American Scoundrel (41 page)

In between official duties downtown, Dan rested at Bloomingdale with Teresa and Laura. For the devoted Teresa, this period was a gala spring, as a shirt-sleeved, thinned-down, convalescent Dan rowed his wife and daughter across the mouth of Striker’s Bay on the broad and tranquil Hudson. He found, however, for the first time that Laura did not take him entirely on trust, even though she was frequently taken in by his habitual charm and fascinated by his aides and the sentries on the road above the house.

Teresa was familiar, from reading and speaking to a limited range of friends, with the phenomenon of other heroes, physically wounded or not, coming home from the battles with a baffling reticence and darkness. Wives felt they no longer recognized their husbands. Mysterious angers rose in some veterans, and those who had been peaceable threw unexpected punches. The city was full of fellows who had been on the Peninsula or at Antietam who needed to anesthetize themselves to sleep by sniffing from a can of ether or placing an ether-soaked wad over their faces. But Dan seemed to be the same Dan, and when he was with Teresa, he gave her his full and intense attention, perhaps even sexually. A physical imperfection marred her. She had a cough, a low but persistent fever, and joint pain. He noticed that she took many patent nostrums for the cough.

At the end of his leave, Dan was eager to return to the world he understood, and he caught up with the army at Frederick in Maryland, west of Washington, on the morning of June 28, the very day Hooker was dismissed by Lincoln. Hooker had been for some weeks exaggerating the numbers of the invading enemy as a reason for his excessive caution. Like Meagher, Hooker now offered his resignation, confident that it would not be accepted by the President. It was.

To Dan, Hooker’s removal was “a misfortune for the army,” but it
was one for him too, because the axis of Hooker, Dan Butterfield, and Sickles had been broken. The new commander of the Army of the Potomac was George Meade, a sober Christian and a West Pointer with a bias against men like Sickles and Butterfield. Meade was full of self-doubt, however, and decided to deploy most of his army, including Dan’s corps, along the pleasant banks of Pipe Creek in northern Maryland, within a walk of the Pennsylvania border, and then send some infantry and cavalry into Pennsylvania to find out where Lee was. Meade was not happy with the progress Dan had made in getting his twelve thousand men up from Frederick to Pipe Creek. “I am directed by the Commanding General,” wrote the assistant adjutant general, “to inform you that the train of your corps is at a stand-still at Middleburg, and delaying, of course, all movements in the rear. He wishes you to give your immediate and personal attention to keeping your train in motion.”

On June 30 there came another chafing reprimand about the slow movement of Dan’s corps. That evening Dan made his headquarters in a farmhouse to the east of Emmitsburg, Maryland, a brief walk from the Pennsylvania border. He saw his divisional and brigade commanders by lamplight as his men camped in the fields around. Northern farmers’ wives came out to the meadows to offer the men flour, fresh bread, and delicacies, a new experience for the troops, since they were now fighting among their own people. The van of the Union Army, represented by John Reynolds’s First Corps and John Buford’s cavalry, was ten miles to the north in a town named Gettysburg, and Reynolds had been placed in charge of the whole left wing of the army, to which Dan’s Third Corps belonged. So on the morning of July 1, Dan told Major Harry Tremain to ride off and find Reynolds in Gettysburg and receive orders from him. When Tremain tracked down Reynolds near a theological seminary to the west of Gettysburg, a battle had already begun just down the road. Reynolds said, “Tell General Sickles I think he had better come up.”
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When Tremain got back with the message, Dan would later say, he spent an anxious hour deciding what to do, given that Meade had told him to hold his position at Emmitsburg at all hazards. But no enemy
was near. He sent another courier off to Reynolds and waited at the farmhouse, chewing his cigar in his usual manner. In early afternoon the courier galloped up to the farmhouse and handed Sickles an eloquent note. “General Reynolds is killed. For God’s sake come up—Howard.” General Reynolds had been fatally shot through the head, and Oliver Howard, not an admirer of Dan’s but trying to hold the town of Gettysburg, had to call on the New York sybarite for help. Being, as Joe Hooker said, “always taken up with Sunday schools and the temperance movement,” Howard was of a theological bent, and Dan knew he did not invoke God’s name lightly. Thus Dan Sickles sent his lead division up the Emmitsburg Road a little after three in the afternoon, and rode with them toward the supreme encounter of his life other than the one that had occurred four years past in Lafayette Square.

