Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  That is, if it didn’t disintegrate on its own. In the wake of McClellan’s dismissal in November 1862, and the debacle at Fredericksburg in December, desertions from the Army of the Potomac reached hemophiliac proportions—200 a day by one estimate, and over 25,000 by the end of January. Joe Hooker had, in a surprisingly skillful display of both carrot and stick, managed to restore and rebuild the army through the spring of 1863, bringing the number of deserters down to only 2,000 and ensuring that the army was well fed and well equipped. But the promises of victory that Hooker so lavishly spread around came to nothing at Chancellorsville in May; and what was worse, approximately 30,000 of the men in the ranks of the Army of the Potomac had been enlisted for two-year terms, rather than the customary three-year volunteer service, or else had signed up for nine months’ service during the panic which greeted Lee’s invasion of Maryland in the fall of 1862. Those enlistments were due to expire in May and June 1863, taking away what seemed to one Minnesota soldier to be “fully one-half of the fighting strength of the old Army of the Potomac.” This was the rankers’ view; in terms of actual numbers, the army could still field between 85,000 and 94,000 men (allowing for sickness, leaves, and assignment to rear-echelon duties). More serious damage was done to the inner workings of the army, which lost units and officers that had otherwise been part of the day-to-day machinery of divisions and corps. John Reynolds’ 1st Corps was reduced from 16,000 to 9,000 men, and within the 1st Corps, James Wadsworth’s division was shrunk from four to two brigades and John Cleveland Robinson’s division from three to two. Dan Sickles’ 3rd Corps was downsized from three divisions to two. Not even the commanders stayed still: not a single one of the major generals who would command a corps at Gettysburg had been in command ten and a half months before at Antietam; sixteen of the Army of the Potomac’s nineteen divisions got new commanding officers between Antietam and Gettysburg.32

  And yet, the army survived its battering at Chancellorsville in far better shape than it had Fredericksburg. “A sort of fatality had … settled down upon the Army of the Potomac,” the sense expressed by a corporal in the 71st Pennsylvania “that the Soldiers … must depend Only on themselves for fighting out an honorable peace.” A soldier in the 5th Maine rebuked the plea of his wife in a letter (“don’t go in to another battle for my sake”) by telling her that he wouldn’t be worth having back “if we are called upon to go in to battle to leave the ranks and fall back in the rear if I am able to go with them.” And they would fight with increasing clarity, resolved Oliver Edwards, a captain in the 37th Massachusetts, “to leave the blessing of freedom to our children” in a nation cleansed from “the foul blot of slavery.” It almost surprised Edwards to hear himself think this way. “You see,” he added, “I am now a thorough ‘Black Republican’ Abolitionist. Well, this war is a good school to make them.”33

  CHAPTER THREE

  This Campaign is going to end this show

  OUR MEN seem to be in the spirit and feel confident,” wrote the newly promoted Confederate division commander William Dorsey Pender. “I wish we could meet Hooker and have the matter settled at once.” But it was a good question whether Pender was likely to get his wish (or Lee to get his to invade Pennsylvania) so long as the military fortunes of the Confederacy were sagging in so many other places. In the West, the Confederacy had staked out ambitious ground for itself, planting rebel flags in western Kentucky, turning Missouri into a battleground, and choking off Northerners’ access to the great economic throughway of the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys. This ambition quickly came unsprung. Federal troops successfully cleared Missouri and penetrated northern Arkansas by the spring of 1862. At the same time, still more Federal troops and river gunboats seized the vital Confederate posts on the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers in western Tennessee, forcing the principal Confederate army in the West to abandon Kentucky and most of Tennessee. The Federal Navy blew open the defenses of New Orleans at the far end of the Mississippi, and by the end of 1862 Confederate control of the Mississippi had shrunk to a single stretch of river between Port Hudson (in Louisiana) and Vicksburg. Three times, a Confederate field army tried to recover the lost territory in Tennessee and Kentucky, in battles at Shiloh, Perryville, and Murfreesboro. All three times it failed, and now the Confederacy was left barely clinging to the southeast corner of Tennessee, while a Union army was fastening its grip on Vicksburg. If these points were lost, nothing would stand between the Union forces and the vital economic intestines of the Confederacy in Georgia and Alabama, and the Confederacy would be as good as finished, no matter what happened in the East.

