On the surface, everything went smoothly. Lee handled the northward march most competently, and Hooker never had a good chance to attack him en route. Longstreet held his corps in and east of the Blue Ridge, Ewell smashed a Federal outpost at Winchester and then moved boldly north, across Maryland and into Pennsylvania; Hill followed with his corps, and when he crossed the Potomac, Longstreet slipped beyond the mountain wall and followed him. By the final days of June, Lee had all of his infantry and artillery above the Potomac. Ewell had gone far to the eastward and was threatening Harrisburg and York. Hill was ready to move after him, and Longstreet had his men posted at Chambersburg, awaiting developments.

  This wartime lithograph, “Lee and His Generals,” does show a great many Confederate generals, although many of them were not especially associated with Lee (except that they all fought on the same side). Lee of course is in the center. The more prominent other generals include P. G. T. Beauregard, mounted, at left, with Braxton Bragg over his right shoulder; Joseph E. Johnston, raising his hat, with heavily bearded Jeb Stuart on his right. Mounted, on Lee’s left, is James Longstreet, followed (to the right, in background) by Bedford Forrest, John B. Hood, and A. P. Hill. Mounted in the right foreground, is Stonewall Jackson; mounted, by Jackson’s right elbow, is Richard Ewell. (The Bettmann Archive, Inc.) (Illustrations 1.1)

  By the night of June 28 Lee learned two things—that the Army of the Potomac was north of the Potomac River, instead of lying inert to the south of it as he had supposed, and that Meade had replaced Hooker as its commander. He at once ordered his army to assemble at the handiest place, which turned out to be Gettysburg. Meade, meanwhile, ordered his own army to concentrate along a little stream called Pipe Creek, which offered a good defense position covering both Washington and Baltimore, while his cavalry under Buford rode north to get a line on Lee’s position. Stuart’s Confederate cavalry, meanwhile, was trying desperately to regain its proper position on Lee’s immediate right flank. (Illustrations 1.2)

  There was a slight question about Lee’s cavalry. It was led by Major General J. E. B. (“Jeb”) Stuart—flamboyant, picturesque, a headline-hunter, but an uncommonly able cavalry leader for all that: a man on whom Lee relied implicitly. Stuart had a double assignment—to screen Lee’s army and to keep Lee informed all the time where Hooker’s army was. When the last of Lee’s infantry crossed the Potomac, Stuart was supposed to follow it and then move eastward along Lee’s right flank, covering the march and making certain that Lee knew just where all the elements of the Federal army might be.

  Preparing to leave Virginia, Stuart got Lee’s permission to put a little extra frill on his march. The Federal army lay in camp in Virginia a few miles east of the Blue Ridge, and Stuart believed he could best get into Pennsylvania by marching entirely around this Federal army and crossing the Potomac far downstream from the crossings Lee’s infantry had used. Lee approved, stipulating only that whatever he did, Stuart must get promptly to his assigned position on the invading army’s right flank. On this march deep into enemy territory Lee simply had to have Stuart near him.

  Stuart moved on June 25 and immediately ran into trouble. Hooker had moved up to the Potomac, and his huge army occupied all of the river crossings Stuart had planned to use. Stuart was crowded far off into eastern Virginia, Hooker got his entire army north of the river unobserved, and instead of rejoining Lee’s army within thirty-six hours Stuart did not regain contact for a solid week. During that time—in some ways the most important week in his whole military career—Lee was in effect a blind man. He did not know where his enemies were.

  To make matters worse, Stuart’s reputation for complete reliability led Lee to make a false assumption. When days passed with no word from Stuart, Lee naturally assumed that the Army of the Potomac was inactive, remaining in its camps in Virginia; if it were on the move, Stuart would surely send word, as he had always done in the past. (Lee of course had no idea that Stuart had been blocked out of the play altogether.) If Hooker remained inactive south of the Potomac, the invading Confederates, far north of the river, could do things they would not have ventured to do if their foes were in close pursuit. So by June 28 Lee had his army spread out over a forty-five-mile crescent, Lee himself with Longstreet’s corps at Chambersburg, Ewell in York and on the river bank opposite Harrisburg, Hill moving east eight or ten miles from Chambersburg. The army was dangerously dispersed, but with the Army of the Potomac south of the river this was safe enough.

