George Meade’s problem was the exact opposite of Lee’s—Meade’s difficulty was restraining his subordinates from acting as though he didn’t exist. Corps commanders like Slocum and Reynolds were accustomed to seeing George Meade as an equal, or even a junior; they certainly did not see him as their superior. To the extent that the Republican major generals also saw Meade as an acolyte of McClellanism, they had all the more reason to do what was right in their own eyes. This attitude was not ameliorated in the slightest by Meade’s ferociously molten temper and his willingness to let political identities cloud his military judgment, especially in the treatment he dealt out to Abner Doubleday and David Birney, and the dismissive fashion in which he planted Sickles and the 3rd Corps as far out of sight as he could.
Meade has had his admirers over the years, but much of the admiration is dutiful rather than enthusiastic, almost forced. Apart from his single impulse to organize some sort of strike on the morning of July 2nd, Meade’s behavior at Gettysburg was entirely reactive, a matter of responding to critical situations as they were thrust upon him. He missed the first day’s fighting completely, and began the battle of Gettysburg off balance. Granted: he was in top command for only three days, with staff he didn’t know and didn’t have time to replace, on a battlefield he hadn’t chosen and wasn’t even noddingly familiar with. But he also stayed reactive to the very end, even down to missing Pickett’s Charge. “Having suddenly and unexpectedly thrust upon him a problem with which he was utterly unprepared to grapple, without plans or time to prepare them, and with the certainty that within a few days … he would be compelled to meet a victorious and exultant enemy,” wrote Thomas Rafferty (who commanded the 71st New York at Gettysburg), Meade could be forgiven for failing to rule the Army of the Potomac with a rod of iron, “to employ it to its fullest extent and annihilate Lee’s army.” But that only meant that winning the battle had less to do with Meade than it did with a bevy of otherwise minor characters—Pap Greene, Joshua Chamberlain, Samuel Carroll, Alexander Webb, Francis Heath, Patrick O’Rorke, Strong Vincent, Gouverneur Warren, Norman Hall, George Stannard—who stepped out of themselves for a moment and turned a corner at some inexpressibly right instant. These self-starting performances became almost routine for Union officers at Gettysburg; by contrast, they are achingly absent from the Army of Northern Virginia.32
It is possible to say, in that light, that Robert E. Lee lost the battle of Gettysburg much more than George Meade won it. “He escaped complete defeat,” as one officer in the Vermont brigade ungenerously put it, “through the want of proper co-operation among his assailants.” But this does not mean that Lee’s decisions were foolish. When he concluded not to press Ewell into an attack on Cemetery Hill or Culp’s Hill unless it was practicable, Lee was not being prissy or ill-informed. Ewell’s corps was exhausted; it had had a long, debilitating march, sustained some unexpectedly fierce resistance, and there was no reason to suppose that much in the tactical picture as it appeared on the night of July 1st would change all that much by the morning of July 2nd. Based on what Lee knew of the scattering of the Army of the Potomac across the Maryland landscape, he should have had no difficulty wiping Cemetery Hill clean and then converting it into a club to beat the hapless Federals with whenever the rest of them finally arrived.
Longstreet’s attack, likewise, was an unobjectionably logical approach to the situation as Lee found it on the morning of July 2nd. He would stage a repeat of Chancellorsville; Longstreet would circle onto the Federal flank and knock it silly; and if Longstreet did not actually send the Federals completely over the moon by nightfall, all that Lee would need to do the next day was follow matters up the way he had at Hazel Grove and Fairview Cemetery at Chancellorsville. Only this time, the Army of the Potomac would not be retreating across the Rappahannock; it would be streaming in despair for the Susquehanna crossings, and the Keystone State would be ready to go up in flames. “Between the repulse of McClellan … and the Battle of Gettysburg, most of the adherents of the North were consciously hoping against hope,” wrote William Michael Rossetti, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Walt Whitman’s British editor. “By “the time of … the Northern invasion by Lee in 1863,” the Union’s British sympathizers “were almost ready to confess the case desperate.” The ultras in the Army of the Potomac, like Henry Nichols Blake, would never let Meade forget that he deserved only “a very small degree of the honor for this decisive triumph.” But considering what happened at Chancellorsville, and how easily it might have happened all over again at Gettysburg, that was a well enough earned honor, after all.33
Many people assumed that the battle of Gettysburg was, as Blake said, “a decisive triumph,” and given the forces involved, the length of time elapsed, and the casualties afterward, perhaps it should have been. But not in 1863. “An army of 60,000 or 80,000 men is not to be knocked in pieces by any such battle as we have fought yet,” Andrew Atkinson Humphreys reminded the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War when he testified before them in March 1864. If by decisive, people meant a single knockout round which ended matters on one battlefield, Humphreys was right, and Lincoln was wrong—those kinds of decisive battles, where an army closed its hands and eliminated the enemy, were no longer tactical possibilities, as they had been in the days of Napoleon. Even with the horrendous losses Lee sustained, and even with the Army of Northern Virginia’s back to the Potomac, “it is a rare thing to read of an army being completely broken in pieces, so that it cannot be collected together again.” And it is probably wise not to assume that the Gettysburg Campaign would have yielded such an end.
