Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  At some point, John Bell Hood joined the perplexed knot of Confederate observers and “found that in making the attack according to orders”—in other words, according to Lee’s plan of wheeling left and driving up the Emmitsburg Road—“I should have first to encounter and drive off this advanced line of battle.” Hood’s first reflex was to send a six-man scouting team from his old 4th Texas to find out exactly what force was out in front of them, while Longstreet’s was to start positioning McLaws’ division to the left and Hood’s to the right. Even as they did so, “puffs of smoke” began to rise “at intervals … as the Federal batteries fired upon such portions of our line as became exposed to view.”12

  This, as Lafayette McLaws dryly remarked sixteen years later, “presented a state of affairs which was certainly not contemplated when the original plan or order of battle was given, and certainly not known to General Longstreet a half hour previous.” According to Captain Johnston’s morning report, there should have been no Union forces of any substance anywhere south of Cemetery Hill, all of which raises the very peculiar question of what, exactly, Captain Johnston saw, or did not see, that morning. By every Union account, the area south of Cemetery Hill had been swarming with Federal activity from sundown on July 1st straight through to noon of the 2nd—John Geary’s division of the 12th Corps had been the first to be posted along Cemetery Ridge on the night of July 1st; Geary moved over to Culp’s Hill early in the morning of July 2nd, as the 3rd Corps arrived piece by piece from Emmitsburg to replace him; and Winfield Scott’s 2nd Corps moved up the Taneytown Road behind the Round Tops and finished getting into position between the 3rd Corps and Cemetery Hill as Geary’s division was pulling out.13

  Taken together, these Federal troop movements make Johnston’s claim to have ridden straight up to the summit of Little Round Top unopposed and with nothing to observe simply incredible—unless, of course, Johnston had not been anywhere near the Round Tops in the first place. The broad undulating plain between South Mountain and the Susquehanna is punctuated with any number of cones, drumlins, moraines, and hillocks, and on the morning of July 2nd, it was also blanketed with “a heavy fog” which “hung over the field.” Samuel Johnston was certainly no novice at reconnaissance. But he was, as a Virginian, on entirely new and unmarked ground in south-central Pennsylvania, with a dearth of existing maps to help him (Johnston mentions Lee possessing a map of the general area, but never mentions carrying one himself on his early morning expedition). The gentlest conclusion to draw is that Johnston climbed some other hill, and thought it was the Round Tops (which may, in turn, account for his surprise at leading McLaws and Moncure along a road and up a rise which, without warning, revealed them to Federal signalmen), and thus completely overlooking the mass of Union troops between Cemetery Hill and the Round Tops that morning. It was a harmless enough error, taken by itself. But it was not by itself; it joined forces with the oversized and overheated imagination of Daniel Edgar Sickles to create a catastrophe of carnage.14

  Dan Sickles belonged in a novel rather than an army. Corrupt and confident, he coruscated political charm, talked in the grandest of hotel manners, and oozed sleaze and dissimulation from every pore. He was born in 1819—although Sickles persistently gave out alternative birth dates—in New York City, where his father’s fortune in real estate speculation guaranteed him the finest of tutors (including Lorenzo Da Ponte, who taught Italian literature at Columbia and had, in his long-ago youth, written libretti for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) and an unceasing bankroll of funding for lascivious escapades. Sickles was, from the beginning, a spoiled brat, and he matured from there into a suave, charming, and pathological liar, not unlike certain characters in Mozart operas. He studied law, but his real passion quickly became politics, which in New York City meant Democratic politics. He made his maiden speech at the tender age of sixteen on behalf of Martin Van Buren, and from there he rose to editing a campaign newspaper for James Knox Polk, sitting in the New York state assembly, wangling an honorific commission in the state militia, tagging along with James Buchanan as an assistant during Buchanan’s four years as American minister in London, and getting himself elected to Congress in 1856. His fellow New York lawyer, George Templeton Strong, recoiled from Sickles as “belonging to the filthy sediment of the profession,” or at least “one of the bigger bubbles of the scum.”

