Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  2. Israel Daniel Rupp, The History and Topography of Dauphin, Cumberland, Franklin, Bedford, Adams, and Perry Counties (Lancaster: Gilbert Hills, 1846), 526–47, 541; John T. Riley, History and Directory of the Boroughs of Gettysburg, Oxford, Littlestown, York Springs, Berwick, and East Berlin (Gettysburg: J. E. Wible, 1880), 12–13; John Badger Bachelder, Bachelder’s Illustrated Tourist’s Guide of the United States (Boston: Lee, Shephard & Dillingham, 1873), 7; George Sheldon, When the Smoke Cleared at Gettysburg: The Tragic Aftermath of the Bloodiest Battle of the Civil War (Nashville: Cumberland House, 2003), 22–23.

  CHAPTER ONE People who will not give in

  1. Howard, Autobiography (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1907), 1:440.

  2. Theodore Ropp, War in the Modern World (New York: Collier, 1962, 175, 178–79; Robert Cole, in R. E. L. Krick, “ ‘The Great Tycoon’ Forges a Staff System,” in Audacity Personified: The Generalship of Robert E. Lee, ed. Peter Carmichael (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), 98; Richard Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War in the United States (Edinburgh: Wm. Blackwood & Sons, 1879), 38.

  3. Abraham Oakley Hall, Horace Greeley Decently Dissected: In a Letter on Horace Greeley Addressed to A. Oakley Hall by Joseph Hoxie, Esq. (New York: Ross & Tousey, 1862), 32.

  4. The American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge for the Year 1859 (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, 1859), 114, 151–54; Halleck, Elements of Military Art and Science; or, Course of Instruction in Strategy, Fortification, and the Tactics of Battles (New York: D. Appleton, 1846), 145–46; Carol Reardon, With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 55; Alexander McKay, The Western World; or, Travels in the United States in 1846–47 (London: Richard Bentley, 1850), 3:210–13.

  5. Paul R. Van Riper and Keith A. Sutherland, “The Northern Civil Service: 1861–1865,” Civil War History 11 (December 1965), 351; Edward McPherson, ed., The Political History of the United States During the Great Rebellion (Washington: Philp & Solomons, 1864), 115; Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh, West Pointers and the Civil War: The Old Army in War and Peace (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 75–76; Phillip Howes, The Catalytic Wars: A Study of the Development of Warfare, 1860–1870 (London: Minerva Press, 1998), 177.

  6. John S. Robson, How a One-Legged Rebel Lives: Reminiscences of the Civil War (Durham, NC: The Educator Co., 1898), 8; Carlton McCarthy, Detailed Minutiae of Soldier Life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861–1865 (Richmond: Carleton McCarthy, 1882), 29–30, 39, 115; Benjamin H. Trask, 9th Virginia Infantry (Lynchburg, VA: H. E. Howard, 1984), 45, 47–48; Ervin L. Jordan and Herbert A. Thomas, 19th Virginia Infantry (Lynchburg, VA: H. E. Howard, 1987), 2–3, 39–41; James I. Robertson, Soldiers Blue and Gray (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), 25; Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 134; Randall C. Jimerson, The Private Civil War: Popular Thought During the Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 201; “An Army: Its Organization and Movements,” Continental Monthly 6 (September 1864), 332.

  7. William Henry Morgan, Personal Reminiscences of the War of 1861–5; In camp—in bivouac—on the march—on picket—on the skirmish line—on the battlefield—and in prison (Lynchburg, VA: J. P. Bell, 1911), 24–25; Mosby, The Memoirs of Colonel John S. Mosby (1917; Nashville: J. S. Sanders & Co., 1995), 102; Mark H. Dunkelman, Brothers One and All: Esprit de Corps in a Civil War Regiment (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), 189, 211, 217; Hsieh, West Pointers and the Civil War, 144; Hyde, Following the Greek Cross; or, Memories of the Sixth Army Corps (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 16, 37; Robertson, Soldiers Blue and Gray, 127.

