by Alan Axelrod
Confederate forces encircled the Union fishhook on three sides: along the length of the shaft, above the curve of the hook, and to the east of the barb. Nevertheless, the Union’s I and XI Corps, surrounded though they were, occupied the highest ground at every point. This meant that any Confederate attack would not only have to be made uphill, it would require an initial advance over open fields exposed to fire from above. Moreover, thanks to the time Brigadier General Buford had bought, nearly 90,000 soldiers of the Army of the Potomac were now in position at Gettysburg, whereas Lee commanded at most seventy-five thousand—deployed not in concentration, but strung out along a wide encirclement on high ground and low.
At the southwest “tie-end” of the upside-down fishhook was the freshly arrived III Corps commanded by Major General Daniel Sickles. He occupied the critical position that morning. It was the left flank of the Army of the Potomac, the very end of the Union line. Head-to-head fighting is brutal, but if an enemy can hit you at the end of your line, bringing his front against your flank, he gains a virtually overwhelming advantage. He can bring a whole line of fire to bear upon a point from which you can offer but little resistance. It is like a classic battle at sea in which the skillful captain “crosses the T,” bringing the many guns of his broadside to bear upon the less-skilled captain’s bow or stern, two places nearly undefended.
The Union could not afford for Dant Sickles to falter. But he was not a career military man. Far from it, he had been a congressman who earned a sensationally seedy reputation for having left his pregnant wife in New York City to tour England with a prostitute. Later, when he discovered that the very wife he had humiliated was having an affair with Philip Barton Key, district attorney of the District of Columbia and the son of “Star-Spangled Banner” lyricist Francis Scott Key, Sickles shot him dead in broad daylight, in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House. (His attorney, future secretary of war Edwin M. Stanton, pleaded Sickles not guilty by reason of temporary insanity—the first time in US legal history that such a plea had ever been entered. He won.) With the outbreak of the Civil War, Sickles became one of Lincoln’s most unsavory “political generals,” as those appointed by reason of their political influence rather than for military expertise were called. Unlike most officers in this category, however, Sickles managed to compile a decent record of command in several major battles. Unfortunately, Gettysburg would not be among them.
For reasons that have never been made clear and without being ordered to do so by General Meade, Sickles made the perverse decision to lead III Corps out of its assigned anchor position at the end of the Union line by advancing over a half-mile west. This move not only isolated the corps, it laid bare the flank of just about the entire Union force assembled at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863.
For the Union, a tragedy was in the making—or should have been. But James Longstreet, commanding the Confederate force opposite Sickles, was so baffled by his movement out of line that, instead of seeing it as the blunder it was, he worried that it was a ruse meant to draw him into an enveloping attack. Instead of seizing the battle-winning, maybe war-winning, opportunity presented to him, Longstreet pondered and delayed, waiting until four in the afternoon before he finally decided to attack. He ordered his most aggressive division commander, Major General John Bell Hood, to hit III Corps in the “Peach Orchard,” where it was now positioned, northwest of the Round Tops. Sickles’s soldiers were forced to fall back toward Little Round Top, traversing a boulder-strewn patch of ground Hood’s soldiers came to call Devil’s Den because of the fierce fight that ensued there.
The Union line seemed destined to break at this place, but, shortly before Hood commenced his attack, the eye of Brigadier General Gouverneur K. Warren, chief engineer of the Army of the Potomac, took in something no one else seems to have noticed. Little Round Top, the rise of ground below the tie end of the Union fishhook, was vacant, unoccupied except for a few signalmen. To Warren, the sight signified only one thing: utter disaster. In a moment, he pictured the enemy charging up the undefended slope of the hill, concentrating forces on the high ground, and then charging down from it to crush the Union’s flank. If Hood could maintain the momentum of such a thrust, there would be nothing to stop him from rolling up the fishhook shaft. With that, Gettysburg would join Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville in the list of Lee’s victories over the Army of the Potomac.
