Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (31 page)

In all, Dawes’ little moment of inspiration netted him more than 200 prisoners, a rebel battle flag, and six or seven officers’
swords which Dawes had to hand awkwardly over in a bundle to his adjutant. It also took the edge off the advance of the rest of Joe Davis’ brigade. No one had told Davis, any more than they had told James Archer, to expect Union infantry on
McPherson’s Ridge. Davis was wholly unprepared for the resistance he had encountered, and Dawes’ counterattack on the railroad cut convinced him that “a heavy force was … moving rapidly toward our right.” Davis signaled a pullback to
his first position on Herr Ridge, Cutler’s battered brigade moved back out to “occupy the crest of the ridge,” and in the scramble
James Hall’s gunners were able to recover their lost piece.
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It was now between eleven o’clock and noon, and Harry Heth had quite an unlooked-for mess on his hands. The easy saunter into Gettysburg he had anticipated that morning started with frustration and slow-ups, risen to a full-scale deployment of two of his brigades, and now culminated in a humiliating repulse by Federal infantry which shouldn’t have been there at all. Should he break off? Should he go back in with his next two brigades, under Pettigrew and Brockenbrough? Should he wait for instructions from Powell Hill? If he waited, would more Federal infantry appear to threaten him? The last of these questions was about to become the most urgent, because (although Heth could not know it) another Federal corps was arriving in Gettysburg from the south, and its commander,
Oliver Otis Howard, was at that moment climbing up to the widow’s walk on Henry Fahnestock’s store to have a look around.

  CHAPTER TEN  

G
EORGE
G
ORDON
M
EADE
arrived with his staff at Taneytown, Maryland, at midday on June 30th, to be greeted by “the stars and stripes floating from a Liberty-pole and a signal flag from the cupola of a meeting-house.” He had now been in command of the
Army of the Potomac for all of three days and he was still struggling to sort out his priorities. His orders on the morning of the 30th had been for continued movement northward on a broad front—the
1st Corps and
11th Corps to move up toward Gettysburg, the
3rd Corps to Emmitsburg, the
5th Corps to Hanover, the
12th Corps to Two Taverns, and the
6th Corps in reserve at Manchester, behind
Pipe Creek. But beyond that, he admitted that “he had not had time to give the subject as much reflection as he ought to give it, having been so pressed with the duties incident upon taking command.” When Buford’s warning arrived at headquarters that “the enemy are advancing, probably in strong force, on Gettysburg” Meade sent out a second circular, instructing his corps commanders “to hold this army pretty nearly in the position it now occupies until the plans of the enemy shall have been more fully developed”—all of which meant, in practical terms, that Reynolds was to halt at Emmitsburg, Slocum was to stop at Littlestown, and the others were to stand down while Meade made up his mind what to do next.

Between noon and one o’clock, Meade sent a plea to Pleasanton for “reliable information of the presence of the enemy, his forces and his movements,” and especially whether Lee looked like he was trying to slip around Meade’s
right flank “in the vicinity of York” or around his left, “toward Hagerstown and the passes below Cashtown.” But at one o’clock, he redirected Winfield Hancock and the
2nd Corps to move through Taneytown and prepare to support
George Sykes and the
5th Corps at Union Mills on Pipe Creek “in case of a superior force of the enemy there.” A bit later, Meade received a curious note from Dan Sickles, just below Emmitsburg, where he was steaming over Meade’s criticism of “the very slow movement of your corps.” Informing Meade that Reynolds had ordered him to move up toward Gettysburg, Sickles almost insolently reminded Meade that his orders were to plant the
3rd Corps at Emmitsburg—which order was he to obey? “Shall I move forward?” Sickles asked.
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Sometime that evening, Meade settled on the plan he had been nursing all along for a pullback to Pipe Creek, and in the morning he composed yet another circular, directing the Army of the Potomac to “withdraw … from its present position, and form line of battle with the left resting in the neighborhood of Middleburg, and the right at Manchester, the general direction being that of Pipe Creek.” Reynolds was to abandon any movement on Gettysburg and pull the 1st, 3rd, and
11th Corps “direct to Middleburg.” Once in position, Reynolds would command the left of the Pipe Creek line, Slocum would take charge of both the 12th and 5th Corps to form the center, and Sedgwick would hold down the right flank at Manchester with the
6th Corps. Hancock and the 2nd Corps would “be held in reserve … to be thrown to the point of strongest attack.” Meade left open the possibility that “developments may cause the commanding general to assume the offensive from his present positions,” but that was only one sentence in a circular of 866 words, the balance of which was devoted entirely to “withdrawal.” For good measure, Meade sent the army’s chief of artillery, Henry Hunt, to scout “the country behind Pipe Creek for a battle-ground.”
²

