Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Whatever the exact timing of Hancock’s arrival, Howard was looking for Slocum, not Hancock, at that moment, and he was even more surprised when Hancock proceeded to announce that “he had been ordered to assume command.” Command? Hancock later insisted that Howard “acquiesced in my assumption of command” and from that point “gave no orders save to the troops of his own corps.” Hancock’s chief of staff even added that Howard “was pleased that Hancock had come,” and declined Hancock’s offer to show him the written directive from Meade. But this was not how Howard remembered the moment. Very much to the contrary, he was “deeply mortified,” principally because Howard enjoyed a healthy amount of seniority over Hancock in the Volunteer service, and as far as Howard was concerned, Meade’s orders only designated Hancock “to represent Meade as Butterfield, the chief of staff, would have done on the field of battle.”

  But there was more behind Howard’s mortification at Meade “superseding me in command of the field by a junior in rank” than just the technicalities of seniority: it would be missed by no one that an order to Hancock to supersede Howard was a gesture of political contempt for the army’s senior Republican. In the ranks of the 11th Corps, Hancock’s appearance was interpreted as something even more ominous: that Hancock had been sent by Meade “to withdraw his forces, and not attempt to hold the position he had chosen.” (This, said an officer in the 25th Ohio, “was talked about and believed by nearly all the officers in the corps.”)18

  Rather than happily surrendering responsibility to Hancock on Cemetery Hill, Abner Doubleday remembered that Howard immediately burst out in protest: “Why, Hancock, you cannot give any orders here! I am in command and rank you!” Hancock had evidently anticipated that this would not be easy, and replied, “I am aware of that, General, but I have written orders in my pocket from General Meade which I will show you if you wish to see them.” Howard would not budge: “No. I do not doubt your word, General Hancock, but you can give no orders while I am here.” By now, the silliness of arguing over precedence while two badly mauled infantry corps were struggling to dig themselves into Cemetery Hill began to dawn on both Howard and Hancock, although it is not clear which one was the first to offer a face-saving compromise. Abner Doubleday’s chief of staff later claimed that Hancock (who had nothing but his own staffers around him to enforce his authority) gave in first, saying, “Very well, General Howard, I will second any order that you have to give,” as if duplicating orders was sufficient to preserve the authority of each general. But he also added a comment which must have chilled Howard. “General Meade has also directed me to select a field on which to fight this battle in rear of Pipe Creek”—something which appeared nowhere in Meade’s orders to Hancock and which no one afterward would admit having heard Meade say. What pulled the stinger on that warning was Hancock’s hasty assurance that he was willing to endorse Howard’s stand on Cemetery Hill as “the strongest position by nature upon which to fight a battle that I ever saw, and if it meets your approbation I will select this as the battlefield.”19

  Less than half a mile to the east, Hancock could see the thickly wooded eminence of another hill, named for the farmer, Henry Culp, whose house and barns lay at its north foot. Howard had no opinion that Culp’s Hill could be turned into a second artillery platform to match Cemetery Hill. But Culp’s Hill did overlook the Baltimore Pike, which linked Gettysburg to the railhead at Westminster, Maryland. If he was indeed going to make a fight of it here, he would need that pike secured. So Hancock took it upon himself to order the woozy remnants of the 1st Corps over to Culp’s Hill, with Stevens’ 5th Maine battery posted to cover the saddle between Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill. Hancock sent his report back to Meade with William Mitchell, “informing him that I could hold the position until nightfall, and that I thought that the place to fight our battle.”20

