This is far cry from a grant of full discretion; there is nothing which implies that Lee intended pass around their army to mean a joyride around the entire Army of the Potomac or even just the three Federal corps which formed the westernmost wing of Hooker’s pell-mell rush to the Potomac. Both Stuart and, years later, Stuart’s aide Major Henry B. McClellan argued that Lee followed this June 23rd order with a third order that night, explaining “at considerable length … that, as the roads leading northward from Shepherdstown and Williamsport were already encumbered by the infantry, the artillery, and the transportation of the army,” Stuart should not only ride eastward, but far enough eastward that when he turned north, he would rendezvous with Jubal Early on the Susquehanna, rather than with “Ewell at Harrisburg.” But even if the “third order” was actually a confusion introduced by Stuart’s report, as Charles Marshall claimed, or an invention of Henry McClellan’s postwar imagination, Lee had still given Stuart an opening; and given how badly Stuart wanted what Longstreet half-apologetically called “something better than the drudgery of a march along our flank,” even a tea-cup crack would have sufficed. East of the mountains thus became any point on the Potomac between Harpers Ferry and Washington.32
After spending June 24th organizing and preparing, Stuart and three brigades of Confederate cavalry, 4,900 men in all, set out in the predawn darkness of June 25th. And from that moment, nearly every part of Stuart’s grand design began to go awry. Moving through Glasscock’s (rather than Hopewell) Gap to Haymarket, the head of Stuart’s column bumped unexpectedly into “an immense wagon train,” which turned out to be the tail end of Winfield Hancock’s 2nd Corps, blocking the roads north in exactly the fashion Lee had described as a “hinderance.” Stuart had been assured by Mosby’s scouts that there were no Federals nearer than Manassas Junction, but here was a dauntingly large number of them, and he dared do nothing more than unlimber a battery of light horse artillery and lob a few annoying shells their way. 33
Stuart might have read the signs for what they were, and doubled back to the Shenandoah toward Shepherdstown. Instead, he took this as the encouraging omen he wanted, and rode eastward, barging into Fairfax Court House on June 27th just as the Federals had left it behind, and heading for Rowser’s Ford, only ten miles above Washington, to cross the Potomac. A few miles more, and Stuart’s horsemen struck the National Road west of Washington, where to their delight they bagged an eight-mile-long Federal wagon train with 140 wagons and mule teams. The train’s cavalry escort tried to turn the head of the train around, but as soon as “the rebels … saw the turning wagons,” they descended “with lightning speed.” Wagons trying to turn out of the road collided with wagons already in flight, “taking off wheels, breaking the tongues, and … becoming a total wreck.” Only “about fifteen or twenty” of the wagons managed to escape; the rest, along with 600 mules, “swapped hands in an hour.” The last wagon in the train was so close to Washington that “the dome of the capitol was distinctly visible” and Stuart sat down to wonder whether it might be worth “our entering Washington City.” But the heavy artillery in the Washington fortifications would offer more resistance than unarmed teamsters, and since “most of the drivers were negroes,” who could be converted into high-value slave property in Richmond, there was more to be accomplished in sorting out these new prizes. (One trooper even “recognized and claimed” several of his relatives’ runaways.) Besides that, it was finally beginning to dawn on Stuart that he had “lost much time from my march to join General Lee,” and it was time to rendezvous with his commander. The problem was that, although Stuart had made a few perfunctory attempts to communicate with Lee, by June 28th he had no idea of Lee’s location, much less Early’s or Ewell’s.34
Click here to see a larger image.
In the years after the Civil War, Stuart’s dilemma would become the shackles around his reputation. Embittered Confederates would blame Stuart’s “wild ride” (as Longstreet called it) for blinding Lee’s eyes, failing to obtain intelligence on the numbers, direction, and leadership of the Federals, and forcing him to fight a battle at Gettysburg which Lee had never planned and did not want. “The failure to crush the Federal army in 1863,” solemnly pronounced Harry Heth, “can be expressed in five words—the absence of our cavalry.” Lee himself started to grow restive in Stuart’s absence on June 27th, and began sending out scouts “inquiring of the whereabouts of General Stuart.” By June 28th he was complaining “that he was much disturbed” by Stuart’s absence. “I cannot think what has become of Stuart. I ought to have heard from him long before now.”35
Stuart’s raid was, indeed, an act of folly—ill-planned, badly conducted, and (until the very end) executed with an almost total disregard for any interest other than the self-promotion of J.E.B. Stuart. And yet, one crime which Lee should not have hung on Stuart’s shoulders was that of depriving the Army of Northern Virginia of the intelligence the cavalry owed it. John Mosby insisted, in Stuart’s defense, that “nobody can show that General Lee did, or omitted to do, anything on account of his ignorance of the situation of the Northern army.” Nor was Lee as ignorant of Stuart’s position as was later portrayed. Lee told Campbell Brown that he knew “Gen’l Stuart had not complied with his instructions” but instead had “gone off clear around” the Federal army, because “I see by a (Balto or N.Y.?) paper that he is near Washington.” It was not the absence of information that Stuart ought to have supplied, “as that of Stuart himself, that so disturbed General Lee.”36
The proof of that arrived at Lee’s headquarters tent near Chambersburg on the evening of June 28th, just as Stuart’s whooping cavalrymen were corralling the great wagon train outside Washington. It came in the form of a scout, and his name was Harrison.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A universal panic prevails
