Gettysburg (20 page)

It was Henry Heth’s division of Hill’s Corps that led the way through the mountain pass, heading east. To guard his flank, Heth sent a detachment of North Carolina troops and a Mississippi regiment south toward Fairfield with orders to watch the Emmitsburg approaches. “On June the 29th,” Heth later recollected, “I reached Cashtown, eight miles from Gettysburg. … My men were sadly in want of shoes. I heard that a large supply of shoes were stored in Gettysburg.” Barefoot or not, Hill’s troops were in high spirits. When the 55th North Carolina reached Cashtown this night, it was, in the estimation of a member of the regiment, “in splendid condition.” The only unsettling words were heard by a gunner in one of Hill’s batteries, when a woman watching from the roadside shouted, “‘You are marching mighty proudly now, but you will come back faster than you went.’” One officer could not help but ask the woman why she thought so. “‘Because you put your trust in General Lee and not in the Lord Almighty,’” she answered.

An unrecorded act by an unnamed trooper riding with Jeb Stuart accomplished one strategic objective this day. By pulling down the telegraph wires running between Baltimore and Frederick, Stuart’s men cut off the Army of the Potomac from timely contact with Washington and Harrisburg.
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A courier service was established between Meade’s headquarters and the nearest operating point on the telegraphic route, but the flow of valuable intelligence coming from Harrisburg slowed to a trickle. Even more than Hooker before him, Meade now had to depend on George Sharpe and his Bureau of Military Information for help in discerning the enemy’s intentions.

Robert E. Lee was beginning to manifest some anxieties that his most trusted staff found disquieting. This morning he had occasion to speak with a late-arriving officer on Ewell’s staff who was passing through Chambersburg on his way to rejoin his command. At one point during their discussion, Lee asked if the officer had heard anything of Jeb Stuart. The young captain replied that he had met a pair of cavalrymen who had told him that Stuart was still in Virginia on June 28. “The General was evidently surprised and disturbed” by this news, Ewell’s officer later noted. Lee waved over one of his staff officers, Walter Taylor, and had the story repeated for him. A few moments later, standing alone with Taylor, the captain inquired about Lee’s obvious concern. Taylor explained “that General Lee expected General Stuart to report before that time in Pennsylvania, and that he was much disturbed by his absence, having no means of information about the movements of the enemy’s forces.”

This seems to have been the day on which Lee learned that George Meade now commanded the Army of the Potomac.
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Precisely how this information reached him is unclear, but with tens of thousands of Union soldiers suddenly in the know, its transmission to Confederate headquarters was inevitable. Equally inevitable was that someone should ask Lee
what effect he thought the change would have on for his plans. He responded, “General Meade will commit no blunder in my front, and if I make one he will make haste to take advantage of it.” Lee revealed some more of his thinking today when he greeted John B. Hood of Longstreet’s Corps with the words “Ah, General, the enemy is a long time finding us; if he does not succeed soon, we must go in search of him.”

An artilleryman marching with Longstreet recalled that during their sojourn in Chambersburg, he and his batterymates got accustomed to “living upon the fat of Pennsylvania.” While no thorough accounting was ever made, the amount of materiel removed from the Keystone State by Lee’s soldiers was unquestionably prodigious. One observer cataloged the spoils simply as “great quantities of horses, mules, wagons, beefs, and other necessaries.” A South Carolina surgeon was certain that the number of rustled Pennsylvania beeves was in the “thousands … enough to feed our army until cold weather.” And in a letter published in a Richmond newspaper, “an intelligent young officer” advised readers, “You can form no idea of the immense droves of cattle and horses that are being sent to the rear from our advanced forces in Pennsylvania.”

The Michigan cavalry regiments, whose arrival in Gettysburg had so boosted everyone’s spirits on June 28, left without fanfare this morning. “Quiet has prevailed all day,” Sarah Broadhead wrote. Most felt as if they were in the eye of some terrible storm. An editorial writer for the town newspaper complained, “It is annoying to be thus isolated.”

As evening came on, a bold resident named Samuel Herbst, who had successfully hidden his horse from Gordon’s searches, rode the animal south toward Emmitsburg. Herbst returned after dark with word that there were thousands of Federal troops on the way. “The news flew through the town like wildfire,” recalled another in Gettysburg.

During the time it took for Lee’s mounted couriers to cover the distance from Chambersburg to Carlisle, Richard Ewell continued to operate on the assumption that he was to move against Harrisburg. On his orders, Captain H. B. Richardson, an engineer, went out with some of Jenkins’
cavalry to scout the capital’s defenses. Their approach ignited brief skirmishes at all the various points of contact, especially near a road intersection known as Oyster’s Point. But “on Monday morning, June 29,” claimed an officer with Jenkins, “… we … viewed the city of Harrisburg and its defenses.”

“About 9
A.M
.received orders to march back to Chambersburg,” noted a staff officer with Johnson. “Great surprise expressed.” Whatever frustration he may have felt, Ewell acted promptly to carry out his new instructions. A rider was dispatched with orders for Jubal Early, at York, directing him to move the next day, when Robert Rodes would also be in motion. It was just past noon when Ewell sent Johnson’s Division off toward Chambersburg with all the corps supply wagons and two battalions of reserve artillery. “The people seemed delighted at our going,” reported a soldier in the 4th Virginia. The only Confederate smiles were cracked when one of the columns passed a file of captured Pennsylvania militiamen: a Virginia cannoneer observed that “all of them [were] barefooted, their shoes and stockings having been appropriated by needy rebels.”