  8. Christian B. Keller, “Flying Dutchmen and Drunken Irishmen: The Myths and Realties of Ethnic Civil War Soldiers,” Journal of Military History 73 (January 2009), 120–22, 126–27; Martin Oefele, “German-Americans and the War up to Gettysburg,” in David L. Valuska and Christian B. Keller, eds., Damn Dutch: Pennsylvania Germans at Gettysburg (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2004), 18, 20, 21, 25; Christian B. Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans: Nativism, Ethnicity, and Civil War Memory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 10, 31–32; Michael Bacarella, Lincoln’s Foreign Legion: The 39th New York Infantry, the Garibaldi Guard (Shippensburg, PA: White Mane Press, 1996), 117, 121, 129; Robert B. Edgerton, Death or Glory: The Legacy of the Crimean War (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 49, 87; C. V. Tevis and D. R. Marquis, The History of the Fighting Fourteenth, Published in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the muster of the regiment into the United States service, May 23, 1861 (Brooklyn: Eagle Press, 1911), 213; Trevor Royle, Crimea: The Great Crimean War, 1854–1856 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 107; George Norton Galloway, The Ninety-fifth Pennsylvania Volunteers (Gosline’s Pennsylvania Zouaves) in the Sixth Corps (Philadelphia: Collins, 1884), 6, 8.

  9. Scott, in Jason Mann Frawley, “Marching Through Pennsylvania: The Story of Soldiers and Civilians During the Gettysburg Campaign,” Ph.D. dissertation, Texas Christian University (2008), 45; Spencer Glasgow Welch to Cordelia Strother Welch (August 18, 1862), in A Confederate Surgeon’s Letters to His Wife (New York: Neale Publishing, 1911), 20.

  10. Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters (New York: Viking, 2007), 540; J. Boone Bartholomees, Buff Facings and Gilt Buttons: Staff and Headquarters Operations in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861–1865 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 27, 34, 35–36, 39, 105, 107, 108, 144–45, 202–3, 277–78; Edward Hagerman, “Field Transportation and Strategic Mobility in the Union Armies,” Civil War History 34 (June 1988), 143, 144–45, 147–48, and The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare: Ideas, Organization, and Field Command (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 62, 66; Arden Bucholz, Moltke and the German Wars, 1864–1871 (Houndsmills, U.K.: Palgrave, 2001), 20, 21, 32–34; Taylor, Destruction and Reconstuction, 106–8; Frederick G. Burnaby, “The Practical Instruction of Staff Officers in Foreign Armies,” Journal of the Royal United Services Institution 16 (January 1872), 638; C. W. Tolles, “An Army: Its Organization and Movements,” Continental Monthly 6 (June 1864), 713; Scott Bowden and Bill Ward, Last Chance for Victory: Robert E. Lee and the Gettysburg Campaign (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2001), 24; R. L. DiNardo, “Longstreet and Jackson Compared: Corps Staff and the Exercise of Command in the Army of Northern Virginia,” in James Longstreet: The Man, the Soldier, the Controversy, eds. R. L. DiNardo and Albert A. Nofi (Conshohocken, PA: Combined Books, 1998), 167, 170–71; Joseph Orton Kirby, “A Boy Spy in Dixie,” National Tribune (July 5, 1888); “The Union Cavalry Service” (July 15, 1863), in Rebellion Record (1864), 7:185.

  11. Morgan, Personal Reminiscences, 24–25; E. J. Allen, Under the Maltese Cross, Antietam to Appomattox: The Loyal Uprising in Western Pennsylvania, 1861–1865 (Pittsburgh: Werner Co., 1910), 184; Augustus Horstmann (June 16, 1862), in Walter D. Kamphoefner and Wolfgang Johannes Helbich, eds., Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 122; Andrew Elmer Ford, The Story of the Fifteenth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War, 1861–1864 (Clinton, MA: J. Coulter, 1898), 278; Alfred Seelye Roe, The Tenth Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1861–1864: A Western Massachusetts Regiment (Springfield, MA: 10th Regiment Veterans Assoc., 1909), 56–58; Theodore B. Gates, diary entry for January 9, 1863, in The Civil War Diaries of Col. Theodore B. Gates, 20th New York State Militia (Hightstown, NJ: Longstreet House, 1991), 60.

  12. John Hamilton SeCheverell, Journal History of the Twenty-Ninth Ohio Veteran Volunteers, 1861–1865: Its Victories and Its Reverses (Cleveland, OH: n.p., 1883), 73–74; Hyde, Following the Greek Cross, 136; Torrance to Sarah Torrance (September 9, 1861), in “The Road to Gettysburg:
The Diary and Letters of Leonidas Torrance of the Gaston Guards,” North Carolina Historical Review 36 (October 1959), 483.

