Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  By noon on July 1st, however, the plan was dead. First, Meade received Couch’s warning “of the enemy’s withdrawal from Harrisburg,” which stoked his eagerness to concentrate the army “to the rear … on Pike Creek, between Middleburg and Manchester, covering my depot at Westminster.” When the 2nd Corps arrived at Taneytown around 11 a.m., Winfield Hancock rode over to pay the honors to his new commander and found Meade ready “to fight on Pipe Creek; that he had not examined the ground, but, judging from his maps, it was the strongest position he could find; that the engineers were examining and mapping it, and that he had made an order for the movement to occupy that line.” (He would have had the order printed and distributed before this, he claimed, except that the army’s chief of staff, Dan Butterfield, whom he “roundly damned” for his “slowness in getting out orders,” was only then in the process of having it copied.) Half an hour later came Capt. Stephen Weld with the alarming news from John Reynolds that he had taken the 1st Corps into a stand-up fight at Gettysburg. Meade’s first inclination was to treat Reynolds’ move as a covering action for the Pipe Creek withdrawal, and he sent Sedgwick and Slocum a note informing them that Reynolds would probably “hold the enemy in check, and fall slowly back.” In that case, “the line indicated in the circular of to-day will be occupied to-night.” But then came word from Buford with the same dire news of a collision at Gettysburg, followed by yet another note from Buford, via his chief, Alfred Pleasanton, announcing that “General Reynolds was killed this morning” and that “there seems to be no directing person” in charge. We need help now, pleaded Buford.3

  This was not the battle that Meade wanted, nor was it in the place he had wanted. But the 1st Corps was in serious trouble, and perhaps the 11th Corps as well. The unpredictable Sickles sent another dispatch, energetically informing Meade that Otis Howard had called on the 3rd Corps “to support him,” and Sickles was now on the road to Gettysburg, so for all Meade knew, almost half of his army was heading into some unknown maw sixteen miles to the north. Moreover, John Reynolds was dead, and that made the Pipe Creek plan look like a run for cover. On the other hand, the information from Gettysburg was so fragmentary that Meade could not be sure what he would be ordering the rest of the army into if they went there—would the 1st Corps still be holding its ground? If they were overrun and scattered by the time Meade could get troops there, would each of his corps be smashed in similar fashion as they arrived?4

  He improvised. The Pipe Creek Circular would go off to the 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 12th Corps, so that at least half the army was on its way to the new defensive line; he would need more information about the 1st and 11th Corps, and he had the 2nd Corps near at hand if he needed to cover any possible retreat by Doubleday and Howard. Meade himself would stay put at Taneytown so that Sickles, Sykes, Sedgwick, and Slocum would know where to find him. Butterfield promptly recommended that Meade “send me as his representative” to Gettysburg. But Meade, who privately detested Butterfield as one of Hooker’s toadies and would soon enough look up a replacement for him, cringed at the idea of putting Butterfield in charge of anything, much less a battle. Butterfield then suggested that Meade send Hancock, and before Butterfield could write up the orders Meade had ridden off to find Hancock and send him to Gettysburg to discover what was happening and recommend the best response.5

  In the report Meade submitted in October, he described his directive to Hancock as simply “to represent me on the field” and act “in conjunction with Major-General Howard.” But years later, that was not how Hancock remembered it. “General Meade came immediately to my headquarters and told me to transfer command of the Second Corps to [Brigadier General John] Gibbon, and proceed at once to the front,” Hancock recalled, “and in the event of the truth of the report of General Reynolds’s death or disability, to assume command of the corps on that field.” Hancock was startled, partly from the news that “General Reynolds has been killed, or badly wounded,” and partly because, whether he realized it or not, Meade was disregarding the cardinal rule of army seniority. Hancock had only been in corps command for little more than a month, and was four steps below Otis Howard in seniority in the volunteer service, while John Gibbon was actually junior to another of Hancock’s division commanders, John Caldwell. Meade paid no attention to Hancock’s scruples. He “must have a man who he knew and could trust,” someone who could make a politically reliable estimate of the situation, and not some wild-eyed call to an abolitionist suicide ride. Hancock was as steady a McClellanite as Meade himself, while Gibbon was, if anything, even more contemptuous of the Republican crusaders. Besides, Lincoln and Stanton had given Meade the blanket authority, denied to Joe Hooker, to override seniority and delegate authority to whomever he wished: You are authorized to remove from command, and to send from your army, any officer or other person you may deem proper, and to appoint to command as you may deem expedient.6

