Upon the Altar of the Nation

by Harry S. Stout

  On June 3 Lee’s audacious move north commenced, to the horror of Pennsylvania residents and the unrestrained joy of Virginians, thankful at last to have the war in the lap of the enemy. Mindful of Northern papers and public opinion, Lee forbade all pillaging in hopes of a counterexample to the behavior of invading Union armies. At Chambersburg Lee declared: “No greater disgrace can befall the army and through it our whole people, than the perpetration of barbarous outrages upon the innocent and defenceless. Such proceedings not only disgrace the perpetrators and all connected with them, but are subversive of the discipline and efficiency of the army, and destructive of the ends of our movement.”

  While these orders undoubtedly had a restraining effect, in practice he was no more able to prevent random soldiers’ raids on Northern property than were Union officers. Lee succeeded in saving towns from the torch, however, and prevented wanton theft and destruction of civilian property.1 Lee’s army considered railroads and former slaves fair targets, and black escapees (free and former slaves) in Pennsylvania were forcibly sent back to the South. One Confederate officer, William Christian, confessed that despite his orders to protect property, “there is a good deal of plundering going on, confined principally to the taking of provisions. No houses were searched and robbed, like our houses were done by the Yankees.” As for blacks: “We took a lot of Negroes yesterday. I was offered my choice, but as I could not get them back home I would not take them.” Then, in an odd moment of compassion, he added: “In fact, my humanity revolted at taking the poor devils away from their homes. They were so scared that I turned them all loose.”2

  When Hooker learned of Lee’s movement north, he began to position his army in Lee’s rear around Frederick, Maryland, to prepare an attack on undefended Richmond. The plan made sense. But a skeptical General Halleck, lacking all confidence in Hooker, countermanded his orders. Betrayed and humiliated, Hooker had no choice but to proffer his resignation on June 28, which President Lincoln accepted on the spot. General George Gordon Meade, the battle-hardened former commander of Fifth Corps, assumed command of the Army of the Potomac at its most critical hour and reversed course to engage Lee in Pennsylvania.

  Deprived of his usual intelligence by a stymied Stuart and marching in unfamiliar terrain, Lee was surprised to learn in late June that Hooker had been replaced by Meade. He learned, too, that Meade had abandoned his base south of the Potomac to close in with his army. By sheer coincidence, the two armies arrived around the farming village of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on July 1. Immediately it became clear to both commanders that this quiet village offered ideal terrain for a pitched battle. The ground sloped and rose in valleys and small hills strewn with heavy rocks and caves that afforded perfect defensive protection. Added to these formidable defensive positions were open fields begging for heroic frontal assaults. The stage was set for a perfect battle.

  At 10:00 a.m. on July 1, scattered fighting began outside of Gettysburg. Several skirmishes had already been fought and it was not immediately apparent to commanders on either side that this one would be any different. But as both sides rushed to secure strategic defensive positions from which they could launch offensive thrusts, the stakes quickly grew higher. Knowing Lee’s location, Meade appointed his best young general, John F. Reynolds, to command the left wing of the army with trusted veterans from the First Corps (the Iron Brigade of midwesterners), Oliver Howard’s Eleventh “Dutch” Corps, and Daniel Sickles’s Third Corps. Immediately they established a strong defensive position near the town of Emmitsburg, just west of Gettysburg.

  “Field Where General Reynolds Fell.” This photograph taken by Alexander Gardner, originally titled “A Harvest of Death,” shows the bodies of Federal soldiers killed on July 1, 1863, near the McPherson Ridge, on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg.

  Events quickly took on a momentum of their own. General John Buford’s Federal cavalry encountered heavy resistance from two divisions of A. P. Hill’s Third Corps advancing rapidly on Gettysburg. Recognizing immediately the strategic location of the junction at Gettysburg, Buford dismounted his cavalry and ordered them to hold McPherson Ridge, on the route to Seminary Ridge, “at all costs” (meaning no retreat, no surrender). Reynolds bravely led his First and Eleventh Corps in to reinforce Buford, but was promptly shot dead, leaving command of the wing to Abner Doubleday, who continued the attack. Soon Ewell’s powerful Second Corps arrived to support Hill and the Battle of Gettysburg was launched.

