Glory Road (45 page)

John Buford was leading his cavalry division north from Frederick and Emmitsburg, prowling close to the slope of South Mountain, trying to find the enemy. On the last day of June, after narrowly missing a collision at the little town of Fairfield, he drew a bit farther to the east and late in the afternoon brought his men into the town of Gettysburg, a pleasant place in the open hilly country where many roads converged, with the long blue mass of the mountain chain lying on the horizon off to the west. Confederate patrols had been in the town, and they went west on the Cashtown pike as Buford's troopers came in. Somewhere not far beyond them, clearly, there must be a solid body of Rebel infantry. Buford strung a heavy picket line along a north-and-south ridge west of town, threw more pickets out to cover the roads to the north (army intelligence warned that Ewell's corps was apt to be coming down those roads from Carlisle before long), and snugged down for the night with headquarters in a theological seminary.

The brigade which was responsible for picketing the roads north of town was commanded by Colonel Tom Devin, and as Buford and Devin talked that night Devin doubted that there was any substantial number of Rebels anywhere near him. He would keep a good watch, he said, but he could handle anything that could come up during the next twenty-four hours. But Buford was convinced that most of Lee's army was within striking distance, and he warned Devin sharply.

"No, you won't," he said bluntly. "They will attack you in the morning and they will come booming—skirmishers three-deep. You will have to fight like the devil until supports arrive."
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Buford was more anxious that night than his staff had ever seen him, and he kept his scouts moving all night, west and north of town. He impressed on his subordinates that they must be alert—"Look out for campfires during the night and for dust in the morning"—and he messaged Meade that there might be trouble next day. He was told to hang on, Reynolds and the I Corps would be up sometime in the morning, and Howard with the XI Corps would not be far behind.

There was a bright moon that night, and most of the army kept to the road long after the sun had gone down. Nothing had actually happened yet, but there was a stir in the air, and the first faint tug had been felt from the line that had been thrown into Gettysburg, a quiet hint that something was apt to pull the whole army together on those long ridges and wooded hills. The soldiers kept on marching, and a strange thing happened, significant because it showed how little the men who led this army understood the spirit of the men they were leading. Somewhere in the officer corps a little plot was hatched: the men would be told that McClellan was back in command, and they would be so inspired and heartened that they would fight and win this battle before they found out that the rumor was false.
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In various moving columns that evening staff officers galloped up in mock frenzy and shouted out the news: "McClellan is in command again!" The boys cheered and tossed their hats, and for half an hour the business was a sensation, yet it appears that something about the news failed to ring true, and most of the soldiers were not greatly deceived. Here and there veterans wagged their heads and agreed that maybe if they lost this next battle and were forced back into the lines around Washington, McClellan would indeed be called in to save the day—otherwise, not a chance.

Inspired or otherwise, the men kept moving. Colonel Strong Vincent, leading a brigade in the V Corps, took his men through a little town, where the moonlight lay bright on the street, and in every doorway there were girls waving flags and cheering. The battle flags were broken out of their casings and the men went through the town in step with music playing, and Gettysburg lay a few miles ahead. Vincent reined in his horse and let the head of the column pass him, and as the colors went by he took off his hat, and he sat there quietly, watching the flags moving on in the silver light, the white dresses of the girls bright in the doorways, shimmering faintly in the cloudy luminous dusk under the shade trees on the lawns. To an aide who sat beside him the colonel mused aloud: There could be worse fates than to die fighting here in Pennsylvania, with that flag waving overhead. . . ,
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There was the long white road in the moonlight, with the smalltown girls laughing and crying in the shadows, and the swaying ranks of young men waving to them and moving on past them. To these girls who had been nowhere and who had all of their lives before them this was the first of all the roads of the earth, and to many of the young men who marched off under the moon it was the last of all the roads. For all of them, boys and girls alike, it led to unutterable mystery. The column passed on through the town and the music stopped and the flags were put back in their casings, and the men went marching on and on.

In the Gettysburg cemetery, quiet on a hilltop just south of the town, there was a wooden sign by the gatepost—just legible, no doubt, in the last of the June moonlight, if anyone had bothered to go up there and read it—announcing that the town would impose a five-dollar fine on anyone who discharged a firearm within the cemetery limits.