Wasting no time, Warren sent a staff officer to Colonel Strong Vincent with orders that he lead a brigade to Little Round Top—now. Vincent did just that and was killed in resisting Hood’s advance, but his brigade bought just enough time for another brigade, under Brigadier General Stephen Weed, to get into position. At the extreme southern end of this brigade—and thus at the very end of the Army of the Potomac—was the 20th Maine Regiment, a battered unit wasted to half its original strength by continuous combat. Its remaining five hundred men—which included a number of captured deserters the regiment had been assigned to guard—were commanded by Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the Bowdoin College professor of rhetoric we briefly met in chapter 5. The severely depleted 20th Maine fell under attack by one of Longstreet’s Alabama regiments, fresh and at full strength. They charged Chamberlain’s men, who fought fiercely, refusing to yield an inch of Little Round Top.
But then word reached Chamberlain that his regiment’s ammunition was exhausted. In this circumstance, surrender loomed as the only option. Instead, Chamberlain gave the order to fix bayonets and counterattack. Charging downhill, his men so intimidated the Alabamans that the Southerners threw down their weapons and surrendered. Absent Chamberlain, the Battle of Gettysburg might have ended on July 2, 1863, with the collapse of the Army of the Potomac. His order to fight without ammunition was a bluff backed by extraordinary courage, and while it did not win the Battle of Gettysburg, it surely kept the Union from losing it. Combat would resume for a third day.
Pickett’s Charge
By afternoon of Day 3, it became clear that the momentum had shifted to the Union. Culp’s Hill, which had been contested on Day 2, was secured by the Union in the course of a bitter seven-hour fight. But Lee was convinced the battle as a whole could still be won. The first day had been his, and while he had failed to win the battle on Day 2, Lee had surely wearied and worn down the Union defenders. Their hold on the high ground, the Confederate commander believed, was tenuous. The Union position would fall to an overwhelming final assault.
Unsurprisingly, Longstreet disagreed. He warned Lee that Union forces now enjoyed superior numbers and, more importantly, they were fighting like men who had no intention of losing. The only counterargument Lee could summon was that far too much blood had been spilled to give up now. He therefore ordered—not, this time, merely requested—a massive infantry charge, essentially head on, across a wide-open field of fire, followed by an uphill assault.
“My heart was heavy,” Longstreet later wrote. “I could see the desperate and hopeless nature of the charge and the hopeless slaughter it would cause.”
The operation would later be immortalized as “Pickett’s Charge,” even though Major General George Pickett led but three of the nine brigades Lee committed to it. Generals James Johnston Pettigrew and Isaac Ridgeway Trimble led the other six, with three each. Against the ceaseless explosion of cannon and roar of musketry, the three generals and their subordinate commanders formed up their grand ranks—some 12,500 men in all, arrayed as if for a parade. They advanced from all along Seminary Ridge onto the mile of open field separating that ridge from the Union line on Cemetery Ridge to the east.
From Seminary Ridge, 150 Confederate Napoleons (field cannon) opened fire against Cemetery Ridge. Intended to soften Union resistance, the bombardment did nothing but elicit an intense return of artillery fire from Union gunners. Never before in the Civil War had there been such a cannon duel. It ended abruptly, however, at 1:45 when the Confederate guns fell silent, and nine brigades, 12,500 men, rank on gray rank, marched forward. The pace be
gan at a steady walk, even after the Union gunners trained their cannon onto the field. The impact of cannonballs and canister shot—not solid balls, but fragmentation shells intended to explode, sending shot and shrapnel in all directions—thinned the oncoming ranks, but did not change their direction or their pace. Those who survived to reach the foot of Cemetery Ridge raised, in unison, of the fabled “rebel yell” and broke into a trot.
More antipersonnel canister rounds poured down from Federal cannon lined up wheel to wheel. The plain below was transformed into a killing field, raked by jagged iron shards.
That night, after it was over and done, Pickett would write about it all to his fiancée: “Over on Cemetery Ridge the Federals beheld a scene which has never previously been enacted, an army forming in line of battle in full view,” he began.
Indeed, the Army of the Potomac men watched it form and then watched it advance, wave upon gray wave, which, like ocean waves in a storm, seemed to break in jagged lines as men fell first to the detonation of canister shot and then, as the waves became individual soldiers at closer approach, to the impact of Minié balls from thousands of Union rifle-muskets.
