Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  With Lee’s urging in mind, Davis wired Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice president, to come to Richmond for a briefing on a special mission. Stephens, curiously, had also written Davis, on June 12th, urging the opening of some kind of discussions in Washington about a “general adjustment” based on “recognition of the Sovereignty of the States.” Whether Stephens was prepared to insist on Confederate independence was uncertain, but he was willing to try, and Davis was willing to authorize him. Stephens arrived in Richmond on June 26th, where Davis handed him a letter he was to present under a flag of truce to Abraham Lincoln. Ostensibly, Stephens’ mission was “to arrange and settle all differences and disputes which may have arisen or may arise in the execution of the cartel for exchange of prisoners of war.” But if the circumstances provided an opening for a more freewheeling discussion of issues of reconciliation, Stephens had the latitude to proceed. And the circumstances would in large measure be shaped by what Robert E. Lee would accomplish somewhere north of the Potomac.28

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  The Shenandoah Valley, not Harpers Ferry, would be the route to the Potomac in 1863, and the Army of Northern Virginia would cross the river at Boteler’s Ford (near Shepherdstown) and at Williamsport. To get there, the Federal garrison in Winchester would have to be evicted, and that would mean tackling the three brigades stationed there and the fortifications they occupied under the command of Robert Milroy. These 6,900 Union soldiers—mostly Ohio and West Virginia recruits—had done little since their enlistments but guard duty on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and their fortifications were badly sited to resist a determined attack. Above all, Brigadier General Milroy was a man of big mouth and small talent as a soldier. An Indiana lawyer, an unbuttoned abolitionist, and (perhaps most to his advantage) a political ally of Lincoln’s secretary of the interior, John P. Usher, Milroy won his brigadier general’s star in September 1861, and did some minor but undistinguished campaigning in the western Virginia mountains and the Shenandoah Valley.29 Apart from that, Milroy’s energies had been turned toward nominating himself to be emancipation’s missionary to the Shenandoah. This did little beyond antagonizing a populace already ill-disposed to Union occupation, and painting a large target on Milroy’s back. “Everywhere we hear the same talk of [the] oppression and cowardly cruelty of Milroy,” wrote one of Longstreet’s staff officers. “The reign of Milroy,” proclaimed the Richmond papers, was a lesson in “brutality and robbery,” and the “one prayer in Winchester … is ‘Oh, God, how long, how long!’ ” The Virginia legislature branded Milroy an “outlaw” and it was rumored in Winchester that “the Confederacy (some people in the Confederacy)” had put a price of $100,000 on Milroy’s gray-bearded head. Even Robert E. Lee, in a rare moment of vindictiveness, branded Milroy “atrocious” and suggested to Secretary of War Seddon in January 1863 that “prisoners from his command captured by our forces be not exchanged but that they be held as hostages for the protection of our people against the outrages which he is reported to be committing.”30

  Dick Ewell drew the ticket to carry the torch to Milroy. This only seemed appropriate, given that the sixty-four infantry regiments of Ewell’s corps included twenty-five who had fought under Stonewall Jackson and won Jackson’s most spectacular victories at Front Royal and Winchester in 1862. And if the unusual concentration of eccentric division and brigade commanders in the corps was any proof, the stamp of Stonewall Jackson was still very deep on Ewell’s command. His senior division commander, Jubal Early, was the army’s most caustic and opinionated curmudgeon. Edward Johnson (who ranked just behind Early) commanded the next division, and “always carried a big hickory club or cane” which he preferred as a weapon to a saber or revolver. (Johnson, known affectionately as “Allegheny Ed” and “Old Allegheny,” had the distinction of crossing swords with Milroy in western Virginia back in 1861 and again in 1862.) Early’s senior brigade commander, Harry Thompson Hays, commanded five Louisiana regiments who had collectively borrowed the “Louisiana Tigers” label from its original owners in 1862. Early’s second brigade was commanded by William Smith, who won the sobriquet “Extra Billy” from the surcharges he had skimmed for carrying government mail on his stagecoach line during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Although Extra Billy would be sixty-six in September and candidly admitted that he was “wholly ignorant of drill and tactics,” he had just been elected (for the second time) governor of Virginia, and for that reason alone no one in this Virginia-besotted army was eager to dispute his place at the head of a brigade.31

