The Devil's Own Work

by Barnet Schecter

  Union reinforcements arrived two hours later, just in time to halt the rebel advance against the exhausted cavalrymen. By early afternoon, the two sides faced each other along a three-mile arc north of the town, where the nineteen thousand Federals were outnumbered by twenty-four thousand Confederates. Lee arrived from the west and saw his advantage. Without waiting for more troops to arrive, he allowed the commanders present to attack with full force, and with their unnerving rebel yell, the divisions smashed the Union right wing and then drove the tougher left wing off the high ground, ultimately forcing both to retreat through Gettysburg to Cemetery Hill, half a mile south of the town.24

  Lee's forces had won the first round, but whoever could seize and hold the long ridge and hills south of Gettysburg would ultimately win the battle and control the area. Lee assigned General Richard Ewell to storm Cemetery Hill if possible, but the latter decided against the risky assault, which, had it occurred and succeeded, might well have changed the outcome of the entire battle. Instead, by nightfall another corps of Union troops had arrived and extended the defensive line from Cemetery Hill along the entire two-mile ridge and the adjacent hills. Meade arrived that night with more Union forces, further bolstering their natural fortresslike position with artillery, men, and materiel.25

  The Battle of Gettysbutg, July 1-3, 1863

  General James Longstreet urged Lee to maneuver around the southern end of the Union position, thereby threatening Washington, D.C., and drawing the Federals out into a battlefield of the Confederates' choosing. However, Lee was determined to make a frontal attack the next day, because his men's ardor was at a fever pitch from their repeated successes, and he felt a flanking maneuver would smack of fear and retreat in the face of an inferior foe. Like Lincoln, Lee thirsted for the destruction of the enemy army, which had eluded him despite the big victories in the Seven Days' Battles in 1862, when he had driven McClellan away from the outskirts of Richmond, and at Chancellorsville in May.26

  "Send forward more troops as rapidly as possible," Governor Curtin of Pennsylvania frantically telegrammed Seymour on July 2. "The battles of yesterday were not decisive, and if Meade should be defeated, unless we have a large army, this State will be overrun by rebels." Seymour responded by sending additional militia regiments, further stripping New York of defenders.27

  Two days earlier, the Republican mayor of New York City, George Opdyke, had telegraphed Seymour, urging him "as a matter of absolute necessity" to authorize General Sandford to raise twenty or thirty militia regiments in New York City and Brooklyn for home defense. Opdyke estimated that between the militia and U.S. troops, the city had fewer than one thousand men, and told Sand-ford that at least two or three regiments of militia should be left in the city. Sandford replied that he had to follow Seymour's orders, but assured the mayor that the militia and police could handle any "emergency likely to arise."28

  Elected mayor in 1861, for decades Opdyke had been manufacturing and selling cheap clothing used for slaves in the South. Like other New York merchants, he profited from slavery but nonetheless became an ardent Republican and a leading war organizer. He found profits there too, supplying thousands of blankets to the Union army. As state clothing inspector, he had recently approved shoddy Union army uniforms from Brooks Brothers.29*

  Opdyke worried that the city was "filled with Rebel emissaries" spreading "a revolutionary and treasonable spirit among our people," and feared violent resistance to the upcoming draft from New York's poorer citizens, who were clearly angry about the three-hundred-dollar exemption clause. The Lincoln administration viewed that dollar figure as a cap that would help keep the price of a substitute from skyrocketing while raising money to pay bounties to volunteers. As Opdyke explained it, the government was beneficently guaranteeing any draftee a substitute for three hundred dollars instead of leaving him to the mercy of the open market, where the rich would bid up the price. While that amount was equivalent to the average worker's annual salary, factories, workingmen's associations, towns, and cities could raise money for draftees as a group.30

  For the average worker, however, the exemption seemed a flagrant case of class discrimination, making the conflict "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight." The New York Evening Post reported a snippet of conversation on the street in which one man explained

  that the law was intended to provide for the purchase of substitutes and particularly for the support of the families of those who had no $300 and must, therefore, serve. "Tom" seemed convinced that the intent was just, but asked, pertinently:

  "Why didn't he say so then?" adding: "[Senator Henry] Wilson is a blockhead to make such a law; he might have known that it would be taken as holding up the rich agin the poor."