  Even now, in the spring of 1863, an entire Federal infantry corps (the 9th Corps, under the unfortunate Ambrose Burnside) was being transferred to the Ohio River, and in Richmond it looked to Jefferson Davis as though a hammer blow was being prepared for the Confederacy on the other side of the Appalachians. Davis had only two aces to play in the West—the Confederate garrison holding Vicksburg, under John C. Pemberton, and the lone Confederate field army in the West, the Army of Tennessee, under Braxton Bragg. Overall Western command was in the hands of the now recovered Joe Johnston, and Johnston did not hesitate to tell Davis that concentration of Confederate military strength in the West was “our true system of warfare.” The Confederacy could “beat the enemy here, and then reconquer the country beyond it which he might have gained in the mean time.” In the same key, the Charleston Mercury insisted that an “invasion of Kentucky … can be made with a force of thirty or forty thousand men at least. A single great victory won by such a force over Burnside would roll the war back at once beyond Louisville and to the very banks of the Ohio.”1

  In March 1863, Jefferson Davis called Lee to Richmond to discuss the suggestion that Lee “detach a corps for service in the West” from the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee’s response was cagey—a good idea, but “an unexpected activity has been exhibited by the enemy in Northern Virginia” which made it impossible for the moment. When Davis pressed him again two weeks later, Lee was still evasive. Joe Hooker’s army, “from the zealous manner of guarding their lines, and the systematic propagation of reports of an intended advance of their armies on the Rappahannock,” required keeping the Army of Northern Virginia together. In fact, Lee added, he was hoping “to make some aggressive movements” of his own, in the form of “a blow at Milroy, which I think will draw General Hooker out, or at least prevent further re-enforcements being sent to the west.” (The Milroy in question was Robert H. Milroy, the commander of the Federal garrison at Winchester, Virginia, and it is with this casual reference to Winchester that the first dim outline of what would become the Gettysburg campaign makes its appearance.) Unappeased, Secretary of War Seddon pressed Lee: “I am … unwilling to send beyond your command any portion even of the forces here without your counsel and approval,” but would Lee not at least consider parting with “two or three brigades”?2

  The answer, of course, was no. Robert E. Lee had thrown away a lifelong career, thrown away, in fact, an oath sworn on his honor, for the sake of Virginia and all of the Virginians like his Carter cousins—“my relatives, my children, my home.” Virginia was his all, and Virginia’s success was the only hope he had of recouping all he had ventured for the Old Dominion’s sake. What he would not give up for Winfield Scott and Abraham Lincoln, he was certainly not going to endanger for the sake of Jefferson Davis and James A. Seddon. “Save in defense of my native State, I never desire again to draw my sword”—those words, which Lee wrote to Scott back in the springtime of the war, had as much application to the Richmond government as to Winfield Scott. Besides, Lee already had other plans in mind for the use of the Army of Northern Virginia in 1863, plans which he had discussed with no one in Richmond, but which had first taken shape back in February, when Stonewall Jackson had, without any further explanation, instructed his chief topographical engineer, Jedediah Hotchkiss, to “prepare a map of the [Shenandoah] Valley of Virginia extended to Harrisburg, Pa., and then o
n to Philadelphia.” Hotchkiss had been warned to keep “the preparations … a profound secret,” and Jackson’s prize mapmaker quietly slipped his engineering staff across the Potomac in civilian dress “to examine the Country in and around Harrisburg.” Once in Pennsylvania, “plenty of fine horses and cattle, with the means of their support, could easily be procured” for an invading army; and Lee could “maneouver & alarm the enemy, threaten their cities” and generally encourage the peace party to demand an end to the war. And if Lee could lure the Army of the Potomac into “a pitched battle” on ground and timing of his own choosing, the Union forces “would be seriously disorganized and forced to retreat across the Susquehanna—an event which would give him control of Maryland and Western Pennsylvania, and … would very likely cause the fall of Washington city and the flight of the Federal government.”3

