Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (32 page)

This would come as a jolt to Slocum and Sykes. Through most of July 1st, Slocum and the
12th Corps “sauntered slowly” from Littlestown to Two Taverns, just five miles below Gettysburg, where the corps fell out for a “leisurely” lunch. Still, even before Meade’s orders reached them, the 12th Corps was already seeing disturbing signs of something gone seriously wrong up ahead. “Groups of frightened women and children, on their way to safe shelter, met us with imploring eyes; men hurrying away with their household goods in carts reported disaster to our army.” George Sykes’
5th Corps had been on the march all day, crossing the Pennsylvania state line around noon. The colonel of the 118th Pennsylvania marked the crossing by ordering the
regimental colors unfurled, and riding “down the column,” calling for “3 cheers for Penn., which were given with a will.” Col.
Strong Vincent, a Pennsylvanian from Erie, who had been boosted to brigade command in the 5th Corps only on May 20th, also ordered his brigade’s flags uncased when they approached Hanover “about dusk.” Vincent “reverently bared his head” and announced to his adjutant, “What death more glorious can any man desire than to die on the soil of old Pennsylvania fighting for that flag?” Sykes had sent his staffers ahead to mark out
bivouac sites around Hanover for the thirty-five regiments in the 5th Corps, and the men were “in the act of issuing fresh meat, inspection of arms etc.” when a general officers’ call was sounded. Brigade and division commanders soon came back with the news that “the enemy had been met that day by our advanced corps, at Gettysburg, and that tomorrow would probably be fought the decisive battle of the war.” That meant down with shelter tents and coffee boilers, and “we took up the line of march” again, this time “sharply to the left,” toward Gettysburg. Sykes pushed them on until, by two in the morning, “all human endurance was on the verge of utter collapse.”
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Based on the pay and
muster reports recorded on June 30th, Meade should have had an army of approximately 112,000 men on hand, either for
Pipe Creek or for Gettysburg. Determining the manpower of Civil War armies is a tricky business, compounded by lost or unsubmitted reports and differing definitions of what counted as
“present” (which usually meant everyone who was issued rations) or
“present for duty” (subtracting the sick but not the noncombatants) or
“present for duty equipped” (those actually armed for the line of battle). In the 69th Pennsylvania, for example, the present and accounted for tallies on May 30th listed 389 men; but 52 of these were actually absent in hospital. Other men leaked away through desertion, and by the time they
reached Gettysburg, the 69th could only count 292 on hand. In the 18th Massachusetts, the present-for-duty report listed 314 men, but the sergeant who “kept the company accounts” knew that only 108 “were found at the front” at Gettysburg. Meade himself believed that he had “about 95,000 … including all arms of service,” but in terms of troops ready to engage in combat, the Army of the Potomac was probably ready to furnish somewhere between 83,000 and 85,000 men.

The army’s real strength may have been more fragile even than that, since the expiration of many two-year enlistments from 1861 and emergency nine-monthers from 1862 had reduced the Army of the Potomac, after Chancellorsville, to as few as 40,000, and it was only by drawing some 37,000 troops from Schenck’s and Heintzelman’s garrisons in Baltimore and Washington that Meade was able to pull together a force worth challenging Lee. Units like
George Stannard’s
Vermont brigade, George Willard’s New York brigade (newly exchanged after being captured at Harpers Ferry in 1862 and cruelly mocked as the “Harper’s Ferry Cowards”), and
Samuel Wylie Crawford’s
Pennsylvania Reserve Division all increased the raw numbers of the army, but it remained to be seen how well they would fit with the rest of the army, or even if they would fight at all. Meanwhile the best estimate Meade had of Lee’s strength pegged the Army of Northern Virginia at 109,000—“about 90,000 infantry, from 4,000 to 5,000 artillery, and about 10,000 cavalry.” Chief of staff Butterfield seconded Meade: based on scouting and citizen reports “at different points,” Butterfield estimated that “Lee had 91,000 infantry, 12,000 cavalry, and 275 pieces of artillery.”
