Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Unlike the Confederate Army, this march would not be remembered fondly by the Army of the Potomac. Hooker had a great deal of fast marching to do, with no time for planning and most of it during alternating intervals of baking dry heat and heavy rains. The officers of the 11th Massachusetts had been “playing a game of base ball, when the adjutant arrived with marching orders” that had them all in motion by one in the afternoon, ready or not. The 6th Corps was marched all day on June 14th to Stafford Court House, made camp, but then was tumbled back into the line of march at ten o’clock that night. “What a march was made that Sunday night; wagons, heavy guns, and soldiers, all contending for the road, such whipping and swearing, such pulling and hauling, such starting and halting.” The army’s provost marshal, Marsena Patrick, raged in his diary at the poor planning and the worse results: “a badly managed march … the [supply] Train had a bad time in getting under way—I found the road blocked, with all sorts of obstacles—miserable Officers in charge of Artillery … This made very great delays and I had to turn in several times to get Waggons out of the way.” The next day was even worse. “We had a most horrible march. 8000 men fell out from this Corps in sheer exhaustion,” wrote a soldier in the 3rd Corps. “This is the most of a scorcher we have had yet.”5

  If the heat was sickening, so were some parts of the line of march. The 1st Corps passed “directly through the field of the first Battle of Bull Run” and saw “hundreds of skeletons lying about,” washed out of “shallow graves.” Horse and mule carcasses gave off “a foul odor,” and even the trees and fences were still scarred by bullets and shell fragments. “The men were evidently affected and depressed at the sight,” wrote the colonel of the 116th Pennsylvania, and “murmurings of discontent arose from the ranks.” In the 13th New Jersey, the situation might have turned bleaker still had not one “soldier with a penchant for absurd remarks” noticed a half-buried corpse with its arm sticking up toward the sky and turned it all to black laughter by shouting “Say, boys, see the soldier putting out his hand for back pay.”6

  And then, on June 18th, the rains came down. Oh! How it rains! wailed a soldier in the 29th Ohio. In the 17th Maine, a soldier remembered that as night fell and the march kept on, “it was with the greatest difficulty that we could distinguish even a faint outline of each other marching side by side; and it was only by continually shouting to our comrades that we were enabled to keep our places in the ranks.” Virginia seemed to have been converted overnight into “one vast expanse of mud” in which “the heavily loaded wagons, and the ponderous wheels of the gun carriages sink,” while “the drivers whip and scream and swear—principally the latter—and infrequently the pressing infantry come in for a share of the maledictions.” If the adjacent fields were level enough, the infantry columns would “take to the fields” and bypass the mired wagons and artillery. But in the gloomy woodlands, “horses and drivers and tugging artillerists … occupy all the available room, and only now and then a common soldier can dodge past.” So when they were not cursing the teamsters and drivers, or being cursed by them, the sodden soldiers cursed their commander. “The boys here damn Hooker and wish for little Mac and any one that says Hooker is as popular as Mac is a damn liar.”7

  In case there were any inclinations to desertion, the Army of the Potomac resorted to the same lesson plan as its Confederate counterpart. The 1st Corps had to do its firing squad duty as soon as the orders to march had been received, although the firing party only managed to wound their target, a private in the 19th Indiana who deserted because he “had a wife at home, back in Indiana, who was lying desperately ill.” One member of the detail, deliberately and with every eye riveted on him, reloaded and shot the deserter through the head to end the misery. On June 19th, a pause in the downpours gave the 12th Corps time to stop and “witness the shooting of three deserters,” two from the 46th Pennsylvania and one from the 13th New Jersey. “There were the usual terrible formalities,” wrote a soldier from the 20th Connecticut, “the ready excavated graves, the coffins at their brink, with the wretched prisoners and condemned seated thereon … and the word ‘fire!’ from the lips of the commanding officer and, perforated each with eight bullets, somebody’s son, or brother, or father, tumbles over into his box, and the tragedy is ended.”8

