Gettysburg (23 page)

Something about Hill’s and Heth’s smug assurance prompted Pettigrew to wave Louis Young up to join the group. Under questioning, Young offered his opinion that the enemy riders had been not militia scouts but “well-trained troops.” Hill, however, either would not or could not accept that the Army of the Potomac might be that close. Even if Young’s surmise was true, he said, there was no place he would rather
have the Yankee infantry than in front of him at Gettysburg. At this point, Heth spoke up.

“If there is no objection,” he said, “I will take my division to-morrow and go to Gettysburg.”

Hill thought for a moment. With Ewell’s troops passing north of Gettysburg from east to west, it made sense to try to keep the Federal riders from using the town as a base from which they could harass the Second Corps’ march. Besides, he needed to know what was in his front.

Hill had his answer. Any objection? “None in the world,” he said.

On June 29, John Buford had received orders from Alfred Pleasonton, directing him to proceed “to Gettysburg” no later than the night of June 30. He had accomplished that task with hours to spare. Buford knew from his brief meeting with John Reynolds in Emmitsburg that the whole army was moving slowly forward along a front perhaps twenty-five miles long. If all went according to program, the marching orders for July 1 would bring that line up so that its left flank (Reynolds’ First Corps, supported by Howard’s Eleventh and Sickles’ Third) was at Gettysburg. It was Buford’s responsibility to secure the place to ensure that the foot soldiers would arrive unmolested. This he now set out to do.

“The night of the 30th was a busy night for the division,” he would later write. Buford had with him perhaps 2,750 men in two brigades, plus one six-gun battery. After setting up his headquarters at the Eagle Hotel, he had made contact with what he later termed some “reliable men”— very likely belonging to the intelligence network operated by David McConaughy—who helped fill in some of the details. The cavalry officer had also spent the remaining daylight hours riding about the area to gauge the lay of the land. He was observed at around 4:00
P.M.
by Daniel Skelly, who would never forget Buford’s “calm demeanor and soldierly appearance.” As the general seemed to be “in profound thought,” Skelly did not bother him.

In the absence of further orders either to move on in the morning or to withdraw, Buford saw it as his duty to hold the approaches from the west, north, and even east until the infantry came up. But the more he thought about the problem he faced, the more impossible it all seemed. Members of his staff would later recall that they “had never seen him so apprehensive[,] so uneasy about a situation as he was at this time.” A signal officer concurred that John Buford seemed very “anxious.”

By the time Buford met with his two brigade commanders, Colonels William Gamble and Thomas C. Devin, he had settled on a plan. He would post a strong series of vedettes to the west and north. All the intelligence Buford had gathered suggested that the whole of Hill’s Corps was “massed back of Cashtown” to the west, but there were also clear indications that Ewell’s Corps was “coming over the mountains from Carlisle,” to the north. Having decided that Hill represented the more immediate threat, Buford resolved to concentrate most of his strength west of the town, along McPherson’s Ridge, and assigned Gamble to that sector. Devin was to cover Gamble’s right as well as the roads leading into Gettysburg from the north and east.

Buford was determined not to be caught napping. The most advanced posts in his screen formed an arc from west to north more than three miles from the town’s center. It would take a column of infantry at least an hour to march that distance unopposed. And John Buford had every intention of providing some opposition.

No single mood characterized the citizens of Gettysburg this night. True, many were reassured by the presence of Buford’s men: young Daniel Skelly remarked that the townsfolk went to bed “with a sense of security they had not enjoyed for days,” and Catherine Foster was certain that with the “cavalry between us and the enemy,… the battle was good as begun, fought and won.” A few felt, like Tillie Pierce, that luck was with them and that “some great military event was coming pretty close to us.” But others expected the worst. “It begins to look as though we will have a battle soon,” wrote Sarah Broadhead, “and we are in great fear.”

