A Thousand May Fall

by Brian Matthew Jordan

  By the time the Eleventh Corps crossed into Maryland on the afternoon of June 25, the van of the Army of Northern Virginia had lurched into south-central Pennsylvania. Tethered to his Rappahannock River line for seven months, Lee was impatient to resume the offensive—not only because it would satisfy the demand of Confederate civilians for forward movement, but because the Cumberland Valley would afford him the chance to provision his men. Fortified by a steady diet of northern newspapers, the general likewise appreciated the mounting opposition to the war north of the Mason-Dixon Line; this lent him a sense of urgency similar to the one that impelled him north in the autumn of 1862. “We should neglect no honorable means of dividing and weakening our enemies,” Lee reasoned in a wordy missive to Confederate president Jefferson Davis. “It seems to me that the most effectual mode of accomplishing this object, now within our reach, is to give all the encouragement we can, consistently with truth, to the rising peace party of the North.” Davis hardly shared Lee’s enthusiasm for a second northern invasion (the rebel chief executive was especially concerned about the fate of Vicksburg, the Confederacy’s last fortified bastion on the Mississippi, which Ulysses S. Grant’s forces threatened to besiege), but he nonetheless nodded his approval to Lee.9

  Using the Blue Ridge Mountains to screen their movements, Lee’s troops loped down the Shenandoah Valley. At Winchester, the gray- and butternut-clad men easily brushed aside a seven-thousand-man federal garrison commanded by Major General Robert Huston Milroy, adding one more to the town’s already imposing tally of flag changes. Albert Gallatin Jenkins’s mounted troops, in the van of the rebel column, splashed across the Potomac shortly thereafter. Before long, the southerners made the aims of their invasion evident. In Franklin County, near Chambersburg, Lee’s men commenced “a regular slave hunt,” kidnapping free blacks and threatening to “burn down every house which harbored a fugitive slave.” It was “sufficient,” one civilian lamented, “to settle the slavery question for every humane mind.” Elsewhere, Lee’s men paid little heed to a general order forbidding pillage and plunder, helping themselves to Pennsylvania’s seemingly limitless bounty. With the Army of the Potomac still feeling its way north, the governor activated home-guard “emergency militia” units, so as to offer some resistance to the invaders.10

  As panic gripped the denizens of south-central Pennsylvania, the long blue columns of Hooker’s army inched north through the Maryland countryside. From Edward’s Ferry it was a grueling, twenty-eight-mile march to Jefferson. The next day, after a shorter trek, the men bivouacked near Middletown, the steepled village whose buildings had been repurposed as hospitals in the grisly aftermath of Lee’s last northern gambit. Here the men learned that “Fighting Joe” would lead them no longer. “We did not know much about General Meade,” Jacob Smith recalled of Hooker’s replacement, but the men trusted that the Fifth Corps commander—the old, “goggle-eyed snapping turtle” who led the Pennsylvania Reserve division into Antietam’s bloody Cornfield and broke through the rebel lines at Fredericksburg—would give battle to Robert E. Lee.11

  Meade wasted little time; within hours, his troops had marching orders. On June 29 the men made a “wearisome” march, checked by “droves of cattle, ammunition & supply trains, squadrons of cavalry, [and] stragglers of all sorts.” They stopped to pitch tents for the evening about “a mile north” of Emmitsburg, a Maryland village nestled in the Catoctins. “The beauty and tranquility of the place,” mused one Buckeye soldier, affectionately describing the town’s “scrupulously-kept gardens” and “little cemetery with its methodical array of grassy graves and white crosses,” contrasted sharply with “the military tumult [that] suddenly invested it.” But kid gloves once more concealed the “hard hand of war.” “In Virginia everything we could lay our hands on was confiscated without delay,” one enlisted man explained, “but here nothing is destroyed but what is absolutely necessary, and if we want anything the farmers have they sell it at a reasonable price and all are willing to pay for it.”

