Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  John Reynolds was nothing if not “a most accomplished artilleryman,” and he could fully translate the meaning of Cemetery Hill for cannoneers. Even more, in the fall of 1862, Reynolds had been in command of the Pennsylvania militia, headquartered at Carlisle, and, “therefore, knew the importance of the Gettysburg pass.” It was Reynolds, agreed his adjutant, Joseph Rosengarten, “who first appreciated the strength and value of Cemetery Hill.”

  That made George Meade’s notion of pulling back to Pipe Creek, seventeen miles south, all the more agonizing. On the evening of June 30th, Reynolds summoned the nearest of the other two corps commanders in his “wing,” Oliver Otis Howard, to his temporary headquarters at the Moritz Tavern, on Marsh Creek. Howard presented an almost complete contrast to John Reynolds. Born in Maine in 1830, he was ten years Reynolds’ junior (although he was only two notches below Reynolds in seniority on the volunteers’ service list), graduated from Bowdoin College at age nineteen, then went on to West Point, where he graduated fourth in his class. It was there that Otis Howard met Reynolds, and it was there that the voluble Howard and the taciturn Reynolds somehow became “warm friends.” Howard, like Reynolds, had been commissioned into the artillery. But in 1857, he experienced a profound spiritual conversion to evangelical Protestantism and seriously considered leaving the army “to preach the Gospel of Peace.” The cascade of events that led to the Civil War arrested that decision. “It is,” Howard concluded, “no time for a man who loves his country and has been educated by it, to desert her.” The question was whether his country, or at least the army, wanted Howard. As the Duke of Wellington had once remarked, an army was no place for “a man who has nice notions about religion.” The U.S. Army was not much different. Regular officers were a tight-lipped, unemotional club; praying soldiers were at best the butt of jokes, and at worst the victims of social shunning. The prewar army employed only thirty post chaplains, and not until August 1861 did Congress enact provisions for chaplains in each regiment, Regular and volunteer.20

  Otis Howard had experienced both the jokes and the shunning. Meade’s staff rolled their eyes when Howard, invited to “quite an elaborate ‘spread’ ” at Meade’s headquarters, “asked grace, with the true New England style.” None of it deterred him. “It is not how people see me,” he explained to an inquirer, “but I wonder how God sees me.” But Howard was not the stereotypical Holy Joe. He had been given command of a brigade of raw New Englanders at First Bull Run, and managed to extricate them in remarkably good order from the jaws of a three-way trap on Chinn Ridge. He had lost his right arm to a nasty wound on the Peninsula, where “he won the name of an excellent officer and brave man,” and returned to command the Philadelphia Brigade (in the 2nd Corps) at Antietam and a division at Fredericksburg. He might be “the only religious man of high rank … in this army,” but no one could fault Otis Howard for courage. Charles Wainwright, who had no very high opinion of the pious, thought Howard was “the most polished gentleman I have met.”

  Howard was, in fact, a sign of how thoroughly evangelical religion had permeated Anglo-American society in the nineteenth century, and even begun to acquire a grudging respect in the profane culture of the military profession. The 1850s were witness to the rise of the model “Christian soldier,” whose outlines were drawn in the best-selling Memorials of Captain Hedley Vicars, 97th Regiment, an evangelical British officer killed during the siege of Sevastopol, and in the life of Major General Henry Havelock, the victor of battle after battle against forbidding odds during the Indian Mutiny. In the Army of Northern Virginia, the martial piety of Stonewall Jackson shut the mouths of more than a few scoffers. Howard’s problem was that he was not only an evangelical; he was an abolitionist and a Republican, and his blending of political and religious moralism in one skin—holding prayer meetings that condemned slavery, admitting the army’s black teamsters and cooks to these meetings as equals—covered him with contempt. Hostility to abolition in the army was, as Howard learned, “bitter and unmeasured.”21

  When Joseph Hooker appointed him to command the 11th Corps in April 1863, the Germans who made up half of the 11th Corps’ units “made very long faces,” and mocked Howard with taunts of “Boys, let us pray!” “Tracts now, instead of sauerkraut!” When the 11th Corps broke and ran under the blows of Stonewall Jackson’s attack at Chancellorsville, the army as a whole cursed the “flying Dutchmen” in the 11th Corps. “Every man” of them, raged a captain in the 2nd Corps, “ought to be hauled off the face of the Earth.” The “Dutchmen,” in turn, cursed Howard, and all the more vigorously when Howard banned the issue of lager. As Howard learned later, even “several officers high in command, some aspiring” to take his place, “went to Mr. Lincoln at the White House and besought my removal.”22