As it was, Gettysburg did not end the war; even the powerful combination of Gettysburg and Vicksburg did not end the war. It would go on for almost two more years, because two more years would be required to grind the latent resistance of the Southern Confederacy down to the nub. The Army of Northern Virginia’s morale, which sank so low in the weeks after Gettysburg, proved how elastic a factor like morale could be, rebounding through the fall and winter of 1863 to the point where Confederates could open a new campaigning season in 1864 “in fine spirits and anxious for a fight.” Even Stuart’s cavalry shook off the pall of blame and “is now generally considered to be in better spirits & health, also better armed and equipped &c, than at any previus [sic] time during the war.” Nor did Gettysburg write a blank check for the Union forces. Little more than a year after Gettysburg, two Federal armies (in Virginia and in Georgia) would appear to be hopelessly mired in sieges of Atlanta and Petersburg which had no visible ending point, and Abraham Lincoln would be so close to losing the White House to George McClellan (as the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 1864) that he felt the need to obtain a pledge from his cabinet to fight the war down to his last day in office, because after McClellan would take the presidential oath, everything would go straight to the negotiating table.
But Gettysburg was record setting for its sheer carnage: in a war which began with one-day set-piece battles over a field two or three miles square, Gettysburg had been drenched in three days of unremitting slugging, cast over fifteen square miles, like some gigantic boxing tournament gone wildly into three-digit extra rounds. Gettysburg also put an end to a certain set of expectations—that the South really could carry the war into the North, that the Army of Northern Virginia could triumph on valor alone, that Robert E. Lee was so magisterially wise that only an act of God (like the Lost Orders before Antietam) could frustrate him. Even as he led his Alabamians up the slopes of Little Round Top to grapple with Strong Vincent, William Oates knew that the long-term odds were against the Confederacy, even if “none of us were ready to admit it.” After Gettysburg, they could stave it off no longer. Oates and his fellows would recover their fighting spirits and continue “to fight manfully for the cause and win victories.” But when contemplating their long-term prospects, even the optimists “began to despair when Lee turned back from Gettysburg.” And when Lincoln won reelection, and with it t
he support of the North for pressing the war to its last bitter drop, it would become possible to look back at Gettysburg and really see it as a sort of turning point in the war. “The battle of Gettysburg,” declared Michael Jacobs, “must be regarded as the great and decisive battle of this wicked war. Although treason has been met in many a bloody field … at Gettysburg it received a blow, from which it will never recover.”34
In the final accounting, Gettysburg was a victory, for George Meade, for the Army of the Potomac, and for the Union. “Public feeling has been wonderfully improved and buoyed up by our recent successes at Gettysburg and Vicksburg,” John Nicolay, one of Lincoln’s secretaries, rejoiced. It was not decisive enough to bring the Confederacy to its knees, but it was decisive enough for the Union that, as even Jefferson Davis conceded, “the drooping spirit of the North was revived.”
