Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (24 page)

  CHAPTER EIGHT  

G
EORGE
M
EADE
took up command of the
Army of the Potomac on the morning of June 28th with only the dimmest idea of how its parts were spread over the surface of central
Maryland. He and most of his subordinates were also unfamiliar with the topography facing the army as it moved toward
Pennsylvania. “Maps, whenever possible, must be obtained from citizens,” pleaded the army’s chief of staff,
Daniel Butterfield.
¹
But within twenty-four hours, Meade had gotten a reasonably good fix on the locations of his seven infantry corps:

Screening them to the west were two divisions of Pleasonton’s cavalry, with the lead division under a veteran of Indian chasing on the Plains who was just this spring taking over his first field command in the war,
John Buford.

Thanks to
George Sharpe’s intelligence network and the flurry of reports relayed to him from Darius Couch in Harrisburg, Meade also knew that Lee was moving north and east, with Longstreet’s and Powell Hill’s corps around Chambersburg, Ewell almost at the Susquehanna at Harrisburg, and Early in York. To keep the Army of the Potomac between them and Washington,
Meade redirected the 1st, 3rd, and 11th Corps north toward Emmitsburg and the Pennsylvania state line, and the 2nd, 5th, 6th, and
12th Corps to the northeast, toward Pipe Creek and Taneytown, where Meade would pitch his temporary headquarters.
²

It had been raining off and on since the 24th and the endless kill-pace marches in the drizzle and mud wore the men down. “It does seem as though we were being marched to death,” complained a lieutenant in the
5th Corps. But when his regiment reached Union Mills, on Pipe Creek, “we were met by the inhabitants with loud cheers, and a flag … was proudly waving on the principal house of the town,” and the prospect of “approaching the border of a ‘free state’ ” put more energy in the soldiers’ step. The 1st Corps passed through a town whose “streets were lined with welcoming people, the colors were unfurled, the bands and drum-corps struck up, and, quickly taking the step, with muskets at a shoulder, the regiments treated the delighted citizens to an exhibition scarcely less stately and impressive than a grand review.” Near Mechanicstown (just five miles below Emmitsburg), “coffee, tea, and milk were tendered to the men as they passed, and fresh bread, cakes and pies easily found their way into capacious haversacks.” Farther along the route, “the farmers with their families came out to see us pass” and “brought to the roadside immense loaves of home-made bread … in pans as large as milk-pans, and with them crocks of sweet fresh butter.” One soldier in the 80th New York marveled at how the women “with one broad sweep of a huge knife” could “spread the butter over the face of the mighty loaf,” and with “a swift stroke” detach “a thick slice” and hand it off in time to cut off another fat slice for the next men in line. “Someone at the head of the column” of the 97th New York “struck up the
John Brown chorus, which was quickly taken up along the whole line, and presently every man fell into a step in time with the cadence of this simple yet soul stirring hymn.”
³

Still, in other places, the civilians’ reactions seemed as unsympathetic as the weather. An officer commanding a battery of light artillery with Pleasonton’s cavalry ordered a rail
fence taken down to get his guns and horses across a field, only to be accosted by “one old fellow” who pleaded, “For God’s sake, gentlemen, don’t go into that field. Don’t you see my wheat is only three days up?” Even the roads seemed uncooperative. On the days when the rain stopped and the sun baked the mud, the 5th Corps found itself punching up “a fine white powder” as it marched, “making an unspeakable dust that covered the fields on either side with a white cloud, as far as we could see.”
John Sedgwick was pushing the men of the
6th Corps so hard that his own horse gave out from fatigue, sparking raillery from passing soldiers: “Get another horse and come on; we’ll wait for you, Uncle John; we’re in no hurry, Uncle John.” In the
2nd Corps, men grumbled that they were being overmarched
because their commander, Winfield Hancock, had “a wager of 1500” dollars with George Sykes of the
5th Corps “that the old Second could outmarch the Fifth.” Along the roads, men began to straggle, and brigades leaked clots of exhausted soldiers, who in turn obstructed the path of other units struggling to maintain their places on the roads.
George Stannard’s nine months’ brigade of
Vermonters had spent most of their time in the safety of Washington’s fortification, until they were ordered forward to bulk up Hancock’s 2nd Corps. They had little experience of long marches, and so “the men fell out badly, in consequence of exhaustion.” In the
3rd Corps, the 141st
Pennsylvania drew the job of picking “up all stragglers … a task both difficult and unpleasant” since any number of the laggards had somehow managed to get “their canteens filled with whisky, became intoxicated” and “were too drunk to travel.” Alexander Webb, who had just inherited command of the 2nd Corps’
Philadelphia Brigade, had his brigade bugler signal officer’s call and furiously told them to “
arrest any of the men found straggling and to bring them to him and he would shoot them like dogs.”
⁴