  Not Reynolds, though. He and Howard “were together at Centreville, Va., at Middletown, Md., and at Frederick and Emmetsburg” on the march up to Maryland, and when Reynolds and the 1st Corps continued on to the Pennsylvania line on June 29th, Howard and the 11th Corps stopped and pitched their tents at Emmitsburg, followed in turn by Dan Sickles and the 3rd Corps on the afternoon of the 30th. Late that afternoon, a rider from Reynolds brought a note asking Howard to “ride up to Marsh Creek and see him” at “his Hd. Qrs, near Marsh Run.” Howard arrived in time to eat dinner with Reynolds and his staff in the front room of the Moritz Tavern. After the meal had been cleared away, Reynolds took Howard into the back room of the tavern, which he had converted into a command post. There, Reynolds had piled up “a bundle of dispatches,” “the maps of the country,” and a collection of reports “from Buford at Gettysburg, from scouts, from alarmed citizens, from all directions.” And from that moment until eleven o’clock, “we looked over the different maps, discussed the probabilities of a great battle, and talked of the part our wing would be likely to play in the conflict.” It struck Howard that Reynolds “seemed depressed, almost as if he had a presentiment of his death.”23

  Meade’s plans for Pipe Creek notwithstanding, Reynolds intended to move up to Gettysburg with the 1st Corps in the morning, and he wanted Howard and the 11th Corps in support, followed as fast as possible by the 3rd Corps. It was Howard’s understanding that Reynolds planned to “have reserved a portion of my Corps” and “placed me at once on the Cemetery heights, and then brought his own thither as soon as he found the enemy in a large force.” He would, in other words, use the 1st Corps to measure how much Confederate strength was moving toward Gettysburg; and if that strength was more than the 1st Corps could handle, he would fall back to Cemetery Hill, where Howard and the 11th Corps were waiting. This would, without saying it, also force George Meade’s hand, and the other corps of the Army of the Potomac would have to be marched to Gettysburg to fight the “great battle” there, not in Maryland. To expedite Howard’s move up to Gettysburg, Reynolds specified that one of Howard’s divisions would move up the main road from the south into Gettysburg, the Emmitsburg Road, while his other two divisions would split off to the east at a crossroads known as Horner’s Mill and use a parallel road into town that linked Gettysburg to Taneytown.24

  Howard rode back to Emmitsburg in the dark. “It was general talk at headquarters” that Reynolds was going to provoke an action at Gettysburg—that “there would certainly be a contest.” The 17th Maine’s Charles Mattocks, bedded down “upon a nice bed of straw in my shelter,” was convinced from the thick cloud of flying rumors that “we are now close upon the enemy, and I somewhere think there will be a few guns fired July 1st.” Forty miles distant, a Baltimore newspaper managed to come to the same conclusion. “There is a probability,” the Baltimore American solemnly speculated, “that a great battle will be fought in the course of the present week in the neighborhood probably of Hanover or Gettysburg.”25

  Robert E. Lee cultivated an image of serene and unruffled detachment. A civilian, watching him in camp, noted that although “he has a grey beard and moustache, and presents quite an elderly appearance,” he was dressed simply, �
��in a neat looking grey coat and light colored felt” hat without “any indication of rank.” The operations of his mind, however, were more complicated than this impression, and his recall orders involved at least five movements by the Army of Northern Virginia:

  • Dick Ewell was to return his corps from its advanced position at Carlisle, march down to Heidlersburg, on the east side of South Mountain, and “proceed to Cashtown or Gettysburg, as circumstances might dictate,” sending his trains on the long route back through Shippensburg to Chambersburg so as not to bottle up the roads to Heidlersburg.

  • Powell Hill’s corps was to pack up on June 29th and move eastward from its bivouac east of Chambersburg to Cashtown, and keep moving “in the direction of York … and to co-operate with General Ewell, acting as circumstances might require.”

