Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

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  Howard was long ahead of his men by that time. He got his first glimpse of the town on a small rise in the road, beside a peach orchard owned by Joseph Sherfy, a deacon in the Marsh Creek Church of the Brethren and “a pioneer in the peach business.” Around eleven o’clock, he arrived on Cemetery Hill. “Here was a broad view which embraced the town, the seminary, the college, and all the undulating valley of open country spread out between the ridges.” Howard turned to his adjutant, Theodore Meysenberg, and noted, “This seems to be a good position, colonel.” Meysenberg looked around. “It is the only position, general.”16

  The head of Steinwehr’s division arrived soon after, hard on the heels of the last wagons of the 1st Corps trains, and even in the “dull, vapory atmosphere” of an overcast summer’s day, “the magnificent panorama” almost took the soldiers’ collective breath away. “As far as the eye could reach, until the earth touched the heavens in their convergence, was one expanse of ever-varying field and wood, hill and dale, interspersed here and there with farmhouses, while from over the hills in every direction roads came trailing down into the village of Gettysburg.” Howard at once turned them onto Cemetery Hill. There was an elaborate brick gatehouse on the eastern flank of the cemetery, and Howard spread the two brigades of Steinwehr’s division, plus the corps artillery under Maj. Thomas Osborn, between the gatehouse and the Taneytown Road, facing north. Schurz’s division would arrive by the same path an hour later, and then Barlow on the Emmitsburg Road.

  Hoping to link up with Reynolds, Howard sent off his aide (and younger brother) Charles Howard to find Buford or Reynolds, and then rode up into the town, along Baltimore Street, looking for a useful eminence from which to take his bearings. His first notion was to use the steeple of the county courthouse; but that steeple turned out to be a closed box, with only slits to see through, and anyway, no one could find a ladder. Looking up from the street, one of Howard’s staffers noticed Henry Fahnestock’s wife and two teenaged boys on the widow’s walk above the Fahnestock store. One of the boys, Daniel Skelly, went down to let Howard into the store by the side entrance on Middle Street, and guided Howard and “a staff officer, who seemed to be a Captain and a German … with a large field-glass” up to the “observatory.”17

  The “General with only one arm … took the glass and swept the field long and anxiously.” Howard could see the network of roads radiating outward from Gettysburg toward “Bonnaughtown, York, Harrisburg, Carlisle, Shippensburg, Chambersburg, and Hagerstown.” But closer at hand, he could also see “Wadsworth’s division of infantry, fighting near the Oak Ridge railroad cut” and “Doubleday’s division beyond the Lutheran seminary, filing out of sight beyond the Oak Ridge to the south of west, a mile away.” He would have no time to reflect on these observations, because “as I stood there” an officer clattered up Middle Street, saluted, and shouted something to Howard: “General Reynolds is wounded, sir.” Howard did not, at first, want to believe this. “I am very sorry,” Howard shouted back. “I hope he will be able to keep the field.” Any hope of that was soon banished when another rider followed, this time the ubiquitous Major Riddle: “General Reynolds is dead, and you are the senior officer of the field.”

  A sense of cold misery crept over Howard. “Is it confessing weakness,” he asked years later, “to say that when the responsibility of my position flashed upon me I was penetrated with an emotion never experienced before or since?” He had walked into a battle begun by someone else, in the presence of an enemy whose numbers he could not estimate, and with help far enough away that “it seemed almost hopeless that Meade could gather his scattered forces in time for any considerable success to attend our arms”—and he, of course, would be held to account for it all.18

  And then the iron entered into him: “God helping us, we will stay here till the army comes.” He had already sent off requests to Slocum and Sickles, so there was nothing more he could do, until they arrived, to shore up the 1st Corps apart from getting his own corps into action. His first order was to make sure that Steinwehr and the corps artillery brigade stayed put on Cemetery Hill, then “rode slowly” back to the gatehouse, where he met Schurz, coming in ahead of his own division. They would have half a chance, Howard decided, if he could get Schurz’s and Barlow’s divisions through the town and up onto Oak Hill, on Wadsworth’s right flank, and thus present a stable line of defense for over a mile against whatever the Confederates might choose to send at them during the afternoon. If the 1st Corps and 11th Corps together could hug that long ridgeline, with the McPherson farm at its center, then Meade and the others would have time to collect the rest of the Army of the Potomac and stride to their rescue; if not, there was always Cemetery Hill (and Steinwehr’s division) as the fallback. “I directed Schurz to move forward and seize a woody height in front of his left, on the prolongation of Oak Ridge.” As soon as Barlow came up, Howard would send Barlow’s division in support. By the clock in the courthouse tower, it was 11:15.19

