Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Early’s infantry struck eastward, John Gordon’s brigade on the York Pike, and two other brigades (under Harry Hays and Extra Billy Smith) moving north of Gordon and parallel to the pike. So much had gone so easily that Early was growing apprehensive that the Yankees were concentrating their forces to defend York and finally pick a real fight. But by the time Early caught up with Gordon outside York, the latter was already able to report that “there was no force in York” to speak of. If so, Early said, then Gordon should move past York as quickly as possible and secure the great railroad bridge on the Susquehanna that linked Wrightsville on the west bank with Columbia on the east.21

  It was no ordinary bridge. A mile and a quarter long and built on twenty-eight piers, the railroad bridge at Wrightsville was the longest roofed bridge in North America, and seizing it would give Early a vital lodgment on the east side of the Susquehanna. He could then “march upon Lancaster, lay that town under contribution, and then attack Harrisburg in the rear while it should be attacked in front by the rest of [Ewell’s] corps.” In Early’s and Gordon’s way, however, Darius Couch planted another hastily contrived militia regiment, the 27th Pennsylvania Emergency Militia. This regiment was commanded by the forty-five-year-old Jacob Gellert Frick, whom Couch also put in charge “of all bridges and fords on the line of the Susquehanna, in Lancaster County.” Unlike his militiamen, Frick was not a stranger to war or politics. He had served in Mexico and in the 11th U.S. Infantry, and in 1860 had been a delegate to the Republican national convention, which had nominated Abraham Lincoln. In 1862, Frick took command of the 129th Pennsylvania, a nine-months’ regiment raised for the Antietam emergency, and won distinction for leading his regiment, colors in hand, at Fredericksburg, and then saving the same colors when they nearly fell into rebel hands at Chancellorsville. Frick’s problem was his prickly sense of rectitude about his own judgment. He had held one commission in the volunteer service already, in the 96th Pennsylvania, and resigned in 1862 because he couldn’t get along with the regiment’s colonel. Then, he was nearly booted from the army in January 1863 for “insubordination,” stemming from his refusal to make a requisition for “frock coats” so that the 129th Pennsylvania could appear on parade in full dress. As a soldier, Frick was perfectly willing to fight; he simply couldn’t distinguish friend from foe.22

  No one, however, had ever put Frick’s competence in dispute. He managed to enlist three companies of home guards to construct earthworks around the railroad bridgehead at Wrightsville (although the civilians quit when a fourth company of blacks was brought in) and reeled in a Maryland militia company, 187 ambulatory volunteers from the military hospital in York, and a few understrength companies of Philadelphia customshouse workers who formed the 20th Pennsylvania Emergency Militia—all told, about fifteen hundred men. (Their numbers were slightly increased, and morale correspondingly decreased, by the arrival of Major Haller and the gaudy troopers of the First City Troop in their flight from Gettysburg.) For the purposes of putting up a fight for York, this was a hopeless proposition, and the terror-stricken citizens of York knew it. A three-man Committee of Safety was designated to intercept Gordon’s brigade as it moved to the outskirts of York on the morning of June 28th and abjectly offered to surrender the town.23

  That suited Jubal Early handsomely. Isaac Avery’s and Extra Billy Smith’s brigades were ordered to occupy York; Harry Hays would bivouac two miles out of town at the county fairgrounds; and John Gordon would pass through, move the last ten miles down to “the Susquehanna and secure the Columbia Bridge, if possible.” It was Sunday, and the churches were already filling up with “well-dressed … church-going men, women and children” when Gordon’s brigade swung along Main Street, with bands playing and the colors flying. The 31st Georgia stopped in the town center to haul down a garrison-sized Stars and Stripes from a 100-foot-high flagstaff there (provoking one elderly attorney, John L. Evans, to burst out at his apathetic neighbors, Is it possible to have lived to this day to see the flag torn down and trampled in the dirt?; the minister of Christ Lutheran Church, hearing the naughty strains of “Dixie” during his sermon, could only bow his head on the pulpit and weep). Early made his headquarters in the York County Court House, and once again the division quartermaster published the requisitions: 165 barrels of flour or 28,000 pounds of baked bread … 3,500 pounds of sugar … 1,650 pounds of coffee … 300 gallons of molasses … 1,200 pounds of salt … 32,000 pounds of fresh beef or 21,000 pounds of bacon or pork … 2,000 pair of shoes or boots … 1,000 pairs of socks and 1,000 felt hats … and $100,000 in cash.24

  Gordon pushed on to Wrightsville, topping a rise that allowed him to inspect “the blue line of soldiers guarding the approach” to the bridge from a distance. He could already imagine descending upon the shaky Pennsylvania militia, seizing the bridge, and launching on a march which would “pass rapidly through Lancaster in the direction of Philadelphia.” So, at 6:30, with daylight beginning to slip away, Gordon’s six regiments of Georgians shook out lines of skirmishers and began trading potshots with Jacob Frick’s picket line, “and we had it quite lively for some time.” Eventually, Gordon brought up two of the 20-pounder Parrott rifles captured at Winchester and began throwing shells in Frick’s direction.