  Otis Howard was writing to Meade, too, although his message was a complaint about Hancock’s usurpation of his seniority, the opening gun in an ongoing war of words between Howard and Hancock which lasted for the rest of their lives. “I believe I have handled these two corps to-day from a little past 11 until 4,” Howard complained, and all that Hancock did after that was to assist “in carrying out orders which I had already issued.” Hancock’s assertion that he had been sent to rescue the 1st and 11th Corps from disaster “has mortified me and will disgrace me.” In an army with a heavy McClellanite tilt at the top, and stacked against a corps commander with as enviable a reputation as Hancock’s, this was a debate the overstigmatized Howard was doomed to lose. But looked at closely, it was Howard, and not Hancock, who saved Cemetery Hill as the Army of the Potomac’s redoubt, and who (in all likelihood) carried out John Reynolds’ determination to compel George Meade to fight at Gettysburg.21

  In the gray twilight, Henry Slocum’s 12th Corps finally swung into view on the Baltimore Pike, “arriving there in the evening.” Slocum would never adequately explain why he had waited for three hours at Two Taverns, within earshot of what could have been heard as a major battle, before coming up to Gettysburg. “In the morning, or very soon afterwards, we heard rumblings of artillery,” wrote one man in the 27th Indiana, and the “firing early became so distinct and rapid that many were apprehensive that the decisive battle … might be on.” If Slocum had pressed on, “the distance … might have been traversed by noon.” But Slocum was operating under the Pipe Creek Circular. As Abner Doubleday put it, Slocum was anxious not to “antagonize the plans of the General-in-Chief,” and he would not take the chance of irritating Meade by leaving Two Taverns until Meade’s countermand arrived around four o’clock. But once on the road, Slocum pounded ahead till “men fell out of the ranks in squads by the roadside for a brief rest.” The advance guard of the 12th Corps finally reached Cemetery Hill around six o’clock, to the “notes of the bugle and the inspiring strains of bands.” One of Slocum’s divisions (under the onetime territorial governor of “Bleeding Kansas,” the six-foot, six-inch John White Geary) was posted on the left of Cemetery Hill, where a gentle ridgeline dangled southward, and the other alongside the gnarled bits of the 1st Corps who had been sent to Culp’s Hill. In the process, Slocum’s provost guard spread out across the Baltimore Pike to begin snagging nearly 1,500 stragglers and returning them to the ranks, while George Stannard’s nine-months’ Vermont brigade and the 7th Indiana (on detached duty guarding the 1st Corps ammunition train) showed up to put some modest weight back into the 1st Corps.22

  The arrival of Henry Slocum and the 12th Corps put a practical end to the jostling between Howard and Hancock, since Slocum outranked them both. Moreover, Meade had instructed Hancock to defer to Slocum when the 12th Corps finally arrived—although, even then, Hancock could not resist trying to take charge of Slocum’s lead division before Slocum himself galloped up to the gatehouse in the darkening twilight. (In his after-action report, a tight-lipped Slocum was at pains to claim that his first division was actually deployed “agreeably to suggestion from General Howard.”) Hancock had briefly worried that “the enemy will mass in town and make an effort to take this position,” and Doubleday was frantic that “there was nothing to prevent the enemy from encircling and capturing us all, for every division of the Confederate forces … was either in line of battle or very near the town.” But as the last light died away, “no very serious demonstrations were made against our new position.” Otto von Fritsch remembered that “everything remained quiet,” while “plenty of cartridges were distributed, and, now and then, a box of crackers was carried to a starved regiment.”23

  In the twilight, Confederate skirmishers began peppering the Union positions on Cemetery Hill with sporadic fire. Union soldiers began knocking down “headstones and iron fence” in the cemetery to clear fields of fire and make room for the artillery. But even that died away after dark, and in “a lower room of the gate house of the Gettysburg Cemetery … six or seven generals” gathered around a barrel with a “burning tallow candle stuck in the neck of a bottle on top of i
t.” They listened “to the accounts of those who had been in the battle of the day … discussing what might have been and finally all agreeing in the hope that General Meade … would decide to fight the battle of the morrow on the ground on which we then were.” This impromptu debriefing broke up, and the commanders wandered back to their units to “lay down, wrapt in our cloaks, with the troops among the gravestones.” None of them afterward remembered commenting on the irony of their position—whether the Army of the Potomac had been digging its own grave on that hill. There was nothing but “profound stillness in the graveyard, broken by no sound” but the snoring of the exhausted men, the nervous pawing of the artillery horses, “and sudden rumblings mysteriously floating on the air from a distance all around.”24