  One thing the Army of the Potomac had in its favor was a bridge train it could call up from Washington and stretch across the Potomac over a string of sixty or more pontoon boats. The crossing occupied the better part of three days, from June 25th to June 27th, and in the meantime Hooker was planning one last gambit to retrieve his reputation, inspired in part by the comment Lincoln made a week earlier about “Lee’s army” covering so much distance that “the animal must be very slim somewhere.” It occurred to Hooker that if the three corps which made up his left wing could quickly move up to Frederick, they could veer west, unite with the Harpers Ferry garrison, cross the Catoctin Mountains, and hit the thinned-out Confederate columns somewhere near the old Antietam battlefield. Harpers Ferry, now swollen by escapees from Winchester and Martinsburg, contained 10,000 men, the equivalent of a small-sized infantry corps. The Harpers Ferry troops would be combined “with General Slocum’s corps … the two making about 25,000 men.” Hooker would then “throw them rapidly in rear of General Lee’s army, cut his communications … and capture his trains, and then reunite with the main army for the battle … If the enemy turned back to attack this force in their rear, the corps at Middletown holding the mountain passes could fall on their flank.”9

  Lincoln could hardly tell him not to take Lincoln’s own advice, telegraphing Hooker that “it gives you back the chance that I thought McClellan lost last fall.” Hooker snatched at this encouragement, and on June 24th was ready to launch an operation which would “paralyze” the Army of Northern Virginia’s “movements by threatening its flank and rear if it advances.” But the key component here was Hooker’s demand to have the Harpers Ferry garrison released to his control, and Halleck interpreted that demand as Hooker’s real object, not attacking Lee. When Halleck objected to Hooker’s demand, Lincoln refused to intervene. Hooker rode into Harpers Ferry himself on June 27th, and when he discovered that Halleck had vetoed his commandeering of Harpers Ferry (“Pay no attention to Hooker’s orders” was Halleck’s directive to the commandant at Harpers Ferry), Hooker played his last card and wired Halleck that afternoon that he would appeal directly to Lincoln for confirmation, or else resign as commander of the Army of the Potomac.10

  Hooker returned to Frederick, knowing in all likelihood what the result would be. He unburdened himself to his chief of staff, Dan Butterfield, explaining “that if every available man could not be concentrated and used against Lee” and if “Halleck did not give him that cordial assistance and co-operation which he had a right to expect,” then it “was his duty to withdraw from the command.” In any case, “he would rather go into the ranks as a private soldier than to hold the position he then held.” He would soon enough get his chance. Halleck tersely acknowledged Hooker’s telegram at eight o’clock that night. Half an hour later, Lincoln even more tersely directed Halleck: “Accept his resignation.” Before midnight, War Secretary Edwin Stanton’s own chief of staff, James Hardie, was on his way by train from Washington with Lincoln’s order removing Hooker from command. (He found a seat on the train beside no one less than Dan Sickles, returning from leave to command of the 3rd Corps, and managed to chat with him “all the way, without revealing a word of his mission.”)11

  Ridding himself of Hooker was a major triumph for Halleck; but replacing him would pose a greater challenge, with the army in mid-stride, but even more particularly because so many voices were ready at once to clamor for the return of George McClellan. At the army’s headquarters, Marsena Patrick grudgingly acknowledged that “the feeling is strong” in the army “that McClellan must resume his position”—which was putting it very mildly, since a staff officer who announced to the 118th Pennsylvania that “McClellan had been restor
ed to the command of the army” was met with “shout and yell and cheer, and as they echoed and re-echoed from battery to battalion and battalion back to battery, the woods and fields were resonant with the enthusiastic demonstration.”12

  Lincoln would probably have preferred to cut off his right hand rather than put McClellan back in charge of the Army of the Potomac, not the least because it was no secret by the summer of 1863 that McClellan was ogling the possibility of the Democratic presidential nomination for 1864, and was in fact taking his first steps in that direction by publicly endorsing the Democratic candidate for Pennsylvania’s governorship, George Woodward. Having been pleasantly but firmly turned down by every other corps commander in the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln turned, almost by default, to the one corps commander in the Army of the Potomac he had not bothered before to interview, and that was the commander of the 5th Corps, George Gordon Meade. This time, Lincoln did not consult, request, or beg; he simply ordered Meade to take command.13

