Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (82 page)

Still, if Stuart was looking for a fight, or merely to renew the brushfire encounter of the afternoon before at Hunterstown, he did not have to go far to find it. Three miles east of Gettysburg, Stuart’s four brigades brushed up against
George Armstrong Custer’s
Michigan cavalry brigade and a battery of artillery, and a spattering of artillery fire was traded back and forth along yet another undulating rise known as
Cress Ridge, between the York Pike and the
Hanover Road. In short order, a second Federal cavalry brigade, under
John McIntosh, came up to reinforce Custer, followed by yet another brigade, this one belonging to
John Irvin Gregg, followed by the overall division commander, John Gregg’s brother,
David McMurtrie Gregg. McIntosh’s brigade was supposed to be Custer’s relief (Custer belonged to
Judson Kilpatrick’s division, and Kilpatrick had moved the bulk of his division to the south end of the battlefield), but David Gregg easily persuaded Custer, who “conjectured” that some rough play was in the offing, to stay and the fight was on.

For almost an hour, from 12:30 to 1:30, both sides jockeyed for advantage in a long-range duel between dismounted cavalry, fighting with
carbines, and artillery. Stuart tried to dislodge the stalemate with an aggressive mounted attack across the farm of
John Rummel, which in turn was met by a furious saber-swinging mounted counterattack by Custer and his Michigan cavalry, Custer at their head crying, “Come on, you Wolverines!” For an hour, the Rummel farm was turned into a smaller-scale version of the cavalry scrum at Brandy Station a month before. In the end, both sides drew off with little to show for it except for some minor casualties—less than 5 percent for Stuart, and half that for David Gregg, except for Custer’s brigade (where 32 men were killed and 147 wounded, a pattern of heedless bloodletting which Custer would carry to a more famous spot on a dusty hillside in Montana thirteen years later).
⁶

There was another cavalry action, this one involving a poorly calculated mounted attack on some of
John Bell Hood’s infantry down by
Big Round Top. As battered as Hood’s men had been by the fighting on July 2nd, they illustrated how little hope there was of light cavalry doing anything even remotely harmful to infantry by shooting the Union brigade apart. “We called out for them to throw down their sabres and get off their horses,” wrote an infantryman in the 1st Texas, “but they still kept on until shot.” The entire business got the brigade’s commander and twenty of his men killed, and on the whole it has to be said that the battle of Gettysburg would not have ended five minutes sooner or later if either affair had never happened.
⁷

Lee did have one other use for the cavalry, however. That night, he summoned
John Imboden, whose rough-edged Virginia cavalry brigade had only just arrived the night before from Chambersburg. Imboden knew that “the day had gone against us,” but he assumed “that with to-morrow’s dawn would come a renewal of the struggle.” Lee, “who betrayed so much physical exhaustion” that Imboden “stepped forward to assist him,” knew that he had nothing left to fight with. The
Army of Northern Virginia had fought enough in three days to equal three separate battles, where Lee had only been prepared, at most, to fight one, and if he asked any more of it, the entire army might fall apart. “The unsuccessful issue of our final attack” determined Lee’s mind to withdraw “to the west side of the mountains.” If the Federals attempted to follow him, he did not mind taking the chance of a strictly defensive fight, “if the enemy offers it.” But once on the far side of
South Mountain, he would continue his retreat until the Confederates were once again on the south side of the Potomac.
⁸

The notion of “active operation” Lee now had in mind for Imboden was for the unstylish cavalryman (whom J.E.B. Stuart had deemed “inefficient”) to take immediate charge of the logistics of the retreat. “We must return to
Virginia,” Lee began. “I have sent for you because your men are fresh, to guard the trains back to Virginia.” There were two routes open: the
Cashtown Pike, leading back the way they had come, to Greenwood and thence south to
Maryland and Williamsport on the Potomac, and the
Fairfield Road, which led through the village of Fairfield and crossed
South Mountain at Monterey Pass, and reached Waynesboro before also turning down toward Williamsport. The Fairfield route was twenty miles shorter, but the Chambersburg route had better roads, and so rather than risk piling the entire army onto just one thoroughfare, Lee wanted Imboden to take all the army’s ammunition, supply, and ambulance wagons by the more northerly Cashtown-to-Greenwood route. The infantry would use the Fairfield-to-Waynesboro route, with Powell Hill’s corps in the lead, followed by Longstreet’s, and then Ewell’s. Screening would be provided by Stuart and the cavalry, Fitz Lee’s brigade accompanying Imboden, and the rest covering the infantry’s tail.
⁹

