Gettysburg: The Last Invasion
Page 9
It was really Joe Hooker who took the Yankee cavalry firmly in hand, reorganized it into a full-fledged corps of three divisions, and placed it all in the hands of George Stoneman. “I give you full power over your officers,” Hooker warned, “arrest, cashier, shoot—whatever you will,” but get them working as a useful unit. Hooker’s principal mission for Stoneman was raiding “remote from the supporting army … in which the aim was not to encounter the enemy in force and fight him, but rather to avoid serious conflicts of arms and expend all possible energy in the destruction of lines of communication and depots of military supplies.” In that expectation, George Stoneman turned out to be a colossal disappointment, riding his cavalry corps almost entirely out of contact with Hooker at Chancellorsville and only doing “easily repaired” damage along the Virginia Central Railroad between Richmond and the Rappahannock. The crestfallen Stoneman sheepishly removed himself from Hooker’s wrath by taking medical leave for “the cavalryman’s complaint”—hemorrhoids—and command of the cavalry fell back to Alfred Pleasonton, who had assiduously undermined Stoneman and positioned himself to replace him.13
Pleasonton was a kid-glove-wearing dandy, a ladies’ man, a vivid talker, with a full, placid face, a sharp eye for the main chance, and an open door for reporters who might obligingly puff his name in the papers. Charles Francis Adams, in the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry, moaned that Pleasonton was “a newspaper humbug … a bully and toady” who “does nothing save with a view to a newspaper paragraph,” and that view was shared pretty broadly by the rest of the cavalry corps. But Pleasonton had seniority, and he had political pull—he was closely tied to John Franklin Farnsworth, a Radical Republican representative from Illinois’ 2nd District, and Farnsworth’s nephew, Elon, was one of Pleasonton’s staff officers—and so the task of popping whatever bubble J.E.B. Stuart and the rebel cavalry were developing around Culpeper would go to Pleasonton.14
Stuart struck many people as a mirror image of Pleasonton. “There were few men produced by the war whose character was so mixed with gold and dross as Stuart,” remembered an officer in the 4th Virginia Cavalry. He could be “brave as his sword,” but “frivolous to the point of ridicule,” as though he was always (in the words of one staffer) “on stage.” Like Pleasonton again, he owed much of his rapid advancement to command of the cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia to his assiduous cultivation of the powerful—in this case, of both Joseph Johnston and Robert E. Lee. He met Lee while still a cadet at West Point in the 1850s, and he had the exquisite good fortune to be in the secretary of war’s office in October 1859 when the secretary called for a volunteer to take an urgent message about John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry to Lee. Stuart took command of the 1st Virginia Cavalry at the outbreak of the war, and so impressed Joe Johnston as having “by nature … the qualities necessary for an officer of light cavalry” that he earned his brigadier general’s stars that September. (That impression was strengthened by Stuart’s considerable talent for flattery: “Johnston is in capacity head and shoulders above every general in the Southern Confederacy,” Stuart announced, including Lee, with whom Stuart was now “disappointed.”) But when Lee succeeded Johnston in command, Stuart at once reintroduced himself and proposed a cavalry raid which would ride a circle around George McClellan and the Army of the Potomac. Lee was dubious. But Stuart pulled it off by sheer audacity, and from that moment his reputation as the Confederacy’s—and Lee’s—favorite cavalryman was sealed. Stuart returned the compliment by appointing Virginians to command four of his division’s five brigades, including a son and a nephew of Robert E. Lee.15
There would always be some question about the real value of Stuart’s raid. Porter Alexander groused that the raid only “alarmed McClellan for his rear” and thwarted Lee’s larger goal of cutting off McClellan’s retreat. It was so bloodless (the great raid cost Stuart’s 1,200 troopers exactly 1 dead and 4 wounded) and so limited that it never quite proved to the infantry’s satisfaction that cavalry had a job worth doing. “I call them a perfectly surplus body of men,” snorted a Georgia infantryman. “The real fighting must be and is done by our foot cavalry.” In a fight, sneered another Georgian, “the bravery of one man is rarely sufficient to overcome the running propensities of six legs.” There was, however, one singular lesson which Stuart took away from the raid, and that was raiding would easily garner headlines in the Richmond papers.16
