Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  There were no concessions to fatigue, weather, and equipment on this march. “No interval was allowed between any two units of the corps, whether artillery or infantry,” wrote an officer in the 20th Massachusetts. “It was the closest marching column that we had ever experienced.” By the time the 6th Corps reached the Pipe Creek line, “many were marching in their drawers.” The soldiers themselves marched as comfortably, or as sloppily, as they dared. “Here comes a man,” wrote the chronicler of the 19th Massachusetts, whose “cap is turned around with the visor covering one ear and half of one eye … His blouse is hitched up in a roll above the belt … his cartridge box is around on his hip, the belt loose, while his haversack and canteen are dangling in front of him.” The everlasting road dust “settled upon us, and adhering to the moist skin, gave one uniform color of dirty brown to caps, coats, faces, hands, trousers, and shoes.” And always there was “the monotonous clatter of tin dippers against bayonets and canteens.” Men might be “noisy with conversation” in the early hours of the march, but by late afternoon they “have no stomach or spare wind for words, and scarcely anything is heard but the groan of some sufferer from blistered feet, or the steady clink of the bayonet swinging at the left side against its neighbor the canteen.”6

  On June 29th and again on the 30th, Meade sent out fresh sets of orders to his corps commanders, instructing the 1st and 11th Corps to cross the state line and move toward Gettysburg and the 3rd to stay behind them in support at Emmitsburg; the 5th Corps would move up, in parallel ten miles east, to Hanover, with the 6th Corps in reserve behind them at Manchester; the 2nd and 12th Corps would plant themselves midway between the others, at Taneytown (just below the state line) and Two Taverns (just beyond it). As long as Lee continued to move northward, Meade could keep his army hovering between the Confederates and Baltimore or Washington. But if Lee suddenly turned, like some coiled snake, to strike, Meade already had his engineers at work behind Pipe Creek. He assured Halleck that he was prepared, if necessary, to move over the Pennsylvania line “in the direction of Hanover Junction and Hanover” after the rebels. But shortly before noon on June 30th, he received an urgent wire from Secretary Stanton in the War Department, alerting him that “Lee is falling back suddenly from the vicinity of Harrisburg … York has been evacuated. Carlisle is being evacuated.” All of it looked like “a sudden movement against Meade,” intending “to fall upon the several corps and crush them, in detail.” That was precisely what Meade wanted to hear. His task was “to compel [Lee] to loose his hold on the Susquehanna.” Having thus “relieved Harrisburg and Philadelphia,” it was now time “to look to his own army, and assume position for offensive or defensive, as occasion requires, or rest to the troops.” And that meant “the collecting of our troops behind Pipe Creek.”7

  Meade’s most advanced—and therefore most vulnerable—units were the three infantry corps around Emmitsburg: John Reynolds’ 1st Corps, Otis Howard’s 11th Corps, and the 3rd Corps, whose commander, Dan Sickles, had only just caught up with his men after returning from leave. Meade had no love for either Sickles, the renegade Democrat, or Howard, the evangelical abolitionist. His first two communications to Sickles had been nasty little reprimands for “the very slow movement of your corps yesterday,” and he pushed the lot of them to the edge of his thinking by placing all three corps under the temporary “wing” command of John Reynolds. But when Meade learned that Reynolds had in fact moved the 1st Corps up and over the Pennsylvania line to Marsh Creek, just below Gettysburg, Meade warned him (at midday on June 30th) to beat a retreat to Emmitsburg “without further orders” if any Confederates showed their heads. He had “made up his mind to fight a battle on what was known as Pipe Creek,” and in the meantime he would draw up a general circular, recalling all units north of Pipe Creek to “form line of battle with the left resting in the neighborhood of Middleburg, and the right at Manchester.”8

  This withdrawal, despite Meade’s wishes, was precisely what John Reynolds had no inclination whatsoever to perform.

