Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Someone went off to rouse Howard and Slocum from their hasty slumber, and the little knot of generals was soon joined by Dan Sickles, who had also just arrived in advance of his 3rd Corps. Howard launched into a briefing of the situation and “told Meade at once what I thought of the cemetery position,” especially with Sickles and Slocum at hand. “I am confident we can hold this position,” Howard concluded. Slocum chimed in, “It is good for defense,” and even Sickles thrust in his endorsement: “It is a good place to fight from, general.” To Howard’s relief, Meade agreed, although with something less than his generals’ bounce. “I am glad to hear you say so, gentlemen, for it is too late to leave it.” Carl Schurz quizzed Meade about how many men they could expect to fight with. “In the course of the day I expect to have about 95,000,” Meade replied, although again without enthusiasm. “Enough, I guess for this business.”18

  And then, with the generals trailing behind him, Meade rode off to reconnoiter the two hills and the ridgeline behind Cemetery Hill for himself. Overall, the Union position that night resembled a shallow half-circle, with the center curved around Cemetery Hill and facing north, held largely by the remains of the 11th Corps and the artillery batteries Howard and Hancock had bunched there. To the right, Cemetery Hill fell off sharply into a deep swale whose lower end was covered by Stevens’ 5th Maine battery, and then sloped up steeply again to form the tree-studded crest of Culp’s Hill, where the 1st Corps and one division of the 12th Corps now rested. Off to the left, where Cemetery Hill tapered gently down to the low ridge known simply as Cemetery Ridge, Slocum’s other 12th Corps division was posted, and they would soon be joined by the 3rd Corps as Sickles’ men arrived in the night along the Emmitsburg Road. Meade “rode around the lines through the cemetery … taking a full survey of the natural features of the position.” He stopped to quiz Charles Wainwright about the “dispositions” of his 1st Corps artillery, and at one point “as they rode along the line towards the left,” a few of the light sleepers among the men “sprang up and cheered”—not for Meade, but for McClellan, having mistaken Meade for Little Mac. They rode as far down the ridgeline as a pair of rocky, conelike hills, then circled back to Culp’s Hill, and finally back to Cemetery Hill, with Meade’s staff topographer, Capt. William Paine, busily sketching the terrain as best he could in the milky white moonlight.

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  As they completed this circuit, the silver of the full moon was already beginning to yield noiselessly to the dawn. Meade “sat upon his horse as the sun was rising,” once more surveyed “Cemetery Hill and its environments,” and began ordering adjustments. Slocum’s two divisions would be concentrated on Culp’s Hill, which (as it turned out) was not actually one peak, but two; the 11th Corps would continue to hug Cemetery Hill and the massed batteries around the Evergreen Cemetery. The 3rd Corps was to take up a remote position at the lower end of Cemetery Ridge; when Hancock brought up the 2nd Corps, they would fill in the space on the ridge between Sickles and Cemetery Hill. Meade took for a headquarters the tiny one-and-half-story farm cottage of Lydia Leister, an illiterate widow “with a German face and a strong German accent” who had prudently fled the scene the day before with her four children. But Meade was still uninspired by the battlefield Reynolds and Howard had thrust on him. It was what Abner Doubleday described as “an open secret” that Meade privately “disapproved of the battle-ground.” Still, Meade shrugged and said to Carl Schurz, “we may fight it out here just as well as anywhere else.”19

  Meade made several other decisions at the same time that wear a more puzzling aspect. The first of these concerned poor Doubleday, who had been in command of the 1st Corps since the death of John Reynolds the previous morning. The written update Hancock sent back to Meade from Gettysburg included a brief statement—“Howard says that Doubleday’s command gave way”—which became fixed in Meade’s mind as proof that Doubleday had lost all control of the 1st Corps and somehow caused the collapse of both the 1st and the 11th Corps. It is difficult to believe that either Howard or Hancock intended any judgment this dire, although Doubleday would never forgive either of them. But in the polarized political atmosphere of the Army of the Potomac, it suited Meade to believe that this constituted a very good reason to yank backward one of the better-known Republican abolitionists in the army. And so, in the same orders that authorized Hancock to “take command” over Howard’s head, Meade canceled Doubleday’s takeover of the 1st Corps, returning him to command of his division, and inserting in Reynolds’ place one of John Sedgwick’s division commanders in the 6th Corps, John Newton.20