  Intuiting that another battle was imminent, old doubts and anxieties threatened to overwhelm the confidence with which the Ohioans had addressed their critics after Chancellorsville. “Many of those who had passed through former campaigns and defeats at the hands of the enemy,” one soldier related, “seemed to think that a like fate awaited us in the coming conflict.” Nearby, “the solemnity which always foreruns a battle” took possession of the 17th Connecticut, “intensifying our thoughts of home, and weaving shadows of anxiety across our future.” The scenes of the Talley Farm lingered, a brooding presence never to be banished. “I stood leaning against a camp stake, gazing dreamily across the hill,” one of its soldiers reported, “with mind reverting to Chancellorsville and filled with anticipations of a second edition so soon to be issued.” In his “sad reverie,” the enlisted man was again “amid the carnage, surrounded by gleaming bayonets and staggering wounded,” tormented by the “piercing cries of the mangled combatants.” After a while, a comrade was able to summon him from the eerie spell.

  To be sure, it was a night that few would forget. By the “calm, mellow” light of the moon—the sky, by all accounts, was exceptionally “clear,” stippled with “bright glittering stars”—more than a few soldiers took the opportunity to pen letters to their friends and families back home. The earnest labor of writing concluded, they “sought the refuge of their shelter-tents.” More than a few prayers went up from “sad and heavily burdened hearts.” It was Tuesday, June 30, 1863, and, for more than a few, their last night on earth.12

  ANYONE WHO PEERED at a mid-nineteenth-century map of south-central Pennsylvania quickly took note of Gettysburg. The ten thoroughfares that delivered travelers to the town stabbed in virtually every direction, offering the illusion that the Adams County seat was the “hub” of a “wagon wheel.” The convergence of roads notwithstanding, neither Robert E. Lee nor George Gordon Meade planned to fight a battle there. Though rebel troops commanded by Jubal Early ransomed the town on June 26, they quickly set their sights on the much larger prize of York, still some thirty miles east. Meanwhile, Confederate cavalry began to gape at the defenses of Harrisburg, the Keystone State’s capital and an important railroad junction that sprawled along the Susquehanna. For his part, Meade announced his preference for a defensive battle—and on ground of his own choosing. In a circular, he instructed his troops that they were to withdraw to a perch behind the sturdy banks of Maryland’s Pipe Creek in the event of an enemy attack.13

  But Lee could not be certain of Meade’s intentions. Upon learning that the Army of the Potomac boasted an aggressive new commander, the rebel general ordered his troops, scattered in a wide arc across the Cumberland Valley, to concentrate west of Gettysburg. He would not permit Meade to attack while his men were dangerously divided, ripe for the harvest. (With this order, Lee betrayed his lofty estimate of George Gordon Meade; at Chancellorsville, after all, Lee twice—and almost mechanically—divided his forces in the face of Joe Hooker.) So it was that as the Ohioans dutifully trudged toward Emmitsburg, Lee’s men were beginning to collect at Cashtown, a tiny village at the base of South Mountain.

  While waiting for the Army of Northern Virginia to reunite, on June 30 a brigade of North Carolinians felt its way west from Cashtown to Gettysburg, making the eight-mile trek under a somber drizzle. As they approached the borough of twenty-four hundred, James Johnston Pettigrew’s soggy men were baffled to find federal cavalrymen trundling into town. They instinctively fell back, reporting what they had seen to headquarters. Undaunted by the report—unwilling to concede that the Army of the Potomac had pulled within striking distance in just a few days—division commander Harry Heth resolved to return the next morning with his two brigades.14

  THE EVENING OF June 30 had been a restive one for the Eleventh Corps rank and file, but it was no less so for Oliver Otis Howard. The previous evening, the general trotted north at the urging of Major General John Fulton Reynolds, the Pennsylvanian who commanded the
Army of the Potomac’s First Corps. Together, in the back of the handsome tavern that Reynolds requisitioned as his headquarters, the men pored over maps and studied a “bundle of dispatches” in an effort to deduce the positions of the enemy. Howard did not begin the six-mile ride back to Emmitsburg until after eleven o’clock. Equipped with the most up-to-date intelligence about the proximity of the rebels and their likely “designs,” however, he reasoned that his troops would meet the enemy the next day. He was right. The general had scarcely nodded off to sleep when a messenger conveying orders from Meade’s headquarters roused him: the Eleventh Corps was to push on to Gettysburg, where it would form “in supporting distance” of the First Corps. “Meade,” one student of the battle surmises, “was preparing contingency plans in case the Confederate army attacked.”15