  That was good enough for Hancock. “The moment these instructions were given me, I turned over command of the Second Corps to General Gibbon, and then started, with my personal staff at a very rapid pace for the battlefield.” Hancock and his chief of staff, Charles Morgan, commandeered an ambulance so that they could sit and study a “poor little map that had been furnished” by Meade as they took to the Taneytown Road, while Hancock’s aide-de-camp, William Mitchell, pelted on ahead to notify Howard. There was not much to be learned from Meade’s map, and Hancock finally lost patience with the pace of the ambulance, ordered up the horses, and took off “galloping to the front.” He and his staff were still four miles from Gettysburg when they passed another ambulance, headed in the other direction and escorted by a single officer. It contained the body of John Reynolds, laid out in a crude coffin. “A deep silence fell upon the staff, and not a word was spoken till … the panorama of Gettysburg lay unrolled before them.”7

  It was not clear to Hancock, at that moment, whether Meade intended him to take charge of a fight or arrange for a retreat, “extricating from peril the two corps at the front.” But even as Hancock was on his way, dispatches and wig-wags from the signalers continued to come in to Taneytown, and Meade’s mind slowly began revolving toward a decision to redirect the army toward Gettysburg. By three o’clock, the 2nd Corps was on the road to Gettysburg; the Pipe Creek Circular was canceled, and at 4:30 Meade began issuing orders to Sykes, Slocum, and Sedgwick to turn their corps around and “move up to Gettysburg at once.”8

  This would come as a jolt to Slocum and Sykes. Through most of July 1st, Slocum and the 12th Corps “sauntered slowly” from Littlestown to Two Taverns, just five miles below Gettysburg, where the corps fell out for a “leisurely” lunch. Still, even before Meade’s orders reached them, the 12th Corps was already seeing disturbing signs of something gone seriously wrong up ahead. “Groups of frightened women and children, on their way to safe shelter, met us with imploring eyes; men hurrying away with their household goods in carts reported disaster to our army.” George Sykes’ 5th Corps had been on the march all day, crossing the Pennsylvania state line around noon. The colonel of the 118th Pennsylvania marked the crossing by ordering the regimental colors unfurled, and riding “down the column,” calling for “3 cheers for Penn., which were given with a will.” Col. Strong Vincent, a Pennsylvanian from Erie, who had been boosted to brigade command in the 5th Corps only on May 20th, also ordered his brigade’s flags uncased when they approached Hanover “about dusk.” Vincent “reverently bared his head” and announced to his adjutant, “What death more glorious can any man desire than to die on the soil of old Pennsylvania fighting for that flag?” Sykes had sent his staffers ahead to mark out bivouac sites around Hanover for the thirty-five regiments in the 5th Corps, and the men were “in the act of issuing fresh meat, inspection of arms etc.” when a general officers’ call was sounded. Brigade and division commanders soon came back with the news that “the enemy had been met that day by our advanced corps, at Gettysburg, and that tomorrow would probably be fought the decisive battle of
the war.” That meant down with shelter tents and coffee boilers, and “we took up the line of march” again, this time “sharply to the left,” toward Gettysburg. Sykes pushed them on until, by two in the morning, “all human endurance was on the verge of utter collapse.”9

  Based on the pay and muster reports recorded on June 30th, Meade should have had an army of approximately 112,000 men on hand, either for Pipe Creek or for Gettysburg. Determining the manpower of Civil War armies is a tricky business, compounded by lost or unsubmitted reports and differing definitions of what counted as “present” (which usually meant everyone who was issued rations) or “present for duty” (subtracting the sick but not the noncombatants) or “present for duty equipped” (those actually armed for the line of battle). In the 69th Pennsylvania, for example, the present and accounted for tallies on May 30th listed 389 men; but 52 of these were actually absent in hospital. Other men leaked away through desertion, and by the time they reached Gettysburg, the 69th could only count 292 on hand. In the 18th Massachusetts, the present-for-duty report listed 314 men, but the sergeant who “kept the company accounts” knew that only 108 “were found at the front” at Gettysburg. Meade himself believed that he had “about 95,000 … including all arms of service,” but in terms of troops ready to engage in combat, the Army of the Potomac was probably ready to furnish somewhere between 83,000 and 85,000 men.

