Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  This assurance was all that Harry Heth needed to hear, and he promptly asked Hill if he might take his entire division back into Gettysburg the next day, July 1st, to “get those shoes!” Did Hill have any objection? “None in the world,” Hill replied. Pettigrew was aghast at Hill’s nonchalant attitude, and he tried to get one of his staffers, Lt. Louis Young, who knew Hill, to “tell General Hill what I had seen while re-connoitering.” The Union cavalry’s “movements were undoubtedly those of well-trained troops and not those of a home guard,” and Pettigrew was not sure that there might not be Yankee infantry somewhere close behind them. But Hill scoffed at Young’s intervention: he “still could not believe that any portion of the Army of the Potomac was up; and in emphatic words, expressed the hope that it was, as this was the place he wanted it to be.” No wonder that, thirty-three years later, an accusing John Mosby believed on these grounds that Hill sent Heth “to Gettysburg just for an adventure.”33

  But Hill may not have been as unconcerned as Mosby and Heth believed. Rumors flickered through Hill’s corps that “the enemy [are] reported in front,” with “a fight expected tomorrow.” Hill, in fact, sent off a courier to Lee to apprise “the general commanding” that “Pettigrew had encountered the enemy at Gettysburg (principally cavalry), but in what force he could not determine.” He also took care to order Richard Anderson’s division to close up on Cashtown in the morning, and sent a courier to Ewell, warning him not to move down on Gettysburg until Hill could “discover what was in my front.” In the larger scheme of Lee’s recall order, Hill was going to have to move on Gettysburg anyway on July 1st, if only to vacate the area around Cashtown for Longstreet, and to secure the Gettysburg crossroads to allow Ewell to move within connecting distance of Longstreet and Hill. And since Harry Heth’s division was first on the line of march, with its pickets already at Marsh Creek, his job would be what Stuart’s normally was: “to ascertain what force was at Gettysburg, and if he found infantry opposed to him, to report the fact immediately, without forcing an engagement.”34

  It was the role of pickets to act as a trip wire, alerting the rest of a command in camp or at rest to the probing presence of an enemy. For that reason, infantry units whose officers liked going by the book would post two or three “concentric lines” of pickets, “disposed in a fan-shaped order.” The outermost line could be posted as much as three miles in advance of an encampment, with each outpost composed of four men not “farther apart than 600 paces,” or farther in advance of the next line than “300 paces.” The third line would be sited another “200 paces” behind the second, so that a reasonably thick curtain of pickets could snare and contain any but the most large-scale attack. An officer in overall charge of the pickets was responsible for keeping small patrols moving along the outpost lines (if only to keep the pickets awake and alert).35

  Cavalry pickets (or, to use their own term, videttes) had more flexibility in setting distances, and John Buford would need to push that flexibility to the limit. Only two of the three brigades of his cavalry division were with him when he rode into Gettysburg at midday on June 30th (the division’s Reserve Brigade was lagging behind with the division’s supply train at Mechanicsburg, Maryland, four miles south of Emmitsburg), so he was compelled to spread his vidette posts—about 700 men—very thinly. They prescribed a wide arc reaching from the Black Horse Tavern, south and west of Gettysburg on the Fairfield Road, then along Knoxlyn Ridge to the west, then across the Mummasburg and Carlisle Roads to the north, and finally ending east of the town on the York road. Buford used the point where the Cashtown Pike crossed the Knoxlyn Ridge as a rough dividing line, posting details from the 8th New York Cavalry and the 8th Illinois Cavalry along the line that ran from Black Horse Tavern to the Cashtown Pike, and then squads of the 12th Illinois Cavalry, 6th New York Cavalry, 17th Pennsylvania Cavalry, and the 9th New York Cavalry along the outpost lines running back to the north and east of Gettysburg. Buford put William Sackett, the colonel of the 9th New York, in overall charge of the outposts for the night, and set up his own headquarters in the Eagle Hotel in Gettysburg. The rest of his two brigades made up camp on the west side of the town, just beyond the fields surrounding Pennsylvania College.36

