by Burke Davis
There was more forage at Westminster, and Stuart spent the night there, with the column strung out as far as Union Mills on the road to Gettysburg. Here he got first word of the Federal pursuit: Kilpatrick's cavalry was at Littlestown, seven miles away. The staff talked over the problem: The enemy was probably moving toward Hanover, over the Pennsylvania line to the north. The Federals were seven miles from Hanover, and Stuart was ten. Yet he held on to the shining new Federal wagons and their teams as if they were the only evidence of his success, and as if the need for haste did not occur to him. Gettysburg was fifteen miles away, but if anyone in the column thought of that fact, it seemed of no consequence; it was not yet a prospective battleground.
On June thirtieth the leading riders entered Hanover and struck the rear of a Federal cavalry brigade on the main street.
The 2nd North Carolina charged, scattered a bluecoat regiment, the 18th Pennsylvania, and with help might have put to flight all of Kilpatrick's column.
But Stuart's line of march was split. Fitz Lee was out to the west, shielding the approach from Littlestown, and Wade Hampton was behind the slow wagon train. There was only the little brigade of Chambliss to come to the aid of the North Carolinians when Kil-patrick countercharged, and there was a chase through Hanover. Citizens in houses along the street threw up windows and fired muskets and shotguns at the graycoats.
Stuart was jogging toward Hanover when the flight approached him. He led Blackford toward town at a gallop and tried to rally the men. There was not a pause in the headlong retreat, and Blackford and Stuart soon found themselves riding almost neck and neck with the head of the Federal pursuit.
They were riding at full speed on a road lined with hedges.when Stuart laughed, drew his saber, and shouted, "Rally them, Blackford!" He spurred his big mare, Virginia, jumping the hedge. Blackford followed him. They were not yet safe. A Federal flanking party ordered them to surrender, but Jeb and Blackford galloped on. Pistol shots sang around them. They rode in a field deep in grass, and neither rider saw a deep fifteen-foot ditch until they were upon it. The horses rose magnificently, Blackford a bit in advance. He turned: "I shall never forget the glimpse I then saw of this beautiful animal away up in mid-air over the chasm and Stuart's fine figure sitting erect and firm in the saddle." Blackford's own horse, Magic, cleared the ditch by a wide margin, a leap of some twenty-seven feet. The pursuing Federals halted and fired after them.
Major McClellan watched other Confederate officers gallop in the field, discover the ditch too late, and land sprawling in the shallow water at the bottom. Stuart and his staff howled with laughter "notwithstanding the peril."
The 2nd North Carolina rallied on a hill nearby and Stuart brought up a gun to halt pursuit. Wade Hampton's men went into line on the right; Fitz Lee joined on the left. The enemy approached, and there was firing, but Kilpatrick did not press the hill position. The wagons had been placed together, with details ready to burn them, but now Stuart ordered the prizes back into the road and had them rolled eastward toward the town of Jefferson, hoping to send them to York, where he expected to get information of the main army.
Stuart faced the enemy until dark, fearing an attack if he moved in daylight. A punishing night march began. Wagons hindered the regiments and broke up the columns with frequent halts. About four hundred new prisoners had been taken, and these rode in the wagon train, many of them as drivers. The mules were wild with hunger and thirst, and often bolted or bucked. More than once the procession ground to a halt, and the trouble was not discovered until officers rode the line and found a driver asleep with his weary mules standing in the traces. Stuart drove the staff to keep the column on the move. He turned north at Jefferson, and on the morning of July-first reached the hamlet of Dover.
It was the day Robert Lee's advance began fighting at Gettysburg.
Fitz Lee, probing eastward toward York, discovered that General Early had left that town and gone to the West. Stuart's best guess today was that the army was concentrating to the north of Chambersburg, at Shippensburg. He groped for more information.
Major A. R. Venable of his staff was sent out from Dover, trailing Early's troops, and Fitz Lee soon afterward sent Captain Henry Lee toward Gettysburg for the same purpose. Stuart pushed the column toward Carlisle.