  Doubleday was aghast. Not only was John Newton some twenty heads behind Doubleday in seniority, he had been a fixture of the McClellanite regime in the 6th Corps and played a direct role in undermining Ambrose Burnside after Fredericksburg. In Washington, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War zeroed in on Newton as one of its chief offenders and balked at approving his promotion to major general until March 1863. To Meade, who had served at Fredericksburg alongside Newton under the arch-McClellanite William Buel Franklin, Newton was the only other major general he could trust politically. To the ordinary soldiers, however, Newton was simply an unknown who had “rather ungraciously” usurped Doubleday. “I know nothing as to what sort of a general he is,” wrote Charles Wainwright when he learned of Newton’s appointment. Nevertheless, it was Newton who “was sent for by General Meade to take command of the 1st corps, because it was said the officer left in command was wounded, or was not satisfactory, or something of that kind.”21

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  Doubleday could guess in exactly what way he was “not satisfactory” to Meade. He was furious at what he interpreted as a barefaced humiliation, but there was also little he could do about it. Meade had been given a blank check to promote, dismiss, or retain as he wished. And anyway, Meade did not have much in the way of plans for the battered 1st Corps, no matter who was commanding it. In the pearly dawn’s light, Meade was scanning the territory north of Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill and wondering whether the 5th and 6th Corps could arrive quickly enough to combine with Slocum’s 12th Corps “with a view to descend into the plain and attack Lee’s left.”

  When Slocum arrived at Gettysburg, he pointed his first division, under Alpheus Williams, to the right of the Union line and posted them as far east as Wolf’s Hill, just beyond Culp’s Hill. Slocum scouted the area personally and eventually pulled Williams’ division back toward Culp’s Hill. “Hence we withdrew from Wolf’s Hill and the Hanover Road,” wrote a captain in the 2nd Massachusetts. But if the 5th Corps was already on the way from Hanover, then it would still be relatively simple to turn them off the Hanover Road at Wolf’s Hill and effect a juncture with the 12th Corps. If the 6th Corps was coming along somewhere behind the 5th Corps, then by mid-morning Meade should have a sufficiently critical mass of infantry to launch a heavy blow east of Wolf’s Hill at the overextended flank of Dick Ewell’s Confederates.22

  But where, exactly, were George Sykes and the 5th Corps, and where were John Sedgwick and the 6th Corps? Sykes pulled down his bivouac near Hanover as soon as Meade’s orders to move on Gettysburg arrived at dusk on July 1st. Baggage wagons were sent south to Westminster, while Sykes’ infantry, along with “the ammunition wagons and ambulances, were pushed forward” on the Hanover Road. The column stopped briefly at two in the morning, “when we laid down in an open woods” near the village of Bonaughtown, but after an hour’s respite, “the drums beat reveille, and soon after we were again in motion.” The 5th Corps had marched “over sixty miles” in the last three days, twenty-six of them alone since 7:00 a.m. on July 1st, and so many “shoeless and hatless” men “dropped out of the ranks” that roll calls were “not averaging more than thirty men to each company.” It was only on the road that men in the 5th Corps “were informed of the trouble at Gettysburg” and “the close presence of the enemy,” and as the sun rose over the thick crowns of oak t
rees ahead the old rumor ignited up and down the columns: “McClellan is to command us to-morrow.” By seven o’clock, the 5th Corps had reached “outriders of Slocum’s corps,” who wheeled them off the Hanover Road and massed them behind Wolf’s Hill. Bringing up the rear was Samuel Wylie Crawford’s division of Pennsylvania Reserves, one of whose regiments contained a company recruited from Gettysburg. As they turned off the Hanover Road “the members of the company” could “see their homes, in the village before them,” and “all of them within the enemy’s lines.”23

  The 6th Corps, however, was having a harder time reaching Gettysburg. “After five days’ severe marching,” John Sedgwick had stopped at Manchester, Maryland, twelve miles east of Meade’s headquarters at Taneytown and twenty-three miles from Gettysburg if he went by way of Hanover. The 6th Corps, however, had no plans to go anywhere, since Manchester sat at the eastern end of Pipe Creek, and the men of the 6th spent most of July 1st “devoted to rest, to cleaning arms, and repairing clothing.” Then came a galloper from Meade “just after sunset,” ordering the entire corps onto the road to Taneytown at once. “Immediately came the verbal order … to ‘pack up and fall in immediately,’ ” wrote a soldier in the 10th Massachusetts, and “in an amazing short space of time … the column filed into the road.” Two hours later, one of Sedgwick’s own staffers, Thomas Hyde, found him with new orders from Meade “to make a forward march to Gettysburg” and to detach John Newton for service with the 1st Corps.

