Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  With that possibility in mind, at some point before the attack on the 3rd Corps, Meade had quietly asked Dan Butterfield, as chief of staff, to draw up a contingency plan for a withdrawal to Pipe Creek, even making “a rough sketch showing the position of the corps” and how he wanted them detached from contact with the Confederates. Butterfield drew up the order, and showed it to John Gibbon, who happened to be at Meade’s headquarters behind the 2nd Corps. Gibbon was alarmed that the order even spelled out “the movement of army corps on specified roads to points in the rear.” Good God, Gibbon exclaimed, Gen. Meade is not going to retreat, is he?

  Once the 3rd Corps disintegrated and took the 5th Corps with it that afternoon, Alfred Pleasonton found Meade in a state of “so little assurance … in the strength of his position,” that he “directed me to gather what cavalry I could, and prepare to cover the retreat of the army.” When the summons to the council arrived at 6th Corps headquarters, John Sedgwick, despite his testimony before the Joint Committee eight months later, drew precisely the same conclusion as Gibbon. “Gen. Sedgwick called” his chief of staff, Lt. Col. Martin McMahon, “about nine [o’clock], saying that he had been called to a Council” and “that General Meade was thinking of a retreat.” Sedgwick’s own aide-de-camp whispered to Thomas Hyde that “the general was going to the headquarters to a council of war” and that “we were going to march back twenty miles that night.”5

  But if Meade was looking for an affirmation for a fallback to Pipe Creek after this disastrous day, he did not get it. “The discussion was at first very informal,” with Meade asking the tightly packed room of generals for an estimate of their losses that day, and then a reckoning of the available troops in each corps. The numbers could not have been reassuring. At best, the generals guessed that the Army of the Potomac could muster 58,000 men, and as the tension of the meeting was occasionally interrupted by eruptions of volleying and artillery fire from the direction of Culp’s Hill, the generals were reminded that those numbers were suffering further subtractions through more casualties even as they spoke.

  John Newton loyally supplied the table-setting observation that Gettysburg was “a bad position” and that Cemetery Hill “was no place to fight a battle in.” Picking up that cue, Meade then asked everyone “whether our army should remain on that field and continue the battle, or whether we should change to some other position,” like Pipe Creek, “which was impregnable.” The answers came bounding back in exactly the opposite direction. “By the custom of war,” John Gibbon wrote, “the junior member votes first as on courts-martial,” and so Gibbon chimed in with a polite but vigorous demurrer: “Correct the position of the army,” Gibbon advised, but do “not retreat.” Alpheus Williams was next: “Stay,” and he was seconded by David Birney and George Sykes. Newton entered the weak plea that “if we wait, it will give them a chance to cut our line,” but he could see which way the wind was blowing, and finally agreed with Gibbon’s “not retreat.” On it went: Howard voted to remain, and even urged an attack if the Confederates stayed their hand. Hancock confirmed Gibbon’s advice, and added with a touch of anger, “Let us have no more retreats. The Army of the Potomac has had too many retreats … Let this be our last retreat.” Sedgwick also voted to “remain” and “await attack”; Slocum went last and uttered only three determined words: Stay and fight.

  This was not the conclusion Meade had wanted; if Sickles’ misbehavior had given him the excuse he needed for retreating, his corps commanders had just stripped it away. “General Meade arose” from where he had been sitting at Lydia Leister’s table, and grumpily reinforced Newton’s objection: “Have it your way, gentlemen, but Gettysburg is no place to fight a battle.” He had taken the poll and it had not gone his way, and he would have to live with it. No one doubted Meade’s personal courage, but there was a general sense that this was not the moment to revert to McClellan-style risk-aversion. “He thought it better to retreat with what we had, than run the risk of losing all,” and there was no doubt in Henry Slocum’s mind that “but for the decision of his corps commanders,” Meade and the Army of the Potomac “would have been in full retreat … on the third of July.”6

  The council broke up near midnight, just as Henry Hunt rode up to the Leister cottage. He quickly learned that “the question had been spoken of as to what they should do … about falling back,” but “there was no person at all in favor of leaving the ground we had then.”7

  Robert E. Lee may also have been anticipating a meeting on July 2nd, albeit a private one, and the atmosphere was, if anything, more likely to be charged with greater disappointment and unhappiness than Meade’s with his generals. After eight days of invisibility, James Ewell Brown Stuart was finally reporting.

