Meade finally relented, mounted up, and rode with Hardie to break the news to Hooker. Fighting Joe had been puzzled by the abrupt response Halleck gave his ultimatum of the previous afternoon, and by the time he went to bed he had convinced himself that the ensuing silence meant that he beaten Halleck. “It was a bitter moment” to be awakened by Hardie and Meade to learn the opposite, and Hooker “could not wholly mask the revulsion of feeling.” Neither could Hooker’s allies in the army, chief of whom was Dan Sickles of the 3rd Corps. Sickles “knew [Meade] was hostile, dating from several incidents in the Chancellorsville campaign,” and Sickles’ own staff recommended he resign on the spot. Meade’s first concern, however, had to be for the army, since as one corps commander out of seven, he had hardly the faintest idea of where to find the rest of the army which was now presumably his to direct. Hooker called in Dan Butterfield (who had his own reasons for disliking Meade), and Meade characteristically said the first thing that came to his mind, which was that “he was shocked at the scattered condition of the army.”
Once the conference was over, Meade drew up a quick note to Halleck, stating with a certain woodenness that “the order placing me in command of this army” had been received and that “as a soldier, I obey it”—as though he regarded his appointment as an ambush and he was being sent on a suicide charge. The only thing he would say for sure about his intentions was that he would at once break off Hooker’s plan to send Reynolds, Sickles, and Howard across South Mountain to attack Lee. “I can only now say that it appears to me I must move toward the Susquehanna, keeping Washington and Baltimore well covered, and if the enemy is checked in his attempt to cross the Susquehanna, or if he turns toward Baltimore, to give him battle.” Until he could get himself properly and comfortably in the seat of command, he would play a game of observation and defense.19
Meade had good reason for caution. He was the fourth commanding general the Army of the Potomac had seen in less than a year, and word of his appointment did not set off spontaneous demonstrations of joy in the army. Beyond Meade’s own 5th Corps, “the army knew but very little about Meade,” and his “appointment … in place of Hooker, just on the eve of battle, was any thing but a pleasant surprise to the whole army.” But a larger reason for caution was Meade’s political self-consciousness: he was clearly not Lincoln’s first choice, something which was surely traceable to his identification with George McClellan. If he was successful in protecting Washington and Baltimore or if he somehow defeated Lee and drove the Confederates back across the Potomac, he would receive precious little credit from the Lincoln administration; if he failed, even for the most plainly military reasons, he expected to be pilloried without mercy as a halfheart and a traitor. No Democratic officer in the Army of the Potomac could forget the fates of Charles Stone or Fitz-John Porter—court-martialed, cashiered, and disgraced—and it was not difficult for Meade to conclude that if this was the way Lincoln wanted to run the war, then he would have no one to thank but himself when his generals played the safest hand they could.
In a confirmation of precisely how personal and petty Halleck’s quarrel with Joe Hooker had been, Halleck went out of his way to inform Meade, in a covering letter with Lincoln’s order placing him in command, that as of that date, “Harper’s Ferry and its garrison are under your direct orders,” and that “your army is free to act as you may deem proper under the circumstances.” But the safest thing Meade could imagine doing now was to recall the army’s moving parts to Frederick, and then find a defensible position beneath the arc of Lee’s invasion into Pennsylvania which would allow him to shield Baltimore and Washington and keep the Army of the Potomac from losing any more battles. Fifteen miles north of Frederick was Pipe Creek, a tributary of the Monocacy River, which in turn flowed down into the Potomac. The ravines and bluffs of the stream offered the kinds of defensive opportunities dear to an engineer’s heart, and less than ten miles behind Pipe Creek was the railhead town of Westminster, where he would have a direct supply link over the Western Maryland Railroad to Baltimore and Washington. That would be the place to plant the Army of the Potomac—on the defensive, protective of the capital, and demanding of no sort of risk, at least until some other plan became clear in Meade’s mind.20
