Gettysburg

  Because the Federals did not record their Gettysburg casualties on a day-by-day basis, and because a number of the brigades and regiments had already fought on Day One or Day Two, their casualties in repelling Pickett’s Charge can only be estimated. This calculation produces a figure of some 2,300 dead, wounded, and missing—just over one-third that of the Rebels. The heaviest casualties were, of course, in Webb’s Philadelphia Brigade, which lost 44 percent of its 940 men. The gallant Irishmen of the 69th Pennsylvania suffered a 47 percent loss in those few minutes at the Copse. The bombardment and the charge cost John Hazard’s Second Corps artillery brigade almost 25 percent of its gunners. 13

  Colonel Wainwright made note in his diary that this was “the great battle of the war so far,” and so the next morning he rode over to the Angle “to see what slaughter is.” Byway of preface, he observed that “historians draw largely on the imagination when they talk of heaps of slain, and rivers of blood.” But imagination was not required today: “There was about an acre or so of ground here where you could not walk without stepping over the bodies, and I saw perhaps a dozen cases where they were heaped one on top of the other.” The night’s rain had left, if not rivers, at least large pools of red.14

  THE TREMENDOUS CANNONADE on Friday afternoon sent Gettysburg’s citizens once again hurrying to their cellars. “The vibrations could be felt and the atmosphere was so full of smoke that we could taste the saltpeter,” remembered young Albertus McCreary. When the guns fell silent there was puzzlement over what it portended, but the observant Professor Jacobs guessed that an attack would follow. He hurried up to his garret with his glass and was just in time to see the Confederate infantry emerge from the woods on Seminary Ridge. He called down to his son, “Quick! Come! Come! You can see now what in your life you will never see again!”

  By dusk the firing had died away and people emerged, being careful about the sharpshooters, trying to find out what had happened. It was noticed that the usually talkative Southerners suddenly had little to say. “Some think the Rebels have been defeated,” Sarah Broadhead entered in her diary that evening, “as there has been no boasting … and they look uneasy and by no means exultant.”

  At first light the next morning, Saturday, July 4—Independence Day—Henry Monath, 74th Pennsylvania, was at his picket post at the foot of Cemetery Hill when he was startled to see in the middle of Baltimore Street at the edge of town a group of citizens “waving their handkerchiefs for us to come.” Sergeant Monath cautiously led his little party through the streets all the way to the town square, finding no enemy except about a hundred sleepy stragglers. During the night the Army of Northern Virginia had evacuated Gettysburg.15

  As the Federals moved in force into the town, there emerged from their various hiding places any number of First and Eleventh corps soldiers who had managed to evade capture since Wednesday’s retreat. One noteworthy fugitive was Brigadier General Alexander Schimmelfennig, who had been hiding behind the Henry Garlach family’s woodpile these past days. Carl Schurz recorded the joyous reunion. As he rode down the street, wrote General Schurz, he saw his old friend standing in a doorway, waving his hat and calling to him. “‘Halloh!’ he shouted. ‘I knew you would come. I have been preparing for you. You must be hungry.’” The lady of the house served them a “jolly repast” of fried eggs, and Schimmelfennig told his tale of derring-do and escape and how he survived on bread and water. Another discovery was Brigadier General Francis Barlow, wounded and captured on July 1 and found recuperating in a private home. All over town the mood that morning was elation. “How happy everyone felt,” wrote Jennie McCreary. “None but smiling faces were to be seen….“16

  In the wake of the grand charge, after doing what he could to hearten and rally his beaten men, Robert E. Lee had wasted no time in deciding on a course of action. Unless he could somehow entice Meade into counterattacking him along his Seminary Ridge line, he must get the army back to Virginia with all speed. There was enough ammunition for only one battle, if that. It was obvious that the whole of Meade’s army was at hand and might now threaten the Confederates’ foraging efforts. His own army was grievously wounded in men and especially in officers. And Lee had to consider the possibility that Meade might aggressively seek to cut across the routes south to the Potomac. There was indeed no time to waste.