This would have been small thanks for what was, by any measure, an extraordinary job of marching. Even under the most favorable conditions, armies moved slowly in the nineteenth century. In the
Prussian Army, a single infantry regiment with “light baggage” was expected to occupy 1,350 yards, or three-quarters of a mile of road; an entire division “in column of march” would occupy “nearly 10 miles.” The trains alone might “extend over seventy miles.” The best marching speed that could be expected of the Prussian Army was about three miles an hour, “but when the terrane loses the character of a parade, it is entirely different.” If bottlenecks—the sort created by pontoon bridges requiring wagons to be widely spaced to prevent knocking the bridge apart, or by crossroads that brought two marching columns into gridlock, or simply by incorrect deployment of units in the march column—then traffic could immobilize an army for hours. On those terms, Napoleon’s soldiers, marching from Boulogne to Austerlitz in 1803, thought it was extraordinary to have covered an average of just over eight miles a day. By contrast, the
Army of Northern Virginia covered the 120-mile line from the Rappahannock through the Shenandoah to Williamsport and Shepherdstown in only ten days, while pausing to fight at Brandy Station and to besiege Winchester. The
Army of the Potomac covered the sixty miles between Fredericksburg and Edwards’ Ferry in four days, and then covered the next fifty miles to the Pennsylvania state line in three. The 5th Corps managed twenty miles on the road from
Monocacy Junction (below Frederick) to Union Mills on
Pipe Creek on June 30th; the
6th Corps logged thirty-four. Whatever American volunteers lacked in discipline, they more than made up for in mobility.
⁵

There were no concessions to fatigue, weather, and equipment on this
march. “No interval was allowed between any two units of the corps, whether artillery or infantry,” wrote an officer in the 20th Massachusetts. “It was the closest marching column that we had ever experienced.” By the time the
6th Corps reached the
Pipe Creek line, “many were marching in their drawers.” The soldiers themselves marched as comfortably, or as sloppily, as they dared. “Here comes a man,” wrote the chronicler of the 19th Massachusetts, whose “cap is turned around with the visor covering one ear and half of one eye … His blouse is hitched up in a roll above the belt … his cartridge box is around on his hip, the belt loose, while his haversack and canteen are dangling in front of him.” The everlasting road dust “settled upon us, and adhering to the moist skin, gave one uniform color of dirty brown to caps, coats, faces, hands, trousers, and shoes.” And always there was “the monotonous clatter of tin dippers against bayonets and canteens.” Men might be “noisy with conversation” in the early hours of the march, but by late afternoon they “have no stomach or spare wind for words, and scarcely anything is heard but the groan of some sufferer from blistered feet, or the steady clink of the bayonet swinging at the left side against its neighbor the canteen.”
⁶