  "But Wilson was a poor man himself—once a workingman."

  "Dunno—if he was, he hasn't a workingman's head." On all of which law makers may do worse than to ponder.31

  The War Department had begun national enrollment of draft-eligible men between the ages of twenty and forty-five in May and June by sending agents door-to-door in each congressional district. The conscription was intended to spur volunteers to enlist and receive a bounty—instead of taking the chance of being drafted. Any district that did not fill its quota with volunteers would have to make up the deficiency with a draft lottery, the names to be drawn at random from the enrollment lists.32

  While federal enrollment officers fanned out across the northern states, thousands of potential conscripts fled, many as far as the western territories and to Canada. Others provided incorrect ages, names, and addresses, while the eldest stopped dyeing their hair and let it go gray. Some pooled their money to create draft insurance. Not realizing that firemen were not exempt from military service, as they had been from the National Guard, some men tried to dodge the draft by joining engine companies. Those who preferred arrest for desertion to being drafted began wearing old army uniforms. Still others claimed foreign citizenship. Most resentful of the conscription were recent immigrants who had declared their intention to become U.S. citizens; they had sixty days to leave the country or risk being drafted.33

  Across the country, almost one hundred enrollment officers were injured and at least two were killed while collecting names door-to-door. Resistance was concentrated in areas where poor immigrants were told by Democratic politicians that the commutation clause was unjust. In the marble quarries of Vermont and the coalfields of Pennsylvania, Irish workers took their cues from party leaders and resisted the machinery of the draft. Opposition sprang up in Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, and to a lesser extent in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois.34

  In the Midwest, where the Union blockade of the Mississippi River and the loss of trade with the South caused severe economic hardship, resentment of the draft ran high, particularly because the industrial Northeast, aided by high tariffs passed by a mostly Republican Congress, was prospering from the war. Roving mobs in Indiana visited small towns, seizing enrollment lists and intimidating provost marshals. Policemen dispersed a crowd in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that had attacked an enrollment officer. In Chicago, a marshal was showered with bricks after arresting two men who had failed to cooperate with a draft official. In the coalfields of southwestern Pennsylvania, labor disputes, already bitter, were heightened by the draft. A coal company executive was gunned down after he reportedly provided workers' names to local draft officials.35

  The first violent resistance in New York City broke out early in July when a laborer on a construction site refused to give his name. Brandishing an iron bar, he threatened the enrolling officer, who fended off the attack by drawing his pistol. When the marshal continued enrolling the names of laborers on the site, the man ran at him, and the two grappled, falling from a plank into the basement. Covered with dirt, the officer crawled up to the street and sent for help, but the military support that had been promised in the event of resistance never arrived. The foreman of the construction site was arrested the following day, but the damage was done: The dr
aft resisters were encouraged, having won the first round.36

  While Seymour dispatched additional regiments to Pennsylvania on July 2, in response to Governor Curtin's telegram, the battle at Gettysburg entered its second day, which included several hours of the Civil War's most savage combat. Despite Longstreet's vehement objections to the plan for a frontal assault on the Union position, Lee ordered him to lead it, because he had two divisions of fresh troops in his corps. Longstreet was to assault the enemy's left wing at the southern end of Cemetery Ridge, with the expectation that Meade would shift troops from his right wing to fend off the attack. At that point, Ewell was to press forward on the enemy's right at Cemetery and Culp's Hills. Lee envisioned his troops closing in from both flanks and crushing the Union forces once and for all.