  Lee’s first move was to order the Second Corps to evacuate Gettysburg. Ewell’s troops were shifted back to the Oak Hill area, thereby shortening and straightening the army’s lines, and told to dig in. Then, so Jed Hotchkiss phrased it in his diary, “The Generals had a council at General A. P. Hill’s headquarters on the Cashtown Road, about sundown, and decided to fall back.”

  In an abrupt change from his familiar practice of hands-off management of his subordinates—a practice he must have recognized as wanting during the last few days—Lee stayed on for some time that evening with A. P. Hill, their tent lit by a single candle, studying the map and discussing how the retreat was to be conducted. The next day Lee would issue a general order spelling out the march routes and exactly who was to do what and where and when. In retreat, at least, every commander in the Army of Northern Virginia should have no doubt about his role.

  General Lee did not return to his headquarters until 1 o’clock on the morning of July 4. Brigadier General John Imboden, commanding an irregular band of cavalry that had been liberally foraging the countryside to the west, was waiting there for him. Lee dismounted and, Imboden wrote, “threw his arm across the saddle to rest, and fixing his eyes upon the ground leaned in silence and almost motionless upon his equally weary horse.” Imboden commiserated: “General, this has been a hard day for you.”

  “Yes, it has been a sad, sad day to us,” Lee replied, and then (Imboden recalled) “relapsed into his thoughtful mood and attitude.” But suddenly he roused himself to speak vigorously of the battle just fought. “I never saw troops behave more magnificently than Pickett’s division of Virginians did today in that grand charge,” he said. But, he went on, they were not supported as they were to have been—“for some reason not yet fully explained to me”—else “we would have held the position and the day would have been ours.”

  Thus, if General Imboden’s account can be accepted, some nine hours after the event Robert E. Lee had convinced himself that his plan for Pickett’s Charge was perfectly sound. Only its execution had been flawed.17

  The task assigned to Imboden was to organize and lead a train of wagons and ambulances to carry the army’s wounded to the Williamsport crossing of the Potomac. His route was to be westward through the Cashtown Gap in South Mountain, then a southward turning to reach Greencastle and the Williamsport Pike to the Potomac, some forty-two miles all told. In addition to the 2,100 troopers of his so-called Northwestern Brigade, Imboden was given two batteries of artillery and the assurance that the cavalry of Wade Hampton and Fitz Lee would protect his rear. As General Lee put it in his instructions, Imboden’s watchwords must be secrecy, promptness, and energy. A citizen of Greencastle who watched this army of the wounded pass by put it more simply: “Hurry was the order of the day.”

  Beginning about 1:00 P.M. on the 4th a steady, pounding rain increased Imboden’s problems manyfold, yet by 4 o’clock that afternoon he had the journey under way. He estimated this “vast procession of misery” stretched for seventeen miles. It bore between 8,000 and 8,500 wounded men, many in constant, almost unendurable agony as they jolted over the rough and rutted roads. One particularly bad stretch was known locally as the Pine Stump Road. The teamsters had strict orders: no halts for any cause whatsoever. “Of all the nights that I spent during the war I think this was the saddest,” wrote one of the escorting cavalrymen. Another trooper remembered that “the cries of the wounded and dying were awful.” 18

  The retreat decision that caused General Lee the most pain was the necessity of leaving behind wounded men too badly hurt to travel in Imboden’s column. Generals Trimble and Kemper were the most prominent of these, but th
ere were also some 4,500 others left to the mercies of the Yankees. (Left behind as well were numerous wounded prisoners. “Happiness was not our condition,” wrote one of these reprieved Yankees; “—we were in seventh heaven.”)

  A second special wagon train was organized that day, this one by Ewell’s corps and put under the direction of quartermaster John A. Harman. The feisty, famously profane Harman, who had served as Stonewall Jackson’s quartermaster, was a hard driver, just the sort to manage a train that contained much of the booty Ewell had collected during his excursions across Pennsylvania. Colonel Fremantle termed it an “immense train of plunder.” Ewell told Major Harman, according to Jed Hotchkiss, “to get that train safely across the Potomac or he wanted to see his face no more.” Harman’s train would cross South Mountain at the Fairfield Gap, southeasterly from Imboden’s train, and reach Williamsport by way of Hagerstown. Behind Harman, the next day, would come the main army.

