Gettysburg (10 page)

After completing his capture of Winchester and then pushing Rodes’ Division across the Potomac at Williamsport, Richard S. Ewell was uncertain what he should do next. Lacking the instinctive understanding of Lee’s greater goals and objectives that might have enabled him to propose some further action, Ewell instead finished cleaning up the task he had been assigned. Jubal Early’s division remained at Winchester to
handle the aftermath of the victory, while Edward Johnson’s men marched to Shepherdstown, where they prepared to cross the Potomac.

Any chance that Robert Rodes and his division, already in Maryland, might act more aggressively was eliminated on June 18, when Albert Jenkins returned to report that his occupation of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, had lasted only until June 17, when a large enemy force had been observed approaching from the north. Not seeking a fight, Jenkins’ entire command had fallen back. Rodes suspected that Jenkins had been spooked, and his suspicion would prove to be right: the “large enemy force” turned out to be a crowd of citizens from neighboring towns who converged on Chambersburg to gawk at the invaders.

Nevertheless, the time Rodes spent in Williamsport and Jenkins’ sojourn (however brief) in Pennsylvania were not without benefit. As Rodes would later report, his food and livestock quartermasters were able to seize “large supplies in their respective departments.” It was the first trickle in what would become a great flood of materiel. Men in the ranks were already beginning to enjoy the fruits of this windfall. If “an old soldier is ever happy,” declared an Alabama man in O’Neal’s Brigade, “it is when grub is plentiful and [there is] no fighting.”

The men of Pickett’s Division (Longstreet’s Corps) had some ground to cover today. Virginian Randolph Shotwell was angry that so little allowance had been made for the men’s previous assignment. Most of them, he noted, were “just out of winter-quarters, where they were well screened from the sun, and now under the combined effect of heat, fatigue, thirst, and intolerable dust they wilt and drop like wax-figures in a fiery furnace.”

Hill’s Corps, now fully gathered around Culpeper, was preparing to follow Longstreet. William Dorsey Pender, whose division had been the last to leave Fredericksburg, had shaken off his previous pessimism: “Everything thus far has worked admirably,” he wrote to his wife on June 17, “and if the campaign goes on as it has commenced it will be a telling one.” The boy colonel, Henry King Burgwyn Jr., was also brimming with optimism. Lee’s army, he reported on June 17, “is admirably organized & officered & has the most implicit confidence in him. The men are all in good spirits & the whole army expects to go into Pennsylvania.”

On June 19, Ewell met with Longstreet to coordinate their movements. That same morning, Lee felt he had to chastise his Second Corps commander for not bringing his divisions together and pushing on. “I very
much regret that you have not the benefit of your whole corps,” he wrote to Ewell at 7:00
A.M.,
“for, with that north of the Potomac, should we be able to detain General Hooker’s army from following you, you would be able to accomplish as much, unmolested, as the whole army could perform with General Hooker in its front.” This time, Ewell got the message. That same day, Rodes’ Division marched out of Williamsport toward Hagerstown, while Johnson’s men crossed the Potomac at Shepherdstown and proceeded as far as Sharpsburg. By the time Early’s men came in behind Johnson’s, they found the Potomac at flood level from recent rains, making it impossible to cross. Not wanting to let his divisions become dangerously separated, Ewell held everyone in place for the next two days.

There was more fighting in the Loudoun Valley, as Union cavalrymen kept pressing toward the gaps in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and Jeb Stuart’s riders battled to block them. Combat flared at Middleburg on June 19 and then at Upperville on June 21. By the latter day’s end, the Federals had battered their way to the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge, and a few bold patrols had even penetrated to the dominating ridge line. Then, just as he had done at Brandy Station, Alfred Pleasonton backed off, satisfied that he had carried out the letter of his orders. He was certain there was no Rebel infantry in the Loudoun Valley.

Hooker was meanwhile using Washington’s intense interest in these actions to bulk up his army. He was now operating within the capital’s defensive zone, which had its own units assigned to it, and he promptly began to appropriate these troops for his purposes. Henry Halleck offered no objection; in fact, on June 22, he placed all of Robert C. Schenck’s men under Hooker’s direct command.

