The Army of the Potomac was in scarcely better shape. George Meade himself had a rough tally ready for his July 4th council which came up with 56,138 infantry and artillery ready for action. That would mean that he had lost nearly 22,000 men. Meade’s first report to Halleck on August 3rd was more specific, and cited 2,834 killed, 13,713 wounded, and 6,643 missing; two months later, he adjusted those numbers slightly, and then submitted final figures which set the totals at 3,155 killed, 14,529 wounded, and 5,365 “captured or missing.” In his testimony before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War the following spring, Meade simply rounded the figures up to “24,000 men killed, wounded and missing,” and these numbers have become the generally received calculation of Union casualties. And yet, there is almost as much uncertainty about these numbers as about Lee’s.
Michael Jacobs, the Pennsylvania College mathematician, estimated that there were “9,000 dead” and “20,000 wounded” in Gettysburg after the armies left, which would require pegging Union deaths at more than 4,000;
St. Clair Mulholland, colonel of the 116th Pennsylvania, also estimated the number of Union dead at closer to 4,400; and in 1900,
Thomas Livermore, a veteran of the battle, painstakingly recalculated unit reports and put the reckoning at 3,903 dead, 18,735 wounded, and 5,425 “missing,” so that the entire butcher’s bill edged up to 28,063. (Most of these casualties, Meade added in his congressional testimony, occurred on July 2nd—“over 20,000 of them”—so that the second day of the battle alone came nearly equal with the horrendous single-day losses at Antietam the year before.)
Officer grades in the Army of the Potomac had suffered even more severely than their Confederate peers. One corps commander (John Reynolds) had been killed and two others (Dan Sickles and Winfield Hancock) were wounded and put hors de combat. Reynolds’
1st Corps lost four of its seven brigade commanders to wounds on July 1st. In the
2nd Corps,
John Gibbon was wounded and lost ten of his division’s thirteen colonels; John Caldwell’s heroic charge into the wheat field cost his division three of its four brigade commanders; and Alex Hays lost three. Each of the
3rd Corps divisions lost a brigadier; the
5th Corps and the
11th Corps each lost a division commander, but the 5th Corps had more to mourn in the death of
Strong Vincent (on July 7th, after finally receiving his brigadier’s star). Some individual units had almost ceased to exist. The
Philadelphia Brigade was down to 660 men (the 69th Pennsylvania could only count 115 after the battle);
the fabled
Iron Brigade was left with less than 700 of the 1,829 who followed Reynolds into action on July 1st.
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But unlike the Confederates, the men of the Army of the Potomac were, for once, brimming with eagerness to come to grips with the rebels. “What do the people of the North think now of the Old Army of the Potomac,” exulted a soldier in the 28th Pennsylvania.
John White Geary wrote to his wife that his division was “now refitting the clothing and equipments of the command … The result of the war seems no longer doubtful, and … the beginning of the end appears.”
John Chase, in the
1st Massachusetts Light Artillery, saw the men take the burdens of the miserable weather and even more miserable roads after Gettysburg “like Martyrs saying if only we can get at them again before they get out of
Maryland and get as good a Ration of Rebs as we did at Gettysburg.” It was a rare day, wrote
Henry Nichols Blake, when the “veterans are anxious to fight,” but “animated by the glorious triumphs of Gettysburg” they “wished with a united voice to be led to the work of carnage” at Williamsport.
The pace of the march, however, struck the first note of suspicion. “We thought our corps commander displayed little energy in finding the enemy,” complained a Pennsylvania colonel in the
5th Corps about the listlessness of
George Sykes’ pursuit, and what was being said about Sykes gradually repeated itself throughout the army. “It began to look as though it were intended that Lee should be allowed to cross the Potomac without another fight, if he wished.” When they awoke on the morning of July 14th, there was a great deal of head wagging and I-told-you-so-ing about Meade. The 77th New York was “more incensed than surprised,” and “for a long time the most awful curses were uttered in connection with the names of Meade and certain generals who opposed the assault.” John Chase was confident that “we could [have] just cleaned them from the word go,” but “I suppose that is the last thing a good many of our damn poor apologys for officers want to see is this war ended.” In the 118th Pennsylvania, the men refused the call of their colonel for three cheers for Meade. “Not a man moved in response, not a voice was heard, all stood still.”