  The next morning, after bugles sounded the notes of reveille, the men received orders to fold up their tents, shoulder their knapsacks, and prepare to march. Frank Barlow’s division took the lead, availing itself of “the direct road from Emmitsburg to Gettysburg.” In the words of one enlisted man in the 17th Connecticut, it was a “hard, tedious march.” The road was not only well rutted (the work of Reynolds’s wagons, which had trundled along earlier that morning), but likewise “obstructed all the way” by ammunition trains and limber wagons. Each thankless stride amplified the sounds of battle in the distance, thickening the lumps in their throats. “Rustic patriots” lined the route to encourage the men, though the somber, careworn expressions worn by the civilians betrayed their sense of foreboding.16

  Howard pressed ahead of his troops and bolted into Gettysburg with his staff, eager to inspect the situation as it was developing on the ground. Hooking his way “through a lumber-room” and up two narrow flights of stairs, the general reached “a fine post of observation” atop Henry Fahnestock’s dry goods store, located at the corner of Middle and Baltimore Streets, not far from the town center. Peering through a set of field glasses, Howard inspected the ridges to the west, now outlined with long lines of blue. Earlier that morning, anticipating a return visit from the rebels, a strong-jawed Kentucky-born, West Point–trained cavalry officer named John Buford planted his 2,900-man division on those ridges. For several crucial hours, his troopers delayed the enemy’s advance—ensuring that when the rebels did splash across Willoughby Run, they would meet federal infantrymen. To Buford’s enormous relief, Reynolds spurred onto the field just before ten o’clock, anchoring a brigade on either side of the Chambersburg Pike. Fierce combat erupted in Herbst’s Woods (where a stout brigade of Midwesterners folded up a line of Tennesseans and Alabamians) and in an unfinished railroad cut (where New Yorkers and a hearty regiment from Wisconsin took advantage of the rebels’ luckless position in the trench).17

  From his perch at Fahnestock’s, Howard watched with glee as Union troops bagged enemy prisoners in the railroad cut and then led them through the borough’s narrow streets. But he would not relish the moment very long. Shortly after 11:30, an aide-de-camp delivered the news that a sharpshooter’s bullet had felled General Reynolds early in the engagement. This left Howard “the senior officer on the field.” “When the responsibility of my position flashed upon me,” he confessed more than a decade later, “I was penetrated with an emotion never experienced before or since.” With little time to waste, Howard summoned the men of the Eleventh Corps, now to be led by his senior division commander, Carl Schurz. The troops were still several miles south of Gettysburg when a breathless staff officer bolted toward them on horseback, demanding they “move up at double-quick.”18

  Sometime around eleven thirty, Schurz caught up with Howard atop Cemetery Hill, a commanding knob immediately south of the borough. “This high ground,” one veteran remembered, afforded in nearly every direction “an unobstructed view” of the surrounding countryside. Laced with low stone walls that could function as “natural breastworks,” the rise also supplied a most enviable platform for artillery. For this reason, Howard opted to steady Brigadier General Adolph von Steinwehr’s division and several batteries of reserve artillery atop the eminence. Troubled by reports that the enemy was “making a movement” to gain the flank of the First Corps, however, Howard directed Schurz to conduct the remaining two divisions up to Oak Ridge, where they could lend some support to James Wadsworth’s men. “Either the enemy was before us in small force, and then we had to push him with all possible vigor,” Schurz reported, “or he had the principal part of his army there, and then we had to establish ourselves in a position which would enable us to maintain ourselves until the arrival of reinforcements.”19

  But first they had to advance through Gettysburg—now a perfect picture of bedlam. “The rush of artillery galloping to the front, the eager movement of infantry, the hurry-scurry of cavalry, the scamper of the terror-stricken inhabitants, the clatter of ambulances and other vehicles,” one officer wrote, “constituted about as wild a sense of excitement as the tumult of war ever presents.” “We went through [the town] in such a hurry we could hardly stop to get anything to eat or drink,” one private lamented with anguish. By the time the men emerged from the town’s tangled streets, however, rebel batteries had already lurched into position, and Robert E. Rodes had deployed his nearly eight thousand Alabamians, Georgians, and North Carolinians (the impressively mustached Virginian commanded the largest division in Lee’s army) atop Oak Hill. Unable to link hands with Wadsworth’s troops, the Eleventh Corps instead stretched out into a line of battle facing north, “nearly perpendicular” to the First Corps. This permitted them to keep a watchful eye on the Carlisle and Harrisburg roads, two thoroughfares that threatened to deliver still more reinforcements to the rebels.20