  Frick actually had no intention of fighting. He knew he lacked the means to hold the bridge. But he certainly had the wherewithal to destroy it. Behind a barricade of coal cars drawn up at the bridge’s mouth on the Wrightsville side, Frick’s black laborers and white militiamen began taking up the plank flooring of the bridge, setting explosive “torpedoes,” and sawing through archways and trusses. After a sprightly firefight of about an hour, Frick ordered everyone to scramble back along the bridge, and as soon as they had reached the fourth span of the bridge Frick ordered the first torpedo fired.25

  The torpedo failed to blow the span completely, but Frick had torches at hand to set fires, and in forty-five minutes the entire bridge was burning luridly from the middle toward both ends. “The moon was bright” as the bridge burned, wrote a newspaper correspondent for the York Gazette, making it possible for “the red glare of the conflagration to be seen for many miles.” Jubal Early, who was just then riding out from York to join Gordon, saw it first as an “immense” funnel of smoke “rising in the direction of the Susquehanna,” and soon guessed what this would mean to his plans for crossing the river. The bridge burned all night, and “some of the timbers, as they fell into the stream, seemed to form themselves into rafts, which floated down like infernal ferry-boats of the region pictured by Dante.” Flying embers from the fire lodged in roofs in Wrightsville, setting homes and stores ablaze, and shortly Gordon’s Confederates had stacked their rifles and were passing buckets in long lines to save the town, as though all thought of the war which had brought them there had been forgotten.26

  In military terms the burning of the bridge was only a reprieve. There were other bridges within marching distance of Early’s division, and although the Susquehanna was wide, it also grew shallow as it descended toward the Chesapeake Bay, and it would not have taken Early too long to have found another way to cross over. As it was, he had more than enough on June 29th to occupy him in stockpiling the requisitioned supplies that York’s merchants tremblingly hauled to the town’s market for his troops. Yet, on the morning of the 30th, the rebels were gone. “Early, with 8,000, left York this morning,” Darius Couch excitedly telegraphed Halleck that afternoon, bound either “westerly or northwesterly.” Not only had Early disappeared from all “other points on the Susquehanna river,” but so had Ewell from Carlisle. Lincoln was dumbfounded. “I judge by absence of news that the enemy is not crossing, or pressing up to the Susquehannah,” he wired Couch. “Please tell me what you know of his movements.” Couch could only confirm that the “Rebel infantry force left Carlisle early this morning.” Why, and where they were going, neither Couch nor anyone else on the east side of the Susquehanna seemed to know. All that Couch could tell the president was that, from wh
at he could learn, “Rebels at York and Carlisle yesterday [were] a good deal agitated about some news they had received.”27

  Even in the dark and disguised as a tramp, James Longstreet knew the man who came out of the dripping rain as his most “active, intelligent, enterprising scout”—which meant, “more properly, a spy.” Longstreet eagerly reached out his hand: “Good Lord, I am glad to see you! I thought you were killed!”

  The “ragged, weather-beaten” man was Henry Thomas Harrison, a Tennessean who had served briefly in a Mississippi regiment in the West, and early on demonstrated more than a little knack for “secret, perilous adventure.” The Confederate War Department brought him east and assigned him to operations inside the occupied Federal zone in coastal North Carolina, and it was there, while Longstreet’s corps was wintering around Suffolk in early 1863, that he came to Longstreet’s attention. Since Robert E. Lee preferred to keep spies at sniffing distance, Longstreet and his staff became Harrison’s controllers and paymasters (at the extravagant sum of $150 a month), and in June 1863 Harrison was armed with Confederate treasury gold and sent off to Washington, to slip into the capital and glean what he could from pliable or drunken Union officials, and scout the general path of Joe Hooker’s pursuit. Longstreet gave him a long leash. He told Harrison that “I did not care to see him till he could bring information of importance.” Now, on the night of June 28th, Harrison had the report he thought Longstreet needed to hear, and allowed himself to be “arrested” by Longstreet’s pickets around Chambersburg and brought before Lee’s “war-horse.”28

