Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

  To be sure, such a gamble meant moving before it was certain Lee would move. It meant anticipating Lee … which in the event Meade’s native caution precluded him from doing. He told his wife, “The most difficult part of my task is acting without correct information on which to predicate action.” To help him predicate action he called in his generals for a consultation—but only on the evening of July 4.24

  Nine generals were invited to attend, according to Butterfield’s notes—John Newton of the First Corps, replacing Reynolds; William Hays of the Second, replacing Hancock; David Birney of the Third, replacing Sickles; Sykes of the Fifth; Sedgwick of the Sixth; Howard of the Eleventh; Slocum of the Twelfth; Pleasonton of the cavalry; and Gouverneur Warren, the army’s chief engineer. General Meade seems to have said little, beyond reminding them of his instructions to cover Washington and Baltimore. He said he “desired the earnest assistance and advice of every corps commander.”

  From his generals Meade extracted a rough count of 55,000 infantry effectives. Adding cavalry, artillery, and battle casualties to that figure still left perhaps 20,000 men unaccounted for. Most of these were stragglers or men knocked loose from their commands in the heat of the fighting, and in time the provost marshals would round them up, but for the moment Meade planned on the basis of 55,000 foot soldiers. The militia of Generals Couch and William F. Smith might (or might not) prove to be of use. Meade had assumed, on the eve of battle, the two sides to be about even; he probably now assumed their casualties to be about even. He knew, from the Bureau of Military Information, that Lee had committed his last reserves yesterday. He knew too, from the captured documents brought him by Captain Dahlgren, that Lee could expect no reinforcements from Richmond. The question remained: What would Lee do now?

  After some rambling discussion, Meade posed four questions for his lieutenants. “Shall this army remain here?” was the first. No one wanted to appear to be giving up a victorious field, yet no one suggested promptly seizing the initiative from the Rebels. Warren’s answer represented the consensus: The army should remain “until we see what they are doing.”

  The second question, “If we remain here, shall we assume the offensive?” brought a unanimous No. None had any interest in testing the Confederates’ Seminary Ridge line. Question three, “Do you deem it expedient to move towards Williamsport, through Emmitsburg?” was also unanimous—this time, Yes. This route represented the so-called inside line, covering Washington and Baltimore, that the army had maintained since the start of the campaign.

  The fourth question asked “Shall we pursue the enemy if he is retreating on his direct line of retreat?” Because of the answer to the previous question, this was merely a matter of degree. Howard’s answer, “By a show of force,” reflected the majority view. Some wanted to pursue with cavalry only, some with a mix of infantry and cavalry. Only Birney suggested no pursuit directly on the enemy’s line of retreat.

  There apparently was no discussion of one other pursuit scheme—dispatching a force to cross the Potomac at Harper’s Ferry and turn upriver to try and thwart the Confederates from crossing at Williamsport. No doubt General Meade was reluctant to divide his understrength army for such a chancy venture. In any event, the idea lost force when, on July 7, Major General William F. French at Harper’s Ferry destroyed the bridge there to prevent the Rebels from using it.

  Since it appeared that there was little known definitively of the enemy’s “position and designs,” General Warren offered to take a division out the next morning simply to see if the Rebels were still there. And so the Federal high command adjourned, determined to wait until General Lee made the first move, and until they learned of it.

  Writing at 6:00 A.M. on July 5, Yankee soldier-correspondent Samuel Fiske noted that Lee’s skirmishers had “kept up a lively firing all along our left, but he would of course do that to cover the signs of his departure, and now this morning we learn that his artillery has been moving all night, and I suppose there is scarcely a shadow of doubt the old fox is gone.“25

  INDEFINITE STORIES of the first two days’ fighting had been trickling into the Northern press, but by the 5th and 6th the battle’s outcome was clear and a triumph was proclaimed. “A memorable day,” wrote New York diarist George Templeton Strong on July 5. “Tidings from Gettysburg have been arriving in fragmentary instalments, but with a steady crescendo toward complete, overwhelming victory.” By the 6th the New York Herald was running a standing headline, “The Great Victory,” over its continuing coverage. The Philadelphia Inquirer trumpeted “Victory! Waterloo Eclipsed!!” At her Philadelphia home, Mrs. Meade was serenaded by a brass band, with the mayor offering complimentary remarks. There was “deafening applause” for her and her husband, “the victor of Gettysburg.”