Until the Pipe Creek line was laid out and marked by his engineers, Meade wanted the army to stay within at least observation distance of Lee’s army in the Cumberland Valley. To keep contact, Reynolds, as the senior major general of the 1st, 3rd, and 11th Corps, would move up from Frederick to Emmitsburg, using the cavalry division which had been riding with him well out to the north and west, near Fairfield and Gettysburg, to track Lee’s movements on the other side of South Mountain. Henry Slocum’s 12th Corps would also move northward to the east of Reynolds, across Pipe Creek and into Pennsylvania through Littlestown and Two Taverns. The 2nd, 5th, and 6th Corps would begin securing the Pipe Creek line, while Meade planted his headquarters at Taneytown, Maryland. With a little cooperation from Robert E. Lee, Reynolds and Slocum would bait the hook and lure the Army of Northern Virginia down to its destruction along the banks of Pipe Creek. Or perhaps not: but in that event, Meade would still have at least saved Washington. Lincoln should be satisfied with that.21
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This would still require a great deal of hard marching by the Army of the Potomac. John Reynolds and the 1st Corps crossed the Potomac on the pontoon bridge at Edwards’ Ferry on June 25th at five in the morning, and marched up to Poolesville, Maryland, and on to Barnesville. The 11th Corps also crossed the Potomac at Edwards’ Ferry on June 25th and marched eighteen miles that day; by June 28th, it had reached Frederick and “marched straight through to Emmettsburg, making a distance of thirty-seven miles in twenty-four hours,” even in pouring rain. Equipment wore out; uniforms were snagged into tatters. “Men who had left the Rappahannock twelve days before with new shoes on their feet were now practically bare-footed,” wrote a soldier in the 1st Minnesota, “and there were quite a number with feet so badly bruised or blistered that they walked like foundered horses.”22
But for all the pounding of the march, the men’s spirit rose by steady notches as the columns forged northward through Maryland. As the first company of the 157th New York stepped off the pontoon bridge onto Maryland soil, the men began to cheer and sing an old Sunday School hymn:
We go the way that leads to God,
The way that saints have ever trod;
So let us leave this sinful shore,
For realms where we shall die no more.
We’re going home, we’re going home,
We’re going home to die no more.
Which was about what one in six of them would be doing in approximately one week. But that was veiled by the newly felt roll of the hills, the familiar lay of the farms, the evidence of a world that approached normal, untouched by war. They joked, they sang, swinging along at an Olympic pace of “five miles an hour, as indicated by the milestones we passed.” They had been defeated, but they had risen anew, and it helped to have a sympathetic populace to line the roads. “One thing that is noticeable since our entrance into Maryland”—or at least Maryland on the eastern side of South Mountain—“and that is the loyalty of the people … There is not that sourness in the countenance of every passers-by which greeted us in our wanderings over the ‘sacred soil’ of the ‘old Dominion.’ ” When the 3rd Corps marched through Frederick on June 28th, the “enthusiastic reception they received” prompted David Bell Birney to put his division in neat marching order, “preceded first by orderlies with drawn sabers, a band playing John Brown’s Body, and then he marched with his staff.” One “pretty child” was pushed out in front of one of Birney’s brigadiers, the transplanted Frenchman Philippe Régis de Trobriand, and held up a bouquet “full of flowers” with the cry, “Good luck to you, general!”23
“Our new commander is determined not to let the grass grow under his feet,” wrote Charles Wainwright in the 1st Corps, “an
d his dispositions would indicate that he has some pretty certain ideas as to where Lee is, and what he ought to do himself.” At the beginning of the campaign, a number of these ideas came from Professor Lowe’s balloons. But Lowe was in the process of shutting down his balloon operation, and the army had hardly left the Rappahannock before Lowe’s “aerial ship was folded up and stowed away” and “that was the last we saw of ballooning in the army of the Potomac.” Another, less direct, source of information on Confederate movements would be Alfred Pleasonton and the army’s three cavalry divisions. Pleasonton’s principal task, after Brandy Station, was to penetrate the screen of mountains behind which the Confederate army was moving and report on Lee’s progress northward. This was, however, easier said than done. Pleasonton tried repeatedly to force a passage through the principal gaps in the Blue Ridge. But Stuart’s cavalry were harboring a slow burn of resentment after their embarrassment at Brandy Station, and the Confederate horsemen stymied three attempts by Pleasonton—at Aldie on June 17th–18th, at Middleburg on June 18th, and at Upperville on June 21st–22nd—to force his way through the gaps for a look-around after the Confederate infantry.24