  Sedgwick angled the line of march northeast, toward Littlestown. Something in Meade’s orders had set the alarms ringing in the usually easygoing Sedgwick. He got up one of the bands to play “Old John Brown”—John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave—and in short order “a score of voices joined throats to the music, then a hundred, then a thousand, and soon ten thousand voices rolled out the battle song: ‘Glory, Glory, Hallelujah, His soul is marching on.’ ” Sedgwick kept the musicians going all through the night to speed up the pace, but the men had more than music animating them: the simple solidarity of the soldiers themselves. “Every man in the Corps knew,” wrote the colonel of the 37th Massachusetts, “that our comrades of the Army of the Potomac were expecting us.” All night long, added a brigade staffer, “we marched eagerly forward to take our places beside our comrades.”24

  By dawn, the 6th Corps had reached Littlestown, where they first began to meet walking wounded on the road or “citizens bringing the wounded from the field in their carriages,” and “with scarcely an exception the tale they told was one of disaster to the Federal army.” You fellows will catch it; the whole army is smashed to pieces! In the distance they caught the “booming artillery” and could see “through an opening between the hills what looks like a white bank of fog.” Closer on, and the fog could be seen full of “white puffs of bursting shells … flashing forked lighting,” making the hills seem to a veteran in the 61st Pennsylvania to be “sending up fire and smoke like a volcano in active eruption.”25

  For all of Sedgwick’s pushing, however, the 6th Corps had no chance of reaching Gettysburg before two o’clock in the afternoon—in truth, they would not be there until closer to five o’clock—undermining Meade’s plan to mass the 5th, 6th, and 12th Corps for a counterblow at the Confederates east of Gettysburg. Henry Slocum was also having second thoughts about the wisdom of such an attack. “At my request,” wrote Slocum, “Gen. Meade sent Gen. [Gouverneur] Warren to examine our position and the ground in our front.” When Warren, Meade’s own chief engineer, added his doubts about the feasibility of attacking across ground that was gullied and uneven, “the order was countermanded.” The 12th Corps would be “detailed for the construction of breastworks and abatis” on the peaks of Culp’s Hill, and the 5th Corps would be moved into a reserve position around the small knoll of Powers Hill, behind Cemetery Hill along the Baltimore Pike.26

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  The attention Meade lavished on the planned morning attack around Wolf’s Hill stands in puzzling contrast to the offhand decision he made that morning to park Dan Sickles’ 3rd Corps far out of range of his attention, near the conical hills at the end of Cemetery Ridge. In response to Reynolds’ early-morning instruction that “he had better come up,” Daniel Sickles already had most of the 3rd Corps on the road to Gettysburg by midday on July 1st, with the band of the 26th Pennsylvania cheerfully playing “Home, Sweet Home” as they crossed the Pennsylvania state line. Already in his short tenure as commander of the Army of the Potomac, Meade had been cuttingly abrupt with Sickles, and if there was any corps commander he would gladly have cashiered on the spot, the self-important New York solon was it. So, although Slocum had originally sent orders for Sickles to move up and link with the left flank of the 11th Corps on Cemetery Hill, Meade issued different instructions when he arrived on the scene. Hancock and the 2nd Corps, who were expected to arrive by six o’clock on the morning of July 2nd, would be slotted into the position beside the 11th Corps; Sickles and the 3rd Corps could content themselves with a more distant perch at the tail of Cemetery Ridge.27

  The less George Meade saw of Sickles, the happier he was, and he was more than content to place Sickles out of sight and out of mind on the far left. Meade would discover too late that in getting Sickles out of his own way, he had put him directly in the way of Robert E. Lee.

