There is bad faith somewhere
THE ARMY ROBERT E. LEE brought back to Virginia had been hideously, cruelly damaged. “You have all heard all the particulars of the terrible battles around Gettysburg,” wrote a demoralized lieutenant in the 10th Virginia. “It had all the bad results of a defeat.” George Pickett, to begin with, was only slightly exaggerating when he claimed that his division had been destroyed at Gettysburg. As in any Civil War military numerations, there are different sets of numbers claiming to be the official calculation, so the most important of them for Pickett’s division might as well be spelled out here:
Within Pickett’s command, Richard Garnett’s brigade was particularly hard hit. Of the more than 1,400 men who marched with him down the Cashtown Pike to join the battle, about 950 of them never came back. Within each regiment, the impact was even greater: the regiment was the soldier’s home neighborhood, and the numbers have a keener edge. The 18th Virginia lost at least 50 dead, 77 wounded, and 104 otherwise unaccounted for; only 50 men returned from the great charge unharmed. The 8th Virginia went into action with anywhere from 205 men (according to its colonel, Eppa Hunton) to 189 men (according to a private, Randolph Shotwell), but in the overall effect, it hardly mattered. Hunton counted only 10 men after the charge, Shotwell 15. The returns of the other two brigades in Pickett’s division are only a little less dreary: Armistead’s approximately 2,000 men left just over half of their numbers behind; of Kemper’s 1,600, 700 or so were missing by the time they returned to Seminary Ridge. Put it all in rough but denatured percentages, and Pickett’s division hemorrhaged two-thirds of its listed strength in that one afternoon.1
Johnston Pettigrew’s division hardly fared better. “Our troops are badly cut up,” wrote an officer in the 55th North Carolina. “Brigades now are not larger than Regts were befor[e] the fight.” Pettigrew’s old brigade lost 1,573 men out of the 2,584 who were ready for duty on July 1st. On the regimental level, it hurt even more. The 26th North Carolina sustained 172 dead, 443 wounded, 72 missing; by the end of the battle, the 800 or so men who had been on the regiment’s rolls had been reduced to nothing more than “a very good skirmish line” of 67 enlisted men and 3 officers (not counting “cooks and extra duty men,” who were probably slaves). In the 11th Mississippi, 32 men were killed and 170 wounded. This translated, within separate companies, to wholesale decimation. Company K “took thirty-eight into the charge” and “at roll call that evening seven answered”; Company D had 10 survivors out of 50; Company E “took in thirty-eight men, of whom fifteen were killed and twenty-one wounded,” including its captain and all three lieutenants; Company A, the “University Grays” (which had back in 1861 numbered 135 and comprised almost the entire student body of the University of Mississippi), had the unwelcome distinction of being wiped out.2
But numbers, no matter how added or multiplied, are still anodyne. “The reality of war is largely obscured by descriptions that tell of movements and maneuvers of armies, of the attack and repulse, of victory and defeat, and then pass on to new operations,” complained Charles Augustus Fuller of the 61st New York. “All this leaves out of sight the fellows, stretched out with holes through them, or with legs and arms off.” It was not merely that men were dead or wounded or captured; it was who they were and what they meant to one another and to their homes. John Oates, the brother of the William Oates who had led the Alabamians up the slopes of Little Round Top, was shot seven times on July 2nd, and lingered till July 23rd, dying slowly from blood poisoning. The battered 26th North Carolina lost a pair of twin brothers, Joseph and W. E. Phillips, in Company F on July 1st; two of the four Kirkman brothers in Company G also were killed on July 1st, and the other two died in Union captivity. Others defiantly dodged the neat categories. Thomas Jolly of the Phillips Georgia Legion was shot, bayoneted, and reported dead at Gettysburg, and his wife filed a death claim on August 14th; but a year later he turned up at his Dalton, Georgia, home, having managed to recover from his wounds and be released from the Union prison at Point Lookout. William Gaskins of the 8th Virginia survived wounding and capture at Pickett’s Charge, only to die in captivity four months later of “obstinate” diarrhea. (On the other hand, a sergeant in the 3rd South Carolina, Young Pope, was hit three times, in the thigh, hip, and arm, but survived to become a lawyer, state attorney general, and chief justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court.)3
The casualty numbers also fail to explain the damage done to the command infrastructure of the army. In the 18th Virginia, twenty-nine of the regiment’s thirty-one officers were killed or wounded; in the 8th Virginia, the colonel, lieutenant colonel, and major were all wounded, and three company captains killed, and two captured. John Bell Hood’s division also lost the colonels of the 2nd, 9th, and 20th Georgia, while in Joseph Kershaw’s South Carolina brigade two more regimental commanders were killed. Jubal Early’s division lost a brigade commander, Isaac Avery, who was mortally wounded and died in the farmhouse of Henry Culp, plus the colonels of the 8th Louisiana and 38th Georgia. Robert Rodes’ hapless division saw three colonels killed and seven wounded (two of whom were also captured). Powell Hill’s corps reeled from the worst hits to its regimental commanders: four of the five colonels in Cadmus Wilcox’s Alabama brigade were wounded, alongside two in the angry Ambrose Wright’s brigade. And worst of all, every one of Johnston Pettigrew’s colonels was killed, wounded, or captured, as were all of Joe Davis’.