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  By the time Stuart and his cavalry descended on the last wagons in the Rockville supply train on June 28th, his anxieties about finding the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia began to crowd out whatever plans he might have entertained for prolonging his raid around the Federal army, capturing Joe Hooker, or making a sensational dash on Washington. “It was important for me,” Stuart realized, “to reach our column with as little delay as possible.” He paroled the 400 prisoners taken with the train, and probably should have dumped the wagons as well, since managing them had become a “serious embarrassment.” His men pulled down telegraph wires, burned railroad bridges, and tore up track, but the overriding problem was that Stuart had only the vaguest idea of where Lee and the rest of the army might be found. He could only guess from the newspapers and from interrogating his prisoners that “the enemy was … moving through Frederick City northward,” and make a rough calculation of how far the army should have progressed by this time. Although Stuart would be roundly blamed for having left Lee to wander in the dark, Lee had hardly done less to Stuart.8

  Stuart actually guessed remarkably well. He had his troopers up and riding early on the morning of June 29th, heading north, and by mid-morning they had reached Westminster, Maryland, pointed toward Hanover, Pennsylvania. Westminster was a terminus for the Western Maryland Railroad and the rail yards at Westminster were staked out by two companies from the as yet untested 1st Delaware Cavalry. To them, nothing much seemed to be happening between there, Hanover, or Gettysburg.9

  Proof of how wrong they were appeared at 3:30 on the afternoon of the 29th, when a civilian came tearing into Westminster with a warning that Confederate cavalry was approaching from the south. Capt. Charles Corbit got his two cavalry companies into their saddles, calling at the same time for the streets to be cleared. As soon as Corbit’s horsemen emerged from the town, they ran into the advanced guard of Stuart’s column, commanded by Fitzhugh Lee. In an act of almost suicidal audacity, Corbit ordered a charge directly into the Confederate column. This struck the 4th Virginia Cavalry entirely by surprise, and Corbit’s seventy-odd troopers actually forced the Confederates back, and fended off two poorly organized countercharges. “The charge was of such impetuosity that we drove them back some distance,” wrote one satisfied Delaware trooper—until Fitz Lee himself came up to take charge. Lee sorted out his tangled regiments, threw out the 4th Virginia in a flanking maneuver, and then closed back in on Corbit in a “short, sharp, decisive” fight. Corbit’s horse was shot down, and Corbit himself captured, “standing astride of his dead horse” and trying to fight the rebels off with his revolver. Lee’s enraged troopers chased Corbit’s men back into the town, hunting them down one by one, and by the end of the day, sixty-seven of the Delaware contingent were killed, wounded, or prisoners.10

  Stuart’s cavalry had already been showing serious signs of fatigue before arriving at Westminster, and this little escapade did not help. “After a series of exciting combats and night marches,” Stuart lamented, “whole regiments slept in the saddle, their faithful animals keeping the road unguided.” The interruption posed by Corbit’s charge was all the persuasion Stuart needed to call a halt, authorize some local foraging, and assemble
a hasty meeting of his three brigade commanders. “Straddling a chair on the sidewalk,” Stuart then nodded off into an exhausted sleep for a few hours. He was up and going again with his men by five o’clock on the morning of the 30th, but in the process he had lost “from ten to twelve hours” because of the Westminster skirmish, and he was going to pay dearly for them.11

  Stuart’s column crossed Pipe Creek at Union Mills, then turned northward into Pennsylvania. Stuart learned from scouts that a considerable body of Federal cavalry was just to the west, at Littlestown, so he pushed on toward Hanover, hoping to find Ewell’s infantry. He almost did, as Jubal Early’s division was at that moment on the road from his point of farthest advance at York and at noon on June 30th was probably less than twenty miles northeast of Stuart’s position. Stuart did not know that, and what was worse, he did not know that the Yankee cavalry the scouts had reported was actually a full Federal cavalry division of 3,500 men, under the newly promoted Judson Kilpatrick.