  The commander of the Army of Northern Virginia never aspired to be an innovator (unlike the man to whom he would eventually surrender, Ulysses S. Grant, who understood that “War is progressive, because all the instruments and elements of war are progressive”). Whenever Robert E. Lee found a tactical trick that worked, he liked to keep using it until it broke. This was a pattern he had established on the Peninsula in 1862, when he had used headlong frontal assaults to win the day at Gaines’ Mill, only to find out at Malvern Hill how costly and fruitless they could be. He then learned at Second Bull Run how frighteningly effective it was to clinch one part of an enemy’s army, even at unfavorable odds, while gathering and landing an overwhelming blow on the enemy’s flank. This had worked to even more devastating effect at Chancellorsville, when Stonewall Jackson’s lengthy loop to the west concluded with a descent on Joe Hooker’s flank that splintered everything in its path. This, therefore, would be the trick he would play on George Meade at Gettysburg. Dally and fool with Meade on his right around Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill, while launching a stealthy but massive blow on the other side of Cemetery Hill. It might well be a costly attack, and he no longer had Jackson to carry this through. But he did have the man who had first shown him how it worked at Second Bull Run, and that was James Longstreet.28

  Longstreet had had a busy day on July 1st, accompanying Lee that morning as far as Cashtown, then turning back to nudge his two stalled divisions to tread on Allegheny Johnson’s heels and move toward Gettysburg. When he rejoined Lee at Gettysburg around five that afternoon, it was only to report that these two lead divisions—John Bell Hood’s and Lafayette McLaws’—had been “completely blocked up” on the Cashtown Pike by Johnson’s division in its struggle to rejoin the rest of Ewell’s corps. As the daylight expired, McLaws’ division had only made it as far as Marsh Creek, and Hood would not make it even that far until midnight. When Lee quizzed Longstreet on how close his corps was, Longstreet had to point backward and admit, “General, there comes the head of my column where you see that dust rising,” some “three or four miles in our rear.” Longstreet offered to push up his two lead brigades, if that would help, but Lee declined. It was “too late … to go on this evening.” Lee’s mind was already turning on how he could use Longstreet’s corps the next day, and Longstreet sent a courier back to Chambersburg to summon the last of his divisions, George Pickett’s, to Gettysburg.29

  This became the moment on which the next great controversy of the battle would hang, as the postwar keepers of Lee’s memorial flame shifted the artillery of blame from Stuart’s ride and Dick Ewell at Cemetery Hill to Longstreet. In 1866, William Swinton
, the Scottish-born correspondent for the New York Times, wrote a bulky survey, Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac, with material from interviews he conducted with a number of the commanders, including Longstreet. The burly Longstreet did not mind telling Swinton that “General Lee expressly promised his corps-commanders that he would not assume a tactical offensive, but force his antagonist to attack him.” But as they approached Gettysburg, Lee abandoned his promise and went on attack. This, Longstreet added, was “a grave error,” but “having … gotten a taste of blood in the considerable success of the first day,” Longstreet believed that Lee had “lost that equipoise in which his faculties commonly moved, and he determined to give battle.”

  Longstreet’s comments were lost in one of Swinton’s footnotes until 1872, when Jubal Early sketched the outlines of an accusation which would help sink Longstreet’s reputation even lower than Ewell’s—that after the evening conference at the almshouse, “Lee left us for the purpose of ordering up Longstreet’s corps in time to begin the attack at dawn next morning.” Longstreet, however, dallied. His “corps was not in readiness to make the attack until four o’clock in the afternoon of the next day,” and by that time all hope of success had evaporated. Early was seconded a few months later by Lee’s old artillery chief, William Nelson Pendleton, who also insisted that Lee had ordered Longstreet “to make an attack at daylight the next morning,” which Longstreet failed to do “but sat on his horse until about 4 p.m.” on July 2nd.30

  A good many of Lee’s and Longstreet’s subordinates, including Lafayette McLaws, Charles Venable, and Charles Marshall, scoffed at Early’s claim. But stung by Early’s charges, Longstreet wrote two self-justifying articles, “put together rapidly,” for the Philadelphia Weekly Times in 1876. In 1887, Longstreet contributed yet another article, “Lee’s Invasion of Pennsylvania,” to The Century’s “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War” series, frankly laying out his disagreement with Lee about attacking the Federal army. According to Longstreet, Lee demurred: “No, the enemy is there, and I am going to attack him there … I am going to whip them or they are going to whip me.”31