  It was a jumpy night, and the lowering clouds “poured down a drenching rain.” Buford’s videttes were “in sight” of the Confederate outposts Pettigrew had left along Marsh Creek, and he was certain that he would be facing all of “A.P. Hill’s corps, composed of Anderson, Heth, and Pender.” W. C. Hazleton, a captain in the 8th Illinois Cavalry, “having charge of a reserve picket-post out on a turnpike near a farmer’s house,” was invited (with his pickets) to dinner, but had to refuse, being “on duty.” The old farmer offered to stand watch for them while they ate, and when Hazelton apologized and turned that offer down, too, the amiable farmer “came out and chatted with us till late at night.” Before darkness fell, a patrol from the 9th New York collided with a squad of Confederate cavalry on the northeast-running Hunterstown road, and captured one of them before the rest took off. The prisoner turned out to be one of Ewell’s corps, which hinted at yet another problem brewing to the north. Later, a farmer was passed through the videttes of the 17th Pennsylvania, north of Gettysburg, in order to warn the 17th’s colonel that the rebel Ewell’s corps was somewhere just to the north and intended marching on Gettysburg the next day.37

  If it really was rebel infantry coming his way, there was no point for Buford to even think of a mounted action like Brandy Station. William Gamble’s brigade had only “about 1,600” men for any fight Buford was contemplating; Devin may have had another 1,600 men available. Besides, massed infantry fire would riddle a light cavalry charge before any horseman even came close. At best, he could dismount his cavalry and fight them as infantry with their carbines. But the vast mix of carbines his troopers were armed with—top-loading Merrills, lever-action Sharps, Burnsides, and Gallaghers, and break-open Smiths—lacked both the punch and range of infantry rifles, and the need to detail horse holders while the men were dismounted would take one out of every four of his available men off the firing line. Even worse, both “men and horses” were “fagged out” by the time they arrived in Gettysburg; he could get no fodder for the horses and “Early’s people seized every shoe and nail,” so he had neither materials nor facilities for reshoeing them. Buford could screen for Reynolds; and if Reynolds wanted to secure Gettysburg before the rebels could, he could even fight a small-scale delaying action to give Reynolds some time. But if John Reynolds wanted Gettysburg, he needed to get the 1st Corps and whatever other infantry was at hand up from Marsh Creek the next morning to do the work himself.38

  The one advantage Buford held was that he knew what was likely coming against him in the morning. Powell Hill and Harry Heth did not; or at least, Hill was unsure enough to warn Heth not to get tangled in a fight with Union forces from which he could not extricate himself safely, and decided to authorize what would have otherwise been a signal of serious action ahead—a tot of whiskey to any man in the corps who wanted one. Orders went out from Heth to have the division ready to march at five the next morning, and given that Pettigrew’s brigade had done the hard work the previous day, the lead brigades on the march would be a newly organized brigade of Mississippians (plus one North Carolina regiment) under President Davis’ stuffy and ambitious nephew, Joseph Robert Davis, and James J. Archer’s mixed brigade of Tennesseans and Alabamians. Archer was a Marylander, a Princeton graduate and a lawyer, but one who abandoned law for a second career in the old Army. In battle, he was a “little gamecock” who “had no sense of fear,” and at Fredericksburg Archer led the 5th Alabama Battalion in a counterattack that saved the Confederate hold on Prospect Hill. But his officers found him an “enigmatical man … very noncommunicative, and … for a time, one of the most intensely-hated of men.” He was neither “a politician or aristocrat,” which went some way toward explaining why Harry Heth, an intellectual lightweight but a pet of Lee’s, had been promo
ted over Archer’s head to division command.

  Pettigrew’s brigade would fall in behind Archer and Davis, followed by Heth’s least reliable brigade, John Mercer Brockenbrough’s four Virginia regiments. Brockenbrough had begun the war as the colonel of one of these regiments, and inherited command of the brigade when its commander, Charles W. Field, was taken out of action in 1862. A wealthy but rough-looking Virginia planter, Brockenbrough had never managed the brigade well, especially at Fredericksburg, and Lee briefly returned him to regimental command and promoted Harry Heth to put some spirit back into the brigade. But when Heth went up to division command in the post-Chancellorsville reshuffle, Brockenbrough, by default, resumed command of the brigade (although without any recommendation from Lee about promotion to brigadier general). The four regiments that made up Brockenbrough’s brigade had been “sadly reduced in numbers” and in morale, and one man in the 47th Virginia wrote fearfully that “we know not what will befall us for some of our soldiers have done mity bad.”39