  • Longstreet’s corps was to close up to Chambersburg, and then turn east toward Greenwood (on the Cashtown Pike) to follow Hill.

  • Jubal Early’s division was to turn back eastward, this time marching through East Berlin, to meet the rest of Ewell’s corps somewhere between Heidlersburg and Middletown.

  • And the cavalry brigades of John Imboden and Beverly Robertson, which had been posted to screen the western approaches of the army’s advance and the army’s communication lines back through the Shenandoah Valley, were ordered to catch up to the main army concentration as swiftly as possible.

  “There can be no other conclusion than they and the rest of the Confederate army had been moving toward one common centre … like a huge machine.”26

  It would take at least two days—the 29th and the 30th of June—and perhaps more for that machine to complete its concentration, especially since the rains had made “the roads very muddy,” forcing “the infantry” to march off the roads “in the fields along side where they would trample broad paths in the wheat, nearly ripe” while the artillery edged gingerly around the sodden roads. This was the sort of incidental damage in wartime that these veterans had long since removed to the category of routine, but among the “Dutch in that section of the country,” it was an apocalypse. It amused Longstreet’s men to have an “old farmer” announce in dismay over his trodden-down wheat, “I have heardt and I have readt of de horrors of warfare, but my utmost conceptions did not equal dis.” By June 30th, as the rain began to taper off, one of Powell Hill’s divisions (Harry Heth’s) had passed Cashtown, with the other two (Richard Heron Anderson’s and Dorsey Pender’s) six miles behind. Two of Longstreet’s three divisions were just behind Anderson’s, with the third (George Pickett’s) left at Chambersburg. Dick Ewell, riding in his carriage along with Robert Rodes’ division, made twenty-two miles on the road to Heidlersburg, nine miles north of Gettysburg, by the end of the same day; at the same moment, Jubal Early’s division was closing in, just three miles east of Heidlersburg. Allegheny Johnson’s division took the outer route, following the corps trains back to Scotland, where he would then turn east to rejoin Ewell. The last details of Ewell’s cavalry brigade did not quit Carlisle until the afternoon of the 30th.27

  Hill’s divisions, however, could not stay at Cashtown. So long as the Confederates relied heavily on foraging to feed themselves, each division would (by the reckoning of nineteenth-century armies) require a circle of twelve and a half miles around its encampments to forage (for water, firewood, and feed for men and horses); one single regiment could denude an acre of woodland just for firewood every three days. The Cashtown area did not afford nearly enough of such space to support three of Hill’s divisions plus two of Longstreet’s. Hill would have to make room for Longstreet’s advance, and the only room that would keep Hill within hailing distance of both Longstreet and Ewell was eastward to Gettysburg. In the overall scheme of Lee’s concentration, the next day—July 1st—should see two of Hill’s divisions move there and camp on the eastern side of the town (toward York), while Richard Anderson’s division and the two lead divisions of Ewell’s corps occupied the bivouac Hill had just vacated around Cashtown. “Lee’s plan had long been formed to concentrate his own army somewhere between Cashtown and Gettysburg,” wrote Porter Alexander, “in a strong position where it would threaten at once Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia.” By sundown on the 1st of July, Hill would have occupied Gettysburg in strength, with Ewell situated just behind him, and Longstreet closing in from the west. “When General A.P. Hill started his column across the mountain on the 29th,” wrote one of his staffers, “his orders were to proceed through Gettysburg towards York.”28

  And it was at this moment, and not on June 28th, that Lee began to feel most keenly the absence of J.E.B. Stuart—not because Stuart was failing to provide intelligence, but because Stuart was unavailable to provide screening to ward off Federal interference with the convergence at Gettysburg. Ideally, Stuart should have been picketing to the south and east of Gettysburg, in a long line from Fairfield on the west to Littlestown on the east, to allow the concentration of Lee’s three corps to take place without observation. His absence left Ewell relying on the 1,600 or so horsemen of Albert Jenkins’ cavalry brigade to screen his corps on its way southward, and Early relying on the wild boys of Elijah White’s solitary cavalry battalion, who probably could not have formed a worthwhile screen even if all of their mothers had asked. Powell Hill lacked even that much cavalry—which is why, on June 29th, Hill fell back on the clumsy expedient of sending two regiments of infantry out to his right as a screen, down to Fairfield, where they collided with John Buford’s Yankee cavalry. And it was the same reason why, on June 30th, Hill sent an entire infantry brigade down the Cashtown Pike to Gettysburg to do the screening in Stuart’s place.

