Dixie Victorious: An Alternate history of the Civil War

by Peter Tsouras

  In addition to locating and identifying units, Hampton’s scouts provided an accurate assessment of the number of troopers Stuart could expect to encounter in Maryland and Pennsylvania. They placed the number at 10,000—only 500 fewer than the actual total available to Hooker. The scouts were less successful in estimating the total strength of the Union army, although by piecing together their reports and head counts gleaned from other sources, Robert E. Lee estimated, more or less correctly, that his own army was outnumbered by about 15,000 muskets. The disparity was not as great as he had labored under during earlier campaigns. The knowledge permitted Lee to gauge accurately his own capabilities as he ranged to and across the Mason-Dixon Line.

  Perhaps the most significant contribution made by Hampton’s scouts was their discovery, late on June 28, that Hooker (who was known to have lost the confidence of his superiors in Washington) had been relieved of army command in favor of Major General George Gordon Meade, former leader of the army’s V Corps. The timing of the change, on the eve of an anticipated encounter with the invaders of the North, was difficult to understand. Regardless, when rushed to his new headquarters outside Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, the intelligence enabled Lee to make an informed and timely selection of his strategic options.21

  Lee Concentrates at Gettysburg, June 28, 1863

  Believing that Meade, a resident of Pennsylvania, would move more quickly than his predecessor to defend the Keystone State, Lee resolved to concentrate his forces in preparation for a showdown with the Army of the Potomac. Already he had sent his advance echelon, Ewell’s corps, from the Potomac shallows toward the Susquehanna. On the 27th Ewell had occupied Carlisle, within striking distance of the latter river and, just above it, Harrisburg. Now Lee recalled the Second Corps, directing it southward toward a junction with Longstreet, Hill, and Stuart. The logical rendezvous was the railroad village of Gettysburg, seat of Adams County, almost 30 miles south of Carlisle and 24 miles east of Chambersburg. No fewer than ten roads, including four hard-surface turnpikes, radiated out of the town like spokes on a wheel, making Gettysburg a magnet for any widely dispersed command such as Lee’s.22

  Late on the 29th, Lee, by now convinced of the strategic importance of Gettysburg, directed Stuart to head there and report on the tactical application of the local geography. At the outset of the campaign Lee had reached a tacit understanding with the defensive-minded Longstreet that he would hold any position he occupied north of the Mason-Dixon Line and await the enemy’s attack. By the 28th, however, the Confederate leader had modified his strategy. He doubted that Meade, who was known as a cautious, conservative warrior, would do him the favor of assaulting any position he might occupy. Thus, as he demonstrated by dispatching Stuart to Gettysburg, Lee hoped to use the high ground surrounding Gettysburg as jumping-off points for an offensive designed to defeat in detail Meade’s equally elongated army.23

  Before dawn on the 30th Stuart started eastward from Chambersburg at the head of two of his brigades (he had left Chambliss’s men at Chambersburg to support the infantry and cover the army’s rear). With Hampton’s scouts in the van and trailed by one of Hill’s brigades, the long line of riders wended its way through South Mountain to and beyond Cashtown. Just shy of 7.00 a.m., a flanking party from Hampton’s brigade located Buford’s Federals—the first element of the Army of the Potomac to have crossed the Mason-Dixon Line—near Fountaindale, just above the Pennsylvania border and perhaps 20 miles southwest of Gettysburg. After sending back word of their presence, Hampton’s flankers shadowed the blue horsemen as they headed north to Fairfield. Outside that farming village, they boldly challenged Buford’s troopers and an accompanying battery of horse artillery. A brisk fight broke out, but then the Union leader abruptly disengaged and headed cross-country toward Gettysburg, apparently in response to imperative orders.24

  A few hours later, Stuart’s main body re-established contact with Buford’s division. Early that afternoon, the Confederates approached the northwestern outskirts of Gettysburg via the Cashtown Road. At about 2.00 p.m., they ran into a phalanx of vedettes—mounted pickets—whom Buford had deployed along Marsh Run, some three miles from the center of town. Careful not to become heavily engaged for fear of disarranging his superior’s plans, Stuart sparred lightly with the Yankees, while his scouts sized up the local area, taking careful note of Buford’s dispositions and trying to gauge his manpower. From prisoners Stuart learned that Buford was on the scene with two-thirds of his normal strength—the brigades of Colonels William Gamble and Thomas C. Devin, plus the six 3-inch ordnance rifles of Lieutenant John Calef’s Battery A, 2d United States Artillery. Most of the troopers had bivouacked atop Seminary Ridge, a quarter-mile west of town, with pickets thrown out north, west, and southwest of Gettysburg. Calef’s guns had gone into battery on either side of the Cashtown Road, placed so as to sweep the most likely avenue of Confederate approach.25