THE COLLAPSE OF WINCHESTER into Dick Ewell’s hands on June 14th was the signal for Abraham Lincoln to issue a proclamation calling out 100,000 militia from Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia “to serve for the period of six months.” It was obviously not a good sign: “Such a call surely would not have been made except under the pressure of a grave emergency,” speculated one Washington newspaper. Two new military departments were declared by the War Department, one to cover Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania (known as the Department of the Monongahela) and the other the Department of the Susquehanna for central Pennsylvania, with its headquarters at Chambersburg—although by the time anyone was able to do anything about it, Chambersburg was already in the hands of the Confederates.1
The Confederate crossing of the Potomac also poured a violent flood of panic northward through the Cumberland Valley to Harrisburg and then spilling east and south to Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia. Anxious Northerners thought it made perfect sense for Lee to “make a bold push for Pittsburgh” and then to “strike across there and then to Cincinnati” while Union forces struggled to fortify the railroad lines Lee would surely destroy in his wake. Every bulletin of Confederate advance over the next ten days generated fresh swells of fear and flight across eastern Pennsylvania and Maryland. All through the Cumberland Valley to the Susquehanna, “inhabitants who had scarcely decided whether war had broken out or not” now were “aroused to a sense of danger” by the prospect of “their cattle and horses flying southward, urged on by southern bayonets.” Pittsburghers began digging fortifications on Mount Washington and “on the outer side of the Allegheny” River, and summoned “Colored Men of the City” to “turn out en masse” to complete them. In Baltimore, “they were expecting Lee to come in a few days. Every street was barricaded with large hogsheads filled with sand—just room in the middle of the streets for one vehicle to pass through, and the streets were full of artillery, all double-shotted at these barricades.” The Baltimore police impressed “about one thousand colored persons from different sections of the city” to shore up “the defensive works” of the city.
On the east side of the Susquehanna, “r
efugees from the seat of war … & other counties the other side of the river” choked the roads toward Philadelphia, camping “along the roads with horses, cattle & wagons loaded with grain and familys.” In Lancaster, “all business is suspended … Every negro has left or is leaving the place, and nearly every white person,” while the roads between the river and Lancaster were “strewn with citizens and vehicles, trudging along to the north and east.” The governor of New Jersey angrily warned Lincoln that “the people of New Jersey are apprehensive that the invasion of the enemy may extend to her soil,” and the former Republican governor of New York beseeched Secretary of War Stanton to “take immediate measures for the defense of the harbor of New York.” Everywhere, gloated Robert Kean, the chief of staff for the Confederate War Department in Richmond, “Yankeedom is in a great fright at the advance of Lee’s army to the Potomac, and considers this part of Pennsylvania south of the Susquehanna as good as gone.”2
Kean would have gloated still more had he been privy to the divided counsels that prevailed in Philadelphia, the second largest city in the country. As a commercial entrepôt with close economic ties to the South, Philadelphia had been “the great emporium of Southern commerce,” recalled Alexander McClure. Although it had been the home of the earliest American antislavery society, in the election of 1860 Philadelphia gave Abraham Lincoln only a token majority of 2,039 votes out of over 76,000. If “the Union is to be divided,” announced Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice George Woodward, “I want the line of separation to run north of Pennsylvania.” To date, Philadelphia’s most significant contribution to the war had been its favorite son, George B. McClellan.3
But after the fall of Winchester, the City Council “suddenly discovered that the city was without protection.” Mayor Alexander Henry called in the “lieutenants of the several Police districts” and deputized them to “enroll … volunteers … for city defense.” Stores were to be shut down “for the purpose of enabling their employees to drill,” churches were opened for congregations to debate “the plan best to be pursued, and their duty in this, our darkest hour,” and a city-wide patriotic rally convened on Independence Square. But the recruiting details trudging through the near-empty streets “with drum & flag” were followed only by “a few ragged boys.” When Major General Napoleon Dana arrived in the city on June 26th to take command of the Military District of Philadelphia, he found only 400 Union soldiers on hand to defend the city (with another 600 reinforcements available from the ambulatory patients in the city’s military hospitals) and some rudimentary entrenchments. The money markets behaved accordingly: by June 12th, “the stock market was unsettled and irregular” and the price of an ounce of gold was pushing up from 1413⁄8 on June 13th to 147⅛ three days later. By the 30th of June, “a great depression of almost all securities” prevailed.4
Composure was also in short supply in Pennsylvania’s capital city, Harrisburg. Governor Andrew Gregg Curtin was (like Lincoln) a lawyer and an old-line Whig who had gone over to the Republicans after the death of the Whig Party in 1856, and been nominated and elected as a Republican in February 1860. He was a handsome and talented administrator who had kept the Commonwealth firmly aligned with Lincoln’s policies, and rallied to repeated calls on Pennsylvania for militia in 1861 and again in the fall of 1862. But Curtin was in political trouble now—one of the numerous political troubles Robert E. Lee was hoping to capitalize upon this summer—and even as the Confederates surged northward, Pennsylvania Democrats were in the process of nominating George Woodward as Curtin’s challenger.