T
he sunset at 7:24
P.M.
By 9:00
P.M.,
any light on the land was man-made and hard to find. The moon, rising just after midnight, was almost full, though its reflected illumination was muted by rain clouds. Lanterns laboriously hauled along lit select tents at various headquarters, but for the most part, the men spread across the landscape for miles around Gettysburg did without and went to sleep.

Along the western bank of Marsh Creek where it crossed the Chambersburg Pike, perhaps three miles from Gettysburg’s town square, Lieutenant Colonel John R. Lane was kept busy setting up the picket line for Pettigrew’s Brigade. The large (800-strong) 26th North Carolina had drawn this night’s assignment. It was standard procedure for the regiment’s colonel to oversee this important task, but Henry King Burgwyn Jr. had let his second in command take over so he could “sleep sound” and be ready for whatever tomorrow morning might bring.

While there was still sufficient light, Lane had mapped out the area his men would cover following the creek bed and selected the all-important reserve posts that would provide support for the widely spaced string of men. Hardly had the line been set when it snagged two women trying to reach their houses, which lay just outside Lane’s perimeter. Offering the gracious explanation that “the Confederate soldier did not make war upon women and children,” Lane not only let the ladies pass but obligingly extended that part of his picket line to include their homes. Otherwise it proved to be a quiet night, with an occasional spattering of light rain. It would also be the last night for 588 men of the regiment, who by the end of tomorrow would be lying dead or wounded on the wooded slopes of a gentle ridge a few miles distant.

In the fields near Heidlersburg, Pennsylvania, the nearly 1,400 North Carolinians of Brigadier General Alfred Iverson’s brigade (Rodes’ Division, Ewell’s Corps) camped for the night, reasonably tired but likely
content. Their march south from Carlisle had covered some twenty miles, along a route running through areas not previously swept by passing Rebel columns. “Cherries were ripe along the rock-walled lanes,” recounted a member of the 23rd North Carolina. “Bringing camp hatchets out, fruit-ladened limbs were severed and we regaled ourselves as we swung onward.”

What general unhappiness there was in this brigade centered on its Georgia-born commander. Alfred Iverson was a competent professional soldier who had resigned a U.S. Army commission to serve the Confederacy. He had helped to organize the 20th North Carolina and had led it with distinction during the Seven Days’ Campaign outside Richmond and in one of the battles preliminary to bloody Antietam; it was after that latter costly engagement that he had succeeded his fallen brigade commander. Iverson’s once-happy relationship with his men was an early casualty of his promotion. Many of his officers had turned on him when he tried to fill a vacant colonelcy with an outside candidate—not only outside the understaffed regiment itself but outside the
brigade.
After Chancellorsville, the brigadier had been stigmatized for his conspicuous absence at the height of the fighting, a lapse he had officially ascribed to the effects of being hit by a spent bullet. And during his outfit’s more recent sojourn at Carlisle, Iverson (who, like Ewell, had been posted there before the war) had gotten quite obviously drunk. Less than a day into the future, his men would march into the bloodiest ambush at Gettysburg, confirming forever, in the minds of many in the brigade, the character of the man they had come so to despise.

Commanding another brigade, this one in William Dorsey Pender’s division of Hill’s Corps, was Colonel Abner Perrin, who counted himself something of a thinking man. Like most of his rank in Lee’s army, he had been told little about the current situation overall, beyond whatever route information he needed for each day’s march. Had he been asked on the morning of June 30 to describe the campaign plan, he would have answered that “Gen Lee expected to concentrate his army at Chambersburg & give the enemy battle there.” Perrin was just as surprised as the other 1,900 South Carolinians constituting the five regiments in his brigade when orders came for them to march toward the mountain gap to their east.

The day was wet and rainy, but the men had some luck: the going was not as bad as it might have been. “But for the firm mountain pike,” recalled an officer in the 1st South Carolina (Provisional Army), “we
should scarcely have been able to move.” And pleasure in some cases was more than just a macadamized road. Resourceful officers such as Surgeon Spencer Glasgow Welch, of the 13th South Carolina, found the few homesteaders in the hills eager to share all they had, which for Welch and his companions meant generous main courses washed down with coffee and sweet milk. “None but a soldier who has experienced a hard campaign could appreciate such a meal,” Welch declared.

