This was a remarkably good estimate. Johnson had indeed arranged his division so that the Virginia brigade of the newly promoted brigadier John Marshall Jones (to the incalculable confusion of nearly everyone, he replaced John Robert Jones, who was not only no relation, but had been charged repeatedly with cowardice under fire), the five Louisiana regiments commanded by Jesse Williams, and half of George “Maryland” Steuart’s brigade would form a front of eight regiments. They were backed up by a line of six more regiments, while the remaining half of Steuart’s brigade was kept back beyond Rock Creek on the left. (Johnson’s fourth brigade, the old “Stonewall” Brigade which had originally been commanded by Stonewall Jackson, was held in reserve.) In all, Johnson was sending in about 4,700 men, which would usually have been more than enough to sweep Pap Greene’s brigade out of their path like dead leaves.
That, certainly, was what many of Greene’s men expected. “It seemed to me that something like two hours must have elapsed,” wrote a New Yorker as the slow-motion ballet of deployment played out beneath their gaze. They waited for their skirmishers to begin firing and falling back, “moments … which were years of agony” as the soldiers’ “pale faces, staring eye-balls, and nervous hands grasping loaded muskets told how terrible were those moments of suspense.” From behind their log walls, they saw an officer ride along the front of the Confederate battle line who “must have made some remarks to the men,” and then with “a flutter of battle flags and hats waving in the air,” the rebels started forward “with arms at right-shoulder-shift, their movement in perfect alignment … at a slow measured tread,” with a skirmish line and a line of pioneers “clearing the way” through fallen trees and other obstructions.23
Greene’s skirmishers, the 78th New York, fell back “slowly up the hill,” trying “to hold the enemy at bay to the last notch” and using “the heavy timber” to make “every tree and rock a veritable battlefield.” Johnson was evidently concerned about the disrupting effect of the terrain on his advance, because “the Confederate infantry halted from time to time, waiting for its advance to clear the way.” And no wonder, since “we found the ground here very uneven, and covered with immense rocks, which necessitated the dismounting of field & staff officers.” But on they pressed, “up the steep acclivity through the darkness,” cracking dead branches underfoot, slipping and skidding, drawing with each breath the dankness of woods still saturated from a week’s worth of heavy rain, guided forward in some places “only by the flashes of the muskets” of the Yankee skirmishers as they fell back. Greene took the precaution of ordering his men “closely concealed … behind the works,” and even had the regimental flags kept below the barricades to disguise his regiments’ positions. He waited, in fact, until the Confederate advance had struggled its way through the abatis and had stopped “to dress up the line”—in other words, “within pistol shot range”—before ordering a general open fire “like chain-lightning” from his brigade.24
The volley in front and the abatis behind trapped John Marshall Jones’ Virginia brigade “scarcely thirty yards from the enemy’s breastworks,” and the Virginians promptly went to ground while their officers figured out what to do next. “We held this point with the briskest fire we could concentrate,” and in George Steuart’s regiments on the left, “we could distinctly see the Federals rise and fire at us from the works in front.” Paralyzed in this position for “probably fifteen minutes,” the Confederates were finally gotten to their feet and rushed Greene’s feebly manned emplacements. “They succeeded this time in getting up to the works,” and then another of Gettysburg’s savage rifle-butt and bayonet-thrust fights broke out. “They reached the works and sought to climb over, and in several places their dead fell within our line.” One lieutenant in the 60th New York counted “four separate and distinct charges”; a sergeant in the 102nd New York counted three. In the 149th New York, the regimental flag had eighty-one bullet holes in it, and its staff was hit so often that the regimental color sergeant, William Lilley, had to keep splicing it together and replanting it on the log walls. But Jones’ Virginians could not punch their way through Old Pappy’s cleverly laid-out revetments, and Marshall Jones himself went down and out of action with a wound in the thigh.25