By now everyone at headquarters knew that Hooker was inflating his estimates of the enemy’s strength. “We get accurate information,” Provost Marshal Patrick complained, “but Hooker will not use it and insults all who differ from him in opinion.” Hooker was also engaging in some curious speculations: speaking with newly arrived Brigadier General Samuel
W.
Crawford on June 21, for example, he wondered aloud if Lee’s objective might not be to capture Pittsburgh.

While Hooker busied himself with getting reinforcements, George Sharpe got very little sleep. The information-gathering network he had created worked best when the army was at rest; now that it was on the move, Sharpe found his apparatus straining to keep up. Frustrations mounted as opportunities were lost due to the absence of simple, commonsense field practices. Prisoner interrogations were haphazard, and little effort was made to assess captured enemy documents in terms of their intelligence value. In one case reported to Sharpe, an operative watched a group of Federal officers have “a right jolly time” reading Rebel material. The next day, Sharpe’s agent picked up a discarded scrap that proved to be a recent and informative muster roll for a Virginia cavalry company.

There were times, these days, when Sharpe even considered returning to line command. One of his biggest headaches was Alfred Pleasonton,
whose position as cavalry chief also made him a key figure for intelligence gathering. Unfortunately, the general showed neither any gift for performing this activity himself nor any skill in assessing the information his troopers brought in, and the often wide discrepancies in his reporting made Sharpe’s job even more complicated. Then, too, aside from the problems inherent in gathering and evaluating intelligence, Sharpe was catching some of the fallout from Hooker’s losing exchanges with Halleck. Provost Marshal Patrick, always on the alert for good camp gossip, wrote in his diary on June 17 that Hooker had treated Sharpe “with indifference at first, & now with insult.”

But despite all that, Sharpe and his staff had still managed to piece together a fairly complete picture of the disposition of Lee’s army. From the Union garrison at Harper’s Ferry had come information that placed most, if not all, of Ewell’s Corps in Maryland, with advance units already in Pennsylvania. Confederate cavalrymen taken prisoner in the Loudoun Valley had related that Longstreet’s Corps was holding Ashby’s and Snicker’s gaps. That left Hill’s Corps to be located. The best guess Sharpe could hazard was that it was en route to the Potomac. As late as June 20, he had sensed that Lee intended to concentrate just south of the Potomac in order to fight Hooker somewhere near Manassas. In a letter to his uncle, Sharpe ventured the opinion that Lee “must whip us before he goes in force to Md. or Penna.”

While Sharpe struggled to bring light into the darkness, Hooker was marking time. Having transferred his Army of the Potomac from the Fredericksburg area to the region just west of Washington, he now made only minor adjustments in position. A nagging suspicion at headquarters that Lee might be seeking to reach Manassas, the scene of two previous Confederate victories, helped keep the majority of the Federal units fixed in place. The exceptions were George Meade’s Fifth Corps, which had been sent into the Loudoun Valley to support Pleasonton’s troopers, and Hancock’s Second with Sedgwick’s Sixth Corps, assigned to monitor the southwestern approaches to Washington through Thoroughfare Gap.

The movements of the Second and Sixth corps had brought the men past the old Bull Run battlefields. “Have we seen some sights,” wrote Private William Penn Oberlin. “In many cases or most all where these soldiers were buried, we could see their heads, arms, hands, and feet sticking out of the grave.” John F. L. Hartwell observed, “We found plenty of signs of the battle that was fought here last summer. … Shots in trees, earth works, &c.” J. W. Muffley of the 148th Pennsylvania claimed that he and
his comrades had located “several grinning skeletons still entire, lying on the surface of the ground still partially clothed in the blue uniforms.”