  Otherwise the Confederates spent this rainy, depressing Independence Day caring for the wounded and burying the dead. “Every house, shed, barn and hut was filled with wounded, dying and dead men, both Yanks and Confederates,” wrote diarist Henry Berkeley. “Blood everywhere. Dead and dying men everywhere. Can there be anything in this world more sad and gloomy than a battlefield. I think not.”

  The corpses, from the July 1 fighting, were described as “a horrid spectacle” by Campbell Brown of Ewell’s staff: “Corpses so monstrously swollen that the buttons were broken from the loose blouses & shirts, & the baggy pantaloons fitted like a skin—so blackened that the head looked like an immense cannon ball, the features being nearly obliterated….” In their new lines Ewell’s men found themselves in the middle of Wednesday’s battlefield, and artillerist Robert Stiles described the odors as nauseating: “in a short time we all sickened and were lying with our mouths close to the ground, most of us vomiting profusely.“19

  Timothy O’Sullivan photographed this unfinished Confederate grave, probably located on the Rose farm, on July 5. (Library of Congress)

  After its many battles the Army of Northern Virginia had few illusions, and Campbell Brown’s appraisal of the army’s mood after the great three-day struggle reflected a common theme: “It would be rediculous to say that I did not feel whipped—or that there was a man in that Army who didn’t appreciate the position just as plainly. But the ‘fight’ wasn’t out of the troops by any means—they felt that the position & not the enemy had out done us….” Everyone in the army knew they had won the first day’s fight, and most took the same view of the second day; only on the third day had they failed. But on July 3 it was the enemy’s superior position that had made all the difference. Just “compel the enemy to come out to a fair field,” said Jed Hotchkiss, and see who would win. To be sure, there was some criticism of “our Genls making any attempt to storm” a position as strong as Cemetery Ridge. Indeed there was generalized commentary on the high command. One man was heard to say, “If Old Jack had been here, it wouldn’t have been like this.“20

  THE 4TH OF JULY was passed by the Army of the Potomac in the mundane and frequently grim tasks of restoring its military health—aiding the wounded, burying the dead, bringing up rations and ammunition, and, when possible, resting from the strains of the past few days. There were no sanctioned salutes to Independence Day, although some bands were heard to play patriotic airs. The rain was a damper on enthusiasms. The burial parties dug long trenches and, after separating Rebel from Yankee, without ceremony piled the bodies several layers deep and threw dirt over them. Charles Morgan of the Second Corps staff reported that all the Confederate corpses he saw had been plundered. The orders were to keep counts, but this was not always done, particularly for the enemy. Sometimes little markers were put up designating at least the units of the Federal dead, but for the most part these mass burials were classified as unknowns. 21

  That morning, under a flag of truce, General Lee proposed an exchange of prisoners, for their “comfort and convenience.” Meade rejected the idea. Just now he would rather have the Confederates burdened with prisoners than reinforced with able-bodied soldiers. A second flag of truce crossed the lines that day, this one from the Union side. The bearer announced that General Longstreet had been wounded and captured, but offered the assurance that he “would be taken care of.” (No doubt this stemmed from a persistent rumor misidentifying the wounded Lewis Armistead as Longstreet.) Old Pete chuckled and told the messenger he believed he could take care of himself quite well, thank you.22

  During the day General Meade immersed himself in matters of military housekeeping and, unlike General Lee, seemed to devote little thought to his course of action. To be sure, he did not have to face his opponent’s multiple crises. His only immediate concern was being attacked again, and after yesterday that was not a matter of great concern. Meade’s telegrams to Washington on the 4th described the sketchy nature of his information about the enemy, and announced that he would “require some time to get up supplies, ammunition, &c., rest the army….“He said in closing that he would order a reconnaissance for the next day, “to ascertain what the intention of the enemy is.”