  Carl Schurz “briskly” hurried through the town with his division, its two big brigades under Alexander Schimmelpfennig, a liberal Prussian Army captain from Posen who had fled Germany with Schurz after the failure of the 1848 Revolution, and the sinister-faced Wladimir Krzyzanowski, a cousin of Frederic Chopin’s and yet another refugee from the ‘48 who had signed up to crush the “terrible trade in human flesh.” The morose and small-statured Schimmelpfennig’s name sounded faintly ludicrous in American ears—as frizzy-sounding as the stereotypical German was supposed to be frizzy-minded—and Lincoln had quipped that commissioning someone named Schimmelpfennig would probably win him the German vote even if Schimmelpfennig knew nothing about soldiering. “His name will make up for any difference there may be, and I’ll take the risk of his coming out all right.” Schimmelpfennig actually had more military experience than almost anyone else in the Army of the Potomac, and it took him aback to discover that American-born generals “have no maps, no knowledge of the country, no eyes to see where help is needed.” Unlike Moltke’s Prussian general staff, the Americans select staff officers from among their “relations, sons of old friends, or men recommended by Congressmen” who then “lose their heads and are unable to control, assist or manoeuvre their corps” in combat. He told one of his fellow Prussian aides, the continent-hopping Baron Otto Friedrich von Fritsch, that Lincoln was a “great President,” but he lacked “a commander who possesses some of Naploeon’s or Moltke’s genius,” and if they ever got into a fight, “let us look out for ourselves, and never expect outside help.”20

  In the lead of Schimmelpfennig’s brigade were Georg von Amsberg’s 45th New York (organized back in 1861 as the 5th German Rifles) and Battery I of the 1st Ohio Light Artillery, commanded “at a trot” by yet another German, Captain Hubert A. C. Dilger, an adventure-seeking officer in the Duchy of Baden’s horse artillery. Once beyond the railroad north of town, the Germans angled north and east, past the buildings of Pennsylvania College, heading up the Mummasburg Road to connect with Wadsworth’s division. Far to the rear, on Cemetery Hill, Howard was anxiously waiting for Barlow’s division to arrive on the Emmitsburg Road, so that they could be put in alongside Schurz’s Germans. Barlow sent ahead an aide, Lt. Edward Culp, when the division was only four miles away, and when Howard finally saw the head of Barlow’s column come into view, he trotted off with “a couple of orderlies” to meet him. “The air was lively with bursting shells” from artillery over beyond the town, and that left Barlow with little to ask in the way of questions except “Where now, General?” Howard was just as direct: “Straight through the town, on to the right.” Barlow slackened pace only to allow two batteries of artillery to pass to the front of his column, and from there, he and Howard rode together up Baltimore Street and through the diamond as Howard hastily briefed him on what had happened so far.21

  But neither Schurz nor Barlow were ever to make their linkup with Robinson and the dangling right flank of the 1st
Corps. As Schurz’s division moved “outside the town and north and east of the Pennsylvania College,” artillery began speaking from beyond the distant knob at the north end of Oak Ridge, and Dilger’s battery stopped and unlimbered to reply. Amsberg threw out four companies of the 45th New York as skirmishers to feel ahead. But by the time they reached the base of the knob, where Moses McLean’s T-shaped farmhouse and red barn sat beside the Mummasburg Road, it was plain for all to see that Confederate artillery was unlimbering and perching on the knob, and Confederate skirmishers were swarming down the hill toward them. They were Georgians and Alabamians from George Doles’ and Edward O’Neal’s brigades and they were the announcement that Richard S. Ewell’s corps had arrived on the scene.22