  Now, to crown the celebration, came news from the West. On Independence Day, it was reported, Pemberton had surrendered the Vicksburg garrison to U. S. Grant. As soon as he heard the news, “his countenance beaming with joy,” Mr. Lincoln addressed a note to General Halleck: “We have certain information that Vicksburg surrendered to General Grant on the 4th of July. Now, if General Meade can complete his work, so gloriously prosecuted thus far, by the literal or substantial destruction of Lee’s army, the rebellion will be over.” Halleck promptly telegraphed the president’s note to Meade.

  “Be assured I most earnestly desire to try the fortunes of war with the enemy on this side of the river,” Meade told the general-in-chief, and added, with a touch of exasperation, “…but I should do wrong not to frankly tell you of the difficulties encountered…. I wish in advance to moderate the expectations of those who, in ignorance of the difficulties to be encountered, may expect too much.“26

  Once he was finally certain that Lee was retreating, Meade moved with commendable speed. He committed seven of his eight cavalry brigades to the pursuit. But his infantry started some twenty-four hours behind Lee’s, and by staying east of the mountains he had half again as far to go as the Confederates. For the march he divided the army into three commands, under Sedgwick, Slocum, and Howard. They followed parallel routes to a scheduled rendezvous on July 7 at Middletown, on the old National Road that led westward across South Mountain toward Hagerstown and the Potomac crossing at Williamsport. After Sedgwick reported on the difficulties of breaking through the enemy’s rear guard at Fairfield Gap, the force trailing the Rebels directly was reduced to a small mix of infantry and cavalry.

  The difficulties the marchers encountered were (as Meade warned) substantial—rain, mud, supply shortages. Rufus Dawes of the Iron Brigade wrote that “the hurried pursuit of the enemy to this point has been by far the most trying campaign…. The men have become ragged and shoeless, thousands have marched for days barefooted over the flinty turnpikes.” Often the pace fully qualified as a forced march. Meade reported to Washington on July 8 that one of his corps “marched yesterday and last night over 30 miles.” That was the Eleventh Corps; the Twelfth marched 29 miles. “We are wanderers on the face of the earth, like the Israelites of old,” Stephen Weld of the First Corps staff wrote home. “We don’t stop 24 hours in the same place, but keep up this eternal marching all the time.“27

  The Confederates encountered the same problems, but at least their route was the shorter of the two, and they had a head start. A. P. Hill’s corps led, followed by Longstreet, with Ewell acting as rear guard. General Lee, looking for any chance to retaliate, instructed Ewell, “If these people keep coming on, turn back and thresh them soundly.” When he heard this, Dick Ewell, sounding very Jackson-like, said, “By the blessing of Providence I will do it!” In the end, however, nothing much came of the Yankees’ direct pursuit.

  “The march was very slow & tedious,” Porter Alexander remembered. “Travel a little ways, & stopped by the thing in front of you stopping—it may be for a few seconds, it may be a half hour. Nothing is more wearying.” Pickett’s division, in the middle of the column, had the onerous task of guarding some 3,800 union prisoners. Any earlier nic
eties about foraging were now forgotten by the hungry Rebels. “We encamped on a Dutchman’s farm and went for his pigs, ducks and chickens,” wrote artilleryman Henry Berkeley. “I don’t think we left him a chick which was large enough to eat.” By the time the Yankees reached Frederick and Middletown, the Confederates were at Hagerstown and Williamsport. 28

  Whatever action marked the retreat and pursuit was initiated by the Yankee cavalry. On the night of July 4, Judson Kilpatrick and two brigades of troopers—following the route that a preemptive strike force dispatched by a bold General Meade would have used—hit Ewell’s train of plunder at a mountain summit called Monterey Pass. There was a wild scramble in the rainy darkness. When it was over, Kilpatrick extravagantly claimed the capture of 1,360 prisoners. The Confederates acknowledged the loss of thirty-eight wagons. Content with his swag, Kilpatrick made no effort to block the pass against the oncoming Confederate infantry.