  Then, that evening, Lee learned that Hooker’s entire army was massed in the vicinity of Frederick, Maryland. It was closer to the separate pieces of Lee’s army than those pieces were to each other. Lee would be destroyed if he did not concentrate at once.

  So Confederate couriers galloped off along the Pennsylvania roads that night, calling the scattered legions together. The army would assemble at Gettysburg—at Gettysburg, and not elsewhere, simply because it was central and the roads led there. The first of the accidents that would make Gettysburg a battleground had taken place. Lee’s soldiers hurried as if drawn there by a magnet.

  And so, for that matter, did the leading divisions of the Army of the Potomac. They were no more interested in Gettysburg than Lee’s men were. They were just groping for the enemy and this town seemed the handiest place to go groping. And as June came to an end, fate was driving thousands of soldiers toward the point of deadly collision.

  Two

  FIRST DAY: COLLISION

  The Federal soldiers who moved toward Gettysburg were Hooker’s army no longer. As they trudged along through the choking dust and the thick summer heat they were under the command of Major General George Gordon Meade, chosen by the government at Washington to replace Hooker at the moment when the greatest battle of the war was obviously just about to take place.

  Hooker had been a dashing, competent soldier as leader of a division and, later, of an army corps, but the top command had somehow been too much for him. Under pressure he had simply folded up; he had fumbled his way to defeat at Chancellorsville because the responsibility of high command had paralyzed his professional faculties, and the failure had been so clearly a failure of his own nerve that he had lost the confidence of President Lincoln, not to mention that of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and General in Chief Henry W. Halleck.

  They had made up their minds to relieve him, but finding a qualified successor was difficult and it was not until the Confederate campaign of invasion was clearly approaching its climax that the change was finally made. They selected General Meade, who had been in command of the V Army Corps, largely because he was known as a reliable professional soldier who did not scare easily.

  Outside of the V Corps, the soldiers had hardly so much as heard of him, and he definitely was not the inspirational leader who arouses the enthusiasm of the rank and file. To use a modern expression, he utterly lacked charisma. He was crusty, not to say crabbed, with a quick temper and a sharp tongue, and he once remarked without rancor that he had heard soldiers refer to him as a “damned goggle-eyed snapping turtle.” But if his inspirational qualities were nil and his strategic abilities were unknown, there definitely was nothing wrong with his nerves. He was not afraid of the weight of top command and he was not in the least afraid of Robert E. Lee, and it soon developed that when they chose Meade the authorities acted very wisely indeed.

  Meade had to defend Washington, along with Philadelphia, Baltimore, and the rest of the northland, and the only way to do this was to bring Lee to battle and defeat him. Somewhat strung out, Lee’s army was moving eastward, and Meade did not know exactly where it was or what Lee had in mind. Sensibly enough, Meade concluded that if he found a substantial piece of this army and prodded it vigorously, the separate parts would come together quickly enough. Then Lee would have to give battle because of the conditions under which he was operating.

  Lee maintained contact with his base in Virginia, but to all intents and purposes he had abandoned his supply line and was living on the country. This Pennsylvania farm country was rich and Lee’s army had had no trouble collecting food and forage—it was in fact living rather high just now—but there was one catch to all this. To live thus, the invading army had to keep moving, because if it stayed in one place very long it would consume all the supplies its immediate neighborhood produced. So far the army had kept on the march and had had no problems, but if Meade could compel it to concentrate it could not wait for him to make the attack. It would have to take the offensive or retreat; with luck, Meade would be able to make Lee attack him on ground of Meade’s own choosing.

  To find a suitable fragment of Lee’s army, Meade sent Major General John Buford’s division of cavalry north to cut across what appeared to be Lee’s line of march. To molest the troops that Buford was likely to find, Meade chose Major General John Reynolds and gave him command of about one third of the army—Reynolds’ own I Corps, Major General Oliver Otis Howard’s XI Corps, and the III Corps under Major General Dan Sickles. On the last day of June Buford got into Gettysburg and discovered that a large body of Confederate infantry lay a few miles to the west, astride the Chambersburg road. Buford strung dismounted troopers out in a battle line on one of the low ridges a mile or so west of Gettysburg, ordered patrols off to the north to check on reports that additional Confederates were coming down from Carlisle, and sent word of all this to Reynolds, who was a short distance south of Gettysburg. Reynolds ordered his men to march for Gettysburg, and on the morning of July 1 he spurred on ahead of them to meet Buford, to get all the news Buford had, and to see for himself how the situation was developing.