It was after sunset on June 20 by the time Hancock’s advance reached Thoroughfare Gap. According to a soldier in the 19th Maine, “While the Regiment was plodding along, slowly picking its way in the dark, one of the boys fell into a deep ditch and when inquired of as to what he was doing down there he answered back, ‘Boys, here’s the gap. I’ve stopped it up.’”

Fifth Corps infantry marching to support Pleasonton’s troopers in the Loudoun Valley had encountered carnage of more recent vintage. “Wounded men lay upon litters of straw near the roadside and in the yards of the houses,” recorded a member of the 118th Pennsylvania. “Dead horses were scattered about, and lost and abandoned arms and trappings were numerous.” The Twelfth Corps had made its own additions to the morbid debris when, on June 19, troops were formed into the ominous hollow square to witness the executions of three of their number found guilty of desertion. “I hope it will have a good effect on those who saw it,” reflected a Connecticut soldier. “I did not care about seeing it at all.”

Particularly poignant were the small groups of escaping slaves who made their way through the Federal lines. “It is really affecting to see a mother with little children …, marching along fatigued and poorly clad,” testified Private oberlin, “the mother unable to carry them much on account of the heavy load she has to carry of clothing to keep them warm after night.” When one black elder asked a Federal if Mr. Lincoln was nearby, the amused soldier pointed toward Washington. “Yes,” the Yankee replied, “he’s in his chariot forty miles back the road.”

On June 18, Hooker sent a letter “confidentially to the [newspaper] editors throughout the country,” imposing restrictions on press coverage of the campaign. From this point on, correspondents would no longer be allowed to identify the “location of any corps, division, brigade, or regiment” or, especially, the placement of army headquarters. Moreover, the newspapermen could print only those official reports that had been cleared by the War Department. “These rules being observed,” Hooker concluded with a touch of gallows humor, “every facility possible will be given to reporters and newspapers in this army, including the license to abuse or criticize me to their heart’s content.”

At the time Hooker’s advisory was sent out, representatives from all the major metropolitan newspapers were spread throughout the army.
They were an unusual band of brothers: comrades and competitors, mere scribblers and sound wordsmiths, open-minded and utterly opinionated. Their status was often what they could make of it. Many found ways to attach themselves to various headquarters, where they could count on having some access to supplies and communications. Most existed on sufferance: one unflattering observation, and a reporter might find himself without a tent flap to cover him at night, and no place set for him at the dinner table.

The best of this breed were proud of their efforts to bring war news and human-interest stories to the home front. Perhaps the most active reporters tagging along with Hooker’s army were the group representing James Gordon Bennett’s
New York Herald.
And one of the busiest of the
Herald
men was Thomas M. Cook, who on June 18 had provided his New York editors with a remarkably prescient assessment of the situation: “There is very large reason for doubt whether any considerable body of the rebels have yet passed beyond the Potomac northward,” he wrote. “Their main force of infantry is yet in the Shenandoah Valley and about Winchester.”

The newsmen’s occupation had its dangers, of course—a fact that became evident on June 22. Lynde W. Buckingham had drawn the
Herald’s
assignment to cover the cavalry actions in the Loudoun Valley. Having gathered his notes about the June 21 fight at Upperville, Buckingham was riding toward the nearest telegraph connection to Washington when he ran into a band of Confederate irregulars near Aldie. His horse bolted at the first shots, galloped headlong down a steep hill, and threw its rider heavily to the ground. Union soldiers from a nearby picket post took the unconscious correspondent to a field hospital located in a church, but Buckingham died the following morning. His close associate Alfred Waud arrived too late to see him alive. Waud, a talented artist whose specialty was sketching battle scenes, “himself dug the grave for the burial of his old friend in a little graveyard adjoining the church, where the remains were interred.”

In Richmond, news of Lee’s advances and successes arrived in penny packets. Rumors of the Winchester fight had begun trickling in on June 16, a day before Lee’s official report reached the capital. “It is believed Hooker’s army is utterly demoralized, and that Lee is
going on
,” wrote War Department clerk John Beauchamp Jones on June 18. It was Jones’
hope that the “long longed-for day of retributive invasion may come at last.”