  John Imboden’s train of wounded was meanwhile enduring its own trials. After it passed through Greencastle on July 4, a party of union irregulars tore at the column. These were some 100 special-duty troopers of the 6th Pennsylvania, under the adventuresome Colonel ulric Dahlgren, allied with a partisan band of 50 civilians led by a Greencastle unionist named Thomas Pawling. Dahlgren and Pawling managed to wreck 130 wagons and take prisoners before the train guard countered. There followed a “severe fight,” wrote a Yankee trooper, “in which we lost nearly all the prisoners we had previously taken, and a number of our own men captured.” The next day Imboden’s column was surprised by an attack from the west. These were some of “Milroy’s weary boys,” union cavalry routed out of Winchester three weeks earlier by Dick Ewell, now rallied and looking for revenge. At the Maryland hamlet of Cunningham’s Crossroads the rejuvenated weary boys took 134 wagons and 645 prisoners, most of them from among the wounded.

  The dauntless Imboden pushed his battered train on to Williamsport on the Potomac, only to find the worst was not over. Something had gone very wrong. When General Lee called up the cavalry brigades of Beverly Robertson and Grumble Jones from Virginia, Jones was made responsible for guarding the army’s pontoon bridge across the Potomac at Falling Waters, six miles downstream from Williamsport. With the Potomac at flood stage and rising, this bridge was the crucial link in the army’s escape route. But in what was surely one of the major blunders of the campaign, the witless Jones left a guard of just fourteen cavalrymen at Falling Waters.

  On July 4 General French displayed the initiative Grumble Jones so notably lacked. From his Harper’s Ferry garrison French sent a party of Pennsylvania cavalrymen up the Potomac to Falling Waters. They swept up Jones’s little guard and, French reported, “entirely destroyed the pontoon bridge.” General Lee’s escape to Virginia became suddenly very complicated. Now his only passage across the flooding Potomac was a small cable ferry at Williamsport that could carry at most two wagonloads of wounded in each transit.

  On July 6 John Buford’s Yankee troopers appeared in force in front of Williamsport, presenting Imboden with his greatest challenge yet. He posted his artillery, dismounted his cavalry, found arms for his teamsters, and prepared to hold to the last ditch. Every man of his command understood, wrote Imboden, “that if we did not repulse the enemy we should all be captured and General Lee’s army be ruined….”

  A Federal 30-pounder fieldpiece, sketched by Edwin Forbes on a rainy day during the pursuit of Lee’s army. (Library of Congress)

  Buford dismounted his men as well, and the fight of cavalry became a fight of infantry. The Federals had some 3,500 men to Imboden’s 2,500, but they were considerably outgunned by the twenty-three pieces of Rebel artillery. At a critical moment two wagonloads of artillery ammunition from Winchester were run across the river on the cable ferry to supply Imboden’s guns. Kilpatrick’s arrival strengthened Buford’s hand, then Hampton’s and Fitz Lee’s brigades arrived to support Imboden. Darkness finally ended the fighting, with the Confederates secure at Williamsport. One crisis was surmounted.29

  By now Jeb Stuart had his troopers in place to screen the marching army and to fend off the Yankee cavalry. Just as important as Williamsport in the Confederates’ scheme was Hagerstown, six miles to the northeast. Hagerstown lay at the center of a road network that Lee needed to control to bring his army safely to the river, and Stuart set about securing it. The battle for Hagerstown was fought at the same time as Imboden’s battle for Williamsport, on July 6.

  Allen Redwood’s drawing of a Confederate column in retreat was intended to represent Imboden’s train of wounded. (Century Collection)

  The opening clash saw the 18th Pennsylvania, of Farnsworth’s brigade (led now by Colonel Nathaniel Richmond), dash down Potomac Street right into the town square, scattering the surprised troopers of John Chambliss’s brigade. The Virginians gathered themselves and counterattacked, and there was a wild scramble of battling horsemen in the streets and byways. A civilian named W. W. Jacobs watched from the roof of the Eagle Hotel. “The discharge of pistols and carbines was terrific,” Jacobs remembered, “and the smoke through which we now gazed down through and on the scene below, the screams and yells of the wounded and dying, mingled with cheers and commands, the crashing together of the horses and fiery flashes of the small arms presented a scene such as words cannot portray.”

