Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  The council met that night in a temporary headquarters Meade borrowed from one of the 6th Corps division commanders, and for all the congratulations he had issued earlier in the day Meade’s tone was still apprehensive. He opened the meeting by suggesting “that the enemy were making a flank movement, and would probably try to interpose between us and Washington.” He sternly reminded everyone that his primary responsibility was to protect the capital, and having stated the situation, he asked “the corps commanders for their advice as to what course he should pursue”—follow on Lee’s heels … shadow him at a distance, moving parallel to Lee down the eastern side of South Mountain into Maryland … or (according to John Sedgwick), “move back to Westminster.” Because “so little” was “definitely known as to the position and designs of the enemy,” the consensus quickly favored waiting until they “could find out something.” This satisfied Meade quite nicely. The succession of heavy rains had made the Potomac unfordable, so it was not likely that Lee could go far, and besides, “My army requires a few days rest, and cannot move at present.”

  But this conclusion did not satisfy Otis Howard, Alf Pleasonton, or David Birney (who had been jumped back into command of what was left of the 3rd Corps by Hancock’s wounding), nor did it satisfy Gouverneur Warren (as chief engineer), who already thought he could see forming the same constellation of attitudes which had allowed Lee to escape from McClellan after Antietam. “Give me command of a division,” Warren excitedly interrupted, and “by 8 o’clock the next morning I would tell them whether the enemy was retreating or not.” The offer received only a stiff acknowledgment. “There was a tone amongst most of the prominent officers that we had quite saved the country for the time, and that we had done enough; that we might jeopardy all that we had won by trying to do too much.” So in the end, by a vote of five to three, it was agreed “to remain twenty-four hours longer in our position, and that General Sedgwick … should be sent with his corps to find out” where the rebels were headed. Later that night, Meade remembered Darius Couch and Baldy Smith, and sent off an order to Couch to gather his little odds-and-ends army of militia and start poking southward through the Cumberland Valley.17

  The Confederates expected more from Meade, and were relieved not to get it. They had come into Pennsylvania, “beginning to look for peace before a great while,” but now their primary fear was “defeat in the enemy’s country.” Their temper was darkened still further by the miseries of having “to stand & wait for an hour or more” on roads “blocked up with troops,” and by the unearthly screaming, shrieking, weeping, moaning, “oaths, and execrations” which arose from the army’s ambulances as the “wagons kept the road” and the uninjured survivors “marched through the fields & woods on each side.” Occasionally, there would be “a brass band on the side of the road … playing ‘Dixie’ & ‘Maryland,’ ” but this did not do much to drown out the cries heard by John Imboden from thousands of voices in the backs of jolting wagons and ambulances: O God! Why can’t I die? … My God! Will no one have mercy and kill me and end my misery? … Oh! stop one minute and take me out and leave me to die on the roadside … I am dying! I am dying! My poor wife, my dear children! What will become of you? Meade’s hesitation gave both parts of Lee’s army a full day’s grace, but since the wagon trains alone occupied anywhere from fifteen to twenty miles of road, the likelihood of Lee putting any great distance between himself and pursuit was dim. Jubal Early’s division, bringing up the rear of the enormous infantry column on the Fairfield Road, didn’t get moving in the direction of South Mountain until two o’clock on the morning of July 5th, all the while “halting now and then to see if the Yankee Army would come out and give us battle.”18

  They needn’t have worried. John Sedgwick’s 6th Corps played a very slow game of catch-up, covering only three very cautious miles along the Fairfield Road by noon on July 5th. Three more miles brought them up to Jubal Early’s skirmish lines outside Fairfield, and Sedgwick sent little more than some random shelling in their direction. The next day, Sedgwick “showed no disposition to push this rear guard.” His skirmishers crept into “the somewhat dilapidated village” of Fairfield, but after throwing “a few shells down the street” in the morning fog, Sedgwick informed Meade that “the enemy have a very strong rear guard and will hold the gaps strongly.” Meade ordered them all back to Gettysburg, apart from one brigade which would content itself with shadowing the rebel column.

