Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  On May 26th, Robert E. Lee presided at a “grand review” of Dick Ewell’s corps, starting with Jubal Early’s division, then proceeding on the 29th to Robert Rodes’ division, which “marched three miles to the reviewing grounds, and stood for several hours before getting properly aligned.” Longstreet’s corps would follow on June 1st, with the corps artillery firing a thirteen-gun salute to Lee, bands playing at the head of each brigade, every company “bringing their pieces from ‘right shoulder’ to ‘carry’ … and from ‘carry’ to ‘present arms’ when stationary.” Each regiment passed by in column of companies, “music in front of each brigade, in front of the old hero, who saluted each flag as it passed by taking off his hat, and exhibiting his cotton scalp to the admiring throng around him.” (The cotton surprised a soldier in the 53rd North Carolina, who remembered how, one year before, when Lee took command, “his hair was black [and] now he is a gray-headed old man.”) Rumors of a new campaign were already flying up and down the review columns, and George Campbell Brown, Ewell’s stepson and staffer, noticed that “they are all for [invading] Maryland & Pennsylvania.” And perhaps, when they did, it would all come to an end. A great battle would be fought, and through the smoke and fire, the way home would finally be open, and there would be peace, independence, and plenty—but especially peace.

  Oddly, across the Rappahannock River, soldiers in the Army of the Potomac had come to the same conclusion. A gunner in Battery B, 4th U.S. Artillery, decided that, “If we are whipped here, and I pull through it alive, I’m going to make tracks for home, and the provost-guard may be damned.” There had been enough fighting to no purpose. “I am inclined to think that this Campaign is going to end this show either one way or the other,” wrote another artilleryman in the 1st Massachusetts Light Artillery, “for if Lee gets the best of us now we are gone up and its no use talking and I think if we get the best of him he is gone the same way.”24

  In the evening, the rebel brigade bands that had played so thumpingly through the reviews played again on the banks of the Rappahannock, with strains of “Dixie” and “The Bonnie Blue Flag” echoing in the still twilight. On the far side of the river, the bandsmen of the Army of the Potomac stirred themselves, and they, too, began to play, this time offering “Yankee Doodle” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” And then, remembered George Henry Mills of the 16th North Carolina, on some mysterious cue the bands on both riverbanks struck up “Home, Sweet Home.” And there “was on both sides a universal shout, reverberating from one to the other, back and forth, showing that there was one tie held in common by these two grand armies.”25

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A perfectly surplus body of men

  IF THERE WAS ONLY one lesson to be learned from Robert E. Lee’s first try at an invasion northward in 1862, it would be about Harpers Ferry. Lodged tightly between the confluence of the Shenandoah and the Potomac rivers, some fifty miles northwest of Washington, Harpers Ferry was ringed by the limestone ridges of Maryland Heights (on the north bank of the Potomac), Loudoun Heights (on the east, overlooking the Shenandoah River), and Bolivar Heights (west of the town). These tall ridges didn’t make Harpers Ferry into some kind of natural fortress; rather, it became the deep center of a bowl that was too wide to be defended. On that assumption, Lee decided in 1862 to cross the Potomac into Maryland downstream from Harpers Ferry, where he could move the Army of Northern Virginia easily up to Frederick, and from there into the Cumberland Valley of Pennsylvania, and left Harpers Ferry in his rear to be snatched up by Stonewall Jackson. But it did not surrender as easily as Lee expected. The tiny Federal garrison put up just long enough of a fight that Stonewall Jackson only barely caught up with Lee in time to fend off the Army of the Potomac’s fast descent at Antietam. Once Lee fell back into Virginia, Harpers Ferry was blithely reoccupied by Federal forces as though the Confederates had never passed that way.

