and lacked food and forage and their mounts were worn. All this was true enough, yet Pleasonton was greatly exaggerating matters when he testified that he agreed to the request because Buford’s command had been “severely handled” on July 1. Buford’s two brigades had actually lost only about 125 men—just over 4 percent—and their situation on July 2 was hardly an emergency.

  Meade raised no objection to Pleasonton’s sending Buford back fo
r rest and refitting, assuming that as a matter of course his place would be taken by another cavalry detachment. He failed to query Pleasonton on this latter point, however, and Pleasonton witlessly ordered Buford’s two brigades to Westminster without sending anyone forward to take their place. For the rest of that Thursday the Federals’ southern flank was unscreened and unguarded and unscouted. When he found it out, this left General Meade “exceedingly annoyed.” It left Dan Sickles exceedingly nervous.23

  Among all the corps commanders, Sickles found himself defending the least defensible ground in the Union line. His assigned section was roughly the southernmost third of Cemetery Ridge, extending from Hancock’s Second Corps position southward to Little Round Top. At the point where the ridge reached the shoulder of Little Round Top it was virtually no longer a ridge; for some 100 yards the advantage of high ground was lost. Nevertheless, this was the ground General Meade had inspected at dawn and had ordered the Third Corps to occupy. Dan Sickles, being a political rather than a professional general, seemed to believe corps-commander rank entitled him to considerable flexibility in obeying orders. In midmorning, when Captain George Meade, the commanding general’s son and aide, inspected the Third Corps’ position at his father’s order, he was told that General Sickles (who was resting after a sleepless night) had not yet deployed his corps because he was in doubt about where he should put it.

  When this message was carried back to headquarters, General Meade, “in his quick, sharp way when annoyed,” told Captain Meade to go back and tell Sickles that “he is to go into position on the left of the Second Corps, that his right is to rest on General Hancock’s left, and that he is to occupy the general line held by General Geary the night before and also to say to him that it is of the utmost importance that his troops should be in position as soon as possible.” Nothing could be clearer, thought General Meade, and he turned to other pressing matters.

  But to General Sickles it was not clear. At about 11 A.M. Sickles rode to headquarters at the Leister house to complain about his poor position. He may also have told Meade about the cavalry departing from the army’s left. In any event, once again Meade repeated his instructions, apparently (so far as the record shows) keeping his temper in check. He even pointed at Little Round Top as the very visible anchor for Sickles’s line. Beyond requesting a staff officer to assist him in posting his guns, Sickles did not reveal the scheme he was concocting. Meade remembered him saying, “there was in the neighborhood of where his corps was some very good ground for artillery.” Sickles also asked if he was authorized to post his corps in a manner he “should deem the most suitable.” Meade replied, “Certainly, within the limits of the general instructions I have given to you; any ground within those limits you choose to occupy I leave to you.” For Dan Sickles, with his elastic notions of military practices and procedures, that was all he needed to hear.24

  Meade gave him artillery chief Henry Hunt to help post the Third Corps guns. Instead of returning southward along the crest of Cemetery Ridge, Sickles led Hunt along the Emmitsburg Road, which slanted in from the southwest through the shallow valley between Cemetery and Seminary ridges. Alongside the road, atop a modest ridge, was Joseph Sherfy’s peach orchard, and it was here that Sickles said he wanted to post his corps. It was some 1,500 yards west of the line on Cemetery Ridge that Meade had ordered the Third Corps to hold.

  Sickles pointed out that this was comparatively higher ground than a portion of what Meade had assigned him on lower Cemetery Ridge, and therefore it was important to prevent the enemy from occupying it. It had superior artillery positions. With Buford’s cavalry gone, Sickles felt better able to keep track of the enemy from this forward line. All that might be true, said Hunt, but in advancing the Third Corps into Mr. Sherfy’s peach orchard—soon to become the Peach Orchard—Sickles would be climbing out onto a limb. The position formed a salient, liable to attack from both flanks. Worst of all, Sickles did not have enough troops to man this extended line—it was twice the length of his assigned Cemetery Ridge line—and still connect with Hancock on the right and with Little Round Top on the left.

  Henry W. Slocum, left, and Daniel E. Sickles led the Union Twelfth and Third Corps, respectively. (National Archives–Library of Congress)

  Hunt’s was the voice of military experience and training, but the cocksure, decidedly untrained Sickles paid scant attention. He asked if Hunt would authorize his advancing the Third Corps as he had described. “Not on my authority,” said Hunt; “I will report to General Meade for his instructions.” Before Hunt left, he cautioned Sickles to reconnoiter the woods beyond the Emmitsburg Road—Pitzer’s Woods—before he did anything else.

  Sickles at least accepted that advice. Four companies of the 1st U.S. Sharpshooters soon crossed the Emmitsburg Road into Pitzer’s Woods to flush out any Rebels they might find. They encountered enemy pickets and pushed them back, then stumbled into a fierce firefight with a goodly body of infantry. Back came the sharpshooters in haste, to report to General Sickles that there were numerous Rebels immediately west of the Peach Orchard.