Yet no matter how many fell, the soldiers kept coming. It was, one Union man later recalled, “an overwhelming relentless tide of an ocean of armed men sweeping upon us! On the move, as with one soul in perfect order … magnificent, grim, irresistible.” Pickett himself wrote to his beloved: “My brave boys were so full of hope and confident of victory as I led them forth!” He wrote of how they charged “across a space nearly a mile in length, pride and glory soon to be crushed by an overwhelming heartbreak” and then abruptly broke off with, “Well, it is all over now. The awful rain of shot and shell was a sob—a gasp.”
Thanks to his letter, we know how Pickett felt. We can imagine his sleepless night, as he continued to hear in his fevered imagination his men “cheering as I gave the order, ‘Forward!’ the thrill of their joyous voices as they called out, ‘We’ll follow you, Marse George, we’ll follow you!’ On, how faithfully they followed me on—on—to their death, and I led them on—on—on—Oh God!”
We know all this because, of the three generals who led the charge, only Pickett was able to write about it that night. Armistead had been killed, and Pettigrew grievously wounded. The fifteen regimental commanders in the charge were all killed or wounded, and of the 12,500 soldiers who set out from Seminary Ridge, only five thousand returned from the assault on Cemetery Ridge. Perhaps 150 men, with Brigadier General Lewis Armistead at their head, actually managed to ascend Cemetery Ridge. They even planted the Confederate battle flag, which waved briefly amid the Federal soldiers until Armistead was cut down and the men with him killed or captured.
* * *
By destroying the brigades sent against them, the Union defenders of Cemetery Hill won the Battle of Gettysburg, the meaning of which President Abraham Lincoln did his best in the course of two incredible minutes to explain. A turning point, the battle pointed the war down a path by which the Union cause would ascend and the Confederate cause decline. Yet the blood sacrifice of so many in the attack on Cemetery Hill revealed that the soldiers of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia intended to make that downward path a very long and costly journey. The war was but half over.
7
November 4, 1864
Lincoln Wins Reelection
Why it’s significant. Abraham Lincoln ran for reelection in 1864 on a platform that included fighting the Civil War to absolute victory, which meant the unconditional surrender of the Confederacy and an end to slavery forever. Lincoln’s opponent, George B. McClellan, promised a negotiated peace that included abolition. The president feared that Northern war weariness would cost him reelection and preserve slavery forever. In the end, Union military triumphs in the run-up to the election returned Lincoln to office by a wide margin, and the war was fought to total victory.
IF MAJOR GENERAL George Brinton McClellan had something of a messiah complex—“The people call upon me to save the country,” he once wrote in a letter to his adoring wife, Ellen Mary Marcy—the Northern public and the press helped to plant it in him. They hailed him as the “Young Napoleon,” and even President Abraham Lincoln put his full confidence in him, challenging McClellan to build a war-winning Union army after the humiliating defeat of Irvin McDowell at the First Battle of Bull Run (July 21, 1861). At first, the adulation and faith seemed amply justified. McClellan transformed the undisciplined band of Sunday soldiers defeated at Bull Run into the Army of the Potomac, the largest, best-equipped, and best-trained military formation the United States had ever fielded.
Lincoln was grateful to McClellan, but the general did not reciprocate. On the contrary, he was among the many Americans at this time who had doubts about Lincoln. In a November 17, 1861 letter to Ellen, McClellan wrote of going “to the White House shortly after tea where I found ‘the original gorilla,’ about as intelligent as ever. What a specimen to be at the head of our affairs now!” It was a phrase he had picked up from Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s contentious secretary of war. Little wonder that it did not sit well with McClellan when President Lincoln began to goad and criticize him for his protracted delay in leading into battle the magnificent weapon he had forged. To a meeting of generals that did not include McClellan, an exasperated Lincoln remarked on January 10, 1862, “If General McClellan does not want to use the army, I would like to borrow it for a time.” In March, the Young Napoleon finally embarked on his Peninsula Campaign, the objective of which was the capture of Richmond. By July, however, the campaign had ended, without the Army of the Potomac having gotten anywhere near the Confederate capital.
