Gettysburg (86 page)

T
he heavy rain that had showered earlier in the evening had hurried off as quickly as it came on, leaving the night sky scoured clean. The moon was high and the stars were bright (though more clouds were building along the skirt of the horizon) as Brigadier General John D. Imboden stood idle near Robert E. Lee’s headquarters tent. The forty-year-old lawyer and businessman commanded a small, unattached cavalry brigade that was then on assignment to Lee. Imboden and his troopers, usually given higher marks for their foraging than for their fighting abilities, had taken over watching the army’s supply trains in Chambersburg from George Pickett’s men before moving up to Gettysburg on the afternoon of July 3. It was past 11:00
P.M.
when the cavalryman received a summons to report to the army commander, learning on his arrival that Lee was in conference with A. P. Hill, Imboden had been instructed to wait.

He put the time at around 1:00
A.M
. when Lee finally returned to his command post, weary beyond measure. The general seemed to have trouble dismounting, and once he had gotten down, he leaned against his horse and saddle, the very picture of exhaustion.

“‘General, this has been a hard day on you,’” Imboden said, feeling the need to say something.

“‘Yes,’” Lee replied at last, “‘it has been a sad, sad day to us.’” The usually reserved army commander followed up another minute or so of silence with a brief soliloquy in which he alternately praised Pickett’s men
and bemoaned the fact that his plan had not been properly implemented. With the anguish of a master designer who had seen one of his finest constructs fall victim to the failings of others, Lee allowed himself a rare venting: “‘Too bad!
Too bad!’
” he exclaimed. “‘Oh! Too Bad!’”

Almost as suddenly as it had roiled up, Lee’s personal storm subsided, and he became all business. “‘We must return to Virginia,’” he told Imboden as they entered his headquarters tent. “‘As many of our poor wounded as possible must be taken home. I have sent for you because your men are fresh, to guard the trains back to Virginia. The duty will be arduous, responsible, and dangerous, for I am afraid you will be harassed by the enemy’s cavalry. I can spare you as much artillery as you require, but no other troops, as I shall need all I have to return to the Potomac by a different route from yours.’” Lee outlined the course he wanted Imboden to take to Williamsport, where he was to cross the Potomac River into Virginia.

After they discussed a few small details, Lee summoned some of his staff to turn his intentions into written orders. When Imboden moved to depart, the commander made one additional request: “‘I will place in your hands [in the morning] … a sealed package for President Davis, which you will retain in your own possession till you are across the Potomac, when you will detail a trusty commissioned officer to take it to Richmond with all possible dispatch, and deliver it immediately to the President. … If you should unfortunately be captured, destroy it.’” Imboden nodded, suddenly aware that he was accepting the greatest professional challenge of his life.

Ever since the Rebels had first occupied Gettysburg, Mary McAllister had slept sitting in a chair pulled up beside an open window. She guessed it was around 2:00
A.M.
when a distant sound awakened her: the low rumble of wagons moving out of the town to the west. Mary hurriedly woke her sleeping sister Martha and told her, “I believe the rebels are retreating.” Martha dared not believe it until they both overheard a man outside speaking to the pair of Confederates guarding their house. “Get up, get,” he told the soldiers. “We are retreating!” For a moment, Mary considered saying good-bye to her protectors, but then she decided “it would have seemed like mockery.”

Others in Gettysburg likewise began gathering hints this night that the occupation’s end was drawing near. Gates Fahnestock, for one, sensed
that “there was movement among the Confederates.” A wounded Federal POW noted with growing excitement that all the enemy columns in sight “were moving in the same direction—not
toward
our lines but
from
them.” Daniel Skelly watched with dawning comprehension as Rebel officers passed noiselessly from post to post along the street below his window, “telling [their men] to get up quietly and fall back.” Henry Jacobs had previously seen columns of soldiers being marched every which way, but the ones he saw now were different. Whereas those earlier formations had been ready to fight, these were “like some great current that had passed through innumerable scenes of wreck, bearing its jetsam with it.”

