Gettysburg (47 page)

Watching the 1st Delaware tumble back from the Bliss farm, its Second Corps division commander, Alexander Hays, immediately began organizing a counterattack. As long as Rebel snipers held the place, he knew, it would be deadly difficult for union troops to move along the
crest of Cemetery Ridge. Between 9:30 and 10:00
A.M.,
Hays drew ten companies from one Ohio and two New York regiments and sent them forward to take the Bliss farm back.

With each passing hour, the Army of the Potomac was accomplishing something more important than bringing more men and arms to the field: it was finding its operational balance, setting in place the systems necessary for effective command and control. By 9:00
A.M.,
all corps present had established headquarters and reported their locations to Meade’s staff. Signal officers had set up observation points on every Union-held piece of high ground; all were linked to Meade’s nerve center by flag communication. The Reserve Artillery was in place, supply limbers of active guns were being serviced, and staff functions were being carried out.

Among those now on hand at headquarters was Meade’s inherited chief-of-staff, Daniel Butterfield, who had requested an assignment upon his arrival. According to his own recollection, Meade told him, “‘General Butterfield, neither I nor any man can tell what the results of this day’s operations may be. It is our duty to be prepared for every contingency, and I wish you to send out staff officers to learn all the roads that lead from this place, ascertain the positions of the corps—where their [supply] trains are; prepare to familiarize yourself with these details, so that in the event of any contingency, you can, without any order, be ready to meet it.’” Butterfield, whose loyalty to the dismissed Hooker had never wavered, took Meade’s statement as a directive “to prepare an order to withdraw the army from that position,” an interpretation he would discuss with other officers.

Also arriving from Taneytown around this time was Gouverneur K. Warren, who had already spent the evening hours of July 1 here, helping Hancock secure the position. Meade promptly entrusted Warren with the important task of examining the ground around Culp’s Hill to assess the feasibility of an offensive. With his right flank settling down, Meade began to consider his left, where Daniel Sickles’ Third Corps was positioned. On switching John Geary’s division from Little Round Top to Culp’s Hill, he had instructed Sickles to cover the position abandoned by the Twelfth Corps men. Now he asked his son George Meade Jr., who was serving with him as a staff aide, to ride over to the Third Corps headquarters and see how the deployment was going.

More eager than experienced, the younger Meade rode south along the Taneytown Road until he saw the diamond-emblemed headquarters flag flapping near a grove of trees just to the west. There he located Captain George E. Randolph, the Third Corps’ artillery chief, and asked if the troop placement was going according to George Meade’s wishes. By way of reply, Randolph reported that Sickles was resting, having been up most of the night. The artillerist entered the only tent that was pitched and remained inside for a few minutes. When he emerged, it was to announce that the corps had not taken up any position at all because Sickles was unclear as to where exactly his men were supposed to go.

This surprised young Meade, who was under the impression that his assignment was merely to confirm orders already given, not to explain the deployment. A more seasoned staff aide might have assumed enough of the commanding general’s authority to insist that the orders be carried out as they were best understood, but George Junior was out of his depth. All he could do was tell Randolph that he would convey the situation to the general, his father, and ask what his wishes were.

When Robert E. Lee reached Richard Ewell’s headquarters, he learned that the Second Corps commander was out reconnoitering his lines with Charles Venable. Present, however, was the unhappy supernumerary, Isaac Trimble, who said he knew just the place when Lee asked to be taken to a good vantage point. Trimble led Lee to the almshouse, which boasted a cupola with a view. From it Lee observed that the Federals on Cemetery Hill were not hopelessly disorganized, as he had hoped. According to Trimble, Lee declared, “‘The enemy have the advantage of us in a short and inside line, and we are too much extended.’”

They returned to Ewell’s headquarters to find that the Second Corps leader had not yet returned. When Armistead L. Long, back from identifying artillery positions along Seminary Ridge, caught up with Lee here, he sensed that “the general had been waiting … for some time.”

At last Ewell arrived with Venable, who was now fully convinced that conditions on this flank would seriously hamper any offensive effort. His earnest seconding of Ewell’s previous arguments confirmed Lee’s conclusion the Second Corps might at best support an assault. This provided the final piece of his attack plan: a flanking movement by Longstreet against the Federal left, accompanied by opportunistic advances in the center by Hill and on the Confederate left by Ewell. One of Ewell’s staff
officers, Jed Hotchkiss, recorded, “General Lee was at our quarters in the a.m. and there planned the movement, though not, in my opinion, very sanguine of its success. He feared we would only take it at a great sacrifice of life.”

George Meade Jr. made a quick round trip between the respective headquarters of Daniel Sickles and his father. The message he brought back from the army commander contained little ambiguity. Sickles, as Meade
fils
recollected the instructions, was “to go into position on the left of the Second Corps [so] that his right was to connect with the left of the Second Corps, [and] he was to prolong with his line the line of that corps, occupying the position that General Geary had held the night before.”

