Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (3 page)

This was the question which chilled the blood of every American who was not actually a slaveowner, and more than a few who were. It was the best of news to European aristocrats who looked upon the United States as the one disturbing testimony against the Romantic revival of absolutism. “If
the United States go wrong what hope have we of the civilized world in our turn?” asked Richard Cobden, the figurehead of the Manchester School and the principal star (along with John Bright) of English liberalism.

Preventing that wrong turn was what the preservation of the Union was about. Emancipating American slaves would remove the cause of that wrong, and make the Union worth preserving. But neither of them would be possible without the triumph of the Union armies. And Gettysburg would be the place where the armies of the Union would receive their greatest test, and the Union its last invasion.

A
NYONE WHO TOOK THE TROUBLE
on one of the few fair days in late June of the year 1863 to climb the winding forest trail to the old Indian lookout on
South Mountain would have enjoyed a sweet reward for his trouble. Looking to the east and north, across central
Maryland and south-central
Pennsylvania, a watcher at the lookout stood high above a plain, full of pleats and tucks, rolling effortlessly eastward to the
Susquehanna River. Only a last chain of hills in the blue distance hid the vista that led southeast, down to Washington, or northeast, to Harrisburg. Laid across this expanse were spinneys of forest—white and red oak, black walnut, sycamore, chestnut, hickory, alder, elm—whose tree crowns would have shimmered in the humid, golden sunlight. Between the fingers of forest lay green and gold patches of grassy farmland, irregularly dotted with small white barns and houses.

If the watcher shifted and looked to the west, the slopes of South Mountain fell away into the lengthening shadows of the Cumberland Valley, before pitching sharply upward again to the ranges of the Tuscarora and Blue mountain and the vast, pine-covered spines of the Appalachians, now turning cobalt in the late afternoon haze.

South Mountain is the first outlier of the Appalachians, and it runs on an axis that tilts northeast from the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia (another outlier chain of the Appalachians) to the west bank of the Susquehanna near Harrisburg. On the western side of South Mountain, the fertile Shenandoah and Cumberland valleys could take a traveler without too much difficulty from Lexington, Virginia, down to the Potomac and across into the Cumberland Valley and to Carlisle or Harrisburg—some 220 miles. But on South Mountain’s
eastern face, the ground drops sharply to the rich green farmlands of the plain. This plain itself subsides into a series of low-lying ridges that parallel South Mountain itself as though they were undulations from the mountain’s upthrust, until one by one they gradually expend their height and their force sixty miles away at the Susquehanna. The roadways which cut across the plain conformed themselves to the undulations, and ran mostly north to south. Only two major east–west roads bored their way horizontally through South Mountain, one stretching from Philadelphia, through Lancaster and York, to the
Cashtown Gap, and the other reaching up from Washington, across Maryland to Turner’s and Fox’s gaps, and thence to Harpers Ferry.

Those upfolded north–south ridges were really the jammed-together lips of great cracks in an enormous underlying sill of granitelike rock. In places, the jamming had been so violent that ungainly masses of stone, gray and coarse-grained, pushed up through the soils, sometimes forming cone-shaped hills that punctuated the ridgelines. But the soils themselves were soft, thick loam, and in 1863 a farming family could support itself on as little as 150 acres. A long time before, the heirs of
William Penn, the original feudal proprietor of Pennsylvania, struggled to prevent the dissipation of this rich, wrinkled plain into a sprawl of small farms, and even tried to set aside a 43,500-acre tract as a manor. But as so often happened to the Penn family’s plans for Pennsylvania, the German Lutherans and Scots-Irish Presbyterians who overleaped the Susquehanna simply dismissed the proprietors’ restrictions. The Penns had neither sufficient interest nor sufficient power to curb the demand for cutting up their “manor” into disposable farmland, and by the 1760s the broad plain between the Susquehanna and South Mountain had passed into the hands of the farmers and speculators. In 1797, the new Pennsylvania state government dissolved all title to the “manor” in favor of those who had squatted on it.
¹

One of these farmers’ sons,
James Gettys, turned speculator himself. Sizing up the growth of the region and the prospects for trade between the mountains and the Susquehanna, Gettys shrewdly bought 116 acres from his father at the point where the principal north–south road to Harrisburg crossed the east–west road heading toward South Mountain and the Cashtown Gap. There were already two taverns there, doing a roaring business, and it seemed to James Gettys that a good deal more could be made out of this intersection. He laid out 210 lots for a town, built around a central square (or “diamond”), and without any excess of modesty named it for himself.
²