Writing more than a year later, Richard Henry Dana believed that Gettysburg “was the turning-point in our history,” not so much for winning a victory as for avoiding a defeat that would have proved the Army of the Potomac’s—and the Union’s—last defeat. “Had Lee gained that battle, the Democrats would have risen and stopped the war. With the city of New York and Governor [Horatio] Seymour, and Governor [Joel] Parker in New Jersey, and a majority in Pennsylvania, as they then would have had, they would so have crippled us as to end the contest. That they would have attempted it we at home know.” So even if Gettysburg was less than decisive in strictly military terms, it was decisive enough to restore the sinking morale of the Union, decisive enough to keep at bay the forces which hoped Lincoln could be persuaded to revoke emancipation, decisive enough to make people look back and understand that the Confederacy would never be able to mount a serious invasion again, decisive enough that the momentum of the war would from now on belong solely to the Union, decisive enough that after Gettysburg, the sun never shone for the South again.35
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
To Sweep & plunder the battle grounds
DANIEL SKELLY was awakened “about midnight” on July 4th “by a commotion” near his home on Middle Street in Gettysburg. It was made by “Confederate officers passing through the lines of Confederate soldiers bivouacked on the pavement below, telling them to get up quietly and fall back. Very soon the whole line disappeared.” Mary McAllister was nudged out of sleep in her home on Chambersburg Street by the rumble of wagons and a man who “came running down the street,” announcing, “Get up, get up, we are retreating.” Federal skirmishers and pickets also noticed the laconic stillness and odd lack of activity in the town. At first light, James Wadsworth sent out details from the 56th Pennsylvania and 7th Indiana to investigate, and so did Adelbert Ames, who ordered “out a skirmish-line consisting of 10 men under a Lieutenant and Sergeant.” Unwary men could still get themselves shot—a sergeant in the 2nd U.S. Sharpshooters “was killed by a shot in his fore-head” as his company probed slowly out to the Emmitsburg Road—so they moved cautiously through the fog and drizzle, communicating “by signs of the hand.” Early-rising farmers along the Fairfield Road galloped into town by side roads, seeking out Federal cavalry pickets to describe the enormous Confederate trains, and Federal signalers also caught sight of the long, withdrawing column.1
As civilians and soldiers alike poked around in ever increasing circles, what they found across the battlefield made words fail on the lips. In the town, the streets were littered with “coffee and groceries of all kinds, boxes and barrels, wagons and guns.” The photographer Charles Tyson returned to his home on Chambersburg Street to find that his desk “had been ransacked and the contents scattered over the room,” and in the parlor he “found a small heap of ashes, the residue of burned letters and papers. Tyson’s “cellar and pantry” had been “pretty well cleaned out,” but at least his gallery was “undisturbed.” Along the York Pike, east of town, were “exploded caissons … abandoned wagons, leveled fences, dwellings in whose yards were bloody clouts.” The “shutters and walls look like a target at a shooting match.” The open fields were thickly stippled with “everything belonging to soldiers afoot or on horseback, such as caps, hats, shoes, coats, guns, cartridge and cap boxes, belts, canteens, haversacks, blankets, tin cups, horses, saddles, and swords.” Along the Emmitsburg Road, details of Union soldiers from Alex Hays’ division began retrieving some 2,500 rifles from where Pickett’s men had thrown them away, thrusting them bayonet-down into the ground so that they were “standing as thick as trees in a nursery.”2
In Joseph Sherfy’s peach orchard, “only skeletons of trees” were “left; there was scarcely a leaf remaining,” and Sherfy’s house had been ransacked, “turning everything in drawers etc. out and clothes, bonnets, towels, linen etc. were found tramped in indistinguishable piles and filth of every description was strewn over the house.” At least Sherfy still had the house; the Sherfy barn had caught fire and burned to the ground, and William Bliss’ house and barn had been deliberately torched. (All that was left were the stone walls of the barn; on July 29th, Bliss filed a claim for compensation to the tune of $1,256.08, but he never received a cent, and finally sold the farm for half of what it had cost him in 1857.) Overall, the town and the surrounding farmlands suffered over half a million dollars in damages, including 800 confiscated horses and 1,000 head of cattle. But few in Adams County ever saw a penny in compensation; in York County, claims for the depredations of Jubal Early’s division amounted to a quarter-million dollars, but even fewer saw anything in the way of recompense. There were even a few missing persons: the Confederates may have missed John Burns, but they arrested nine other Gettysburg civilians on suspicion of bushwhacking, and carried them off to Richmond, where they remained imprisoned for the rest of the war.3 And there is no record of anyone ever learning the fate of Gettysburg’s kidnapped blacks.