  George Meade was forty-seven years old on the morning that command of the Army of the Potomac was unceremoniously dumped into his lap by James Hardie, and there is no reason to doubt Meade’s protest that this rendered him the most surprised man in the army. Meade had never wanted to be a soldier in the first place, much less take over direction of an army which, at that moment, was facing its ultimate wartime challenge. His father was a second-generation Philadelphia merchant whose investments turned horribly sour and led to his premature death in 1828. West Point was the one place where the young Meade could obtain a free college education, and there he went, never intending “to remain in the army after his graduation, but merely to serve in it sufficiently long to warrant his resigning, as having afforded an equivalent for his education.” He graduated nineteenth in a class of fifty-six in 1835, put in a year as a second lieutenant in the 3rd Artillery, and then resigned his commission to become a civil engineer.

  Four years later, he made up the lost social distance caused by the bankruptcy and death of his father by marrying into Philadelphia’s Whig ascendancy—his bride, Margaretta Sergeant, was the daughter of Henry Clay’s running mate in Clay’s failed Whig Party presidential bid against Andrew Jackson in 1832. But Meade does not seem to have prospered in civil employment, and in 1842 he took the unusual step of reentering the army, as a second lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers. He served as a staff officer during the Mexican War, with neither too much risk nor too much distinction, and by the time he made captain in 1856, George Meade’s principal achievements were a series of lighthouses on the New Jersey and Florida shores, and a survey of the Great Lakes. He was still on duty in Detroit when, on August 31st, 1861, he received a summons to report to Major General George B. McClellan and take up a command in the Pennsylvania Reserve Division as a brigadier general of volunteers.14

  The figure of George McClellan looms large behind George G. Meade, a fact Meade’s later biographers were not always eager to admit. Both were from socially prominent Philadelphia families that had been conservative Whigs until the mid-1850s, when the disappearance of the Whig Party drove them into the arms of the Stephen Douglas Democrats. Meade’s brigadier general’s commission “was due to him [McClellan], and almost entirely to him,” and Meade reciprocated McClellan’s endorsement. “I have great confidence personally in McClellan,” Meade wrote shortly before coming east in 1861, “know him well—know he is one of the best men we have to handle large armies.” Meade also had great confidence in McClellan’s politics, since McClellan stood for the idea of limiting the war strictly to the goal of national reunion, leaving the slavery question out of the picture entirely. “Duty required I should disregard all political questions & obey orders,” but that did not keep him from wishing that “the rulers on both sides” would “terminate this unnatural contest.” He frankly hoped that “the ultras on both sides” would somehow “be repudiated, & the masses of conservative & moderate men may compromise & settle the difficulty.” In the eyes of a Boston-born staffer in the 1st Corps, Stephen Minot Weld, “all the soldiers are still strong McClellanites, and General Meade among the number.”

  If anything, Meade had an even greater stake in compromise than McClellan: Virginia governor Henry Wise was one of Meade’s brothers-in-law on the Sergeant side, and two of his sisters had married Southerners, one of whom lost two of her sons fighting for the Confederacy. If Meade desired victory, it was a limited victory which would either convince the South that “it is useless to contend any longer,” or one which induced “the people of the North … to yield the independency of the South on the ground that it does not pay to resist them.” It was not clear whether George Meade had a particularly well-defined preference either way.15

  Meade performed well as a brigade commander on the Peninsula, and then as a division commander in the 1st Corps at Antietam. As he rose in rank, he also rose in notice, although not quite in the ways he might have wanted. A soldier in the 19th Maine described Meade as “a tall, spare man with grayish whiskers and a large nose” who “always wore spectacles.” One officer spoke of Meade’s “elegant manners” and “patrician aspect,” and his “large, bulging, brilliant eyes and a hawk nose.” The war correspondent Charles Coffin was pleased that Meade was “thoughtful and silent” and “cared but little for the pomp and parade of war.” The problem, wrote Charles Francis Adams (the son of the American minister to Great Britain and an officer in the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry) was that although everyone granted that Meade was “a man of high character,” he frequently spoiled that impression by being “irritable, petulant and dyspeptic.” Theodore Lyman, one of Meade’s staffers, put it as diplomatically as he could when he said that Meade “is a man full of sense or responsibility”—in other words, he feared being in over his head—and these attacks of anxiety gave Meade “the most singular patches of gunpowder in his disposition.” One soldier thought “he might have been taken for a Presbyterian clergyman, unless one approached him when he was mad,” and then the unhappy messenger was liable to be hosed down with a livid stream of fury, impatience, and arrogance. Behind his back, he was called “a damned old goggle-eyed snapping turtle,” and an officer in the 118th Pennsylvania, who called him “Old Four Eye,” thought that Meade “certainly cares very little for the rank and file” and “appears to be a man universally despised.”16