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The soldiers were not the only ones infuriated at the escape. The
Washington Sunday Morning Chronicle
released the first news of the Gettysburg victory on July 5th, trumpeting its certainty “that Lee’s army is already seriously interfered with, and his escape from our army will be a matter of great difficulty.” A week later, the
Chronicle
was ever more ebullient: “That there will be another battle … is highly probably … It will probably be a bloody conflict but we do not hesitate to predict that it will be a great, if not, indeed, a decisive victory over the insurgents.” Both Senator
Henry Wilson, the chair of the Senate’s Committee on Military Affairs, and Vice President Hannibal
Hamlin came up from Washington to be present at the finish, and no one was more eager to see the Army of the Potomac go in for a funeral than Abraham Lincoln. The president released an announcement of the Gettysburg victory on the morning of July 4th, praising the army for “news … such as to cover that Army with the highest honor” and “to promise a great success to the cause of the Union.” In the first flush of good news, he was “more than satisfied with what has happened North of the Potomac so far,” and on July 11th, he seemed to his secretary
John Hay to be “in a specially good humor, as he had pretty good evidence that … Meade had announced his intention of attacking them.” But it did not take long before Lincoln’s anxieties began to rise. He was disturbed by “Meade’s slow movements since Gettysburg,” and he was particularly irritated at the phrase in Meade’s congratulatory order to the army on July 4th and its call to “drive the invaders from our soil.”
Drive the invaders from our soil!
Lincoln burst out in unrestrained dismay,
My God! Is that all?
He grumbled to Hay, “Will our Generals never get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is
our
soil.” And he added ominously, “This is a dreadful reminiscence of McClellan.”
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McClellan was not the name Meade should have wanted his own to conjure up in Lincoln’s mind. The president had never shaken off the sense that McClellan deliberately pulled his military punches on the Peninsula and after Antietam so that the war could be drawn out further and further toward the mutual exhaustion of both sides, and some form of negotiated settlement. “They did not mean to gain any decisive victory,” he confided to Hay, “but to keep things running on so that they, the army, might manage things to suit themselves.” By July 13th, Lincoln worried that no one has “yet heard of Meade’s expected attack,” and Lincoln took the desperate step of sending Meade a plea which did everything but sink down on bended knee: “You will follow up and attack Genl. Lee as soon as possible before he can cross the river. If you fail this dispatch will clear you from all responsibility and if you succeed you may destroy it.” (This message may have been hand-carried to Meade by Hannibal Hamlin, as the real mission of the Hamlin-Wilson visit to Williamsport.) But at noon on the 14th, Meade sent the news Lincoln wanted least to hear. “On advancing my army this morning,” Meade reported, “I found, on reaching his lines, that they were evacuated.”
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Lincoln was not a man often given to displays of emotion, but that afternoon, he was—as Hay put it—“deeply grieved.” Lincoln’s son Robert was home from Harvard, and walked into his father’s office to find him “in much distress, his head leaning upon the desk in front of him, and when he raised his head there were evidences of tears upon his face.”
We had them in our grasp
, Lincoln wailed.
We had only to stretch forth our hands & they were ours
. That image of Meade and his war council holding “the war in the hollow
of their hand & they would not close it” kept coming back to Lincoln, and he began to wonder whether “if I had gone up there I could have whipped them myself.” Hamlin, likewise, met the journalist
Noah Brooks at Meade’s headquarters, “raised his hands and turned away his face with a gesture of despair.” When Lincoln encountered
Gideon Welles, his secretary of the navy, on “the lawn” between the War and Navy department buildings, his mind was already turning toward the possibility that “Meade, Couch, Smith and all” had some McClellan-like plot up their sleeves. “He said, with a voice and countenance which I shall never forget, that he had dreaded yet expected this … There is bad faith somewhere … What does it mean, Mr. Welles? Great God! what does it mean?”