  None of this was explained to Davis and Seddon, however, and so on May 9th, while the dying Stonewall Jackson was preparing to cross his last river, the mystified Confederate secretary of war wired Lee in cipher to ask why Pickett’s division could not be spared for Pemberton and the relief of Vicksburg. Lee stubbornly refused. “The adoption of your proposition is hazardous, and it becomes a question between Virginia and the Mississippi,” and he informed Seddon that he would obey only if he received a direct order. Seddon was very nearly ready to give up on persuading Lee when Jefferson Davis interposed and invited Lee to Richmond again to have this all out in person on May 14th. No minutes of the conference survive, but when Davis and Seddon afterward met with the Confederate cabinet, both of them had evidently been persuaded by Lee to shelve any plans for reinforcing Joe Johnston with troops from Virginia.

  The only other dissent Lee had to cope with came, surprisingly, from within the circle of his corps commanders, from James Longstreet. Joe Johnston had been Longstreet’s commanding officer in 1861–62 for almost as long as Lee had been in 1862–63, and Longstreet retained a stubborn loyalty to Johnston, which Longstreet believed was widely shared in the army. When Johnston took up department command in the West, Longstreet offered to ask for a transfer if Johnston wanted him. (Longstreet may have even sought out Seddon in Richmond on May 6th precisely to propose such a transfer.) He was surprised to discover that Seddon was thinking along the same lines, and promptly offered not only himself for transfer but “the two divisions of my command” which had missed the Chancellorsville battle. But when he repeated the proposition to Lee, the army commander refused: he was already planning a new offensive and could “spare nothing from this army to re-enforce in the West.” Like Seddon, Longstreet relented—but only with Lee’s assurance that the Army of Northern Virginia would conduct any pitched battle during this invasion on the tactical defensive. “We were not to deliver an offensive battle, but to so maneuver that the enemy should be forced to attack us … offensive strategy, but defensive tactics.” (Or at least that was how Longstreet would remember the agreement years later.)4

  Lee had won the first battle of his campaign. The next battle would be with the Union army.

  What would this battle look like? The great British historian Thomas Arnold warned in 1874 that “the part which unprofessional men can least understand” about military affairs “is what is technically called tactic,” about which “the commonest sergeant, or the commonest soldier, knows infinitely more of the matter than he does.”5 But even with that caveat in mind, the appearance of Civil War battle—soldiers standing up, elbow to elbow, firing single-shot muzzleloaders by volley, in neat parade-ground lines, as though they were consciously imitating the battles of Napoleon and Frederick the Great—seems to pass all understanding. The fact that these same armies were employing weapons—in the form of the rifle musket and rifled artillery—which hugely increased the range and accuracy of fire combat over the eighteenth century’s short-range smoothbore musket and pop-gun cannon, and hugely increased the Civil War’s casualty lists, makes the Civil War look like an exercise in raw stupidity equivalent to the slaughters of the Western Front.

  Arnold’s “commonest sergeant” would not have thought those lines of battle so unwise. For a long time, it was customary for Civil War historians to speak of the rifle musket and rifled artillery in awed tones, as though rifling were a prototype of the machine gun, or so novel that Civil War officers were unable to come to grips with its implications. The legendary Bruce Catton summed this up about as well as anyone could when he wrote in 1953 that:

  the generals had been brought up wrong. The tradition they had learned was that of close-order fighting in open country, where men with bayonets bravely charged a line of men firing smooth-bore muskets … But the rifle came in and changed all of that. The range at which charging men began to be killed was at least five times as great as it used to be, which meant that about five times as many of the assailants were likely to be hit.6

