George Meade, for his part, never saw the slightest fault in himself. “This is exactly what I expected,” he wrote to Margaretta after Halleck’s no-censure telegram arrived. “Unless I did impracticable things, fault would be found with me.” He certainly had the backing of the other McClellanites. “You will wonder … why we did not crush the enemy,” John Sedgwick wrote to his sister on July 17th; she should know that “the enemy crossed the river at Williamsport” with “forces … far superior in numbers to our own.” McClellan himself put his imprimatur on Meade’s decision by assuring him that “you have done all that could be done and the Army of the Potomac has supported you nobly … I feel very proud of you and my old Army.” Meade would surely “have another severe battle to fight, but I am confident that you will win.” So there was no need for Meade to hang his head. “I have ignored the senseless adulation of the public and press,” Meade congratulated himself, “and I am now just as indifferent to the censure bestowed without just cause.” He had dodged both disgrace and disaster, which was more than his own father had done, and there must have been at least one small part of George Gordon Meade which would actually have welcomed retirement at that moment so that he could preserve his Gettysburg laurels intact for the rest of his life.12
McClellan was right about the “severe battle” to be fought, but it would not be fought with the Army of Northern Virginia. Meade did not cross the Potomac until July 18th, his bands playing “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” and by that time the Confederates were well out of his grasp. There was some menacing checkerboarding across northern Virginia for several weeks, but by mid-August the two armies were pretty much back where they had been at the beginning of June on the Rappahannock. Another burst of tactical energy that fall nearly produced a serious confrontation at Bristoe Station, and again at Mine Run, and Lincoln once again offered to take all the blame and let Meade have all the credit if only Meade would act. But at the last minute Meade pulled back, and the two armies went into winter quarters and the war in 1863 ended in Virginia as unresolved as it had been when the year started.
This did not mean that Meade lacked for enemies to fight, but they were all within his own army, starting with Dan Sickles. The abundantly confident New Yorker survived the amputation of his leg surprisingly well, convalescing exuberantly in Washington and filling the ears of any politicians, all the way up to the president, with tales of how the 3rd Corps had saved the Army of the Potomac from sure destruction on July 2nd and prevented Meade from packing up for a retreat to Pipe Creek. Word of this came back to a stony-faced Meade, and when Sickles returned to the army on October 18th, expecting restoration to command, Meade made it bluntly clear that under no imaginable circumstances would he ever agree to having Sickles in charge of anything in the Army of the Potomac. In fact, Meade wanted to be rid of the entire 3rd Corps, not to mention the troublesome spirits in the 1st Corps, and in the spring he ordered the breakup of both corps and the redistribution of their divisions among the much more reliable 2nd and 5th Corps.13
Other heads rolled, as well. Abner Doubleday protested Meade’s promotion of John Newton to command of the 1st Corps, and was flatly dismissed on July 5th, never to return to command in the Army of the Potomac. In November, when a massive Federal defeat in the west (at Chickamauga) impelled Lincoln and Stanton to pull troops away from the East to send to the rescue of a besieged Federal army in Chattanooga, Meade was only too happy to send Otis Howard and Henry Slocum and most of their corps as his contribution to the rescue. (Once free from the onus of the Army of the Potomac’s politics, Otis Howard developed into one of the finest corps commanders in the Union Army; he marched with Sherman through Georgia, and though the profane Sherman could not have occupied a more different mental world than the pious Howard, Sherman picked him to succeed his own protégé, James B. McPherson, as commander of the Army of the Tennessee.) It may be too much to call this a purge of abolitionists and Republicans, but by the end of the year, the Army of the Potomac had no one of either description in command at corps level.14
In the end, however, Meade found himself outflanked by the politicos. Sickles turned in fury from his dismissal by Meade, gained the ear of Lincoln and his old friends in Congress, and began assiduously poisoning as many minds as he could reach with the message that “General Howard and perhaps himself” had been the ones who determined to fight at Gettysburg, and that Meade was on the verge of abandoning the position on July 2nd when Sickles forced the issue by moving forward to the Emmitsburg Road. Some refused to listen. “Allowance must always be made for Sickles,” sighed Gideon Welles. After all, Sickles’ move amounted to something very close to outright disobedience of orders, which put him in more trouble than he had been since the murder of Philip Barton Key. Diverting attention to George Meade’s failures was Sickles’ best strategy for concealing his own.15
But there was more evidence than Meade liked to admit that he had been strangely negligent about the threat to his left flank on July 2nd until it was too late, and that he really had favored a pullout for Pipe Creek at his council of war that night. “There is no doubt,” Henry Slocum insisted, “but for the decision of his corps commanders, the army on the third of July would have been in full retreat,” and the Independence Day which followed it would have been “the darkest day ever known to our country.” Slocum teasingly insisted that “I have in my possession a small scrap of paper three or four inches long … that would throw a flood of light on the battle of Gettysburg,” and which “would appear after his death”; instead, Slocum’s papers were destroyed. Samuel Wylie Crawford assured Sickles in 1886 that “a staff officer of Gen. Meade … goes far to establish your assertions in regard to Meade’s determination to leave Gettysb[urg],” but the officer feared for his career, and nothing was ever made public.