The tail of the column had left Dover at sunrise, and here the last of the batch of prisoners was paroled. Stuart's men plodded through the village of Dillsburg, taking horses as they went. They gathered more than a hundred in this region from people who had joined a protective league, guaranteeing defense against Confederate raiders, and had left their horses conveniently at hand. Men took all the food they could find in houses, and many robbed beehives. Women were put to work cooking for the troops.
Stuart wrote: "... after as little rest as was compatible with the exhausted condition of the command I pushed on for Carlisle where I hoped to find a portion of the army."
But when his commissary officers reached Carlisle in late afternoon, they found EwelFs men had long since departed; the enemy occupied the town. Stuart came up and was told that a brigade of volunteer infantry was in ambush in the town, under command of General William F. ("Baldy") Smith. Jeb sent in a demand for surrender. Smith declined, and Stuart threatened bombardment. Smith's message was plain: "Shell away." The guns were firing almost before the messenger was out of town. Stuart burned the U.S. Cavalry barracks. A civilian witness wrote:
"And now began a general flight of the inhabitants into the country and cellars and behind anything strong enough to afford hope of protection, a stream of women and children and infirm people on foot, with outcries and terrified countenances. To add terror to the scene the sky was lighted up by the flames of a woodyard in the vicinity of the rebel encampment, and about 10 o'clock the barracks and the garrison were burnt. ... In the middle of the night there was another pause in the firing, and another call for a surrender made, to which a rather uncourteous reply was made by General Smith, and the shelling proceeded, but with diminishing power and frequency. It is supposed that ammunition had become precious in the hostile camp."4
The truth was that Stuart, after eight days on the move, had only now learned where Lee was: "The whereabouts of our army," he wrote, "was still a mystery, but during the night I received a dispatch from General Lee that the army was at Gettysburg and had been engaged this day."
The news was brought back by Venable and Henry Lee, with orders to hurry the column to Gettysburg. They also had glowing reports of victory over Meade's infantry during the day. Stuart left Carlisle at one A.M., with about thirty miles to go by the nearest route.5
The column left the wagon train behind, entrusted to Colonel R. L. T. Beale of the 9th Virginia. Beale got the wagons six miles south of Carlisle before he called a halt and watched as his weary drivers "suffering in agony for sleep, lay on the road with bridles in hand, some on rocks, and others on the wet earth, slumbering soundly." There was soon an order from Stuart, far in front, to see that Beale's command remained in the saddle all night. Beale replied that this would rob him of fresh troops in tomorrow's fighting, and Stuart, as if the factor of fatigue had not occurred to him, replied that the riders should have some sleep. Jeb himself had seen men falling asleep while their horses were trying to jump fences.
Stuart got brief rest in the night. Esten Cooke saw him halt for an hour, "wrapped in his cape and resting against the trunk of a tree, and then mount again, as fresh, apparently, as if he had slumbered from sunset to dawn."
On the morning of July second Captain Blackford rode far ahead of Stuart to the field at Gettysburg. He came onto a landscape already made terrible by long hours of the most savage fighting the army had known, but found Lee's headquarters strangely quiet after the roar of the armies meeting head-on. Across rolling fields masses of bluecoats lay on slopes stretching from tumbled rock piles called Big Round Top and Little Round Top, past a peach orchard, along the Emmitsburg Road into Gettysburg-and then, more heights, Culp's Hill
and Cemetery Ridge.
But Blackford was most impressed by the homely spectacle of Lee in the grip of an uncomfortable illness. Staff officers told him he could not see the commander, though Blackford had often visited Lee's tent with messages from Stuart, and had always been admitted. But today Lee's aide took his report into the tent himself. For half an hour Blackford talked with Colonels Charles Venable and Walter Taylor of Lee's staff of Stuart's adventures in the wide circle of the enemy. Blackford was surprised to see Lee make several exits from the tent and go to the rear. "He walked as if he was weak and in pain," Blackford said, and one of the officers explained that Lee had suffered an attack of diarrhea.