  A raffish, red-haired, and highly overrated womanizer with a damningly selfish willingness to throw away his troopers’ lives in battle (which earned him the unflattering nickname “Kill-cavalry”), Kilpatrick was nevertheless a favorite of Alfred Pleasonton’s. And even though Kilpatrick had spent three months under military arrest for a host of infractions that included pocketing money from the sale of government property, Pleasonton was so eager to purge foreign-born officers from the cavalry corps of the Army of the Potomac that he handed command of Julius Stahel’s division to Kilpatrick and sent him off to screen the center of Meade’s pursuit of Lee into Pennsylvania. Kilpatrick had for brigadiers two officers who had just as dramatically jumped the seniority queue from captain to brigadier general, Elon Farnsworth and the “incorrigible” George Armstrong Custer, a former McClellan aide-de-camp. Both were cut from nearly the same cloth as Kilpatrick in their passion for action and display, for their mischievousness and recklessness.12

  Kilpatrick set off for Hanover early on the morning of the 30th, slouching easily through the town square before noon. He had already sent Custer’s brigade through the town, to the accompaniment of bell ringing and schoolchildren singing patriotic songs, when skirmish fire broke out to the southwest. At the moment, Kilpatrick had indulgently permitted the troopers of Farnsworth’s brigade a time-out to enjoy the hospitality of Hanover. As the staccato ricketing of carbine fire was joined by the deeper thud of artillery, he sent off a galloper to bring back Custer, and then, standing up in his stirrups, said for all to hear: “Boys, look at me. I am General Kilpatrick. I want you to know me, and where I go I want you to follow. Stuart is making a call on us, and we are going to whip him.” And together they went pelting back through the town in search of trouble.13

  While Kilpatrick had been leisurely walking his division through Hanover, moving east, the head of Stuart’s cavalry had appeared, coming north on the Westminster road, and barged into Farnsworth’s rear guard. The skirmishing quickly took on serious dimensions, spilling into the streets of the town. (Unlike Gettysburg, a substantial number of Hanoverians grabbed firearms to take aim at the Confederate cavalrymen in the streets, and an ad hoc detail of mounted civilians, armed with shotguns, tried to offer their services to Kilpatrick.) Farnsworth’s brigade thundered into the rebels, evicting the Confederate skirmishers and “driving the rebels in confusion along the road and through the fields.” Stuart had neither wanted nor anticipated a fight at Hanover, but by the time he came up to the head of his column he could already see his lead brigade—John R. Chambliss’ three Virginia and one North Carolina cavalry regiments—falling back in disorder from the town. “As General Stuart saw them rushing out of the place,” he rode up and began trying to rally them. No success: “The long charge in, the repulse out … had thrown them into utter confusion.”14

  Instead of rallying, Stuart and his staff had to hightail for it themselves, jumping a high fence and drainage ditch like Saturday-morning fox hunters. Custer came blazing back down the road and, leaving Farnsworth to mop up in the town, the Boy General wheeled his brigade into the open ground just south of the town. But Stuart had more cavalry coming up the road, and this made Custer decide to limit himself to little more than threatening gestures. At sundown, Stuart quietly disengaged, and filed his brigades to the east, where they would have a clear route toward York and—he hoped—Dick Ewell. Kilpatrick made no effort to pursue him. Reports of Confederate infantry to the north (this was Jubal Early’s division, heading toward their rendezvous with Ewell and Rodes at Heidlersburg) convinced Kilpatrick that he was too exposed for comfort, and Stuart was allowed to slip away in the night.15

  Jubal Early was actually close enough to hear the distant rumble of artillery from the Hanover fight. Getting up from lunch in a tavern in the hamlet of Davidsburg, Early and his staff “heard the booming of cannon toward the southwest.” Casually, Harry Hays remarked, “I suppose a battle has begun.” And not only Harry Hays, but “the whole command distinctly heard Stuart’s guns.” But Early proved to be more curious about paying the bill, handing the proprietor twenty dollars in Confederate notes to cover the meals for his staff and senior officers, and moved off to his rendezvous with Ewell. When Fitz Lee’s advance guard reached the York Pike that night, they found that Early’s division had passed through some twelve hours before.