  The critics, unhappily, were not exaggerating. He had no good opinion at all of the volunteer service. “They do not any of them officers or men seem to have the least idea of the solemn duty they have imposed upon themselves in becoming soldiers. Soldiers they are not in any sense of the word.” He relented enough to admit that the men in the ranks “are good material,” but “the officers, as a rule with but few exceptions are ignorant, inefficient & worthless.” Meade had seen in his own family how precarious success could be, and after only a year of service in the Civil War, he did not want to be sunk by others’ failures. That included George McClellan. After the Peninsula debacle, Meade began cautiously distancing himself from McClellan, who “has lost the greatest chance any man ever had on this continent,” and who now displayed to Meade the “vice” of “always waiting [to] have every thing just as he wanted before he would attack.” Meade was frankly jealous of his fellow Pennsylvanian John Fulton Reynolds for standing in the way of promotion. When Reynolds was detailed to Pennsylvania during the Maryland Campaign of 1862 to organize the Pennsylvania militia, Meade hoped Reynolds would stay in Pennsylvania permanently and leave him free to move up to corps command. Instead, Reynolds returned to assume command of the 1st Corps, leaving Meade to complain, “I do wish Reynolds had staid away, and that I could have had a chance to command a corps in action.”

  But he could not shake off the suspicion of Radical Republicans in Congress that he was just another politically unreliable McClellan Democrat, an impression Meade had unwisely made in the spring of 1861 when he refused Radical Michigan senator Zachariah Chandler’s invitation to participate in a mass Union meeting in Detroit
. In retaliation, Chandler tried to block Meade’s initial appointment as a brigadier general under the assumption that Meade must have been born a Southerner, and “they would not trust the chicken hatched from an egg laid in that region.” William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, weighed Meade and found him wanting in zeal for the destruction of slavery. “There seems to be a marked deficiency of benevolence, and a dainty, aristocratic look, which … reveals a character that never yet efficiently and consistently served a liberal cause.” He was, in The Liberator’s caustic opinion, an example of how “McClellan’s spirit is still in the army. Is some of it in Gen. Meade, and in some of the Major Generals under him?”17

  None of this prevented Meade from finally winning corps command after leading the only near-successful Union attack at Fredericksburg in December 1862, and he continued to serve as commander of the 5th Corps throughout the Chancellorsville Campaign. But the decision to appoint Meade as Hooker’s successor was anything but a foregone conclusion. It was four in the morning when Hardie (disguised in civilian dress in case Confederate guerrillas ambushed his train to Frederick) arrived at Meade’s tent, carrying the orders. He startled Meade by woefully announcing, “General, I am the bearer of sad news.” This induced Meade to think for a moment that he was being put under arrest, since he and Hooker had been at violent loggerheads over the blame for Chancellorsville to the point where Alexander S. Webb (who would shortly have a brigade in the 2nd Corps thrust into his hands to command) feared that “a court martial might ensue.” The orders, when Meade tore them open, told an entirely different tale, and his first instinct was to wire Halleck and decline. His next impulse was to protest that he was being vaulted over the heads of three other senior major generals in the Army of the Potomac, Reynolds, Sedgwick, and Slocum, and that would create an unholy amount of resentment on the part of career professionals who might not enjoy taking orders from their junior. Above all, he balked at Hardie’s proposition to walk over to Hooker’s tent and inform Hooker face-to-face of his deposition. Protocol dictated that Meade should first be recalled to Washington and commissioned directly by the president or Halleck. Hardie had to tell him that each of these objections had been anticipated, and the answer was, in each case, no.18