In a warm and sultry afternoon, the men enjoyed the countryside of gentle downland and the geniality of the people they passed, who cheered them from behind their fences and porches. That evening, Dan and Tremain, riding ahead, met up with Howard in the twilight near the cemetery just south of Gettysburg, the graveyard that gave its name to Cemetery Ridge, bound now to be a Union strongpoint. In a furious affray of less than two hours, the Confederates had driven Howard’s men out of Gettysburg, and the forces of the Union were massed in this cemetery area, along the ridge beside the very road on which Dan’s corps had advanced. Sickles could tell, when he arrived, how the presence of the Third Corps lifted the spirits of Howard and his men, and of the other corps up on Cemetery Ridge, commanded temporarily by the supposed inventor of baseball, General Abner Doubleday.

After riding around the position on the ridge with one-armed General Howard, Sickles sent off an enthusiastic note to Meade, urging him to concentrate his troops at Gettysburg, because “it is a good battlefield for us, although weak in the left flank.” By that, Dan meant that the farther one got from the cemetery, the lower the ridge. It might help readers to imagine the Union position as a fishhook stood on end. Just a little way north of the bend of the hook was Gettysburg. The bend and some of the shank ran along a ridge connecting hills, modest geographic features
that would soon have international fame: Rock Creek up to Culp’s Hill and on to Cemetery Hill and southward along Cemetery Ridge, ending just before two hills of varying size, Little Roundtop and Big Roundtop. But much of the southern end of this ridge was lower than the rest. Late that night, godly Meade turned up at a farmhouse near the cemetery, worn by an anxiety the confident Dan did not share. Weighing on Meade was the same consideration that had unmanned Hooker: if he committed his troops to fight here, and it turned out to be the wrong choice, the Union itself would be lost.

Dan’s men had taken a position on the lower end of Cemetery Ridge, ending their informal line on low ground below Little Roundtop. Along this line they had camped and rested overnight. Whatever nightmares would haunt the survivors of the coming day, for the moment the men displayed the extraordinary composure of veterans. They knew all the old soldiers’ saws, including the one about its taking a man’s weight in lead to kill him. Of two lines firing frenetically at each other, said the veterans, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the only thing killed was the powder. It was not infrequent that a whole line of the enemy would fire upon a Union line without doing perceptible damage. Artillery, however, altered that proposition.
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This Sunday was to be a supreme day for the Union. Although Gettysburg would be fought over three days, July 2 came to be the day the issue was decided, the day of crucial strategies. At eight o’clock in the morning in his bivouac, Dan was snatching sleep after being up the entire night when one of Meade’s aides, Meade’s own son, arrived to see how Sickles’s corps was lining out. Roused, Dan told the aide that he was about to post his men, but he did not know where he should go, given that this end of the ridge was so low—“a hole,” in fact, as he told the young man—and a higher ridge existed a little ahead of him by the road. Dan feared it would be a case of Hazel Grove and Chancellorsville all over again. If the Confederates took the higher ridge ahead along the Emmitsburg Road, and in a peach orchard and wheatfield that could be seen from here, they would be able to destroy his men with artillery. Young Captain Meade rode back to his father and returned soon to tell
Dan not to take that higher ground ahead; instead, he was to extend his line along this lower ground in line with General Hancock’s Second Corps. Sickles sent a message to Meade that his men would shortly be in position there.

The more Dan looked at it, though, the more he believed his line unsatisfactory. He was in a slough. To abandon the ridge ahead and the road to the enemy would be unpardonable. The force at his disposal was 11,898 men, “insufficient to hold the line along Cemetery Ridge to Roundtop and defend that height, which was obviously the key to our position.” He had scouts out, particularly reconnoitering off to his left, in the screen of woods beyond the Emmitsburg Road, where anything might be happening. Cavalry came back to tell him that there were considerable enemy forces hidden over there to his front. Colonel Berdan’s Sharpshooters and the 4th Maine went across the peach orchard, over the Emmitsburg Road, and into the woods on the far side. Near a farmhouse on the road, a barefoot boy came up to them and said, “Watch out, there are lots of Rebels in there, in rows.”
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In view of all this, Dan sent his aides riding to headquarters again and again through the morning, reporting the situation and pleading to be allowed to take the higher ground. He seemed more frustrated than afraid, nor—unlike other generals on the edge of a murderous field— did he write a final letter to his wife or express torment at the idea of his soon-to-be, perhaps, fatherless child. Nostalgia did not delay the concentration of his intellect or will a second. At eleven o’clock, not having received any answers, he rode to Meade’s headquarters, situated at a farmhouse near the cemetery.