Greene, meanwhile, was finally getting some reinforcement. He sent off pleas to Geary, to Otis Howard on Cemetery Hill, and even to Winfield Hancock, and though Geary had no choice but to ignore him, Hancock sent one regiment, the 71st Pennsylvania. They did not do much on Greene’s behalf. The colonel blundered around the south peak of Culp’s Hill, let loose a scattering fire at some Confederates, then decided that it was no part of their job to “have his men murdered” in the dark, and walked back to Cemetery Ridge. But James Wadsworth sent over a small ad hoc brigade—the 6th Wisconsin, the red-legged chasseurs of the 14th Brooklyn, and the stubborn survivors of the 147th New York; and Otis Howard dispatched four regiments from the brigade of the still missing Alexander Schimmelpfennig. Together, this amounted to little more than 700 men. But at that moment, as they charged “with all their might … without regard to alignment and in silence,” they “tumbled the rebels out” of any breaks in Greene’s line. Their brief rush gave Greene’s own men time to step back, swab out their powder-fouled rifle barrels, and scavenge for spare ammunition. Finally, between 9:30 and 11:00, darkness and disappointment quieted the last of the Confederate attacks. If a former professor of rhetoric had saved Little Round Top, Old Pappy Greene had saved Culp’s Hill.26
What Old Pappy could not do, however, was to prevent Maryland Steuart’s brigade from wrapping around the overstretched Federal grip on the south peak. The 6th Wisconsin and 14th Brooklyn, which were detailed by Greene to cover the south peak alongside Greene’s own 137th New York, found Steuart’s Confederates already swarming over the lower part of the peak’s slopes and the positions occupied only a few hours before by the rest of the 12th Corps—including the vital back door to the Baltimore Pike. An officer in one of Steuart’s regiments, William Goldsborough, “having acquired some knowledge of the country in my youth,” was sure that the pike lay only a few hundred yards away. With another officer and “one of his most reliable men,” Goldsborough conducted an impromptu reconnaissance in the dark until he was “so close to the turnpike that he was able to see the wagons in motion.” There were no Yankees between Steuart and the pike, and if Steuart took the three regiments of his brigade sitting in reserve beyond Rock Creek, or if Johnson could summon up the Stonewall Brigade, they could be planted securely across the Army of the Potomac’s lifeline.
Goldsborough, however, could not get Steuart to pay attention to this news, nor (when he tried) could he make much of an impression on Allegheny Ed Johnson. “He could easily have flanked it,” wrote Goldsborough in despair. “But, then, General Johnson was not a Stonewall Jackson, and the opportunity was allowed to pass unimproved.” If Johnson had listened and acted, there was, as one of Greene’s staffers later admitted, nothing Greene could have done about it. “Had Lee succeeded in … placing himself square across the Baltimore pike in rear of the center and right wing of the entire army,” wrote an officer in the 60th New York, the results could have been nothing less than “disastrous”; Greene’s brigade was already too overextended to spare a company to defend the pike. But “the Rebels … apparently fearing a trap, hesitated to press their advantage … though their skirmishers advanced without opposition to the Baltimore Pike.” It was becoming symptomatic of the Army of Northern Virginia—advantages not pressed, initiative not taken, and passivity and uncertainty in charge.27
But this time, the opportunity had not been completely missed. Johnson’s division had obtained a critical lodgment on the lower peak of Culp’s Hill and if Slocum did not find a way to retrieve that ground, then daylight could easily bring the refocused Confederates howling down on the pike—and the rear of the Army of the Potomac—without any significant obstruction except Powers Hill. It had taken all of July 2nd, but finally, by the ligh
t of a rising full moon, Robert E. Lee had finally forced Meade, by withdrawing the 12th Corps from Culp’s Hill, to remove a piece from the board whose place he could not fill.