  Harpers Ferry was not enough of a prize to be worth a second risk of that sort. So in the summer of 1863, Lee’s plan for another invasion of the North would point farther westward, bypassing Harpers Ferry entirely. He would pull away from the lines along the Rappahannock where the two armies had been glowering at each other since Chancellorsville, and shift north and west over the Blue Ridge, entering the great tunnel formed by the Shenandoah and Cumberland Valley, and crossing the Potomac at points between ten and twenty-five miles above Harpers Ferry. Once across the Potomac, Lee would make Hagerstown, in the Cumberland Valley, his first objective (instead of Frederick), and then begin a long curl north and east, down the valley, through Greencastle, Chambersburg, Shippensburg, Carlisle, and finally to Harrisburg and the banks of the Susquehanna. Along that entire line, there was only one Federal outpost of any size worth worrying about, and that was Winchester, at the lower end of the Shenandoah Valley and just twenty-five miles from the Potomac. But there were fewer than 7,000 Federal soldiers there, and the town had changed hands so often during this war that it was not likely to put up much resistance to changing hands again.

  It seems odd to modern eyes that Lee wrote out none of these plans, gave no precise timetables, and specified no schedule of objectives. (If anything, Lee was still fiddling with the realignment of the army’s artillery, and still haggling with Secretary of War Seddon for the addition of five more brigades of infantry from North Carolina and the defenses of Richmond.) Nothing of that nature seems to have survived apart from two operational orders issued to A. P. Hill on June 5th and June 16th, and even these are merely directives to move and occupy certain points, without any specifics about how or when.1 But this was not unnatural in the mid-nineteenth century, when the movement and communication of armies were still surprisingly haphazard affairs, especially through the broad expanses of the American landscape. In 1863, twenty-five miles represented a full day’s travel—the experiential equivalent of, say, a coast-to-coast flight—so that a trip from Philadelphia to Chicago in 1863 would feel like going halfway around the world. Within those limits, campaign plans were always going to be full of improvisation, with plenty of loose room left for unanticipated encounters, unforeseen obstacles, and raw happenstance.

  In European warfare, the new technologies of the railroad and the telegraph were rapidly closing these distance gaps, and annihilating the delays in travel and information which had previously made mischance and make-it-up-as-you-go part of the normal play of war. The fifteen state-owned railroads and thirty-one private railroads in the kingdom of Prussia had been severely subordinated to a military railroad commission and a section of the Prussian general staff in the 1850s, and elaborate mobilization timetables had been developed to govern the concentration and movement of Prussian troops in any eventuality. In 1855, the British Army experimented with constructing a military railroad in the Crimea to supply the siege lines at Sevastopol, and in the North Italian War in 1859, Napoleon III moved 130,000 French troops at unprecedented speed into the war zone.2

  But Robert E. Lee had nothing like these rail systems at his disposal. His main railroad support consisted of a cluster of lines which came up from the Carolinas to Petersburg and Richmond, and even these were inadequate to the supply needs of the Army of Northern Virginia. From Richmond, only two major rail lines were strung northward to the Potomac—the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac, which was controlled by the Federals north of the Rappahannock River, and the combined lines of the Virginia Central and Orange & Alexandria, which passed out of Confederate control north of Culpeper Court House. The only effective rail link between Lee and the Shenandoah Valley in 1863 ran westward through Charlottesville to Staunton, way at the upper head of the Shenandoah, and that was ninety miles from Harpers Ferry. Even if Lee had wanted to devise a tight plan of campaign operations, the tools needed for such a plan simply didn’t exist for him or the Army of Northern Virginia.3

  Click here to see a larger image.

  Once the parades and reviews of the three infantry corps of the Army of Northern Virginia were complete, Lee began the first st
age of the long journey northward on June 3rd, with Lafayette McLaws’ and John Bell Hood’s divisions of Longstreet’s corps discreetly packing up and marching south (in order to disappear from Federal sight) through the green groves of locusts and oaks toward Spotsylvania Court House and then turning westward, across the Rapidan River, to Culpeper Court House, on the Orange & Alexandria Railroad. (Longstreet’s third division, under George Pickett, was waiting on two of the brigades Lee was struggling to shake loose from Secretary Seddon; those two units, under Micah Jenkins and Montgomery Corse, would finally stay put, north of Richmond, to protect the capital.)4

