Gettysburg (42 page)

Frustrated though Lee may have been with this discussion, it likely never entered his mind to issue peremptory orders for Ewell to either attack or withdraw. The notion of imposing his will on a subordinate was simply too alien to Lee’s nature for him even to admit as a possibility. Yet the situation would have been enough to tax the patience of Job. Hill’s Corps had taken stiff casualties this day and was in no condition to carry the lead role in renewing the attack, and Ewell and his division commanders had firmly opted themselves out of playing a principal part. That left Longstreet, who had already crossed a tacit line into disrespectful behavior with his insubordinate outburst today. Thus burdened with a collection of poor options, Lee returned to his headquarters.

There was something decidedly funereal about the scene. In the near distance a horse battery was banging away in an irregular but steady cadence that suggested the firing of a minute gun, and the air was tanged with the incense of burned wood. Had he not been so overpoweringly tired, Jeb Stuart might well have registered how appropriate it all seemed, for his hopes of a triumphal and successful completion of his mission were as ashes in the dust.

The stop in Dover had accomplished little in the way of resting his troopers. An officer in the column later recollected that “the men were overcome and so tired and stupid as almost to be ignorant of what was taking place around them.” It did not help that their route from Dover to Carlisle took them across the northernmost spur of the South Mountains, requiring extra exertion from the already exhausted men and animals. Then, to round off this thoroughly wretched day, Stuart’s leading elements under Fitzhugh Lee reached Carlisle to find that not only had they missed contacting Ewell’s column by a matter of hours, but the town itself was now occupied by Yankee militia who gave no signs of skedaddling.

Since it was only militia, after all, and lacking any better ideas, Stuart allowed Fitzhugh Lee permission to frighten the garrison into submission. Nimbly bypassing a mounted picket posted east of the town, Lee used his six-gun battery for a slow bombardment on Carlisle, punctuated by several parleys during which he offered the enemy commander his choice between an honorable surrender and total destruction. To everyone’s surprise, the Federal officer (a regular army man with something to prove) refused to give up, so the desultory cannonade persisted, starting some small fires and knocking away pieces of a few buildings.

Stuart stubbornly and dully let the purposeless drama continue. According to one observer on the scene, “The men were falling asleep around the guns, and the present writer slept very soundly within ten feet of a battery hotly firing. … The best example, however, was the one which General Stuart mentioned. He saw a man climb a fence, put one leg over, and in that position drop asleep!” As midnight approached, a thoroughly irritated Fitzhugh Lee sent men forward to torch the Carlisle barracks and other town property. At least one Rebel trooper was alert enough to marvel at the way the firelight from the burning barracks “fell magnificently upon the spires of the city, presenting an exquisite spectacle.”

The first news reports of the Gettysburg fighting left Taneytown for Frederick right around sunset. One bore the byline “Agate,” the nom de plume of Whitelaw Reid; the second was penned by Lorenzo L. Crounse, covering the war for the
New York Times.
Reid got his story almost entirely from Crounse, who on his own meanderings in search of the army had crossed paths with several couriers, a bit of serendipity that enabled him to piece together a broadly accurate picture of what was happening at a place called Gettysburg.

Crounse’s first brief dispatch to the
Times
reported a “heavy engagement” just outside the town, involving two Rebel and two Federal corps. Because his information string had run out by early afternoon, though, his scoop on John Reynolds’ death was accompanied by the claim that the First and Eleventh Corps were “successfully” resisting all attacks against them.

Reid wrote up his own report, opportunistically incorporating Crounse’s intelligence (while taking care to acknowledge his companion’s role in obtaining the information), and the two entrusted their stories to a rider bound for the telegraph hub at Frederick. Then the
newspapermen rode toward the fighting. They made their way past columns pressing northward, all the while hastily interrogating anyone who seemed to be coming from the scene of the action. The Federals were either enjoying great success or on the brink of ruin, depending upon the source.

