Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (48 page)

Sickles was now certain that Meade had deliberately left him alone in the path of a Confederate landslide, with no cavalry screen and no supports within easy distance. Major Tremain’s repeated visits to headquarters had been met first with indifference, and then by a visit from one of Meade’s staffers (who happened to be George Meade junior) “to inquire of [Sickles] if his troops were yet in position, and to ask what he had to report.” Young Meade hadn’t even taken the trouble to find Sickles himself, but left the message with the chief of the 3rd Corps’ artillery,
George Randolph. Meade came
back an hour later with an irritated order from his father for Sickles to get into position, and at eleven o’clock, a troubled Sickles took himself directly up to the Widow Leister’s cottage to see Meade personally. “Observing, from the enemy’s movements on our left, what I thought to be conclusive indications of a design on their part to attack there,” Sickles later testified, “I went in person to headquarters and reported the facts and circumstances which led me to believe that an attack would be made there, and asked for orders.” He got nothing but a dismissive instruction to tie his right flank to the
2nd Corps and his left flank to the Round Tops. “I found that my impression as to the intention of the enemy to attack in that direction was not concurred in at headquarters,” and when Sickles asked Meade to at least come over and have a look for himself, Meade replied that “his engagements did not permit him to do that.” If not Meade himself, would Meade at least send his chief engineer, Gouverneur K. Warren? The answer was even more curt:
no
.
²²

If Meade had not been convinced that the main attack “would be made upon his right,” he might have noticed that the signalers up on the Round Tops had (notwithstanding the best efforts at concealment by Longstreet, McLaws, and Porter Alexander) been sending messages to headquarters as early as noon about the movement of the “enemy’s skirmishers … from the west, 1 mile from here,” and how “the rebels are in force,” and describing Berdan’s firefight. More warnings followed about the approach of “a heavy column of enemy’s infantry … opposite our extreme left,” and then two more just after two o’clock. Instead, Meade snorted loftily at Sickles’ worries: “Generals are all apt to look for the attack to be made where they are.” Sickles countered the rebuff with a request: if Meade had no plans to intervene, could Sickles at least move his men around to suit his own judgment? Yes, Meade snapped impatiently, within reasonable limits, “any ground … you choose to occupy I leave to you.” Sickles also wrested assent from Meade to take the army’s artillery chief, Henry Hunt, back to the
3rd Corps position. Meade told Hunt, who had just returned from inspecting Union artillery positions, that Sickles “wished me to examine a new line” so that Sickles could make better use of his artillery.
²³

That was all Sickles needed to hear. At Chancellorsville, Joe Hooker had compounded the mistake of indolence in the path of Stonewall Jackson by evacuating, a day later, an ideal artillery plateau at
Hazel Grove, and allowing Confederate artillery to plant themselves there and pound the hapless Hooker and his cinched-in lines around the Chancellor house. The Federal troops whom Hooker pulled away from Hazel Grove had been, not surprisingly, those of the 3rd Corps, and from that Sickles had learned a lesson about holding on to high ground which he swore never to forget. As Sickles explained matters to Hunt,
Cemetery Ridge declined imperceptibly by almost fifty feet
as it snaked south from
Cemetery Hill, so that at the point where the 3rd Corps was bivouacked, his troops were actually sitting, not on a ridge, but in “a low marshy swale.” Not only was it in “a hole” compared to Cemetery Hill, it was actually sixty feet lower than Sherfy’s peach orchard out at the
Emmitsburg Road. And in between his “swale” and the road stretched three-quarters of a mile, bisected by a stony ridge which would be “unfit for artillery & [a] bad front for infantry.” The solution would be to move his two divisions up to the Emmitsburg Road and Sherfy’s peach orchard, where they would have the advantage of “the commanding ground.”
²⁴

Hunt shifted uneasily. Examining the proposed Emmitsburg Road line with Sickles, Hunt pointed out what should have been obvious to Sickles: the Emmitsburg Road might well be “commanding ground,” but to get there Sickles would have to unhook himself from Hancock’s
2nd Corps, and leave a 600-yard gap yawning between Hancock’s left flank and Sickles’ right. At the other end, if Sickles lined up his divisions behind the Emmitsburg Road, the subtle angle of the road to the southwest would swing his other flank far out into the air, leaving the Round Tops completely uncovered. If Sickles was right, and the rebels were moving in force on the other side of the Emmitsburg Road, then he was presenting them with a target, begging to be bowled over. “The right of his proposed line was out where it would not be connected with the 2nd Corps,” Hunt gingerly explained, and “it would have to be connected, perhaps, by throwing out the left wing of the 2nd corps, and that could not well be done” unless the stony ridge “was under our control.”