  “To those who knew little of” John Fulton Reynolds, “he may at times have appeared stern and unnecessarily exacting,” even “cold and somewhat haughty,” wrote one of his regimental officers in the 1st Corps. In an army of volunteers, almost any Regular officer might have been seen that way, although John Reynolds really was by temperament a taciturn and private man. On the 30th of June 1863, Reynolds’ moods were fluctuating by the hour, by turns “inflamed” and “depressed.” South-central Pennsylvania was, after all, his home. Born in Lancaster in 1820 and descended from Huguenot and Protestant Irish forebears who had accumulated some of the largest landholdings in Lancaster County, John Reynolds grew up in a household where national politics was the stuff of everyday acquaintance. His father owned the Democratic Lancaster Journal, sat in the Pennsylvania legislature as a Democrat, and was a political ally of President James Buchanan’s. The Reynolds’ family political connections made it easy to secure an appointment for the young Reynolds at West Point in 1837, although he only managed to graduate twenty-sixth out of a class of fifty-two. He was commissioned into the 3rd Artillery, fought at Monterrey and Buena Vista in the Mexican War, and in 1859 went back briefly to West Point as commandant of cadets. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the Reynolds name translated into a brigadier general’s commission to command one of the volunteer brigades making up the Pennsylvania Reserve Division, and in 1862, when Robert E. Lee’s first thrust northward threatened Pennsylvania, Governor Curtin begged to have Reynolds returned to Pennsylvania to take charge of the militia. After the Maryland Campaign, Reynolds came back to the Army of the Potomac as a major general of volunteers to command the 1st Corps at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. In the eyes of the soldiers of the 1st Corps, he was “alertness personified.”9

  One individual who was not happy at Reynolds’ return to the army in the fall of 1862 was George Gordon Meade. Like Reynolds, Meade had also first obtained brigade command in 1861 in the Pennsylvania Reserves—just one step beneath Reynolds in seniority. When Meade moved up to division command in the 1st Corps before Antietam, he was set to succeed to command of that corps after its commander was wounded, especially with Reynolds out of the way in Pennsylvania. But when Reynolds returned to the Army of the Potomac, the 1st Corps command Meade hungered for went to Reynolds. And it was Reynolds, not Meade, to whom Lincoln had first turned as a possible replacement for Joe Hooker. Meade remained cordial and polite with Reynolds, but privately his letters curdle with envy, even when corps command finally came Meade’s way after Fredericksburg.10

  Meade’s opinion of Reynolds would have turned darker still if he had had any inkling on June 30th that Reynolds was seriously planning to upset his calculations for a retreat to Pipe Creek. Reynolds complained to Abner Doubleday, who commanded one of the three divisions in the 1st Corps, that if Meade gave the rebels “time by dilatory measures or by taking up defensive positions they would strip” Pennsylvania “of everything.” For days, since crossing the Potomac, Reynolds had been impatient “to attack the enemy at once, to prevent his plundering the whole State,” and Chapman Biddle, the colonel of the 1st Corps’ 121st Pennsylvania, heard Reynolds urge “striking them as soon as possible. He was really eager to get at them.” Meade’s June 30th order, directing the 1st Corps toward Gettysburg, might bring him close enough to engage; the follow-up dispatch at midday which told him that if “it is your judgment that you would be in a better position at Emmitsburg than where you are, you can fall back,” seemed to offer Reynolds the option to do as he pleased. Or at least, it told him that he could fall back to Emmitsburg if he wanted. Nothing was said that forbade him to advance on Gettysburg—although it did puzzle Meade that Reynolds’ acknowledgments of his communiqués seemed “to be given more with a view to an advance on Gettysburg, than a defensive position.”11