  The reluctant Longstreet, however, took until 4 p.m. to advance against the enemy's left wing, seriously hampering the coordinated attacks from the start. Two divisions of Union troops had posted themselves half a mile in front of Cemetery Ridge in a line running through a peach orchard, a wheat field, and a group of boulders known by locals as Devil's Den. Longstreet's fifteen thousand howling rebels quickly overwhelmed these Union troops at several points, but Meade and his officers managed to fill the gaps in the line with reinforcements.

  When an Alabama brigade did break through and was about to seize Little Round Top—a hill that would have enabled Confederate artillery to dominate Meade's left wing on Cemetery Ridge—a regiment of Union troops from Maine fought them off for two hours. When the Union troops ran out of ammunition, their commander ordered a bayonet charge, down the hill through the smoke-filled woods, and they killed or captured numerous rebels, dumbstruck by the howling bluecoats. Farther north, another Alabama brigade found a gap in the Cemetery Ridge line but was driven back by a regiment of seasoned Minnesota veterans, most of whom were killed in this counterattack. By dusk, the strong defensive line on the Union left was still securely intact. To the north, at Cemetery and Culp's Hills, Ewell's forces had made little headway by nightfall, when Union troops drove them out of some trenches they had gained during the afternoon.

  After two days of fighting, almost thirty-five thousand men were killed, wounded, or missing from both armies combined, more than in any other battle of the war up to that time. And the toll would rise: Despite the carnage, and despite the skill displayed by Union officers and troops, Lee believed he was making progress, and the Battle of Gettysburg would resume the following morning.37

  While Lee invaded Pennsylvania, some 2,500 Confederate troops under General John Hunt Morgan were making a foray into Indiana and Ohio, hoping to stir up a rebellion among the area's prosouthern, Copperhead residents. Having started out from Tennessee in late June, Morgan and his men crossed the Cumberland River into Kentucky on July 2. "The river was out of its banks" because of heavy rains, a commander recalled. Using canoes and small rafts, and making their horses swim, the two brigades hauled four cannon with them across the swift, flooded river.

  Confederate general Braxton Bragg had authorized Morgan to raid Kentucky and pin down the Union forces under General Ambrose Burnside, preventing them from reinforcing General Rosecrans in middle Tennessee. However, the maverick Morgan intended to press northward into Indiana and Ohio, pillaging small towns, freeing thousands of rebel prisoners in Indianapolis, and sacking Cincinnati. Morgan's plan would keep him within a day's ride of the Ohio River—the southern border of those two states—should he need to flee in the face of overwhelming Union forces. If he couldn't reach a shallow area to recross the Ohio River, Morgan planned to head east into Pennsylvania and join forces with Lee if he was still there.

  In Kentucky, Burnside postponed his march and dispatched cavalry units to hunt down Morgan, who was reported to be attacking everywhere but never materialized. Morgan's telegrapher had tapped into Union army wires on July 2 and sent messages reporting a much larger Confederate force in various places at once all over northern Kentucky. Meanwhile, the rebel horsemen plunged onward toward the Indiana border.38

  The fighting at Gettysburg resumed at dawn on July 3 with a protracted clash on the Union right, where Federals returning from the left wing retook the few trenches at the base of Culp's Hill that Ewell's men had been able to hold from the previous day. Longstreet meanwhile had again failed to convince Lee that a frontal assault was futile.

  Lee's plan, however, was not as impulsive as it seemed. A careful student of military history and an admirer of Napoleon, Lee had thought out a complex scheme in which the frontal assault would mainly be a diversion. While Ewell closed in on the Federals' right wing, providing a second distraction, General J. E. B. Stuart and his six thousand cavalrymen were supposed to hit Cemetery Ridge from the rear like a cleaver, splitting Meade's forces in two. Broken and surrounded, the Union forces would swiftly be destroyed.39

  Shortly after 1 p.m. Longstreet carried out Lee's order to bombard the Union center in preparation for an assault by three infantry divisions. In the biggest Confederate artillery barrage of the war, Longstreet's 150 guns pounded Cemetery Ridge for two hours, and the Federals, protected by stone walls and breastworks from the balls flying overhead, responded with an equal number of cannon, creating a din that could be heard 150 miles away in Pittsburgh.