  Stuart did more than study Buford’s emplacements. Hampton’s scouts, sent cross-country to points south of Gettysburg, located couriers passing between Buford and the advance of the Army of the Potomac. The scouts chased down and captured one messenger, whom they found to be carrying a dispatch from John Reynolds—then encamped five miles south of Gettysburg—in response to Buford’s request for infantry support at Gettysburg. The message conveyed Reynolds’s promise that his I Army Corps would hasten to the cavalry’s side at an early hour on July 1, followed as closely as possible by the more distant XI Corps of Major General Oliver Otis Howard.26

  Relayed to Chambersburg, the captured dispatch told Lee that, if he moved to Gettysburg early the next morning, he would be opposed by cavalry alone. Lacking infantry support, even John Buford’s savvy, hardbitten troopers would giveway before the gray tide, permitting Lee to deal with Reynolds and Howard in succession rather than in combination. Thus, fully apprised of the tactical situation taking shape east of his present position, a confident Lee started the balance of Hill’s corps toward Gettysburg before dawn on July 1. Even as Hill set out, Lee sought to coordinate his movements with Ewell’s. Courier-borne messages directed the Second Corps to come down southward-leading roads from Carlisle as well as the roads that led southwestward from the city of York (the latter a recent objective of one of Ewell’s divisions), prepared to join hands with Hill’s troops just outside Gettysburg. The succession of communiqués permitted Ewell to coordinate his movements with Hill’s with remarkable precision, ensuring a concerted strike at Buford.27

  Perhaps never before in the history of American warfare had an army advancing through hostile territory been better prepared to meet an enemy holding ground well chosen for its defensive capabilities. The result would be an object lesson in the value of what later generations would call real-time, strategic intelligence.

  The Battle of Gettysburg, July 1, 1863

  John Buford’s experienced eye had enabled his troopers and horse artillerymen to exploit Gettysburg’s topography to maximum effect. The tall, steep, foliage-crowned ridges that flowed west toward the foothills of South Mountain appeared perfectly suited to a defense in depth. To Buford’s profound surprise, however, the high ground proved no obstacle to the gray-clad troopers who came calling on him on that sultry early-summer morning. First contact between Hill’s skirmishers and Gamble’s vedettes occurred at about 5.30 a.m. along Marsh Creek near its crossing of the Cashtown Road. Attacking with a full head of steam, Hill’s foot soldiers, supported closely by the Carolina centaurs of Hampton and the Virginia cavaliers of Fitz Lee, quickly began to drive in Buford’s pickets south of the road.

  At first, Gamble’s men retreated grudgingly, firing as they went. Their combativeness, however, did not assure them of a successful withdrawal. Before they could reach the relative safety of Herr Ridge, Stuart’s main body swarmed over their position, felling them with saber swipes and pistol shots. Quickly surrounded, dozens of Yankees were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, while panicky survivors scrambled for the rear.28

  Thos
e who reached Herr Ridge found no sanctuary. While comrades corralled a huge haul of prisoners, gray-clad riders thundered up the slopes to attack the pickets seeking refuge at the summit. Again the attackers uprooted Gamble’s line and swept it from the field. In a memorable display of might, Wade Hampton personally dispatched several opponents with his long-bladed Spanish sword and 31-caliber pocket revolver. According to some accounts, it was he who fired the shot that dropped William Gamble, lifeless, from his horse.

  As soon as they had Gamble’s men on the run, Hampton’s people charged toward McPherson’s Ridge and, beyond, Seminary Ridge, the last long stretch of high ground west of Gettysburg. Riding an irresistible momentum, they cleared McPherson’s of blue skirmishers in mere minutes. Then, at Hampton’s bellowed command, they halted, regrouped, and confronted at longer range the guns of Calef’s battery that Buford had emplaced astride the Cashtown Road.