Still others in town had not a clue as to what was happening. Sarah Broadhead drifted into an uninterrupted sleep, willing herself not to become hopeful. William Bayly recollected “nothing of special note during the evening and night.”

Shortly before dawn, a 74th Pennsylvania sentinel posted to watch Baltimore Street saw several civilians in the town waving for him to come on. After a quick palaver with others on the picket post, a small patrol inched forward. “In every house we entered [there] were rebel soldiers sleeping,” recalled a member of that group. Word swiftly spread along the outpost line, and soon a number of impromptu probes were poking into Gettysburg’s southern outskirts. Two parties from the 58th New York laid claim to 280 prisoners. Several companies from the 106th Pennsylvania, on detached service with the Eleventh Corps, also took part in these initial explorations. Sarah Broadhead was awakened by the sound of Rebel officers herding their men out in a final sweep: “I looked up the street and saw our men in the public square, and it was a joyful sight, for I knew we were now safe,” she declared. The commotion lured Alexander Schimmelfennig from his hiding place behind the Garlach residence. Catherine Garlach saw the Eleventh Corps officer walking “stiff and cramped like” toward the patrols, who welcomed the general as one returned from the dead.

Behind these first, improvised ventures, larger efforts were being organized. “This morning the enemy has withdrawn his pickets from the positions of yesterday,” George Meade scribbled to Henry Halleck at 7:00
A.M.
“My own pickets are moving out to ascertain the nature and extent of the enemy’s movement.” At 8:00
A.M.,
Wlodzimierz Krzyzanowski led the
119th New York and 26th Wisconsin of his brigade on a short reconnaissance along the town’s southwestern outskirts and toward Seminary Ridge.

Shortly after 10:30
A.M.,
a full-scale mission was undertaken to fix the enemy’s new position. Henry Slocum personally led a brigade-sized expeditionary force on a wide swing to the east that allowed it to enter the town via the Hanover Road. A soldier in those ranks would remember that he and his fellows “moved cautiously, every moment expecting to hear the rebel shells in their midst.” When they at last reached Gettysburg, the Twelfth Corps men made quite an impression. “Ye gods!” exclaimed Daniel Skelly. “What a welcome sight for the imprisoned people of Gettysburg! The Boys in Blue marching down the street, fife and drum corps playing, the glorious Stars and Stripes fluttering at the head of the lines.” The good spirits came to an abrupt end, however, on the western side of town, where Rebel riflemen had drawn a new dead line.

Especially dangerous was an area where Middle Street provided a clear line of sight on anyone crossing it using Washington Street. After seeing one unwary cavalryman be wounded in the intersection, sixteen-year-old Julia Jacobs positioned herself in the doorway of her family’s home on the northwestern corner of the crossing and began shouting warnings to Federal soldiers approaching from the south along Washington Street. When the Rebel sharpshooters realized that someone was alerting the Yankees, they began targeting the doorway, forcing Jacobs deeper into the house, though she never abandoned her station. “We could see the leaves and twigs of our linden trees fly as they were snipped by the bullets,” recollected Julia’s brother Henry, “but none of them reached her.” Finally, a determined squad of Federal soldiers threw a barricade across Middle Street and, after a furious exchange of gunfire, neutralized the threat.

Slocum’s was not the only effort under way to locate Lee’s new line. From the east, a patrol from the 4th Pennsylvania Cavalry moved north from the Hanover Road to the York Pike, which it then followed into town, capturing a picket post and several aid stations on the way. To the south, the united States Sharpshooters probed west from Little Round Top, while a force of U.S. Regulars supported by a brigade from the Sixth Corps pushed toward the Emmitsburg Road. “Found the Enemy in force about 1 mile in the rear of his old position,” recorded a Pennsylvania soldier. “He opened up with shell on our advance.”