So much of the fighting ended in agonizingly near misses for the Army of Northern Virginia—the within-an-inch failure to capture Little Round Top … the last-minute blunting of Barksdale and Wilcox by George Willard’s “Cowards” and the charge of the 1st Minnesota … Ambrose Wright’s bitter moment of abandonment, just shy of Cemetery Ridge … Harry Hays’ Tigers having victory (not to mention captured Federal artillery) snatched from their hands by Samuel Carroll’s helter-skelter counterattack by the Evergreen Cemetery gatehouse and left without support by Rodes’ inertia … and finally the failure to overrun just one Union brigade on Culp’s Hill—that it has become almost a matter of habit to speak of Longstreet’s attack or Early’s assault on east Cemetery Hill purely in the mordant tones of failure. This is not really true. In the first place, although James Longstreet’s corps failed to turn Dan Sickles’ collapse into a complete rout, this was no more of a failure than Stonewall Jackson’s famous flank attack at Chancellorsville on May 2nd. Jackson, like Longstreet, achieved a great initial success; but Jackson’s attack, also like Longstreet’s, fell far short of dislodging the entire Federal army (that work had to be completed by Lee on May 3rd). Jackson, again like Longstreet, had begun his attack so late that darkness forced him to halt substantially short of that goal. Yet no one has ever suggested that Jackson’s descent on the Union right flank at Chancellorsville was a failure—or at least not in the way Longstreet’s descent on the Union left at Gettysburg would be described.
No one that night seemed much dismayed over the results, either. James Risque Hutter of the 11th Virginia found his old friend Lindsay Long “making some disposition of the Prisoners captured from Genl Reynold’s command.” Long, as one of Lee’s personal staff, assured Hutter that “all we had to do was to follow them up the next day.” Henry Morrow, the captured colonel of the 24th Michigan, thought his rebel captors “very sanguine of their ability to dislodge the Army of the Potomac from its position, and the capture of Washington and Baltimore was considered a thing almost accomplished.” When William Swallow rode through the town that night to report to Lee’s headquarters, he found Gettysburg “filled with Confederates, who, soldier like, were busy preparing their meals all along the streets. They appeared to be in the highest spirits.” And at Lee’s headquarters at the Widow Thompson’s, “All seemed gratified with the results of the day; certainly nobody looked gloomy or desponding.”28
The Army of Northern Virginia had dealt its Union counterpart a series of blows which, purely in terms of casualties and human destruction, had the unhappy Army of the Potomac as thoroughly on the ropes as it had ever been. The 1st Corps and 11th Corps had been crushed down to the nubs on July 1st; on July 2nd, the 3rd Corps and 5th Corps, along with an entire division of the 2nd Corps, had been ground into oblivion. By moonrise on the night of July 2nd, George Meade had only the 12th Corps and the 6th Corps in any sort of fighting shape, along with four brigades in Hancock’s 2nd Corps which had managed to escape mauling with the others. Meade would need to put the two divisions of the 12th Corps back on Culp’s Hill in the morning; he would need the 6th Corps as his last-option reserve, and he would post them near Powers Hill; after that, he would have only those four brigades of Hancock’s and the sweepings of the 1st and 11th Corps to hold Cemetery Hill. David Birney muttered, in “a moment of despondency,” to de Trobriand that “he had had a horse killed under him, and … wished he had shared the fate of his horse. He believed the day lost; he counted up his friends dead and wounded; he saw his command half-destroyed, and, thinking of the Republic, he trembled for it.” Lee, by contrast, would have an entire division of Longstreet’s corps ready to put into action anywhere he might choose, along with several lightly dented portions of Powell Hill’s corps, and at least one of Dick Ewell’s brigades, plus that lodgement on Culp’s Hill.29
It must have occurred to George Meade that perhaps the stand at Gettysburg had been a big mistake, after all. Perhaps the retreat to Pipe Creek which had been so unthinkable that morning was now worth contemplating, especially since Meade would have a very obvious, and deliciously appropriate, scapegoat to absorb the president’s disappointment in Dan Sickles. Perhaps it was time to bring his surviving corps commanders together for a face-saving consultation which would authorize Meade to do what he had all along been convinced he should do.
The call to the generals went out.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Let us have no more retreats
ON THE 5TH OF MARCH, 1864, George Gordon Meade sat down before Senator Benjamin Franklin Wade to contribute his testimony to what he had been disingenuously advised was the desire of the Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War to create “a sort of history of the war.” Meade was not fooled by this, or by the smiling assurance of “Bluff Ben” Wade that this was not an inquisition and that there were no “charges against me.” Three days before, on the floor of the Senate, Wade’s Radical Republican colleague Morton Wilkinson accused Meade of ordering “a retreat” from Gettysburg, and Meade was only too well aware that “Generals Sickles and Doubleday” had been whispering to the committee about a directive Meade had composed for a withdrawal to Pipe Creek on July 2nd.