  Civilians of both loyalties joined the battle. Mr. Jacobs came down from the rooftop and took up a rifle for the Union, sniping at the Rebels from behind an iron picket fence. The 18th Pennsylvania’s historian told of an elderly civilian who came out of his house with musket in hand “and fell in with our boys…. He was shot down before he had crossed the second block.” By report, a young woman, the daughter of a Hagerstown doctor loyal to the South, took aim from her second-floor bedroom window and killed a sergeant of the 18th Pennsylvania.

  Artist Forbes pictured Yankee scouts in a farmhouse attic observing the Rebel army near Williamsport on July 12. (Library of Congress)

  Both sides reinforced, but the Rebels were additionally braced by infantry, and by day’s end the Yankees had to fall back and concede Hagerstown to Stuart. By July 7 Lee was occupying the entire Hagerstown–Williamsport–Falling Waters area and the immediate danger was past. The next day Stuart boldly tried to extend his screen by driving the Federal cavalry out of Boonsboro, at the western foot of South Mountain, but this time it was the Yankee infantry that came up and saved the day.

  While his army was catching up to the retreating Confederates, General Meade took the United States Hotel in Frederick for his headquarters. He enjoyed the luxury of a hot bath and a change into fresh clothes for the first time in ten days. “I think I have lived as much in this time as in the last 30 years,” he complained to his wife. But his welcome in Frederick acted as a tonic: “The people in this place have made a great fuss with me. A few moments after my arrival I was visited by a deputation of ladies & showers of wreaths & bouquets presented to me.” (Staff man Stephen Weld offered his own homely view of the scene: “Some ladies came in to see General Meade, giving him bouquets, and insisted on kissing him. I saw the performance through the window.”) The general went on to remark that when he rode into town the street was crowded with people “staring at me & much to my astonishment I find myself a Lion.”

  He assured Mrs. Meade that his head was not turned by all this attention, and in fact he fully expected he would soon have to prove himself all over again: “I think we shall have another battle before Lee can cross the river tho from all accounts he is making great efforts to do so.“30

  AS SOON AS HE LEARNED that his pontoon bridge at Falling Waters had been destroyed, General Lee sent his engineers and artillerist Porter Alexander ahead to the Potomac to stake out a line to defend the Williamsport crossings. Right at Williamsport was a ford the army had easily marched across some three weeks before; just now it was under thirteen feet of rushing water. Falling Waters, six miles downstream around a sweeping bend, remained the best site for a replacement pontoon bridge.
That task was assigned to the resourceful quartermaster John Harman.

  As to the defensive line, in Colonel Alexander’s words, “There was no very well defined & naturally strong line, & we had to pick & choose, & string together in some places by makeshifts & some little work.” The high ground they chose, known locally as Salisbury Ridge, ran some nine miles from just west of Hagerstown southward to the Potomac, securing both the Williamsport and Falling Waters crossing sites. Federals attacking this line would encounter boggy ground in many places, then have to climb rocky slopes to reach the defenders. The double line of entrenchments was (as Alexander noted) largely makeshift, but no less imposing for that. Rocks, dirt, logs, fence rails, even wheat sheaves were incorporated into parapets and bastions. Artillery emplacements were made especially strong. Where the ground was weak defensively, Alexander massed batteries to deliver a crossfire. Behind the lines was a network of roads to enhance troop movements. All of this work was closely inspected and approved personally by no less than Generals Lee, Longstreet, Ewell, and Hill. Union officer Henry Abbott had to compliment the Rebels: “The same night that they arrived they made their defences, & their position became identically that of ours at Gettysburg, & theirs ours.”

  While it might have appeared to Yankee observers as the work of one night, this battle line was in fact the work of several nights and days. The troops as they arrived did most of the digging, and they did it enthusiastically; there was nothing they wanted more than to be attacked and to gain some revenge. In that event they could have shouted “Gettysburg! Gettysburg!” just as the Yankees had shouted “Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!” a few days earlier. Alexander would write that the Yankees’ pursuit reminded him of a mule chasing a grizzly bear—“as if catching up with us was the last thing he wanted to do.” Of course Alexander, like his comrades, had desperately wanted them to catch up: “And, as we got things into shape, oh! how we all did wish that the enemy would come out in the open & attack us, as we had done them at Gettysburg.” 31