  Turning to look back over the artillery battalion he commanded, Edward Porter Alexander felt a surge of “pride & confidence … in my splendid battalion, as it filed out of the field into the road, with every chest & ammunition wagon filled, & every horse in fair order, & every detail fit for a campaign.” Few of these Confederate soldiers, however, stayed splendid for long. The weather was “beautiful” and “bright” on the 3rd, but the next day, when it became the turn of Dick Ewell’s corps to begin slipping away toward Spotsylvania, it became “very warm & we were in a cloud of dust most of the time.” The marching was kept easy—ten-minute rest breaks every hour, and camp by 3:30 in the afternoon. Ewell’s corps followed Longstreet’s across the Rapidan at noon on June 7th and camped by four o’clock near Culpeper. Neither of them entirely evaded Union observation. The Army of the Potomac began experimenting in late 1861 with hydrogen-filled observation balloons supplied by the ingenuity of Thaddeus Sobieski Coulincourt Lowe. A number of the balloons were still operational, and on June 5th Ewell’s corps noticed the ascent of “the Yankee balloon” over Banks’ Ford on the Rappahannock.5

  Lee kept A. P. Hill’s corps in position on the Rappahannock and thinned it along the south bank, “making such disposition as will be best calculated to deceive the enemy, and keep him in ignorance of any change in the disposition of the army.” But thanks to the balloon, Hooker was already notifying Lincoln that the Army of Northern Virginia was on the road and that Lee must be intending “to move up the [Rappahannock] river, with a view to the execution of a movement similar to Lee’s of last year.” That would mean either a move “to cross the Upper Potomac” above Harpers Ferry “or to throw his army between mine and Washington” by lunging around Hooker’s flank and reoccupying the old Bull Run battlefield.

  Only a few months before, Hooker had been riding a tide of success so neatly that he was allowed to report directly to Lincoln, and would hardly have needed to signal Lincoln at all in order to deal with a Confederate movement. But Hooker’s stock had fallen so flat after Chancellorsville that when he suggested a countermove across the Rappahannock, he met with the president’s stony disapproval: “It does not appear probable to me that you can gain any thing by an early renewal of the attempt to cross the Rappahannock.” The more Hooker persisted in asking for authorization to respond, the more irritable Lincoln became, and on June 5th, he curtly notified Hooker that henceforward he would report to Major General Henry Wager Halleck, the general in chief of all the Union armies. This was bad news for Hooker, since Halleck had rarely ever used his role as general in chief to do more than act as a glorified liaison officer, and because Halleck and Hooker had known each other before the war, and on the worst possible terms.6

  Hooker pressed Halleck to allow him to cross the Rappahannock in force, overwhelming whatever rebel force had been left at Fredericksburg, and then lunging down the line of the Virginia Central toward an almost undefended Richmond. “Will it not promote the true interest of the cause,” Hooker was reduced to pleading, “for me to march to Richmond at once?” And Hooker went so far as to push across the Rappahannock at Franklin’s Crossing (three miles below Fredericksburg) with a division of John Sedgwick’s 6th Corps while the Army of the Potomac’s engineers hurriedly built a pontoon bridge. The Yankee division cleared about a mile of the far bank of the Rappahannock, with skirmishers keeping up “a sharp firing all day,” and the other two divisions of the 6th Corps took turns over the next few days occupying the newly conquered pocket around the crossing. As he had suspected, a great many of the rebels were gone.7

  Establishing this little bridgehead was Hooker’s way of demonstrating that the road to Richmond was demonstrably open, but it merely drew from Halleck and from Lincoln the immediate and frosty reminder that a move toward Richmond would leave the field open for Lee to trade queens by attacking an almost undefended Washington. Besides, those generals animated by “the true interest of the cause” would be seeking out a decisive confrontation with the Confederate Army, not Richmond. Hooker had been selected for command by Lincoln because he was supposed to be “Fighting Joe,” the perfect anti-McClellan who would wade in and land the jaw-crushing blow to the Army of Northern Virginia that the McClellan lovers refused to throw. But not only had Hooker allowed his own jaw to be crushed at Chancellorsville, he was now bleating for permission to betake himself to Richmond while the rebel army held the entire Potomac River to ransom. “I think Lee’s army, and not Richmond, is your sure objective point,” Lincoln replied coolly on June 10th. “If he comes toward the Upper Potomac, follow on his flank and on his inside track.” And that was that.8