The bad blood between the general and the president became more toxic when Lincoln detached and moved a large portion of McClellan’s Army of the Potomac north—minus McClellan—to join John Pope’s Army of Virginia. Unfortunately, what Pope did with the combined forces (about 51,000 men of the Army of Virginia and 26,000 from the Army of the Potomac) was even worse than what McClellan did (and failed to do) with the Army of the Potomac alone. Pope suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Robert E. Lee in the Second Battle of Bull Run (August 28–30, 1862). This gave Lee an opening to invade Maryland and prompted Lincoln, fresh out of options, to once more tap McClellan to lead the Army of the Potomac against Lee. To his wife, on September 5, the general wrote: “Again I have been called to save my country.”
McClellan did battle with Lee at Antietam, Maryland, on September 17, 1862—the single bloodiest day in US history. Although his army suffered horrific casualties there, McClellan did narrowly gain a strategic victory by forcing Lee to withdraw to Virginia (Chapter 4). Having achieved this, however, McClellan failed to pursue the retreating Army of Northern Virginia to its destruction. Lincoln traveled to Antietam to personally confront McClellan and urge him forward. To a friend who accompanied him on the journey, Lincoln pointed to the vast encampment of the Army of the Potomac and asked his companion if he knew what lay before them. “It is the Army of the Potomac,” the man answered. “So it is called,” President Lincoln replied, “but that is a mistake; it is only McClellan’s bodyguard.”
The meeting between the president and his general produced no action. On October 6, 1862, Lincoln wrote McClellan a letter ordering him to “cross the Potomac and give battle to the enemy.” By way of reply, McClellan did nothing. A week later, the president wrote another letter, demanding to know why he had failed to carry out his mission. This time, McClellan wrote a reply, explaining that his horses were worn out. Lincoln shot back: “I have just read your dispatch about sore-tongued and fatigued horses. Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the Battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?” It was not merely that President Lincoln had lost faith in McClellan, he had lost respect for him. On November 5, 1862, Lincoln relieved the Young Napoleon of command of the Army of the Potomac. Secretary of War Stanton ordered McClellan to Trenton, New Jersey, to await further orders. T
he general waited. The orders never arrived, and, while waiting, George B. McClellan accepted the Democratic nomination for president, resigning his commission on Election Day, November 8, 1864.
McClellan doubtless relished the prospect of dashing the reelection hopes of his nemesis in the White House. His contempt for Lincoln was personal—but his political opposition to Lincoln was also a matter of policy. McClellan was an outspoken and sincere advocate of an expeditiously negotiated end to the war and restoration of the Union. He saw the demand for the abolition of slavery as the chief obstacle to such a negotiation, and he therefore proposed to take abolition off the table. So compelling was McClellan’s desire for reconciliation between North and South that some historians attribute it to a deficiency of aggression in his martial make-up. When he actually ran for president, however, McClellan felt compelled to repudiate the platform of his own Democratic Party, which called for an immediate end to the war to be followed by a negotiated settlement with “the Confederacy.” End now, negotiate later? This implied, first and foremost, the legitimacy of the Confederacy and, second, the very real possibility that the war would end without restoring the Union. McClellan could not step this far into conciliation. While he wanted to negotiate and was quite willing to take abolition off the table, he insisted on restoring the Union before declaring the war to be at an end. At odds with his own party, McClellan conducted a political campaign marked by an inconsistency that failed to win votes.
Yet Abraham Lincoln was far from confident that the people would reelect him. After all, he had so far failed to win the war, a war that was claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. Without question, war weariness spread throughout the North, and many of Lincoln’s fellow Republicans shared the president’s doubts. Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy, a Kansas Republican, wrote an open letter, widely published in newspapers in the North and South, arguing that Lincoln could not win reelection and that Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury at the time, would make a more viable Republican nominee. In August of 1864, Thurlow Weed, a newspaper publisher who was a political advisor to Secretary of State William H. Seward, told Seward that Lincoln’s “re-election was an impossibility” because “the People are wild for Peace” and yet “are told that the President will only listen to terms of Peace on condition Slavery be ‘abandoned.’” Others in the Republican fold urged President Lincoln to offer the South peace on the sole condition that the Constitution be acknowledged as final and supreme. This would provide a basis for ending the war and restoring the Union—while also protecting slavery.