SIX

End and Beginning

1. The Economics of Eighty Per Cent

West of Gettysburg the land rolls to the mountains in a long easy ground swell, without whitecaps or breakers. The ridges run north and south and they are broad and rounded, with wide shallow valleys between. It is good farming country, and by July most of the land is bright with growing crops. Here and there are open groves, with farmhouses and big stone-and-timber barns close by.

On the morning of July 1, 1863, Yankee cavalry held one of these ridges a mile west of town. The troopers were a mixed group, New York and Illinois men
mostly
, with a couple of squadrons of Hoosiers, and their pickets looked down a gentle slope toward a little brook, Willoughby Run, which came lazily south and crossed the graveled pike that ran toward Cashtown, a little village half a dozen miles to the west, close to the mountain wall. The pickets looked west, and the dawn came up behind them, throwing long gray shadows across the hollows and lighting the blue crest of South Mountain. Men who glanced back noted an ominous red sky in the east, with a promise of heat.

The light grew, and a dun-colored column of troops came snaking eastward. John Buford had had it pegged: the column was preceded by a triple line of skirmishers who overflowed the wheat fields and pastures beside the Cashtown road and came along jauntily, their muskets ready. These Confederates be
longed to the division of Harry
Heth in A. P. Hill's corps. Hill was sick that morning, and it seems he did not believe there would be many Yankees around Gettysburg. Heth thought the Gettysburg stores might contain shoes, and he wanted to get them, or so it is stated, at any rate, although Jubal Early's men had gone through the place a week earlier, and it was most unlikely that they would have overlooked anything useful. It may be that these Confederates simply were looking for a fight. They had seen nothing in Pennsylvania so far but militia, and as far as they knew there was nothing but militia in front of them. And so as Buford had predicted, they came booming over the western ridge, skirmishers three-deep, striding forward into the rising sun.

The first Federals to get a good look at them were a corporal and three men of the 9th New York Cavalry near Willoughby Run. The corporal sent his men back to spread the alarm while he trotted across the stream and up the hill for a closer look. Rebel skirmishers loosed a few long-range shots at him, and he rode back to the little bridge, and as the skirmishers came over the ridge he fired a few times with his carbine and then turned and galloped back to the main line. With that harmless exchange of shots the battle of Gettysburg had begun.
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If the Confederates were looking for a fight, Buford was just the man for them. Unsupported cavalry was not expected to stand off infantry, and for a couple of hours or more Buford's two brigades would be entirely unsupported, but Buford liked to fight and he did not propose to leave until somebody made him leave. He dismounted his regiments and spread them out along the ridge, one man in every four standing fifty yards in the rear holding horses, the rest squatting behind fences, bushes, trees, or what not and peering at the Rebel skirmishers over their stubby carbines.

Buford had to keep part of his men patrolling the roads that came down from the north, because the word was that Ewell's troops would be approaching from that direction before long, so his fighting line was a bit skinny. He had six guns with him—Battery A, 2nd U. S. Artillery, under Lieutenant John Calef—and he sent them out the Cashtown road to take position in the center of the line of dismounted cavalrymen. Calef swung his guns into battery, trained a piece on a knot of mounted Confederate officers three quarters of a mile off, and nodded to the gunner, who jerked the lanyard. The flash and the echoing report and the bursting shell notified the Confederates that they were expected, and the ridge to the west blossomed out with rolling spurts of dust as the Rebel guns went in at a gallop to unlim-ber and return the fire. Rebel skirmishers began working their way up from Willoughby Run, and there was an intermittent clatter of rifle and carbine fire.

Two or three hundred yards east of the ridge where the cavalry and the guns were posted there was another rise of ground, slightly higher and much longer, and a little way south of the Cashtown pike on this high ground there was a Lutheran theological seminary, its white bell tower rising above walls of ivied brick. Buford went back to this building and climbed up in the tower to survey the situation. It did not take him long to see that if Yankee infantry did not come up soon the cavalry would be in a bad spot. Rebel infantry was present in strength and more was coming up all the time, and Heth was putting additional guns into battery on the far side of Willoughby Run. Buford sent gallopers hurrying away to give the news to General John Reynolds, who was to bring the I Corps up toward Gettysburg from the south. The Confederate skirmish line pushed in more closely, the racket of the firing was getting louder, and men were being hit. Confederate artillery was blasting the crest of the ridge, and Calef was firing fast in reply, and the weight of metal was all in the Confederates' favor.