From the vantage point of the watcher on South Mountain, Gettysburg lay at the north edge of the horizon, although a good brass naval telescope could bring it pretty easily into view. But on that late June afternoon, the watcher’s attention would be captured, not by James Gettys’ distant town, or by the newly cut mounds of grass and hay, or by the fields of full-grown wheat
and the knee-high cornstalks, spread out like yellow aprons on the plain below. Instead, if the watcher looked to the west in the oncoming twilight, the darkening shadows over the Cumberland Valley quickly became pinpricked with a carpet of fire lights. Or, if the watcher looked east, what caught the eye was an interminably long snake of traffic—white canvas-topped wagons, horses, men on foot, ambulances, more and more men on foot with the sun glinting sharply off the rifle barrels perched on their shoulders, big-wheeled cannon, flags (some huge and square, some small and swallow-tailed, the Stars and Stripes, state flags, headquarters flags)—all stopping and starting, and stopping again, and then sluggishly moving again, and all of it headed north, toward Gettysburg. The watcher was beholding something never seen before from this spot, and never seen again—two great armies, bound for the greatest and most violent collision the North American continent had ever seen.

PART 1
 

  CHAPTER ONE  

T
HE
A
MERICAN
C
IVIL
W
AR
had been raging for just a little more than two years when the armies came into the view of the Indian lookout. “Neither party,” Abraham Lincoln would say later, “expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained.” Hardly ever has any nation fallen into the abyss of war less prepared to wage it, or with less foresight of the costs it would have to pay. From the moment they took a republic rather than a monarchy as the shape of their government, Americans prided themselves on being a nation of peace, dedicated to the arts of commerce rather than the rapacity of empire and “the spirit of war.” Americans hadn’t entirely given up on the call to arms—there was a war with Britain in 1812, then a war with Mexico in 1846, and ongoing flashes of conflict with uncooperative tribes of Creeks, Choctaw, Shawnee, Comanche, Kiowa, and Sioux. But none of these occurred on any great scale, and all of them could be explained away as regrettable but necessary defensive measures for the good of the republic. There would invariably be Americans who gloried in war and killing, just as there would be anywhere. But the numbers of the bloodlusters would not be great. Even one of the small cadre of professionally trained officers produced by the republic’s military academy at West Point,
Oliver Otis Howard, admitted to deep religious uneasiness about the glorification of war. “We cannot well exaggerate … the horrors, the hateful ravages, and the countless expense of war,” Howard wrote long after the Civil War’s guns had fallen silent. And stories of war serve only one purpose, to “show plainly to our children that war, with its embodied woes and furies must be avoided.”
¹

This ambivalence toward wars and soldiering lent strength to the penury
of the Federal Congress, which routinely set military expenditures and military personnel to a level befitting a national constabulary. At the first shot of the Civil War, the United States Army comprised only 16,357 officers and men, almost none of whom were grouped together in one place in any formidable size. Nor was there any professional association equivalent to Britain’s
Royal United Services Institution to foster thinking on new weapons and tactical schemes. “Nearly the whole of my eleven years’ service,” wrote one West Pointer of the class of 1850, “has been with my company on the frontier of Texas,” and
Richard Stoddert Ewell, who would wear a Confederate lieutenant general’s stars at Gettysburg in 1863, confessed that during his twenty years’ service as a cavalry officer, “he had learned all about commanding fifty United States dragoons, and forgotten everything else.”
²

Even this minuscule army was too much for
Horace Greeley, the mad-hatter editor of the country’s most widely read newspaper, the
New-York Tribune.
“Of all solecisms, a Standing Army in a Republic of the XIXth Century is the most indefensible,” Greeley announced in 1858. “We have no more need of a Standing Army than of an order of nobility.”
³
In the event of any national emergency, the states would put their part-time militias into Federal hands, like the
Prussian
Landwehr
in 1813, and
they
would provide the manpower which the Regular Army could deploy. The officers would emerge, like Napoleon’s generals, as corporals with field marshals’ batons in their packs. “It was the fashion to sneer at those who had made the profession of arms their study,” complained a contributor to the
Army and Navy Journal
, and “experience in Congress was apparently regarded as a more essential qualification to command than a course of study at West Point.” One lonely voice,
Henry Wager Halleck (who himself had left the army in despair and gone quite profitably into law and banking), warned that “disorganized and frantic masses” were not likely to provide “as good a defense against invasion as the most disciplined and experienced.” But it was easier to believe otherwise, and cheaper, too. In 1857, a Democratic-controlled Congress spent more money on Federal judges than on “armories, arsenals, and munitions of war,” more on customhouses and warehouses than on “Fortifications, and other works of defence,” and more on the General Post Office building in Washington than on West Point.
⁴