This Great Struggle (36 page)

Hooker demurred, but he did put his army in motion, marching north to stay between Lee’s army on the west and Washington on the east. The long-suffering soldiers of the Army of the Potomac had to put in hard marches, sometimes thirty miles or more in a day, in order to make up for their general’s late start. By late June, Lee’s army had entered south-central Pennsylvania through the Cumberland Valley, an extension of the Shenandoah Valley north of the Potomac. The Rebel army’s lead elements, following the northeasterly curve of the valley, were approaching Harrisburg. Hooker demanded that Washington give him control of the Harpers Ferry garrison and, when his superiors rejected his demand, requested to be relieved of command, assuming that Lincoln and Halleck would not dare to remove the commander of the Army of the Potomac with Lee deep in Pennsylvania and a major battle in the offing. They dared. Hooker had not realized how low his stock had sunk in Washington. Lincoln, on June 28, replaced him with Fifth Corps commander George G. Meade (West Point, 1835).

That same day Lee also received a nasty shock, learning for the first time of Hooker’s northward marches and of the Army of the Potomac’s consequent presence only a few dozen miles from his own. That information came from a spy, not, as it should have, from Jeb Stuart, Lee’s chief of cavalry and de facto chief of intelligence. Lee had hitherto assumed that his opponent’s army was still deep in Virginia since Stuart had brought him no word of its movement.

That was Stuart’s duty, but he was by this time far out of position to perform it. Stung by the embarrassment of Brandy Station, Stuart had decided to stretch his orders from Lee and make another daring ride around the Army of the Potomac, thus restoring his reputation. The superiority on which that reputation had been based was gone forever now, and the newly confident blue-clad riders successfully screened Stuart’s horsemen away from the Federal main body, forcing him to take a wide outside track. On top of that, just as he started his ride, the Army of the Potomac started its rapid northward marches, forcing him to go that much farther to get around it. By the time he and his troopers completed the circuit and rejoined Lee, they were too late to provide the reconnaissance he needed. Lee had to make this campaign without the superior scouting that had been a large measure of his own previous superiority.

During late June the various units of Lee’s army were spread out for the purpose of plundering the Pennsylvania countryside. At the outset of the campaign Lee had issued high-sounding orders to his troops admonishing them not to treat Union civilians as the Union armies had treated Virginia civilians. In fact, however, Lee fully intended his army to live off the land, and its behavior in Pennsylvania differed little from that of Union armies in the South. Lee’s troops took all the food, clothing, shoes, and livestock they could find, occasionally offering payment, at gunpoint, in Confederate paper money they knew to be worthless but more often simply taking what they wanted. On their superiors’ orders they burned bridges, railroads, and depots, as well as the Caledonia Ironworks, whose owner, Thaddeus Stevens, was a leading congressional abolitionist and advocate of racial equality. Some of the troops added their own unauthorized acts of vandalism along the way.

Lee’s army also had a policy of seizing and carrying off into slavery in the South every black person it encountered—man, woman, or child, escaped slave or freeborn citizen of Pennsylvania. Those who received timely warning and could do so fled as the Army of Northern Virginia approached. Those who did not or were too slow were caught and driven along under guard.

On learning that the Army of the Potomac was nearby, Lee ordered the scattered units of his own army to unite. The most centrally located point from their various positions and the hub of the south-central Pennsylvania road net was the town of Gettysburg, and Lee’s orders directed his troops in that direction with a view to uniting at nearby Cashtown. The concentration of forces was nearing completion when, on the evening of June 30, Lee approved a request from one of his division commanders who wanted to take his division—one of nine infantry divisions in Lee’s army—and probe toward Gettysburg the next day.

THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG

Early on the morning of July 1, that division, under the command of Major General Henry Heth, encountered Union cavalry near Gettysburg. The blue-jacketed troopers fought a skillful delaying action until the Union First Corps arrived and handed Heth a severe drubbing. By that time it was mid-morning, and Lee had arrived from Cashtown along with most of the rest of the Confederate Third Corps. Almost simultaneously the Confederate Second Corps, still marching to join Lee’s main body after having threatened Harrisburg, approached Gettysburg from the north while the Third Corps faced it from the west. Shortly after noon the Confederates recognized and made the most of this opportunity to strike the Union defenders of Gettysburg from two directions.