  Demonstrating a tactical versatility that his Virginia colleagues appeared to lack, Hampton dismounted most of his men and placed them behind cover on either side of the road, where they began to pick off battery horses and gun crews. The dismounted troopers, many of whom wielded the celebrated Enfield rifle, took such a toll of the battery that the foot soldiers coming up behind Stuart—the Tennesseeans, Alabamians, Mississippians, and North Carolinians of Major General Henry Heth’s division—easily overran Calef’s position. Calef himself, having emptied his pistol at the onrushing hordes, was forced to surrender along with 40 of his men. Even as they were herded to the rear, their captors trundled the guns into position facing Seminary Ridge; soon they were spraying that last bastion of Yankee resistance with canister and shell.29

  Aware that his line was crumbling but determined to shore it up or die trying, John Buford galloped west from Seminary Ridge at the head of Gamble’s reserves. Calmly noting his approach, Hampton remounted a portion of his command and guided it at the head of the blue column. In the valley between Seminary and East McPherson’s Ridges, the antagonists collided with a resounding crunch. Many riders were lifted out of their saddles; others were thrown head over heels when their horses went down in the horrid, dust-clouded tangle. A North Carolinian spoke for troopers on both sides when he declared the result the “the loudest, deadliest, most frightening fifteen minutes I spent during the war.”30

  During that quarter-hour, those opponents who remained in the saddle engaged each other in a desperate sword-and-pistol contest, but one whose outcome was never in doubt. Given their greater numbers, the Confederates not only pummeled Buford’s troopers in front but also lashed their flanks and rear, surrounding and squeezing their prey with python-like precision. At the height of the mêlée, Buford took a gunshot wound to the thigh that would prove fatal, although he managed to extricate himself from the slaughter and, along with a few dozen of his men, flee eastward. Bloody and breathless, the survivors were pursued through the streets of Gettysburg by Rebels screaming like banshees. Almost 100 fugitives were chased down blind alleys and captured, while almost as many others fell to cold steel or hot lead.31

  While Hampton’s men, backed by Brigadier General James J. Archer’s infantry brigade, overwhelmed Gamble’s position west of Gettysburg, Fitz Lee’s troopers, supported closely by the foot soldiers of Brigadier General Joseph R. Davis’s brigade, veered northward to oppose the vedettes and skirmishers under Tom Devin. In this sector, too, the outcome seemed preordained. Lacking Gamble’s artillery support and forced to stretch his lines thinly to cover the roads north and northeast of town, Devin’s position was not deep enough to hold back the hundreds of attackers who flooded over it, shooting and shouting.

  Devin faced a two-pronged assault. While Davis attacked in front, holding the Federals in place, Fitz Lee burst through their picket line, then circled into their rear, Assailed simultaneously from many angles, the position came unhinged with startling rapidity. Within 45 minutes of first contact, surviving troopers were retreating east and south, most of them afoot, many having discarded the repeating carbines that had proven no match against the overwhelming assault. Many, if not most, of the fugitives were ridden down and captured before they could reach their led horses. Others made no attempt to escape; upwards of 600 Yankees, including whole companies of New Yorkers, Illinoisans, and Indianans, were compelled to surrender when trapped in an unfinished railroad cut. When marched off, they left behind almost 50 comrades lying dead or dying amid the pastures and farm fields north of the Cashtown Road.32

  By 7.30 a.m., the struggle was over. Even the victors seemed shocked that Buford’s lines had collapsed so quickly, so completely. In his post-campaign report, Stuart betrayed his wonderment when noting that:

  “… in less time than it takes to tell, my brigades had chased the enemy from successive positions, strengthened by field-works and supported by artillery, forcing him inside Gettysburgh [sic], where he was relentlessly pursued and overtaken, until no fewer than 1,000 federal troops had been rendered hors de combat. The accomplishments of the Cavalry Division on this field beggar comparisons with any in the annals of mounted warfare.”33

  The fighting that followed the seizure of the high ground west and northwest of Gettysburg, while consistently heated and occasionally savage, smacked of anticlimax. By 10.00 a.m., or shortly thereafter, Heth’s infantry, now backed by the division of Major General William Dorsey Pender, had occupied not only the town itself but also the high ground below it, covering the path of approach of Reynolds’s I Corps. Within a half-hour of taking up these positions, the defenders were supported on the left by two-thirds of Dick Ewell’s corps: Major General Jubal Early’s division, which had come down from the north just as the cavalry fighting wound down, and the division of Major General Robert Rodes, which soon afterward reached Gettysburg from the northeast via the York Pike.