  The army’s real strength may have been more fragile even than that, since the expiration of many two-year enlistments from 1861 and emergency nine-monthers from 1862 had reduced the Army of the Potomac, after Chancellorsville, to as few as 40,000, and it was only by drawing some 37,000 troops from Schenck’s and Heintzelman’s garrisons in Baltimore and Washington that Meade was able to pull together a force worth challenging Lee. Units like George Stannard’s Vermont brigade, George Willard’s New York brigade (newly exchanged after being captured at Harpers Ferry in 1862 and cruelly mocked as the “Harper’s Ferry Cowards”), and Samuel Wylie Crawford’s Pennsylvania Reserve Division all increased the raw numbers of the army, but it remained to be seen how well they would fit with the rest of the army, or even if they would fight at all. Meanwhile the best estimate Meade had of Lee’s strength pegged the Army of Northern Virginia at 109,000—“about 90,000 infantry, from 4,000 to 5,000 artillery, and about 10,000 cavalry.” Chief of staff Butterfield seconded Meade: based on scouting and citizen reports “at different points,” Butterfield estimated that “Lee had 91,000 infantry, 12,000 cavalry, and 275 pieces of artillery.”10

  The Confederates had a humbler view of their numbers: Augustus Dickert in the 3rd South Carolina reckoned that “by the non-extension of all furloughs and the return of the slightly wounded,” Lee could count on “sixty-eight thousand,” and Lee’s adjutant, Walter Taylor, calculated that Lee had only 67,000, counting infantry, cavalry, and artillery. In fact, Lee is likely to have had as many as 80,000 men in all three arms. Like their Union counterpart, these numbers included the addition of untested regiments and brigades, not to mention two new corps commanders. But the Army of Northern Virginia enjoyed invisible assets denied to the Army of the Potomac. “There were no employees in the Confederate army,” wrote William Allan, one of Stonewall Jackson’s old staffers, in 1877, assessing the strength of the Army of Northern Virginia. Instead, as the British military observer Lt. Col. Arthur James Lyon Fremantle of the Coldstream Guards noticed, “in rear of each regiment were from twenty to thirty negro slaves.” From the beginning of the war, Confederate armies had annexed large contingents of slaves—between 12,000 and 20,000 at Manassas Junction in 1861, and “fifteen or twenty thousand” on the Peninsula in 1862. By the time of the Gettysburg Campaign, Thomas Caffey, an English-born Confederate artilleryman, estimated that “in our whole army there must be at least thirty thousand colored servants who do nothing but cook and wash.” In his battalion alone, Caffey counted “a cooking and washing corps of negroes at least one hundred and fifty strong!”

  Add, then, to the 80,000 white soldiers Lee commanded, the unnumbered corps of 10,000 to 30,000 black slaves who marched with the Army of Northern Virginia (and performed many of the noncombatant duties that, in the Army of the Potomac, were performed by those “present for duty”), and George Meade may not have been at all unjustified in believing “that General Lee was, as far as I could tell, about 10,000 or 15,000 my superior.” It made Meade all the more conscious that one wrong move on his part, and not only the Army of the Potomac, but the entire Union cause, could be lost in the next twenty-four hours, and he would join that long gallery of American failures that included Horatio Gates in the Revolution, William Hull in the War of 1812, and, inevitably, Meade’s own bankrupt father.11

  It was after 10:45 when the firing died down along McPherson’s Ridge, and a lull settled over the flattened wheat fields and now railless fences held by James Wadsworth’s battered Union division. The division’s ammunition train had arrived, and the wagon handlers worked down the line, spilling big wooden boxes of cartridges off the backs of the wagons for the men to break open and distribute. With the death of Reynolds, overall command of the 1st Corps fell to Abner Doubleday, as the senior division commander. Only that morning, Doubleday had been complaining that, with Meade’s promotion just four days before, command of Meade’s 5th Corps ought to have gone to him, by seniority. Now Doubleday had his corps command, only it was the 1st Corps, and it came to him by the death of Reynolds rather than by the mechanics of rank. His own division was arriving at the seminary, although it really contained only two small brigades under Tom Rowley and Roy Stone, and somewhere behind them was the last of the 1st Corps’ divisions, with two big brigades under John Cleveland Robinson. Doubleday had received no direction from Reynolds about what steps to take next, but his instinct was “to hold on to the position until ordered to leave it,” and an officer in the 149th Pennsylvania heard Doubleday say that “all he could do was fight until he got sufficient information to form his own plan.”12

