Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Congressional parsimony continued to be the rule even after the Civil War began. Rather than enlist hundreds of thousands of recruits as long-service Regulars, Congress turned to an expedient it had tried once before, in the Mexican War—the enlistment of half a million state “volunteers” for two- or three-year terms. Volunteers were a category of military service borrowed from British practice in the Napoleonic Wars, as a less costly way of protecting the home islands without relying on county militias or paying for a greatly expanded regular army. In like manner, American volunteers in 1861 would be recruited by the states into regiments bearing state designations (83rd Pennsylvania, 75th Ohio, and so on) and carrying state colors as well as the Stars and Stripes, and with officers elected by the regiments themselves and appointed by state governors. They would be paid and equipped by the Federal government and march under the orders and articles of war of federally appointed general officers (drawn mostly from the ranks of the Regular Army), but without any long-service commitments from either the volunteers or the government. The Confederate government, strapped by even greater financial problems, adopted the same state-based volunteer system, keeping the state designations in place even after it instituted a compulsory draft.5

  What these volunteer regiments contributed in numbers was often sacrificed in efficiency. Unlike the British soldiers of the Crimean War of 1854–56, who already had an average of seven years’ service under their cross-belts, the Civil War volunteer was a temporary soldier, long on self-esteem and very, very short on experience. He “entertained the idea that he was little, if any, inferior to Napoleon, in his capabilities and possibilities,” and was “never ready to submit to the routine duty and discipline of the camp or the march.” Few of them grasped what discipline meant, and fewer still saw any sense in unquestioningly following orders. “Many of the men seem to think they should never be spoken to unless the remarks are prefaced by some words of deferential politeness,” raged one Michigan officer. “Will the gentlemen who compose the first platoon have the kindness to march forward, or will they please to halt, &c. is abt. what some of them seem to expect.” It was the privilege of “the old Confederate soldier” always to believe that he “would decide some questions for himself,” wrote Carlton McCarthy, who served in the Richmond Howitzers. “To the last he maintained the right of private judgment, and especially on the field of battle.”6

  Not that the volunteers’ officers were much superior to the men they commanded. “None of the officers or men had any military education,” wrote a volunteer in the 11th Virginia, “and were all, officers and men, quite green and inexperienced in military affairs generally.” John S. Mosby, who went from being a Virginia lawyer to a cavalry private to the most famous partisan officer of the war, conceded that “I could never repeat the formulas of the regulations.” A soldier in the 147th New York chuckled sardonically to himself at the ineptness of his company’s captain. He “went out with us on Battalion Drill yesterday and got so befuddled he could not do anything, so we drilled or skedaddled about for half an hour, then came back to camp.” In the 31st Illinois, a private who had seen some service in the Mexican War had to give instruction to his officers in company drill. Thomas Hyde was surprised to find himself elected major of the 7th Maine, but then again, “I was the only man in the regiment” who knew how to “drill a company.” Even so, Hyde had to stay one drill lesson ahead by “studying by candle light.”7

  This bumbling was not helped by the culture gaps formed by large numbers of immigrants in the volunteer ranks, whose principal motivation for enlistment might be a uniform, bounties, pay, and something besides unemployment and penury. German and Irish immigrants made up slightly less than a third of the Federal volunteer forces, with some units—the 39th New York (the “Garibaldi Guard”), 58th New York (the “Polish Legion”), and the five regiments of the “Irish Brigade” (63rd, 69th, 88th New York, 28th Massachusetts, and 116th Pennsylvania)—marching under the red-white-and-green banner of Italian unification, the green-and-gold of Ireland, and the black-red-and-gold of the German Revolution of 1848. The Confederacy recruited proportional numbers of German immigrants, and its most dreaded regiment, the 1st Louisiana Special Battalion (the “Louisiana Tigers”), was supposed to be composed entirely of Irish wharf rats from the New Orleans docks. In some ways, it was not a bad thing in a democracy to have such a diverse army. On the other hand, the immigrants often spoke no English—in the 27th Pennsylvania, “the intercourse between officers as well as men is in German”—and the foreign-born officers were just as likely to have their expertise thrown back in their faces by resentful native-born Americans. (Ironically, that resentment did not extend to foreign military dress: given the reputation of the French Army as the embodiment of military dash and sizzle, volunteer regiments like the 18th Massachusetts and 74th New York or the 23rd and 114th Pennsylvania borrowed the patterns of French specialty units and kitted themselves out as chasseurs, in “red pants, white leggings, blue jacket, with broad red chevrons and shoulder knots, and cap with blue band, red above and blue top,” or as Zouaves, the elite shock troops of France’s Armeé d’Afrique, with rounded monkey jackets, two rows of brass buttons, and baggy trousers “in broad folds” and a “pleated waist.”)8