On June 29th and again on the 30th, Meade sent out fresh sets of orders to his corps commanders, instructing the 1st and
11th Corps to cross the state line and move toward Gettysburg and the 3rd to stay behind them in support at Emmitsburg; the
5th Corps would move up, in parallel ten miles east, to Hanover, with the 6th Corps in reserve behind them at Manchester; the 2nd and
12th Corps would plant themselves midway between the others, at Taneytown (just below the state line) and Two Taverns (just beyond it). As long as Lee continued to move northward, Meade could keep his army hovering between the Confederates and Baltimore or Washington. But if Lee suddenly turned, like some coiled snake, to strike, Meade already had his engineers at work behind Pipe Creek. He assured Halleck that he was prepared, if necessary, to move over the
Pennsylvania line “in the direction of
Hanover Junction and Hanover” after the rebels. But shortly before noon on June 30th, he received an urgent wire from Secretary Stanton in the War Department, alerting him that “Lee is falling back suddenly from the vicinity of Harrisburg … York has been evacuated. Carlisle is being evacuated.” All of it looked like “a sudden movement against Meade,” intending “to fall upon the several corps and crush them, in detail.” That was precisely what Meade wanted to hear. His task was “to compel [Lee] to loose his hold on the Susquehanna.” Having thus “relieved Harrisburg and Philadelphia,” it was now time “to look to his own army, and assume position for offensive or defensive, as occasion requires, or rest to the troops.” And that meant “the collecting of our troops behind Pipe Creek.”
⁷

Meade’s most advanced—and therefore most vulnerable—units were
the three infantry corps around Emmitsburg: John Reynolds’
1st Corps, Otis Howard’s
11th Corps, and the
3rd Corps, whose commander, Dan Sickles, had only just caught up with his men after returning from leave. Meade had no love for either Sickles, the renegade Democrat, or Howard, the evangelical
abolitionist. His first two communications to Sickles had been nasty little reprimands for “the very slow movement of your corps yesterday,” and he pushed the lot of them to the edge of his thinking by placing all three corps under the temporary “wing” command of John Reynolds. But when Meade learned that Reynolds had in fact moved the 1st Corps up and over the Pennsylvania line to
Marsh Creek, just below Gettysburg, Meade warned him (at midday on June 30th) to beat a retreat to Emmitsburg “without further orders” if any Confederates showed their heads. He had “made up his mind to fight a battle on what was known as Pipe Creek,” and in the meantime he would draw up a general circular, recalling all units north of Pipe Creek to “form line of battle with the left resting in the neighborhood of Middleburg, and the right at Manchester.”
⁸

This withdrawal, despite Meade’s wishes, was precisely what John Reynolds had no inclination whatsoever to perform.

“To those who knew little of”
John Fulton Reynolds, “he may at times have appeared stern and unnecessarily exacting,” even “cold and somewhat haughty,” wrote one of his regimental officers in the 1st Corps. In an army of volunteers, almost any Regular officer might have been seen that way, although John Reynolds really was by temperament a taciturn and private man. On the 30th of June 1863, Reynolds’ moods were fluctuating by the hour, by turns “inflamed” and “depressed.” South-central Pennsylvania was, after all, his home. Born in Lancaster in 1820 and descended from Huguenot and Protestant Irish forebears who had accumulated some of the largest landholdings in Lancaster County, John Reynolds grew up in a household where national politics was the stuff of everyday acquaintance. His father owned the Democratic
Lancaster Journal
, sat in the Pennsylvania legislature as a Democrat, and was a political ally of President
James Buchanan’s. The Reynolds’ family political connections made it easy to secure an appointment for the young Reynolds at West Point in 1837, although he only managed to graduate twenty-sixth out of a class of fifty-two. He was commissioned into the 3rd Artillery, fought at Monterrey and Buena Vista in the
Mexican War, and in 1859 went back briefly to West Point as commandant of cadets. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the Reynolds name translated into a brigadier general’s commission to command one of the volunteer brigades making up the
Pennsylvania Reserve Division, and in 1862, when Robert E. Lee’s first
thrust northward threatened Pennsylvania, Governor Curtin begged to have Reynolds returned to Pennsylvania to take charge of the militia. After the
Maryland Campaign, Reynolds came back to the
Army of the Potomac as a major general of volunteers to command the 1st Corps at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. In the eyes of the soldiers of the 1st Corps, he was “alertness personified.”
⁹