  Joseph Davis’ brigade suffered from a similar crisis of confidence. The 2nd and 11th Mississippi had been organized in 1861 under a galaxy of local worthies (one of whom was William C. Falkner, the great-grandfather of novelist William Faulkner) and had gone through blood and fire together from the Peninsula through Antietam. But after Antietam, they were spliced together with two newly raised regiments, topped with an inexperienced brigadier general in the form of Joe Davis, and sent off to the backwater of North Carolina until after Chancellorsville. Davis had been a lawyer before the war, and briefly colonel of the 10th Mississippi. Most of his service had been as an aide on the staff of his president-uncle, and the principal force behind his promotion to brigade command was simon-pure nepotism. The Confederate Senate had actually rejected President Davis’ nomination of his nephew for promotion; the president bought off a few objectors with promises of patronage, and Joe Davis got his star. It was harder, though, to buy the affections of a brigade where two of the regiments mistrusted not only the commander, but the reliability of two of its as yet untested units. What was worse for Joe Davis was that, as his brigade shuffled out into the Cashtown Pike to follow Archer’s brigade, they were minus one of their two veteran outfits—the 11th Mississippi had been detailed to guard the corps supply train, still parked at Cashtown.40

  The “misty rain” continued till dawn, but as Heth’s division fell regiment by regiment into the Cashtown Pike, the rain stopped, leaving a fleecy, light cloud cover and temperatures already in the 70s. The “rains during the night had laid the dust,” recalled one of the officers Pettigrew had left on the Confederate picket line. “I never saw troops in better spirits, everybody seemed lively.” A brigade at the head of a column of march would usually have a small advance party of skirmishers and axemen (or “pioneers”) to clear obstructions, fanning out in open order and about “a thousand paces” ahead, accompanied by skirmishers along the flanks of the advancing column, and led by a mounted staff officer. Most of the division assumed that this morning’s movement was simply one more part in the army’s overall concentration of forces, and John Brockenbrough told one of his colonels, William Christian of the 55th Virginia, that “we probably might meet some of Ewells command or Stuarts.” But Heth sent a staffer down the column to the brigade and regimental commanders, warning them that there might be a fight up the road and convincing Brockenbrough that they were all surely in for fireworks. The colonel of the 13th Alabama “rode back to the colorbearer” of the regiment “and ordered him to uncase the colors, the first intimation that we had that we were about to engage the enemy.” Otherwise, as one of the crew of the four-gun Fredericksburg Artillery remembered, “we moved forward leisurely smoking and chatting as we rode along.”41

  The advance party, followed by the head of Archer’s brigade, crested the last ridge before dipping down to Marsh Creek between 7:00 and 7:30, moving through the pickets left by Pettigrew the previous evening. Across the creek, the road rose to Knoxlyn Ridge, where the home of a blacksmith, Ephraim Wisler, was perched. There, watching the long Confederate column cross the creek and begin its ascent of the road, was one of Buford’s outlying videttes—four troopers of the 8th Illinois Cavalry. The four cavalrymen hallooed for their sergeant, and when they could not find him, one of the troopers, Thomas Kelley, mounted up and galloped the 200 yards back to the reserve post to find Lt. Marcellus Jones. Kelley and Jones came up in a hurry, and the four troopers pointed to the moving column and “the old Rebel flag” up ahead. When their sergeant, Levi Shafer, also showed up, Lieutenant Jones asked him for his carbine, steadied and aimed it “in a crotch” of a rail fence, and squeezed off a shot. Pettigrew’s outpost officer “was watering my horse” in Marsh Creek while Heth’s “troops were passing” when he was startled by a shot in the thick morning air, some 400 yards ahead. His first thought was that it was some slovenly soldier’s “accidental discharge.” It was, instead, the first shot of the battle of Gettysburg.42