  When Gettysburg is studied as a problem in strategy and tactics, attention is usually focused on General Robert E. Lee. This does some injustice to the Union commander, Major General George Gordon Meade; for if Lee lost the battle, Meade was the man who won it, and the Union cause owed a great deal to the cool competence with which he handled his army. For the first time the Army of the Potomac was under a man who refused to get nervous or uncertain when he confronted Lee on the battlefield. Meade was not a man who scared easily.… He is shown here in a picture made some time before Gettysburg; he wears a major general’s shoulder straps but they have been tacked on to a brigadier general’s coat. (Illustrations 2.1)

  It was developing fast, and fighting had already begun. Buford’s troopers were firing at an advancing line of Confederate infantry, artillery had gone into action on both sides, and while Buford’s men were holding the Confederates in check they obviously could not do so much longer; in a situation like this, cavalry could not hope to do much more than delay advancing infantry and force it to send out a formal line of battle. Reynolds conferred with Buford on the grounds of a Lutheran seminary near the Chambersburg road, concluded that this was a good place for a fight, and sent couriers off to bring in the leading elements of the on-coming I Corps.

  The first Federal troops to come up were good ones—Brigadier General James Wadsworth’s division, which included the famous Iron Brigade: western troops, known as one of the stoutest fighting units in the army. Reynolds put the westerners south of the Chambersburg road, sent Wadsworth’s other brigade into action north of the road, had Buford withdraw his cavalry, and made it clear that if the Confederates wanted to occupy that ridge they would have to fight for it.

  It speedily became clear that this was just what the Southerners proposed to do. They belonged to A. P. Hill’s III Corps, and Hill was one of the most pugnacious soldiers in either army—tense, impetuous, a man who liked to force the fighting regardless of consequences, coming in now in the style of a heads-down slugger always willing to take a blow in order to land one. Hill had no especial reason to get into Gettysburg, but he did not need one; there were armed Yankees in front of him offering to fight, and he was going to accept their offer without delay and that was that. In place of the routine sparring that had been going on when Reynolds rode up to get Buford’s situation report, an uncommonly savage battle was rapidly developing.

  Because rifled muskets gave infantry greatly increased fire power, the day of massed cavalry attacks on foot soldiers in the style of the Napoleonic wars had passed by the 1860s. Dismounted cavalrymen, however, could stand off an infantry attack long enough to compel the infantry commander to deploy his men in battle order, thereby displaying his strength and his intentions, and so it was on the morning of the first day’s fighting at Gettysburg. On the ridges west of town, Union cavalry commander Brigadier General John Buford put his cavalry in action against Confederate infantry of Lieutenant General A. P. Hill’s III Corps, delaying the Confederate advance just long enough to permit Union infantry to reach the scene. When cavalrymen fought on foot, one man in every four was detailed to hold the horses a short distance behind the fighting line; the other three used their carbines dismounted, acting precisely like infantry. (Illustrations 2.2)

  On July 1 Hill’s III Corps struck Meade’s advanced infantry, the I Corps under Reynolds, just west of Gettysburg. Howard’s XI Corps came up to help the Federals just as Ewell’s II Corps struck the Union flank from north and northeast. By mid-afternoon the Federals had been driven through Gettysburg and were holding on to high ground just south of the town. Lee was bringing up the rest of his army, while Meade was hurrying his own infantry to the scene. (Illustrations 2.3)

  Reynolds did not live to see much of it. He rode forward to get the Iron Brigade lined up against Hill’s advancing infantry, in the woods and fields of a farm owned by a man named McPherson, and some Confederate sharpshooter in Mr. McPherson’s barn drew a bead on him and shot him dead. Reynolds might have had command of the Army of the Potomac—it appears that the job was definitely offered to him not long after the battle of Chancellorsville—but he did not want it because he believed the War Department interfered with the army’s commander too much; he said so and the job went to Meade, and now Reynolds was killed in the opening moments of the battle he had helped to bring on.

