Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg

by James M. McPherson

  Not to be outdone, Mississippians have entered the fray. Under pressure from Senator Trent Lott of that state, the Park Service in 1998 allowed a monument to the Eleventh Mississippi to be placed about two hundred yards north of, and as close to the Union lines as, that of the Twenty-sixth North Carolina. The Eleventh Mississippi was a notable regiment. Most of its companies were composed of rough-hewn backwoodsmen, famous for their marksmanship. But all of the soldiers in Company A were University of Mississippi students who enlisted as a body in 1861—the University Greys. They later earned literary fame through the medium of William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! On July 3, 1863, a baker's dozen of the Eleventh did get as far as the place where their monument now stands. But what the tablet on the monument does not say is that when the lieutenant commanding this contingent looked back for the rest of the regiment, he was dismayed to see it running to the rear “in full disorder, at the distance of about one hundred & fifty yards from us.” Having no choice, the lieutenant hoisted a white flag and surrendered to the Yankees of the 111 th New York.

  These controversies about who got the farthest would be amusing if Confederate heritage groups did not take the matter so seriously. Pickett's Charge— excuse me, the Pickett-Pettigrew assault—is viewed not only as the Confederacy's high-water mark, but also as one of the most courageous and praiseworthy events in military history. For decades the hearts of surviving veterans swelled with pride when they recounted their deeds in that attack. Southern honor knew no finer hour. I have always been struck by the contrast between this image and that of the Army of the Potomac's frontal assault against Confederate lines at Cold Harbor exactly eleven months later. In that attack, ordered by Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, fifty thousand Union soldiers suffered seven thousand casualties, most of them in less than half an hour. For this mistake, which he admitted, Grant has been branded a “butcher” careless of the lives of his men, and Cold Harbor has become a symbol of mule-headed futility. At Gettysburg, Lee's men also sustained almost seven thousand casualties in the Pickett-Pettigrew assault, most of them also within a half hour. Yet this attack is perceived as an example of great courage and honor. This contrast speaks volumes about the comparative images of Grant and Lee, North and South, Union and Confederacy.

  The Eleventh Mississippi monument stands close to the Brian house and barn. One of the park's markers spells the name as Bryan; the other, a few feet away, as Brian. Perhaps the Park Service agrees with Andrew Jackson, a notorious misspeller, who said that he could not respect any man who knew only one way to spell a word. In any case, Abraham Brian's twelve-acre farm was right smack in the middle of the fighting on July 3. Shells tore holes in his roof; bullets broke his windows; soldiers trampled his crops. But Brian/Bryan was not there to see it. Like many of the other 474 African-Americans in Adams County— 190 of them living in the town of Gettysburg—he had fled north with his family to put the Susquehanna River between them and the Confederates.

  These black people had good reason to flee. Although most of them, including Brian and another black farmer who lived on the battlefield, James Warfield, had always been free, some were former slaves who had escaped from Maryland or Virginia. In the previous Confederate invasion of Union territory, in September 1862, Southern cavalry had made little distinction between free blacks and escaped slaves, driving dozens of them back to Virginia and slavery. They were doing the same thing again in Pennsylvania. In Chambersburg, two local residents wrote in their diaries that when Confederates entered the town in June, “one of the revolting features of this day was the scouring of the fields about the town and searching of houses in portions of the place for Negroes.” “O! How it grated on our hearts to have to sit quietly & look at such brutal deeds—I saw no men among the contrabands—all women and children. Some of the colored people who were raised here were taken along.”

  The Chambersburg newspaper estimated that the Rebels sent at least fifty local blacks back to Virginia. A diarist raised the estimate to 250 from Franklin County. Blacks in Gettysburg had plenty of warning, and cleared out. Some never returned. Abraham Brian did return. He repaired his house and tided his family over until the next season by exhuming the bodies of Union soldiers at a dollar each for reinterment in the soldiers’ cemetery dedicated in November. Brian submitted a claim of more than a thousand dollars to the federal government for damages to his farm. He received forty-five dollars.