Even Welles was persuaded that Meade “can obey orders and carry out orders better than he can originate and give them, hesitates, defers to others, has not strength, will, and self-reliance.” In December, when the first session of the new 38th Congress assembled, Henry Wilson introduced a resolution of thanks for Gettysburg that, to Meade’s fury, singled out for praise “Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, Maj. Gen. George G. Meade, Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard”—as though Hooker and Howard deserved an equal share with Meade in securing the Gettysburg victory. Lincoln signed the resolution anyway on January 28th, and in February the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War (with some behind-closed-door-urging from Dan Sickles) opened its hearings into the Confederate escape. The first witness was Sickles, insisting that the destruction of the Confederate army at Williamsport “was the great aim and object of our army and … I do not think there was any military difficulty to prevent a decisive attack upon General Lee.”16
Sickles gave his knife one more valedictory twist on March 12, 1864—a week after Meade himself had been hauled before the committee—with a sensational 4,370-word article in the New York Herald which made Sickles the hero of the battle and accused Meade of ignoring “the repeated warnings of that sagacious officer, General Sickles.” It was signed only HISTORICUS, but few people had much doubt that it emanated from Sickles’ staff, or perhaps from the pen of Dan himself. Meade certainly believed that Sickles was the author, and he was ready to demand a court of inquiry “to ascertain whether Major-General Sickles has authorized or indorses this communication.” Halleck advised against it, and after the Historicus feud went through several back-and-forths in the Herald, and as Meade’s old 5th Corps officers rose in his defense, the controversy finally burned itself out.17
A more serious threat to Meade’s standing came in a more subtle fashion during that same session of Congress, when Illinois congressman Elihu Washburne proposed a bill “to revive the grade of general in the United States Army”—meaning the rank of lieutenant general, once held by George Washington and Winfield Scott. Washburne had long been the principal congressional cheerleader for Ulysses S. Grant, and it was obvious that this was intended as Grant’s prom
otion to the top of the army; even though the final bill made no mention of Grant, it was Grant to whom Lincoln offered the post. Grant came east in early March to receive his commission, and Lincoln made it clear to Grant that he hoped Grant would use his new rank to take direct control of the Army of the Potomac. In the end, a reluctant Grant compromised: he would stay in the East as senior officer of the entire Union Army and retain Meade in local command of the Army of the Potomac, but he would travel with Meade and give as much supervision as the situation seemed to warrant. Meade understood all too well that this could very likely include the appointment of “some one else whom he knows better in command of this army.”18
To their mutual surprise, Grant and Meade seemed at first to be quite content with each other. Grant “has expressed himself and acted towards me in the most friendly manner.” But once the campaigning season began again in May 1864, a frost between the two set in. By June, Meade was complaining that Grant “has greatly disappointed me, and since this campaign I really begin to think that I am something of a general,” and he began foaming at every “real or imaginary slight … in regard to which he appeared to think sufficient importance had not been given to his opinion as Commander of the Army of the Potomac.” Grant soon began to understand why Lincoln had such a jaundiced view of Meade. “Meade and I got on perfectly well together,” Grant insisted long after the war, but he admitted that Meade’s “fits of despondency, or temper … were trying.” Despondency led to tantrums, and tantrums led to threats of resignation, and eventually Grant “resolved, should he repeat the offer of his resignation, to accept it.” He kept Meade in titular command of the Army of the Potomac through the end of the war, but Meade was increasingly reduced to the level of a glorified adjutant, executing orders for the Army of the Potomac which were spelled out by Grant.
Meade, for his part, never admitted that he had been mistaken at Williamsport: “If I had attacked [Lee] on the 13th [of July] … it is believed by several of my officers who subsequently inspected his lines … that it would have been a failure.” Although he protested that he was “nothing of a copperhead,” he never shook off the suspicions that he had been “in correspondence with McClellan” all through the campaign. Privately, Meade continued to hope that Lincoln would “make terms of some kind or other with the South,” and in January 1865, when Confederate commissioners headed by Alexander Stephens came through the Union lines to hold one last-minute round of negotiations with Lincoln at Hampton Roads, Meade “talked very freely with them” and offered them talking points to use in the negotiations. “I told them very plainly what I thought was the basis on which the people of the North would be glad to have peace,” which might not have been all that unusual apart from being proffered by a major general of the Union Army. What was needed, Meade claimed, was simply “the emphatic restoration of the Union.” As for slavery, dealing with this issue was “not insurmountable,” and as though he had never heard of the Emancipation Proclamation, Meade “thought some system could be found accommodating both interests, which would not be as obnoxious as slavery.”19
The Confederacy got the news of Gettysburg slowly. “The enemy has been completely routed,” rejoiced the Charleston Mercury. “Forty thousand prisoners were taken on Sunday.” Except, of course, that they hadn’t. Robert E. Lee sent off his first dispatch to Jefferson Davis on July 4th, delicately apprising the Confederate president that after two days of success at Gettysburg, “our troops were compelled to relinquish their advantage and retire.” He was less opaque in a second dispatch on July 7th about “the unsuccessful issue of our final attack on the enemy in the rear of Gettysburg,” and on the 12th he admitted to his wife that “our success at Gettysburg was not as great as reported. In fact, we failed to drive the enemy from his position & that our army withdrew to the Potomac.” But on July 15th, he once again labored to put as good a face as he could on the invasion. His “return is rather sooner than I had originally contemplated, but having accomplished what I proposed on leaving the Rappahannock, viz., relieving the Valley of the presence of the enemy & drawing his army north of the Potomac, I determined to re-cross the latter river”—as though the battle had been purely incidental.