  It was not, at first, a difficult assignment. Harry Heth’s division was Hill’s lead division in the line of march, and Heth detailed James Johnston Pettigrew’s North Carolina brigade to push on ahead into Gettysburg and report back. Pettigrew was an intelligent choice for the job: he was a cultivated litterateur, had traveled through Europe and written a travelogue, Notes on Spain and the Spaniards, and had even spent time in Italy as a volunteer aide with the French and Italian forces against the Austrians in 1859.29 In his after-action report in September 1863, Heth would mention in passing that Pettigrew’s brigade was also to “search the town for army supplies (shoes especially),” and a New York Herald reporter who got himself captured along the Cashtown Pike passed Confederates “loaded with chickens, butter, eggs and vegetables of every description.” (Harry Heth himself claimed a fine felt hat from a store in Cashtown, and although it was a size too large, an enterprising staffer rolled up “a dozen or more sheets of foolscap paper” and stuck them into the sweatband of the hat to make it fit.) If he discovered Yankees prowling around, he was to report back at once.30

  The most significant witness to Pettigrew’s mission was a physician, John William Crapster O’Neal. Born in Virginia, O’Neal was educated at Pennsylvania College, and then trained as a physician at the University of Maryland. He practiced medicine in nearby Hanover in the 1840s, and then moved his practice to Baltimore until 1863, when he returned to Gettysburg as Adams County’s medical director (supervising the county almshouse north of town and the county jail on High Street). Late in the morning of June 30th, O’Neal was riding out to a sick call on the Cashtown Pike when he met “a body of men coming down the pike from [the] direction of Cashtown” at “the old Herr tavern,” a mile west of the town. The body of men turned out to be three regiments of North Carolinians. They stopped him, and Pettigrew proceeded briefly to interrogate O’Neal on the road, and then let him go on.

  O’Neal did not get very far. A rebel orderly came pelting after him and pulled him back to Pettigrew, who “reexamined me, asking whether there were any Yankees in town, when I left town and whether I had any newspapers.” O’Neal knew nothing about Yankees in Gettysburg, and so a second time Pettigrew released him. But this time, Pettigrew demanded that O’Neal ride with him into Gettysburg and go no farther out along the pike. They jogged only a short distanc
e farther when, perched upon a steep ridgeline between them and the town, Pettigrew saw “about a half-dozen mounted men”—Union cavalry. “I understood you to say there were no Yankees in [the] town,” Pettigrew said irritably. “There are mounted men!” O’Neal was as surprised as Pettigrew, since there had been no Federal cavalrymen in Gettysburg when he left on his rounds that morning. More bad news soon came back to Pettigrew. Two Confederates—Heth’s division surgeon, E. B. Spence, and Longstreet’s spy, Henry Harrison—had taken themselves ahead of Pettigrew that morning into town, Surgeon Spence to “procure some medical supplies” at “the first drug-store” he could find, and Harrison to look around the general area. Both of them were there when Buford’s troopers came riding up from below town, and both bolted back to warn Pettigrew “that a superior force of the enemy were moving on Gettysburg.” A few of Pettigrew’s officers claimed they could hear “drums beating on the farther side of town.” That meant infantry, and infantry very likely could mean the Army of the Potomac.31

  Bearing in mind Heth’s warning “not to bring on an engagement,” Pettigrew ordered a pullback for four miles, beyond Marsh Creek, and went to report to Heth, whom he found at Cashtown together with Powell Hill. According to Heth’s account in 1877, Hill dismissed any concerns about Union forces in or around Gettysburg. “The only force at Gettysburg is cavalry, probably a detachment of observation.” Hill had just come from Lee’s temporary headquarters up the road at Greenwood, and Lee had assured him that “the information he has from his scouts” indicated that “the enemy are still at Middleburg, and have not yet struck their tents.” (Although there were four Middleburgs or Middletowns along the general path of Lee’s invasion, Hill probably meant Middleburg, Maryland, just behind Pipe Creek.)32