  Scum or not, Sickles sailed regally on the sea of his father’s money, dispensed patronage to loyal allies, and married a “ravishing” sixteen-year-old Italian beauty named Teresa Bagioli—whom he had probably seduced. Any eyebrows raised by this mésalliance were raised still further in 1859, when, after renting a lavish home on Lafayette Square in Washington, he caught the seducible Teresa being seduced by Philip Barton Key, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and the son of Francis Scott Key. An enraged Sickles pursued Key across Lafayette Square and then shot him to death after an energetic scuffle on the curbside across from the White House.15

  The murder thrust Sickles luridly into national headlines, but the high-priced legal team he assembled succeeded in convincing the jury that Sickles’ discovery of his wife’s infidelity had induced an attack of “mental unsoundness”—temporary insanity—and after a seventy-minute deliberation the jury found Sickles not guilty. Sickles reconciled three months later with Teresa, an accomplishment he fully expected to be “fatal to my professional, political, and social standing.” He was right. Congressman Sickles was shunned even on the floor of Congress, where he “was left to himself as if he had smallpox.” He wisely decided not to tempt fate by running for reelection, and he might otherwise have dropped soundlessly into the footnotes of American political history had not the Civil War broken out.

  As a rakehell Democrat, Sickles was expected to fall in with the abundant fellowship of New York City’s Democratic Lincoln haters, and at first, Sickles actually defended “the recognized right of secession” as “a conservative safeguard.” But he balked when the Southern states turned secession into a reality, and instead Sickles bound himself to the Union cause. “I did not vote for” Lincoln, Sickles proclaimed, “but I will fight under his orders and I will trust him everywhere.” He set about recruiting a five-regiment brigade which he named for the New York state motto, the “Excelsior Brigade.” The government was happy to have the men, but paused at commissioning the likes of Sickles as a brigadier general to command them. In 1861, however, Lincoln needed to rally all the bipartisan support he could muster, and the following spring the Senate very reluctantly confirmed Sickles as a brigadier general.16

  Dan Sickles may have been the epitome of the confidence man. But he was also “a Bowery boy,” an indisputable genius of the glad hand, and an organ-grinder of boodle. “Through his whole life, he has been distinguished by the strength and devotion of his friendships, and the consequent intensity of his partisanships,” which made him (as Harper’s Weekly said in its struggle to understand Sickles’ baffling appeal) “loved more sincerely, and hated more heartily, than any man of his day.” Even George Templeton Strong had to admit, against his will, that “there are judicious men who rate Sickles very high.” One such man—although not necessarily one of the more judicious—was Joe Hooker, who thought Sickles a “gallant leader” and an “intrepid chief” and “one of the greatest soldiers of the day.” Sickles’ Excelsior Brigade was attached to Hooker’s division in the 3rd Corps during the Peninsula Campaign, and when Hooker moved to take command of the 1st Corps before Antietam, Sickles took over his slot. In tandem, when Hooker was given command of the Army of the Potomac, Sickles was rewarded with command of the 3rd Corps and a major general’s commission, as well as the adoration of the men of the 3rd Corps who saw Sickles as “an ideal soldier of volunteers.”17

  Among those who were judicious but loathed Sickles was George Gordon Meade, who believed that Sickles, “being intellectually more clever than Hooker,” had obtained “an injurious ascendency over him.” Meade had little love for the 3rd Corps as it was, sin
ce from its earliest organization under Samuel Heintzelman in 1862 it had been stoutly anti-McClellanite. Sickles’ senior division commander, David Bell Birney, was a raspy “pale, Puritanical figure, with a demeanor of immovable coldness,” who would only “smile politely when you spoke to him.” Birney and Meade had been breathing out flames at each other ever since Fredericksburg, when Meade had galloped up to Birney’s brigade and demanded support in terms so profane it “almost makes the stones creep.” After that, Meade was “especially disliked by General Birney.” So, as the lead elements of the 3rd Corps came up the Emmitsburg Road in the twilight, the only task Meade had in mind for them was to turn off the road to the east and shuffle into place on Cemetery Ridge, alongside John White Geary’s 12th Corps division; in the morning, Meade would move Geary’s men over to Culp’s Hill, where he expected the real action to take place. The 3rd Corps would not only be left way off to his left flank and out of sight, but Meade would detach Buford’s cavalry division (which had been picketing the ground west of Cemetery Ridge) and send them back to Emmitsburg to refit, as though the 3rd Corps had no need of cavalry screening.18