  Hooker must have known by this point that he had been weighed in the balances and found wanting by Lincoln, and that Halleck would welcome any opportunity to make the balances weigh even heavier against him. “I think & know that Hooker feels very bad,” the army’s excitably vigilant provost marshal, Marsena Patrick, wrote in his diary. Yet, there was also vanity enough in Hooker to make him hope that, somehow, he had the wherewithal to redeem himself from the irredeemable depths. On June 11th, Hooker’s staff adjutant, Brigadier General Seth Williams, circulated orders to all corps commanders “for all civilians to leave the Army at once, all extra baggage to be sent to the rear, and the men’s extra luggage reduced to the lowest possible amount.”9

  The 3rd Corps would jump off first, heading twenty-five miles north to Catlett’s Station (on the Orange & Alexandria Railroad) and from there up the line to old familiar battlegrounds around Manassas Junction; John Reynolds’ 1st Corps would follow, and behind Reynolds would come Otis Howard and the 11th Corps. The 6th Corps’ bridgehead over the Rappahannock was quietly abandoned after darkness on June 12th, and the next day the remaining four infantry corps of the Army of the Potomac—Hancock’s 2nd Corps, the 6th under Sedgwick, George Meade’s 5th Corps, and Henry Slocum’s 12th Corps—were on the roads, swinging slightly to the east of the others and headed for Fairfax Court House. It was “a terrible suffocating march.” A sergeant in the 28th Pennsylvania counted only nine men present in his company when they reached Fairfax, and he “was completely faged out, almost sick.” But at least this way, the Army of the Potomac would always be interposed between Lee and Washington. It was not the kind of campaign Joe Hooker really wanted to carry on, but by this point, as Marsena Patrick sadly wrote, “Halleck is running the marching and Hooker has the role of a subordinate.”10

  One notion which kept nagging at Joe Hooker was the possibility that Lee’s mysterious departure for Culpeper might not be a serious movement at all, but instead a cover for a large-scale cavalry raid by the Army of Northern Virginia’s cavalry and its flamboyant J.E.B. Stuart. “It may be that they have only intended a cavalry raid,” Hooker wondered hopefully, “and moved their infantry in the vicinity of Culpeper to support it.” That, at least, would seem to explain why Lee was leaving an entire corps’ worth of his infantry—A. P. Hill’s—still in place around Fredericksburg. If Hooker launched a preemptive strike of his own and broke up whatever cavalry raid might be in the offing, he could have something to offer Halleck and Lincoln which might justify a release from the tight leash they had buckled around his neck. On June 6th, Hooker casually informed Halleck that a “heavy rebel force of cavalry about Culpeper may mean mischief,” and that he was taking steps to nip the “mischief” in “its incipiency.” What he was actually pl
anning to do was to take all three divisions of the Army of the Potomac’s cavalry, “stiffened by about 3,000 infantry,” lunge across the Rappahannock upriver at Kelly’s Ford, and deliver a thumping surprise to the Confederate cavalry in its camps around Culpeper.11

  This was not as easy an assignment as it seemed. The cavalry of the Army of the Potomac was suffered as the poor relation of the infantry, with the result that “this arm of our service has been of little account heretofore.” Rebel cavalrymen laughed their Union counterparts to scorn: “Most of the Federal cavalry of the Army of the Potomac in 1861 was inefficient, awkward, uncouth horsemen,” wrote a captain in the 1st Virginia Cavalry. “I have seen raw Dutchmen strapped on the horses by straps buckled around their waists and legs and fastened to the saddle.” Old Winfield Scott had no use for cavalry units larger than a company or an ad hoc battalion. The cavalry McClellan had taken with him on his great campaign up the peninsula formed by the James River, to the doors of Richmond, in 1862 amounted to less than 4,000 out of 98,000 Union troops, and had been parceled out among the big infantry corps for escort and provost guard duties, except for a small two-brigade “reserve.” McClellan eventually concentrated his cavalry into a single division before Antietam, and placed it under Brigadier General Alfred Pleasonton, a West Pointer of the class of 1844 with service in the 2nd Dragoons under Zachary Taylor in Mexico. But Pleasonton’s and the division’s actual contribution to McClellan’s blandly managed battle at Antietam was minimal: while the rest of the Army of the Potomac submitted to the loss of 2,100 lives in that single day in September, the entire cavalry division reported 4 killed and 20 wounded—one of them being Pleasonton, who was deafened in the right ear by the concussion of artillery.12