On his return, young Meade found the Third Corps headquarters all in motion. Sickles displayed no emotion as his superior’s aide delivered the message, and commented only that his troops were deploying even as they spoke. Turning toward the front, Sickles offered the parting observation that Geary’s troops had not held any real position at all but had merely been “massed in the vicinity.”

Sickles rode first to his left, the sector assigned to David B. Birney’s division. By now the corps commander had most likely made up his mind on two important points. First, he was convinced that George Meade’s commitment to stand and fight at Gettysburg was far from resolute. Second, he had concluded that the lack of attention his flank had received from the commanding general made it his responsibility to act. Thus self-empowered, Sickles, with Birney’s willing collaboration, began a deployment that paid a superficial obeisance to Meade’s directives while actually constituting a stealthy repositioning of the Third Corps.

Almost from the instant he first traversed the area Meade had assigned him to defend, Sickles had deemed it “an unsatisfactory line because of its marked depression and the swampy character of the ground between Cemetery Ridge and Little Round Top.” Nor was that his only complaint, for he believed that “to abandon the Emmitsburg road to the enemy would be unpardonable.” Every subsequent action taken by Sickles stemmed from his conviction that the Federal left flank “was our assailable point.” Although he would never explain why he thought so, he would later credit what he perceived to be “the enemy’s movements on our left” with furnishing “conclusive indications of a design on [the Confederates’] part to attack there.”

Birney’s troop deployment provided scant protection for Little Round Top. Instead, the division commander set up a strong outpost line of three regiments along the Emmitsburg Road, near the Sherfy house. Three more regiments were posted northwest of Little Round Top, behind a stone wall fronting a large wheat field. Several batteries assigned to the corps were positioned between these two groups of regiments, aiming generally southward toward the John Rose farm. When Birney’s
absent brigade (Graham’s) came up from Emmitsburg sometime before 10:00
A.M.,
it was massed to support the cannon. Slightly north of this activity, Sickles’ other division, commanded by the no-nonsense Andrew Humphreys, remained in an armed bivouac, with pickets out but troops otherwise resting.

Among the Third Corps units arriving from Emmitsburg was the 4th New York Independent Battery, led by Captain James E. Smith. Smith later recounted, “As we approached the ground between the two armies in the vicinity of the ‘peach orchard,’ I noticed that the fences had been cleared away and all preparations made that usually precede a battle; even then the pickets and skirmishers were uneasy and kept up a desultory fire, little puffs of thin blue smoke dotting the plain before us.” An aide to artillery chief George Randolph directed the battery to a modest road running east from the peach orchard, which it was to follow until it reached a wheat field,
^*
and there park. While Smith’s practiced eye would have taken in the excellent fields of fire near the peach orchard, it would likely not have missed the tumbled, rocky ground just southeast of where his guns halted. It was the kind of place no artilleryman would want to defend.

Following a course correction outside Westminster, Maryland, to get onto the road that would become the Baltimore Pike into Gettysburg, the Sixth Corps, representing nearly one fifth of Meade’s army, trudged on. “Little is said by any one, for we are too weary to talk,” reminisced a Rhode Island soldier, “only now and then an officer sharply orders the men to close up.” Not long after dawn, halts were ordered to allow the men to make coffee, but in several instances, as recollected by a Massachusetts man, “before the coffee is made the bugle rings out its unwelcome call and the procession is resumed.”

The leading elements began crossing the Pennsylvania border shortly before midday. “The bands all discoursed sweet music and you know the almost magical effect which national melodies would have upon the minds of our wearied but brave soldiers,” wrote a member of the 49th Pennsylvania. The Sixth Corps reinforcements were some six miles from Gettysburg.

After departing Ewell’s headquarters, Robert E. Lee rode back to his own, on the southern side of the Chambersburg Pike along Seminary Ridge. There he met with the cavalry brigadier, Albert Jenkins, who had been fetched by an aide sent out by Lee when he was still with the Second Corps. Ewell had complained that he had three good infantry brigades tied down watching after the army’s left flank. On learning that Jenkins’ horsemen had reached the battlefield late the previous day, Lee had decided to use them to relieve Ewell’s units. Jenkins acknowledged the order and left to carry it out.

Lee next checked on Longstreet’s progress. Riding along Seminary Ridge, he passed through an artillery position that he thought belonged with Longstreet’s column. When the officer commanding gently corrected his superior, Lee apologized and asked, “‘Do you know where General Longstreet is?’” Colonel R. Lindsay Walker, A. P. Hill’s artillery chief, spoke up to say that he knew where to find him, and offered himself as a guide. “As we rode together,” Walker later recollected, “General Lee manifested more impatience than I ever saw him exhibit upon any other occasion.”