Gettysburg (43 page)

Even as Ewell was convincing Lee, the entire basis for their discussion was being eliminated by three Indiana soldiers endowed with a good deal of pluck and more than their share of luck. As he set his regiment in place on the crest of Culp’s Hill, Ira Grover took a calculated gamble by covering the right and rear of his position with just a few picket posts, opting to
mass his strength instead toward the north, the direction in which he knew the enemy lay. Unbeknownst to him, Johnson’s Division of Ewell’s Corps had extended the Confederate line until it stretched around the Hoosiers’ right flank. Once his troops had settled into their positions, Johnson sent out his own scouting party, which moved up the hill’s eastern face.

Indiana Sergeant William Hussey was manning a picket post just off the right of the main line. With him were Privates A. J. Harshbarger and W. S. Odell, two likewise steady and resourceful individuals. When they heard the “noise … as of men moving cautiously in the timber,” the trio quietly headed toward the intruders to set up an ambush. The Rebel scouts eased into the trap with their officer out in front. Hussey let the first man pass, then jumped him from behind. At the same time, the two privates opened fire. This brought the picket reserve at a run, sweeping up more prisoners on the way and sending the others tumbling down the hill convinced they had blundered into a well-defended position.

Hussey turned over his captures to Ira Grover, who learned that they were from the 42nd Virginia. Save for a few alarms engendered by jittery survivors of the day’s fight, the rest of the night passed without incident on Culp’s Hill.

When his scouts returned to report, Edward Johnson decided that it would be risking too much to try to advance up Culp’s Hill in the dark. By the time this information moved along the chain of command to Richard Ewell, there was no time for him to act on Lee’s earlier desire to pull the Second Corps away from the town. “Day was now breaking,” he reported later, “and it was too late for any change of place.”

The Sixth Corps had done some hard marching to reach its assigned station in George Meade’s broad frontage deployment. The more-than-13,000-strong corps (the Army of the Potomac’s largest) had tramped into Manchester, Maryland, on the night of June 30. Sunrise, July 1, had brought unexpected news: “Were pleased to hear that we could rest today,” noted one grateful diarist. Many soldiers took the opportunity to pen or pencil letters home. “I feel very tired from irregular hours, and I am footsore,” wrote a member of the 37th Massachusetts. “A day or two of rest,
if we ever get it
, will make all right again.” Not every motivation was so noble, however. Surgeon George T. Stevens observed with stern disapproval that Manchester appeared “well supplied with rye whiskey,”
and that many Sixth Corps soldiers seemed to “have a way of finding out the existence of that luxury.”

The atmosphere began to change dramatically at around 7:30
P.M.,
when, according to a Wisconsin soldier, “some of us saw a mounted officer come galloping down the pike from the West.” The rider spotted the men and approached them. “‘Where is Corps Headquarters?’” he demanded. A few in the group gestured to a knoll about sixty-five feet away, where the corps headquarters flag was visible. According to one of those present, the orderly “struck spurs to his horse and dashed in that direction, leaped from the saddle and rushed into the tent.” Any hope of a full day’s rest went by the boards as the headquarters erupted in a frenzy of “staff officers … rushing in all directions.” Within minutes, bugle and drum calls signaling “Assemble” began to echo from the camps.

By this point in the war and this campaign, veteran units were proficient in the drill, so it was not long after 8:00
P.M.
that the first regiments began marching. “None of us knew our destination,” recorded a Pennsylvania soldier, “but we suspected something important would soon occur.” According to John Sedgwick, commanding the Sixth Corps, “I received orders from General Meade to march for Taneytown, which at that time was his headquarters.” To accomplish the movement, Sedgwick’s staff led the various columns along a series of roughly parallel country roads, in the dark. “We would march a while then stop and stand until we had to sit down and rest,” recollected a pennsylvania man. “But scarcely would we get down until the order ‘forward’ would be given.” “We go limping around with blistered feet and chafed limbs, and lame shoulders,” added a Massachusetts comrade.

The columns had been moving for several hours when an unsettling rumor skittered over the army grapevine. “Head of the column seems to have lost its way,” scribbled a diarist during one halt. After George Meade decided to relocate his headquarters to Gettysburg, it had taken a while for his staff officers to find the Sixth Corps and redirect its officers to turn their men onto the Baltimore pike, instead of marching them across it to connect a few miles farther on with the route to Taneytown. The word came too late for the leading elements in Sedgwick’s column. “By the time the right road was discovered,” grumbled a Maine foot soldier, “the boys were mostly asleep; and the starting up and the turning of them around to retrace their steps, caused much strong language.”

The action of July 1 was a battle of brigades and regiments, not of divisions and armies. Nowhere was it written in stone that the two sides would fight at Gettysburg, nor was the slow escalation inevitable once the combat began. The actions of this first day occurred because no one in a position to end the fighting ever saw the whole picture.

At a corps level, Confederate leadership covered the extremes, from A. P. Hill’s distrait control to the opportunistic initiative of Richard Ewell (however false his impression that Hill’s men were under threat), a cocky mood that faded by day’s end into a wary caution. Both men looked to Robert E. Lee for some sign, but neither received clear guidance, nor did either successfully interpret the messages Lee
did
send. The army commander, for his part, was mentally unprepared for the scale of this day’s encounter and poorly informed by his key subordinates. His unleashing of Hill’s men late in the afternoon was less a considered action born of a comprehensive strategy and more a reflex to protect Ewell.