Nor were general officers exempt, beginning at the top with Hood. Of Lee’s fifty-two generals at Gettysburg, a third of them were casualties of some sort, starting with the wounding of Alfred Scales and the capture of James Archer (and two of his colonels) on July 1st. Lafayette McLaws lost two of his brigadiers, the ebullient William Barksdale but also Paul Semmes, who was wounded by a shell fragment in the leg on July 2nd and was expected to recover, but died on July 10th. Dick Ewell lost only one brigadier to wounding, John Marshall Jones, but Pickett lost Armistead and Garnett (though not James Kemper, despite nearly everyone’s prediction that his wound was fatal). Old Isaac Trimble was also wounded during Pickett’s Charge, and at age sixty-one managed to survive both the amputation of his leg and Union imprisonment, and lived for twenty-five more cantankerous years. Keenest of all were the two losses no one expected. The first was Dorsey Pender. The other was Johnston Pettigrew, who survived both the battle for Herbst’s Woods on July 1st and the great charge on July 3rd, only to be shot in the abdomen by a Federal cavalryman while covering the tail end of Hill’s corps as it crossed the pontoon bridge at Williamsport. “The noble Pettigrew” was carried across the bridge and died three days later in Martinsburg. All of these casualties reduced or eliminated months and years of experience, familiarity, networking, and confidence which could not be replaced merely by promotion of the next in line.4
Surveying the army’s survivors, Lee reported 2,592 killed, 12,700 wounded and 4,150 “captured or missing” after Gettysburg—20,451 casualties in all, based on data collected by the army’s chief medical officer, Lafayette Guild. Each of these numbers has a blurred boundary, since those missing might have been killed without leaving any record, or be deserters who might, or might not, at some point rejoin the army. Wounded included anything from a minor gunshot wound (like Harry Heth’s) to a blast to the head which caused the victim to linger for days or weeks before succumbing. In the 2nd South Carolina, James Casson, a twenty-three-year-old private, “had a portion of his skull shot away above one eye” by an artillery round from Federal artillery in the peach orchard on July 2nd; he lived for five days, but “was out of his mind instantly.” Would Casson, or would William Gaskins, who survived his wound but then died of disease in a Union prison, be best defined as merely wounded? Any way the numbers are piled, though, the results were equivalent to a historic catastrophe. Even if one takes the lowest mark, the Army of Northern Virginia suffered something comparable to two sinkings of the Titanic, the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, ten repetitions of the
Great Blizzard of 1888, and two Pearl Harbors. Or, if percentages provide more clarity, the Confederates at Gettysburg sustained two and a half times the losses taken by the Allied armies in Normandy from D-Day through August 1944. And anyone who had any doubts about the impact needed only to consult the officer who wrote to his sister on July 17th, “The campaign is a failure and the worst failure that the South has ever made … and no blow since the fall of New Orleans has been so telling against us.”5
The Army of the Potomac was in scarcely better shape. George Meade himself had a rough tally ready for his July 4th council which came up with 56,138 infantry and artillery ready for action. That would mean that he had lost nearly 22,000 men. Meade’s first report to Halleck on August 3rd was more specific, and cited 2,834 killed, 13,713 wounded, and 6,643 missing; two months later, he adjusted those numbers slightly, and then submitted final figures which set the totals at 3,155 killed, 14,529 wounded, and 5,365 “captured or missing.” In his testimony before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War the following spring, Meade simply rounded the figures up to “24,000 men killed, wounded and missing,” and these numbers have become the generally received calculation of Union casualties. And yet, there is almost as much uncertainty about these numbers as about Lee’s. Michael Jacobs, the Pennsylvania College mathematician, estimated that there were “9,000 dead” and “20,000 wounded” in Gettysburg after the armies left, which would require pegging Union deaths at more than 4,000; St. Clair Mulholland, colonel of the 116th Pennsylvania, also estimated the number of Union dead at closer to 4,400; and in 1900, Thomas Livermore, a veteran of the battle, painstakingly recalculated unit reports and put the reckoning at 3,903 dead, 18,735 wounded, and 5,425 “missing,” so that the entire butcher’s bill edged up to 28,063. (Most of these casualties, Meade added in his congressional testimony, occurred on July 2nd—“over 20,000 of them”—so that the second day of the battle alone came nearly equal with the horrendous single-day losses at Antietam the year before.)
