23. Lines of Confederate advance from Williamsport into Maryland and Pennsylvania, June–July, 1863.
{Robert E. Lee, Volumes 1, 2, and 3, by Douglas Southall Freeman, copyright © 1934, 1935, by Charles Scribner’s Sons, copyright renewed 1962, 1963, by Inez Godden Freeman. All rights reserved.}
Fortunately, we have in Lieutenant-Colonel Fremantle’s diary an objective professional soldier’s assessment of Lee’s army and the country through which it was moving. Armed with letters of introduction to generals Longstreet and Lee, Fremantle had set off from Richmond on June 10, and was dismayed to find “an enormous pile of excellent rifles rotting in the open air,”* when he changed trains at Gordonsville—this was his first experience with the haphazard quality of the Confederate supply system.
By June 21, although his borrowed horse had a sore back and had thrown a shoe, Fremantle reached the Shenandoah Valley, and remarked that while the countryside was “really magnificent,” it had been “cleaned out” by two years of war. “All fences have been destroyed, and numberless farms burned, their chimneys alone left standing.” Procuring feed for his horse proved almost impossible, even for gold—let alone finding a working blacksmith. For two years both armies had been marching back and forth along the Valley and had devastated it. “No animals are grazing and it is almost uncultivated,” Fremantle writes, and as he gradually catches up with Lee’s army he begins to get a sense of what will become—what is already—a major problem for Lee: he cannot halt his army; he must keep it constantly moving forward to feed his men and his animals, because the inadequacies of the Confederate supply system are such that the army must live off the land, whether its own or the enemy’s. At Berryville on June 21 Fremantle gets his first glance at Lee, “a general officer of handsome appearance, who must, I knew from description, be the Commander in Chief,” and learns that Ewell’s corps is “in front and across the Potomac.” On June 25, Fremantle himself fords the Potomac to Williamsport, getting his legs soaked, and rides on to Hagerstown, Maryland, where he observes that the town “is by no means Rebel in its sentiments, for all the houses were shut up, and many apparently abandoned,” adding that “the few natives that were about stared at the troops with sulky indifference.”
This was the same day that Lee, about to ford the Potomac in the pouring rain on Traveller while a band played “Dixie,” was apparently struck by the same sight. He drew the conclusion that neither the Federal government nor the people of the North were as “demoralized” as he had supposed, and wrote to President Davis, from “Opposite Williamsport,” suggesting that everything should be done “to promote the pacific feeling” (in the “Federal States”) and that “our course ought to be so shaped as not to discourage it.” How advancing into Pennsylvania was to shape a “pacific feeling” in the North, Lee does not specify—in fact, for a general embarking on a major invasion with his whole army, his letter is something less than optimistic. He notes that he has “not sufficient troops to maintain my communications, and, therefore, have to abandon them,” and repeats an earlier suggestion that General Beauregard be ordered to organize “an army, even in effigy” at Culpeper Court House, presumably to give Lincoln the impression that Washington was to be attacked from the south, as well as cut off from the north by Lee. The time to have proposed this would have been long before the Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac, since by now anyone with a map in hand could see exactly where Lee was going; and once his men were in Maryland or Pennsylvania it did not require a sophisticated spy network to inform Washington of the direction of the Confederate advance or the number of Confederate troops involved—almost every adult civilian was pro-Union, and certain to pass the presence of enemy troops along. Lee ended his letter with a sentence that expresses a certain pessimism about his campaign: “I think I can throw General Hooker’s army across the Potomac and draw troops from the south, embarrassing their plan of campaign in a measure, if I can do nothing more and have to return.” Of course Lee could not have foreseen that he was only six days away from fighting the biggest and most desperate battle of his life, but even allowing for that, his expectations for the campaign seem curiously modest, as if its whole purpose was merely to draw Hooker away from the Rappahannock, after which Lee might withdraw his army back across the Potomac to Virginia, together with whatever supplies his quartermasters had “requisitioned.”
