Gettysburg (21 page)

After clearing Emmitsburg, Buford turned north, heading for the point designated in his orders as his objective for this day: Gettysburg.

Henry Heth was looking for Brigadier General J. Johnston Pettigrew, who commanded one of the four brigades in his division, all now camped around Cashtown. Lieutenant Louis G. Young was standing within earshot as Heth found Pettigrew, and later recalled their conversation: “General Pettigrew was ordered by General Heth,” recollected Young, “to go to Gettysburg with three of his four regiments present, three field pieces of the Donaldsonville Artillery, of Louisiana, and a number of wagons, for the purpose of collecting commissary and quartermaster stores for the use of the army.” Pettigrew’s instructions allowed for the usual latitude, but on one point
Heth was very specific: “It was told to General Pettigrew that he might find the town in possession of a home guard, … but if, contrary to expectations, he should find any organized troops capable of making resistance, or any portion of the Army of the Potomac, he should not attack it.”

Drums soon began to beat throughout the brigade camps, and by 6:30
A.M.,
Pettigrew had his 2,000 men marching east on the Chambersburg Road. As his column passed through Heth’s picket line, manned by the 55th Virginia, Pettigrew used a little gentle persuasion on the officer commanding the regiment, successfully convincing him to append his more experienced unit to the expedition.

It was just as well that Pettigrew brought help, because after marching on a short distance, his advance party was approached by a friendly scout who warned that a large force of Yankee cavalry was already at Gettysburg. This was disincentive enough for the cautious Pettigrew, who held up the advance until a courier could make the round trip to Heth’s headquarters, returning with orders to continue.

The next incident on this mission occurred not far from Gettysburg, when a sniper took a shot at the 47th North Carolina. The officer in charge of the regiment prudently eased back from the gunman, who had failed to hit anyone. Pettigrew pressed on. By about 9:45
A.M.,
his leading scouts had a clear view of the town of Gettysburg.

It was a sign of trouble to come, as sure as anything. At first Mary Fastnacht was perplexed that the black mother and daughter whom her own mother had hidden from John Gordon’s Confederates on June 26 had packed up and left town. The tension of having to hide at a moment’s notice was just more than they could face, evidently; Mary remembered very clearly the young girl’s telling her that “she couldn’t be paid to put in such another night.” Now they were gone—nimble, defenseless creatures fleeing before a fire.

When Sarah Broadhead stepped outside this morning, she was feeling less anxious than she had felt in days. Her husband had come home the night before, after being stranded in Harrisburg when the trains stopped running. Her relief was short-lived, though: glancing westward, she at once saw the “Rebels [who] came to the top of the hill overlooking the town on the Chambersburg pike, and looked over our place. We had a good view of them from our house, and every moment we expected to hear the booming of cannon, and thought they might shell the town.”

Jeb Stuart’s column—cavalry, some prisoners, and those captured wagons— finished unwinding from last night’s camps near Union Mills at around 8:00
A.M.
Stuart’s intention was to march through the town of Hanover and from there angle to York, where he hoped to find Ewell’s Corps. Something new began slowing him down today: the moment his riders passed into Pennsylvania, recalled one aide, “details were immediately sent out to seize horses.” Stuart’s scouts had reported enemy cavalry a few miles to the west, at a place called Littlestown. Despite the equine distractions, Stuart pushed on, hoping to get past Hanover before the Federals arrived. As they drew near the town, however, riders brought back word that Union troopers had been encountered; in the words of Stuart’s aide, “We stirred up the Hornets.” It was approaching 10:00
A.M.

J. Johnston Pettigrew was a prudent man. He halted his command along Seminary Ridge, just west of Gettysburg, and sent forward a line of skirmishers to ascertain what might be lurking in the town. He was quite conscious of his orders from Henry Heth, which, as his aide Louis Young doubtless reminded him, “were peremptory, not to precipitate a fight.” Every available telescopic glass was turned on Gettysburg. The skirmish line had disappeared into the town below when, at about 10:30
A.M.,
someone told Pettigrew that Yankee cavalry had been spotted. Another report indicated that drumming could be heard in the distance—which might mean infantry nearby, since cavalry generally used only bugles. That was all Pettigrew needed to know: he issued orders for his column to return to its camps. The slow countermarch began at around 11:00
A.M.

The long column of Union cavalry that eased out of Littlestown starting at 8:00
A.M.
had, until June 28, been assigned to the defenses of Washington. The units had been vacuumed up by Hooker as he passed through that zone, to be added to the Army of the Potomac’s cavalry corps as its Third Division. The original commander of these troops was thought to be too timid for combat, so, in one of his first administrative moves, George Meade had installed Brigadier General Judson Kilpatrick at the head of the new unit. Flamboyant in appearance, conniving in manner, and possessed of boundless ambition, Kilpatrick was described by a fellow cavalryman as a “brave, injudicious boy, much given to
blowing.” These characteristics, translated into action, had his men calling him “Kill-cavalry.”

Most of Kilpatrick’s men rode through Hanover before 10:00
A.M.,
on their way toward York. The column’s tail, its supply wagons followed by a security detachment from the 18th Pennsylvania, began to enter the town from the west as the rear guard, the 5th New York, held position near the town square—partly to watch over the wagons and partly to enjoy the food and other delicacies provided by Hanover’s grateful citizens.