  With “promptness and spirit,” Brigadier General Alexander Schimmelfennig, an old Forty-Eighter and Prussian army veteran, arrayed Schurz’s division “on the right of the First Corps in two lines.” Barlow then assembled his troops—including the 107th Ohio—on the campus of the county almshouse, a collection of multistory brick buildings astride the Harrisburg Road that, since the 1820s, had served the local indigent and insane. From a tactical vantage point, the position was anything but desirable; unlike the men west of town, who deployed along ridgelines and behind ribbons of woods, Barlow’s two brigades were assembled on an exposed, “level plain,” bereft of either “natural or artificial defenses.”21

  They wouldn’t remain there very long. As his men caught a much-needed breath (“after we marched through Gettysburg, I dropped on the ground, like a dead person, all exhausted and very tired,” an enlisted man in the 17th Connecticut confessed), Barlow spied a “small hill” in the distance. Behind the healthy stand of oak and hickory that screened its northern edge meandered lazy Rock Creek. The locals referred to the rise, located on thirty-five-year-old David Blocher’s farm, as Blocher’s Knoll.22

  Gettysburg was an unassuming county seat of 2,400 when the Army of the Potomac and Army of Northern Virginia collided there in July 1863. This period photograph captures the borough from the west. Library of Congress

  WHENEVER FRANK BARLOW resolved to do something, he went at it with an almost reckless zeal. The orders he received that afternoon were unambiguous: “prolong” the line of the Eleventh Corps, maintain a “connection” with Schimmelfennig’s troops, and “refuse his right wing” so as to confront any potential “flanking movement by the enemy.” But after surveying the surrounding ground, he was “determined to occupy the knoll” to his front. Nothing—including Schurz’s commands—would dissuade him from his considered course of action. On Barlow’s orders, Colonel Leopold von Gilsa obediently delivered his brigade to the knoll. Comprising two New York units and an outfit mustered from eastern Pennsylvania, the brigade now had the strength of a single, healthy regiment—yet one more devastating testament to “Stonewall” Jackson’s effectiveness at Chancellorsville. The men of the 25th Ohio soon joined von Gilsa’s men, providing “battery support” for the four Napoleons commanded by nineteen-year-old Lieutenant Bayard
Wilkeson, which creaked into position and unlimbered at the summit. With the balance of Ames’s brigade, the 107th Ohio looked on from a reserve position several hundred yards to the rear, doubtless addled by the eerie coincidence that once again, they had been dispatched to the right flank of an overextended Union line.23

  Von Gilsa’s men had no more rustled into position when three of Lieutenant Hilary Pollard Jones’s Confederate batteries—each planted on a rise “about a half mile northeast of Blocher’s Knoll”—erupted in earnest. “I never saw guns better served than Jones’ were on this occasion,” one Confederate major recollected. The shot and shell cut down trees, which meant that before they were subjected to a hail of lead, the men first had to dodge a storm of splinters. “Large shells and six-pounders passed close over our heads,” one New York captain recalled, obligating officers and men to quickly master the art of stooping, dodging, and bending “low.” More ominously, however, the growl of Jones’s ordnance rifles announced the arrival of Major General Jubal Anderson Early’s division in Gettysburg.24

  At two o’clock, the rattle of musketry replaced the roar of artillery. In the narrow belt of timber that skirted the “abrupt” banks of Rock Creek, von Gilsa’s skirmishers squinted their eyes, squeezed their triggers, and emptied at least three volleys into the Confederate pickets. “Slowly” at first, but then with the swiftness of a “savage charge,” the howling rebels sloshed through the creek, driving the Yankee skirmishers in an effort to clear the way for John Brown Gordon’s brigade of six Georgia regiments—slightly more than eighteen hundred soldiers. Showered with near universal acclaim for his “soldierly bearing” (the five gunshot wounds that he received in the space of two hours at Antietam’s Bloody Lane conveyed something of his poise in a fight), the thirty-one year old brigadier general trotted into the battle on a “beautiful coal-black stallion captured at Winchester.” Gordon leapt from his saddle, “bareheaded, hat in hand, arms extended,” urging his men forward in “a voice like a trumpet.” In the estimation of one rebel enlisted man, it was “absolutely thrilling.” Campbell Brown, a Confederate staff officer, enthusiastically agreed. Gordon’s advance, he wrote, was “one of the most warlike & animated spectacles I ever looked on.”25