  The Regular officers who were embedded with the volunteers to give them some professional stiffening privately regarded them as uncontrollable adolescents who kicked off every back-home restraint the moment they were on campaign. During the Mexican War, austere General Winfield Scott complained to the secretary of war that “our militia & volunteers, if a tenth of what is said be true, have committed atrocities—horrors—in Mexico, sufficient to make Heaven weep, & every American, of Christian morals, blush for his country.” What Scott meant by atrocities was not the torture, mauling, or execution of enemy combatants, but an epidemic of petty theft, happy-go-lucky foraging, and a general spirit of carnival whenever the volunteers felt like it. They learned to let the admonitions of the professionals at headquarters go in one ear and out the other, and it was no different a decade and a half later. “Whenever we stop for twenty-four hours,” wrote one horrified Confederate medical officer in the 13th South Carolina, “every corn field and orchard within two or three miles is completely stripped. The troops not only rob the fields, but they go to houses and insist on being fed, until they eat up everything about a man’s premises which can be eaten.”9

  Judged beside the volunteers, the Regulars were the apex of military professionalism; judged beside their counterparts in the European armies, they seemed little better than the volunteers. The prewar Regular Army had almost nothing in the way of an administrative staff (the Confederate armies had an average of only five staff officers at each command level, as compared to fifty for the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte), and few staff officers were expected to serve as more than glorified orderlies. Staff appointments often went to relatives and favorites, and routine staff functions, from provost guards to company clerks, had to be improvised from scratch by robbing personnel from the ordinary regimental rolls. In the Prussian service, staff officers were trained to be “land artists” and the chief of the Prussian general staff, Helmuth von Moltke, created a comprehensive map system of the Prussian kingdom which he used for war gaming, lecturing, and strategic planning. But in America, the best prewar map of Virginia was a nine-sheet affair with a scale of only five miles to the inch that was first published in 1827. Even on their own ground in Virginia, complained Richard Taylor, a Confederate general and the son of onetime U.S. president Zachary Taylor, “the Confederate commanders … were without maps, sketches, or proper guides” and “knew no more about the topography of the country than they did about Central Africa.”

  Nor did they have any concept of the transportation requirements for armies which could easily amount to more than 50,000 men, nor any sense of how the railroads and telegraph lines (which had only begun to spread their webs over the American landscape in the 1840s) might be brought to bear on
directing them. Regimental medical staffs might include a doctor and one or two orderlies, but their practical function was to prevent “shirkers” from absenting themselves from duty, not provide medical care. Sanitary inspection was beyond consideration. One Union scout later remarked that “awful bad air” was a sure giveaway of the nearness of Confederate soldiers, since “the smell simply indicated the presence of the rebel army in the neighborhood.” A Pennsylvania civilian remarked sourly that “a column” of Confederate cavalry “can be smelled as far as a slave ship.”10

  Under such circumstances, what was it that kept the volunteers to their task as they twined their way northward toward Gettysburg in that long summer of 1863? It was certainly not that they “liked to fight just for the fun of it; I did not for one, I well know,” recalled a member of the 11th Virginia. His opposite number in the 155th Pennsylvania agreed: “The anxiety for battle and thirst for gore and terms so freely used by descriptive writers, belongs to the domain of fiction, and describes a sentiment far from the truth.”

