Gettysburg (40 page)

In forming the lines, Hancock “received material assistance from Major-General Howard, Brigadier Generals [Gouverneur K.] Warren and [John] Buford, and officers of General Howard’s command.” Although
he usually respected formalities regarding the chain of command, Hancock had no such qualms on this occasion. “I made such disposition as I thought wise and proper,” he later testified. Nor did he forget George Meade, starving for information at Taneytown: he dispatched a trusted aide to inform the army commander “of the state of affairs, and to say that I would hold the position until night.” Not one for false modesty, he would always insist, “After I had arrived upon the field, assumed the command, and made my dispositions for defending that point …, I do not think the Confederate force then present could have carried it.”

R
ichard Ewell, still shaky from the fall off his stricken horse, made his way into Gettysburg, likely following Carlisle Road. Hardly had one courier met him with word that Robert E. Lee was nearby, on Seminary Hill, when Walter Taylor found him and conveyed Lee’s desire that he press on up Cemetery Hill. It was a good antidote to the Second Corps commander’s anxiety over disregarding his superior’s prime directive. Taylor saw the concern on Ewell’s face turn to determination; he left convinced that Lee’s suggestion would soon become action.

Ewell did want to act on Lee’s advice, but not until he had heard from the two of his division commanders who had fought well this day, Robert Rodes and Jubal Early. Ewell set himself up at the center diamond, and sent riders looking for his subordinates. A staff officer with him recalled that the “square was filled with Confederate soldiers, and with them were mingled many prisoners, while scarcely a citizen was to be seen.” The corps chief passed the time “receiving reports from all his command, giving directions as to the disposition of his troops, directing supplies of ammunition and making disposition of a large number of prisoners that had fallen into our hands.” (Among this number was Henry A. Morrow of the 24th Michigan, who bristled when Ewell lectured him about his having kept his unit in action even after the situation became hopeless. “‘Genl Ewell, the 24th Mich. Came here to fight, not surrender,’” the proud officer declared.)

At length Rodes and Early joined Ewell. “They desired General Lee to be informed that they could go forward and take Cemetery hill if they were supported on their right; that to the south of the Cemetery there was in sight a position commanding it which should be taken at once,” recalled Ewell’s aide Captain James Power Smith, who was promptly detailed to deliver that message. Not wishing to sit idle waiting for Lee’s reply, the three officers rode south along Baltimore Street in hopes of ascertaining just how much of a problem Cemetery Hill might pose.
Despite the efforts of Yankee sharpshooters who soon drove them to seek cover, they learned a thing or two about the position—enough, that is, to convince them that it would not be a simple matter of walking up the hill to claim it.

Ewell had paid a price for his victory. Rodes’ Division was battered, scattered, and not at all ready to undertake another serious offensive operation. Early’s troops were less combat-worn, but their occupation of Gettysburg had so disorganized them that it would take some time to get them back under full control. Still, Ewell acknowledged that there was a chance here to finish this day’s work—if only he could push the Yankees off that hill.

James Longstreet had ridden well ahead of his corps, which was just then moving through the Cashtown Pass. He put the time at a little after 5:00
P.M
.when he reached Lee’s headquarters, near the Chambersburg Pike on Seminary Ridge. There was a martial racket drumming in the town as the last organized Federal units elbowed their way south. Lee was busy when Longstreet arrived, so the First Corps commander took the opportunity to examine the situation, especially on Cemetery Hill. Lee was also interested in that point. He called up his staff officer Colonel Armistead L. Long and, as Long remembered it, “directed me to reconnoitre the position to which the enemy had retired.”

