Authors: Noah Andre Trudeau
The result of today’s movements by the Army of the Potomac was the concentration of its corps around Frederick, Maryland. That end necessitated some fair tramping for the Second and Sixth corps, but for once, all the conditions were right. A New Yorker under Hancock marveled that he was “marching through a land of beauty and loveliness. … Maids and pretty girls smile approvingly as our war-worn veterans march on.” There was time for reflection. A Pennsylvania enlisted man felt sure that he was involved in the “campaign of the war, and the rebs have staked their all upon it.”
The officer commanding the Second Corps’ 5th New Hampshire was also thinking. An aide, concerned that Colonel Edward E. Cross was “in a sort of abstracted mood that was not usual for him,” listened in as the
popular officer spoke with a signal corps captain about various matters of the moment. After a time, the conversation turned to the battle that everyone sensed was coming. The aide was shocked and horrified to hear Cross, speaking in a “grave, decided way,” confide to the captain, “‘It will be my last battle.’” What unsettled the aide most of all was that the colonel’s statement sounded so matter-of-fact: the thirty-one-year-old veteran commander seemed at once at peace and resigned to the knowledge that he would not survive his regiment’s next fight.
The same special train that had carried James A. Hardie to Frederick had also brought Major General Daniel E. Sickles back to take charge of the Third Corps. In the community of officers commanding corps in the Army of the Potomac, Sickles stood apart as the only one who had not attended West Point or served in the military prior to the war. He stood apart in other ways as well, not many of which would be considered flattering. A scarred veteran of New York City’s political brawls, Sickles had thrived in the army, thanks especially to his fierce ambition, which was wedded to a reckless determination to prevail.
His instinct to act first and think afterward had already made him notorious. As a congressman in 1859, Sickles had stalked and publicly killed his wife’s lover. At his trial, one of the most closely followed of its time, he had set the legal world on its ear using the first-ever successful plea of temporary insanity. With the advent of the Civil War, Sickles had proved so effective a recruiter and organizer that he had entered the ranks as a general.
Daniel Sickles owed his elevation to corps command to the patronage of his friend Joe Hooker. When he reported to Hooker for duty after returning to Frederick, he was informed of the change at the top. Worse yet, at least from Sickles’ point of view, was that the man who had been handed the reins exemplified everything he despised most about the cliquish, cautious, calculating West Pointers. That his associate and mentor was to be replaced at this critical time struck Sickles as madness. As he would later declare, “I should always regard it as a most hazardous expedient to change the commander of an army in such exigencies as then existed.”
While many of the West Point officers serving in the Third Corps regarded Sickles’ military acumen with the greatest skepticism, many in the volunteer ranks were of a different mind. “Sickles is a great favorite with this corps,” asserted Private John Haley of the 17th Maine. “The
men fairly worship him. He is every inch a soldier and looking like a game cock. No one questions his bravery or patriotism. Before the war he killed a man who seduced his wife. A person who has the nerve to do that might be expected to show good qualities as a general where daredeviltry is a factor.”
Sickles had rejoined his command against his doctor’s orders, and indeed, a reporter who saw him around this time described him as being “in delicate health.” Partly for this reason, some on the general’s staff had counseled him to resign from the corps. Then, too, Sickles himself believed that his new superior, George Meade, harbored animosity toward him “dating from several incidents in the Chancellorsville campaign.” Accordingly, during the same meeting with Hooker in which he learned of the change, Sickles asked his former commander if he should also step down. “‘You cannot ask to be relieved on the eve of battle,’” Hooker told him. “‘Wait at least until after the engagement.’” Sickles agreed: he would wait, bide his time. And watch George Meade very carefully.
The sun was decidedly post meridiem as John B. Gordon looked down at the defenses of Wrightsville and its still-intact covered bridge across the Susquehanna River. He held a note that had been surreptitiously passed to him by a civilian as his command marched through York,
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describing in good detail the layout of Wrightsville’s defenses. As best Gordon could tell from where he was standing, the intelligence was correct in every aspect.