  By now, Stuart’s troopers were “broken down & in no condition to fight.” A lieutenant in the 9th Virginia Cavalry saw men slumped in saddles, “so tired and stupid as almost to be ignorant of what was taking place around them. Couriers in attempting to deliver orders to officers would be compelled to give them a shake and call before they could make them understand.” Even the drivers of the captured wagon train were falling asleep on their seats and causing fits of stop-and-start that further slowed Stuart’s column. Yankee prisoners from the Hanover fight had to be pressed into duty as drivers “and it required the utmost exertions of every officer on Stuart’s staff to keep the train in motion.”16

  Stuart’s bleary-eyed brigades stumbled into the village of Dover in the wee hours of July 1st. The only information he could glean about Early’s possible direction was some local rumor about him marching toward Carlisle or Shippensburg. “I still believed that most of our army was before Harrisburg,” Stuart wrote, “and justly regarded a march to Carlisle as the most likely to place me in communication with the main army.” But when Stuart reached Carlisle early that evening with Fitz Lee’s brigade, not only had two divisions of Dick Ewell’s corps left Carlisle the day before, but Federal infantry were now in possession of the town. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that the infantry amounted to just over 2,500 Pennsylvania emergency militia, with two guns manned by thirty of the U.S. Regulars who had been forced so incontinently to abandon the Carlisle Barracks a few days before. The prospect of administering a convenient whipping to some open-jawed militia roused Stuart’s men as a compensation for their long frustration. “We were preparing to have the time of our lives with the Pennsylvania Militia,” wrote one of Stuart’s artillerymen. But Stuart preferred to waste as little in the way of lives or strength as possible, and sent in a courier under a flag of truce—“a third of an ordinary bed sheet” in size—warning that Stuart would bombard the town if it was not surrendered to him at once.17

  The Yankees may have been militia, but their commander was not. He was William Farrar Smith, known more colloquially as “Baldy” Smith, West Point class of 1845, colonel of the 3rd Vermont at First Bull Run, a division commander in the Army of the Potomac on the Peninsula and then of the 6th Corps at Fredericksburg. “Shell away,” he snarled to Stuart’s messenger, “and be damned.” For three and a half hours, Fitz Lee’s artillery flung shells and solid shot on the hapless town, striking houses and the county courthouse, but doing “no particular damage.” It was not a task Fitz Lee enjoyed: “My first military service after graduating from West Point was there” and he had “received the hospitalities of most of its citizens”—whom his artillery we
re now very likely to kill. “It was with much regret that I proceeded.”18

  When the bombardment produced no further response from Baldy Smith, the increasingly testy Stuart ordered the 4th Virginia Cavalry to torch the Carlisle Barracks, and for a grand finale Stuart’s gunners shelled the town gas works, which blew up in a spectacular red cloud of flame. Stuart sent one last courier to Smith at midnight, but the Confederate shelling had done nothing to make Baldy more pliable. He asked “that the bearer inform General [Fitzhugh] Lee that he would see him in a hotter climate first.” Stuart’s gunners had fired over 135 rounds into the town to no useful effect, and after a little more desultory firing, they gave up. Whatever pleasure the shelling gave Stuart, it gave little to his men. “I could not but reflect as I looked back on the burning town, on the wickedness, the horrors of this felt war,” wrote one of Stuart’s weary junior officers. “I was made to feel very unhappy indeed, and to pray, ‘God grant that terrible war may lead to an early peace.’ ”19

  Stuart’s irritation faded before the fires he had set burned out, because “about midnight,” one of Stuart’s couriers “returned with the first information we had received from our army and with orders from Gen. R.E. Lee for Stuart to march to Gettysburg at once.” Stuart’s column swayed perilously southward toward Gettysburg until they had passed through the village of Hunterstown, just five miles north of the town. Sometime between two and four o’clock in the afternoon, as the rear guard under Wade Hampton cleared Hunterstown, Federal cavalry skirmishers began nipping at the heels of the column. But Dick Ewell sent a pair of 10-pounder Parrott rifles to back Hampton up—the first direct involvement of the army with Stuart’s cavalry since the campaign began—and by dusk the skirmishing finally petered out. After eight days of almost ceaseless riding and fighting, Stuart’s cavalry had been forced to ride and fight right up to the end.20