To Longstreet’s way of thinking, a frontal assault on an entrenched position was a tactic always best avoided. When Lee joined him he therefore suggested straight off that the Confederate forces disengage in order to “file around [the enemy’s] left and secure good ground between here and his capital.” Lee was surprised by Longstreet’s proposal, particularly since he knew that his First Corps commander had not been briefed of the overall situation. “‘If the enemy is there tomorrow,’” Lee answered, pointing toward Cemetery Hill, “‘we must attack him.’” All of Longstreet’s concerns about the current campaign now welled up in a rare burst of insubordinate testiness. “‘If he is there, it will be because he is anxious that we should attack him,’” Longstreet said, “‘a good reason, in my judgment[,] for not doing so.’” He himself could have pointed in another direction—at the orderly rows of bodies in a field just a few hundred yards away—to provide proof of the price paid for any direct effort. Reflecting back upon this moment, Longstreet would feel certain that “General Lee was impressed with the idea that, by attacking the Federals, he could whip them in detail.”

Ewell’s aide James Power Smith found Lee and Longstreet together, still in discussion, and delivered his message. Lee passed the young officer his binoculars, pointing once again as he did so to Cemetery Hill, and said that he supposed that was the high ground that Ewell was referring to in his communication. Lee told Smith that “he had no force on the field with which to take that position,” and then asked Longstreet how near his closest division was. Longstreet replied that it was six miles away—and even then “was indefinite and noncommittal,” Smith observed. After Lee reiterated his desire that Ewell “take the Cemetery Hill if it were possible,” the aide immediately set off on the return circuit to his corps commander.

Longstreet took Lee’s reaction as a complete rejection of his idea. “The sharp battle fought by Hill and Ewell on that day had given him a taste of victory,” he would reflect afterward. It was a brooding, doubting First Corps commander who rode back to his troops sometime after 5:30
P.M.
“I believed that he had made up his mind to attack,” Longstreet later stated, “but was confident that he had not yet determined as to when the attack should be made.”

In fact, despite any impression he may have given to the contrary, Lee was
not
absolutely committed to continuing the offensive here. It would take more than Longstreet’s scheme, however, to deflect him from that course. There would be great risk indeed involved in pulling Ewell’s Corps back from Gettysburg during the night, as Longstreet advocated, and to try to do it in daylight would be to invite the enemy’s revenge. Arguing against an advance, though, was the report delivered by the reconnoitering Armistead L. Long, who testified that Cemetery Hill was “occupied by a considerable force, … and … an attack at that time … would have been hazardous.” Then Walter Taylor returned from his errand. He had conveyed Lee’s suggestion regarding Cemetery Hill to Ewell, he said, and felt certain that the Second Corps commander would act on it. Lee now realized that a great deal was riding on conditions about which he knew very little. He called for his horse. He would ride over and speak with Ewell himself.

When kept apart, the separate elements of the union retreat and the Confederate pursuit through Gettysburg were by and large inert, but mixed together they were volatile. Huddled with her family in the cellar of their house, Salome Myers recollected how they all “knelt shivering
and prayed. The noise above our heads, the rattling of muskets, the unearthly cries mingled with the sobbing of children, shook our hearts.” Daniel Skelly watched as a wounded Federal lieutenant was cornered by Confederates who still had the blood lust. His amazement at what happened next would stay with him for the rest of his life: “My mother intervened,” he remembered, “offering to dress his wound first. The Confederates agreed and never came back for him. We hid him from capture the whole time.” Watching similar scenes from her family’s cellar, Liberty Hollinger reflected, “we were really in the midst of an awful reality.”

Inspired by solid leaders such as Captain Francis Irsch, the 375-strong 45th New York had opened the fighting north of Gettysburg and held its own throughout the collapse of the Eleventh Corps. Only after it joined the retreating procession through the town did disaster strike the regiment, as nearly two thirds of the men were cut off near the Eagle Hotel. These soldiers, joined by stragglers from other commands, forted themselves in a row of houses, from the relative safety of which, wrote a member of the 45th, “several attempts of the enemy to dislodge us were repelled successfully.”

The intrepid band held out until nearly sundown, when the offer of a parley was accepted by Irsch. During these negotiations, he observed that Confederate forces completely controlled the town. According to a regimental history, “Upon returning and reporting what he saw, Captain Irsch, with other officers, ordered their men to destroy their arms and ammunition and throw them into the wells, and then all formally surrendered.”
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The closer he got to Gettysburg, the unhappier Henry Slocum became. The Union Twelfth Corps commander, as one of the most senior officers in Meade’s army, could expect to assume control of all units on hand when he reached the battlefield. It was not a prospect he relished. With Meade’s Pipe Creek circular by now old news, Slocum was heading into an unknown situation filled with ominous portents. Shortly after his column got under way, an orderly had come forward from Two Taverns carrying a note from Meade informing him of John Reynolds’ death.
Although he had not been instructed to do anything more than manage his own corps, Slocum had turned over temporary control of the Twelfth to his senior division commander, Brigadier General Alpheus Williams. He would never explain this curious action, but it seems likely that he anticipated being put in command of the right wing of Meade’s forces.

Something of Slocum’s state of mind may be gleaned from his response to a message delivered by one of Oliver Howard’s aides, who had been dispatched to meet the general on the road and request that he ride forward to Gettysburg to take charge. “‘I’ll be damned if I will take the responsibility of this fight,’” Slocum snapped in reply. Soon after this encounter, Slocum sent Meade a gloomy progress report: “A portion of our troops have fallen back to Gettysburg. Matters do not appear very well.” Nevertheless, he directed his two divisions to continue toward the town. Again inexplicably, he instructed Alpheus Williams to march his division north from the Baltimore Pike just prior to crossing Rock Creek, on a route that would ultimately take it toward Gettysburg from the east, via the Hanover Road.

Williams would later relate that his men (some 5,000 or so) “turned off to the right on a narrow, winding path or country road, and after a couple of miles reached a dense wood, behind which was a high, bald hill on which a good position could be had in sight and rear of the town.” The elevation in question was Benner’s Hill, smack on the flank of those portions of Ewell’s Corps that were then in Gettysburg. While Federal scouts reported that Rebels were holding the hill, a personal reconnaissance by Williams revealed some mounted personnel but no infantry. He made plans to storm the rise, but the action was aborted when a courier arrived with orders from Slocum, directing him to pull back and join the rest of the union army on Cemetery Hill. The time was approaching 7:00
P.M.

Williams’ advent provided welcome reinforcement for Hancock, who was still setting his defenses when this first Twelfth Corps division arrived. By his own account, Hancock placed Williams and his men “some distance to the right and rear of Wadsworth’s division.” The other Twelfth Corps division, under Brigadier General John W. Geary, came up from Two Taverns not long after. Although Hancock did not have direct control of this unit, he advised its commander “to take possession of the high ground” to the south, and thereby obtained some security for the left flank.

The message that James Power Smith brought back from Lee was unhelpful. Anything that happened on Cemetery Hill, Ewell saw, would have to be his doing alone, as A. P. Hill could provide no assistance from the western side. Robert E. Lee, quoted Smith, “regretted that his people were not up to support him on the right, but he wished him to take Cemetery Hill if it were possible.” The clear subtext was that he should do it
if
it could be done without a significant fight. The defenses that Ewell had personally observed already on the hill made such a scenario unlikely.

There might, however, be another way to gain some ground without bringing on more serious fighting. Lying adjacent to Cemetery Hill on an easterly tack was another rise, known as Culp’s Hill. The Federals appeared not to have covered that point, which also overlooked the Baltimore Pike. Ewell now decided to concentrate on taking
that
hill, using his one unengaged division, Johnson’s, which was expected at Gettysburg momentarily. This decision did not suit Isaac Trimble, the unwelcome supernumerary whom Lee had appended to Ewell’s headquarters. After loudly insinuating that Ewell lacked the nerve to assault Cemetery Hill, Trimble stalked off.
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