Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (69 page)

Jubal Early was actually close enough to hear the distant rumble of artillery from the Hanover fight. Getting up from lunch in a tavern in the hamlet of Davidsburg, Early and his staff “heard the booming of
cannon toward the southwest.” Casually, Harry Hays remarked, “I suppose a battle has begun.” And not only Harry Hays, but “the whole command distinctly heard Stuart’s guns.” But Early proved to be more curious about paying the bill, handing the proprietor twenty dollars in Confederate notes to cover the meals for his staff and senior officers, and moved off to his rendezvous with Ewell. When Fitz Lee’s advance guard reached the
York Pike that night, they found that Early’s division had passed through some twelve hours before.

By now, Stuart’s troopers were “broken down & in no condition to fight.” A lieutenant in the
9th Virginia Cavalry saw men slumped in saddles, “so tired and stupid as almost to be ignorant of what was taking place around them. Couriers in attempting to deliver orders to officers would be compelled to give them a shake and call before they could make them understand.” Even the drivers of the captured
wagon train were falling asleep on their seats and causing fits of stop-and-start that further slowed Stuart’s column. Yankee prisoners from the Hanover fight had to be pressed into duty as drivers “and it required the utmost exertions of every officer on Stuart’s staff to keep the train in motion.”
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Stuart’s bleary-eyed brigades stumbled into the village of Dover in the wee hours of July 1st. The only information he could glean about Early’s possible direction was some local rumor about him marching toward Carlisle or Shippensburg. “I still believed that most of our army was before Harrisburg,” Stuart wrote, “and justly regarded a march to Carlisle as the most likely to place me in communication with the main army.” But when Stuart reached Carlisle early that evening with Fitz Lee’s brigade, not only had two divisions of Dick Ewell’s corps left Carlisle the day before, but Federal infantry were now in possession of the town. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that the infantry amounted to just over 2,500 Pennsylvania emergency militia, with two guns manned by thirty of the U.S. Regulars who had been forced so incontinently to abandon the
Carlisle Barracks a few days before. The prospect of administering a convenient whipping to some open-jawed militia roused Stuart’s men as a compensation for their long frustration. “We were preparing to have the time of our lives with the
Pennsylvania Militia,” wrote one of Stuart’s artillerymen. But Stuart preferred to waste as little in the way of lives or strength as possible, and sent in a courier under a flag of truce—“a third of an ordinary bed sheet” in size—warning that Stuart would bombard the town if it was not surrendered to him at once.
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The Yankees may have been militia, but their commander was not. He was William Farrar Smith, known more colloquially as “Baldy” Smith, West Point class of 1845, colonel of the 3rd Vermont at First Bull Run, a division commander in the
Army of the Potomac on the Peninsula and then of the
6th Corps at Fredericksburg. “Shell away,” he snarled to Stuart’s messenger, “and be damned.” For three and a half hours, Fitz Lee’s artillery flung
shells and solid
shot on the hapless town, striking houses and the county courthouse, but doing “no particular damage.” It was not a task Fitz Lee enjoyed: “My first military service after graduating from West Point was there” and he had “received the hospitalities of most of its citizens”—whom his artillery were now very likely to kill. “It was with much regret that I proceeded.”
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When the bombardment produced no further response from Baldy
Smith, the increasingly testy Stuart ordered the
4th Virginia Cavalry to torch the
Carlisle Barracks, and for a grand finale Stuart’s gunners shelled the town gas works, which blew up in a spectacular red cloud of flame. Stuart sent one last courier to Smith at midnight, but the Confederate shelling had done nothing to make Baldy more pliable. He asked “that the bearer inform General [Fitzhugh] Lee that he would see him in a hotter climate first.” Stuart’s gunners had fired over 135 rounds into the town to no useful effect, and after a little more desultory firing, they gave up. Whatever pleasure the shelling gave Stuart, it gave little to his men. “I could not but reflect as I looked back on the burning town, on the wickedness, the horrors of this felt war,” wrote one of Stuart’s weary junior officers. “I was made to feel very unhappy indeed, and to pray, ‘God grant that terrible war may lead to an early peace.’ ”
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Stuart’s irritation faded before the fires he had set burned out, because “about midnight,” one of Stuart’s couriers “returned with the first information we had received from our army and with orders from Gen. R.E. Lee for Stuart to march to Gettysburg at once.” Stuart’s column swayed perilously southward toward Gettysburg until they had passed through the village of Hunterstown, just five miles north of the town. Sometime between two and four o’clock in the afternoon, as the rear guard under
Wade Hampton cleared Hunterstown, Federal cavalry skirmishers began nipping at the heels of the column. But Dick Ewell sent a pair of 10-pounder
Parrott rifles to back Hampton up—the first direct involvement of the army with Stuart’s cavalry since the campaign began—and by dusk the skirmishing finally petered out. After eight days of almost ceaseless riding and fighting, Stuart’s cavalry had been forced to ride and fight right up to the end.