Meade and Sickles disliked each other and were at temperamental poles. Now, according to Dan, he asked General Meade to come with him and reconnoiter the ground, but Meade dismissively said he was too busy. So Dan requested the chief engineer and the staff artillery officer to visit the ground, and, before he left, asked Meade whether he could dispose his corps according to his own judgment. Meade replied, “Certainly, within the limits of the general instructions I have given to you.”

Hunt, the staff artillery officer, and Sickles rode over Dan’s part of
the field, from the swale and swamp of what Dan considered the hole between Cemetery Ridge and Roundtop and, above all, to the ground ahead, the ridge along the Emmitsburg Road that Dan wanted to occupy. Hunt too liked the advanced ground along the road. It bent nicely at a lane by the peach orchard, and the corps’ line of men could be anchored at a clump of rocks named Devil’s Den. Hunt pointed out where artillery could be placed to defend the ground by the road, dependent on General Meade’s permission.

Dan waited an hour after the staff artillery chief left. No orders came. The troops were “anxious to profit by all the advantages of the ground,” and started knocking down any fences between them and the Emmitsburg Road. Over in the direction of the peach orchard there were frequent exchanges of fire between hidden Confederates and Union pickets. Sickles would later plead his case in plain and economic language: “Impossible to wait longer without giving the enemy serious advantages in his attack, I advanced my line toward the highest ground to my front, occupying the Emmitsburg Road at the very point where Longstreet hoped to cross it unopposed.”

Dan’s men, the survivors of Chancellorsville, were as pleased as Dan to go to the road and the orchard, but this was a most controversial move. It took Sickles out of line with the rest of the Union Army. The decision may have been understandable in terms of Dan’s character and his rebelliousness against Meade, but the question as to whether it won or nearly lost the battle is still argued by scholars, and on sites on the Internet. For Dan, by going forward, had left adrift the flank of the rest of the army on Cemetery Ridge. One of his brigade commanders, Régis de Trobriand, would write that Dan’s decision “showed more ardor to advance to meet the fight than a nice appreciation of the best means to sustain it.” The new situation of the Third Corps “offered some great inconveniences and some great dangers.” Dan had perhaps placed his twelve thousand men in some peril, in that they were barely adequate to cover the ground, and in that they would obviously provoke a strenuous attack and an attempt by Lee’s lieutenant, James Longstreet, to consume them from the flank.

The rest of the Union Army on Cemetery Ridge was amazed to see Dan go forward to his higher ground along the road and around the peach orchard. Some sober officers thought it a gesture more political than military—to draw attention to himself. After all, he was “a politician, and some other things, exclusive of the Barton Key affair,” wrote one officer, “a man after show and notoriety and newspaper fame and the adulation of the mob.” But Sickles believed he was being conscientious, and, unlike what would later be said of Longstreet, he did not court the possibility of defeat as a means of teaching his commander a lesson. He had, though, certainly been offended that Meade had been too busy to visit his end of the field, as if the Union left were of small consequence, and so, as a civilian might, he decided that it was mere common sense that he would know the ground better than a man who had not visited it. Above all, he thought of the consequences of his ordered withdrawal from the high ground at Chancellorsville, the more than four thousand casualties. He did not want a repeat of that carnage.
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As controversial as Dan’s advance was, the concealed march Longstreet had made that day to take on the Union left has been a matter of argument ever since. These two generals, Longstreet and Sickles, jointly held the future of their respective nations in their hands. Longstreet was a professional soldier, an undistinguished graduate of West Point, a major in the Pay Corps at the war’s beginning, and two years younger than Dan. He had had a large falling-out with Lee over strategy, and had been pressing on him great strategic plans about continuing northwest to Cincinatti, or else turning southwest and assaulting the Union Army in Tennessee. As for the position here at Gettysburg, Longstreet did not want his commander to take the initiative of attacking the Union Army lined out along Cemetery Ridge. He wanted the Confederate Army to make a massive move completely around the Union’s flank—in this case, around Sickles—and take up a strong position somewhere between here and Washington.