Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Other isolated Federals died harder. The last glimpse a captain in the 24th Michigan had as he turned to run was the torn shreds of the regiment’s flag, held for the last time by a “wounded soldier,” unable to move and lying “on his right side,” but still clutching the colors. Beside him was a wounded sergeant, unable to load a rifle but still gamely tearing cartridges with his teeth, and handing the opened cartridges to the few men still around him. A soldier in the 143rd Pennsylvania saw a Southern skirmisher get close enough to Stevens’ Maine battery to lay a hand on one of the pieces and cry triumphantly, “This gun is mine.” The Union gunner, with his friction tube and lanyard at the breech, snarled back, Damn you, take it then, pulled the lanyard, and blew the overeager rebel to fragments. A rebel officer, also too eager to get at the guns in Stewart’s battery, had his head cracked by one of the gunners, wielding a rammer like a club. That was enough to make the artillerymen take thought for their precious guns, and Stewart’s and Stevens’ batteries were hastily “limbered up & passed through the town.” Two of Stewart’s guns had been smashed by rebel artillery fire, and rebel skirmishers were able to bring down the wheel horse of one of the 1st New York Light Artillery’s pieces, stalling the gun in the middle of the Cashtown Pike and forcing its abandonment.6

  Now there was another stream of Union fugitives, pouring off Seminary Ridge into the Cashtown Pike, and heading into the town in tandem with the remains of Baxter’s, Paul’s, and Stone’s brigades. Some of Biddle’s brigade and the Iron Brigade made off southward from the seminary, where they were protected by covering fire from cavalry squads posted by John Buford, and could skirt entirely around the west and south sides of the town. (Lane’s North Carolina brigade might have cut them off at the Fairfield Road, but Buford staged a small-scale bluffing attack, and, for the only time under fire in the Civil War, Lane formed his brigade into a Waterloo-style hollow square to repel cavalry.) But the rest were piling on top of one another into a town whose layout none of them knew, and where they were bound to collide at right angles with the disorganized and desperate refugees of the 11th Corps. Unless someone figured out how to organize an escape path for approximately 8,000 frightened and demoralized men, none of them might ever make it to the refuge of Cemetery Hill in a better condition than the one for which the hill had been originally designed.7

  “From the time that Lee’s army had crossed the Potomac we knew there was trouble ahead for us,” wrote Harriet Bayley, who lived on a farm just north of Gettysburg. But for most of Gettysburg, that “trouble” had already come and gone, in the form of Jubal Early’s brief passage through the town a week before. “The funds of the bank and the goods of the merchants had been removed to places promising more security,” recalled Henry Eyster Jacobs, the nineteen-year-old son of Pennsylvania College mathematics professor Michael Jacobs, but “as to the position of the two armies there was much speculation but no information.” Harriet Bayley had no “thought that a battle would be fought”; the worst she could imagine might come from “reckless raiders and their foraging expeditions.” Charles Tyson, who operated a photographic studio on Chambersburg Street, opened his gallery for business that morning, since the other stores were “all open and doing business.” Classes in both the college and the seminary were ready, despite noticeable absenteeism, to begin “prayers and recitations as usual.” The town boys who had gathered curiously around the main encampment of Yankee cavalrymen behind the seminary were disappointed when the horse soldiers were bugled to boots-and-saddles and trotted off westward, and a number of them were so oblivious to what was happening that several of them—including young Daniel Skelly and Albertus McCreary—tried to follow them, finally settling on climbing the trees on Oak Ridge to keep their newfound heroes in view. They were soon joined by “men and boys from town … not having the slightest conception of the proximity of the two armies.” A few tried to tease information out of “a number of mounted pickets standing by the roadside” about the cavalry’s movement beyond the town.8

  The answer came first in the form of “skirmish fire … about three miles” from Daniel Skelly’s leafy perch on Oak Ridge. The sound of firing “seemed to be coming nearer and nearer,” until presently shells “began to plow” up the ground around them. Daniel Skelly heard something pass “dangerously near the top of the tree I was on,” and when Albertus McCreary saw a shell fall “only a short distance from us” and explode, he concluded “that I had better make for home.” Up in his tree, Skelly saw the civilians make “a general stampede toward town,” and he made haste to slide down from the tree and join the retreat. From the rear balcony of her home in the town, Catharine Foster was almost amused at the spectacle of seminary students taking an unauthorized dismissal from class and “running down the hill faster than ‘Double Quick.’ ” Over at the college, Martin Colver was on his way to prepare for the eleven o’clock recitation he would face. As he walked the short space between Pennsylvania Hall and Linnaean Hall with “book in hand,” another student, Horatio James Watkins, called to him from a third-floor window in Pennsylvania Hall and asked whether Colver could hear “shooting.” Colver was about to answer no, when for the first time he noticed “the ominous sounds.”