  The confidence Lee put behind Ewell’s corps was richly rewarded. Ewell hurried his corps for twenty-three miles, fording the Shenandoah without giving the men “time to stop & take off shoes & socks,” and arrived within three miles of Winchester before noon on the 13th. He then split his divisions, with three brigades of Jubal Early’s division swinging away to the west of Winchester, Early’s remaining brigade and Allegheny Johnson’s division deploying beside the turnpike south of the town, and Robert Rodes’ remaining division out to the east (where they cleared one of Milroy’s brigades out of an advanced post at Berryville).32

  Startled at the sudden appearance of masses of Confederate infantry, Milroy hastily manned Winchester’s defensive lines and spent most of the afternoon hours of the 13th looping shells at the rebel infantry he could see south of the town. Neither he nor anyone else in the defenses caught sight of Jubal Early’s three brigades as they moved quietly into position west of the town “by a blind and circuitous road” and “spent the night in a drenching rain.” On the morning of the 14th, Harry Hays and his adjutant were able to creep up “to the edge of the woods” near one of Milroy’s outlying artillery emplacements and “discovered several men lying on the ground under the shade of a tree” while “sentinels lazily paced their rounds, and everything betokened a total ignorance of our proximity.” That was enough to persuade Jubal to attack, and at 6:00 p.m. Early’s artillery battalion (plus one battery from Allegheny Johnson’s division) began firing shells at the Federal emplacements and trenches on the west side of Winchester. After forty-five minutes, the brigades of Hays and Extra Billy Smith, and the North Carolina brigade of Isaac Avery, burst from the treelines that had concealed them, and “in a few minutes they were over the breastworks, driving the enemy out in great haste and confusion.” Only the fall of night kept the Confederates from swarming into the streets of Winchester itself.33

  Robert Milroy, who had a great deal more to answer for than most Union soldiers if he was captured, convened a hasty conference at nine o’clock with his three brigade commanders, and decided to make a run for it. It was too late. Dick Ewell guessed that the Federals would bolt down the turnpike toward Martinsburg or Harpers Ferry, and in the night he directed Allegheny Johnson to march three of his brigades around Winchester and position themselves athwart the turnpike at Stephenson’s Depot, where a railroad embankment for the Winchester & Potomac Railroad cut across the pike. Milroy’s would-be escapees barged into Johnson’s brigades in the predawn light, and tried to run over them. But after three attempts “to storm and capture their batteries,” Milroy gave every regiment leave to look out for itself, and what had once been Milroy’s command broke up in desperately fleeing fragments. Some made it to safety in Martinsburg, others—including the hapless Milroy—to Harpers Ferry. But 2,500 fell prisoner to Johnson, and another 1,500 were taken in Winchester by Jubal Early when his brigades entered Winchester that morning and tore down the huge garrison flag which had waved over Milroy’s main fort. If Ewell had had more than just one company of cavalry with his corps, he might have bagged still more of the running Yankees; as it was, the few horsemen he had at his disposal spent “two days after the defeat of Milroy … actively engaged in pursuing and harassing the enemy” and running down bands of fugitives “who were retreating in great disorder.”34

  It was one of the most swift, total, and bloodless Confederate victories of the war. Only 42 out of the 23,000
men of Ewell’s corps had been killed; in return, Ewell had surprised and obliterated 3 Union brigades (which would, in fact, never be reconstituted), captured 23 pieces of Union artillery, and gobbled up “ammunition and a large number of wagons and teams.” A “gentleman from the Valley” estimated that Ewell had acquired between 6,000 and 7,000 Union prisoners, 2,800 horses, 400 to 500 wagons, and stores worth $1.5 to $2 million. There was enough captured material for “the Qr. Master” to reequip Early’s division with “all necessaries … from this post, and everybody is now completely equipped for the campaign.” The artillery officer detailed to inventory the captured Union guns did a little gobbling of his own “among the plunder” and “found myself possessed of a nice pair of oil cloth pants and writing materials sufficient to stand a 12 mos siege,” while Sam Pickens in the 5th Alabama supplied himself with “a good Havre sack, almost new & … an abundance of good soap & some nice toilet soap.”35