  The timely intelligence that Stuart’s troopers had gathered on Buford’s dispositions had enabled Lee to recall Ewell’s people to Gettysburg before the Army of the Potomac could leave Maryland. Early on July 1, Ewell had started Rodes’s troops south from Heidlersburg, while ordering Early, then moving east from York, to meet him at Gettysburg. By the time the divisions converged on the field of battle, the troops of Heth and Pender—most of them still fresh, having been lightly engaged thus far—had dug in astride the upper reaches of Seminary Ridge.

  In response to instructions from army headquarters, members of Stuart’s staff guided Ewell’s men into position atop and behind an equally formidable position—Cemetery Ridge, which ran south from Gettysburg roughly parallel to, and a mile east of, Heth’s and Pender’s perch. The last third of Ewell’s corps was also on hand to greet the Army of the Potomac. The division of Major General Edward Johnson had departed the Carlisle vicinity on June 30 and reached Chambersburg that evening. The head of Johnson’s column arrived just west of Gettysburg at about 7.00 a.m. on the 1st. Within three hours, Stuart’s aides had placed the newcomers in position on Early’s right, covering the ground between the ridges.34

  The result of this timely concentration was that at 10.30, when John Reynolds came up to the southern outskirts of Gettysburg at the head of the I Corps, he found himself not only out-numbered but badly out-positioned. Obliged to attack uphill against well-prepared defenses, his command was blocked by Johnson and supporting forces, while the rest of Ewell’s corps joined A.E Hill in shredding both of its flanks. Despite lopsided odds and mounting casualties, the I Corps held its ground for two hours, praying that Howard’s troops would come up to relieve at least a measure of the pressure it was under.

  Instead, when the vanguard of the XI Corps reached Gettysburg via the Emmitsburg and Taneytown Roads some minutes after noon, Early and Rodes tore into it with abandon, defeating Howard’s every attempt to secure a position on Reynolds’s right. After brief resistance, the corps splintered, cracked, and broke apart, its men abandoning the field with the same alacrity they had displayed when routed by Ewell’s revered predecessor, Stonewall Jackson, at Chancellorsville. As soon
as the ground in their front was free of the enemy, Ewell’s people turned west to batter the right and rear of the I Corps.

  It seemed only a matter of time before what remained of the Union line collapsed under this multi-directional pounding, but the process was expedited after a shell fragment struck the charismatic Reynolds, killing him instantly. Thereafter the I Corps steadily relinquished what little ground it had secured, before abandoning the field altogether, almost as a body. By mid-afternoon, two Union corps had been transformed into a panic-stricken rabble in full retreat toward the Maryland border, Stuart’s hard-riding troopers howling at their heels. When darkness halted retreat and pursuit, the I and XI Corps had suffered a combined total of 11,500 casualties, including more than 5,000 captives, out of 16,000 engaged at Gettysburg. Meanwhile, Gamble’s and Devin’s brigades had lost almost half their combined pre-battle strength of 2,900, the majority in captured or missing. In something under six hours of combat, one-seventh of the effective strength of the Army of the Potomac had been irretrievably lost.35

  Longstreet’s Repulse, Pipe Creek, Maryland, July 29, 1863

  The long-range results of the debacle west and south of Gettysburg have been chronicled by a sizable body of literature; they can be recounted here with some brevity. Once apprised of the disaster and persuaded that the day could not be redeemed, Meade countermanded the orders that would have sent the balance of his army to Adams County. Instead, he activated a contingency plan, copies of which he had disseminated among his corps commanders prior to Reynolds’s decision to support Buford at Gettysburg. From his headquarters in the saddle (he had been en route from Taneytown, Maryland, when Reynolds and Howard were overthrown), the army leader directed the II, III, V, VI, and XII Corps, as well as the bulk of Pleasonton’s cavalry, to assemble along Little Pipe Creek, in north-central Maryland.