Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

James Longstreet, in short, was made a convert to a new faith. What Lee confided to him was a plan to march north through Maryland and into Pennsylvania, and Old Pete declared himself enthusiastically in favor of the idea. “If we could cross the Potomac with one hundred & fifty thousand men,” he speculated to Senator Wigfall, it should at least bring Lincoln to the bargaining table; “either destroy the Yankees or bring them to terms.” He closed his letter with the observation that in a day or two Lee would be in Richmond “to settle matters. . . . I shall ask him to take a memorandum of all points and settle upon something at once.”12 “We should assume the aggressive,” Lee had written Mr. Davis just a month earlier.

However he made the case, nothing in Lee’s correspondence or recollections suggests that he raised any hopes among his listeners that by marching into Pennsylvania he would pry Grant loose from Vicksburg.

Soon enough these rumors acquired a certain weight when a small party of Albert Jenkins’s Virginia cavalrymen slipped across the Pennsylvania line and briefly occupied Chambersburg. The roads became choked with dusty columns of refugees, many of them runaway slaves and free blacks trying to evade these outriders of slavery. Those who did not flee quickly enough were ridden down and rounded up by Jenkins’s troopers. Some fifty blacks were formed into a coffle and marched south to be sold into bondage.

Should it indeed be Lee’s intention to march north on either a raid or an invasion, Hooker had told the president on June 10, and if he were permitted “to operate from my own judgment,” he would seize this opportunity to strike at Richmond—“the most speedy and certain mode of giving the rebellion a mortal blow.” According to Hooker’s information, hardly more than a provost guard now defended the Confederate capital. He argued that in case Lee should attempt a counterstroke against Washington, the garrison there could hold the fortifications long enough for “all the disposable part” of his army to “be thrown to any threatened point north of the Potomac at short notice. . . . ” It was an intriguing proposal, and if executed with the sort of imaginative planning that Hooker had employed in the opening of his Chancellorsville campaign, it would almost certainly have forced Lee to cancel his Pennsylvania incursion. President Davis was as sensitive about Richmond’s safety as President Lincoln was about Washington’s; surely Davis would summon Lee to the rescue the moment a Yankee army appeared before the gates of Richmond. As it happened, however, it was the sensitivity about Washington that decided the question. Within ninety minutes of receiving Hooker’s telegram, the president quashed the idea. “I would not go South of the Rappahannock, upon Lee’s moving North of it,” the commander-in-chief told his general. “I think Lee’s Army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point.”...

Slave-catching, whether or not it was officially sanctioned, was without question widely and officially tolerated. Three days later, Longstreet’s adjutant, in a dispatch to General Pickett, made note that “The captured contrabands had better be brought along with you for further disposition.” The number of free or fugitive blacks condemned to slavery during these weeks can only be estimated, but widespread testimony suggests that it was in the hundreds. Of various ugly incidents stemming from Lee’s Pennsylvania invasion, this was surely the ugliest.28

General Howard, receiving this message at the head of his column on the Emmitsburg Road, ordered his corps to speed up its march and then hurried ahead himself to Gettysburg. His first act, in obedience to Reynolds’s order, was to reconnoiter Cemetery Hill. “This, Colonel, seems to be the military position,” he told his chief of staff, Charles Asmussen. “Yes, General,” Asmussen observed, “this is the only position.” Both Buford and Reynolds had earlier recognized that fact; now Howard was committed to holding the high ground with the Eleventh Corps.

Joshua Chamberlain also took a decision, one he (like William Oates) believed to be inevitable. His men around him were displaying empty cartridge boxes; his line, he thought, was thinned far beyond the point of holding off another charge. At the foot of the slope in front of him he saw the “hostile line now rallying in the low shrubbery for a new onset.” All Chamberlain could think to do now to meet his orders to hold the position “at all costs” was to launch a charge of his own, to surprise and break up the Rebels before they could form for another attack. Just then Lieutenant Holman Melcher, commanding Company F at the center of the line, came to Chamberlain with a plea to let him advance his company to rescue some wounded comrades trapped between the lines. “Yes, sir, in a moment!” said Chamberlain. “I am about to order a charge!” His order “Fix bayonets!” ran swiftly along the line. Lieutenant Melcher returned to his company and immediately led it forward, along with the regimental colors. With a shout the right half of the 20th Maine charged down the slope. The order to charge had not reached the left wing before the right started forward, but Captain Ellis Spear, commanding on the left, saw the colors advancing and quickly seized the moment. “The left took up the shout and moved forward,” Spear recalled; “. . . every man eager not to be left behind, the whole line flung itself down the slope through the fire and smoke upon the enemy.” The effect was stunning, as exp...

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Lee’s battle plan for Day Three, as he conceived it that Thursday evening, is how barren and uninformed it was. There is no knowing what Longstreet’s and Ewell’s couriers may have said to Lee about the July 2 fighting, but they were surely poor substitutes for personal accounts delivered by the two generals themselves. It is thus astonishing how little General Lee knew of his own army, of the enemy’s army, and of the battlefield when he announced that his general battle plan was unchanged and that the attack would continue.