  For most in the Union Army, the war was a campaign to save liberal democracy from a conspiracy to replant European-style aristocracy in America. Augustus Horstmann, a German-born captain in the 45th New York, thought the war in America was “much the same as it is in Germany, the free and industrious people of the North are fighting against the lazy and haughty Junker spirit of the South.” “Freedom is the same everywhere,” agreed a Danish-born captain in the 15th Massachusetts, when he spoke of the American Union as the keystone of a universal desire for the cause of freedom. “I cheerfully give my life in its defense. I would give more if I had it.” And then there was slavery. The war might have begun “for the preservation of the Union,” wrote a soldier in the 10th Massachusetts, but “all were equally aware that it could not continue a very great while without trouble over the slavery question,” and by 1863 that “question” had already induced President Lincoln to issue an Emancipation Proclamation as “the [death] knell of the institution of slavery in this Country.”11

  Moreover, as citizen-volunteers, they fought “in obedience to the dictates of duty and of patriotism,” not in “personal hatred toward those who for the time they call enemies.” Thomas Hyde remembered riding out on the Union picket lines along the Rappahannock River, and seeing “a tall lank rebel dressed in ‘butternut’ … step out from his picket post in the woods across the river and gravely present arms, while I scrupulously returned the salute.” These volunteers were neither indifferent praetorians nor soulless cosmopolitans. Leonidas Torrance of the 13th North Carolina writing home to answer his sister’s questions about what Yankees were like merely replied that “If you were to see a yankey you would think it was a man too. (They are nothing more than other men.)” They occupied a shifting arena which was part chivalry and part piracy, an amalgam of prankster, protector, and avenger, capable at one moment of self-interested thievery and at another of self-limiting innocence, and they invested their struggle with a tragic nobility, because defending their republic meant estranging themselves from the anti-aristocratic values which formed its soul.12

  Defending slavery deprived the Confederate soldier of the same claim to nobility, but not to tragedy. “I have seen men who have spent their whole lives in affluent circumstances and in rural pursuits, men who have led quiet and peaceable lives,” said the Marquess of Hartington (the leader of the Liberal Party) in the House of Commons, after visiting the Confederacy in 1862,

  I have seen them serving as privates in regiments of their States, serving badly clothed, badly fed, perhaps hardly with shoes upon their feet … I have seen men who have lived all their lives in poverty, who you would say have nothing to lose and nothing to gain, who had no interest in slavery, but who have joined with as much readiness as those who had the ranks of the army—I have seen these men in their camps as cheerful as possible, and asking for nothing but again to be led to battle with the enemy … I say surely a people animated with such a feeling … [are] not a people who are going to give in.

  Like their Union counterparts, many Confederates saw themselves as fighting for home and county, or for “sectional and financial interests,” and some “for the inestimable right of self-government.” Harry Handerson, who enlisted in the 9th Louisiana, was actually born and educated in the North, but emigrated to Louisiana in 1859 to become a tutor in a plantation family. “All my interests lay in the South and with Southerners, and if the seceding States, in one of which I resided, chose deliberately to try the experiment of self-government, I felt quite willing to give them such aid as lay in my feeble power.” At the same time, there is no use denying that many quite frankly fought to protect slavery, which laid on the survivors of the rebel armies an incubus to which few were willing to admit in later years. More than one out of three Confederates whose campfires dotted South Mountain in the June dusk owned slaves or were the sons of households owning slaves, and more than half of their officers were slave owners. And they brought slaves with them on campaign to tend to the menial jobs that, in the Union armies, had to be performed by enlisted men or civilian hires. They were touchy, disinclined to take advice, and pulled between religious imaginings and creek-bank carousing. The slave system had invested them with an instinctive impulse for domestic dictatorship; they could brawl, stab, and shoot, in and out of race tracks and saloons, and still assume that they were God’s natural aristocrats. Alexis de Tocqueville, in his sojourn through the United States in 1831, found Southerners “high-minded, prompt, irascible, ardent in his desires, impatient of obstacles,” but also “easy to discourage if he cannot triumph with the first stroke.”13