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However late Stuart was in arriving, the
Army of Northern Virginia was still glad to see him. As he rode along the
York Pike into Gettysburg, “such joyful shouts as rent the air I never heard” and “the cavalry for once was well received.” Lee, however, had grown increasingly “uneasy & irritated by Stuart’s conduct,” recalled
George Campbell Brown and “had no objection to [Brown] hearing of it,” which was surprising for “a man of Lee’s habitual reserve.” In time, descriptions of an epic confrontation between Lee and Stuart surfaced, mostly for the purpose of showing that Robert E. Lee himself pointedly held Stuart responsible for the Gettysburg battle. But there is no contemporary description of such a meeting, despite its inflation in subsequent retellings to a level with the return of the Prodigal Son. Although it is safe to say that Stuart
may
have reported directly to Lee after his arrival in the late afternoon of July 2nd, the few descriptions we have of Stuart that evening place him “at the vidette-post nearest” the “Infantry” or Ewell’s corps, near
Rock Creek. As for
Henry McClellan, Stuart’s chief of staff, his only comment on Stuart’s arrival in Gettysburg (in his 1893 biography of Stuart) was
to describe, laconically, how “for eight days and nights, the troops had been marching incessantly,” and “on the ninth night they rested within the shelter of the army, and with a grateful sense of relief which words cannot express.”
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There were other voices beside those of the generals to be heard at Gettysburg that night. Some came from sergeants calling company rolls to find out who was still available to answer. In the 19th Massachusetts,
roll calls were the cue for the battle’s first laments:
John was killed before we fired a shot
or
I saw Frank throw up his arms and fall just after we fired the first volley
or
Jim was shot through the head
or
George was killed by a piece of shell, while we were firing
. The names went on into the empty air, and “strong men sobbed.”
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Much louder and more numerous were the sounds that came from the throats of thousands of mangled and dying men left to lie, immobilized with smashed legs, internal hemorrhages so massive that they had scarcely more than the strength to wail, or so crazed with shock that they took to stumbling about in the dark. “You would hear some poor friend or foe crying for water, or for ‘God’s sake’ to kill him,” remembered
Louis Léon of the 53rd North Carolina, or “some of your comrades, shot through the leg, lying between the lines, asking his friends to take him out, but no one could get to his relief, and you would have to leave him there, perhaps to die.” Henry Blake in the 11th Massachusetts bitterly condemned “the chief portion of the
ambulance corps” for sticking to “safe positions” through the night; it was the ordinary soldiers who made up small details from each regiment to gather up canteens to “succor their wounded comrades” and who “bore the suffering to the hospitals in blankets and upon muskets, and rails.” Occasionally, “squads of rebels … upon a similar mission” would wander into Union picket lines, but they were usually released, as if some kind of unspoken contract had come to prevail. One Confederate who was stopped by Blake’s pickets said, “I am your prisoner, if you say so; but I am giving water to all that ask for it.” They let him go.
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All across the darkened ridges, and especially across
Devil’s Den, the peach orchard, and the
Emmitsburg Road, men with “lighted lanterns … passed to the front and scattered over the valley, seeking out the wounded,” and as the Confederates did likewise, the “space between the two armies” became filled with “wandering jets of light.” Over on the other side of
Culp’s Hill,
William Swallow found “both banks of
Rock Creek lined with wounded Confederates washing and tying up their wounds,” while others were compelled to fight off the unwanted attentions of local livestock who had been turned loose to wander by the fighting. A lieutenant in the 118th Pennsylvania was surrounded by “a number of stray hogs” who “commenced rooting and tearing at the dead
men around me,” and when “one hog of enormous size … attempted to poke me,” the lieutenant had the presence of mind to jam “my sword into his belly, which made him set up a prolonged, sharp cry.”