  Colver wanted a good look, and he and a few other students clambered hurriedly up the steps that led to the rooftop cupola of Pennsylvania Hall. There, “not far distant from us,” they could see skirmishers “of both armies exchanging bullets—saw the first batteries planted on our side … heard a shell from the first rebel battery pass in close proximity to our ears.” The shell failed to explode, but that was enough to send the college boys clattering back down the cupola steps—passing on the way down the mathematics professor, Michael Jacobs, guiding a party of blue-coated signalmen with flags and telescopes on the way up “to make observations from the tower.” Down in the classrooms, the college president, Henry L. Baugher, was struggling to hold the attention of his class of seniors through all the stair clumping inside and the growing military rumbling outside. “Amid repeated failures on the part of the class,” Baugher wearily gave up. “We will close and see what is going on,” he said, “for you know nothing about the lesson anyhow.” Another “solid shot went through the roof of the College” and lodged in the cupola.9

  Just as no one in the town had been ready for a battle, no one in the 1st Corps or the 11th Corps seems to have given much thought to how they were to get through the town. Otis Howard had waited so optimistically for the arrival of Henry Slocum and the 12th Corps that he had failed to make any plan for conducting a fallback to Cemetery Hill—no directions for moving the ammunition wagons and their teams, no plan for reserving certain routes through the town for the artillery, no staff officers posted at critical intersections to direct the reflux of two Federal infantry corps. (Almost the only instructions anyone thought to give them were orders to clear civilians off the streets and into their cellars, anticipating that “the rebels will shell the town.”) Even in the last few minutes of the stand at the seminary, word was still being passed along, “Hold a little longer, the Twelfth Corps is coming.” A staff officer whose path crossed Abner Doubleday’s assured Doubleday that he “had passed Slocum’s (Twelfth) Corps only a little ways out.” Where is he? Doubleday lit up. When did you see him? And then, “turning to me with a savage expression,” Doubleday lapsed back into skepticism and growled, “Get out of my way, son, we all know where Slocum was this morning. Where is he now? Who in hell are you, anyhow?”10

  On a map, the town of Gettysburg presents a neat grid of small streets, intersecting at clear right angles, and grouped around the diamond. But Gettysburg is also a town of alleys running behind the streets, crisscrossing in an internal labyrinth, sometimes ending abruptly, frequently turning off into unlooked-for dead ends. Into these streets, from the north and west, poured the dislocated crumblings of the 1st and 11th Corps, knowing only that escape meant a hill somewhere south of the town. “The streets … were soon filled with a confused mas
s of troops, artillery, and ambulances,” with no one visibly in charge. Both Carl Schurz and Abner Doubleday would swear afterward that “there was no element of dissolution in it,” that their men even “walked leisurely from the Seminary to the town, and did not run.” In one sense, this is true: regiments, or what was left of them, managed to stay more or less together, grouped around their colors or behind a junior officer who thought he knew where to go. But even Schurz conceded that “the retreat through the town was of course more or less disorderly, the streets being crowded with vehicles of every description, which offered to the passing troops exceedingly troublesome obstructions.” Someone, or some officers, tried to rise above the chaos, and at one intersection shouts of “First Corps this way” and “Eleventh Corps this way” went up; but no one could tell who was giving the orders or what street or alley was meant by this way.11