  What carried these particular Confederates as far as they had come also had a great deal to do with their confidence and adulation for the man who commanded them—“the idol of his soldiers & the Hope of His Country,” and the “only man living in whom they would unreservedly trust all power for the preservation of their independence,” who “combines the organizing capacity of a Marlborough, the intuition of a Turenne, the celerity of a Napoleon, and the tenacity of a Wellington.” His name was Robert E. Lee.14

  CHAPTER TWO

  There were never such men in an army before

  MARLBOROUGH WAS FIFTY-FOUR at the time of his victory over the French at Blenheim; Wellington was forty-six at Waterloo. At fifty-five, Robert Edward Lee was older than either in the summer of 1863, but the impression he made on soldiers and spectators easily rivaled the image of the great dukes. “He is six feet in height, weighs about one hundred and ninety pounds; is erect, well formed, and of imposing appearance,” wrote a Confederate journalist. He had grown a beard at the beginning of the war (a military fashion popularized by the British Army in the Crimean War), although both that and the jet-black hair and mustache he had in 1861 quickly turned gray, and then silvered over to white. “He is exceedingly plain in his dress,” sometimes wearing “a long linen duster, which so enveloped his uniform as to make it invisible, topped off with “a wide-brimmed straw hat,” and sometimes in a “well-worn long gray jacket, a high black felt hat, and blue trousers tucked into his Wellington boots.” He wore none of the usual Confederate officer’s gold braiding on his sleeves to indicate his rank, only “three stars on his collar” and “a military cord around the crown” of the hat. “No man,” wrote a Richmond newspaper, “is superior in all that constitutes a soldier and the gentleman—no man more worthy to head our forces and lead our army.”1

  This was a judgment that few people would have been inclined to make only two years before. “When Gen. Lee took command there was really very little known of him generally,” admitted Edward Porter Alexander, who would later become one of Lee’s most talented officers. He was the fifth child of one of George Washington’s favorite devil-may-care cavalrymen, “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, and Anne Hill Carter. Light-Horse Harry was a spendthrift and a rake, and when he abandoned them, one step ahead of his creditors, Robert, his siblings, and his mother were thrown back on the resources o
f their Carter relations. He learned from that to prefer “my own kith & kin to any one elses,” and when he married, it was to one of his cousins, Mary Anna Custis.2

  Lee entered West Point in 1825 and went on to graduate second in his class, without a single behavioral demerit. But any gloating was buried beneath self-discipline, a punctiliousness about paying debts, and a reserve which made him seem to Mary Chesnut, the greatest of Confederate diary keepers, to be “so cold and quiet and grand.”3 And although the Custis marriage settled Robert Lee financially and put a permanent roof over his head in the form of the Custis mansion, Arlington, Lee stayed with the army rather than earn the reputation of a sponger. During the Mexican War, he made an immediate and admiring impression on his commanding officer, Winfield Scott. Lee was “the very best soldier I ever saw in the field,” Scott wrote to the secretary of war in 1857, and Scott later prophesied that Lee “is the greatest soldier now living, and if he ever gets the opportunity, he will prove himself the greatest captain of history.”4

  Lee never indulged much hope for the future for slavery. “In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country,” Lee wrote in 1856. But in his mind, emancipation “will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery controversy.” And so Lee deplored slavery—and still held slaves, rented slaves, and on one occasion whipped them. As the Union began to tear itself apart over slavery in the winter of 1860–61, Lee felt a similar ambivalence. His long service in the army, and in so many different locales, made it obvious to him that the American republic “contained no North, no South, no East no west, but embraced the broad Union, in all its might and strength, present and future.” But when Virginia finally made up its mind to join the Confederacy in April 1861, Lee was pulled in the other direction by the enormous debts he owed to the “kith and kin” who had kept him afloat in his youth. Lee had never owned a square inch of Virginia soil in his own name, and thought of the Lower South fire-eaters as a malignant political cancer; but Virginia’s people had been the single safety net that his mother and her children had known, and to that intervention Lee owed everything.5