It was now plain to all that Lee intended an infantry assault on the center, and Major Osborn thought that should be encouraged. So did the general commanding. General Meade had just visited Cemetery Hill, said Osborn, and “expressed the hope that the enemy would attack, and he had no fear of the result.” Osborn suggested that the artillery cease fire all along the line, to lure Lee into thinking his bombardment was successful and thus be persuaded to send in his infantry.

The Yankee artillerists utilized three types of ammunition in this long-range fire. The smoothbore Napoleons fired solid shot with a deliberately low trajectory that, skipping and bounding into the flank of a column of marching men, was as demoralizing as it was destructive; in its random, very visible course one of these 12-pound iron balls might knock down an entire file of men. The rifled pieces fired primarily either percussion shells, exploding on contact, or fuzed case shot, exploding overhead and raining down shrapnel on the marchers. In enfilading fire all that was required was aim; against these long ranks of marching men a decently aimed shot simply could not miss. And unlike the Rebels’ ammunition, exceedingly few Federal shots were misfires due to faulty fuzes.

Yankee farm boys described the enemy as falling before them like ripe grain before the sickle or the scythe—similes of unsparing accuracy. Afterward an industrious observer examined the board fence along the eastern edge of the Emmitsburg Road. One board, he wrote, “was indeed a curiosity. It was sixteen feet long, fourteen inches broad, and was perforated with eight hundred and thirty-six musket balls.”

own skirmish line and his horse artillery was exchanging shots with the Confederate gunners. Twenty-three-year-old George Custer, West Point ’61, youngest brigadier in the Potomac army, was dressed for battle in a sailor’s blouse with silver stars on its wide collar points, red cravat, black velveteen hussar’s jacket spangled with gold braid, olive corduroy pants, gleaming jackboots, and wide-brimmed felt hat. It was said he looked “like a circus rider gone mad.” Yet for all the gaudy trappings, George Custer always led his Michigan troopers by example and always from out front.3

Finally the failing Southern troopers, on their failing horses, assailed it must have seemed from every direction, began to break off and turn back. The Yankees were too shattered themselves to mount a serious pursuit. Having played his last card, Stuart broke off the action. In this cavalry battle royal the Federals would record a loss of 254 men, 219 of them in Custer’s Michigan brigade. The Confederates’ loss came to 181. The fighting had lasted perhaps forty minutes. Tactically it was a draw, but certainly Stuart, by being halted in all his ambitions for the day, was the loser. The victor, David Gregg, summed it up: “General Stuart had in view the accomplishment of certain purposes. . . . His was to do, ours to prevent. Could he have reached the rear of our army . . . disastrous consequences might have resulted.”

Thoughts of an immediate counterattack—a classic ploy among military theorists—were already on Meade’s mind. He soon recognized, however, that the Sixth and Fifth corps were not “pressed up” to launch an attack, nor could they be before dark. In Meade’s commitment to the defensive on Day Three, he had allowed no provision for an offensive—or a counteroffensive. No substantial force was massed and ready to advance. Sedgwick’s Sixth Corps, largest in the army, unengaged on the first two days, was scattered from one end of the battlefield to the other to patch holes from the earlier Confederate attacks. Sykes’s Fifth Corps, spread along the army’s left, had seen two of its three divisions severely battered on Day Two and was hardly prepared to spearhead an assault. Skirmishers were sent out “to feel the enemy,” but, said Meade, events conspired to make it “so late in the evening as to induce me to abandon the assault which I had contemplated.”

To be sure, had George Meade possessed the unerring prescience to know beyond any doubt that Lee would attack his center on July 3; and had he therefore massed the entire Sixth Corps under Sedgwick just behind Cemetery Ridge; and had he sent Sedgwick rushing forward right on the heels of Pickett’s and Pettigrew’s and Trimble’s retreating troops; and had such doughty fighters as James Longstreet and A. P. Hill been too stunned to react—perhaps then Lee’s army might have been split asunder. Yet neither Meade nor his generals would or could have advocated such a gamble. (When Hancock later said, “I think that our lines should have advanced immediately, and I believe we should have won a great victory,” he conveniently forgot his July 2 vote for the army to stand on the defensive.) The fact of the matter was that Meade sensed Lee would welcome a counterattack, and he refused to oblige him. “I knew he was in a strong position, awaiting my attack,” Meade told General William F. Smith on July 5, “which I declined to make, in consequence of the bad example he had set. . . . ”8

he seemed only to trust Stuart to bring him usable intelligence. As a consequence, when the Confederates stumbled into battle on July 1, they not only knew nothing of the opposing army but nothing of the battlefield either. Lee was guilty of mishandling his cavalry during the campaign, but Jeb Stuart’s failing was the more grave. His lack of reconnaissance deprived Lee of one of the cornerstones on which his campaign was based—the choice of battlefield.

In the final analysis, it was Robert E. Lee’s inability to manage his generals that went to the heart of the failed campaign.

The fact of the matter is that George G. Meade, unexpectedly and against the odds, thoroughly outgeneraled Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg.