Gettysburg (41 page)

Ewell’s caution was justified when a report arrived from one of Jubal Early’s brigade commanders. Brigadier General William “Extra Billy” Smith’s Virginia brigade had not participated in the fighting north of Gettysburg but had instead been detailed to guard the flank and rear of Early’s deployment. By Early’s recollection, the gist of Smith’s sighting report was that “the enemy was advancing a large force of infantry, artillery, and cavalry on the York Road, menacing our left flank and rear.” Although he would later profess not to have put much stock in Smith’s credibility, Early nonetheless “thought it best to send General Gordon with his brigade out on that road, to take command of both brigades, and to stop all further alarms from that direction.”

Ewell had to be sure, so he and Jubal Early followed Gordon’s men to a vantage point. He spotted some skirmishers in the distance; on further investigation, they proved to be Smith’s Virginians, but the threat was potentially so ruinous that Ewell thought it better to leave Gordon out on the road. The reconnaissance had also brought him closer to Culp’s Hill, so he took advantage of the moment and detailed two staff
officers to scout the position while he returned to town to see Edward Johnson. When they met, his long-absent division commander informed Ewell that while his troops were no more than a mile away, they were stuck in a traffic jam with a wagon train that would take the better part of an hour to untangle.

Ewell turned to Jubal Early, whose troops were nearest to Culp’s Hill, and wondered aloud if they could not make an effort to secure the place right away. Early replied testily that “his command had been doing all the hard marching and fighting and was not in condition to make the move.” Johnson took this as a personal insult, and the two officers engaged in a sharp exchange that Ewell finally had to cut off. He would wait for Johnson’s men to arrive.

Soldiers on both sides faced the setting sun with a wide range of emotions. Some were frustrated. “Why we failed to push on and occupy the heights around and beyond Gettysburg is one of the unsettled questions,” griped a private in Archer’s Brigade. “Our army expected to do so and were disappointed when we did not.” Many were exhausted. “Tired soldiers mopped from their sweaty mouths the black powder smudge of bitter cartridges,” wrote a soldier in the 43rd North Carolina. A musician-turned-medical-assistant in the 26th North Carolina recalled that “as our wounded men came in, we helped the surgeons with them until 11 o’clock at night, when I was so thoroly tired I could do no more, and lay down for a little rest.” “We laid all night among the dead Yankees,” noted a soldier camped along McPherson’s Ridge, “but they did not disturb our peaceful slumbers.”

Others were in shock. The 24th Michigan counted 102 present out of the nearly 500 who had marched this morning. “A sorrowful band, indeed, that night!” remembered one survivor. “Company officers called loudly for their men to fall in, not yet realizing that all but a few had fallen out forever,” another declared.

There was a good deal of clean-up to be done. One such assignment went to the South Carolina troops who had broken Doubleday’s line on Seminary Ridge. “Volunteers were called for, to go through Gettysburg and secure such of the enemy as might be lurking there,” recorded an officer. “But so many offered themselves that details had finally to be made. … A goodly number of prisoners were brought in.” “I think we dragged as many as 500 from the cellars,” a Virginia officer boasted.

A different kind of tidying-up was going on across the fields west of the town, where Mississippi surgeon LeGrand Wilson presided over one of the details charged with burying the dead. “This forced me to go all over that horrid field,” he recollected. “The poor, wounded Federals were crying piteously for water in every direction. … This was my first experience on the battlefield after the fighting, and it was horrible beyond description.”

Confederate forces held all the areas that had witnessed fighting this day. As troops were pulled back in the evening to refit, they passed through the scenes of earlier combat. “Then it was we saw the sickening horrors of war,” a lieutenant in Pettigrew’s Brigade wrote. “A great many of our wounded had not yet been carried to the hospital. The enemy’s dead … lay with their wounded—crying piteously for water. … Our dead were laying where they had fallen, but the ‘Battlefield Robbers’ had been there plundering the ‘dead.’ They seem to have respected neither the enemy’s nor our own dead.” Mulling over all he had seen this day, Rufus Dawes thought, “It is a troubled and dreamy sleep at best that comes to the soldier on the battlefield.”

Sleep was the last thing on Arabella Barlow’s mind. Francis Barlow’s wife had been in town when her husband’s troops, the Eleventh Corps’ First Division, retreated through to Cemetery Hill. She had been swept along with the wave, searching all the while for her husband. Finally she had encountered an aide to one of Barlow’s brigadiers, who told her that the commander lay “‘wounded outside of Gettysburg.’” The resourceful Arabella found an ambulance driver who was willing to take risks, and then, remembered an aide, “sitting next to the driver with a white flag in her hand, [she] drove quickly towards the town, although we could still hear firing.”

July 1 proved to be a never-to-be-forgotten day for the English observer with Lee’s army, Arthur Fremantle. He began and ended it appended to Longstreet’s headquarters, and in between spent the entire morning on the western side of the Cashtown Pass waiting for the traffic to clear. It was well into the afternoon before Fremantle managed to get through the cut and close to Gettysburg. His introduction to the fighting came when he overtook a column of wounded men seeking aid. “This
spectacle, so revolting to a person unaccustomed to such sights,” he remarked, “produced no impression whatever upon the advancing troops, who certainly go under fire with the most perfect nonchalance.”

Before coming into sight of Gettysburg, Fremantle also passed gangs of Union prisoners. He located A. P. Hill’s field headquarters and was able to speak for a short while with Lee’s Third Corps commander, who confessed that “he had been very unwell all day.” Hill reported the success won by two of his divisions but added without prompting “that the Yankees had fought with a determination unusual to them.”

Dinner at Longstreet’s headquarters was served after sundown. The resourceful Englishman found himself a place near the head of the table so he could converse with the man in charge of the First Corps. “General Longstreet spoke of the enemy’s position as being ‘very formidable,’” Fremantle quoted, appending Longstreet’s cautionary note that the Federals “would doubtless intrench themselves strongly during the night.”