The regular foot soldiers did well, too. “That night whiskey was again issued to us,” remarked a line officer. The men were told to prepare rations enough to last them through the next day, an order that “at once aroused our suspicions, for we concluded we were about to meet the enemy,” recollected Surgeon Welch. His surmise was more accurate than he could have guessed, for in less than a day, Perrin’s Brigade would charge into a wheel-to-wheel phalanx of Yankee cannon that would smash down nearly 600 of its men.

Northeast of Gettysburg, John B. Gordon’s six regiments of Georgia troops (slightly more than 1,800 men) were the last of Jubal Early’s units to pull into the division’s encampments near Heildersburg. Gordon had marched his men over from York, where they had enjoyed a bounty that few of their fellows would have imagined possible. “Even when our men awoke [to march this morning] they paid no attention to the great piles of supplies we had brought them,” grumbled one Georgia soldier, “and marched away, leaving their portions for anybody who might find them.”

As two weary companies from the 38th Georgia trudged off to take up their assigned picket posts, Gordon tried hard to shake off a curious premonition. It was his brigade that had marched through Gettysburg on June 26, on which occasion he had briefly surveyed the area and noted the dominating presence of Cemetery Hill. As Gordon later remembered it, “I expressed to my staff the opinion that if the battle [we all expected] should be fought at Gettysburg, the army which held the heights would probably be the victor.” Ahead for Gordon’s Brigade was a moment of pure glory in the fields north of the town, a hard-fought victory that would cost the brigadier more than 500 of his men and present Robert E. Lee with the intoxicating prospect of the battle of annihilation he was seeking.

Lee himself fell asleep satisfied that his instructions to consolidate the army were being carried out with few hitches. Given another day without incident, he would be ready for anything Meade might send his way. Sleep did not come so easy to Lee’s Third Corps commander, A. P. Hill.
Hill was not an especially stolid campaigner, and his health had been compromised by a youthful bout with a sexually transmitted disease. He would be quite unwell on the morning of July 1, so it is likely that he suffered through this night. For his part, Hill’s confident subordinate Henry Heth
should
have spent some sleepless hours worrying about all the little details involved in an operation as tricky as a reconaissance in force. The evidence of his actions in the next morning’s events, however, suggests that he neglected to do so.

Perhaps half to three quarters of a mile east of Lane’s North Carolina pickets were the most advanced vedette posts in the wide, watchful screen set out by John Buford. These Yankee boys came from Company E of the 8th Illinois Cavalry. Whereas as much as six hundred yards separated the outposts along some portions of Buford’s perimeter, the observers positioned on either side of the Chambersburg Pike were only about two hundred yards apart, attesting to the roadway’s importance.

Each vedette post, typically numbering four or five men, was located on a prominent point or near some important strategic feature such as a water crossing or an accessible passage. A short distance behind the forward outposts were the vedette reserves, made up of men from the same company as those assigned to the front. To ensure alertness and guard against surprises, small roving squads periodically checked the stations. In the main compounds spread along McPherson’s Ridge, half of the horses were kept fully bridled, and a third of the men remained awake and ready for quick deployment if needed.

The man commanding the vedettes and their reserves was spending this night at the Eagle Hotel with his staff. Buford had decided that if the enemy advanced on Gettysburg in the morning, he would make a fight of it with his two brigades. Relief, he knew, was on its way: the infantry marches ordered for July 1 should bring the First Corps into town and put the Eleventh nearby. At 10:30
P.M.,
he sent off a situation report to John Reynolds, headquartered just south of town. Ever the practical warrior, Buford closed his note with a request: “Should I have to fall back [in the morning], advise me by what route.”