  For the moment, it appeared that any concerns Robert E. Lee had nursed about Ewell’s fitness for independent action—and especially for filling Stonewall Jackson’s boots—had been triumphantly erased. The egg-headed Ewell now became “our glorious Ewell” in the Richmond Daily Dispatch, which announced that Jackson’s former division commander “has indeed caught the mantle of the ascended Jackson. Brilliantly has he re-enacted the scenes of the spring of ‘62, on the same theatre.” When the news reached Longstreet’s corps on the other side of the Blue Ridge, they were inclined to cheer the same way. “Ewell won his right to Jackson’s game on Jackson’s ground,” Charles Blackford, one of Jackson’s veteran officers, wrote to his wife, Susan, on June 16th. “This success will give the corps more confidence in Ewell.” Or, almost more confidence. The shadow of Jackson did not dissipate quite so easily. A Virginian who had served in Stonewall’s old brigade in the Shenandoah in 1862 acknowledged that Ewell “did well in routing Milroy from Winchester.” But if Jackson had been in command on June 14th, he added, Jackson “would have had his line of battle around Winchester, and captured the whole command”—especially Robert Milroy. “If he had been captured by some of our men he would have fared badly.”36

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Victory will inevitably attend our arms

  MILROY DID NOT, in fact, fare badly at all, despite the dissolution of his command. He admitted that he had been surprised by the speed with which the Confederates had reached Winchester from the Rappahannock. “I believed that Lee could not move his large army, with its immense artillery and baggage trains, and perform a six days’ march in my direction, unless I received timely notice of that important fact.” But that, in Milroy’s mind, only thrust the real blame onto his superiors—onto Henry Halleck as general in chief and onto Robert Schenck as his department commander—who, presumably, had access to the latest news on Lee’s movements and should have given him more than the ambiguous directives he had received from Washington and Baltimore. Halleck was infuriated, and on June 20th he ordered Milroy’s arrest. But a court of inquiry that fall cleared Milroy of responsibility for the Winchester debacle, and he went on to take command of another backwater railroad district in Tennessee, where he once again set the civilian population’s teeth on edge and invited another price on his head.1

  One person who might have derived some bleak satisfaction from seeing Halleck tagged with blame for the Winchester debacle was Joseph Hooker. The day before Winchester was attacked, Hooker warned Halleck that “my sources of information” indicated that “Longstreet’s and Ewell’s corps” were on the march “toward the Valley.” The next day he coyly wired Lincoln to ask whether “anything further” had been “heard from Winchester.” Lincoln, of course, had lost all communication with Winchester, and anxiously asked Hooker whether, “if they could hold out a few days, could you help them.” Surely, Lincoln reasoned uneasily, “if the head of Lee’s army is at Martinsburg and the tail of it on the Plank road between Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, the animal must be very slim somewhere. Could you not break him?” But the slim part would lie in the Shenandoah Valley, and the valley lay in someone else’s military department, and after Chancellorsville, Halleck and Lincoln had limited any discretion Hooker had to give orders anywhere outside the Army of the Potomac. So it pleased Hooker only too well to be able to say—and to say directly to Halleck—that “the instructions of the President, approved by yourself, and your original letter of instructions, compel me” to stick close to the line of the Orange & Alexandria Railroad in order to protect Washington, not Winchester.2