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The Confederates had a humbler view of their numbers:
Augustus Dickert in the 3rd South Carolina reckoned that “by the non-extension of all
furloughs and the return of the slightly wounded,” Lee could count on “sixty-eight thousand,” and Lee’s adjutant, Walter Taylor, calculated that Lee had only 67,000, counting infantry, cavalry, and artillery. In fact, Lee is likely to have had as many as 80,000 men in all three arms. Like their Union counterpart, these numbers included the addition of untested regiments and brigades, not to mention two new corps commanders. But the Army of Northern Virginia enjoyed invisible assets denied to the Army of the Potomac. “There were no employees in the Confederate army,” wrote
William Allan, one of Stonewall Jackson’s old staffers, in 1877, assessing the strength of the Army of Northern Virginia. Instead, as the British military observer Lt. Col.
Arthur James Lyon Fremantle of the Coldstream Guards noticed, “in rear of each regiment were from twenty to thirty negro slaves.” From the beginning of the war, Confederate armies had annexed large contingents of slaves—between 12,000 and 20,000 at
Manassas Junction in 1861, and “fifteen or twenty thousand” on the Peninsula in 1862. By the time of the Gettysburg Campaign,
Thomas Caffey, an English-born Confederate artilleryman, estimated that “in our whole army there must be at least thirty thousand colored servants who do nothing but cook and wash.” In his battalion alone, Caffey counted “a cooking and washing corps of negroes at least one hundred and fifty strong!”

Add, then, to the 80,000 white soldiers Lee commanded, the unnumbered corps of 10,000 to 30,000 black slaves who marched with the Army of Northern Virginia (and performed many of the noncombatant duties that, in the Army of the Potomac, were performed by those
“present for duty”), and George Meade may not have been at all unjustified in believing “that General Lee was, as far as I could tell, about 10,000 or 15,000 my superior.” It made Meade all the more conscious that one wrong move on his part, and not only the Army of the Potomac, but the entire Union cause, could be lost in the next twenty-four hours, and he would join that long gallery of American failures that included
Horatio Gates in the Revolution,
William Hull in the
War of 1812, and, inevitably, Meade’s own bankrupt father.
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It was after 10:45 when the firing died down along
McPherson’s Ridge, and a lull settled over the flattened wheat fields and now railless fences held by James Wadsworth’s battered Union division. The division’s ammunition train had arrived, and the wagon handlers worked down the line, spilling big wooden boxes of cartridges off the backs of the wagons for the men to break open and distribute. With the death of Reynolds, overall command of the
1st Corps fell to
Abner Doubleday, as the senior division commander. Only that morning, Doubleday had been complaining that, with Meade’s promotion just four days before, command of Meade’s
5th Corps ought to have gone to him, by
seniority. Now Doubleday had his corps command, only it was the 1st Corps, and it came to him by the death of Reynolds rather than by the mechanics of rank. His own division was arriving at the seminary, although it really contained only two small brigades under Tom Rowley and
Roy Stone, and somewhere behind them was the last of the 1st Corps’ divisions, with two big brigades under
John Cleveland Robinson. Doubleday had received no direction from Reynolds about what steps to take next, but his instinct was “to hold on to the position until ordered to leave it,” and an officer in the 149th Pennsylvania heard Doubleday say that “all he could do was fight until he got sufficient information to form his own plan.”
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Doubleday planted Roy Stone’s three Pennsylvania regiments (the 143rd, 149th, and 150th) on the right of the
Iron Brigade, so that they could occupy the McPherson house and barn, which had been vacated when the 95th New York and 14th Brooklyn charged the
railroad cut. Stone was only twenty-six years old, but he had risen to the rank of major in the old 42nd Pennsylvania,
which touted itself as a regiment of marksmen by tacking a buck’s tail to their caps, and in 1862 Stone was commissioned to raise an entire brigade of “Bucktails.” The original 42nd Pennsylvania disdained them as “Bogus Bucktails,” and Gettysburg would offer them their first opportunity to live that sneer down. Tom Rowley was a Pittsburgh Republican alderman and contractor who had served with the
1st Pennsylvania Volunteers in the
Mexican War, but who brought to the war in 1861 little more than good political intentions. He had commanded the 102nd Pennsylvania on the Peninsula, survived a head wound that fractured his skull, and gone up to brigadier general in the
6th Corps after Antietam, only to be bumped out of place by a brigadier with
seniority. Rowley was instead assigned to the
1st Corps, commanding (like Roy Stone) a newly confected brigade of Pennsylvanians (the 121st, 142nd, and 151st Pennsylvania) and the 80th New York, and his job would be to hold down the left flank of the Iron Brigade, extending the 1st Corps line down toward the
Fairfield Road.