Despite the arrival in the meantime of the Union Eleventh Corps, the Federals were badly outnumbered. Lee’s seventy-five-thousand-man army was divided into three corps plus cavalry and artillery, while Meade’s eighty-six-thousand-man force was composed of seven corps plus the usual artillery and cavalry. Thus, Lee’s corps averaged twice the size of the Union formations of the same name. The more numerous Confederates drove the Yankees through the town of Gettysburg, capturing many along the way. The surviving Federals took refuge on a hill that overlooked the town from the southeast and was known, because of the presence of the municipal cemetery, as Cemetery Hill. Lee ordered Second Corps commander Richard S. Ewell to continue the attack against the bluecoats on the hill if he thought he could do so without too much trouble. Ewell did not think so, and he was almost certainly right. The hill was a strong defensive position, held by a substantial number of well-led troops. With Ewell’s decision not to press the attack, the day’s fighting ended.

Meade, who arrived on the battlefield well after nightfall, had not done particularly well that day. The day before he had decided to concentrate his own army in a defensive position just across the Maryland line some miles to the south along Pipe Creek and had sent an order for such a movement to each of his corps commanders. The orders had not yet reached the commanders of the First and Eleventh corps before their troops became involved in the fighting at Gettysburg, but they did reach the other five corps commanders in time to make them hesitant and uncertain about whether they should march to join the fighting at Gettysburg, of which couriers informed them and which some could hear in the distance, or whether they should march as ordered toward Pipe Creek. Meade did not adequately clarify the situation until it was too late to help his hapless troops at Gettysburg. Indeed he seemed as uncertain as any of his corps commanders, remaining thirteen miles away at Taneytown, Maryland, throughout the day and sending various subordinates to direct the fighting at Gettysburg. During the evening, however, and through the course of the night, four more of Meade’s corps arrived at the Union position south of Gettysburg.

Thus, on July 2 Meade had six of his seven corps and Lee eight of his nine divisions present to continue the fight. The remaining troops of each side would arrive later that day. Before they did, Lee renewed his attack. Hoping to repeat the success of Chancellorsville, he sent Longstreet with three divisions on a roundabout march to strike at the Union left flank while Ewell attacked the Union right flank with three more divisions. As it turned out, Lee had received incorrect information about the location of the Union left, but by the time Longstreet reached that neighborhood, late in the afternoon, the Union commander in that sector, Daniel Sickles, had, in violation of Meade’s orders, moved his troops to a vulnerable position.

Longstreet struck, and intense fighting raged for hours around landmarks that would later be famous: a peach orchard, a wheat field, a boulder-strewn hillside the locals called Devil’s Den, and a higher hill they called Little Round Top. Meade sent reinforcements steadily throughout the evening and almost blundered by pulling too many troops away from his opposite flank. A subordinate talked him into leaving at least a minimal force to guard the right, and this proved fortunate when in the last minutes of twilight Ewell struck there. In confused night fighting the Federals on the right managed to hold on to most of their positions, as had those on the left.

Still determined to build on the success he had won in the first day’s fighting, Lee planned to attack again on July 3. Since he had tried both Union flanks and found them strong, he reasoned that the Union line must be thin in the center, along a gentle fold of ground that ran south from Cemetery Hill and was called Cemetery Ridge. Longstreet, with three new divisions in place of the exhausted ones he had used in the previous day’s fight, would attack there. Simultaneously, Ewell would renew the attack on the Union right that had seemed promising as darkness closed in the night before. His troops would assault Federals on a wooded eminence called Culp’s Hill. While those two attacks struck the Union center and right, Stuart, who had finally arrived with his weary cavalry late on July 2 to a frosty reception from Lee, would lead his troopers on a ride far around the Union right flank and into the rear of the Army of the Potomac so as to strike the center of the Union line from the rear while Longstreet was assaulting it from the front.

As events played out on July 3, Lee’s Napoleonic plan went badly awry. The Federals on Culp’s Hill, now reinforced, preempted Ewell with a predawn attack of their own bent on regaining the positions they had lost the night before. Ewell’s lines surged forward in their own attack, and several hours of fighting followed. By mid-morning Ewell’s troops were fought to a frazzle, and the Union right flank remained solidly in possession of Culp’s Hill. Meanwhile, Longstreet, who disagreed with Lee’s plan of battle, had moved slowly and was not ready to launch his assault on the center. Shortly after noon Longstreet’s cannon unleashed a preparatory bombardment. Stuart launched his ride to swoop down on the Union rear, but before his squadrons could get close they were met and turned back by Union cavalry under the command of a twenty-three-year-old newly promoted brigadier general named George Armstrong Custer.