  Doubleday planted Roy Stone’s three Pennsylvania regiments (the 143rd, 149th, and 150th) on the right of the Iron Brigade, so that they could occupy the McPherson house and barn, which had been vacated when the 95th New York and 14th Brooklyn charged the railroad cut. Stone was only twenty-six years old, but he had risen to the rank of major in the old 42nd Pennsylvania, which touted itself as a regiment of marksmen by tacking a buck’s tail to their caps, and in 1862 Stone was commissioned to raise an entire brigade of “Bucktails.” The original 42nd Pennsylvania disdained them as “Bogus Bucktails,” and Gettysburg would offer them their first opportunity to live that sneer down. Tom Rowley was a Pittsburgh Republican alderman and contractor who had served with the 1st Pennsylvania Volunteers in the Mexican War, but who brought to the war in 1861 little more than good political intentions. He had commanded the 102nd Pennsylvania on the Peninsula, survived a head wound that fractured his skull, and gone up to brigadier general in the 6th Corps after Antietam, only to be bumped out of place by a brigadier with seniority. Rowley was instead assigned to the 1st Corps, commanding (like Roy Stone) a newly confected brigade of Pennsylvanians (the 121st, 142nd, and 151st Pennsylvania) and the 80th New York, and his job would be to hold down the left flank of the Iron Brigade, extending the 1st Corps line down toward the Fairfield Road.13 John Cleveland Robinson’s division arrived on the heels of Stone and Rowley, and Doubleday held it at the Lutheran seminary as a reserve. Robinson was a burly, undemonstrative New Yorker, yet another abolitionist in this corps teeming with abolitionist officers. Like Doubleday he had paid for his opposition to slavery by slow promotion and even slower recognition.

  Meanwhile, the unemployed cavalry of William Gamble’s brigade, who had put up the fight that enabled the 1st Corps to throw its shield between Gettysburg and Harry Heth’s Confederates, were being redeployed by John Buford. The 8th Illinois Cavalry was posted “out to the south-west,” beyond the dangling left flank of the 1st Corps, and the other dismounted cavalrymen and the men of Robinson’s d
ivision were set to work building a hasty “crescent-shaped” barricade of fence rails and fieldstone on the seminary’s west side.14

  Doubleday fully expected that Meade “would ride to the front to see for himself what was going on, and issue definite orders of some kind.” But just before eleven o’clock, it was not Meade who showed up, but Oliver Otis Howard. As soon as Reynolds’ summons of the 11th Corps had come into Howard’s hands at Emmitsburg, he put his three divisions into motion. The division of Francis Barlow would take the main road between Emmitsburg and Gettysburg (the same one Reynolds was at that time using from Marsh Creek). He sent the other two divisions, under Carl Schurz and Adolf Steinwehr (who was actually Baron Adolph Wilhelm August Friedrich von Steinwehr, a onetime officer in the army of the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel) on the parallel Taneytown road, so as to avoid traffic snarls. (Barlow’s division was on the shorter of the two routes, but he ran into Reynolds’ “trains and artillery carriages” on the Emmitsburg Road and ended up arriving later than both Schurz and Steinwehr.) Howard himself took off ahead, meeting yet another messenger from Reynolds at about 10:30, begging Howard to “Come quite up to Gettysburg,” then another: “I am hardly pressed; have your troops come up at the double-quick.” By way of relay, Howard sent off staffers to Sickles, back at Emmitsburg, to Slocum and the 12th Corps, and to Meade at Taneytown, repeating Reynolds’ plea. “Where does he want my divisions placed,” Howard asked. The aide—the hard-riding Maj. William Riddle—shrugged his shoulders impatiently: “Choose your ground anywhere near here.” Heading the other way were the inevitable crowds of civilian refugees, followed by wounded cavalrymen and mounted couriers. “Within six or seven miles of Gettysburg … the distant boom of cannon could be heard.”15