  As the walking wounded and unwounded survivors of the Pickett-Pettigrew attack reached their own lines, they found Lee and Longstreet working vigorously to patch together a defense against an expected counterattack. “General Pickett,” said Lee to a slumped figure from whom all thoughts of glory had fled, “place your division in the rear of this hill, and be ready to repel the advance of the enemy should they follow up their advantage.” “General Lee,” replied Pickett despairingly, “I have no division now.” According to later recollections by Confederate soldiers, Lee rode among his men to buck up their spirits. “It's all my fault,” he reportedly said. “It is I who have lost this fight, and you must help me out of it the best way you can. All good men must rally.”

  Rally they did, after a fashion. But Meade did not order a counterattack. It was not for lack of urging by at least some of his subordinates, including Hancock. Wounded at the height of the action by a bullet that drove a bent nail from his saddle into his thigh, Hancock—misinterpreting the source of the nail—said, “They must be hard up for ammunition if they throw such a shot as that.”

  The Confederates were short of artillery ammunition. And they had lost at least 23,000—perhaps as many as 28,000—killed, wounded, and captured men during these three days. But Meade, who knew that his own army had been hurt—23,000 casualties altogether—could not know just how badly off his adversary was. The Union commander's failure to follow up his victory with a counterthrust during the nearly four hours of remaining daylight on July 3 provoked criticism at the time and through the years. He had kept the 13,000 fresh troops of the Sixth Corps in reserve; most of them had not fired a shot in the battle. Eight thousand of them were on alert a mile south of the area where the heaviest fighting took place, but Meade had not sent word for them to deploy, nor did he do so after the Confederates were repulsed.

  Meade has his defenders, however. They point out that a heavy load of responsibility weighed on his shoulders. He had been in command for only six days, three of them fighting for his army's survival. Could he jeopardize his victory by risking a counterattack against an enemy that still had sharp teeth and might bite back as hard as it had been bitten? “We have done well enough,” said Meade to a cavalry officer eager to do more. Meade later explained that he did not want to follow “the bad example [Lee] had set me, in ruining himself attacking a strong position.”

  Out on the Union left flank more than two miles south of Meade's headquarters, however, one Union officer anticipated an order for a counterattack. He was Brigadier General Judson Kilpatrick, commander of a Union cavalry division. Learning at about 5:00 P.M. of the repulse of the Pickett-Pettigrew assault, Kilpatrick ordered a combined mounted and dismounted attack by two brigades against the Confederate right flank west of the Round Tops. Unsupported by infantry, this attack was a bloody fiasco. From a point near the monument to Major William Wells of the First Vermont Cavalry on South Confederate Avenue, we can view the scenes of the mounted attack through the fields of the Slyder farm. Before the Park Service cleared out twenty-seven acres of woods west of the Slyder farmhouse that were not there in 1863, and before a hundred-acre woodlot south of the road was culled, it was impossible to visualize how cavalry could operate in this area. Now, happily, we can understand the tactics of Kilpatrick's attack—faulty and foolhardy though it proved to be.

  Next day—the Fourth of July—Union infantry from the Fifth and Sixth Corps moved out from the vicinity of the Round Tops to probe Confederate positions in that area. Was this the beginning of a Union counterattack? Impossible to say, for in late
morning a drenching rain began to fall and continued intermittently for several days, bringing operations to a halt. Lee had already decided to retreat, and that evening his army started to pull out and head for Virginia. The rain hindered both the retreat and Meade's snaillike pursuit.

  Heavy rain fell after several Civil War battles. A widespread theory at the time held that the thunder of artillery somehow caused clouds to let loose their own thunder and moisture. I am unable to say whether this theory holds water.