Lee was not alone in soft-pedaling the consequences of Gettysburg. The traveling Georgia correspondent Peter Wellington Alexander described the battle in a July 4th report as “the bloodiest and most desperate battle of this bloody and desperate war,” and managed to conclude that “the Confederates have had the best of the terrible conflict.” Three days later, Alexander accounted for the “apparent retrograde movement” of the Army of Northern Virginia as an attempt to reopen “communications.” For at least a week, the only word most Southerners had of the battle was that “Gen. Lee has given the Yanks a sound threshing at Gettysburg Pa.” and that the battle had resulted “in the substantial destruction of the Northern ‘Army of the Potomac,’ and the unheard-of capture of 40,000 men.” Only on the 14th, safely across the Potomac, did Alexander admit that he had not been able “to tell the whole truth, lest … important information [be] communicated to the Federal commander.” Readers should brace themselves for the term unfortunate “as applies to the operation of the army in Maryland.” Not until the 19th did the Charleston Mercury finally admit that Gettysburg was a defeat in every detail.20
The soldiers, however, knew all too well what had happened. Randolph McKim, who had watched the failure of Allegheny Johnson’s brief occupation of Culp’s Hill, wrote dazedly in his diary on July 11th, “I went into the last battle feeling that victory must be ours—that such an army could not be foiled, and that God would certainly declare himself on our side. Now I feel than unless He sees fit to bless our arms, our valor will not avail.” A soldier in the 11th Georgia, a regiment which had fought its way over the rocky slopes of Devil’s Den, wrote his mother that “the Armey is Broken harted” and “don’t Care which Way the War Closes, for we have Suffered very much,” and one of the survivors of Ewell’s corps mourned how he began the campaign “in good hopes that the war would soon be over,” but “it don’t look much like it at this time.”21
By July 12th, well-placed civilians were also beginning to understand the dimensions of what had happened. “It turns out that the battle of Gettysburg was a virtual if not an actual defeat,” Robert Kean in the Confederate War Department wrote in his diary, “the success” of the first two days of the battle “went for nothing.” A week later, Kean was so despondent over both Gettysburg and Vicksburg that “in the present state of affairs it would seem to be worthy of consideration whether it would not be well to obtain the assistance of some powerful foreign state, even at the expense of some pride and independence” in a “sort of protectorate.” The Richmond papers were now full of the tidings of defeat. The Richmond Enquirer was willing to concede on July 10th that “after three days’ fighting in Pennsylvania, with we know not what success, Gen. Lee has fallen back, withdrawn his forces backward from Gettysburg,” and on July 13th the Richmond Examiner admitted that “the Confederates did not gain a victory,” although it was quick to add, “neither did the enemy.” By the 24th, however, the Enquirer had shifted down to admitting that “it cannot be denied that the invasion has been a failure.” By September, there was “great depression … in all parts of the country … and in many States positive disaffection.”22
Almost at once, there had to be a reason why. After all, Lee had enjoyed what was acknowledged on all sides as success on the first two days; Pickett’s Charge ought to have finished the matter in the same way Raglan’s attack at the Alma had chased off the Russians. The blame was deposited on a number of doorsteps, some of it before the battle was even finished. Dick Ewell’s failure to strike for Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill on the evening of July 1st produced many pursed lips even then, and men in Ewell’s corps who had served under Stonewall Jackson were not reluctant to repeat over and over “that if we had had Jackson with us at the battle of Gettysburg he would have flanked the enemy off th
ose heights with his corps, if he had to take one day’s rations and go around by Washington City to get there.” The Charleston Mercury took up the cry against Ewell in mid-August, declaring that “we lost the golden opportunity in not keeping up the attack that evening … Timidity in the commander (Ewell) that stepped into the shoes of the fearless Jackson prompted delay.” Ewell never replied in print, but he was conscious that “I have been blamed by many for not having pressed my advantage the first day at Gettysburg.” Still, he could not understand why he was being condemned when the responsibility really lay with Lee. “General Lee came upon the ground before I could have possibly done anything, and after surveying the enemy’s position, he did not deem it advisable to attack.” Others blamed John Bell Hood for allowing himself to be distracted by Devil’s Den and Little Round Top, and failing to “envelop the enemy’s left,” although others contended that it was “the wounding of General Hood early in the action” which “was the real misfortune of the day.”
Gettysburg: The Last Invasion Page 62