Hoping to make better time, they angled off the packed Taneytown Road and traveled across country for a while before intersecting with the Baltimore Pike, which led them into Two Taverns. There they learned that a Union corps headquartered in the hamlet had moved toward Gettysburg some hours earlier. “That didn’t look like a serious disaster,” Reid concluded. Other snatches of information made it clear that armies of both sides were concentrating near Gettysburg, leading Reid to observe that July 2 “must bring the battle that is to decide the invasion.”

It would do the reporters no good to reach the action in a state of exhaustion, so they prevailed on one of the two tavern keepers to put them up for a few hours. The pair planned to reach Gettysburg by sunrise. “If the situation is as we hope, our army must attack by daybreak,” Reid declared.

It was the waiting that was hardest on George Meade. He had accomplished nothing important since sending Hancock off to Gettysburg, other than tracking the obviously worsening situation through the messages and testimony of the couriers arriving from the various commands. At perhaps 4:45
P.M.,
cavalry commander Alfred Pleasonton brought Meade a dispatch sent by John Buford about an hour earlier. After reporting the presence of two Confederate corps pressing from the north and west, Buford rated the morning’s fighting as a “tremendous battle.” Moreover, “In my opinion,” Buford declared (casting aspersions on both Howard and Doubleday), “there seems to be no directing person.” His terse postscript spoke volumes: “We need help now.”

Meade did everything he could within the limits of prudence and caution, because until he heard from Hancock, he was not going to commit himself fully. Orders were sent to the other corps commanders, instructing them to be prepared to march on short notice. Shortly before 6:00
P.M.,
Hancock’s aide arrived and reported that the army at Gettysburg could maintain itself until dark. Meade knew from the message traffic that the First and Eleventh Corps were soon to be joined by the Twelfth, which was likely just reaching the town, and later by the Third and Fifth Corps, now on their way there. “It seems to me,” Meade declared in a dispatch sent at 6:00
P.M.
to both Hancock and Doubleday, “we have so concentrated that a battle at Gettysburg is now forced on us.”

At virtually the same moment, the army commander dictated a summary for Henry Halleck in Washington, relating all he knew. “I see no other course than to hazard a general battle,” he conceded. He still did not commit himself irrevocably, however, adding, “Circumstances during the night may alter this decision, of which I will try to advise you.” About
an hour after this note left on its journey to the telegraph exchange at Frederick, Meade received another update from Hancock, who had written, “I think we can retire; if not, we can fight here, as the ground appears not unfavorable with good troops.” While not exactly a ringing endorsement of the position, it was all the confirmation Meade needed. Starting at 7:00
P.M.,
orders began to issue from his headquarters directing all units not already moving toward Gettysburg to get on the march. The Pipe Creek plan became just another what-might-have-been.

Everything bustled as tents came down and materiel was packed up preparatory to moving army headquarters forward to Gettysburg. Meade was not expecting Hancock in person this night, but the Second Corps commander surprised him by appearing shortly before 10:00
P.M.,
followed soon after by the army’s chief engineer, Gouverneur K. Warren. Henry Slocum had finally reached Cemetery Hill and assumed command by virtue of his seniority, making it possible for Hancock to return to Taneytown. There he briefed Meade personally on the day’s actions, as well as the general situation as of sunset. Hancock was dead on his feet, so Meade allowed him to catch some much-needed sleep. For George Meade himself, there would be none for quite a while.

It was shortly after 10:00
P.M.
when he and his staff set off for a place he had never seen, but where he expected to meet Robert E. Lee in battle.

Both sides had taken prisoners this day. Just from Archer’s, Davis’, and Iverson’s Brigades, Union provosts corralled more than a thousand men, with other Rebel commands contributing a few hundred more. “I will never forget, & yet I can never describe my feelings & thoughts, just at that time, when I found I was a
prisoner
,” reflected a Mississippi soldier snagged at the railroad cut. He and others were quick-marched through Gettysburg, some of whose citizens “jeered and laughed at us from their doors, tops of houses & other places of safety,” he noted bitterly.