Raiding was, therefore, what both the newspapers and Joe Hooker expected Stuart to do, sooner or later. Hooker gave Alf Pleasonton unusually explicit instructions about blighting any cavalry raid while it was still in the bud: move up to Warrenton Junction on June 7th, scout the area, and then in the early hours of June 9th cross the Rappahannock at Kelly’s and Beverly fords “and march directly on Culpeper.” There, Pleasonton should “disperse and destroy the rebel force assembled in the vicinity of Culpeper, and … destroy his trains and supplies of all description to the utmost of your ability.” Even if Pleasonton did no more than give the Confederate cavalry a good running off, Joe Hooker would be satisfied and Washington would be impressed. One of Hooker’s aides, Captain Ulric Dahlgren, would act as Pleasonton’s overall guide and (since Pleasonton seems to have had no more fixed notion of where Culpeper was than he did Mecca) Dahlgren would “hand you some maps of the direction in which you are operating.”17
What actually happened on the 9th held surprises for both Pleasonton and J.E.B. Stuart. The day before, Stuart scheduled the last of the Army of Northern Virginia’s great campaign reviews for Robert E. Lee on the broad 2,200-acre plantation of the unhappy Virginia Unionist John Minor Botts. A captain in the 6th Virginia Cavalry remembered how “Gen. Lee, with his staff, first rode rapidly along the front of the line, around the left flank, then along the rear, around the right flank to his position on the hill in the front,” and then “at the sound of the bugle, taken up and repeated along the line, the corps of horsemen broke by right wheel into columns of squadron, and moving south for a short distance, the head of the column was turned to the left, and again to the left, moving in this new direction, whence it passed immediately in front of the commanding general … ten thousand sabres flashing in the sun light … before the greatest soldier of modern times.” The most dour of Stuart’s five brigade commanders, the aptly nicknamed William “Grumble” Jones, was heard muttering about Stuart’s “horse show and sham fight,” and predicted that Stuart would soon enough “have a fight without the sham.” But Robert E. Lee was well pleased with Stuart’s review: “It was a splendid sight,” he wrote to Mary Custis Lee. “Stuart was in all his glory.”18
Lee and Stuart might have done better to have listened more carefully to Grumble Jones, because at five o’clock on the morning of the 9th, an entire division of Federal cavalry forded the three-and-a-half-foot-deep waters of the Rappahannock at Beverly Ford, emerging out of early morning river mists and quickly pouring along the road toward Beverly Ford and Culpeper, ten miles away. Two regiments of Grumble Jones’ rebel cavalry who had been posted along the road turned hastily and bleary-eyed out of their blankets, recovering horses turned out to graze and sometimes only mounting bareback, and struggled to fight a series of delaying actions along the road. But what surprised the Federal troopers was that they were there at all, since the reports Alfred Pleasonton had collected the day before had no Confederate cavalry located between the river and Culpeper. But Stuart, after the review of June 8th, had camped most of his wearied cavalry east of Culpeper, nearer the river, and set up his own headquarters tent on a low ridge known locally as Fleetwood Hill, and by the time the Federal cavalry had worked its way along the Beverly Ford road toward Fleetwood Hill, more than enough Confederate cavalry, along with sixteen guns from Stuart’s collection of light artillery, had collected itself at a small crossroads two miles west of Beverly Ford. There, by 7:30, the Federal advance slowed to a stop, and a headlong attempt by the 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry to overrun the rebel artillery collapsed into a melee of Union and Confe
derate horsemen, popping away with revolvers or hacking futilely at each other with sabers.19
Alf Pleasonton had another surprise in waiting. His two other divisions of cavalry crossed the Rappahannock eight miles below Beverly Ford that morning, also moving east and with the understanding that they would link up with the first division somewhere near Brandy Station before pushing on to Culpeper. This second arm of Pleasonton’s attack then divided itself, with one division under David Gregg angling northward toward the rendezvous at Brandy Station and the other, smaller division under a nervous French émigré (and Crimean War veteran) gloriously named Alfred Napoleon Duffié moving straight west to the crossroads of Stevensburg to shield the main body of Pleasonton’s force from any possible interference from Confederate infantry away to the south. The appearance of yet more uninvited Yankee visitors perversely delighted Grumble Jones, who seemed pleased that Stuart would “damned soon see for himself” the folly of his ways.20