This process too was producing less satisfactory results than had been anticipated. Lee reported to President Davis on June 23 that food, salt, and forage were scarce, and that flour “in Maryland costs $6.50 a barrel; beef, $5 per hundred, gross,” adding, “We use Confederate money for all purchases.” This is a little disingenuous on Lee’s part; he was surely aware that Confederate paper money was regarded as worthless in the North. The Pennsylvania countryside was certainly even more productive than that of Maryland, but there was in both states quiet, stubborn resistance to Confederate requisitions of food and forage, coupled with great reluctance to accept payment in Confederate dollars, still less “vouchers” that could be redeemed in Richmond after the Confederate victory—one imagines that the stout burghers of Maryland and Pennsylvania were hiding away whatever they could, and were not eager to exchange their goods for worthless paper; indeed Colonel Fremantle never fails to note that the only way he could procure corn for his horse and food for himself was by offering to pay in gold coins.
By this time, Lee may already have made a fatal mistake, with consequences so serious that Lee’s aide Charles Marshall devotes over twenty pages of his memoirs to explaining how it occurred and why neither Lee nor his staff was responsible for it. Before crossing the Potomac, Lee wrote to Stuart, giving him orders and instructing him “to take position on General Ewell’s right . . . guard his flank, keep him informed of the enemy’s movements, and collect all the supplies you can for the use of the army.” This order was to become one of the most intractable and long lasting of the many controversies surrounding Lee’s handling of the Battle of Gettysburg. The importance Lee attached to the instructions to his cavalry commander is underscored by the fact that he repeated them in another letter to Stuart the next day, a sign that he wanted to make sure that Stuart understood them, or was perhaps concerned that his first letter had not been precise enough. In conveying Lee’s letter of June 22 to Stuart—who was operating under Longstreet’s command—Longstreet added a covering letter of his own with further instructions, another sign of the importance everyone in command attached to the role of the cavalry in the coming days.
Charles Marshall goes to tremendous lengths to unravel this correspondence but avoids the critical question of whether Lee’s original orders were clear enough, considering that they were addressed to Stuart. Major-General Fuller condemns Lee’s orders as being “as usual vague,” but the real problem is that they leave too much to Stuart’s discretion and set him a whole series of contradictory tasks—“holding the mountain passes south of the Potomac,” raiding “round the rear of Hooker’s forces,” capturing supplies, and eventually taking up a position on Ewell’s right as he advanced toward York—without establishing a firm priority among them. Knowing Stuart as well as he did—and Stuart was like another son to him—Lee should have established from the first that Stuart’s most important task was to guard Ewell’s right and report on the direction of Hooker’s advance once Lee crossed the Potomac. The big cavalry battle at Brandy Station had left Stuart smarting—the Richmond newspapers had been unusually critical of him, not only attributing “negligence” and vanity to him but urging him to learn from the experience, and accusing him (unjustly) of “rollicking, frolicking and running after girls.” Given Stuart’s high spirits and heroic self-image he did not take well to this kind of humiliation, all the less since Brandy Station was a Confederate victory; and it would not have been difficult to guess that given the leeway to do so, he would seek to silence his critics by repeating one of his famous exploits, such as his ride around McClellan’s army on the peninsula.
Both Lee and Longstreet were anxious about the exact point at which Stuart would cross the Potomac, although Longstreet, in the postscript on the subject in his covering letter to Stuart, may have unintentionally confused Stuart. The fact was that if Stuart crossed behind Lee’s infantry, this would place the cavalry between Lee’s army and the enemy, and in a position to guard Ewell’s right and warn Lee of Hooker’s approach—exactly what Lee expected. On the other hand, if Stuart crossed to the rear of Hooker, the cavalry would be placed between the Federal army and Washington—a position that would enable Stuart to raid Hooker’s supply trains, interrupt his line of communications, and ride right around the Federal army to join Ewell near York, a triumphant “joyride” that would bring him within ten miles of Washington. To do Stuart justice he wrote a note to Lee telling him of his position and plans—a note that Lee never received—and then forded the Potomac with considerable difficulty and reached Rockville, Maryland, approximately thirty miles from where Lee expected him to be; there, he and his men fell on an “eight-mile train of 140 wagons.” Stuart later boasted that he had taken “more than one hundred and twenty-five best United States model wagons and splendid teams with gay caparisons,” containing “foodstuffs, oats, hay . . . bacon, ham, crackers and bread,” but his progress was now slowed by his enormous wagon train of captured supplies, horses, and mules, and he did not cross the Pennsylvania state line until June 29. Far from guarding Ewell’s right, Stuart was now moving away from Ewell, with no idea where Hooker’s army might be and no communication at all with Lee, who inquired frequently of his aides, “Can you tell me where General Stuart is?” and was obliged to send out patrols looking for him in vain.