  As the pursuing rebel infantry pressed into the streets, fear sparkled viciously through the tangled masses of Federal soldiers. Men began breaking away down alleys that ran, like the one used by the 82nd Illinois, “into a cul-de-sac,” and together the men had to “have a heavy, tight board fence knocked down to make it possible to proceed.” An officer in the 80th New York saw “an opening like an alley leading through to the next street parallel to the one I was on … to regain the road to the right which I should have taken” in the first place. The streets now “became a battleground,” and the crowds of soldiers “overflowed into yards and alleys,” struggling to escape capture. Men from the 150th Pennsylvania were “leaping fences, crossing gardens, or passing through shops and dwellings in order to reach streets to which the pursuing forces had not yet penetrated.” Henry Morrow, the colonel of the 24th Michigan, staggered into Gettysburg, bleeding from a wound to the head; he was taken in by Mary McAllister, “a lady of Gettysburg,” who bandaged his wound, but he refused her offer to hide him or give him a civilian coat, and was gobbled up by pursuing Confederates as soon as he ventured out into the streets again. The adventurous Prussian Otto von Fritsch was stopped by an “excited fellow” who grabbed the bridle of Fritsch’s horse. The rebel failed to see the heavy Saxon cavalry saber Fritsch carried. “You be damned,” Fritsch snarled, “and cut off his hand.” Fritsch spurred his horse down the street, but lost himself in the maze of alleys, “surrounded by high fence rails.” With rebels closing in from behind, he put the horse to the fence “with an enormous effort” and jumped it clear “and made off towards Cemetery Hill.”12

  Many others had less happy prospects. Alexander Schimmelpfennig turned into an alley off Washington Street, only to face a dead end, with Confederates in hot haste behind him. He vaulted over the Garlach family’s back fence (the Garlach house faced onto Baltimore Street), and frantically squeezed himself into “a wooden culvert” over “an old water course in our yard,” where the exasperated Prussian would hide for three more days. Corporal Leander Wilcox of the 151st Pennsylvania burst in the back door of Catharine Foster’s house on Washington Street, and was hidden in Foster’s potato bin. The chaplain of the 90th Pennsylvania, Horatio Howells, was tending wounded men in a makeshift hospital in Christ Lutheran Church. Staggering from the church after a shell hit the roof, Howells only appeared to jubilant South Carolinians as another Federal officer, and they shot him down on the church steps.13

  As the overcast sky began its first fading, clumps of raggedly battered men from the 1st and 11th Corps began toiling up from the town toward the gatehouse on Cemetery Hill. There, with fat whitish-gray columns of smoke and the erratic staccato of rifle fire ascending behind them, the survivors of the day’s fighting came into view, some in reasonably good order, some in companies, some in dribbles, some (mostly 1st Corps men) picking their way around the edge of the town to find the Emmitsburg Road, all drooping in dejection and exhaustion. They found, on arrival, that Oliver Otis Howard had prepared a crisscrossing pattern of 12-pounder Napoleons and 3-inch Ordnance Rifles from the two 11th Corps batteries he had held in reserve, plus the three 11th Corps batteries that made it back to the hill through the town. Together with the six 1st Corps batteries, there were forty-five guns atop Cemetery Hill—enough to blow any would-be Confederate attackers in the other direction.14

  The infantry was another matter. After sending off Charles Coster’s brigade to its untimely demise, Otis Howard had only the four regiments of Orland Smith’s brigade on Cemetery Hill, and it was a good question in Howard’s mind whether “the broken regiments … emerging from Gettysburg” could be rallied to stand there, much less to fight. “When the very first of the troops came up the pike there was a little reluctance manifested to face about, march back and form a new line of battle.” The Iron Brigade had come up the road to Gettysburg that morning with between 1,800 and 1,900 men in the ranks; of that number, 1,212 were either dead, prisoners, wounded and hors de combat, or simply wandering somewhere in the opaque gloom of the smoking battlefield. Even under the most favorable conditions, units which lost 36 percent of their number in action were virtually incapacitated; a loss of 60 percent would would invite a rout. Too many pieces in the vital communication chain of officers, noncoms, and privates would be gone, and the result would be ill-sorted muddles of soldiers who had no idea who was giving direction, and no idea whether the strangers on either side of them would stay or run. By that standard, the Iron Brigade, which had lost 65 percent of its strength, was a military derelict; the 24th Michigan, which set the Iron Brigade’s record with an 80 percent casualty rate, had been pounded into a bloody wreck. The 1st Corps as a whole was in even worse straits: of the 8,300 men who had followed John Reynolds’ call to come up to Gettysburg, 69 percent had been killed, wounded, captured, or simply gone missing at the end of the day. The 11th Corps was only marginally healthier. Otis Howard had started July 1st with 6,000 men under his command; he was ending it without 53 percent of them.15