  Thanks to John Buford’s cavalry screen, Reynolds may have known more about the precise location of the Army of Northern Virginia than the Union c
ommanding general did. Buford “resembles Reynolds very much in his manners,” wrote Charles Wainwright of the 1st Corps artillery, “reserved and somewhat rough.” He was also, like Reynolds, a Regular, born in Versailles, Kentucky, in 1826 (but raised in Illinois), from a long line of Bufords who had fought in the Revolution and the War of 1812. And he was a West Pointer, class of 1848, and was commissioned into the dragoons. Entering the army just months too late for Mexican War service, Buford had instead spent most of the 1850s tracking and fighting Indians on the Plains. The outbreak of the Civil War brought him a militia commission from the governor of Kentucky to serve in what was then a still undeclared border slave state. Buford refused: “I sent him word I was a Captain in the United States Army and I intend to remain one.” Still, for a solid year, Buford twiddled away his time behind a desk in the army inspector general’s office. He finally broke out of the paper ghetto when the ill-starred John Pope, who had known Buford in Illinois and could vouch unreservedly for his loyalty, wangled him command of a brigade of cavalry. After Pope’s debacle at Second Bull Run in August 1862, Buford was returned to staff duties. But in January 1863, he was once more put in charge of a cavalry brigade in the field, and in June he was promoted to major general and distinguished himself by his handling of one of Pleasonton’s divisions at Brandy Station. “He is a man of middle height with a yellow mustache,” wrote one of Meade’s staff, “and a small triangular eye,” as though he were capable of reading someone’s mind.12

  Click here to see a larger image.

  Once Meade took command of the Army of the Potomac, Buford’s cavalry division was posted well to the west of the Army of the Potomac, so that his two brigades would provide a screen for John Reynolds and the three-corps “wing.” Buford’s brigades moved on June 29th to spread out and check the South Mountain gaps between Boonsboro and Monterey, and then cross the state line on up to Fairfield (where Buford would be, north and west of the head of Reynolds’ infantry at Marsh Creek). As his troopers slumped wearily into Fairfield that evening, Buford was met by two scouting reports, one from David McConaughy in Gettysburg “giving the locality of Confederate troops” and the other from a Maryland Unionist who reported “a rebel camp one mile above Cashtown.” Buford and several of his officers rode to the top of Jack’s Mountain and saw in the distance an unwelcome sight: a multitude of campfires along the roads west from Fairfield, which could only mean Confederate infantry, and lots of it. Early the next morning, Buford decided to feel them out, “exchanging a few shots” and brushing up against what he described as “two Mississippi regiments of infantry and two guns.” Buford had no desire to try consequences with what were, in all likelihood, elements of Powell Hill’s corps, and instead sent off a galloper to Reynolds at 5:30 on the morning of June 30th to warn him that Confederate infantry was as close to him as Cashtown.13

  Staying across the head of Reynolds’ column, Buford then took his brigades into Gettysburg, and an hour and a half later reported driving off some of Hill’s infantry outside the town. The people in the town were ecstatic to see Buford’s troopers, especially after Jubal Early’s whirlwind clean-out of the town three days before. Two regiments of Federal cavalry had passed through Gettysburg on the 28th, but they were bound for service with Couch and the defense of Harrisburg, and they only stayed through the night outside town. Buford, on the 30th, was bringing two entire brigades, and he seemed determined to stay. A captain in the 8th Illinois Cavalry was amazed at how “men, women and children crowded the side walks and vied with each other in demonstrations of joyous welcome. Hands were reached up eagerly to clasp the hands of our bronzed and dusty troopers. Cake, milk, water and beer were passed up to the moving column.”14

  That afternoon, Buford himself rode four miles south to Reynolds’ camp on Marsh Creek, then that night sent another galloper back to Reynolds, warning that “A.P. Hill’s corps is massed just back of Cashtown, about 9 miles from this place,” with Confederate infantry pickets planted for the night only four miles west of Gettysburg, on the Cashtown Pike. Reynolds was “convinced that the enemy would attempt to interpose between Gettysburg … and the main part of the army by way of Fairfield,” and “seeing the importance of Gettysburg as a position … ordered Buford to hold onto it to the last.” If Buford could buy enough time, he might be able to get his infantry into line “before the enemy should seize the point.” Ten minutes later, Buford sent another courier off to find the chief of cavalry, Alfred Pleasonton, so Pleasonton could report these encounters to Meade.15