  But by 1863, there was nothing novel about the improvements in accuracy and range produced by rifling. The Minié rifle musket system (the brainchild of French weapons innovator Claude-Etienne Minié) had actually made its debut in the Crimea in 1854 in the form of both the Minié rifle and its British-made counterpart, the Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle musket, and from there, the rifle musket become the weapon of choice for both the British infantry in the Indian Mutiny in 1857 and the French and Austrian infantry in the North Italian War in 1859. Two brigade commanders at Gettysburg, Cadmus Wilcox and George Lamb Willard, had actually written pretty lucidly on the uses of the rifle musket before the war, and the practical lessons which Wilcox, Willard, and many others took out of the rifle’s debut in the 1850s were about its limitations as much as its advantages.7

  Rifling bestowed greater range and accuracy on a musket, but it did so at the price of forming a trajectory for the bullet which “dropped” rather than went straight to a target. To hit a target thus required exact knowledge of the speed and distance of a target, something which in battle was rarely available. “A very good marksman, by placing his piece in the more careful manner, generally at a dead rest … and firing usually not more than once in five minutes,” might very well be able to “strike a half-dollar tolerably often,” wrote the future Confederate general Raleigh Colston in 1858. But how often did such conditions prevail in battle? And if those targets got close enough that the rifleman had no time to reload, then the targets’ bayonets, not the rifle musket, would be what decided the encounter. Despite the oft-touted ability of the soldier to load and fire three aimed shots in a minute, in practice the rate of fire produced by muzzleloading rifle muskets by regiments in line of battle (just like its smoothbore counterpart) was actually closer to one every four and a half minutes. “Tacticians talk, no doubt, about firing four and five shots in a minute,” snorted one British officer, but these were “miserable puerilities, not worth discussing.” At Montebello, in northern Italy, the battle had been won by French infantry bayonets, not by long-range rifle musket fire or rifled artillery, and won so successfully that the Austrian Army thereafter cast off any hope of the rifle musket dominating battlefields. The British had learned much the same lesson in India in 1857.8

  Whatever the gains bestowed by the technology of the rifle musket and rifled artillery, those improvements were only apparent under ideal conditions (which is to say, not in the middle of a firefight). “On the target-ground,” warned a British officer, it was possible to concentrate entirely on perfect shooting, and exclude “the least disturbance that may distract the attention.” But “how will it be in the ranks at volley-firing or file-firing” when men are “excited to the highest degree, cannon-balls decimating the ranks, shells and bullets whistling their infernal tune overhead”? Under that kind of stress, “it will matter little; the soldier will simply raise his rifle to the horizontal, and fire without aiming.” Nor was the technology itself foolproof. The black powder which continued in use as a propellant through the Civil War blanketed a battlefield in rolling clouds of smoke. Soldiers on the firing lines quickly found “the smoke from their
rifles hanging about them in clouds,” and it was not uncommon for officers to have to get down on all fours to peer under the smoke bank to confirm enemy troop positions. At Fredericksburg, artillery gun crews ran laps around their guns, waving their arms, in an effort to dispel the powder smoke from the guns’ discharge.9 No improvements in accuracy or range could trump blindness. The black powder itself quickly packed the rifle’s grooves with residue from firing, and the need to load the rifle by ramming home each charge from the muzzle with a ramrod, whose banging about nicked and chipped the muzzle at the very point where the bullet was expelled, further degraded the accuracy of the rifle in use.

  Another limitation on the impact of rifled weapons in battle was field communications. In 1863, there could be only the most primitive synchronization of actions on different portions of a battlefield, because orders had to be delivered personally, through couriers or aides, a process which could require up to an hour between army headquarters and corps headquarters, another thirty minutes from corps to division, and another twenty from division to the fundamental unit of Civil War combat, the brigade. Once engaged in combat, the noise of battle was “absolutely impenetrable by the voice to any distance,” and “orders have to be so multiplied and repeated, that the genius of a Napoleon would get entangled on a day of battle.” Officers on the line of battle responded to situations by herding their men within earshot of drums, bugles, and their officers’ own voices rather than dispersing them; sometimes they were reduced to using the most basic visual signs, or the position of the regimental colors. Hence, in the context of nineteenth-century battle, the elbow-to-elbow line was still the best way to concentrate fire or coordinate movement, and the bayonet remained, quite reasonably, the queen of the battlefield.10