  Caution was Meade’s compass. There was no need to fall back to Westminster, he concluded, but also no sense in a hot pursuit of Lee’s infantry. “I am not able to say what Lee is going to do,” Meade wrote to Baldy Smith, “but expect he is off for the Potomac or the lower end of the Valley; he may, however, remain behind the mountains.” The one thing he knew he could not do was what McClellan usually did, which was to stay put and lick his wounds. But if he must get up and chase after Lee, he was determined to do so with all antennae quivering. He would move down the east side of South Mountain, keeping the mountains between himself and Lee, and keeping the Army of the Potomac between Lee and the capital. At Frederick, he would meet the 6,000 wagons which made up the army’s quartermaster and commissary trains, and then he would judge whether “I may have an opportunity of attacking.” For now, he would leave it to his cavalry to harass and delay Lee’s movements.19

  This was live bait to Pleasonton, Judson Kilpatrick, and John Buford. On July 4th, Kilpatrick swung around the flanks of Lee’s infantry on the Fairfield Road and struck seven miles west of Fairfield, at Monterey Pass, slashing and hacking at Dick Ewell’s column. A few hours later, troopers from one of Buford’s brigades ambushed Imboden’s seventeen-mile-long train at Greencastle, making off with “130 wagons … two iron guns, and 200 prisoners”; late that same day, another ambush sliced off 134 wagons and 645 prisoners. A day after, on July 6th, Buford’s cavalry raided Williamsport itself ahead of Lee’s arrival. On July 6th, Stuart fended off an attempt by Kilpatrick’s horsemen to seize Hagerstown; the same day, he parried Buford’s blow at Williamsport, keeping the line of Lee’s retreat to the Potomac open, and on July 8th he fought a successful delaying action behind Lee’s infantry at Boonsboro. Despite “rain and mud, rough mountains, and difficult roads,” and despite harassment from emboldened civilians in Greencastle who jeered at “ye lousy Revelscallims,” stole rebel horses, and stove in the spokes of “ten or a dozen wheels and dropping the wagons in the streets,” Imboden made Williamsport with “nearly the whole of the immense train” on July 6th. Lee and the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia made it on the 7th, ready to cross over into Virginia.20

  Williamsport, however, quickly took on the shape of a trap rather than a haven. The cross-river traffic there was usually served by a ferry, punted across on a wire cable strung between the Maryland and Virginia shores; there were also numerous shallow fords around the ferry, and the Confederates had made easy use of them in June when they first crossed the Potomac. Four miles downstream at Falling Waters, Confederate engineers had also built a pontoon bridge in June for the army’s use. But the on-again, off-again rains had swollen the Potomac “to an almost unprecedented height,” well “beyond fording stage,” and the pontoon bridge at Falling Waters had been destroyed by a Federal raiding party on July 4th. Barred by the high water, Lee cast around quickly for alternatives, and wanted Imboden to name for him “all fords as high up as Cumberland [Maryland], and describe minutely their character, and the roads and surrounding country on both sides of the river.”

  But the situation was no better at any of those alternatives and Lee did not have the luxury of waiting for the river to fall. “There was neither rations or ammunition for the troops and prisoners, nor food for the starving animals, who could scarcely drag themselves through the mud.” So, Lee improvised a long defensive line along a ridge that covered both Williamsport and Falling Waters, and set his engineers to tearing down everything in the neighborhood made of wood and stripping every sawmill along the river of “boar
ds and crossbeams” to construct makeshift pontoons. If he could bluff his pursuers, he might be able to buy the time he needed to build an escape route; if not, then Lee would be facing a second Antietam, only this time with his back to a Potomac that offered him no “hope of long resistance.” Porter Alexander was amazed to see how much serenity Lee was able to summon, but one of Alexander’s officers admitted that “every one feels how disastrous to us our defeat at Gettysburg was … and the retreat has been almost as bad for us as the defeat.”21