  PART 2

  The First Day

  CHAPTER NINE

  The devil’s to pay

  THE NEWS of the Confederate contact set the chain of picket lines into motion: Lieutenant Jones sent a trooper back to his captain, Daniel W. Buck, at a “wayside inn about a mile and a half from camp,” and Buck in turn sent a galloper to find Major John Beveridge of the 8th Illinois, and then on again to find William Gamble and Buford at the Eagle Hotel. Buford’s signal officer, Aaron Jerome, caught the message as the courier hurried past, and took his “glass” with him up into the cupola of the Lutheran seminary. Beveridge ordered boots-and-saddles, and by the time Gamble and Buford rode up the Cashtown Pike to Gamble’s bivouac, “the brigade stood to horse, prepared to mount,” and off they went, moving a long dismounted skirmish line along the next ridge, where the Cashtown Pike crossed the farm property of Edward McPherson, a protégé of Thaddeus Stevens’ and a former Republican congressman. Buford sent Gamble off with his brigade and ordered Tom Devin to extend Gamble’s line on the ridge northward on the other side of the pike. A knot of boys from the town had come out to poke around Devin’s encampment and rub shoulders with real soldiers, but the call for boots-and-saddles quickly scattered them.1

  Buford climbed up into the Lutheran seminary’s cupola (it was a small flat affair, open on all sides, with a wooden canopy, and accessed by a ladder and hatch) to have a look westward with Lieutenant Jerome’s heavy signal telescope, and what he saw did not please him. “He seemed anxious,” Jerome noticed, “even more so than I ever saw him.” He kept climbing up and down from the cupola, spitting orders, riding out along the line of McPherson’s Ridge to supervise the placement of Gamble’s and Devin’s brigades, then riding back to the seminary and climbing up to the cupola again. A slow-witted staffer whom Reynolds had sent up to Gettysburg to act as a messenger for Buford asked dully, “Why, what is the matter general.” At that moment, a dull boom revealed that someone in the distance had unlimbered artillery and was trying the range. “That,” Buford snarled, “is the matter.” Only three miles separated Lieutenant Jones from the diamond at the center of town, and if Reynolds did not get his infantry athwart the Cashtown Pike in the next two hours, he might as well stay at Moritz Tavern.2

  Click here to see a larger image.

  Buford’s troopers might, however, buy Reynolds at least some extra innings. He had a battery of long-range 3-inch Ordnance Rifles under Lt. John Calef which might force a little hesitation on the rebels’ part, and he also had Harry Heth’s uncertainty about what might lie behind Buford’s pickets to add to the delay. And sure enough, Harry Heth’s first reaction was to stop the line of march, unlimber a battery “in the road,” and shake out skirmishers from Archer’s brigade to clear the ground in front of them. As Archer’s skirmishers deployed, a company of the 8th Illinois under Capt. Amasa Dana conveniently showed up, and this allowed Jones and Dana to set up a skirmish line of their own on the next ridge. “Scattering my men to the right and left, at intervals of
thirty feet, and behind post and rail fences,” Dana “directed them to throw up their carbine sights to 800 yards, then taking rest on the top rail we gave the enemy the benefit of long range practice.”3

  It is not clear how many times the 8th Illinois played cat and mouse with Archer’s skirmishers, backing up the Cashtown Pike toward Gettysburg. (They probably inflicted the first Confederate casualty of the battle, too, a skirmisher named Henry Raison of the 7th Tennessee.) But every time the Confederate column stopped to swat at the Yankee cavalry, formations at the rear of the advance slackened, men fell out to boil coffee, and tempers frayed. And the clock ticked: the Confederates, just to be certain that it was only cavalry in front of them, would need to move from marching column into line of battle, and orders from a division commander in Heth’s position to his brigade commanders would require at least twenty minutes for transmission (including writing them out, and sending them by courier), and another fifteen to get verbal orders from brigade commanders down to the colonels of the brigade’s regiments. To preserve the unity of companies in a regiment, a column could not simply be turned off the road and allowed to convert column files into battle lines; it required a complicated process, starting with the regimental lieutenant colonel (or adjutant) galloping off to mark where the far flank of the regiment was to rest, and the junior major of the regiment marking the other flank. Company sergeants had to mark out the points along the line which would be filled by companies, always ensuring that the regimental colors were front and center. Whatever artillery was on hand would also need to be galloped into place, unlimbered, and readied for action. And this was likely to consume yet another forty-five minutes to an hour.4