  13. “An English View of our Civil War,” National Intelligencer (May 28, 1863); Varina Davis Brown, A Colonel at Gettysburg and Spotsylvania: The Life of Colonel Joseph Newton Brown and the Battles of Gettysburg and Spotsylvania (Columbia, SC: State Co., 1931), 12; Handerson, Yankee in Gray: The Civil War Memoirs of Henry E. Handerson, ed. C. L. Cummer (Cleveland: Western Reserve University Press, 1962), 28; Ruth Hairstone Early, Lieutenant General Jubal Anderson Early, C.S.A.: Autobiographical Sketch and Narrative of the War Between the States (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1912), ix–x; Joseph T. Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse (New York: Free Press, 2008), 18–22; Elisabeth Lauterbach Laskin, “Good Old Rebels: Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1862–1865,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University (2003), 4–5, 22–27, 117, 421–30; Kent Masterson Brown, Retreat from Gettysburg: Lee, Logistics, and the Pennsylvania Campaign (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 31, 49–50; Richard Rollins, “Black Confederates at Gettysburg—1863,” Gettysburg Magazine 6 (January 1992), 94–97; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 360.

  14. Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 140; Gallagher, “ ‘Our Hearts Are Full of Hope’: The Army of Northern Virginia in the Spring of 1864,” in The Wilderness Campaign (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 49–50; J. B. Turney, “The First Tennessee at Gettysburg,” Confederate Veteran (December 1900), 537.

  CHAPTER TWO There were never such men in an army before

  1. Peter W. Alexander, “Confederate Chieftains,” Southern Literary Messenger 37 (January 1863), 34; Winey, Confederate Uniforms at Gettysburg, 20; Michael Fellman, The Making of Robert E. Lee (New York: Random House, 2000), 90.

  2. Alexander, Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander, ed. Gary W. Gallagher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 90; Pryor, Reading the Man, 34; Fellman, The Making of Robert E. Lee, 10, 11, 13.

  3. Pryor, Reading the Man, 56; Chesnut, diary entry for July 24, 1861, in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 116.

  4. J. William Jones, Personal Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Letters of Gen. Robert E. Lee (New York: D. Appleton, 1875), 60, 482; Pryor, Reading the Man, 67–68, 187; Fellman, The Making of Robert E. Lee, 60.

  5. Pryor, Reading the Man, 125, 144–45, 278; Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography (New York: Scribners, 1936), 1:372; Armistead L. Long, Memoirs of Robert E. Lee: His Military and Personal History, ed. M. J. Wright (Philadelphia: J. M. Stoddart, 1887), 83; Mosby, “A Rejoinder to General Robertson,” The Century 35 (December 1887), 323; My Life in the Old Army: The Reminiscences of Abner Doubleday from the Collections of the New-York Historical Society, ed. Joseph E. Chance (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1998), 214–15; Roy Blount, Robert E. Lee: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2003), 62, 63; Thomas Connelly and Barbara Bellows, God and General Longstreet (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 98–99.

  6. Emory M. Thomas, Robert E. Lee: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 173; Alan Nolan, Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 112–13; Lee to Jefferson Davis (July 6, 1864), in Lee’s Despatches: Unpublished Letters of General Robert E. Lee, CSA, to Jefferson Davis, eds. D. S. Freeman and G. McWhiney (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1957), 368; Lee to G. W. C. Lee (February 28, 1863), in The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee, eds. Clifford Dowdey and L. H. Manarin (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), 411; Peter S. Carmichael, “Lee’s Search for the Battle of Annihilation,” in Audacity Personified: The Generalship of Robert E. Lee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), 17.

  7. Stephens, “My Impression of General R. E. Lee,” Southern Bivouac 1 (February 1886), 538; Memoirs of Colonel John S. Mosby, 375.

  8. Pryor, Reading the Man, 125, 144–45; Freeman, R. E. Lee, 1:372; Long, Memoirs of Robert E. Lee, 83; Mosby, “A Rejoinder to General Robertson,” The Century 35 (December 1887), 323; My Life in the Old Army: The Reminiscences of Abner Doubleday from the Collections of the New-York Historical Society, ed. Chance, 214–15; Blount, Robert E. Lee, 62, 63; Alexander, in Fighting for the Confederacy, 91; Davis, “Robert E. Lee,” North American Review 150 (January 1890), 65; Thomas Connelly, The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 208; Memoirs of Colonel John S. Mosby, 374.

  9. Davis, “Robert E. Lee,” 62; Clifford Dowdey, The Seven Days: The Emergence of Lee (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), 139–42; Stephen W. Sears, To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992), 155–56; “Special Orders No. 22” (June 1, 1862), in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1890–1901), series one, 11 (pt. 3):569 (hereafter abbreviated as O.R.); Nofi, “Introduction: History, Politics and James Longstreet,” in James Longstreet, 13; Robert M. Epstein, “The Creation and Evolution of the Army Corps in the American Civil War,” Journal of Military History 55 (January 1991), 22, 25, 26.