  Epilogue

  THE CONFEDERATE RETREAT from Gettysburg turned into a nightmare. An ambulance train several miles long jounced over rutted roads and bogged down axle-deep in mud, causing untold agony for the ten thousand wounded men that the Army of Northern Virginia managed to take along on the retreat. They had to leave behind at least seven thousand wounded to be treated by Union surgeons, who had their hands full with fourteen thousand Union wounded. As well as farmhouses and barns on the battlefield, virtually every public building and many homes in town became hospitals. The medical corps set up numerous tent hospitals as well. Hundreds of volunteers flocked to Gettysburg to help care for the wounded. Burial details hastily interred more than three thousand dead Union soldiers and many of the almost four thousand dead Confederates. Four thousand of the wounded, about evenly divided between the two sides, subsequently died of their wounds. Five thousand dead horses were doused with coal oil and burned. For months the stench of hospitals, and of corpses unburied or buried in shallow graves, hung over the town and countryside.

  Meanwhile the Army of the Potomac, prodded by President Lincoln and General-in-Chief Halleck, plodded through the mud in pursuit of Lee. Union cavalry captured the Confederate wagon train carrying the pontoons necessary to bridge the Potomac. Swollen by rain, the river was unfordable. Lincoln urged Meade to attack the Rebels while they were trapped north of the Potomac. Lee fortified a defensive perimeter at Williamsport, Maryland (forty miles southwest of Gettysburg), with both flanks on the river. There he awaited attack while his engineer corps frantically tore down buildings to construct a new set of pontoons to bridge the raging Potomac.

  When news reached Washington of Vicksburg's surrender to Grant on the Fourth of July, and of other Union victories in Tennessee and Louisiana, Lincoln was jubilant. “If General Meade can complete his work by the literal or substantial destruction of Lee's army,” said the Union president on July 7, “the rebellion will be over.” Lincoln hovered around the War Department telegraph office “anxious and impatient” for news from Meade. But the Union commander and his men were exhausted from lack of sleep and endless slogging through quagmires called roads. The Confederate earthworks at Williamsport were formidable, even though Lee had only 45,000 tired men to defend them while reinforcements had brought Meade's strength back up to 85,000. Meade's famous temper grew short as messages from Halleck pressed him to attack. Lincoln's temper also grew short. When Meade finally telegraphed on July 12 that he intended “to attack them tomorrow, unless something intervenes,” Lincoln commented acidly, “They will be ready to fight a magnificent battle when there is no enemy to fight.”

  Events proved Lincoln right. Meade delayed another day, and when the Army of the Potomac went forward on July 14 they found nothing but a rear guard. The dropping river had enabled the enemy to vanish across a patched-together bridge and a nearby ford during the night. “Great God!” exclaimed Lincoln when he heard this news. “We had them in our grasp. We had only to stretch forth our hands and they were ours. Our army held the war in the hollow of their hand and would not close it.”

  Lincoln may have been right about that—or he may not have been. A Union assault might have succeeded—with heavy casualties—or it might not have. In either case, destruction of Lee's veteran army was far from a certainty. When Meade learned of Lincoln's dissatisfaction, he offered his resignation. This was a serious matter. Despite his caution and slowness, Meade had won public acclaim for his victory at Gettysburg. Lincoln could hardly afford to fire him two weeks after the battle. So he refused to accept the resignation, and sat down to write Meade a soothing letter.

  As the president's pen scratched across the paper, however, the letter became anything but soothing. Gettysburg was a “magnificent success” for which Lincoln was “very—very—grateful to you.” But, “my dear General,” the president continued, “I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee's escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.” As Lincoln reread these words, he realized that the letter would scarcely mollify Meade's feelings. So he filed it away in his papers and never sent it.