  Command of the I Army Corps passed temporarily to the senior division commander, Major General Abner Doubleday, and as fast as fresh Union troops came up Doubleday fed them into action. A Confederate attack south of the Chambersburg road was beaten back sharply, and a Confederate brigade trying to advance through a railroad cut north of the road was broken up with heavy loss; but Hill had more men than Doubleday had and he kept piling them in relentlessly, and while the Federals held their ground tenaciously, they suffered fearful casualties. Before the day ended the Iron Brigade had been wrecked, one of its regiments having lost 80 per cent of its numbers, and the whole I Corps had been so badly mangled that it was never again really effective as a combat force. During the following winter it was broken up, with its survivors distributed among other corps.

  Until noon and past, the Union I Corps managed to hold its ground. Then a new pressure developed—a powerful battle line of Confederate infantry, marching south from the general direction of Carlisle: Major General Robert Rodes’s division of Ewell’s II Corps, coming in on the Federal right flank as neatly as if it had all been planned in advance.

  Federal reinforcements came up just in time, Howard’s XI Corps hurrying up from the south on the double in response to the messages Reynolds sent out before he died. Howard conferred briefly with Doubleday, took general command, by seniority, of all the troops present, planted one of his brigades as reserve on Cemetery Hill, the high ground just south of Gettysburg, and sent the rest of his corps into the open country north of town to meet Rodes’s attack. For a time the situation was stabilized, and an enlarged battle rolled and crashed across the Pennsylvania countryside, the two Federal corps making a line that ran north and south along the ground of the morning’s fight and then bent eastward at right angles in an improvised line that could hold temporarily but was by no means strong enough to meet any additional pressure.

  Additional pressure came at once. Among the odd chances that combined to bring about a major battle at Gettysburg was the fact that Lee’s order for a concentration of the army brought his troops into the Gettysburg area at the precise times and places where they could do the Federals the most harm. Now it was another of Ewell’s divisions, commanded by the dour fighting man Major General Jubal Early, hurrying westward from York, that found itself coming into battle when and where it was most needed. It struck Howard’s exposed right flank and lapped over into the area behind him, and Early ordered a vigorous advance. Howard’s men had had all they could do to stave off the attack from the north. Before this new assault they were helpless.

  The first Federal infantry to reach the battlefield was Major General John F. Reynolds’ I Army Corps. Meade had ordered Reynolds forward to determine whether Gettysburg was a suitable place for a battle and gave him temporary control of the III and XI Corps besides his own. Reynolds had his men relieve Buford’s overmatched cavalry and opened a hot fight along Seminary Ridge and astride a railway cutting north of the Chambersburg road; he ordered the other infantry forward and sent word to Meade that Gettysburg was a good place to fight. Having done this, he rode forward to arrange his battle line and was shot dead by a Confederate sharpshooter. An enlisted man who rode with him as his orderly said later that he had seen many men killed in the war but that he never saw a man die as quickly as did Reynolds. Apparently the general was lifeless before his body struck the ground. (Illustrations 2.4)

  By the oddest chance Lee himself reached the scene shortly before this happened. He had started eastward from Chambersburg in the morning, with Longstreet’s corps preparing to take the road behind him; hearing the sound of Hill’s battle, Lee had spurred on ahead, and he rode up to Hill’s field headquarters and got a size-up of the situation. He concluded at once that this fight ought not to be pressed any farther just now. He had no idea where the rest of Meade’s army was, less than half of his own army was on the scene, and it seemed to him that it would be rash to bring on a finish fight until he had all of his own forces in hand and knew where the bulk of the opposing force might be. He told Hill not to press the offensive—and just then the arrival of Early’s division caught the Federals in the flank. Ewell’s third division was not far away, Longstreet’s troops were on the road and would be up in a few hours; here was what looked very much like a decisive victory taking shape under the smoke clouds to the north and east—and Lee instantly reversed himself and ordered a general offensive by everybody in sight.

 

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