The prospect of a Confederate invasion only sharpened Curtin’s anxieties. Even before the fall of Winchester, Curtin nervously issued a call of his own for a “corps” of “emergency militia” for “the defense of our own homes, firesides, and property from devastation.” But, to Curtin’s embarrassment, the response was negligible. Lincoln’s militia proclamation on June 15th crossed wires with Curtin’s emergency militia call, and potential recruits were suddenly uncertain whether they were being mustered into state service or Federal service, how long they would be expected to serve, and who would be paying them. On June 26th, Curtin had to issue a second proclamation for 60,000 emergency militia, specifying that they would only be in state service for ninety days and begging Pennsylvanians not to “undergo the disgrace of leaving your defense mainly to the citizens of other States.” But by the 29th, there were only about 16,000 ill-sorted volunteers on hand to defend Harrisburg, and a “wearied and disappointed” Curtin seemed to a New York reporter to be “resigned to the fate that awaits the capital of the glorious old Commonwealth.”5
The truth was that more people were trying to get out of Harrisburg as refugees than to get there as its defenders. “People of the Keystone State,” exhorted the Philadelphia Public Ledger, with a deliciously satirical appeal to pure self-interest:
Hostile footsteps press your soil
Pause not now for cold debate
While your foemen seize the spoil.
See, they come, on plunder bent!
Haste the mischief to prevent:
Save the produce of your tillage,
Save your fields and farms from pillage.
Save your stores and dwelling-houses,
Comfort your affrighted spouses;
Plainly show those hungry sinners
You’ll not furnish them with dinners …
Pennsylvania can’t afford
These voracious gangs to board …
The American-born piano virtuoso Louis Moreau Gottschalk arrived in Harrisburg as part of a concert tour he was taking through the North that season, and though he drew a surprisingly “respectable audience” to his performance, he was more entertained himself by the frantic rage of most of Harrisburg’s population to leave town. The scene “at the depots,” gibbered the Washington National Intelligencer, “was indescribable if not disgraceful. A sweltering mass of humanity thronged the platform, all furious to escape the doomed city.” The roads were packed with “carriages, carts, chariots … spring carts, trucks, buggies,” and even “wheelbarrows” were trundling out of the city, piled high with “trunks, boxes, bundles of clothes, furniture, mattresses, kitchen utensils, and even pianos,” a great deal of which soon ended up on the side of the road. In the state capitol, clerks “in their shirt-sleeves” hurriedly packed records, books from the state library, and portraits of former governors for shipment to safety.6
The solitary circle of calm in Harrisburg’s circus of terror was Darius Nash Couch, who until May had been the commander of the 2nd Corps of the Army of the Potomac and the army’s senior major general under Joe Hooker. A New Yorker by birth, Couch had been a classmate of McClellan’s at West Point and had served in the Mexican War, but left the service in 1855 after a dispute with then–secretary of war Jefferson Davis. A moderate pro-war Democrat, Couch had put a uniform back on and risen from regimental command to senior corps command at Chancellorsville. But Hooker’s erratic behavior at Chancellorsville convinced Couch that any further service under Hooker was futile, and on May 22nd he offered to resign in disgust. The president instead appointed Couch to take control of the newly created Department of the Susquehanna, effectively promoting Couch to Hooker’s equal.7
Couch arrived in Harrisburg on June 11th, finding little more on hand than a hastily outfitted staff of worried civilian politicians and a temporary office in the state capitol. Unflappability was Couch’s long suit, and he at once signed up 3,000 workers to dig entrenchments, including “priests, pastors, rectors, ministers of all denominations,” who were soon “engaged in wheeling barrows full of earth and in digging pits for sharpshooters.” Once Dick Ewell’s corps occupied Carlisle on June 27th, Couch calmly confessed to Stanton that he fully expected the Confederates to “ford the river” either above or below Harrisburg.
He would not have to wait all that long to find out, either. On June 28th, Ewell’s small cavalry brigade (under Albert Jenkins), exploring routes for Ewell’s adva
nce to the Susquehanna, brushed some of Couch’s militia out of Mechanicsburg, only seven miles from the river; the 14th Virginia Cavalry actually closed to within sight of Harrisburg from “a dominating hill” and an accompanying battery of horse artillery fired a few rounds in the capital’s general direction. Ewell was already preparing Rodes’ division to move out from Carlisle toward the Harrisburg river crossings. “We are here and the Yankees can’t run us away,” a Confederate surgeon wrote on the 28th. “I … suppose we will go to Harrisburg.” It might be fortified, and the militia “may make a stand there, but judging from the way they have been doing it is very doubtful.”8
Gettysburg: The Last Invasion Page 15