The Confederate brigade-level report card was decidedly mixed. Henry Heth failed to key on Archer’s justified caution and ignored Davis’ enthusiastic ignorance, both of which qualities led to tactical disasters. He was far better served by the hard-hitting Pettigrew, whose accomplishments might well have been less costly if Brockenbrough had carried out his assignment. In the closing phase on Seminary Ridge, Scales and Perrin showed what valor could and could not accomplish, while Thomas waited offstage and Lane played his own solitary, unhelpful game. To the north, Robert Rodes was extremely well served by Doles, Daniel, and Ramseur and badly underserved by Iverson and O’Neal. Jubal Early wisely relied on John Gordon to deliver the coup de main, which might not have shone with such luster had Avery and Hays not ably completed the job.

The lack of a well-thought-out follow-through at day’s end was as much of Lee’s making as of anyone else’s. His failure to communicate his intentions, coupled with the restraining effect of his nonengagement order of the day and his decision to withhold Anderson’s fresh division from the fray, made the questions faced by Richard Ewell difficult indeed. Lee’s later capitulation, in allowing the Second Corps to remain tied up in Gettysburg, would offer its commander few advantages for July 2.

For the Union side, the death of John Reynolds meant more than the loss of an inspiring leader; it also removed from the equation the one person with enough vision and sense of purpose to manage this battle. Howard never came close to filling the leadership vacuum, leaving two
corps to fend for themselves. Doubleday nailed the First Corps to McPherson’s Ridge not because it offered great defensive strengths (it did not), but almost entirely because he feared countermanding Reynolds’ last order even more than he feared the Rebels. The able Carl Schurz was handed a busted plan, forced to deploy in an impossible position, and undone by a subordinate’s ill-conceived adventure; and more than that, he was just plain unlucky. Following his masterly delaying action of the morning, John Buford retired to a supporting role, which his men performed all out of proportion to their small numbers. There is no evidence that he was asked for or offered any advice once John Reynolds passed from the scene.

Of Doubleday’s division commanders, only Rowley called it in; all the others did the jobs assigned them. On the brigade level, Meredith’s lack of an open mind bound the crack Iron Brigade to a poor defensive position, while Baxter’s and Paul’s successors performed effectively in a very exposed one. Even though the rest of the army expected the Eleventh Corps to fail (which it did, after all), it was through no fault of its brigade commanders, who fought from their often hopeless positions with more tenacity and skill than they have been credited with.

For the Confederacy, Lee arrived on the field with no plan, tried halfheartedly to improvise one late in the day, and ultimately decided to defer exerting his full control until July 2. For the Union, beyond holding Cemetery Hill and waiting for the Twelfth Corps to come up, Howard appears to have had no scheme in mind, nor even any desire to influence events beyond his line of sight.

Although it would pale in comparison with the two days yet to come, July 1 was a hard-fought action. Of the approximately 23,500 Union soldiers engaged this day, almost 9,000 (38 percent) were casualties. On the Confederate side, out of 28,300 on the field, slightly more than 6,000 (22 percent) were killed, wounded, or captured.

C
oiled within and without the infantry camps on the roads feeding into Gettysburg were the artillery parks, harboring the most potent killing weapons in each army’s arsenal. For the moment the tubes were cold and silent, but once heated by action they would spew out death in large measures and small. The men who tended them were a breed apart, bonded by specialized training that molded them into a single entity dedicated to the meticulously choreographed sequence of actions required to feed their beasts. For some of the gunners, this night brought rest, while for others there was movement toward Gettysburg.

Edward Porter Alexander was on the move. His artillery battalion, part of Longstreet’s Corps, had begun marching from a bivouac near Greenwood, west of the Cashtown Gap, just after sunset. The gunners had waited throughout the day for the infantry and baggage trains to clear the pass—a prudent decision, as it turned out, for now they were enjoying, in Alexander’s words, “a lovely march over a fairly good pike by a bright moon.”

The Georgia-born officer, who had celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday on May 26, was considered one of the best artillerists in Lee’s army. That recognition galled his immediate superior, Colonel John B. Walton, who resented the amount of responsibility conferred on his subordinate. Walton was riding with the head of the column this night, allowing Alexander and his six batteries the privilege of bringing up the rear. Alexander cared little for personal politics, for he knew that there would be more fighting soon, and it was in combat that he felt most at home. “All the accounts we had of the fighting [at Gettysburg] represented it as having been very hard & bloody on both sides,” he later recollected, “& though we had finally gotten the ground & the town, we heard enough to assure us that the little dispute was not entirely settled.”

Alexander’s presumption was a matter of fact for another of the South’s capable artillerymen, Major Joseph W. Latimer. A battalion commander like Alexander, Latimer commanded four batteries attached to Johnson’s Division in Ewell’s Corps. These gunners had trailed their infantry, not reaching Gettysburg until nightfall. After parking his cannon in a wheat field east of the town, the twenty-year-old Virginian rode to headquarters seeking orders.

People liked Latimer; Ewell’s aide Campbell Brown described him as “one of those born soldiers whose promotion is recognized by all to be a consequence of their own merit.” His gunners, many of whom were older than he, respected his intensity and skill and had fondly dubbed him the “Boy Major.” This night, on reporting to Colonel John Thompson Brown, Ewell’s artillery chief, Latimer was told to find firing positions on the left of the Second Corps line. Because it would be too dangerous to explore the area in the dark, Latimer snatched what sleep he could, determined to be up before dawn.