This was the first act of the tragedy that was to take place in Pennsylvania, and which might have been avoided by making it clear to Stuart that his most important task was to remain on Ewell’s right. Instead, Stuart would have to make a half circle of more than fifty miles around Gettysburg before arriving at about noon on the second day of the battle, with most of his troopers, his artillery, and his wagon train lumbering along far behind him.
In the meantime, Lee was blind. He did not know that Hooker had crossed the Potomac, nor that the Army of the Potomac was concentrated between Boonsboro and Frederick on June 28, the day Stuart surprised the Federal wagon train at Rockville. At that point, Stuart was well to the east of Hooker’s army and unaware of its presence; he was closer to Washington than to Ewell—indeed, had it not been for the burden of his captured wagon train Stuart even contemplated making a quick raid on Washington.
June 28 was an eventful day for both armies. A brigade of Ewell’s corps reached the Susquehanna River, overlooking Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which was guarded by nothing more formidable than the Pennsylvania Militia, while Ewell himself took Carlisle, Pennsylvania, as far north as the Confederacy would ever reach. At about three o’clock in the morning on June 28 a courier from Washington woke Major General George G. Meade and informed him that he was now in command of the Army of the Potomac, Hooker having at last exhausted the patience of Lincoln and Halleck by demanding more and more reinforcements, then threatening to resign if he was not given the garrison on Maryland Heights, overlooking Harpers Ferry. This was a tactical error on Hooker’s part—his resignation was quietly, and on Lincoln’s part gratefully, accepted, to take effect immediately.
Surprised and unprepared as Meade was, he was in a better position than Lee, had he but known it. His army was spread out from west to east north of the Potomac, his left wing a little below Hagerstown, some of it less than twenty-five miles south of the then insignificant crossroads town of Gettysburg; but at least Meade had a good idea of where Lee’s army was—it was hardly a secret to anyone in Pennsylvania who could tell the difference between rebel gray and Union blue—and knew where it was going. The quickest way of reaching him was to march directly on Gettysburg, and from there, if possible, to attack one of Lee’s corps before his army was fully concentrated.
Seen from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, outside which Lee had placed his headquarters, his position looked promising. Ewell had already reached the Susquehanna in two places, opposite Harrisburg and at Wrightsville; farther east, his army was concentrating behind South Mountain, and so far as Lee knew Hooker was still in Virginia. There seemed no reason why Lee should not cross the Susquehanna; advance on Lancaster, Pennsylvania; and march to cut off Baltimore, or Washington, or both from the north. Several members of his staff later reported that he seemed “apprehensive,” to quote Charles Marshall, and if that is so it was because he had still heard nothing from Stuart, who was supposed to be close by on Ewell’s right, somewhere to the east of South Mountain.
Lee’s day, however, was to end with even more startling news than Meade’s had begun with. Longstreet, who had gone to bed late, his mind only just beginning to dismiss “the cares and labors of the day,” was woken by someone banging on his tent pole. It was the assistant inspector general, Colonel Fairfax, whose pickets had just brought in a well-dressed man asking after General Longstreet. He turned out to be Harrison, Longstreet’s scout, or spy, whom Longstreet had paid in gold after Lee had revealed his plan to take the army north. Harrison brought with him the news that General Hooker had been replaced by General Meade, and the even more startling news that Hooker’s army, far from still being in Virginia, was already across the Potomac in full force and deployed around Frederick, Maryland, less than forty miles as the crow flies from Lee’s own headquarters. Longstreet ordered Fairfax to take Harrison to Lee’s headquarters at once, but Lee, whose distaste for the whole subject of espionage was visceral and who “expressed want of faith in reports of scouts” in general, refused to interview Harrison himself, and deputized Fairfax to do so. Harrison, however, was not only brave—he had been gathering information in Washington, and “walked through the lines of the Union Army,” then “secured a mount” and rode straight to where Longstreet’s corps was bivouacked—but also well-informed and persuasive. Fairfax believed him, and even remarked to Lee that Harrison’s information was close to what General Longstreet had predicted, which would seem to indicate that Longstreet, as usual, did not see the army’s position in such a rosy light as Lee did.* At any rate, Longstreet sent, along with Fairfax and Harrison, a note to Lee suggesting that Ewell’s corps should be halted and brought back from its approach to the Susquehanna in order to concentrate the whole army in the hills of South Mountain, around Chambersburg and Cashtown—thus placing its forward elements less than five miles from Gettysburg, without anyone on either side having planned it. As for Meade, Hooker had not shared his plans with his subordinates, so Meade was completely ignorant of Hooker’s intentions. The best he could do was to pursue Lee as quickly as possible, and “fall upon his rear and give him battle,” while Lee on his part, hoped to concentrate his army, place it on ground of his own choosing, and let Meade attack him.