The Confederates left stragglers and prisoners of their own in Gettysburg, a number of whom were rousted from cellars and houses in the town where they had overslept their leave, or else simply decided they had done enough fighting. Harriet Bayly found a “woebegone little ‘Reb’ ” of “about 17 years of age” on her doorstep north of Gettysburg in the wee hours of July 5th, “who said … he belonged to the North Carolina service” and “never intended doing any more fighting for the Confederacy.” Bayly found him “a suit of citizen’s clothes” and hid him on her farm, and in the end he “remained with the family,” married and acquired a farm in Adams County, and “has been more successful in peaceful pursuit than those of war.” Other rebels were more resigned, or more defiant. Details of Federal soldiers went through the town, “going up to the barn doors and pounding on them with the butts of our muskets … and commanding the Johnnies to come out at once, and to leave their guns behind.” But civilians also began rounding up stray Confederates, posse-style. Robert McLean and his younger brother “assisted in hunting them up,” and found “one in our stable loft fast asleep. I called a couple of soldiers and he was a prisoner before he knew it.” (A few people had scores to settle with their own neighbors: Henry Stahle, the editor of Gettysburg’s Democratic newspaper, the Compiler, was denounced by local Republicans for “pointing out the refuge of Union Soldiers to Rebel Officers,” and briefly imprisoned at Fort McHenry.) Eventually, the provost guard got prisoners moving down to Westminster as soon as possible, where they were herded into “a vacant lot” to await transportation to the Federal prisoner of war camp on Johnson’s Island, near Sandusky, Ohio.4
“Generally speaking,” the rebels appeared to be “ragged, torn, bruised, mutilated, dirty … many of them … miserably ignorant and unable to read or write” and dressed in “every style and color, butternut cloth, half uniforms, no uniforms, full of mud from heavy rains.” But not all of them, and no one less so than Lt. James Crocker of the 9th Virginia, the Pennsylvania College alumnus. Captured at the end of the great charge, Crocker was only slightly hurt, and in that remarkably relaxed view toward prisoners of war that still prevailed in the mid-nineteenth century, he obtained a pass a
nd walked off into his old college town “alone, unattended.” Even Crocker could appreciate that it was “a queer, incongruous sight to see a rebel lieutenant in gray mingling in the crowd.” But Crocker soon enough “met … my dear old professor of mathematics,” Michael Jacobs (who “whispered to me in the kindest, gentlest way not to talk about the war”), and strolling over toward the college itself on Washington Street he crossed paths with the son of the college president, Henry Baugher, who extended “a cordial invitation to dine with him and his father.” Given that “old Dr. Baugher” had buried another son in the Evergreen Cemetery who died of wounds at Shiloh, the unannounced appearance of an unrepentant Confederate might have made for a highly indigestible meal. But “the venerable Doctor saw before him only his old student, recalled only the old days, and their dear memories.”5
Crocker’s peculiar college cheerio sat incongruously beside the rows upon rows of wounded men who crammed “the town churches and public offices” and “many of the private houses in town,” as well as the corps hospitals which had been set up “two to four miles out.” Albertus McCreary remembered “four churches (within a block of us) which had been converted to hospitals” with the “pews in the churches covered with boards … to make beds for the wounded,” plus “two school-houses” on High Street “and the court-house … and many private residences.” The McCreary house was one of those “private residences” and in it “all of our beds were occupied.” The McCrearys could hardly feed themselves, much less convalescent soldiers, and they had to be rescued by the arrival, beginning on July 5th, of a small army of civilian volunteers—a wagonful of nuns from the Sisters of Charity in Emmitsburg, the Patriot Daughters of Lancaster, the U.S. Christian Commission, and the U.S. Sanitary Commission. But even with the assistance of citizen volunteers, there were 21,000 sick and wounded men in a town that usually numbered no more than 2,500, and the suffering easily broke over the thin boundaries of help that surgeons and volunteers tried to build around them. There were “wounds of every imaginable description, and upon all parts of the person … wounds in the head, the breast, the abdomen, the legs, the feet, the hands,” faces “partly shot away, leaving, perhaps, only a single eye or row of teeth.” Over half of the amputations performed in these hospitals resulted in death; by the fall, 14 percent of all the wounded would be dead.6
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