For three hours, Meade “gave … a full history of all the circumstances attending the battle of Gettysburgh, and also of his subsequent conduct.” A week later, Meade appeared again before committee—in this case, Wade alone—with copies of the orders he had issued for the Army of the Potomac’s concentration at Gettysburg, and a month later he submitted a written statement unequivocally denying that he had ever issued or authorized such an order; then came a procession of witnesses to contradict him. Meade was then directed to return to the committee for a third round of testimony. This time, Meade’s fiery temper was only barely in restraint: “I utterly deny, under the full solemnity and sanctity of my oath, and in the firm conviction that the day will come when the secrets of all men shall be made known—I utterly deny ever having intended or thought, for one instant, to withdraw that army, unless the military contingencies which the future should develop during the course of the day might render it a matter of necessity that the army should be withdrawn.”1
And this, in large measure, is where the matter has been allowed to rest for a century and a half. “The charge of a desire to retreat,” insisted Meade’s friends and defenders, consisted of nothing but “groundless aspersions,” ginned up by envious bitter-enders like Sickles and Doubleday, who either wanted cover for their own sins or revenge for imagined slights. The most indubitable confirmation of Meade’s innocence came from his own senior officers—John Sedgwick, John Newton, George Sykes, John Gibbon—in response to a circular from Meade on March 10, 1864, requesting confirmation from them “regarding his intention of retreating from Gettysburg.” At no time in my presence did the General Commanding insist or advise a withdrawal of the army, they repeated one after another, and that, as far as Meade was concerned, “put to rest the injurious statements made” about a retreat on July 2nd.
What no one noticed at the time were the subtle equivocations buried inside a number of the generals’ endorsement letters: At no time in my presence, wrote Sedgwick, which did not exclude Meade having said otherwise to others … nothing that I heard him say, wrote John Newton … never received or heard of any order directing a retreat, added George Sykes, which also fell somewhat short of asserting that no such “order” had actually been contemplated. Nor did anyone remark on the peculiar fact that all of the respondents to the circular were hard-core McClellanites. No response was received from Otis Howard or Henry Slocum, or even Winfield Scott Hancock, and in fact, none may have been solicited.2
One thing beyond contest is that “soon after all firing had ceased” on the evening of July 2nd, “a staff officer from army headquarters” was sent off to all the seni
or commanders, summoning them to Meade’s headquarters in the Leister cottage. There was evidently some confusion over what constituted a senior commander. John Newton was invited, rather than Doubleday, to represent the 1st Corps; David Birney showed up for the 3rd Corps, even though Winfield Hancock understood that he was in command of that corps, and brought John Gibbon with him as titular commander of the 2nd Corps. Sykes, Sedgwick, and Howard were there for the 5th, 6th, and 11th Corps; but Slocum, under the impression that he was still some sort of wing commander, brought Alpheus Williams with him as commander of record for the 12th Corps. Gouverneur Warren was also there, as Meade’s chief engineer, and Daniel Butterfield, chief of staff. “These twelve men were all assembled in a little room not more than ten or twelve feet square, with a bed in one corner, a small table on one side, and a chair or two.”3
Under any circumstances, calling a council would not be a good sign. There was a well-known maxim of Horatio Nelson’s: “If a man consults whether he is to fight, when he has the power in his own hands, it is certain that his opinion is against fighting,” and Joe Hooker had borne that wisdom out all too well at Chancellorsville. At least Meade had scattered a few preparatory hints about the discussion. He warned Henry Hunt, the Army of the Potomac’s artillery chief, that he was worried that “some corps had left behind parts of their ammunition trains” and that “he would not have enough amn.” to “carry us through the battle.” And in a midday report to Henry Halleck, Meade had proposed that, despite occupying “a strong position for defensive” operations, if he found the Confederates “endeavouring to move to my rear and interpose between me and Washington, I shall fall back to my supplies at Westminster”—which was, of course, behind Pipe Creek.4
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