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  If the enemy is there to-morrow, we must attack him

  FOR AN EVENT which has been the subject of so much relentless historical study, professional and amateur alike, there remain surprisingly large gaps in the record of the Gettysburg battle, and none of them is more peculiar at this juncture than the invisibility of Robert E. Lee on the afternoon of July 1st. Once Lee joined Harry Heth on Herr Ridge around two o’clock, almost all mention of Lee evaporates. George Henry Mills of the 16th North Carolina (in Dorsey Pender’s division) saw “Gens. Lee, A.P. Hill, Longstreet and others watching the fighting with their glasses” near the Cashtown Pike. Just as Pettigrew launched his attack on the Iron Brigade in Herbst’s Woods, a soldier in the 52nd North Carolina crossed Willoughby Run and saw “General Lee … sitting on his horse just across the Run, and we boys cheered him. He raised his hat. It was about 3:15 in the afternoon.” Willie Pegram, who commanded an artillery battalion in Hill’s corps, was rewarded with a compliment from Lee, which also locates Lee on the west side of the fighting. Coleman Anderson, acting as a courier for Ewell, found Lee around “4:30 o’clock that afternoon … standing alone on an eminence in an open field, some distance to the right of Heth’s division, with the bridle rein of Traveler thrown over his right arm and looking anxiously through his field glasses at … Cemetery Ridge.”1

  Still, even in the absence of a trail of witnesses, it is hard to survey the resounding success and coordination of the late afternoon attack that swept the 1st and 11th Corps off their feet without seeing the hand of Robert E. Lee at work. The first set of attacks that day, by Heth and then by Rodes, had been thoughtless impulses, embarrassingly uncoordinated, and easily rebuffed by hastily deployed Union forces. Three hours later, after Lee’s arrival, a second series of attacks (beginning with the arrival of Jubal Early’s division) steps off in perfectly timed harmony and support, and rolls over two Union corps with almost no hindrance. If this does not bear Lee’s thumbprint, there is no knowing what does. Once having driven the Federal infantry off Seminary Ridge, Lee seems to have expected Powell Hill to keep moving, and to drive the broken refugees through the town and off the flat-topped eminence Lee could see on the horizon. He even sent one of his staffers, Lindsay Long, “to make a reconnaissance of the Federal position,” and we know that at least one order Lee gave was to the chief of his artillery reserve to find “positions on the right” along Seminary Ridge which could “enfilade the valley between our position and the town and the enemy’s batteries next the town” and begin “a flank movement against the enemy in his new position.”

  But this was not, after all, the way Lee liked to do business. Instead of allowing his corps commanders to take charge on the field, Lee had been required to take charge of them and get them moving properly, and this was not his preferred modus operandi. Hill, who had started the day being surprised by the presence of Federal troops in his path, was now wary of making any more such unanticipated discoveries, and his notion of pressing the fleeing enemy was to allow Abner Perrin’s brigade to move into the town, “taking position after position of the enemy” until Hill was satisfied they had gone as far forward as they could go with safety. “The want of cavalry had been and was again seriously felt,” Hill later explained. But what he really meant was that he was determined not to make that morning’s mistake a second time in the afternoon, with Lee watching: “Prudence led me to be content with what had been gained.” And after adding that the two divisions of his corps that had borne the brunt of the fighting—Heth’s and Dorsey Pender’s—were “exhausted and necessarily disordered,” Hill allowed the momentum which had carried him over Seminary Ridge to leak away. That Hill had an entire, unengaged division under Richard Heron Anderson and two uncommitted brigades from Pender’s division, halted back at Herr Ridge, went unnoticed in Hill’s battle report that fall.2