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John Cleveland Robinson’s division arrived on the heels of Stone and Rowley, and Doubleday held it at the Lutheran seminary as a reserve. Robinson was a burly, undemonstrative New Yorker, yet another
abolitionist in this corps teeming with abolitionist officers. Like Doubleday he had paid for his opposition to
slavery by slow promotion and even slower recognition.

Meanwhile, the unemployed cavalry of
William Gamble’s brigade, who had put up the fight that enabled the 1st Corps to throw its shield between Gettysburg and Harry Heth’s Confederates, were being redeployed by
John Buford. The
8th Illinois Cavalry was posted “out to the south-west,” beyond the dangling left flank of the 1st Corps, and the other dismounted cavalrymen and the men of Robinson’s division were set to work building a hasty “crescent-shaped” barricade of
fence rails and fieldstone on the seminary’s west side.
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Doubleday fully expected that Meade “would ride to the front to see for himself what was going on, and issue definite orders of some kind.” But just before eleven o’clock, it was not Meade who showed up, but
Oliver Otis Howard. As soon as Reynolds’ summons of the
11th Corps had come into Howard’s hands at Emmitsburg, he put his three divisions into motion. The division of Francis Barlow would take the main road between Emmitsburg and Gettysburg (the same one Reynolds was at that time using from
Marsh Creek). He sent the other two divisions, under
Carl Schurz and
Adolf Steinwehr (who was actually Baron Adolph Wilhelm August Friedrich von Steinwehr, a onetime officer in the army of the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel) on the parallel
Taneytown road, so as to avoid traffic snarls. (Barlow’s division was on the shorter of the two routes, but he ran into Reynolds’ “trains and artillery carriages” on the
Emmitsburg Road and ended up arriving later than both Schurz and Steinwehr.) Howard himself took off ahead, meeting yet another messenger from Reynolds at about 10:30, begging Howard to “Come quite up to Gettysburg,” then another: “I am hardly pressed; have your troops come up at the double-quick.” By way of relay, Howard sent off staffers to Sickles, back at Emmitsburg, to Slocum and the 12th Corps, and to Meade at Taneytown, repeating Reynolds’ plea. “Where does he want my divisions placed,” Howard asked. The aide—the hard-riding Maj. William Riddle—shrugged his shoulders impatiently: “Choose your ground anywhere near here.” Heading the other way were the inevitable crowds of civilian refugees, followed by wounded cavalrymen and mounted couriers. “Within six or seven miles of Gettysburg … the distant boom of cannon could be heard.”
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Howard was long ahead of his men by that time. He got his first glimpse of the town on a small rise in the road, beside a peach orchard owned by
Joseph Sherfy, a deacon in the Marsh Creek Church of the Brethren and “a pioneer in the peach business.” Around eleven o’clock, he arrived on
Cemetery Hill. “Here was a broad view which embraced the town, the seminary, the college, and all the undulating valley of open country spread out between the ridges.” Howard turned to his adjutant,
Theodore Meysenberg, and noted,
“This seems to be a
good position
, colonel.” Meysenberg looked around. “It is the
only
position, general.”
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The head of Steinwehr’s division arrived soon after, hard on the heels of the last wagons of the
1st Corps trains, and even in the “dull, vapory atmosphere” of an overcast summer’s day, “the magnificent panorama” almost took the soldiers’ collective breath away. “As far as the eye could reach, until the earth touched the heavens in their convergence, was one expanse of ever-varying field and wood, hill and dale, interspersed here and there with farmhouses, while from over the hills in every direction roads came trailing down into the village of Gettysburg.” Howard at once turned them onto
Cemetery Hill. There was an elaborate brick gatehouse on the eastern flank of the cemetery, and Howard spread the two brigades of Steinwehr’s division, plus the corps artillery under Maj.
Thomas Osborn, between the gatehouse and the
Taneytown Road, facing north. Schurz’s division would arrive by the same path an hour later, and then Barlow on the
Emmitsburg Road.