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  One division of Dick Ewell’s corps, under Robert Rodes, reached Heidlersburg on the evening of June 30th after a thumping-hard march of twenty-two miles through rain, and camped there with Jubal Early’s division, fresh from the occupation of York, just three miles to the east. (Ewell’s other division, under Allegheny Johnson, was off to the west, escorting the corps trains through the village of Scotland.) Ewell, who was still traveling with Rodes, fully expected to arrive within supporting distance of Powell Hill’s corps somewhere between Cashtown and Gettysburg on the next day, although it annoyed Ewell that the orders Lee had issued for this concentration failed to specify whether he was to move on Cashtown or Gettysburg, and he wondered out loud (for all to hear) why someone on Lee’s headquarters staff couldn’t learn to write understandable orders. He assumed that Cashtown was the desired point. With Hill heading for Gettysburg, it would be logical for Ewell to take over Hill’s bivouac at Cashtown as part of Lee’s concentration plan. In the morning, Rodes’ division, with the one-legged Ewell in his carriage, headed for Cashtown by way of Middletown. Early’s division would be ready to move along after them through Heidlersburg. But Rodes and Ewell had only gotten as far as Middletown at around ten o’clock when a courier came panting up with “word from General Lee or Hill to march to Gettysburg, to which point the latter had moved.” The Newville Road led directly down to Gettysburg, so all that Ewell had to do was turn Rodes’ division left at the Middletown crossroads, and then order Early to make the same turn at Heidlersburg; the roads would bring them together, eight miles to the south, at Gettysburg.23

  It was not an easy eight miles for Rodes and Ewell. The country between Middletown and Gettysburg rolls and pitches deeply, and short as the line of march may be, it is all sharply up hill and down dale, with the first hard on the men and the second hard on the horses. “We marched thirteen miles in quick time that morning … without resting,” complained Jeremiah Tate of the 5th Alabama, “many was broke down before going in to the fight.” Even worse, Ewell had no good information on what Hill’s situation at Gettysburg was, and he sent off couriers to Hill and to Lee. But by 11:30, they were close enough to begin hearing the rumble of artillery, so that it was clear that Powell Hill’s people had run into something troublesome. Two miles short of Gettysburg, Rodes sent an aide to explore the ground ahead, then deployed Thomas H. Carter’s artillery battalion and the first of the division’s five big brigades into line of battle (followed by the other four in column) and gingerly pressed his skirmishers forward.24

  Neither Ewell nor Rodes seem to have realized it, but they could not have arrived at a better place or at a better time for the Army of Northern Virginia. The 1st Corps was still panting from its exertions on McPherson’s Ridge over the last two hours, and on the corps’ right flank Lysander Cutler’s battered brigade stuck straight north along the ridge without any cover. Schurz’s 11th Corps division was on its way through the town to join that exposed flank and extend it along the ridge and over the knob of Oak Hill, but it wasn’t there yet, and it had no inkling that a large body of Confederate infantry was moving toward them from the north with plans of its own for Oak Hill. Ewell had it within his power to roll over the knob of Oak Hill, driving into the gap between the 1st Corps and the 11th Corps like a maul, and send both Union corps fleeing in disarray.25

  The first people to discover that an entirely new set of players was about to arrive were Union cavalry. While John Buford had been spending his morning arranging William Gamble’s cavalry brigade as obstacles in the path of Harry Heth’s division on the Cashtown Pike, Buford’s other brigade, under Tom Devin, had been maintaining its picket lines in their semicircle north of Gettysburg. Even as Gamble’s troopers were staging their slow pullback to McPherson’s Ridge, Devin ordered his regiments to saddle up and move out to thicken his pickets, as a precaution. Sure enough, by eleven o’clock, Devin’s outposts to the northwest reported that “long and strong” lines of skirmishers, backed by “heavy columns of infantry,” were now visible “over the hills and across the fields.” One of those outposts, belonging to the 9th New York Cavalry, let the new arrivals come close enough to confirm that they were indeed Confederates, then let off a few shots from their carbines and wheeled their horses around for a fast getaway. Soon, Devin had more notice: the 17th Pennsylvania Cavalry, posted on the Carlisle Road straight north, had traded shots with another sizable force of Confederate infantry, moving toward them from that direction as well.26