  If these men were going to be rallied, Otis Howard would have to do it personally. The first 11th Corps regiment to work its way up to the gatehouse was the 45th New York. At its head was the disheartened Georg von Amsberg, who muttered something to Howard “in German—his English was not at his command just then.” Howard may not have understood the words, but he caught the meaning clearly enough, and standing at a “stone wall, near the edge of the city,” Howard called out to the regiment’s color sergeant, “Sergeant, plant your flag down there in that stone wall.” The sergeant looked at him dumbly, then collected his wits and said, “All right, if you will go with me, I will!” And so the one-armed Howard grasped the flag with his remaining hand, tucking the staff under his stump, and “the regiment seeing the General with difficulty carrying their colors under his one arm, raised a hearty shout and followed upon the double quick” to set the flag in the wall.

  Adelbert Ames, whose brigade had been crushed on Blocher’s Knoll, came up next, and remarked almost as woefully that Barlow was probably dead and Barlow’s division was “all cut to pieces.” That’s no way to talk, Howard curtly reined him in: “Do what you can, Ames, to gather the fragments and extend the line to the right.” A colonel with “a very wilted and drooping appearance” ignored Howard’s order; Howard “promptly put him under arrest and put another officer in charge of the regiment.” Gradually, as they came dribbling in, Howard posted the remains of the 11th Corps to the right of Orland Smith’s brigade, so that they all formed a north-facing crescent around Cemetery Hill, backed up by the artillery and protected in front by what was left of the 25th Ohio—some sixty men—as skirmishers “in the outskirts of the town.”

  Otis Howard had made as many mistakes as anyone else that day, but he did two things which were incontestably right: he fixed on Cemetery Hill as the point to hold from his first moment at Gettysburg and he made the wrecked debris of two infantry corps, who should have been reduced to nervelessness, stop and dig in. There was “no hurry, no confusion in his mind,” wrote one admiring veteran of the 25th Ohio. And no more Chancellorsvilles, either. It was Otis Howard’s fin
est hour, and he was taking the first steps on the path that would make him (in William Tecumseh Sherman’s estimate) a corps commander of “the utmost skill, nicety, and precision” by the end of the war. “I have seen many men in action,” wrote a journalist afterward, “but never so imperturbably cool as this General of the Eleventh Corps.”16

  Otis Howard’s hour, however, would prove, almost literally, to be not much more than an hour. Winfield Scott Hancock, bearing George Meade’s directive “to assume command,” arrived on Cemetery Hill sometime in the late afternoon, although the estimates of exactly when he showed up vary to the point of suspicion. Thirteen years after the battle, Hancock insisted that he rode up to the cemetery gatehouse “by 3:30 P.M., having had over two hours in which to travel the thirteen miles” between Gettysburg and Taneytown. What Hancock wanted, in the years after the battle, was the credit for having taken command and organized Union resistance on Cemetery Hill all by himself, and saving the Army of the Potomac from having the insult of rout added to the injury of defeat. But an arrival this early would have put Hancock on Cemetery Hill even before Early’s attack on Blocher’s Knoll, and Hancock undermined his own claim by describing how he found “our troops retreating in disorder and confusion from the town” and “General Howard … endeavoring to stop the retreat of his troops, many of whom were passing over the hill and down the Baltimore pike.” Hancock’s own first dispatch back to Meade is timed at 5:25, and refers to Hancock’s having “arrived here an hour since.” Organizing “a position in the cemetery” had been well under way, Hancock added, which could not have been so if Hancock had arrived any earlier than five o’clock. Howard actually noted Hancock’s arrival time as “4 p.m.,” and Charles Howard, likewise, fixed Hancock’s arrival “at about 4:25,” so that Hancock found Charles Howard’s one-armed brother “already occupying Cemetery Ridge.” But even an arrival time of 4:25 may be too early, since the last of the 1st Corps refugees do not seem to have reached Cemetery Hill until sometime between five and six o’clock.17