  Dan Sickles took this to mean that the Peach Orchard line he coveted was about to be occupied by the enemy. At 2:00 P.M., without authorization from Meade, without even informing Meade, he ordered the Third Corps forward. The divisions of Andrew Humphreys and David Birney soon occupied the Peach Orchard and the ground to the south of it.

  In the Second Corps line on Cemetery Ridge, Generals Hancock and Gibbon watched in astonishment as Humphreys’s division on their left advanced “in beautiful style” some three-quarters of a mile westward toward the Emmitsburg Road. “We could not conceive what it meant,” John Gibbon later wrote, “as we had heard of no orders for an advance and did not understand the meaning of making this break in our line.” In the heat of the moment, their reaction was rather more outspoken. As the Third Corps advanced, reported a witness, “Gibbon & Hancock both exclaimed, what in hell can that man Sickles be doing!“25

  It was just about this time that Captain Samuel Fiske, Hays’s division, Second Corps, sat down in a shady spot on Cemetery Ridge to write one of his soldier’s letters to the Springfield Republican back in Massachusetts. “I am sitting here under a noble oak,” Fiske began, “in a splendid central position, all ready to describe a battle to you, but somehow it hangs fire.” Fiske went on to tell of the random outbursts of picket-line firing he had been watching in the valley between the lines, where the two armies brushed against each other and struck sparks. “Very likely,” Fiske concluded, “the butternuts will burst out upon us about sundown, after the old Jackson style, with the heaviest kind of an attack, which will give all of us as much battle as we can wish for….“26

  THE CONFEDERATE HIGH COMMAND had gotten an early start that morning. At 4:00 A.M. General Lee set his day’s battle plan in motion by sending a reconnaissance party to investigate the Federals’ left flank. Captain Samuel R. Johnston, an engineer officer on Lee’s staff, and Major John J. Clarke, an engineer of Longstreet’s, were told (as Johnston remembered it) “to reconnoiter along the enemy’s left and return as soon as possible.” Lee was no more specific than that, nor did he need to be, said Johnston; it was understood “that he wanted me to consider every contingency.” In this instance, Lee would have profited by being more specific, for Johnston and Clarke carried out one of the strangest reconnaissances of the war.

  According to Captain Johnston’s recollection (Major Clarke, so the record shows, never wrote a word about the expedition), the party rode from Lee’s headquarters near the Chambersburg Pike southward behind Seminary Ridge to a crossing of Willoughby Run, then eastward toward the Peach Orchard, then south again along Seminary Ridge and across the Emmitsburg Road, “and got up on the slopes of round top, where I had a commanding view….” They then continued southward “along the base of round top” and beyond that high ground for a distance before turning back. On recrossing the Emmitsburg Road, they waited in hiding until a small Federal cavalry patrol passe
d up the road toward Gettysburg before they returned to army headquarters.

  Those three or four troopers, Captain Johnston reported, were the only Yankees they saw on their entire three-hour reconnoiter. He traced his route on a map for General Lee, Johnston recalled, and “When I got to the extreme right of our reconnaissance on the Little Round Top, General Lee turned and looking at me, said, ‘Did you get there?’ I assured him that I did.”

  In point of fact, if Johnston’s party went where he told Lee it went, there was no way it could have failed to see or hear at least some trace of the better part of two Yankee infantry corps and two brigades of Yankee cavalry. Little Round Top was occupied by two regiments of Geary’s Twelfth Corps division until well after daylight on July 2, before they departed for Culp’s Hill. That night and early morning the scattered elements of Sickles’s Third Corps were either camped immediately north and west of Little Round Top or were marching past it on the Emmitsburg Road. At the same time, the Second Corps was passing behind both Round Tops to its position on Cemetery Ridge. John Buford’s troopers patrolled south of the Round Tops all night and morning before leaving the field just before noon. None of these units had orders to operate silently; if not seen, they could surely be heard. All of them had pickets well out and on alert for Rebels.

  The answer to the mystery seems to be that Johnston either did not go as far as to climb Little Round Top and, in his recollections, embellished his role rather than confess his failings; or that he unwittingly went somewhere else. If, for example, he took his “commanding view” from heavily wooded Round Top—which was actually the far left of the perceived Federal position he was told to investigate—it was easily possible he would not have seen or heard any Yankees. But however it happened, his reconnoiter produced utterly false intelligence on the Union position. 27

  In addition to Johnston’s mission, Lee sent Charles Venable of his staff to Dick Ewell to plot action against the Union right. Lee’s initial message delivered to Ewell was to delay any move by Allegheny Johnson until the sound of Longstreet’s guns was heard on the opposite flank. Other reconnaissance missions, toward the Federal left, were undertaken by artillery chief William Pendleton and staff aide Armistead Long, but neither produced the seemingly assured results reported by Samuel Johnston.28