This shelling was the product of an inspired bit of insubordination on the part of Captain William Parker’s Virginia Battery. Lately posted in
Sherfy’s peach orchard, Parker’s men had been among the last to pull back, but their commander halted the movement when he spotted the approaching enemy recon force. Upon instructing his guns to open fire, Parker had the satisfaction of seeing the Yankee formation go to ground. He decided to hold his post for as long as he could, even begging some extra munitions from another battery retiring to his right. The firing brought out one of Longstreet’s staff officers, come to investigate what all the noise was about; once he saw how effectively Parker’s guns were fending off the inquisitive Federals, he ordered some infantry forward to support them. With this help, William Parker’s men would calmly hold their advanced position throughout the day.

George Meade sent his second situation report to Henry Halleck at noon. “The enemy apparently has thrown back his left, and placed guns and troops in position in rear of Gettysburg, which we now hold,” he wrote. He was careful not to raise expectations that he would be going over to an offensive posture. “I shall require some time to get up supplies, ammunition, &c., rest the army, worn out by long marches and three days’ hard fighting,” he explained.

As both sides became more and more convinced that there would be no large-scale conflict this day, concern grew about the need to deal with the battle’s detritus. “Skirmishing today nothing else doing but both sides burying the dead,” noted a diarist in the 6th Virginia. Many corpses, according to a North Carolina soldier in Daniel’s Brigade, “have been lying on the field in the sun since the first day’s fight; it being dusty and hot, the dead smell terribly.” “There is no systematic work,” admitted one of Longstreet’s men, “time being too precious, and the dead are buried where they fell.”

On Culp’s Hill, an officer in the 147th Pennsylvania led a squad that moved across the gunfire-seared slope to bring in the Confederate wounded from Ewell’s assault there. The Federal defense had itself been costly, he observed: “I saw a deep ditch or long excavated series of graves dug and a number of dead Union soldiers lying ready for interment,” he recollected. “Each regiment selects a suitable place for its dead and puts a head-board on each individual grave,” reported a member of the 8th
Ohio. “The unrecognized dead are left to the last, to be buried in long trenches.”

Bodies were found in every conceivable position, with some even grouped in orderly formations where a fanning scythe of canister had cut them down. “The pen cannot perform its duties in describing the horrible, ghastly scenes there visible,” avowed an infantryman from the 15th New Jersey. Trying to compare the horrid sights to something familiar, a soldier in the 136th New York suggested that the dead lay “as thick as we ever saw pumpkins in a cornfield.”

There was other business to be attended to as well. Thousands of fallen soldiers meant thousands of abandoned weapons to be gathered in or destroyed, itself a wretched job under these conditions. “You can imagine what the field was like,” wrote a confederate engineer assigned to the task, “covered with dead men and horses which had lain in the hot July sun for three days.” Not surprisingly, some saw opportunity amid the carnage. The men of the 15th New Jersey, for example, collected enough of the newer, more reliable Springfield model arms to replace the older Enfields they had originally been issued. Along another section of the line, soldiers designated the useful weapons by sticking them bayonets first into the ground. A member of the 64th New York would never forget the image of “acres of muskets standing as thick as trees in a nursery.”

There was also the matter of prisoners, a more troublesome issue for Lee’s army than for Meade’s. Thanks to the open line of communication with Westminster, union provosts had been moving captured Rebels toward that processing point since the very first evening. By contrast, Lee’s officers had simply herded the Union POWs a short distance behind the confederate lines, not wishing to spare any more manpower than necessary to guard them. Some would be released after accepting field paroles, while many more would be marched with the withdrawing Rebel army for eventual disposition in Richmond.

Robert E. Lee did send out a flag of truce this afternoon, hoping to convince George Meade to swap prisoners, but Meade rejected the proposal. There was a moment of light relief amid these dour events when a Federal in the truce party reassured a Confederate officer that the Union had the wounded James Longstreet in custody and was taking good care of him. According to the observer Arthur Fremantle, “Longstreet sent back word that he was extremely grateful, but that, being neither wounded nor a prisoner, he was quite able to take care of himself.”