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The miserable condition of the wounded and dying in Civil War battles has always been one of the first of the war’s horrors to demand both recoil and reproach. In an age without any knowledge of sepsis, and only the crudest of surgical tools and techniques, any wound could be a ticket to death from infection alone. “We had no clinical thermometers; our only means of estimating fever was by touch,” admitted Philadelphia surgeon
William W. Keen. “We had no hypodermatic syringes” and so “the mouth and the bowel were the only avenues for the administration of remedies.” The wounds themselves were made all the more horrible by the weaponry that inflicted them, for while the
rifle musket might fall considerably short of its reputation for accuracy, the weight of the unjacketed lead rounds it fired (between .45 and .69 caliber) were heavy enough that when they did strike a human target, the damage would almost always be life-threatening.
A little powder and a lot of lead
, was the rule in the
British Army,
shoot them once and shoot them dead
. One Union soldier remembered “a soldier named Scottie who received as severe a wound as I have ever known”—a slug struck “him at the base of the jaw, broke those bones and drove the fragments and his teeth out of his mouth” and “as he breathed his cheeks seemed to meet, as there was not anything to keep them apart.”

Wounds to the arms and legs could be treated by
amputation, as a preemptive strategy to head off the onset of
gangrene and blood poisoning. But men with wounds to the chest, and especially to the abdomen, were often simply set aside, to be made as comfortable as possible as they slowly died. As a result, nearly 15 percent of the wounded
would
die, which was more or less equivalent to what the British Army endured in the
Crimean War. “Wounds of the abdomen involving the viscera were almost uniformly fatal,” wrote Surgeon Keen. “Opium was practically our only remedy and death the usual result.” He could not remember “more than one incontestable example of recovery from a gunshot wound of the stomach and not a single incontestable case of recovery from wounds of the small intestines.”
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None of this was helped by the sketchy field
hospital arrangements. The Crimean War had brought the first great revulsion against the inadequacies of military medical services; five years later,
Henri Dunant was so unhinged by the spectacle of the battlefield of Solferino in the
North Italian War of 1859 that he set in motion the creation of the first
Red Cross organization. No news of this arrived in time to prepare the American armies for the Civil War. There were little over a hundred surgeons in the U.S. Army in 1861, presided
over by a geriatric veteran of the
War of 1812, and not until 1862 was a military ambulance corps authorized for the
Army of the Potomac.

But even if they had paid better attention to the improvements in care developed as a result of the Crimean and
North Italian wars, there was still the lead ceiling formed by the limitations on medical knowledge, and by the improvised conditions of medicine on a battlefield. It was the first task of regimental, brigade, division, and corps medical staff to select likely sites for field hospitals; their best choices were often an old stone barn or a grove of shade trees.
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Overall, some 160 different places in Gettysburg and across the surrounding landscape were pressed into service as “hospitals,” some of them churches, still others houses, many of them farmhouses and barns, but some just “out-of-doors, where … surgeons have placed themselves to receive the wounded.” The
11th Corps fixed its corps hospital at the Adams County almshouse on July 1st, only to have to abandon it almost as soon as it was set up; eventually, the 11th Corps settled on a farm owned by
George Spangler near Powers Hill, with a large stone-and-timber bank-barn. Four crude operating tables were put up, and during the day between 700 and 1,000 wounded men arrived, propped up against stalls and cribs, or carried out when dead to make room for more. Still more “were lying with but feeble, or in most cases no shelter … against the sides of the barn, and in an orchard adjoining the sheds.” A Confederate hospital, set up for the wounded of Rodes’ division in the barn of
David Shriver’s 150-acre farm on the
Mummasburg Road, overflowed with “the wounded and mangled,” having only “a couple of impromptu tables for operating purposes,” and only three surgeons to treat 760 wounded men.
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