Responding to a comment made by his medical director, Longstreet insisted that it would require the “whole army” to take Cemetery Hill, and even “then at a great sacrifice.” Despite these forebodings at the top, the mood among the headquarters staff was upbeat. From these officers Fremantle learned that “the universal feeling in the army was one of profound contempt for an enemy whom they have beaten so constantly, and under so many disadvantages.”

Richard Ewell could not get that hill out of his mind. Johnson’s Division had finally navigated through the jammed roads and reached the body-strewn fields north of Gettysburg just before sunset. Meeting with all three of his division commanders, Ewell shared the report he had received from his two staff scouts, who had found Culp’s Hill apparently unoccupied. He asked for opinions. Robert Rodes saw no urgent need to secure the position. Jubal Early, while adamant that
his
men could not be involved, nonetheless thought it vital that
somebody
be sent to claim the place. “If you do not go up there tonight, it will cost you 10,000 lives to get up there tomorrow,” he warned. That was enough for Ewell, who instructed Johnson to take position on the eastern side of town and occupy Culp’s Hill.

Members of the First and Eleventh Corps who had felt disappointed earlier this day about missing the action began to realize tonight, on
reaching their commands, just how lucky they had been. The 41st New York came in past 10:00
P.M.,
after a day spent guarding wagons near Emmitsburg, to find that about half their brigade had been lost. Also arriving at Cemetery Hill before daybreak were the two hundred men detached from Coster’s brigade. The fifty from the 154th New York were told, as one of them later recorded, “that our regiment had been engaged and that every man had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner.”

Colonel Ira Grover had risked his military career by marching his regiment, the 7th Indiana, to Gettysburg. Part of Cutler’s brigade, the unit had been left behind near Moritz Tavern with orders to guard the First Corps wagon train until such time as it was relieved. Through messages shouted by passing couriers, Grover had kept tabs on the fighting to the north until it became clear that his corps was being hard pressed. At that point he ignored his instructions and led his men up to the battle without being relieved.
^*

Traveling on the Baltimore Pike, the 434 Hoosiers reached Cemetery Hill not long after Hancock began organizing the defenses. Besides the dispiriting sight of a defeated army regrouping, the Indiana men encountered their division commander, James Wadsworth, who was in a mild state of shock over the mauling of his command. When Lysander Cutler greeted the new arrivals with the comment “‘If the Seventh had been with us we could have held our position,’” Wadsworth snapped back, “‘Yes, and all would now be dead or prisoners.’”

When Hancock gave Wadsworth the job of securing Culp’s Hill, the weary general first sent in the Iron Brigade, which took up a painfully short line on the hill’s western slope. The 6th Wisconsin was sent over last, taking station on the right of the brigade, nearest the crest. The much-diminished Western unit did not have the manpower to cover the hilltop, so Wadsworth tagged the fresh 7th Indiana for the task.

Ira Grover marched his men over to the hill in the gathering darkness, sent them filing in to the right of the 6th Wisconsin, and spread them out as far as he dared. The bulk of the regiment faced north, with a picket line covering the portion of the hill crest that dipped toward the east. It was far from a perfect deployment, but it was the best Grover could manage under the circumstances.

In both capitals the information received today was of an encouraging nature. Confederate War Department clerk John Beauchamp Jones noted in his diary that the “intelligence of the capture of Harrisburg and York, Pa., is so far confirmed.” At the same time, Abraham Lincoln’s navy secretary, Gideon Welles, was recording in his own diary the receipt of reports “that the Rebels have fallen back from York.” He was not sanguine that the marauding Confederates could be brought to bay, though he closed his entry with the words “We have rumors of hard fighting to-day.”

Robert E. Lee met Richard Ewell at the Second Corps headquarters, located in a small house near the Carlisle Road. It was the first time the two had spoken since June 9. If Ewell feared that Lee had come to chastise him for fighting this day, he was soon relieved on that point. Lee was interested in just two things: the fighting condition of the Second Corps and the prospects of its renewing the attack in the morning. Only Generals Rodes and Early were present with Ewell, Edward Johnson then being occupied with getting his division aligned near Culp’s Hill. While both of Ewell’s subordinates were positive about their readiness, neither felt that the terrain the Confederates were facing was suitable for offensive operations.

Lee’s disappointment was evident to Jubal Early, who could see that he was serious about attacking “the enemy as early as possible the next day.” Was the area assigned to Johnson’s Division a possibility? Lee asked. Early shook his head. In addition to his observation this day, he had surveyed the area when he passed through on June 26. He explained that the “ground over which we would have to advance on our flank was very rugged and steep,” adding that since the town’s narrow streets made it difficult to stage troops for an assault, any attacking force would have to “go on the left of the town right up against Cemetery Hill and the rugged hills on the left of it.” Even if such an action were to succeed, Early concluded, it would “be at a very great loss.”

Now that Early had managed to exempt his division from the mission handed to Johnson, he turned his attention to the entire Second Corps. He gestured toward the area south of Cemetery Hill, where high ground could be seen—ground that he argued “must evidently command the enemy’s position and render it untenable.” Ewell and Robert Rodes strongly endorsed this line of thinking.

“‘Then perhaps I had better draw you around toward my right, as the line will be very long and thin if you remain here, and the enemy may come down and break through it?’” Lee asked. Again Early begged to differ with his commander. Pulling the men back now, he argued, after they had fought so hard to take the town, would put a “damper … [on] their enthusiasm.” There was also the question of moving the wounded, which was no quick process. Early “did not like the idea of leaving those brave fellows to the mercy of the enemy.” Again Ewell and Rodes seconded him.