In the end, Lee, Hooker, and Meade alike would rely far more on civilian informants and scouting detachments to pierce the fog of war than their cavalry. George Sharpe’s Bureau of Military Information deployed at least fifteen enlisted operatives who faded in and out of Confederate lines in civilian clothes to garner stray pieces of information, as well as a larger weir of deputized civilians who could furtively watch (and count) the passing of Confederate troops and report themselves or through Sharpe’s professionals. “Nine thousand men and sixteen pieces of artillery passed through Greencastle yesterday,” reported John Babcock, Sharpe’s chief assistant, on June 24th; two “gentlemen of undoubted veracity” counted Early’s division “with twelve regiments of infantry and two of cavalry and sixteen pieces of artillery” as it passed through “Smithsburg toward Greencastle and Chambersburg” later that day. An informal detachment of volunteer scouts under a lawyer named David McConaughy operated out of Gettysburg and reported on the movements of Albert Jenkins’ Confederate cavalry around Hagerstown and Greencastle. “Contrabands,” prisoners, and deserters—all of them turned over to Sharpe’s bureau for interrogation—provided still more sources of intelligence.25
The Army of Northern Virginia ran the same sorts of agents, although in a much less coordinated fashion. The Confederacy’s primary intelligence bureau was headquartered in Richmond and relied on resident agents and couriers in Northern cities to collect strategic information which might have little or nothing to do with Lee’s immediate tactical situation on the ground. There was no chief signals officer among Lee’s general staff, so that Lee often turned to his staff engineers for reconnaissance. But Lee’s corps commanders—particularly Longstreet—maintained scouts for their own staffs, and they proved remarkably adept at slipping in and around the covert corridor that lay between Washington and Richmond, eavesdropping in Washington saloons and clipping volumes of reports from Northern newspapers whose correspondents cheerfully announced every move of every Union unit. Sometimes, even ordinary Confederate soldiers could pick up all they needed to know about Union troop movements from captured newspapers. For all that the cavalry was spoken of as “the eyes and ears” of the armies, their real task was to seal off the incursions of enemy scouts and spies—sometimes with a drumhead court-martial and a rope, as Federal cavalrymen did at Frederick on June 27th when they captured a Confederate spy named Will Talbot—and to prevent the gathering of intelligence, rather than do that work themselves.26
All of this throws a curious light on what was now to become the single most controversial decision of the invasion. Still smarting from the criticism that had fallen upon him after Brandy Station, J.E.B. Stuart began casting about “for some other point at which to deliver at effective blow.” According to his official report in August 1863, he proposed that, instead of routinely screening the army’s movement northward across the Potomac, he should loop eastward, gallop around the tail of the Army of the Potomac as it moved after the Confederates, and give a presumably underdefended Washington the scare of its life. Stuart had what he counted upon as “accurate and reliable” information from “the fearless and indefatigable” ranger, John Mosby, about Union movements, and once he had sown confusion between Washington and the Army of the Potomac, he could circle north and rejoin “our army north of the Potomac.” Stuart would leave two brigades behind to guard the Blue Ridge gaps; but otherwise he would let the mountains do the screening, and launch his third great cavalry raid of the war.27
Since Stuart’s first outline of this plan has not survived, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when the idea was first conceived and when it was first brought to Lee’s notice. John Mosby recalled that Stuart first raised the possibility of a raid on June 19th, and Lee’s military secretary, Charles Marshall, referred vaguely to a “conversation” Lee had with Stuart and Longstreet at Paris, Virginia (near Ashby’s Gap), which could only have occurred on June 20th. Lee’s first recorded comment, on June 22nd, was an answer to a written plan Stuart had submitted first to Longstreet. It is important to notice, even at this stage of the invasion, that Lee was already annoyed at having to deal with a certain intelligence deficit, since he began his letter by asking Stuart if he knew where Hooker was “and what he is doing? I fear he will steal a march on us and get across the Potomac before we are aware.” Nevertheless, Lee authorized Stuart to carry out his plan, provided he left enough cavalry to guard the gaps, and move “into Maryland, and take position on General Ewell’s right … guard his flank, keep him informed of the enemy’s movements, and collect all the supplies you can for the use of the army.”28