Blackford also saw strange warfare in the town of Gettysburg, where infantrymen of General Rodes occupied houses; men had cut holes in walls to pass easily from room to room and house to house. The troops were naked to the waist and black with powder, firing from rear windows where they had stuffed mattresses and piled furniture as shields. Men not on duty at the windows lounged on elegant chairs and sofas and lay on thick rugs. From the windows Blackford saw the enemy dug in along the natural fortress he assumed General Lee would have occupied, if he had been "in his usually vigorous condition of health."
In these hours Stuart's column moved as rapidly as its worn men and horses would allow. Wade Hampton, with much the shorter road, was first to approach the field. He was ordered to the left of Lee's infantry, but Federal riders appeared when he neared Hunters-ville, a village five miles north of Gettysburg. Stuart halted Hampton to meet this threat to the army's rear and there was a brief skirmish, ended by a charge of South Carolina and Georgia troopers. Hampton held the ground until the next morning, when he found the enemy gone. General Custer, who was with the Federals, claimed victory in this action.
In the afternoon of July second, perhaps at the hour when the army was launching costly attacks in the open, the peach orchard, and facing slaughter on the rocky hillsides, Stuart rode up to face Robert Lee.
Major McClellan and Colonel Munford, among others, witnessed their meeting. "It was painful beyond description," McClellan thought.
Lee reddened at sight of Stuart and raised his arm as if he would strike him. "General Stuart, where have you been?"
Stuart seemed to "wilt," and explained his movements to Lee.
"I have not heard a word from you for days," Lee said, "and you the eyes and ears of my army."
"I have brought you 125 wagons and their teams, General," Stuart said.
"Yes, General, but they are an impediment to me now." His manner abruptly became one "of great tenderness," and he said to Stuart, "Let me ask your help now. We will not discuss this matter longer. Help me fight these people."6
Stuart went to his command and rested on the Confederate left. He took a long look at the field, heard officers talk of the bloody hammering of the day, and concluded that tomorrow would bring a Confederate victory. After nine days, he was in position with the army. The brigades of Jones and Robertson, which he had ordered to guard the rear and follow closely the main army, were far away, no one knew where.
The day's fighting had strewn 8,000 casualties between the armies, with the lines otherwise little changed. Lee's attacks had been delayed and delivered piecemeal: Longstreet had belatedly sent his men in on the right, around the Round Tops and Devil's Den and the Emmitsburg Road, in bloody hours that cost him 80 per cent of some regiments. John Hood was badly wounded. A. P. Hill in the center had seen a few men reach the crest of Cemetery Ridge, but they were driven back and slaughtered in the open; on the left, Ewell was later still, but got a toehold on the rugged slopes of Culp's Hill.
By nightfall, too, Lee had lost his superiority in numbers, for the whole Army of the Potomac was now up and in position. General Meade was by no means confident, however, and in a night council proposed pulling rearward to Big Pipe Creek to await attack. His commanders persuaded him to hold his forbidding line.
The Union cavalry was scattered: John Buford's division, badly hurt by collision with Lee's infantry as Gettysburg opened, was in the rear guarding the railhead at Westminster; Kilpatrick was on Meade's left, and Gregg on the right.
Confederate regiments moved in the night, closing the line. George Pickett's division came in from the rear, fresh and strong, not yet having fired a shot on this field. There was some confusion of command at headquarters, and orders for the next day's action went out verbally. Longstreet and Lee were still engaged in their strange, subtle conflict of wills; Old Pete feared a Fredericksburg in reverse on this terrain.
July third opened with a dawn artillery barrage on Ewell's front near Culp's Hill. Ewell attacked the hill, but the position was too strong, and there were no guns for support. This corps withdrew, to fight no more for the day.
Lee ordered Longstreet to strike the Union center.
"I have been examining the ground over to the right," Long-street said. "I am much inclined to think the best thing is to move to the Federal left."
"No," Lee said. "I am going to take them where they are. I want you to take Pickett's Division and make the attack. I will reinforce you with two divisions of the Third Corps."