  As the second day dawned, Lee’s extended lines were spread thin around the outside of Meade’s defenders with Ewell to the north, Hill in the center, and Longstreet to the south. Despite the Union’s formidable defenses, Lee did not intend to be denied. The burden of attack fell on Lee’s least enthusiastic but most valuable “Old War Horse,” General James Longstreet, who faced Sickles’s Third Corps. Assuming that the greatest Federal strength lay alongside the Emmitsburg Road, with its flank near the Wheat Field, Lee ordered Longstreet to hit the flank with two divisions and then turn north to roll up the supposed enemy strength along the road.

  Battles raged up and down the entrenched Federal line as Lee probed for weak spots to strike and vanquish. The perfect spot of attack, of course, was the disconnected Union line at Little Round Top, still miraculously unoccupied. If Longstreet could get artillery to the top of that mound, the entire Union left would be exposed to a withering crossfire and the battle determined. But Lee, bent on massive destruction, had other ideas, and assigned only a token force of five hundred men from the Fifteenth Alabama to take Little Round Top.

  Five hundred men were not many, but still the strategic position would have sufficed had not Meade’s chief of engineers, General Gouverneur K. Warren, spotted the unprotected hill. Instantly he recognized the mortal danger that Confederate artillery on Little Round Top would pose to exposed Federal lines. Without delay he rang the alarm to the Federal Fifth Corps commander General George Sykes, and elements from the First Minnesota and Twentieth Maine were immediately dispatched to save the hill. The Twentieth Maine, led by the former Bowdoin College professor of rhetoric, Colonel Joshua L. Chamberlain, held the extreme left of the line with orders to hold the position “at all costs.”

  For nearly two hours, Chamberlain’s down-easters held off desperate assaults from the Fifteenth Alabama. No sooner would one charge cease than another began. With one-third of his men down and ammunition all but out, Chamberlain made one of the most intrepid moves in Civil War annals. Instead of retreat or surrender, he ordered his men to fix their bayonets sans ammunition and charge down the hill into the teeth of the Alabamians. Unnerved by the savage roar of the oncoming troops and unaware of their desperate straits, the Confederates surrendered en masse, leaving Little Round Top in Federal hands.3

  In a later memoir, Chamberlain described the successive attacks in words befitting a professor of rhetoric:All around, strange mingled roar—shouts of defiance, rally, and desperation; and underneath, murmured entreaty and stifled moans; gasping prayers, snatches of Sabbath song, whispers of loved names; everywhere men torn and broken, staggering, creeping, quivering on the earth, and dead faces with strangely fixed eyes staring stark into the sky. Things which cannot be told—nor dreamed. How men held on, each one knows,—not I. But manhood commands admiration.4

  With the Round Tops secured, a Union line now extended without gaps. While nothing was settled after the second day, the losses were enormous. Each side suffered nine thousand casualties, bringing the two-day totals to thirty-five thousand—far more than any previous two days in the war. Lee’s prospects for victory were bleak. But that was nothing new, and the outcome was still at issue. For a supremely confident Lee, that meant one more throw of the dice.

  Having already struck unsuccessfully at both of Meade’s flanks, Lee determined that night, again over Longstreet’s vehement but loyal objections, to attack the center in a frontal assault. Again Lee selected Longstreet to lead the assault, augmented with a fresh third division und
er the recently arrived General George Pickett and his five thousand Virginia veterans—all, Pickett bragged, aching for a good fight. The historian Bruce Catton described the scene:Then out of the woods came General Lee’s assaulting column, like actors in some unimaginable drama coming at last onto the stage—rank after rank, Pickett and [General James] Pettigrew and [General Isaac] Trimble and their divisions and when they got into the open the men halted and dressed their ranks as carefully as if they were going on parade. They were worth looking at. Their line was a mile wide from flank to flank, Pickett’s division on the right, Pettigrew’s beside it, Trimble’s in close support, general officers mounted, battle flags overhead, sunlight glinting off of the rifle barrels. They perfected their alignment, finally, and when the line began to roll forward it looked irresistible.5