  The war did continue for another twenty-one months. Whether it would have ended if Meade had “closed upon” Lee at Williamsport is anybody's guess. In any event, people in the North immediately saw Gettysburg as a turning point in their favor. “VICTORY! WATERLOO ECLIPSED!” blazoned the headline in a Philadelphia newspaper. In New York a lawyer wrote in his diary that “the results of this victory are priceless. The charm of Robert Lee's invincibility is broken. The Army of the Potomac has at last found a general that can handle it, and has stood nobly up to its terrible work in spite of its long disheartening list of hard-fought failures. Copperheads are palsied and dumb for the moment at least. Government is strengthened four-fold at home and abroad.”

  In London the news of Gettysburg and Vicksburg drove the final nail into the coffin of Confederate hopes for European diplomatic recognition. “The disasters of the rebels are unredeemed by even any hope of success,” wrote young Henry Adams from London, where he was secretary to his father, the American minister to the Court of St. James. “It is now conceded that all idea of [British] intervention is at an end.”

  Some southerners also recognized the pivotal importance of Gettysburg. “The news from Lee's army is appalling,” wrote Confederate War Department clerk John B. Jones in his diary on July 9. “This is the darkest day of the war.” The fire-eating Virginia secessionist Edmund Ruffin “never before felt so despondent as to our struggle.” Confederate Ordnance Chief Josiah Gorgas, who had performed miracles to keep Southern armies supplied with weapons and ammunition, wrote in his diary at the end of July 1863: “Events have succeeded one another with disastrous rapidity. One brief month ago we were apparently at the point of success. Lee was in Pennsylvania, threatening Harrisburg, and even Philadelphia. Vicks-burg seemed to laugh all Grant's efforts to scorn.… It seems incredible that human power could effect such a change in so brief a space. Yesterday we rode on the pinnacle of success—today absolute ruin seems to be our portion.”

  By this time Lincoln had recovered his spirits. In early August his private secretary wrote that the president “is in fine whack. I have seldom seen him so serene.” In addition to other Union military successes that took place in the latter half of 1863, the administration's emancipation policy gained broader support in the North. The Union army began organizing black regiments composed mainly of former slaves. They acquitted themselves well in minor battles during 1863. The off-year state elections of 1863, especially in the key states of Pennsylvania and Ohio, were shaping up as a sort of referendum on the Emancipation Proclamation. Republicans won impressive victories in those elections. If the Emancipation Proclamation had been submitted to a referendum a year earlier, commented an Illinois newspaper in November, “there is little doubt that the voice of a majority would have been against it. And not a year has passed before it is approved by an overwhelming majority.” A New Yorker noted that “the change of opinion on this slavery question since 1860 is a great historical fact. God pardon our blindness of three years ago.”

  No single event did more to change the Northern mood than the victory at Gettysburg. It was appropriate, therefore, that Lincoln should offer the most profound and eloquent statement
there on the meaning of this new birth of freedom.

  Soon after the battle, David Wills, a Gettysburg lawyer, proposed to Governor Andrew Curtin of Pennsylvania the establishment of a soldiers’ cemetery where the Union dead could be reburied with dignity and honor. Curtin contacted the governors of other Northern states whose soldiers had died at Gettysburg. They all thought it was a splendid idea. The project went forward, and became the model for reinterment of Union war dead in two dozen national cemeteries during and after the war. (Many Confederate dead were reburied in Confederate cemeteries throughout the South.) The dedication of the soldiers’ cemetery at Gettysburg, adjacent to the local burial ground where some of the fighting had taken place, occurred on November 19, 1863.

  Let us conclude our walk by proceeding to this most hallowed of ground, where some 3,577 Union soldiers (half of them unknown) from eighteen states are buried. None of them was from Kentucky. But at the spot where Lincoln was long thought to have stood to deliver his “few appropriate remarks,” Kentucky erected a modest marker to her native son, enshrining in bronze the 272 words of the address Lincoln delivered that day. (The actual spot was probably thirty yards to the south, but it hardly matters.) Edward Everett, the main orator of the occasion, penned Lincoln a note next day: “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”