  The last of the troops Sickles put on the road to Gettysburg on the afternoon of July 1st did not catch up to him on the low end of Cemetery Ridge until 1:00 a.m; an ad hoc brigade Sickles left in Emmitsburg (under an old political flunky of his from New York named Charles K. Graham) did not finish their march until nine o’clock on the morning of the 2nd. By then, Geary had pulled out his division to join the rest of the 12th Corps over near Culp’s Hill, and the gap between Sickles’ corps and Cemetery Hill was being filled by Hancock’s 2nd Corps. Meade left Sickles with no particular direction about how to deploy his two divisions, despite Sickles sending his chief of staff, Henry Tremain, to Meade’s headquarters “several times in the morning of that day, for the purpose of reporting the situation and of obtaining such instructions as might be necessary.” Meade had no such instructions; any battle worth fighting was going to take place over on Meade’s right, and Tremain afterward thought that “the actual situation never seemed to have been fully appreciated by General Meade.”19

  Sickles, however, was becoming convinced that Meade had some darker motive in shunting the 3rd Corps away from the glory of combat. As a man with long experience in the art of the setup, and with plenty of reason to believe that Meade might be happy to have the 3rd Corps end up like the hapless 11th Corps at Chancellorsville, Sickles began grasping at phantoms. When Charles Graham arrived that morning, he jangled Sickles’ anxieties by reporting a brush-up against Confederate pickets not far from the peach orchard, where he had turned to join Sickles. “The pickets and skirmishers were uneasy and kept up a desultory fire, little puffs of thin blue smoke dotting the plain before us.” Two months before, Sickles had seen signs of Stonewall Jackson’s great flank column in motion far in the distance, only to have Joe Hooker dismiss the reports as evidence that Jackson was beginning a retreat. Determined not to be lulled into passivity a second time, Sickles and Birney called up Hiram Berdan, who commanded the only genuinely specialized skirmish troops in the entire Army of the Potomac, the 1st and 2nd U.S. Sharpshooters, and ordered Berdan to “send forward a detachment of 100 sharpshooters” to the west side of the Emmitsburg Road to investigate. Berdan found nothing. But Birney and Sickles were convinced that something had to be happening, and around noon Birney ordered another company of the U.S. Sharpshooters “farther to the left of our lines,” with an entire regiment—the 3rd Maine—as supports, “with directions to feel the enemy.”20

  Sickles actually had no hard evidence beyond his own jumpy intuition that the 3rd Corps was in the line of danger. But when Berdan’s Sharpshooters plunged into the oak and chestnut woods beyond the Warfield farm, “they met a small boy who warned them … ‘Look out! There are lots of rebels in there, in rows.’ ” And they did indeed collide with Confederate skirmishers—Alabamians from Cadmus Wilcox’s brigade who were moving into position as part of Powell Hill’s contribution to the great flank attack. The firefight which erupted probably lasted no more than twenty minutes, but it was long enough for Berdan to glimpse “three columns in motion in rear of the wood, changing direction … by the right flank.” He sent off Capt. Joseph Briscoe to report to Birney, and then slowly disengaged, gradually pulling back across the Emmitsburg Road until, by two o’clock, he was able to report to Birney in person on “the result of our operations.”21

  Sickles was now certain that Meade had deliberately left him alone in the path of a Confederate landslide, with no cavalry screen and no supports within easy distance. Major Tremain’s repeated visits to headquarters had been met first with indifference, and then by a visit from one of Meade’s staffers (who happened to be George Meade junior) “to inquire of [Sickles] if his troops were yet in position, and to ask what he had to report.” Young Meade hadn’t even taken the trouble to find Sickles himself, but left the message with the chief of the 3rd Corps’ artillery, George Randolph. Meade came back an hour later with an irritated order from his father for Sickles to get into position, and at eleven o’clock, a troubled Sickles took himself directly up to the Widow Leister’s cottage to see Meade personally. “Observing, from the enemy’s movements on our left, what I thought to be conclusive indications of a design on their part to attack there,” Sickles later testified, “I went in person to headquarters and reported the facts and circumstances which led me to believe that an attack would be made there, and asked for orders.” He got nothing but a dismissive instruction to tie his right flank to the 2nd Corps and his left flank to the Round Tops. “I found that my impression as to the intention of the enemy to attack in that direction was not concurred in at headquarters,” and when Sickles asked Meade to at least come over and have a look for himself, Meade replied that “his engagements did not permit him to do that.” If not Meade himself, would Meade at least send his chief engineer, Gouverneur K. Warren? The answer was even more curt: no.22