  10. A. R. Boteler, “Stonewall Jackson in the Campaign of 1862,” Southern Historical Society Papers 40 (September 1915), 165 (hereafter abbreviated as SHSP); Henry Kyd Douglas, I Rode With Stonewall, Being Chiefly the War Experiences of the Youngest Member of Jackson’s Staff (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 113; Lee to Jefferson Davis (June 5, 1862, and September 4, 1862), in Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee, 183–84, 288; “Letter From Major General Heth, of A.P. Hill’s Corps, A.N.V.,” SHSP 4 (October 1877), 153–54; Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army, 174–82, 223; Brian Steel Wills, The War Hits Home: The Civil War in Southeastern Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 74; Lee to Milledge L. Bonham (May 22, 1861), in O.R., series one, 2:865; Fellman, The Making of Robert E. Lee, 126, 127–28; Schiebert, Seven Months in the Rebel States During the North American War, W. M. S. Hoole, ed. (1958; Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 75.

  11. Lee to James A. Seddon (June 8, 1863) and Jefferson Davis (June 10, 1863), in O.R., series one, 27 (pt. 3):869, 882; Thomas, R. E. Lee, 287.

  12. Lee to Jefferson Davis (March 21, 1863), in Lee’s Despatches, 81; Carmichael, “Lee’s Search for the Battle of Annihilation,” 15–16; Schiebert, Seven Months in the Rebel States, 75; Epstein, “Creation and Evolution of the Army Corps,” 24–26; Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command (New York: Scribner’s, 1943), 2:467–94; Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 108.

  13. Lee to Jefferson Davis (May 20, 1863), in Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee, 488; “Special Orders No. 146” (May 30, 1863), in O.R., series one, 25 (pt. 2):840; Ethan S. Rafuse, Robert E. Lee and the Fall of the Confederacy, 1863–1865 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 42.

  14. Lee to John Bell Hood (May 21, 1863), in Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee, 490; Alexander, “Confederate Chieftains,” 37–38; William Garrett Piston, Lee’s Tarnished Lieutenant: James Longstreet and His Place in Southern History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 4–6, 21–22, 26–27, 33, 97; William Garrett Piston, “Petticoats, Promotions, and Military Assignments: Favoritism and the Antebellum Career of James Longstreet,” in James Longstreet, eds. DiNardo and Nofi, 57–61; Daniel Harvey Hill, “McClellan’s Change of Base and Malvern Hill,” in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, eds. R. U. Johnson and C. C. Buel (1884–1888; New York: Thomas Yoseleff, 1956), 2:391; Fitzgerald Ross, A Visit to the Cities and Camps of the Confederate States (Edinburgh: Wm. Blackwood & Sons, 1865), 146; Thomas Goree to Sarah Williams Kittrellm Goree (December
14, 1861), in Longstreet’s Aide: The Civil War Letters of Major Thomas J. Goree (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 60; Bela Estvàn, War Pictures from the South (London: Routledge, Warne & Routledge, 1863), 308; Lafayette McLaws to Isaac Pennypacker (August 28, 1888), Lafayette McLaws Letters, Wofford College

  15. James I. Robertson, Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend (New York: Macmillan, 1997), 585, 590, 595, 627, 639, 679–80, 693; Lee to Jefferson Davis (May 20, 1863), in Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee, 488; James I. Robertson, General A. P. Hill: The Story of a Confederate Warrior (New York: Random House, 1987), 192, 193; William J. Miller, Mapping for Stonewall: The Civil War Service of Jed Hotchkiss (Washington, DC: Elliott & Clark, 1993), 167.

  16. Donald C. Pfanz, Richard S. Ewell: A Soldier’s Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 135, 268, 273, 277; Thomas H. Carter, “General Richard S. Ewell,” SHSP 39 (April 1914), 7; Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction, 39; Paul D. Casdorph, Confederate General R. S. Ewell: Robert E. Lee’s Hesitant Commander (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 23–24, 27, 81, 85, 204; Robert G. Tanner, Stonewall in the Valley: Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign, 1862 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), 52; Peter Cozzens, Shenandoah 1862: Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 329; Campbell Brown’s Civil War: With Ewell and the Army of Northern Virginia, ed. Terry L. Jones (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 157–58.