Sickles, who had already authorized David Birney to get his division in motion, offered a compromise. He would post his junior division commander,
Andrew Atkinson Humphreys, along the Emmitsburg Road to secure the “commanding ground” down to Sherfy’s peach orchard, but then angle the line back severely—almost 90 degrees—and use Birney’s division to trace a line down toward the Round Tops. Could he do that? Hunt hesitated: this idea would “so greatly lengthen our line—which in any case must rest on Round Top, and connect with the left of the Second Corps—as to require a larger force than the Third Corps alone to hold it.” Hunt was an artilleryman, not an infantry officer, and he did not relish being caught between a corps commander whom everyone knew carried terrific clout with the politicians and George Meade, who had not yet confirmed Hunt’s position as chief of the army’s artillery. “So far as it was a line for troops to occupy,” Hunt diplomatically replied, “it was a very good line.” But, Hunt warned, Sickles “should wait orders from General Meade” before making such a dramatic move. And with that, Hunt rode off to report, “very briefly, to General Meade.”
²⁵

Not for the first or last time would Sickles hear a
no
and pretend he had heard a
yes
. He took Hunt’s careful attempt to refer the decision to Meade
as “the approval of his own judgment,” which, when Hunt explained it all to Meade, would doubtless be endorsed by the army commander as coming from a less offending source than Daniel E. Sickles. So, the orders went out, and “our line was advanced to the new position.” A slightly bewildered and “uncomfortable” Humphreys “sent out working parties” to take down “all the fences” along the road “in my front,” and along the road he pieced out one of his three brigades, under
Joseph B. Carr, “in line of battle.” Behind Carr, Humphreys placed the old
Excelsior Brigade (commanded these days by
William Brewster), drawn up in a close-interval column, “in line of battalions in mass.” Humphreys’ last brigade was “massed in column of regiments,” at intervals of 200 yards. Birney’s division, which Sickles originally wanted to commit in toto to the Emmitsburg Road line, had its three brigades parceled out to cover the road only as far as Sherfy’s peach orchard (which would be held by Charles Graham’s all-
Pennsylvania brigade), back to the stony ridge (where
Philippe Régis de Trobriand would deploy his brigade), and then down to a massively forbidding rock outcropping known locally as
Devil’s Den, where
John Henry Hobart Ward’s brigade (which included Berdan’s
Sharpshooters) would screen any approach to the Round Tops.

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If the 3rd Corps had brought with it to Gettysburg its third division (which had instead been sent to bulk up the garrison of Harpers Ferry), Sickles might just barely have been able to defend this ground. As it was, his 10,000 would have to cover a line that stretched more than 2,700 yards—three men for every yard, if you counted every non-combatant, and kept no reserves—and which still did not connect with the 2nd Corps or put a single soldier on the Round Tops. There were so few men available to cover all the necessary yardage that Sickles, as an afterthought, sent off an appeal to the artillery reserve for any extra batteries they could spare (they sent him three six-gun batteries—the old eighteen-gun rule), so that he could stuff them into the gap behind the peach orchard between Graham and de Trobriand.
²⁶

Fully in character for Dan Sickles’ corps, the divisions “advanced in a brilliant line.” The 63rd Pennsylvania (from Birney’s division) and the 1st Massachusetts (from Humphreys’ division) were thrown out as skirmishers for the advance, and the fifteen-piece brass band of the 114th Pennsylvania (“Collis’ Zouaves”) thumped away to mark the time. (The regiment was unreservedly proud of its band: they had played on the field at Fredericksburg, although in a fit of oversight someone had forgotten to notify them when the Army of the Potomac retreated, and left the whole ensemble to be bagged as prisoners by the Confederates.) “The eye beheld,” wrote an officer in Carr’s brigade, “battery and brigade extended from point to point,” full of “moving columns
and gay banners.” It was “a grand sight to witness this little corps of two divisions gallantly move on the advance,” and despite taking place on what was, after all, a battlefield, it all “appeared to be a peaceful review,” with a “herd of thirteen or fourteen cows … quietly grazing upon the field.”
²⁷