  The sight did not deceive the Yankees. General Winfield Scott Hancock’s Second Corps held their fire, patiently awaiting the lambs about to be sacrificed. Many must not have believed what a perfect target Longstreet’s courageous divisions made. Perhaps they thought back to their own annihilation at Marye’s Heights. Sergeant John Dunn of the First Delaware later recalled: “This would be our Fredericksburg, and it required no effort on our part to hold our fire until they crossed the [Emmitsburg] road.”

  Pettigrew’s and Pickett’s divisions converged at “the angle” near the center of Meade’s line. At two hundred yards, artillery and infantry fire erupted frontally and on both Confederate flanks. As the rebels continued to advance closer, Federal artillerymen switched their ammunition from case shot and shell to murderous canister and then to golf ball—sized double canister. Longstreet’s brave soldiers fell in waves. Pettigrew’s already mauled division actually led the legendary Pickett’s charge and took the hardest hit. Confederate infantry pulled down their caps over their eyes and bowed their heads, in one observer’s words, “as if meeting a hail storm.”6

  Confederate dead at Gettysburg, 1863. Northern photographers Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan took these photographs on July 5, three days after the soldiers had been killed, and just hours before burial crews began the grisly task of burying the bloated corpses.

  For the oncoming Confederates, the choice was stark: retreat and possibly survive or move forward and die. Amazingly, many continued to press forward over the bodies of their fallen comrades. A few hundred actually breached the Federal line and engaged their foes in close combat. Confederate General Lewis Armistead led the advance through the angle and fell mortally wounded over the muzzle of a Federal cannon, ironically marking “The High Tide of the Confederacy.”

  John Emerson Anderson of the Second Massachusetts retraced the battlefield the following day. The sight filled him with an odd sympathy:Many hundreds of the enemies dead were still lying where they fell. As we passed over that field of blood, and death, in thoughtful silence, we looked on those upturned youthful faces, and as we saw no trace of passion, or of hate, our minds would wander unbidden away off to that Southern home, and picture a fond Mother, who on bended knees is fervently asking Gods blessing to rest on her darling soldier boy. And as we spread our mantle of charity over them we murmur, “my brother rest in peace.”7

  As great as the hatreds were, they could not extend to dead, wounded, and helpless soldiers, who were “brothers” once more.

  Northerners died no less grimly than Southerners. One destined to die at Gettysburg was Sergeant Charles Ward of the Thirty-second Massachusetts Volunteers. Like many soldiers, Ward had written, “I hope I may come home again but life here is uncertain,” and wondered “how I shall conduct myself if called to fight.” He found out soon enough as his brigade charged the wheat field and absorbed 50 percent of the casualties. Sergeant Ward fell, wounded by a sharpshooter. After lingering for seven days, he died on July 9. In his last letter to his mother, written after he was wounded, he wrote: “Dear Mother, I may not again see you but do not fear for your tired soldier boy. Death has no fears for me. My hope is still firm in Jesus. Meet me and Father in heaven with all my dear friends. I have no special message to send you but bid you all a happy farewell. Your affect and soldier son, Charles Ward.”8

  For the Confederates, devastation prevailed. Longstreet had predicted the disaster and consoled himself with the knowledge that he had minimized the numbers of soldiers committed to the assault (to the criticism of later Lost Cause Confederate historians). But Pickett would not be consoled. As he watched the butchery from Emmitsburg Road, tears filled his eyes as he cried, “Great God, where, oh! Where is my division?” Pickett never forgave Lee. Later he claimed, “[T]hat old man had my division slaughtered.” Lee did not disagree, and in a letter to President Davis accepted full responsibility and offered to resign. Davis refused to accept Lee’s resignation. Nevertheless, the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia would never again go on the offensive.