As Lee started to concentrate his army which was spread out over thirty miles from Chambersburg to the Susquehanna, and move it to the east of South Mountain (which is actually, despite its name, a series of low hills and ridges), Meade was at the same time moving his army north as fast as he could, both of them advancing in the direction of Gettysburg, where they would collide.
Lee, when he heard of Meade’s assuming command of the Army of the Potomac, remarked that Meade “would commit no blunders on my front, and if I make one he will make haste to take advantage of it,” and he was perfectly right: Meade was irritable, sensitive, short-tempered, patrician in manner, and still having trouble coming to grips with his new command, but he was otherwise a calm and well-prepared professional soldier, and unlikely to make a serious blunder. He had one important advantage over Lee—at the head of his army was a cavalry division under the command of Brigadier General John Buford, a supremely competent and tenacious soldier, while Lee, in the continued absence of Stuart, was still virtually blind, and had no idea how many corps Meade had, Harrison having been able to ide
ntify only two of them.
Throughout June 29 and June 30 the two armies moved toward each other—a shorter march for Lee than for Meade, but Lee’s army was still spread out and could not remotely have been described as “concentrated.” Wherever he encountered the Federals, he would have no more than a third of his army with which to meet them—hence the increasing anxiety of his questions about Stuart, from whom he had received no communication since Stuart crossed the Potomac on June 25. It was not just that Lee desperately needed information about the enemy’s position and strength, which Stuart had always excelled at providing, Stuart was also a comforting, cheerful, gallant, ebullient presence, with a contagious confidence and good humor that never failed to lift Lee’s spirits even in the most difficult of circumstances. Stuart’s absence was to have a profound effect on the battle, even beyond the fact that it rendered Lee “a blinded giant.”
There are two schools of thought about Longstreet’s presence. Freeman (like the whole “Lost Cause” school of southern historians) holds that Longstreet was “the spirit that inhibits victory”: not only was Longstreet argumentative and wrong in his arguments about tactics in the coming battle, and indeed the whole strategy of the Pennsylvania campaign, but his glumness and his stubborn, disloyal opposition to Lee’s plans and mulish disruption of them over the next four days would lead inexorably to defeat in the decisive battle for the independence of the South; had Longstreet carried out his orders and done what Lee told him to do, the battle would have been won. “Lee’s feelings were gloomy,” Freeman writes of June 29, “which had broken dark and stormy” of course, and leaves no doubt whom he holds responsible for the lowering of Lee’s spirits. Certainly, Longstreet could be taciturn and argumentative, but the difficulty with this picture of the two men is that it is sharply contradicted by Colonel Fremantle, who was there beside them from June 27 to the end of the battle. “The relations between [Lee] and Longstreet are quite touching,” he wrote on June 30; “they are almost always together. Longstreet’s corps complain of this sometimes, as they say they seldom get the chance of detached service, which falls to Ewell. It is impossible to please Longstreet more than by praising Lee.” Fremantle was a good judge of men, if not of causes—well into 1864, he continued to believe the South would win its independence—and if he found the relationship between the two men “touching,” it seems unlikely that Longstreet was full of “sullen resentment” or, worse still, guilty of insubordination, of which Freeman also accuses him. Freeman paints a portrait of Longstreet sulking in his tent like Achilles, but nobody who was there seems to have felt that. Of Lee’s staff, Marshall makes no mention of it—Stuart is the man he blames for losing Gettysburg—and Long mostly disputes what Longstreet wrote in his memoirs years after the event, a typical old soldiers’ quarrel.* That Longstreet had appealed over Lee’s head about the invasion of Pennsylvania is true, and that he thought Lee had agreed to fight a defensive battle once there is also true, but it is a long way from this to the charge that Longstreet sabotaged the battle once it was under way.
Clouds of Glory Page 65