Many Confederate prisoners were accumulated in a field just south of Cemetery Hill; one of Archer’s men thought they “remained in the vicinity of the town about three hours.” That was about the time when Ewell’s Corps was making its presence known on the field. “Started us at almost a ‘double quick’ toward Baltimore,” recounted the Mississippi man. It was early evening when the first batches neared Taneytown, where the general army’s provost units took them. Soon George Sharpe’s
officers were interviewing the POWs and rapidly adding detail to their picture of the size and composition of the enemy force at Gettysburg.

For their part, the victorious Confederates made little attempt at a systematic analysis of the approximately 3,655 officers and men they had captured. Many of the Federals were wounded and scattered about the area in makeshift aid stations and private houses. One of the ambulatory prisoners, a member of the 99th Pennsylvania, recalled marching “over back of Seminary Ridge, and [then they] rounded us up in a field, thru which a sluggish stream ran, Marsh Creek, I think.” There the Yankee boys were herded together and guarded. Many of these July 1 prisoners would have nothing to eat for another two days.

The more Robert E. Lee considered it, the less sense it made to him to leave Ewell’s Corps where it was. He had hardly returned to Seminary Ridge before he had his staff officer Charles Marshall heading back to Ewell’s headquarters with orders for the Second Corps to slide around to the south. When Marshall reported in again, just after 10:30
P.M.,
he had Ewell with him. The situation had changed, Ewell explained. Johnson’s men had moved up into line, and if they had not yet taken control of Culp’s Hill, they should be doing so at any moment. The position was ideally suited for cutting Federal communication and supply along the Baltimore Pike, and it would constitute a critical springboard for taking Cemetery Hill. It would be foolhardy to pull back from it, Ewell argued.

Lee was not quite so ready to believe that the Federals would leave something as crucial as Culp’s Hill uncovered, but if Ewell was right, it would be a blunder to relinquish it. He therefore reversed himself: the Second Corps would hold its position. He would find a role for it in the actions to come.

It was not yet midnight when Ewell, victorious once more this day, rode back toward his headquarters.

On one matter Lee had not changed his mind one iota. A battle had been begun today but not completed; he would finish it tomorrow. All the strategic points he had discussed so long ago with Jefferson Davis compelled him to give battle sometime during this campaign. Circumstances had chosen Gettysburg as the place. But there was another reason for his resolve: the Federals had fought well this day, and they must not be allowed the time to draw pride from that experience. As Lee later reported, “Encouraged by the successful issue of the engagement of the
first day, and in view of the valuable results that would ensue from the defeat of the army of General Meade, it was thought advisable to renew the attack.”

Private E. C. Culp of the 25th Ohio (Eleventh Corps) may well have been the most optimistic Yankee on the field this night. “We lay on our arms,” he would later recollect, “happy in the thought that by morning our position would be re-enforced by the balance of the best army ever organized, and that for once we would ‘have things our own way.’”

Nightfall found the citizens of Gettysburg in every mood possible: some frightened, some curious, some just plain excited. From a young boy’s perspective, July 1 had been a time of terrible wonderment. Charles McCurdy would always remember it as a “day of excitement and strange adventure.” Daniel Skelly, still aglow over having helped Oliver Howard find an observation post, “enjoyed a good night’s rest after the feverish anxiety of the first day’s battle.”

Sleep was anything but welcome for Tillie Pierce. After the fighting ended, she had gone exploring with her friend Beckie Weikert. The pair had looked into a barn that was now being used as an aid station. “Nothing before in my experience had ever paralleled the sight we then and there beheld,” Tillie would reminisce in later years. “There were the groaning and crying, the struggling and dying, crowded side by side.” Sleeping was hard for her this night, for she was “surrounded with strange and appalling events, and [had] many new visions passing rapidly through my mind.” “At night all was quiet,” recalled another of Gettysburg’s young women, “but the tramp of the guards reminded the town that its citizens were prisoners.” Sarah Broadhead saw not only the present moment but also what was to come. “As I write all is quiet,” she confided to her diary, “but O! how I dread to-morrow.”