Officer grades in the Army of the Potomac had suffered even more severely than their Confederate peers. One corps commander (John Reynolds) had been killed and two others (Dan Sickles and Winfield Hancock) were wounded and put hors de combat. Reynolds’ 1st Corps lost four of its seven brigade commanders to wounds on July 1st. In the 2nd Corps, John Gibbon was wounded and lost ten of his division’s thirteen colonels; John Caldwell’s heroic charge into the wheat field cost his division three of its four brigade commanders; and Alex Hays lost three. Each of the 3rd Corps divisions lost a brigadier; the 5th Corps and the 11th Corps each lost a division commander, but the 5th Corps had more to mourn in the death of Strong Vincent (on July 7th, after finally receiving his brigadier’s star). Some individual units had almost ceased to exist. The Philadelphia Brigade was down to 660 men (the 69th Pennsylvania could only count 115 after the battle); the fabled Iron Brigade was left with less than 700 of the 1,829 who followed Reynolds into action on July 1st.6
But unlike the Confederates, the men of the Army of the Potomac were, for once, brimming with eagerness to come to grips with the rebels. “What do the people of the North think now of the Old Army of the Potomac,” exulted a soldier in the 28th Pennsylvania. John White Geary wrote to his wife that his division was “now refitting the clothing and equipments of the command … The result of the war seems no longer doubtful, and … the beginning of the end appears.” John Chase, in the 1st Massachusetts Light Artillery, saw the men take the burdens of the miserable weather and even more miserable roads after Gettysburg “like Martyrs saying if only we can get at them again before they get out of Maryland and get as good a Ration of Rebs as we did at Gettysburg.” It was a rare day, wrote Henry Nichols Blake, when the “veterans are anxious to fight,” but “animated by the glorious triumphs of Gettysburg” they “wished with a united voice to be led to the work of carnage” at Williamsport.
The pace of the march, however, struck the first note of suspicion. “We thought our corps commander displayed little energy in finding the enemy,” complained a Pennsylvania colonel in the 5th Corps about the listlessness of George Sykes’ pursuit, and what was being said about Sykes gradually repeated itself throughout the army. “It began to look as though it were intended that Lee should be allowed to cross the Potomac without another fight, if he wished.” When they awoke on the morning of July 14th, there was a great deal of head wagging and I-told-you-so-ing about Meade. The 77th New York was “more incensed than surprised,” and “for a long time the most awful curses were uttered in connection with the names of Meade and certain generals who opposed the assault.” John Chase was confident that “we could [have] just cleaned them from the word go,” but “I suppose that is the last thing a good many of our damn poor apologys for officers want to see is this war ended.” In the 118th Pennsylvania, the men refused the call of their colonel for three cheers for Meade. “Not a man moved in response, not a voice was heard, all stood still.”7
The soldiers were not the only ones infuriated at the escape. The Washington Sunday Morning Chronicle released the first news of the Gettysburg victory on July 5th, trumpeting its certainty “that Lee’s army is already seriously interfered with, and his escape from our army will be a matter of great difficulty.” A week later, the Chronicle was ever more ebullient: “That there will be another battle … is highly probably … It will probably be a bloody conflict but we do not hesitate to predict that it will be a great, if not, indeed, a decisive victory over the insurgents.” Both Senator Henry Wilson, the chair of the Senate’s Committee on Military Affairs, and Vice President Hannibal Hamlin came up from Washington to be present at the finish, and no one was more eager to see the Army of the Potomac go in for a funeral than Abraham Lincoln. The president released an announcement of the Gettysburg victory on the morning of July 4th, praising the army for “news … such as to cover that Army with the highest honor” and “to promise a great success to the cause of the Union.” In the first flush of good news, he was “more than satisfied with what has happened North of the Potomac so far,” and on July 11th, he seemed to his secretary John Hay to be “in a specially good humor, as he had pretty good evidence that … Meade had announced his intention of attacking them.” But it did not take long before Lincoln’s anxieties began to rise. He was disturbed by “Meade’s slow movements since Gettysburg,” and he was particularly irritated at the phrase in Meade’s congratulatory order to the army on July 4th and its call to “drive the invaders from our soil.” Drive the invaders from our soil! Lincoln burst out in unrestrained dismay, My God! Is that all? He grumbled to Hay, “Will our Generals never get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil.” And he added ominously, “This is a dreadful reminiscence of McClellan.”8