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  James Wadsworth seems to have been the first senior officer in the 1st Corps to awake to this peril. “I am not sure that they are not moving around on our right flank,” Wadsworth wrote suspiciously in a note he dashed off to Doubleday just past noon, “though I do not see any indication of it.” As a precaution, he pulled Cutler’s brigade back from the northern extension of McPherson’s Ridge into Sheads’ Woods “to take such position as [Cutler] deemed proper,” and begged from Doubleday a brigade from John Robinson’s reserve division at the seminary to plant on Cutler’s flank, barely reaching to the Mummasburg Road. As the rebel skirmishers gradually pushed the Yankee cavalrymen backward toward the town, Rodes and Ewell finally mounted the knob of Oak Hill, and there they could see that they “could strike the force of the enemy with which General Hill’s troops were engaged upon the flank.” But they could also see the head of Schurz’s division moving up from the town onto the broad plain below Oak Hill, so if they were to move, it would have to be done quickly. Doles’ Georgians were swung well out to the left, to warn off Schurz’s oncoming Germans and pin them in place on the plain, and O’Neal’s Alabamians and Junius Daniel’s five North Carolina regiments deployed on either side of Alfred Iverson’s leading brigade, poised to roll up the 1st Corps’ unprotected right flank. “It was the only time in the war that we were in position to get such a view of contending forces,” marveled one of O’Neal’s Alabamians, and what Rodes saw convinced him (as he wrote in a hasty note to Jubal Early) that “I can burst through the enemy in an hour.”27

  But it was not quite as comprehensive a view as he thought. In his haste to “push the attack vigorously,” Rodes now proceeded to make one overeager mistake after another. Once Hubert Dilger’s Ohio battery rolled into position on the plain north of Pennsylvania College, they began splintering Rodes’ artillery battalions, sitting in the open on the slopes of Oak Hill. “They blew up two or three caissons and entirely disabled one or two of the guns.” The battalion commander, Thomas Carter, accosted Rodes and asked, “General, what fool put that battery yonder?” only to realize after an “awkward pause and a queer expression on the faces of all” Rodes’ staffers that Rodes himself had placed it there. Nor did Rodes take the usual precautions: none of the three brigades poised to roll down on the 1st Corps flank bothered to put out skirmishers, and none of the three brigade commanders was sure what the signal for an advance would be. These were three cavaliers to whom it was not wise to give too much of their own lead. Edward O’Neal was quarrelsome and unhappy under Rodes, still mired at the rank of colonel and convinced that Rodes was planning to replace him; Alfred Iverson was a Richmond political pet whose promotion was deeply resented in his Nort
h Carolina brigade as a vote of no confidence in their political loyalties; and Junius Daniel hadn’t been in action with the Army of Northern Virginia since the Peninsula Campaign. Moreover, the majority of the North Carolinians in both Daniel’s and Iverson’s brigades had never yet been in a major battle. “Although we had been in the field nearly sixteen months,” admitted a soldier in one of Daniel’s regiments, “it was our first regular battle.”28

  O’Neal and Iverson promptly justified those doubts. Three of O’Neal’s five Alabama regiments bolted forward prematurely and collided at the Mummasburg Road with Union infantry that wasn’t supposed to have been there. These were the six regiments of Henry Baxter’s brigade—two New York, three Pennsylvania, and one Massachusetts—that Wadsworth had planted at the last minute on Lysander Cutler’s unprotected right flank. Henry Baxter was a blunt, rumple-bearded miller from Hillsdale County in south-central Michigan who seemed to rise conveniently in the rifle sights of every Confederate he encountered, sustaining a bad wound to the midsection on the Peninsula, a wound to the leg at Antietam, and another to the shoulder at Fredericksburg. From each, he bounced back, his feistiness undiminished, and he was steadily promoted until reaching brigadier general by March 1863. As a convinced abolitionist, he was happily parked in John Cleveland Robinson’s division of the 1st Corps on the road to Gettysburg. All six of the regiments in Baxter’s brigade had seen action before, but the brigade itself had only been cobbled together in late May, and Gettysburg would be their first fight together.29