  “Truly,” wrote Longstreet’s chief of staff, Moxley Sorrel, Harrison’s “report was long and valuable.” The spy had a complete account of all of the Army of the Potomac’s movements since leaving the Rappahannock line and up to the last forty-eight hours, and in particular he had even more recent news about the command of the Union army, “of the removal of Hooker and the appointment of George Meade to command of the Army of the Potomac.” Longstreet was at once “on fire at such news,” and sent Harrison with an aide to rouse Lee, who listened to Harrison’s report with “great composure and minuteness.” This confirmed what Lee already suspected: that the Army of the Potomac was shaking itself into pieces that Lee could turn upon and beat one by one, with all the odds in his favor. If he succeeded in “crushing Meade’s army, Philadelphia will be at his mercy, or he may come down on Washington in its rear.” Nor was he apprehensive about the Army of the Potomac’s new commander. He appraised Meade with remarkable accuracy when he remarked that “General Meade will commit no blunder in my front, and if I commit one he will make haste to take advantage of it”—an elegant way of saying that George Meade would likely do nothing rather than run the risks of doing something.

  So, rather than wait to be hunted by the Yankees (which is what Longstreet believed Lee had promised back in Virginia), Lee would go hunting himself for the climactic victory he had always wanted. “Ah! General, the enemy is a long time finding us,” Lee remarked to John Bell Hood, when Longstreet’s junior division commander stopped by to pay his respects. “If he does not succeed soon, we must go in search of him.” And he now had a fairly good idea of where the searching should begin. “We will not move to Harrisburg, as we expected,” Lee announced to his staff on the afternoon of the 29th, “but will go over to Gettysburg and see what General Meade is after.”29

  The only unhappy person in the Army of Northern Virginia seemed to be Dick Ewell, whose heart had been set on capturing Harrisburg, and his men, who “expected to go to Philadelphia or New York.” Do not “destroy any of the barracks at Carlisle,” Ewell ordered the commander of his rear guard, “as he hoped we would return there in a few days and would want to occupy them again.”30

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  You will have to fight like the devil to hold your own

  GEORGE MEADE took up command of the Army of the Potomac on the morning of June 28th with only the dimmest idea of how its parts were spread over the surface of central Maryland. He and most of his subordinates were also unfamiliar with the topography facing the army as it moved toward Pennsylvania. “Maps, whenever possible, must be obtained from citizens,” pleaded the army’s chief of staff, Daniel Butterfield.1 But within twenty-four hours, Meade had gotten a reasonably good fix on the locations of his seven infantry corps:

  • The 1st, 3rd, and 11th Corps lay along a ten-mile-wide line, just north of Frederick, on either side of the Monocacy Creek and east of South Mountain, facing on a slight tilt to the northwest.

  • The 2nd, 5th, and 12th Corps were positioned around Frederick.

  • The 6th Corps, bringing up the rear, was ten miles south of Frederick.

  Screening them to the west were two divisions of Pleasonton’s cavalry, with the lead division under a veteran of Indian chasing on the Plains who was just this spring taking over his first field command in the war, John Buford.

  Thanks to George Sharpe’s intelligence network and the flurry of reports relayed to him from Darius Couch in Harrisburg, Meade also knew that Lee was moving north and east, with Longstreet’s and Powell Hill’s corps around Chambersburg, Ewell almost at the Susquehanna at Harrisburg, and Early in York. To keep the Army of the Potomac between them and Washington, Meade redirected the 1st, 3rd, and 11th Corps north toward Emmitsburg and the Pennsylvania state line, and the 2nd, 5th, 6th, and 12th Corps to the northeast, toward Pipe Creek and Taneytown, where Meade would pitch his temporary headquarters.2