  One of Buford’s brigade commanders, a former carriage-maker-turned-soldier from New York named Thomas Devin, tried to deflect any unease by suggesting that whatever the Confederates were likely to send in the direction of Gettysburg on the next day could be handled quite easily by the Yankee cavalry. “No you won’t,” growled Buford. “They will attack you in the morning and they will come booming—skirmishers three deep. You will have to fight like the devil to hold your own.” And why? Because, Buford continued, “the enemy must know the importance of this position and will strain every nerve to secure it, and if we are able to hold it, we will do well.” Two signals officers had been detached for service with each corps, and Aaron Jerome, an Alabama-born signals lieutenant who had originally signed up with a New Jersey infantry regiment and then transferred to the Signal Corps, had been assigned to Buford’s division. Buford told him “to look out for campfires, and in the morning for dust.”16

  Both Robert E. Lee and John Reynolds had particular reason to want to secure control over Gettysburg. “Gettysburg was of considerable importance to General Lee,” wrote one Union veteran, “as it was the first point he could reach after crossing the South Mountain.” If Lee wanted to concentrate his three corps, Gettysburg would be the easiest place to do it, since ten roads radiated from the town diamond, drawing in traffic from all points of the compass. In addition, the undulating waves of ridgelines which swam eastward from South Mountain to the Susquehanna created a series of lovely defensible lines for infantry to seize and hold against any attacker coming from the west, through the Cashtown Gap. Alfred Pleasonton was one of the few senior Union officers who knew the Gettysburg area reasonably well, since the year before he had been selected by George McClellan to survey the area against the possibility of Lee getting loose in Pennsylvania, and he was “satisfied … that there was but one position in which for us to have a fight, and that was Gettysburg.” But in addition to the topography and road network, Gettysburg possessed one other advantage, and that was Cemetery Hill, the gentle 505-foot height just south of the town that accommodated the town’s Evergreen Cemetery and the farms of Thomas Miller and David Zeigler.17

  Those undulating ridges whose names have become the staple of Gettysburg lore—Herr Ridge, McPherson’s Ridge, Seminary Ridge—may have been valuable as defensive positions for infantry, but their crests lack the elevation required by nineteenth-century artillery (which was, ideally, one percent of the distance to the target and never greater than 7 percent of the distance). Likewise, their spines were almost all too narrow to support batteries of artillery with any ease, since artillery (unlike infantry) used a substantial back space to accommodate limber chests, caissons, horse teams, and battery wagons.18 The chief exception to this geographical conundrum is Cemetery Hill. Although modern visitors standing there can get no idea of this because of the foliage that has grown up since 1863, a four-negative panorama taken from Cemetery Hill in 1869 by the local Gettysburg photographers William Tipton and Robert Myers shows a dramatically uncluttered viewshed to the west and south. And since the hill is actually a broad flat plateau, Cemetery Hill constituted an artillerists’ ideal: a gun platform with plenty of room to accommodate at least three batteries of artillery plus their teams and chests, and at an elevation which would allow either an unobstructed arc to rifled guns firing shell to the north or west; or, at 105 feet above the surrounding terrain, just the elevation prescribed to “graze” (or ricochet) solid shot into oncom
ing attackers at 600 yards distance. It was “a battlefield to make an artilleryman grow enthusiastic,” wrote one Pennsylvania officer. “This high ground which dominated the town and the fields in all directions, save one” (to the east) gave to an artillerist’s eye “an unobstructed view of the rolling country open and accessible to the fire of our guns.” Even Confederate observers admitted that Cemetery Hill was “made, one might say, for artillery.”19