McClellan was not the name Meade should have wanted his own to conjure up in Lincoln’s mind. The president had never shaken off the sense that McClellan deliberately pulled his military punches on the Peninsula and after Antietam so that the war could be drawn out further and further toward the mutual exhaustion of both sides, and some form of negotiated settlement. “They did not mean to gain any decisive victory,” he confided to Hay, “but to keep things running on so that they, the army, might manage things to suit themselves.” By July 13th, Lincoln worried that no one has “yet heard of Meade’s expected attack,” and Lincoln took the desperate step of sending Meade a plea which did everything but sink down on bended knee: “You will follow up and attack Genl. Lee as soon as possible before he can cross the river. If you fail this dispatch will clear you from all responsibility and if you succeed you may destroy it.” (This message may have been hand-carried to Meade by Hannibal Hamlin, as the real mission of the Hamlin-Wilson visit to Williamsport.) But at noon on the 14th, Meade sent the news Lincoln wanted least to hear. “On advancing my army this morning,” Meade reported, “I found, on reaching his lines, that they were evacuated.”9
Lincoln was not a man often given to displays of emotion, but that afternoon, he was�
��as Hay put it—“deeply grieved.” Lincoln’s son Robert was home from Harvard, and walked into his father’s office to find him “in much distress, his head leaning upon the desk in front of him, and when he raised his head there were evidences of tears upon his face.” We had them in our grasp, Lincoln wailed. We had only to stretch forth our hands & they were ours. That image of Meade and his war council holding “the war in the hollow of their hand & they would not close it” kept coming back to Lincoln, and he began to wonder whether “if I had gone up there I could have whipped them myself.” Hamlin, likewise, met the journalist Noah Brooks at Meade’s headquarters, “raised his hands and turned away his face with a gesture of despair.” When Lincoln encountered Gideon Welles, his secretary of the navy, on “the lawn” between the War and Navy department buildings, his mind was already turning toward the possibility that “Meade, Couch, Smith and all” had some McClellan-like plot up their sleeves. “He said, with a voice and countenance which I shall never forget, that he had dreaded yet expected this … There is bad faith somewhere … What does it mean, Mr. Welles? Great God! what does it mean?”10
Meade really had no such grandiose schemes. But far from feeling any embarrassment, when Meade learned through Halleck that “the escape of Lee’s army without another battle has created great dissatisfaction in the mind of the President,” Meade considered himself the injured party. He replied to Halleck’s telegram as immediately as the wires permitted, indignantly requesting that he be given the martyr treatment. “The censure of the President conveyed in your dispatch … is, in my judgment, so undeserved that I feel compelled most respectfully to ask to be immediately relieved from the command of this army.” But he must have known that neither Halleck nor Lincoln would actually dare to cashier him. The Northern newspapers were full of jubilation over Gettysburg, and full of praise for a commanding general whom they could praise, and Lincoln was not about to throw things into a cocked hat by replacing Meade for not winning more. Halleck tamely damped Meade’s indignation: “My telegram, stating the disappointment of the President at the escape of Lee’s army, was not intended as a censure but as a stimulus to an active pursuit.” And Lincoln himself wrote a soothing letter, insisting on how “very—very—grateful” he was “to you for the magnificent success you gave the cause of the country at Gettysburg.” But even as he assured Meade that he was “sorry now to be the author of the slightest pain to you,” the bitterness still seeped back in. “I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape.” Again, the image of the unclosed hand came to him. “He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war.” And then, realizing the futility of it, he filed the letter away, scribbling on the envelope, To Gen. Meade, never sent, or signed.11
Gettysburg: The Last Invasion Page 61