As Ewell’s troops marched out of Carlisle, someone asked a civilian, If you could have peace by letting the South secede, what would you do? “I would let you’ins go,” was the reply. When the long files of soldiers turned back onto the route they had come in by the day before, the men’s “disappointment and chagrin were extreme,” confessed one of them. Still, their dismay did not come close to matching Ewell’s. “The General was quite testy and hard to please,” grumbled an officer at headquarters, adding that he “became disappointed, and had every one flying around.” Preoccupied by his personal turmoil, Ewell dropped an important stitch. Although a number of couriers left his headquarters today with changed directions for his infantry commanders, no one thought to notify Albert Jenkins, in charge of the cavalry force operating with the Second Corps, that Harrisburg was no longer the target. As a result, the mounted units that might have effectively screened Ewell’s movements over the next two days remained in contact with Harrisburg’s defenders for another twenty-four hours.

Jeb Stuart’s destructive midday sojourn at Hood’s Mill blocked Ohio reporter Whitelaw Reid’s efforts to catch up with the Army of the Potomac. The train on which Reid was riding, along with fellow
correspondents Sam Wilkeson (
New York Times
) and Uriah H. Painter (
Philadelphia Inquirer
), stopped just outside Baltimore, where the passengers were told that service to Frederick had been interrupted. The three newsmen had no choice but to return to Washington. The
Boston Journal
’s Charles Coffin was having better luck: already in Frederick, he had been able to find a horse and spent this day riding along the line of march taken by the Second and Fifth corps.

Sometime this evening, George Meade penned a letter to his wife. “We are marching as fast as we can to relieve Harrisburg,” he informed her, “but have to keep a sharp lookout that the rebels don’t … get … in our rear. They have a cavalry force in our rear, destroying railroads, etc., with the view of getting me to turn back, but I shall not do it. I am going straight at them and will settle this thing one way or another.”

Time and circumstances were still conspiring against Jeb Stuart. After investing several hours in prying up the rails running into and out of Hood’s Mill, the Confederate cavalry chief now had his men back on roads leading north. Their destination this time was Westminster, Maryland. Because this stop on the Western Maryland Railroad would soon be a forward supply base for the Army of the Potomac, a guard of ninety-five Delaware cavalrymen was posted in the town.

With the odds at 4,000 to 95, the fight at Westminster was never in doubt, though its brevity belied its ferocity. The Union riders were routed in a series of small-scale but savage combats that left two of Stuart’s promising young lieutenants—St. Pierre Gibson and John W. Murray—sprawled dead on the side of the road. The victorious Confederate troopers rounded up the Federal survivors and located what Stuart would later describe as a “full supply of forage,” though he would also concede that, “the delay and difficulty of procuring it kept many of the men up all night.” “We left that town that night,” remembered one of the general’s aides, “bivouacked in the rain by the roadside [at Union Mills, and] pushed on at dawn.”

It was a long day in the saddle for the men of the First and Second brigades of John Buford’s division, who rode a weary circuit today
covering the western flank of George Meade’s long infantry line. The troopers had broken camp at Middletown (about ten miles west of Frederick) at 9:00
A.M.,
headed west through Turner’s Gap in the South Mountains, and then turned north to follow the mountain range. “Traveled near forty miles thro’ a most beautiful country,” one Yankee rider recorded in his diary. Another was less complimentary, declaring that the town of Boonsboro seemed “to be mostly occupied by Secessionists.” Either way, it was hardly a pleasure ride: a New York cavalryman noted that the blue-coats “heard of the movements of the enemy all the way.”

A touch of fanfare marked the moment when the columns crossed the state line. A trooper in the 17th Pennsylvania would long remember the “responsive and ringing cheers of the gallant soldiers as they marched past the trooper of Company G, who stood with streaming guidon, on the boundary line of the state, indicating our exit from doubtful Maryland into loyal Pennsylvania.” Buford’s command then swung back east through the mountains at Waynesboro to camp at Fountaindale, near the eastern end of the pass, about four miles south of Fairfield. The warm reception they were given here was invigorating, and all the more so for the contrast with their experience in Maryland. “The citizens were overjoyed to see us and we were enthusiastically welcomed,” wrote an Indiana trooper. For him, this Monday in late June would go down as “one of life’s grandest days.”

W
hile the main body of John Buford’s division rested at Fountaindale, an advance party took station at Fairfield, where the mood was decidedly cooler. “The whole community seemed stampeded, and afraid to speak or to act,” Buford observed. What it was that the townsfolk were unwilling to reveal became evident soon after his column set out this foggy morning on a northward course toward Cashtown, from which it would turn toward Gettysburg. Buford’s scouts had not gone more than a half mile when gunfire popped and then crackled in the gloom: the Yankee advance had run into the small Confederate force that Henry Heth had dispatched from Cashtown the night before.

The combative Buford fed more men into the skirmish line before he was satisfied as to the size and composition of the enemy force blocking him. With typical staccato terseness, he reported, “Resolved not to disturb them. … Fairfield was 4 or 5 miles west of the route assigned to me, and I did not wish to bring on an engagement so far from the road I was expected to be following.” He would take a more direct route to his prescribed destination. Buford’s men backed away from this fight and passed through Emmitsburg, then occupied by portions of John Reynolds’ First Corps. Although there is no record of their having met, it seems unlikely that Buford would have ridden through the area without speaking to Reynolds. The infantry officer had more up-to-date information and was in touch with Meade’s headquarters, affording Buford an opportunity to pass along word of his encounter with some of Lee’s foot soldiers.
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Perhaps coincidentally, Reynolds sent off a courier to Meade at about the time Buford was there.