Key to his plan of attack was a “deep gorge or ravine” mentioned in the message, which was said to offer a protected approach to the town’s southern side. Once the existence of this feature had been confirmed, it became a simple matter for Gordon’s combat veterans to occupy the attention of the enemy militia in their front while a select strike force infiltrated their flank. What Gordon had not counted upon, however, was the inability of the green defenders to withstand even a probing effort. Hardly had his artillery batteries begun their part of the program when the Yankee troops began to flee across the bridge. Unwilling to see his undertrained men sacrificed for no purpose, Jacob Frick had ordered them to fall back.
Before Gordon’s men could get in position to rush the bridge, one of its spans was set on fire. As the Rebel general watched, the flames spread until the entire thing was ablaze. No civilians volunteered to help fight the bridge fire, but when the flames actually threatened Wrightsville, bucket brigades appeared. It was a point of pride for John Gordon that his men “labored as earnestly and bravely to save the town as they did to save the bridge.”
But if the public-relations part of this operation could be deemed a success for the Confederates, no advantage was achieved from a military point of view. Quite the opposite, in fact: Jubal Early’s hope of using the bridge to gain a jumping-off point across the Susquehanna was reduced to ashes, like the structure itself. Ewell’s ambitious division commander arrived on the scene just after the fire had done its job. “I regretted this very much,” Early would later admit. Only in retrospect would it become evident that the long line of march laid out by Lee, which had begun at Fredericksburg twenty-four days earlier, had reached its climax along the banks of the Susquehanna, in the smoldering wreckage of a once-famous span.
In addition to George Sharpe’s Bureau of Military Information, there was another group—this one outside the military or government—tracking the movements of Lee’s army with a determined exactitude. At newspaper editorial offices throughout the East, amateur strategists stuck pins into maps and tried to figure out where the next big battle story would happen. The newspaper that got there first with the best men would also get the glory. For the longest time, the betting had been divided among Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia; now, increasingly, Harrisburg seemed to be the focal point. Every editor was scrambling to put his top war correspondent in the field.
Whitelaw Reid, a prized reporter for the
Cincinnati Gazette
, was resting in Washington following what he termed “a flying visit to Frederick, Maryland.” Even though he had left there before the Union army settled in, Reid’s nose for news did not fail him: “The week,” he wrote today, “it would seem, must bring a battle; two days may do it.” Reid was looking forward to getting a good night’s sleep in a decent bed when he was handed a note from the manager of his paper’s Washington bureau. “Would like you (if you feel able) to equip yourself with horse and outfit, put substitutes in your place in the office, and join Hooker’s army in time for the fighting,” it read. With that, any thought of a soft bed was gone. Whitelaw Reid was going to find the war.
Charles Carleton Coffin was another member in good standing of the veteran correspondents’ club. He prowled his beat for the
Boston Journal.
The wily Coffin was where Reid wanted to be, in Frederick, with the Army of the Potomac clustered all around him. “Cavalry, infantry, and artillery were pouring through the town,” Coffin scribbled, “the bands playing, and the soldiers singing their liveliest songs.” The reporter knew for a fact that Hooker was out and Meade in. He saw the Army of the Potomac’s new commander, a “tall, slim, gray-bearded man, wearing a slouch hat, a plain blue blouse, with his pantaloons tucked in to his boots.” The experienced Coffin took a hard look at the man in those clothes. “There was no elation,” he noted, “but on the contrary he seemed weighed down with a sense of the responsibility resting on him.”
By the end of this day, George Meade had a plan. He mapped it out in a memo to Henry Halleck, and later he would put it into words for a congressional committee: “I determined,” he said, “… I should move my army as promptly as possible on the main line from Frederick to Harrisburg, extending my wings on both sides of that line as far as I could consistently with the safety and the rapid concentration of that army, and should continue that movement until I either encountered the enemy, or had reason to believe that the enemy was about to advance upon me, my object being at all hazards to compel him to loose his hold on the Susquehanna and meet me in battle at some point. It was my firm determination … to give battle wherever and as soon as I could possibly find the enemy.”