This was not going to be an ordinary chore. “The wagons and
ambulances and the wounded could not be ready to move till late in the afternoon,” Imboden wrote. Maps would have to be drawn up and distributed; orders would have to be written and sent off as far as Winchester to have empty wagons brought to meet the trains at the Potomac crossing; lists of names would have to be compiled and a rough triage would have to be performed by the surgeons, separating the wounded who could be accommodated by the existing transport from those who would have to be left behind for the Yankees to pick up. But Imboden did better than Lee could have hoped, and the head of his hastily organized train began rolling westward fifteen hours later. “The wagons and ambulances were loaded with all the wounded that could be moved,” wrote one of Fitz Lee’s troopers, “but we had to leave many of our poor fellows that we never saw again.”
¹⁰

It began to rain that night, “in blinding sheets,” and horses and mules “were blinded and maddened by the wind and water.” Longstreet’s men found “the roads muddy, wagon ruts deep, the night awful,” and Longstreet’s chief of staff,
Moxley Sorrel, remembered a night of “rain in torrents, howling winds, and road almost impassable.” The gloom of the weather was matched by the slumping spirits of the army. “The battle of Gettysburg was … as clear a defeat as our army ever met with,” admitted
Franklin Gaillard, the lieutenant colonel of the 2nd South Carolina. In the
North Carolina and
Georgia regiments, the misery fanned dissent. “The men from North Carolina … believe they will go back in the Union,” warned a soldier in the 53rd Georgia, while
“the men from Georgia say that if the [Union] army invades Georgia they are going home. I don’t believe our army will fight much longer.” Even
Lewis Armistead’s parting comment to
Henry Bingham before Armistead was carried off—about doing an injury to “you all” which he would “repent”—sounded to Bingham like an admission that “the sentiment” of repentance now prevails “among some of the leading men of the South.”
¹¹

There was more bad news the next morning. On July 4th, the 29,000 Confederate soldiers who formed the garrison of Vicksburg “marched out of their works, and formed line in front, stacked arms”—and surrendered. Bobbing in the waters of Chesapeake Bay,
Alexander Stephens’ truce boat waited in Hampton Roads for permission to proceed up the Potomac, but with the news that “Lee is on the retreat,” Stephens’ request to come to Washington was deemed by Lincoln and his cabinet to be “inadmissible.” In Pittsburgh, the newspapers exulted that “the peace-at-any-price leaders … are trimming their sails to the fresh gale of success favoring the Union cause.” In New York City, “soon after daylight,” church bells “began clanging, and cannon firing … in Union Square,” and New York’s Democratic governor was persuaded to omit from a scheduled speech “a fierce attack upon the war management of the Government and its generals and a eulogy of McClellan.” Everything Robert E. Lee had hoped to gain by coming north had been lost.
¹²

At first, George Gordon Meade had no idea that Pickett’s final attack had been repulsed. Having taken himself, in a worst-case scenario, down to the artillery redoubt on Powers Hill, Meade had “only a few orderlies” with him and it was only after “the enemy’s artillery fire ceasing, heavy musketry firing being heard, and … meeting many men moving to the rear,” that it occurred to Meade that defeat had not descended upon him after all. He started off for the
Taneytown Road, meeting his son, Capt. George G. Meade, Jr., and telling young George to join him “at his Head Qrs. or on the line.” Meade came up behind the right flank of the
2nd Corps, and gradually worked his way up the line, looking for Alex Hays or anyone who could tell him what had happened. (Meade was, for a moment, surrounded by “a large body of prisoners” who recognized that “he was someone in authority” and began asking
him
“where they should go.”)