Gregg’s division heard the booming of Stuart’s horse artillery, and swung up toward the southern spur of Fleetwood Hill to hit the rebel horsemen from behind. After noon, a breathless Confederate courier spurred up to Stuart with a warning that Gregg’s troopers were already heading up the lower rise of the hill. Stuart at first refused to believe him. But a second courier with the same message finally got Stuart’s attention, and Stuart pulled an entire brigade of rebel cavalry back at an angle to fend off Gregg’s attack. The result was an even bigger melee in the open fields below Fleetwood Hill and east of Brandy Station, full of regiments and companies fighting with no particular direction amid dust clouds, “terrific, grand, and ludicrous” by one observer’s reckoning, “acres and acres of horsemen sparkling with sabers, and dotted with brilliant bits of color where their flags danced above them.” Horses, “wild beyond the control of their riders,” carried men in and out of their opponents’ reach, and in one Federal unit several troopers “escaped because their clothes were so covered with dust that they looked like graybacks.” One of them was captured and recaptured three times, while another was so coated with grime that he “played secesh orderly to a secesh colonel for a while, and then escaped.”21
By the middle of the afternoon, it was obvious to Pleasonton that this was going nowhere. Robert E. Lee himself arrived “as calm and unconcerned as if he were inspecting the land with a view of a purchase,” and with him came an entire division of rebel infantry which Lee had detached from Dick Ewell’s corps around Culpeper. Pleasonton pulled his three divisions back across the Rappahannock, confident that he had done as much as either Joe Hooker or the circumstances had warranted. “I did what you wanted, crippled Stuart so that he can not go on a raid,” Pleasonton chirped to Hooker in a note written that evening, which was putting as good a face on a frustrated plan as possible. Lee bestowed accolades on Stuart for his “judicious and well planned” handling of his troopers—which could not quite disguise the fact that Stuart had not only been caught by surprise, but had been given the fight of his life. “The cavalry fight at Brandy Station can hardly be called a victory,” one of Longstreet’s staff officers wrote to his wife. “Stuart was certainly surprised and but for the supreme gallantry of his subordinate officers and the men in his command it would have been a day of disaster and disgrace.”22
The fight around Brandy Station was a reasonably good example of what happened when large numbers of light cavalry pitched into one another at full tilt—which was to say, not very much, apart from killing eighty-one of Pleasonton’s officers and troopers and leaving fifty-one dead among the Confederates. For what was otherwise the largest cavalry-on-cavalry battle of the entire war, this amounted to less than one percent of all those in action. Although numerous stories of hand-to-hand fighting emerged out of Brandy Station—including a joust of sorts between Capt. Wesley Merritt of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry and Robert E. Lee’s son “Rooney” Lee—there were also less well-publicized stories about cavalry units who displayed a noticeable reluctance to come to close bloodletting quarters. A lieutenant in the 6th U.S. Cavalry wrote in irritation three days after Brandy Station about urging his squadron to charge with the sabre “but [I] could not get those cowboys to come on.” The 2nd South Carolina and the 4th Virginia Cavalry broke and ran “like sheep,” and in his official report, the colonel of the 4th Virginia, unable to evade what he frankly termed the regiment’s “disgraceful” conduct, added humbly that he was ready for “any inquiry” Stuart “may see fit to institute.” But Stuart had problems of his own after Brandy Station. The first reports in the Richmond newspapers announced in stinging terms that “All seemed to concur in the opinion … that our forces were surprised, and did not know of the presence of the enemy until reports of his artillery were heard.” Elsewhere, the newspaper criticisms were even more severe: “a disastrous fight,” a “needless slaughter.” Even within Lee’s staff, the best that could be said was that “It was nearly an even fight … neither can be said to have made a great dent.”23
What was bad news for J.E.B. Stuart, though, did not necessarily become good news for Joe Hooker. Hooker wired Lincoln the following afternoon to announce that Pleasonton’s “affair with the rebel cavalry yesterday near Brandy Station” had clearly forced Stuart to abandon “his contemplated raid into Maryland,” and would the president now finally authorize him to take the offensive and cross the Rappahannock with the Army of the Potomac to attack Richmond?