  Not unnoticed, however, by officers in his command. David McIntosh, who commanded an artillery battalion in Hill’s corps, thought it was “almost incomprehensible” that “the Seminary Ridge should not then have been occupied with Confederate artillery to play upon the opposing heights” and give it enough pounding to “have led to an abandonment” of Cemetery Hill. A surgeon in the 13th South Carolina, writing home to his wife, was sure that “If ‘Old Stonewall’ had been alive and there, it no doubt would have been done.” Dorsey Pender begged Hill to bring up Anderson’s division, “but neither Anderson nor his Division were anywhere to be found.” Abner Perrin was unsure whether this was “Gen Hill’s fault” or whether “it may have been the fault of Anderson himself,” but either way, it gave “the enemy during this eventful time” the opportunity to gain “their new position at the Cemetery Hill.” If Hill had added Anderson to the pursuit, “it is more than probable that the whole Yankee force would have been captured.” And so, almost spontaneously, the tongues in Hill’s corps began to wag in criticism. “Hill was a good division commander,” the wise heads were already concluding before the campfires had even been lit, “but he is not a superior corps commander. He lacks the mind and sagacity of Jackson.”3

  It has to be said, however, that it was not just “prudence” that led Hill to balk at rushing after the shattered Federal infantry. Between 4:30 and 6:00, the streets and alleys of Gettysburg were filled with a paralyzing accumulation of small gun battles. As the French had learned to their sorrow at Magenta in 1859, the tacticians of the nineteenth century had no workable doctrine that governed street fighting, which is why both attackers and defenders in the Civil War did their best to avoid it. No Confederates moving through Gettysburg were eager to pass by potential knots of Union soldiers hiding in cellars and garrets, lest they find enough courage again to start sniping at Confederates from behind, and so still more rebel soldiers had to be detailed to clear Gettysburg’s houses and shops of concealed Federals. Albertus McCreary’s family had finally taken refuge in their cellar as the fighting moved down Baltimore Street, and the cloud had hardly passed over before “the outer cellar doors were pulled open and five Confederate soldiers jumped down among us,” announcing that “we are looking for Union soldiers.” Sure enough, the rebels found “thirteen of our men” in the upper floors of the McCreary house, “some under beds, and one under the piano, and others in closets.” A lieutenant in the 6th Louisiana wrote his brother to describe how “we shot them, bayonetted them, & captured more prisoners than we had men in the brigade.” Three Union officers (one of them from the Iron Brigade) tried to hide in the pile of store goods and firewood in the Stoever family’s home on the town diamond, only to be rousted out “after a diligent search.” Even if the Federals surrendered, time was required to round up and disarm them, and then men were needed to escort them to temporary holding pens. As much as Dorsey Pender might have wanted to keep moving through the town, even he had to order the 1st South Carolina “to halt, and go back and take the prisoners out.” Chaplain J. Marshall Meredith, in Brockenbrough’s Virginia brigade, could hardly move forward into Gettysburg because of the “long and large force of Federal prisoners marching back on the Cashtown road westward.”4

  Confederates who could not find hidden Yankees soon turned their attention to other prizes of war. Liberty Hollinger, on the
east side of Gettysburg, remembered that rebels who had satisfied themselves that no Union soldiers were hiding in the Hollinger home proceeded to help “themselves to anything they could find,” and “forced the locks” on her father’s storehouse “and took what they wanted and then ruined everything else.” Nellie Auginbaugh, who was twenty years old and living with her parents on Carlisle Street near the railroad station, saw a “Union soldier … shot down right in front of Mother’s home.” In a few minutes, “a Confederate came along, and he searched the dead man’s clothes,” only to find “nothing of value” but a “small picture of the dead man and apparently his wife and two little children.” Auginbaugh’s grandfather carefully slipped out the door and rolled the body up in a blanket—only to have another Confederate come along a few minutes later, unroll the blanket, and go “through the pockets, as the other had done.”5