This is an oddly worded letter, since it does not appear to be answering the question Stuart claims in his August report to have put before Lee—whether he could launch a raid around the Army of the Potomac toward Washington. If anything, it reads like a response to a far simpler suggestion that Stuart’s cavalry quit guarding the Blue Ridge gaps and move north across the Potomac with Dick Ewell’s corps, at the head of the invasion. If we remember that the Army of the Potomac’s infantry was still dribbled out on the roads between Fairfax, Manassas Junction, and Leesburg, then giving up the gaps was actually a serious proposition, since Hooker might then turn abruptly westward, overrun the gaps, and move into the Shenandoah Valley behind Lee. Certainly, Lee still nursed some anxiety that the cavalry collisions at Aldie, Upperville, and Middleburg might signal “a real advance toward the valley” by Hooker. But Ewell’s corps was already at Greencastle on the 22nd; that same day Lee authorized him to strike north and east through the Cumberland Valley to Harrisburg, and by that point Lee may have regarded the gaps as superfluous. Stuart, then, could go and join Ewell on the Susquehanna—where, presumably, the action would be—and Lee advised Ewell that he should expect Stuart “to march with three brigades across the Potomac” and screen Ewell’s right, while John Imboden’s independent cavalry brigade would “perform the same offices on your left.”29
Lee routed this authorization through Longstreet, so that Longstreet would be aware that his right flank would have only a two-brigade screen in the gaps. Stuart’s headquarters was at that moment at Rector’s Crossroads, just ten miles east of Ashby’s Gap and the road northwest to Winchester, and it would have cost Stuart little in the way of time or trouble to have pivoted north, keeping the Blue Ridge on his left, and cross the Potomac just below Harpers Ferry. But Longstreet forwarded the authorization to Stuart on the evening of the 22nd with a “suggestion” that Stuart “pass by the enemy’s rear if he thinks that he may get through.” That was an entirely different proposition, since getting anywhere near “the enemy’s rear” would have forced Stuart to turn east rather than north, swinging below Manassas Junction and coming up to cross the Potomac somewhere between Washington and the Union Army at Edwards’ Ferry. Longstreet had evidently had some conversa
tion with Lee about this, since he added for Stuart’s benefit that Lee spoke “of your leaving via Hopewell Gap”—just north of Thoroughfare Gap, in the diminutive Bull Run mountain range, and southeast of Rector’s Crossroads—“and passing by the rear of the enemy.” Almost as an afterthought, Longstreet explained that if Stuart followed strictly in the path of the Army of Northern Virginia, it would surely send to Hooker the message that Lee had completely abandoned the Shenandoah, whereas a movement eastward would be “less likely to indicate what our plans are.” After all, Longstreet was still operating under the assumption that Lee was not looking for anything more than a defensive battle north of the Potomac, and there was no point in poking Hooker into motion by a gesture as dramatic as the disappearance of the last sizable Confederate forces south of the Potomac.30
If Lee had indeed been worried that Stuart might give his game away, by the next day he had changed his mind. On June 23rd, Lee sent a supplementary order to Stuart, directing him that, “if General Hooker’s army remains inactive,” he could make his move eastward. But if Hooker should “now appear to be moving northward,” then the game was afoot and Stuart need not worry about tipping the Army of Northern Virginia’s hand. In that case, Stuart should pull his cavalry back into the Shenandoah Valley, and cross the Potomac at Shepherdstown after Longstreet and Hill. Only then should he turn east, to Frederick, and then make a straight beeline north to catch up to Ewell so that he could begin screening “the right of Ewell’s troops.” But Lee then added this fatal liberty: if “you can pass around their army without hinderance,” Stuart should consider himself the best judge and instead “cross the river east of the mountains.” A good deal of what happened afterward hung on the exact meaning of the words east of the mountains. (Charles Marshall believed that Lee meant that Stuart was to cross the Potomac “immediately east of the mountains, so as to be close to the right flank of the army.”) Stuart could, if he thought best, use the east of the mountains option for crossing the Potomac. But it was Lee’s opinion that “you had better withdraw this side of the mountain to-morrow night” and “cross at Shepherdstown next day.”31
Gettysburg: The Last Invasion Page 14