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  But Hooker now had more to do than snicker darkly at his nemesis in Washington. The fall of Winchester removed the one serious obstacle in Robert E. Lee’s path down the valley to the Potomac, and with that gate open, there was no longer any need to conceal his intentions so closely. Powell Hill’s corps, which had kept the Army of the Potomac pinned uncertainly to the Rappahannock, was on the march for Culpeper by the afternoon of the 14th, and by the 19th, they, too, were in the Shenandoah. Ahead of them, Longstreet abandoned his shielding position east of the Blue Ridge gaps and concentrated his three divisions at Winchester on the 15th, while Ewell sent Robert Rodes’ untried division, which Ewell had kept in reserve at Winchester, to clear out Martinsburg and secure the upriver Potomac ferry at Williamsport. Fanning out on the other side of the Potomac were two cavalry brigades, one under John Imboden and the other under Albert Gallatin Jenkins. These cavalrymen were little better than local rangers, but for the purpose of setting off a confusing cloud of alarms in south-central Pennsylvania they would do very nicely. Jenkins, in particular, would start across the Potomac on June 15th, heading for Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, the first major town on the valley route into Pennsylvania. There, he would spend three days, torching bridges, wrecking railroad equipment, burning warehouses, cutting telegraph wires in Chambersburg and throughout the nearby towns of McConnellsburg, Mercersburg, and Greencastle—and diverting attention from Lee’s crossing of the Potomac.3

  Lee still preferred to keep any discussion of ultimate objectives under wraps. “From orders read out at dress parade this evening,” one Virginia private in Longstreet’s corps guessed that “there is some great move on hand, but I do not know what it is, or where we are going.” The adjutant of Joseph Kershaw’s South Carolina brigade “came around with orders” and relayed the headquarters gossip that “we were on our way to Hagerstown, Md.” Another new division commander in Hill’s corps, the North Carolinian Dorsey Pender, wrote to his wife that “tomorrow morning we start as I suppose for Penn[sylvani]a,” something he had long believed “the large majority of the Army would like to” do. But that gave no joy to his wife, Fanny Pender, who was convinced that any kind of war which was not strictly a defense of North Carolina’s hearths and homes was unjust and illegitimate, and tempted God. She was not alone. In the 26th North Carolina, nine men deserted on June 16th, and five more three days afterward. “Our men are deserting fast,” wrote a private in the 26th, “and a great many more talks of leaving.” What kept more of them from deserting was the prospect that this would be the last campaign—that “the South is going to gain her independence during this campaign,” as one soldier in the 8th Virginia wrote, with another adding, “So far Gen. Lee’s campaign has been very successful and I hope that a few weeks may bring the war to a happy conclusion.”4

  Having moved so swiftly from Culpeper to Winchester, Ewell’s corps was already showing “unmistakable signs of exhaustion.” The Confederates now slowed their pace to the Potomac, spending three days covering the forty miles between Winchester and the river. Once again, Ewell’s corps took the lead, with the 14th North Carolina being the first of Ewell’s regiments to cross. The two divisions of Allegheny Johnson and Jubal Early used Boteler’s Ford, just below Shepherdstown, to cross the Potomac between June 18th and 22nd. The river there “was very high,” which forced the men to strip, sling “their clothing and accoutrements” over their rifles, and carry every
thing “above their heads to keep them dry.” One Louisiana Tiger thought it made for no end of comedy “to see the long lines of naked men” fording the river; the chill of the water added to the amusement, since it made “the men as they entered it … scream and shout most boisterously.” A Virginian saw the soldiers’ spirits lift as they crossed into Maryland: “The health of the troops was never better and above all the morale of the army was never more favorable for offensive or defensive operations … Victory will inevitably attend our arms in any collision with the enemy.”5

  The same skylarking spirit appeared when Robert Rodes’ division from Ewell’s corps waded the Potomac on June 19th, fifteen miles upriver near the ferry at Williamsport. From there, Ewell’s and Rodes’ troops marched the ten miles up to Hagerstown, Maryland, where the regimental colors were uncased and the bands blared “The Bonnie Blue Flag” through the streets. Longstreet’s corps caught up to the Potomac at Williamsport on June 25th, crossing as though it was a holiday, with bands playing “Maryland, My Maryland,” and men singing the dirgelike popular song “All Quiet Along the Potomac To-night.” Lee was traveling with Longstreet, and out of deference to the commander and “the ladies who came down to see the sight,” Longstreet’s divisions “waded into the water without stopping to roll up their pantaloons.” But they “came over in good order as if on review, cheering at every step” and took up the parade through Hagerstown “in columns of companies.”6