Finally,
John Gibbon’s aide
Frank Haskell came up and Meade began pummeling him with questions. “How is it going here?” Meade asked, “earnest and full of care.” Haskell replied, “I believe, General, the enemy’s attack is repulsed.” Meade was astonished: “What! Is the assault already repulsed.” “It is, sir,” Haskell delightedly answered.
Thank God
, Meade marveled. Meade
pushed on farther to find Hays, and instead found an officer commanding Woodruff’s battery who also assured Meade that the rebels had just turned and fled. Meade sat himself down “on a great bowlder” as reports began to stream in—he was particularly curious about the rumor “that General Longstreet had been killed … at the head of the charge”—and a band struck up “Hail to the Chief” and “Yankee Doodle.” Major Mitchell, Winfield Hancock’s aide, finally found Meade with Hancock’s message about “a great victory gained,” and he dictated a reply, thanking Hancock “for the service he has rendered the Country and me this day.”
¹³

It eventually occurred to Meade that he needed to find out if anything was in the offing elsewhere, and so he rode first up to
Cemetery Hill, and then down to
Little Round Top. From the ambulance which carried him from the field, Hancock sent Meade a follow-up message, explaining to Meade as delicately as a subordinate dared that “nothing is wanting” in the victory they had won but “to make it decisive,” which Meade could easily do if “the Sixth and Fifth Corps” are “pressed up.” Alf Pleasonton, who joined Meade at “the top of the mountain,” also begged Meade “to order a general advance of his whole army in pursuit of the enemy.” This was, Pleasonton argued, Meade’s once-in-a-lifetime chance “to show yourself a great general” and destroy Lee’s army the same way Wellington had Napoleon’s at Waterloo. (The Federal officers were not the only ones expecting Meade to attack; Longstreet, for one, shuddered at the possibility of seeing “Meade ride to the front and lead his forces to a tremendous counter-charge,” and so did Lee, who “expected Meade to follow the fugitives of Pickett’s division.”) But Meade only had the 6th Corps as his reserve, and only Crawford’s Pennsylvania Reserves from the
5th Corps were in any kind of useful shape, and though he ordered
George Sykes to have Crawford and the Reserves “clear the woods” in front of Little Round Top where Hood’s and McLaws’ depleted divisions lay, he added that if Crawford “found too strong a force I was not to engage them.” Crawford’s Reserves actually gained a good deal of ground, pushing disheartened rebel skirmishers past the wheat field and the stony ridge and bagging “over two hundred prisoners” before enough resistance forced Crawford to call it off. Otherwise, Meade was not in a mood to jeopardize what he was now beginning to realize was the first clear-cut victory the Army of the Potomac had enjoyed. And so although “Meade ordered demonstrations in front of our line,” a sighing Gouverneur Warren said, “they were very feebly made.”
¹⁴

When the morning of the 4th came, the rain was still plunging down in torrents, “but all was quiet,” and to the relief of the Confederates, “no enemy was in sight.” That afternoon, David Birney summoned the band of the 114th Pennsylvania “to play in honor of the National Anniversary” up on the “line of
battle.” They played the usual “national airs, finishing up with ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’ At that moment, the rebels sent a shell over our lines.” It was the last shot of the battle of Gettysburg.
¹⁵

That night, Meade called another council of war. Despite the weather, Union signalers had spotted the movement of Lee’s wagons on the Fairfield and Cashtown roads, and on the strength of those reports Meade issued a congratulatory order to the Army of the Potomac, announcing that the enemy “has now withdrawn from the contest … utterly baffled and defeated.” On the other hand, he had word from Francis Barlow, who turned out to be quite alive after his ordeal on July 1st and was convalescing at the
Josiah Benner farmhouse, warning that “the movement of the enemy” was “a mere feint.” So, Meade added to his order, “our task is not yet accomplished,” and he looked to “the army for greater efforts to drive from our soil every vestige … of the invader.” He followed the order with a circular to the corps commanders that no “present move” would be made by the Army of the Potomac, “but to refit and rest” and “get the commands well in hand.”
¹⁶

The council met that night in a temporary headquarters Meade borrowed from one of the
6th Corps division commanders, and for all the congratulations he had issued earlier in the day Meade’s tone was still apprehensive. He opened the meeting by suggesting “that the enemy were making a flank movement, and would probably try to interpose between us and Washington.” He sternly reminded everyone that his primary responsibility was to protect the capital, and having stated the situation, he asked “the corps commanders for their advice as to what course he should pursue”—follow on Lee’s heels … shadow him at a distance, moving parallel to Lee down the eastern side of South Mountain into Maryland … or (according to John Sedgwick), “move back to Westminster.” Because “so little” was “definitely known as to the position and designs of the enemy,” the consensus quickly favored waiting until they “could find out something.” This satisfied Meade quite nicely. The succession of heavy rains had made the Potomac unfordable, so it was not likely that Lee could go far, and besides, “My army requires a few days rest, and cannot move at present.”