At times, the journey had seemed impossibly long and filled with obstacles too great to overcome, but Arthur J. L. Fremantle, of the British Cold-stream Guards, was not a man to be deterred by such things. He had read all about the American war during his boring outpost duty at Gibraltar, in the process becoming a long-distance admirer of the “gallantry and determination of the Southerners.” Fremantle had subsequently wrangled a leave of absence, hopped a blockade runner that got him in through Brownsville, Texas, and then followed endless roads on a trip that had carried him through nine Confederate states and introduced him to some of the Southern Republic’s most powerful figures, including Jefferson Davis.
Fremantle had chased after Lee’s army for seven days, passing from one contact to the next, enduring bad horses, bad manners, and abominable roads. He had finally caught up with Longstreet’s headquarters on Saturday, June 27, and gratefully attached himself to that command.
Today he met Major General John B. Hood, one of Longstreet’s division commanders, whom he described as a “tall, thin, wiry-looking man, with a grave face.” Fremantle spent part of the day in Chambersburg, whose natives were greatly bemused by his presence. They refused to believe that he was a noncombatant Englishman, insisting he “must be either a Rebel or a Yankee”; only when he showed that he had some gold to spend did they become “quite affable.” He recounted the story of his journey to Pennsylvania and was amazed to discover how parochial the townsfolk were: “They seemed very ignorant,” he wrote afterward, “and confused Texans with Mexicans.”
This was a day for rumors in Richmond, and C. S. War Department clerk Jones heard them all. “There are two reports of important events current in the streets: first, that Lee’s army has taken and destroyed Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; and second, that Vicksburg has fallen,” he noted. Jones was properly skeptical of both stories, though he very much wanted to believe the first. Thomas Cooper DeLeon, a Confederate officer stationed in the capital, thought he knew why: “Such … was the universal belief of the southern people …,” he observed around this time, “and so great was their reliance in the army that was to accomplish the brilliant campaign, that they looked upon it already as a fixed fact.”
There was considerable puzzlement in the office of Jefferson Davis as the Confederate president pondered Lee’s June 23 note suggesting the establishment of a mock army corps under Beauregard at Culpeper. “This is the first intimation that he has had that such a plan was ever in contemplation,” avowed presidential adviser Samuel Cooper. Davis today penned a response that carefully sketched out the strategic picture (nowhere as positive as it had been portrayed by Lee in his note) and itemized the troops that were needed to defend Richmond and therefore not accessible to Lee. “Do not understand me as balancing accounts in the matter of brigades,” Davis concluded. “I only repeat that I have not many to send you, and [not] enough to form an army to threaten, if not capture, Washington as soon as it is uncovered by Hooker’s army.” He hoped his message was clear this time: Lee could expect no further help from Richmond.
At today’s cabinet meeting, Abraham Lincoln revealed that Joseph Hooker had requested to be relieved, and that he had obliged him. There
was some discussion regarding the choice of his successor, but it soon became apparent that the decision had already been made. “We were consulted after the fact,” lamented Navy Secretary Gideon Welles. After the meeting, Welles asked around about Hooker’s replacement, George Meade. “He is not great,” Welles heard. “His brother officers speak well of him, but he is considered rather a ‘smooth bore’ than a rifle. It is unfortunate that a change could not have been made earlier.”
The time was about 10:00
P.M.
Robert E. Lee was inside his headquarters in the woods east of Chambersburg when he heard a respectful rap on the tent pole. It was Major John W. Fairfax of Longstreet’s staff, with important news: a scout employed by Longstreet, a man named Harrison, had been brought in from the picket line with a remarkable report regarding the enemy’s real position. As Fairfax later recollected their conversation, Lee “questioned me about my opinion of Harrison’s veracity. My answer was General Longstreet has confidence in him.” Lee sent the aide away and considered this development. He was not overly fond of civilian scouts and preferred to seek independent verification of any intelligence they provided, but with Stuart not yet back in contact and no word from Robertson, who was supposed to be watching for such enemy movements, there was no immediate means of checking Harrison’s information. All Lee could do was look the man in the eye and trust his own instincts.