South of Gettysburg, Reynolds's infantry could hear the firing, and they quickened their pace. Reynolds galloped on ahead of them and rode into town, got a quick size-up of the situation from a scout, and turned west and rode fast to the seminary. Buford saw him from the belfry, called out, "There's the devil to pay!" and came clattering down in a rush. He told Reynolds what he knew, and Reynolds got off a hasty note to Meade: the enemy was coming on, but "I will fight him inch by inch, and if driven into the town I will barricade the streets and hold him back as long as possible."
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A courier went pounding back with the note, and the head of the infantry column swung west as it neared the town, crossing the fields to get over to Seminary Ridge.

The column was led by Major General James Wadsworth, a vigorous white-haired old man who had been a well-to-do gentleman farmer in New York State before the war and who was turning into a good general. His men liked him immensely. He was a stickler about things like adequate rations and decent housing, and in winter quarters the men found it not at all unusual to wake up before dawn on cold mornings and see the old chap poking his nose inside to find out for himself whether the huts were warm and decently ventilated. He had run unsuccessfully for governor of New York against Copperhead Seymour the previous fall, scorning to go home and campaign on the ground that it did not befit a soldier.
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Now he was leading his division into action, an old Revolutionary War saber in his hand, Reynolds galloping back to meet him to tell him where to put his troops.

Wadsworth's division contained just two brigades, but they were good ones. One of them was composed of four New York regiments and one regiment from Pennsylvania, led by Brigadier General Lysander Cutler, and the other was the Iron Brigade, Influential Citizen Meredith riding at the head of it. As this brigade approached Gettysburg, Meredith or someone else ordered the flags uncased and set the fife-and-drum corps playing at the head of the column, and the Westerners fell into step and came swinging up the road, their black hats tilted down over their eyes, rifle barrels sparkling in the morning sun. There were eighteen hundred fighting men in this brigade, and the men were cocky. Officially they were the 1st Brigade of the 1st Division of the I Army Corps, and they figured that if the army were ever drawn up in one long line for inspection they would stand at the extreme right of it, which somehow was cause for pride. On the ridge to the west there was a crackle of small-arms fire and a steady crashing of cannon, with a long soiled cloud of smoke drifting up in the still morning air, and at the head of the column the drums and the fifes were loud—playing "The Girl I Left Behind Me," probably, that perennial theme song of the Army of the Potomac, playing the Iron Brigade into its last great fight.
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On Seminary Ridge, Reynolds divided the column, telling Cutler to form line north of the Cashtown pike and calling the Iron Brigade into action on the south side. The veteran regiments wheeled into line and the dismounted cavalrymen came sifting back through the intervals to take their horses again. They had done well enough, holding A. P. Hill's men off for two hours, and now they could go to the rear while the infantry took over. Back with them went Calef and his battery, one gun limping along with but two horses left to pull it. Into the place Calef had vacated came the 2nd Maine battery, Captain James Hall, the same who had so impressed the rookies on the line at Fredericksburg by his extreme coolness under fire, sitting his horse and making chit-chat with a brigadier while the Southern gunners used him for a target.

There was no time now for Captain Hall to put on a show for nervous infantry. The Rebels had a good deal of artillery in action, and twelve guns promptly opened on this Maine battery, getting it in a deadly cross fire. Confederate infantry was getting in close, too, and skirmishers were shooting down the gunners. Cutler's boys relieved this situation slightly when they opened fire, but the Confederates were coming on with a rush, their line extending farther to the north than Cutler's line, and before long the Federals found themselves flanked, with a couple of Southern regiments advancing on their right and crumpling them up. The infantry was ordered to retire, the 147th New York did not get the order and was left isolated, in danger of being captured en masse, and Hall suddenly found that he was all alone on the ridge, with a Rebel column on his right barely sixty yards off. Coolly he ordered his right and center sections to swing over and blast the charging column with canister, while the two guns of his left section continued to duel with the twelve guns on the ridge to the west. The enemy charge was broken, but it realigned itself and came on again, skirmishers creeping forward to pick off the gunners. Hall's men did their best, but as a Federal infantry officer who saw the fight remarked, "Artillery against skirmishers is like shooting mosquitoes with a rifle."
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