  It had been raining off and on since the 24th and the endless kill-pace marches in the drizzle and mud wore the men down. “It does seem as though we were being marched to death,” complained a lieutenant in the 5th Corps. But when his regiment reached Union Mills, on Pipe Creek, “we were met by the inhabitants with loud cheers, and a flag … was proudly waving on the principal house of the town,” and the prospect of “approaching the border of a ‘free state’ ” put more energy in the soldiers’ step. The 1st Corps passed through a town whose “streets were lined with welcoming people, the colors were unfurled, the bands and drum-corps struck up, and, quickly taking the step, with muskets at a shoulder, the regiments treated the delighted citizens to an exhibition scarcely less stately and impressive than a grand review.” Near Mechanicstown (just five miles below Emmitsburg), “coffee, tea, and milk were tendered to the men as they passed, and fresh bread, cakes and pies easily found their way into capacious haversacks.” Farther along the route, “the farmers with their families came out to see us pass” and “brought to the roadside immense loaves of home-made bread … in pans as large as milk-pans, and with them crocks of sweet fresh butter.” One soldier in the 80th New York marveled at how the women “with one broad sweep of a huge knife” could “spread the butter over the face of the mighty loaf,” and with “a swift stroke” detach “a thick slice” and hand it off in time to cut off another fat slice for the next men in line. “Someone at the head of the column” of the 97th New York “struck up the John Brown chorus, which was quickly taken up along the whole line, and presently every man fell into a step in time with the cadence of this simple yet soul stirring hymn.”3

  Still, in other places, the civilians’ reactions seemed as unsympathetic as the weather. An officer commanding a battery of light artillery with Pleasonton’s cavalry ordered a rail fence taken down to get his guns and horses across a field, only to be accosted by “one old fellow” who pleaded, “For God’s sake, gentlemen, don’t go into that field. Don’t you see my wheat is only three days up?” Even the roads seemed uncooperative. On the days when the rain stopped and the sun baked the mud, the 5th Corps found itself punching up “a fine white powder” as it marched, “making an unspeakable dust that covered the fields on either side with a white cloud, as far as we could see.” John Sedgwick was pushing the men of the 6th Corps so hard that his own horse gave out from fatigue, sparking raillery from passing soldiers: “Get another horse and come on; we’ll wait for you, Uncle John; we’re in no hurry, Uncle John.” In the 2
nd Corps, men grumbled that they were being overmarched because their commander, Winfield Hancock, had “a wager of 1500” dollars with George Sykes of the 5th Corps “that the old Second could outmarch the Fifth.” Along the roads, men began to straggle, and brigades leaked clots of exhausted soldiers, who in turn obstructed the path of other units struggling to maintain their places on the roads. George Stannard’s nine months’ brigade of Vermonters had spent most of their time in the safety of Washington’s fortification, until they were ordered forward to bulk up Hancock’s 2nd Corps. They had little experience of long marches, and so “the men fell out badly, in consequence of exhaustion.” In the 3rd Corps, the 141st Pennsylvania drew the job of picking “up all stragglers … a task both difficult and unpleasant” since any number of the laggards had somehow managed to get “their canteens filled with whisky, became intoxicated” and “were too drunk to travel.” Alexander Webb, who had just inherited command of the 2nd Corps’ Philadelphia Brigade, had his brigade bugler signal officer’s call and furiously told them to “arrest any of the men found straggling and to bring them to him and he would shoot them like dogs.”4

  This would have been small thanks for what was, by any measure, an extraordinary job of marching. Even under the most favorable conditions, armies moved slowly in the nineteenth century. In the Prussian Army, a single infantry regiment with “light baggage” was expected to occupy 1,350 yards, or three-quarters of a mile of road; an entire division “in column of march” would occupy “nearly 10 miles.” The trains alone might “extend over seventy miles.” The best marching speed that could be expected of the Prussian Army was about three miles an hour, “but when the terrane loses the character of a parade, it is entirely different.” If bottlenecks—the sort created by pontoon bridges requiring wagons to be widely spaced to prevent knocking the bridge apart, or by crossroads that brought two marching columns into gridlock, or simply by incorrect deployment of units in the march column—then traffic could immobilize an army for hours. On those terms, Napoleon’s soldiers, marching from Boulogne to Austerlitz in 1803, thought it was extraordinary to have covered an average of just over eight miles a day. By contrast, the Army of Northern Virginia covered the 120-mile line from the Rappahannock through the Shenandoah to Williamsport and Shepherdstown in only ten days, while pausing to fight at Brandy Station and to besiege Winchester. The Army of the Potomac covered the sixty miles between Fredericksburg and Edwards’ Ferry in four days, and then covered the next fifty miles to the Pennsylvania state line in three. The 5th Corps managed twenty miles on the road from Monocacy Junction (below Frederick) to Union Mills on Pipe Creek on June 30th; the 6th Corps logged thirty-four. Whatever American volunteers lacked in discipline, they more than made up for in mobility.5