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Meade really had no such grandiose schemes. But far from feeling any embarrassment, when Meade learned through Halleck that “the escape of Lee’s army without another battle has created great dissatisfaction in the mind of the President,” Meade considered himself the injured party. He replied to Halleck’s telegram as immediately as the wires permitted, indignantly requesting that he be given the martyr treatment. “The censure of the President conveyed in your dispatch … is, in my judgment, so undeserved that I feel compelled most respectfully to ask to be immediately relieved from the command of this army.” But he must have known that neither Halleck nor Lincoln would actually dare to cashier him. The Northern newspapers were full of jubilation over Gettysburg, and full of praise for a commanding general whom they could praise, and Lincoln was not about to throw things into a cocked hat by replacing Meade for not winning more. Halleck tamely damped Meade’s indignation: “My telegram, stating the disappointment of the President at the escape of Lee’s army, was not intended as a censure but as a stimulus to an active pursuit.” And Lincoln himself wrote a soothing letter, insisting on how “very—
very
—grateful” he was “to you for the magnificent success you gave the cause of the country at Gettysburg.” But even as he assured Meade that he was “sorry now to be the author of the slightest pain to you,” the bitterness still seeped back in. “I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape.” Again, the image of the unclosed hand came to him. “He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war.” And then, realizing the futility of it, he filed the letter away, scribbling on the envelope,
To Gen. Meade, never sent, or signed
.
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George Meade, for his part, never saw the slightest fault in himself. “This is exactly what I expected,” he wrote to Margaretta after Halleck’s no-censure telegram arrived. “Unless I did impracticable things, fault would be found with me.” He certainly had the backing of the other McClellanites. “You will wonder … why we did not crush the enemy,”
John Sedgwick wrote to his
sister on July 17th; she should know that “the enemy crossed the river at Williamsport” with “forces … far superior in numbers to our own.” McClellan himself put his imprimatur on Meade’s decision by assuring him that “you have done all that could be done and the Army of the Potomac has supported you nobly … I feel very proud of you and my old Army.” Meade would surely “have another severe battle to fight, but I am confident that you will win.” So there was no need for Meade to hang his head. “I have ignored the senseless adulation of the public and press,” Meade congratulated himself, “and I am now just as indifferent to the censure bestowed without just cause.” He had dodged both disgrace and disaster, which was more than his own father had done, and there must have been at least one small part of George Gordon Meade which would actually have welcomed retirement at that moment so that he could preserve his Gettysburg laurels intact for the rest of his life.
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McClellan was right about the “severe battle” to be fought, but it would not be fought with the Army of Northern
Virginia. Meade did not cross the Potomac until July 18th, his bands playing “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” and by that time the Confederates were well out of his grasp. There was some menacing checkerboarding across northern Virginia for several weeks, but by mid-August the two armies were pretty much back where they had been at the beginning of June on the Rappahannock. Another burst of tactical energy that fall nearly produced a serious confrontation at Bristoe Station, and again at Mine Run, and Lincoln once again offered to take all the blame and let Meade have all the credit if only Meade would act. But at the last minute Meade pulled back, and the two armies went into winter quarters and the war in 1863 ended in Virginia as unresolved as it had been when the year started.
This did not mean that Meade lacked for enemies to fight, but they were all within his own army, starting with Dan Sickles. The abundantly confident New Yorker survived the
amputation of his leg surprisingly well, convalescing exuberantly in Washington and filling the ears of any politicians, all the way up to the president, with tales of how the
3rd Corps had saved the Army of the Potomac from sure destruction on July 2nd and prevented Meade from packing up for a retreat to
Pipe Creek. Word of this came back to a stony-faced Meade, and when Sickles returned to the army on October 18th, expecting restoration to command, Meade made it bluntly clear that under no imaginable circumstances would he ever agree to having Sickles in charge of anything in the Army of the Potomac. In fact, Meade wanted to be rid of the entire 3rd Corps, not to mention the troublesome spirits in the
1st Corps, and in the spring he ordered the breakup of both corps and the redistribution of their divisions among the much more reliable 2nd and
5th Corps.
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