The answer came back as a flat no that evening, accompanied the next morning by a terse amen from Halleck. The fact was that, even though Lincoln remained “partial to Hooker,” Lincoln, Halleck, and War Secretary Edwin Stanton were already preparing to replace him. But only preparing: firing Hooker outright would be politically perilous because of Hooker’s connections with the antislavery Radical Republicans in Congress. Inducing Hooker to turn in a resignation himself was preferable but would require some very adroit painting into a corner. In the meantime, Lincoln had begun quietly interviewing the corps commanders of the Army of the Potomac as a replacement for Hooker, beginning with Darius Couch on May 22nd, then Henry Slocum of the 12th Corps, Winfield Scott Hancock of the 2nd Corps, and John Sedgwick of the 6th Corps, and finally John Reynolds of the 1st Corps on June 2nd.24
Nothing had as yet emerged from this, first because Hooker turned a blind eye to any signals that a resignation would be welcomed, and then because command of the army had by now become such a bull’s-eye for political combat that none of the army’s senior major generals wanted the job. The Radical Republicans in Congress had already shown their mistrust of the prevailing McClellanism in the army in 1861 by creating the Joint House-Senate Committee on the Conduct of the War with full powers to investigate the decisions and the politics of the army’s commanders, and no officers with Democratic or McClellanite leanings were eager to put their necks into the Joint Committee’s noose. Hancock, in particular, had rebuffed the idea of succeeding Hooker precisely because “I do not belong to that class of generals whom the Republicans care to bolster up. I should be sacrificed,” the same way McClellan had been. So for the moment, Hooker would remain in command, but only by default, and any notions of galloping wildly off toward Richmond would stay firmly collared by Lincoln and Halleck.25
It was Robert E. Lee who really made the question of Hooker’s movements moot. Every indication he had from Ambrose Powell Hill’s corps, still at Fredericksburg, confirmed in Lee’s mind that the bulk of the Army of the Potomac was sitting inertly on the Rappahannock and not devoting serious resources to tracking Lee’s movement to Culpeper. The way was now clear for Lee’s great invasion plans to unfold. On June 11th, the day George Pickett’s division finally caught up with the rest of Longstreet’s corps at Culpeper, Dick Ewell’s corps began the first leg of its march north. His lead division under Robert Rodes swiftly passed over sixteen miles to Flint Hill, arriving the next day at Chester Gap in the Blue Ridge Mountains and entering the Shenandoah Valley at Front Royal, where, as one North Carolina soldier in Rodes�
� division wrote, “the ladies treated us very good.” The rest of Ewell’s corps was hard on Rodes’ heels—Jubal Early’s division arrived at Front Royal on the 12th, followed by Edward Johnson’s division, and by the 13th all of Ewell’s corps was in the Shenandoah. Longstreet’s corps, with Lafayette McLaws’ division in the van, took up the march parallel to Ewell, on the east side of the Blue Ridge, covering the other passes into the Shenandoah—Manassas Gap, Ashby’s Gap, Snicker’s Gap—from any potential interference.26
Lee was already anticipating that his invasion plans were likely to have far more than just a military impact. “Recent political movements in the United States … have attracted my attention,” Lee wrote to Jefferson Davis even as he was preparing for this next movement northward. In the first half of June, the Northern newspapers that Lee regularly gleaned for information were full of uproar over the arrest and imprisonment of Clement Vallandigham, an uproar that included a gigantic antiwar meeting in Albany and a peace rally at New York City’s Cooper Institute. Vallandigham’s arrest was promptly followed by the sensational shutdown by Federal troops under the disastrously impulsive Ambrose Burnside of the anti-administration Chicago Times (followed by a protest assembly of 20,000 people in Chicago). “Under these circumstances,” Lee urged, “we should neglect no honorable means of dividing and weakening our enemies,” even if it meant stretching the truth a little by offering to negotiate a restoration of the Union. Once the negotiating began, “the war would no longer be supported” in the North, and at that point “the desire of our people for a distinct and independent national existence” could be put forward without much fear that the negotiations would be suspended or the war resumed. The final straw for Lincoln-weary Northerners would be a successful invasion of the North.27