"That will give me 15,000," Longstreet said. "I have been a soldier all my life, in pretty much all kinds of skirmishes. I think I can safely say there never were fifteen thousand men who could make that attack successfully."
Lee continued to explain his plan; Longstreet went to his front. Hours dragged. Longstreet was once found asleep in the woods, as the gray regiments were brought up for the assault.
George Pickett wrote his bride:
. . . Oh, the responsibility for the lives of such men as these!
Well, my darling, their fate and that of our beloved South-
land will be settled ere your glorious brown eyes rest on these
scraps of penciled paper
The men are lying in the rear, and the hot July sun pours its scorching rays almost vertically down on them. The suffering is almost unbearable.
I have never seen Old Peter so grave and troubled. For several minutes after I saluted him he looked at me without speaking.' Then in an agonized voice, the reserve all gone, he said, "Pickett, I am being crucified. I have instructed Alexander to give you your orders, for I can't."
... I saw tears glistening on his cheeks and beard. The stern old war horse, God bless him, was weeping for his men, and, I know, praying too that this cup might pass from them. It is almost three o'clock.
Alexander's 159 guns had rolled for more than an hour, blasting the line on Cemetery Ridge, a mile away across the open. Pickett's ranks were assembling in front, under the blazing sun. Their front was more than a mile wide, in three solid columns.
There was a desperate message to Pickett from General Alexander, at artillery headquarters:
For God's sake come quick Come quick or my ammunition will not let me support you properly.
Pickett saw a cavalryman on his way out—Fitz Lee: "Come on, Fitz, and go with us; we shall have lots of fun there presently."
Men behind heard Pickett shout as he rode through the infantry ranks: "Up, men, and to your posts! Don't forget today that you are from Old Virginia!"
The 15,000 stepped forward.
Stuart was up early, and if he had been stung by Lee's reception after his exhausting march, he gave no sign of it. He sent the troopers back to the ordnance wagons for ammunition; they were two hours or more at the task. Newcomers were in the ranks today, one brigade of them the half-disciplined Western Virginia riders of General A. G. Jenkins. These were now commanded by Colonel M. J. Ferguson, since Jenkins had been wounded at Hunterstown the day before. This brigade, through some error, drew only ten rounds of ammunition per man.
The Horse Artillery had ammunition troubles as well, and Stuart was forced to march about noon, leaving Major Breathed with orders to follow when he could fill his caissons. Jeb took the brigades of Jenkins and Chambliss eastward on the York road; Fitz Lee and Wade Hampton were ordere
d to follow.
Almost as soon as Jeb moved the procession was seen by Federal scouts on Cemetery Ridge, and the warning went rearward to General David Gregg, commanding cavalry on that wing. The bluecoats were concentrated along the Low Dutch Road, where the roads to York, Hanover and Baltimore intersected.
Stuart marched two and a half miles out the York turnpike without sighting a Federal soldier. The route led through rich farmlands, thickly settled, dotted with clumps of woodland and big barns. Heat shimmered over the fields, many of which were enclosed by stone fences. Stuart turned off the highway to his right, on a country road leading to "a commanding ridge which completely controlled a wide plain of cultivated fields stretching toward Hanover on the left, and reaching to the base of the mountain spurs among which the enemy held position."
He was on Cress Ridge, whose northern slopes were clothed in woods which masked his approach from enemy scouts. In the open below, some three hundred yards away, was a big frame barn known as the Rummel Barn. Stuart took in the position at a glance, and with his instinct for terrain, made it his. His object was to shield General EwelFs left, observe the enemy's rear, and strike on the flank if the opportunity arose. Cress Ridge seemed to him ideal, for he could see almost every road leading from the rear of the Federal army, and the open fields gave him room to maneuver.
Jeb hid the two brigades in the trees until they could not have been seen from the nearby barn. The landscape gave not a hint of war, and there was no sound from the main armies, which faced each other a scant three miles away. Stuart's next move mystified his staff.
Jeb ordered one of the guns of a new Maryland battery to the edge of the woods and fired it in several directions, giving the orders himself. The shells burst far away over the empty landscape.