  If Meade had not been convinced that the main attack “would be made upon his right,” he might have noticed that the signalers up on the Round Tops had (notwithstanding the best efforts at concealment by Longstreet, McLaws, and Porter Alexander) been sending messages to headquarters as early as noon about the movement of the “enemy’s skirmishers … from the west, 1 mile from here,” and how “the rebels are in force,” and describing Berdan’s firefight. More warnings followed about the approach of “a heavy column of enemy’s infantry … opposite our extreme left,” and then two more just after two o’clock. Instead, Meade snorted loftily at Sickles’ worries: “Generals are all apt to look for the attack to be made where they are.” Sickles countered the rebuff with a request: if Meade had no plans to intervene, could Sickles at least move his men around to suit his own judgment? Yes, Meade snapped impatiently, within reasonable limits, “any ground … you choose to occupy I leave to you.” Sickles also wrested assent from Meade to take the army’s artillery chief, Henry Hunt, back to the 3rd Corps position. Meade told Hunt, who had just returned from inspecting Union artillery positions, that Sickles “wished me to examine a new line” so that Sickles could make better use of his artillery.23

  That was all Sickles needed to hear. At Chancellorsville, Joe Hooker had compounded the mistake of indolence in the path of Stonewall Jackson by evacuating, a day later, an ideal artillery plateau at Hazel Grove, and allowing Confederate artillery to plant themselves there and pound the hapless Hooker and his cinched-in lines around the Chancellor house. The Federal troops whom Hooker pulled away from Hazel Grove had been, not surprisingly, those of the 3rd Corps, and from that Sickles had learned a lesson about holding on to high ground which he swore never to forget. As Sickles explained matters to Hunt, Cemetery Ridge declined imperceptibly by almost fifty feet as it snaked south from Cemetery Hill, so that at the point where the 3rd Corps was bivouacked, his troops were actually sitting, not on a ridge, but in “a low marshy swale.” Not only was it in “a hole” compared to Cemetery Hill, it w
as actually sixty feet lower than Sherfy’s peach orchard out at the Emmitsburg Road. And in between his “swale” and the road stretched three-quarters of a mile, bisected by a stony ridge which would be “unfit for artillery & [a] bad front for infantry.” The solution would be to move his two divisions up to the Emmitsburg Road and Sherfy’s peach orchard, where they would have the advantage of “the commanding ground.”24

  Hunt shifted uneasily. Examining the proposed Emmitsburg Road line with Sickles, Hunt pointed out what should have been obvious to Sickles: the Emmitsburg Road might well be “commanding ground,” but to get there Sickles would have to unhook himself from Hancock’s 2nd Corps, and leave a 600-yard gap yawning between Hancock’s left flank and Sickles’ right. At the other end, if Sickles lined up his divisions behind the Emmitsburg Road, the subtle angle of the road to the southwest would swing his other flank far out into the air, leaving the Round Tops completely uncovered. If Sickles was right, and the rebels were moving in force on the other side of the Emmitsburg Road, then he was presenting them with a target, begging to be bowled over. “The right of his proposed line was out where it would not be connected with the 2nd Corps,” Hunt gingerly explained, and “it would have to be connected, perhaps, by throwing out the left wing of the 2nd corps, and that could not well be done” unless the stony ridge “was under our control.”

  Sickles, who had already authorized David Birney to get his division in motion, offered a compromise. He would post his junior division commander, Andrew Atkinson Humphreys, along the Emmitsburg Road to secure the “commanding ground” down to Sherfy’s peach orchard, but then angle the line back severely—almost 90 degrees—and use Birney’s division to trace a line down toward the Round Tops. Could he do that? Hunt hesitated: this idea would “so greatly lengthen our line—which in any case must rest on Round Top, and connect with the left of the Second Corps—as to require a larger force than the Third Corps alone to hold it.” Hunt was an artilleryman, not an infantry officer, and he did not relish being caught between a corps commander whom everyone knew carried terrific clout with the politicians and George Meade, who had not yet confirmed Hunt’s position as chief of the army’s artillery. “So far as it was a line for troops to occupy,” Hunt diplomatically replied, “it was a very good line.” But, Hunt warned, Sickles “should wait orders from General Meade” before making such a dramatic move. And with that, Hunt rode off to report, “very briefly, to General Meade.”25