  When the bombardment stopped around 3 p.m., Longstreet believed the Union artillery had been knocked out and, against his better judgment, ordered the infantry to attack. George Pickett led the charge, as fourteen thousand Confederate troops formed a moving tapestry of gray coats a mile wide, surging forward across open ground to Cemetery Ridge. The Federals had stopped their barrage only to fool the Confederates and save ammunition, and they resumed with a fury, tearing into the enemy ranks with solid shot and exploding shells, followed by canister at closer range. Regiments from Vermont, Ohio, and New York came forward from the ridge and fired on the Confederates' left and right flanks, helping to doom their assault, from which only half the men returned.40

  Only with the help of the cavalry charge from the east, against the Federals' rear, could Pickett's men have broken through the Union center from the front. Stuart and his formidable horsemen, however, had been cut off by the fearless young commander of the Union cavalry, Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer, and his 2,500 troopers, mostly Michigan "Wolverines," who battled the Confederates to a draw three miles away.41

  Lee took responsibility for the disaster and quickly formed the retreating men into a defensive line. However, the Union counterattack that Lee expected never arrived. Meade decided that the victory was sufficient, and not knowing how much damage the Federals had inflicted, he did not want to risk an assault that might reverse their gains. In the afternoon of the following day, July 4, Meade was ready to follow up his success, but a heavy rainstorm prevented him from launching an attack.42

  Nonetheless, the victory as it stood was indeed sufficient to cause jubilation when the news reached Philadelphia, where the Inquirer declared, on July 4, "VICTORY! WATERLOO ECLIPSED!" In Washington, Independence Day was celebrated with unprecedented fanfare and excitement. Lincoln bluntly rejected the peace overture from Confederate vice president Stephens by withholding permission for him to proceed up the Potomac. Confederate hopes for British recognition and intervention on their behalf were also dashed by the Union victories. Amazingly, after two years of dispiriting defeats at the hands of Lee's troops, the Union's Army of the Potomac had finally reversed the tide of the war.

  The Federals had suffered twenty-three thousand casualties, but the staggering loss was a smaller percentage of the Union's fighting force than were the casualties on the Confederate side. With twenty-eight thousand men—more than a third of his army—killed, wounded, or missing at Gettysburg, Lee began his harrowing retreat in the rain on July 4. For the thousands of wounded, riding in carts that bumped along on uneven dirt roads, the journey was prolonged agony.43

  • • •

  "A cloudy, muggy, sultry Fourth," New York City attorney George Templ
eton Strong recorded in his diary. Church bells chimed and cannon fired a "national salute" in Union Square, but the news from Gettysburg arrived in fragments, so the mood in the city was subdued; the public was accustomed to hearing reports of a major battle without details of which side had prevailed— or with exaggerations of Union success—only to be disappointed later, and then devastated by the long casualty lists in the newspapers. Strong, a staunch Republican and founding member of the city's patriotic Union League Club, had slept fitfully the previous night, "tormented by headache," and awakened periodically by bursts of fireworks. "I arose bilious, headachy, backachy, sour, and savage.44

  The Democrats were not in a festive mood either on July Fourth. At the Academy of Music, Governor Seymour addressed a gathering of the party faithful, which included County Supervisor William Tweed and District Attorney A. Oakey Hall, rising players in Tammany Hall, the dominant Democratic party organization in the city.* Seymour lamented the bitter political division within the northern states—which he blamed on the infringement of civil liberties by the Lincoln administration—and warned of violent consequences. "Let us be admonished now in time," Seymour said, "and take care that this irritation, this feeling which is growing up in our midst shall not also ripen unto civil troubles that shall carry evils of war into our very midst, and about our own homes."45