Over to the right,
John Gibbon, “standing on [Cemetery] hill” with the
2nd Corps, turned a puzzled eye on the show unfolding “out to our left and front.” One staffer gaped at Sickles’ “incomprehensible movements,” while “both officers and men” of the 2nd Corps stood up to offer commentary “as [to] the comparative merits of the line” Sickles was acquiring. Hancock saw it, too: “I recollect looking on and admiring the spectacle, but I did not know the object of it.” He “quietly” remarked to his staff, “Gentlemen, that is a splendid advance” and “beautiful to look at.” But he could not imagine that Meade had sanctioned this parade, and he predicted that “those troops will be coming back again very soon.”
²⁸

George Meade was actually one of the last people on
Cemetery Hill to learn about Sickles’ maneuver, and this was largely because his impromptu headquarters at the Widow Leister’s ramshackle cottage sat on the reverse slope of a hill and was out of sight of anything to the south. At three o’clock, he received the happy tidings that, at last,
John Sedgwick and the
6th Corps were supposed to be closing in, and Meade was finally ready to call for a council of his corps commanders to deliberate on what the now concentrated Army of the Potomac was going to do next. He also dashed off a quick message to Halleck, informing the general in chief that he had put any plans for an attack on hold until the 6th Corps had arrived, but might also “fall back to my supplies at Westminster”—which was to say, to
Pipe Creek—“if I find it hazardous to do so.” Gouverneur Warren, who had been informed by an aide of what Sickles was up to, strolled into Meade’s headquarters at the Widow Leister’s cottage and asked casually whether Meade was aware that Sickles had redeployed the entire 3rd Corps out to the
Emmitsburg Road. Startled by Warren’s news, Meade erupted in Vesuvian proportions, and demanded that Sickles report to him for an explanation.

Sickles at first refused. He “sat upon his white horse, received the papers,” and told the courier, “Say to General Meade that it will be impossible for me to report at his Hd Quarters at this time as this battle will be precipitated upon us before I could reach his Hd Quarters.” Meade furiously sent off a second demand, and this time Sickles obeyed, although the reason had less to do with deference to his commander’s wishes and more with the fact that Charles Graham had glimpsed from his new position in the peach orchard large clumps of Confederate infantry in the woods to the west. Sickles “had not gone 60 ft. before a shell passed over our heads, bursting in air far beyond,”
wrote one soldier in Sickles’ old Excelsior Brigade, and “in a few minutes the battle had Commenced.” When Sickles arrived, lathered and dusty, Meade stopped him from dismounting, and told him to turn around back to his corps, and he would follow. He ordered
George Sykes to get his
5th Corps men, who were sitting comfortably down by Powers Hill on the
Baltimore Pike, up and hurrying to Sickles’ aid, and then he was off himself, outracing his hastily mounted staffers toward the peach orchard, where Sickles had ridden out, dismounted, and was trying to glimpse a “column of infantry” which was “then moving rapidly towards … our left.”
²⁹

Amid the shells arching over their heads, Meade surveyed the Emmitsburg Road. He could see Humphreys’ division, drawn up along the road.
Where was the rest of the
3rd Corps?
Sickles described the long, attenuated deployment of Birney’s division from the Emmitsburg Road down to
Devil’s Den. Meade, “turning and pointing to the rear,” angrily told Sickles where his corps
ought
to have been—“between the left of the Second Corps and
Little Round Top”—and that he had “advanced his line beyond supporting distance of the army.”
And what was the artillery banging away at?
David Birney now leaned-in on Sickles’ behalf, explaining “the position and movements of the enemy; that they were moving in order to turn our left, and we had opened upon them.” The question that blossomed in Meade’s mind was whether Sickles could hold this ground long enough for Meade to get more troops up behind Sickles. “Are you not too much extended, General,” Meade demanded. “Can you hold this front?” Yes, Sickles lied handsomely, but “I shall need support.” He then shifted to what would turn out to be the first in a half-century’s worth of defenses, justifications, excuses, half-truths, and rationalizations. “I have made these dispositions to the best of my judgment.” And he
had
occupied the high ground. But, Sickles quickly added, he
could
pull his men back to where they had started, if that was what Meade wanted. “General Sickles,” Meade sliced in, slamming all the weight of his sarcasm on Sickles’ fingers, “this
is
in some respects higher ground than that to the rear; but there is still higher ground in front of you, and if you keep on advancing you will find constantly higher ground all the way to the mountains.”