  CHAPTER 25

  “FOR THE SAKE OF THE CAUSE”

  The final assault of the three-day Battle of Gettysburg lasted little more than half an hour. Of the fourteen thousand Confederates who braved the assault, only half returned. Pickett lost 42 percent of his men and all of his senior officers. The heaviest casualties in Longstreet’s advance occurred in General Richard B. Garnett’s Brigade (65 percent, including Garnett), including the Eighth Virginia’s astounding 92 percent casualty rate. One eyewitness account described the final day’s battle in stark terms:I have heard more noise, louder crashes, in other battles, but I never saw or heard of such desperate, tenacious fighting as took place on this [left] flank.... Never was there a more vigorous and deadly assault than that made on our centre by Longstreet. It was a death struggle on the part of the enemy to break our lines, repeated and renewed a half-dozen times during the afternoon, in which they were as often repulsed and driven back with a loss of life unparalleled by any previous battle.... The country around Gettysburg is crowded with wounded men. Every house and barn is a hospital. Probably, in the aggregate of both armies, at least 50,000 have been placed hors du combat. 1

  The numbers proved accurate. After three days of battle, Federal losses totaled 23,049 and Confederate losses 28,063. Depending on whether the three days are counted as three battles (in which case the Confederacy arguably won two) or one, the Confederacy had reached its high-water mark and never returned to the North in force.

  Nothing illustrated more starkly the symbolic quality of the war than flags soaked in blood.2 Reports circulated throughout the North about “Rebel Battle Flags”: “Thirty-one new rebel flags, captured by the Union forces in the recent battle at Gettysburg, have been deposited in the War Department,” wrote one reporter. “Most of them were much torn by balls, and many are very bloody.”3

  Newspaper vendor and cart in camp, 1863. Newspapers became a fixture for both sides on the battlefields and were often exchanged by Union and Confederate soldiers during times of inactivity. The governments provided horses and wagons to transport the papers, and allowed journalists an “embedded” presence with armies in the field. This vendor prepares to distribute papers to General George Gordon Meade’s Army of the Potomac.

  Both Northern and Southern presses continued to monitor the enemy’s papers very closely and comment on them. Of these, none were read more closely than Richmond’s papers. Hence it was with some glee that one Northern writer observed how “[t]he Richmond papers are terribly doleful over the recent disasters.”4 Horace Greeley confidently predicted that Lee would soon be vanquished: “We ought now to be near the end of our great struggle, and our Government may, without compromising its dignity ... openly invite proposals from North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, and other revolted States, for a peaceful restoration of the Union.”5

  Contrary to Greeley’s optimism and much to Lincoln’s dismay, Lee lived to fight another day—indeed another year and a half. With inclement weather and a badly mauled army of his own, Meade failed to press his advantage with a wholesale pursuit of Lee’s fleeing forces. The Army of Northern Virginia remained form
idable, and Lee himself maintained his mythic status, minus the air of invincibility that had carried the South through earlier battles.

  With minds set like flint on the task at hand, no question arose of proportion or acceptable losses. One suspects that the casualties could have numbered one hundred thousand instead of fifty thousand and the response would have been the same. One writer for the Independent noted how numbed Americans had become to bloodshed. In the opening, relatively benign, military encounters, “every early dash in the war was turned into fame.... Our first defeats threw the whole community into panics, for men were then unused to stern times.” But that changed profoundly for the worse: “We have since become so familiar with war, that Gettysburg, a greater battle than Waterloo, made no such impression upon the popular mind as the first few flashes of powder from [Fort] Moultrie, at daybreak of April 19, 1861.”6 The moral brake linings had sheared, leaving only reflexive endorsements of a cause that knew no limits.

  In the North, Fourth of July celebrations extended into the following week. Washington was giddy with excitement. One account described the scene: “Bells are ringing wildly all over the city. Citizens grin at one another with fairly idiotic delight.”7 Reports blended fact, rumor, and talk of greatness to the exclusion of any serious inquiry or chronicle. The Philadelphia Inquirer exulted: “Waterloo Eclipsed!!” adding, “The Rebel Loss Truly Frightful ... General Lee reported in full retreat, pursued by Gen. Meade’s Forces.”