  None of this made Meade move any faster. The Army of the Potomac swung into pursuit on the evening of the 5th, “moving in the direction of Emmitsburgh … feeling their way at every step” in the rain and gloom. They crossed the Monocacy River on the 6th, where regiments formed square to hear Meade’s congratulations order; in Frederick, on July 8th, “mail was distributed” for the first time since the beginning of the campaign. One landmark which almost everyone in the Army of the Potomac seems to have noticed as they passed through Frederick was “the body of a spy that had been hung by Gen. Buford.” The man was one of Stuart’s scouts, and he had been “tried by a drum-head court-martial” and “hanged upon a locust tree” with a tent cord. Soldiers passing by “had stripped the bark from the trunk of the tree,” and then gone to work on the spy’s clothes “until the body was entirely nude.”22

  Then, they turned west to the mountain gaps—Fox’s, Turner’s, Crampton’s. Getting over the mountains turned out to be a slower business than anyone anticipated. “The animals,” Meade reported to Halleck, were “completely exhausted, many falling on the road.” It took until July 11th for the Army of the Potomac to descend the far side and begin crossing the Antietam Creek. All the while, still more rainstorms and flash floods soaked the Federals. A soldier in the 18th Massachusetts complained that “nothing could be kept dry, and if a battle had occurred only bayonets could be used,” because the cartridges were so damp that not “one musket in ten could have been discharged.”23

  If the pouring rains mired Meade’s progress, so did “anxiety & responsibility.” Meade complained that he “can get no reliable information of the enemy, and have to grope my way in the dark.” On went the litany: “I have not changed my clothes, have not had a regular night’s rest and many nights not a wink of sleep, and for several days did not wash my face & hands—no regular food, and all this time in a great state of mental anxiety.” He was, in truth, worried sick about his own inadequacy. He had been in command of the Army of the Potomac for exactly ten days, he wrote to Margaretta, and everyone—“the people & the Govt.”—now believed that “I must always be victorious” and that Lee must be “demoralized & disorganized.” Did they not realize, he continued in the same vein, that “battles are often decided by accidents”? He possessed no genius, no magic formula, and as for tactic and strategy, “no man of sense will say in advance what their result will be.” He was almost ready to admit that his great triumph at Gettysburg had been as much a surprise to him as to the rebels, that he had really directed nothing, and that the fine laurel that Gettysburg had planted upon his brow had arrived so mysteriously that it might disappear just as easily. He must be cautious, leaving nothing vulnerable, doing nothing headlong. This, in turn, put Meade in a particularly testy mood when Henry Halleck began needling him to get on with things. “There is reliable information that the enemy is crossing at Williamsport,” Halleck officiously wired him on July 8th. “The opportunity to attack his divided forces should not be lost” and Meade “should move against him by forced marches.” Meade’s temper, not surprisingly, detonated even more grandly than usual. “My army is and has been making forced marches, short of rations and barefooted,” Meade fired back. If Halleck would just back off, “I will use my utmost effort to push forward this army.”24

  But Lee was not going to wait for him. Ammunition was brought up from Winchester and punted across to Williamsport on the ferry, and ambulances and prisoners were ferried back on the return trip. Confederate engineers, sometimes with only one axe or one saw to each squad, managed to cobble together sixteen pontoons, and together with ten pontoons recovered from the wreck of the previous bridge, they strung an 800-foot-long floating causeway across the Potomac at Falling Waters. “It was built in two sections,” wrote one of the engineers, “the first starting on the Maryland side and extending to an island about a hundred yards wide, and then from the south side of the island to the Virginia shore.” Three ferries were now in operation at Williamsport, and, even better, the rains stopped, and the river began to fall—a foot and a half by July 12th. The next afternoon, Lee issued orders to cross the river under cover of darkness: Hill’s and Longstreet’s corps would cross on the bridge at Falling Waters; Ewell’s corps, Stuart’s cavalry, and whatever else was still in Williamsport would use the fords or the punts.25