By noon on July 1st, however, the plan was dead. First, Meade received Couch’s warning “of the enemy’s withdrawal from Harrisburg,” which stoked his eagerness to concentrate the army “to the rear … on Pike Creek, between Middleburg and Manchester, covering my depot at Westminster.” When the 2nd Corps arrived at Taneytown around 11 a.m., Winfield Hancock rode over to pay the honors to his new commander and found Meade ready “to fight on Pipe Creek; that he had not examined the ground, but, judging from his maps, it was the strongest position he could find; that the engineers were examining and mapping it, and that he had made an order for the movement to occupy that line.” (He would have had the order printed and distributed before this, he claimed, except that the army’s chief of staff, Dan Butterfield, whom he “roundly damned” for his “slowness in getting out orders,” was only then in the process of having it copied.) Half an hour later came Capt. Stephen
Weld with the alarming news from John Reynolds that he had taken the 1st Corps into a stand-up fight at Gettysburg. Meade’s first inclination was to treat Reynolds’ move as a covering action for the
Pipe Creek withdrawal, and he sent Sedgwick and Slocum a note informing them that Reynolds would probably “hold the enemy in check, and fall slowly back.” In that case, “the line indicated in the circular of to-day will be occupied to-night.” But then came word from Buford with the same dire news of a collision at Gettysburg, followed by yet another note from Buford, via his chief, Alfred Pleasanton, announcing that “General Reynolds was killed this morning” and that “there seems to be no directing person” in charge.
We need help now
, pleaded Buford.
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This was not the battle that Meade wanted, nor was it in the place he had wanted. But the 1st Corps was in serious trouble, and perhaps the
11th Corps as well. The unpredictable Sickles sent another dispatch, energetically informing Meade that Otis Howard had called on the
3rd Corps “to support him,” and Sickles was now on the road to Gettysburg, so for all Meade knew, almost half of his army was heading into some unknown maw sixteen miles to the north. Moreover, John Reynolds was dead, and that made the Pipe Creek plan look like a run for cover. On the other hand, the information from Gettysburg was so fragmentary that Meade could not be sure what he would be ordering the rest of the army into if they went there—would the 1st Corps still be holding its ground? If they were overrun and scattered by the time Meade could get troops there, would each of his corps be smashed in similar fashion as they arrived?
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He improvised. The Pipe Creek Circular would go off to the 3rd, 5th, 6th, and
12th Corps, so that at least half the army was on its way to the new defensive line; he would need more information about the 1st and 11th Corps, and he had the
2nd Corps near at hand if he needed to cover any possible retreat by Doubleday and Howard. Meade himself would stay put at Taneytown so that Sickles, Sykes, Sedgwick, and Slocum would know where to find him. Butterfield promptly recommended that Meade “send me as his representative” to Gettysburg. But Meade, who privately detested Butterfield as one of Hooker’s toadies and would soon enough look up a replacement for him, cringed at the idea of putting Butterfield in charge of anything, much less a battle. Butterfield then suggested that Meade send Hancock, and before Butterfield could write up the orders Meade had ridden off to find Hancock and send him to Gettysburg to discover what was happening and recommend the best response.
⁵

In the report Meade submitted in October, he described his directive to Hancock as simply “to represent me on the field” and act “in conjunction with Major-General Howard.” But years later, that was not how Hancock
remembered it. “General Meade came immediately to my headquarters and told me to transfer command of the Second Corps to [Brigadier General John] Gibbon, and proceed at once to the front,” Hancock recalled, “and in the event of the truth of the report of General Reynolds’s death or disability, to assume command of the corps on that field.” Hancock was startled, partly from the news that “General Reynolds has been killed, or badly wounded,” and partly because, whether he realized it or not, Meade was disregarding the cardinal rule of army
seniority. Hancock had only been in corps command for little more than a month, and was four steps below Otis Howard in seniority in the volunteer service, while
John Gibbon was actually junior to another of Hancock’s division commanders, John Caldwell. Meade paid no attention to Hancock’s scruples. He “must have a man who he knew and could trust,” someone who could make a politically reliable estimate of the situation, and not some wild-eyed call to an
abolitionist suicide ride. Hancock was as steady a McClellanite as Meade himself, while Gibbon was, if anything, even more contemptuous of the Republican crusaders. Besides, Lincoln and Stanton had given Meade the blanket authority, denied to Joe Hooker, to override seniority and delegate authority to whomever he wished:
You are authorized to remove from command, and to send from your army, any officer or other person you may deem proper, and to appoint to command as you may deem expedient.
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That was good enough for Hancock. “The moment these instructions were given me, I turned over command of the Second Corps to General Gibbon, and then started, with my personal staff at a very rapid pace for the battlefield.” Hancock and his chief of staff,
Charles Morgan, commandeered an ambulance so that they could sit and study a “poor little map that had been furnished” by Meade as they took to the
Taneytown Road, while Hancock’s aide-de-camp,
William Mitchell, pelted on ahead to notify Howard. There was not much to be learned from Meade’s map, and Hancock finally lost patience with the pace of the ambulance, ordered up the horses, and took off “galloping to the front.” He and his staff were still four miles from Gettysburg when they passed another ambulance, headed in the other direction and escorted by a single officer. It contained the body of John Reynolds, laid out in a crude coffin. “A deep silence fell upon the staff, and not a word was spoken till … the panorama of Gettysburg lay unrolled before them.”
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It was not clear to Hancock, at that moment, whether Meade intended him to take charge of a fight or arrange for a retreat, “extricating from peril the two corps at the front.” But even as Hancock was on his way, dispatches and wig-wags from the signalers continued to come in to Taneytown, and Meade’s mind slowly began revolving toward a decision to redirect the army toward Gettysburg. By three o’clock, the
2nd Corps was on the road to Gettysburg; the Pipe Creek Circular was canceled, and at 4:30 Meade began
issuing orders to Sykes, Slocum, and Sedgwick to turn their corps around and “move up to Gettysburg at once.”
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