Suddenly, a band of some sixty Confederate horsemen moved to cut off the Pennsylvanians trailing the wagons. This time, the Rebels’ opponents were no less combative than they: the smaller Yankee detail charged, burst through the enemy cordon, and was chased by the Confederate riders into the town’s center, where the New York troopers were waiting. The Battle of Hanover—waged between two cavalry commands forced to fight largely in the streets and alleys of a Pennsylvania town—was under way.

George Meade’s marching plan for this day was a hostage to circumstances. No longer was the army commander thrusting his corps forward in hopes of disrupting enemy schemes. At 11:30
A.M.,
he sent a summary to John Reynolds: “We are as concentrated as my present information of the position of the enemy justifies,” he declared. “I have pushed out the cavalry in all directions to feel for them, and so soon as i can make up any positive opinion as to their position, I will move again.”

Meade had to consider what he would do if Lee concentrated his forces quickly and moved against the Army of the Potomac. The Union commander needed a place to make a stand, so throughout this day, staff officers under the supervision of his chief engineer, Brigadier General Gouverneur K. Warren, were kept in the saddle scouting out just such a contingency location. Warren’s crew identified a position that followed a twenty-mile-long chain of hills rising along the southern side of Big Pipe Creek. This line would afford Meade excellent high ground and offer the added advantage of positioning his army directly astride three major avenues of approach from south-central Pennsylvania to Baltimore and Washington. In later testimony before Congress, Warren would voice a concern then current at Meade’s headquarters, which argued against concentrating the army into too tight a position: “If [Lee] … could get off
on our right, he could go down to Baltimore,” said Warren. “If to the left, he might escape us and go to Washington.”

There was some confusion today as Meade learned to handle all the component parts of his army. He had earlier reconfirmed the authority of John Reynolds to direct the marches of the First, Third, and Eleventh corps,
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but this seems to have slipped his mind when, around midday, without first checking with Reynolds, he issued marching instructions to Daniel Sickles. The problem was that Sickles had already received different orders from Reynolds. Any thoughts the Third Corps commander may have had about West Pointers at this moment went unrecorded; instead, Sickles sent a note to Meade, informing him of the conflicting orders and requesting clarification. None of this did anything to improve his opinion of his new superior.

First off, small parties of Federal scouts poked around the town’s outskirts. Then, a little after 10:00
A.M.,
a more formidable squadron from the 8th Illinois Cavalry eased into Gettysburg. It did not take the riders long to spot the powerful formations denoting Pettigrew’s men on a ridge west of town. To the surprise and relief of the advance parties, the Confederates slowly turned away; by the time the main body of John Buford’s division arrived, at about 11:00
A.M.,
they were well out of sight.

Since June 26, Gettysburg’s citizens had been seeing Rebel troops come and go, and Union detachments do the same—but this was the first time the appearance of the Federals had caused the Confederates to retire. The advance parties were an undeniable harbinger of larger U.S. forces in the area. That, plus the blessed comfort of having those young, confident Union soldiers in their midst, was more than enough to lift the spirits of even the most dour residents.

Ten-year-old Charles McCurdy clambered atop a rail fence to get a better view of the horsemen. As he later recalled it, the “perfectly accoutered troops” provided “a strong contrast to the Rebel cavalry I had seen a week before.” Tillie Pierce pronounced the procession of riders “a novel and grand sight. … I knew then we had protection; and I felt they were our decent friends.” A trooper riding with the 8th New York Cavalry was pleasantly surprised at “receiving the most enthusiastic welcome from the
citizens, who hailed us as their deliverers; cheers, bouquets and refreshments were tendered us on all sides, accompanied in many cases, by the tears of tender hearted women.” Tillie Pierce joined a group of girls who tried to sing “The Battle Cry of Freedom.” “As some of us did not know the whole of the piece we kept repeating the chorus,” she admitted.

Robert E. Lee moved his headquarters today from the pleasant grove outside Chambersburg to the village of Greenwood, at the western entrance to the Cashtown Gap. James Longstreet reported that he rode along “with General Lee most of the day.” Once Lee’s new headquarters had been established, artilleryman E. P. Alexander came calling to catch up on news with some friends of his who served on the general’s staff. Alexander found the mood at army headquarters “unusually careless & jolly.”

The Cashtown Gap itself was becoming something of a choke point. At midday, Longstreet discovered that his corps’ line of march was “blocked by [Anderson’s Division of] Hill’s Corps and Ewell’s wagon train, which had cut into the road from above.” Just two of Longstreet’s divisions were involved; George Pickett’s men remained near Chambers-burg, charged with watching over the army’s supplies until some cavalry units could relieve them.

No sooner were Longstreet’s headquarters established than he had a visitor of his own. Fitzgerald Ross was an English-born Scotsman and something of a soldier of fortune, having spent much of his professional life officering in the Austrian Army. Ross passed this afternoon “very pleasantly” with Longstreet’s staff. His fellow soldier-tourist Arthur Fremantle, meanwhile, had just been introduced to Robert E. Lee. It took only that one meeting for Fremantle to become an unabashed admirer of the general: “He is a perfect gentleman in every respect,” Fremantle noted. “I imagine no man has so few enemies, or is so universally esteemed.”

Jeb Stuart had not wanted a fight at Hanover; his objective was to link up with Ewell’s men at York and, through them, reconnect with Lee’s army. However, once his aggressive point brigade attacked, Stuart had no recourse but to press the matter. The confused fighting continued for a while in the town’s streets as both sides sent supporting units into the struggle.
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Stuart had to keep up the pressure on the Federals to prevent them from maneuvering against him and his vulnerable wagon train.