  Meade appeared stunned by the magnitude of what had been accomplished by his army, but personally relieved (and satisfied) that he himself had risen to the occasion. When he found time to write his wife, he told her “it was a grand battle, and is in my judgment a most decided victory, tho I did not annihilate or bag the Confederate Army…. At one time things looked a little blue, but I managed to get up reinforcements in time to save the day.” He then added something quite revealing of his state of mind. He assured Mrs. Meade that their son George, his aide, “is quite well & so am I, tho’ at one time I feared I should be laid up with mental excitement.”

  On July 4 George Meade had been in command of the Army of the Potomac one week. Inheriting the command from the secretive Joe Hooker, he started with virtually no knowledge of either his own army or the enemy’s. He was by nature careful and conservative, and from the start he thought defensively—defending Washington and Baltimore, defending the Pipe Creek line, and, finally, defending Cemetery Ridge. Defense, he believed, was the best posture for this recently twice-beaten army—and certainly the best posture for its new and untried commander. For Meade the strains of the past week must have been almost unendurable, the “mental excitement” almost too much to bear.

  It was therefore asking a great deal of him to switch in one day from defense to offense, to take the aggressive, as Lee liked to say. Meade required time to take stock, to cope with the stress he admitted had almost prostrated him. Still, it should have been apparent to him that if he was to challenge Lee’s retreat—if Lee did retreat—he dared not waste a moment. He must block or delay Lee’s crossing of South Mountain, and he must reach the Potomac no later than the enemy if he was to have a favorable chance of bringing him to battle.

  That Saturday, headquarters issued a congratulatory order to the army that was too rhetorical for plain George Meade to have written and was probably the work of Chief of Staff Butterfield (back at work despite his wound). But in it was a passage that Meade had surely approved, and in his state of mind just then probably agreed with: “Our task is not yet accomplished, and the commanding general looks to the army for greater efforts to drive from our soil every vestige of the presence of the invader.“23

  Mr. Lincoln, who was spending most of these tense days in the War Department telegraph office, was greatly troubled by Meade’s declaration. “I left the telegraph office a good deal dissatisfied,” the president told General Halleck. “You know I did not like the phrase, in Orders, No. 68, I believe, ‘Drive the invaders from our soil.’” He went on to note several other dispatches from the army that he found disquieting. “These things all appear to me to be connected with a purpose to cover Baltimore and Washington, and to get the enemy across the river again without a further collision, and they do not appear connected with a purpose to prevent his crossing and to destroy him.” />
  At an Independence Day fireworks display at the White House, Elizabeth Blair Lee encountered the president, and she recorded him telling her, “Meade would pursue Lee instantly but he has to stop to get food for his men!!” And at a Cabinet meeting, according to diarist Gideon Welles, “The President said this morning with a countenance indicating sadness and despondency, that Meade still lingered at Gettysburg, when he should have been at Hagerstown or near the Potomac to cut off the retreating army of Lee…. He feared the old idea of driving the rebels out of Pennsylvania and Maryland, instead of capturing them, was still prevalent among the officers.”

  George Meade was certainly not another George McClellan, as the president feared, nor indeed would he be content simply to see the enemy back across the Potomac. “For my part,” Meade wrote his wife, “as I have to follow & fight him I would rather do it at once & in Maryland than to follow into Virginia.” Nevertheless, right at the start Meade could not bring himself to gamble, to take a risk by sending out a strike force immediately to try and block the Confederates’ primary escape route, or at least divert them to a longer passage through the mountains.

  The Fairfield Gap in South Mountain, on the direct route from Gettysburg to Hagerstown and the Potomac, was well within the reach of, say, a mixed force of Federal cavalry and infantry—perhaps one or two brigades, or even a division, of John Sedgwick’s fresh Sixth Corps. Before day’s end on July 4 such a strike force might start south for Emmitsburg, then westerly toward the gap. Should Lee be forced to fight for the Fairfield Gap, the rest of the army might fall on his rear. Should the Confederates have to divert through the Cashtown Gap, Meade’s chances of cutting them off at the Potomac would improve thereby.