  Meade promised Halleck on July 10th that he would have the Army of the Potomac within four miles of Lee’s defenses that evening. But by July 12th, Meade had only just crossed the Antietam Creek and advanced a mile beyond it in Lee’s direction, and although he promised Halleck again that he “would attack them to-morrow,” that evening (“about 8 or 9 o’clock”), Meade called for yet another council of war. This time, he had a very different audience than the one he had greeted in Gettysburg: Howard, Slocum, Sykes, and Sedgwick were still in command of their corps, but Meade had dumped Birney from the 3rd Corps again and replaced him with William French, and in Hancock’s place, Meade had appointed a nonentity named William Hayes, over the heads of both Alex Hays and John Caldwell. Above all, he sloughed off the wounded Dan Butterfield as chief of staff and appointed Andrew Humphreys, which gave Meade an altogether different choir to conduct. In the years to come, this council would be portrayed as the moment when a suddenly offensive-minded Meade was restrained by his timid corps commanders. Meade “stated briefly the condition of our forces.” But when he put to them the question—Shall we, without further knowledge of the position of the enemy, make an attack?—they all with one consent began to make excuses. He reported to Halleck the next day that his proposal for an attack had been overruled, “five out of six” of the corps commanders” being “unqualifiedly opposed to it.”26

  But a faint suspicion of things not being quite what met the eye hangs over this council. For one thing, Meade changed his story about the council nine months later, testifying before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War that he “cannot state positively what each individual vote was,” but thought that an attack had been favored by two corps commanders, Otis Howard and James Wadsworth (who was temporarily in command of the 1st Corps). Howard remembered three dissenters—himself, Wadsworth, and Pleasonton—as did Wadsworth. And then there was the question itself, whose “peculiar phraseology” convinced Slocum that it “indicated the decision the commanding general anticipated” so that the council’s conclusion would be “precisely what he desired and anticipated it would be when he framed the question.” Meade, in other words, wanted to be on record as favoring an attack, but he also wanted it on the record that he had been talked out of it, which he “at once used to sustain himself at the expense of his brother officers.” Wadsworth was certainly incensed by the decision. He came storming back to the 1st Corps artillery chief, Charles Wainwright, talking “very freely on the subject, and loudly against the decision.” Howard, however, was merely resigned. Although he believed that at a word, he could attack Lee and “double him up,” it was apparent that Meade would not. “I fear that Lee is getting away.”27

  Halleck read through the same lines: “You are strong enough to attack and defeat the enemy before he can effect a crossing,” he frantically wired Meade late on July 13th. “Act upon your own judgment and make your generals execute your orders. Call no council of war.” Above all, “do not let the enemy escape.” But by the time Meade received Halleck’s telegram, the escape was already in progress. Although still more rain began to fall and Longstreet darkly warned that it might be better to wait for
the next day, Lee’s “anxiety was intense” to get away, and so the evacuation proceeded. “And a crazy affair it was, too,” remembered Moxley Sorrel. The rain came down in “blinding sheets,” and wagons stalled in mud on the approaches to the pontoon bridge, and Lee’s men could only risk keeping “three or four torches alight, and those were dimmed at times when heavy rains came.” But “our father, Lee, was scarcely ever out of sight,” and by morning, only the last of Harry Heth’s division was still crossing at Falling Waters. The last regiment to pass was the ghostly 26th North Carolina, without its colonel, its colors, and without almost three-quarters of the men who had crossed the river so happily less than a month before. And then the ropes sustaining the jury-rigged bridge were cut and the retaining cables were pulled to bring the pontoon boats over to the Virginia shore. Except for some 1,500 stragglers and the skirmishers of the 4th Alabama (who had to swim for it), the Army of Northern Virginia was safe.28

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE