Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg Read online

  Two weeks later an opportunity arose. After screening the Confederate infantry's advance northward by defending the Blue Ridge passes from probing Union horsemen, Stuart got permission from Lee to move into Pennsylvania east of the Blue Ridge-South Mountain range, provided he always remained in contact with the infantry through couriers and was capable of rejoining the main body at any time. This Stuart failed to do. Taking his three best brigades, he allowed the northward-slogging Union army to separate him from the Army of Northern Virginia for a full week, depriving Lee of his cavalry “eyes” at a crucial time. That is why the first contact on July 1 at the site of the “first shot” marker occurred between Union cavalry and Confederate infantry advancing without the usual cavalry screen and scouts to determine the enemy's position and strength.

  Nevertheless, the hot days of late June seemed to signify the pinnacle of Confederate success. Ewell's corps, in advance, had bowled over and captured most of a four-thousand-man Union force blocking their way at Winchester, Virginia, and had crossed the Potomac into Maryland and Pennsylvania. One of Ewell's divisions penetrated to the Susquehanna River at Wrightsville, while two others occupied Carlisle and threatened Harrisburg and the Pennsylvania Railroad bridge over the Susquehanna, the destruction of which was one of Lee's goals in the campaign. This initial success seemed to mark Ewell as a worthy successor to Jackson. He even rivaled the famously eccentric Jackson in eccentricity, with an ulcer-induced diet of hulled wheat in milk and an egg yolk. He had a beaked nose and a habit of cocking his head to one side, which reminded observers of a bird. Ewell had recently married a widow, whom he absentmindedly referred to as “Mrs. Brown.”

  While Ewell's divisions were threatening Harris-burg and Wrightsville on June 28, Lee, with the rest of the army, was at Chambersburg, twenty-five miles northwest of Gettysburg. The campaign seemed a smashing success so far. The invaders stripped the countryside and towns of all the cattle, horses, shoes, and food they could find. Pennsylvanians were in a panic. Contrary to time-honored legend, Lee's orders against pillage of civilian property were honored in the breach by many soldiers. “The wrath of southern vengeance will be wreaked upon the pennsilvanians & all property belonging to the abolition horde which we cross,” wrote a Virginian. A North Carolina soldier confessed in a letter home that “our men did very bad in MD. and Penn. They robed every house… not only of eatables but of everything they could lay their hands on. They tore up dresses to bits and broke all the furniture.”

  All that remained was to find the Army of the Potomac and whip it. Despite the troubling absence of Stuart, which left him without accurate intelligence about the enemy's whereabouts, Lee exuded confidence. According to one of his subordinates, Lee said that when he located the Army of the Potomac, “I shall throw an overwhelming force on their advance, crush it, follow up the success, drive one corps back on another, and by successive repulses and surprises create a panic and virtually destroy the army. [Then] the war will be over and we shall achieve the recognition of our independence.”

  This turned out to be the pride that goeth before a fall. The Army of the Potomac was coming, with more speed and elan than Lee realized. That army had a new commander. When the Confederates entered Pennsylvania, Lincoln saw an opportunity as well as a threat, an opportunity to cut off and cripple the enemy far from his home base. The president told Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles that “we cannot help beating them, if we have the man.” But Lincoln became convinced that Hooker was not the man. The general had begun to fret that the enemy outnumbered him, that he needed reinforcements, that the government was not supporting him. To Lincoln these complaints sounded as though Hooker was looking for an excuse not to fight. When the general submitted his resignation over a dispute about the Union garrison at Harpers Ferry, Lincoln accepted it on June 28 and promoted a surprised Major General George Gordon Meade to command.

  Meade was the fourth commander of the Army of the Potomac. He had compiled a solid if not brilliant record as a division commander, and he had not taken part in the cliquish internecine rivalries that had plagued the officer corps of that army. Meade's testy temper and large, piercing eyes crowned by a high forehead caused one soldier to describe him as “a God-damned old goggle-eyed snapping turtle.” But Meade's tactical skills, including the effective use of terrain and reserves, would play a large part in the coming battle.

  As the Army of the Potomac moved north to confront the invaders, its morale rose with the latitude. Civilians in western Maryland and southern Pennsylvania cheered them, in contrast to the hostile curses they were accustomed to hearing in Virginia. “Our men are three times as enthusiastic as they have been in Virginia,” wrote a Union surgeon. “The idea that Pennsylvania is invaded and that we are fighting on our own soil, proper, influences them strongly. They are more determined than I have ever before seen them.”

  These soldiers had been toughened to a flinty self-reliance in earlier campaigns under bumbling leaders. They “have something of the English bull-dog in them,” wrote a Massachusetts officer. “You can whip them time and again, but the next fight they go into, they are as full of pluck as ever.… Some day or other we shall have our turn.”

  That day was coming soon. On the night of June 28, a civilian spy employed by General Longstreet brought word to Lee and Longstreet in Chambers-burg that the Army of the Potomac was concentrated just south of the Pennsylvania border and was moving north. Chagrined that he had not learned this information from Stuart, Lee was nevertheless convinced that he must act quickly lest the enemy get between his divided forces. He sent couriers to recall Ewell's divisions from Wrightsville and Carlisle. Meanwhile, Major General Henry Heth's division of A. P. Hill's corps marched at dawn toward Gettysburg on the Chambersburg Pike, where at 7:30 they encountered Lieutenant Marcellus Jones and his advance picket post.

  This confrontation introduces the first of many supposed “myths” about Gettysburg that continue to provoke arguments to this day. Generations of historians—and battlefield guides—have said that the advance brigade of Heth's division was heading to Gettysburg to find a rumored supply of shoes in town. Young people especially are captivated by the story that the battle of Gettysburg started because of shoes. Recently, however, some historians have debunked this anecdote as a myth. There was no shoe factory or warehouse in Gettysburg, they point out; the twenty-two shoemakers listed in the 1860 census as living in Gettysburg were barely sufficient to make or repair the footwear worn by county residents. And if there had been a surplus of shoes in town, they would have been cleaned out by Brigadier General John Gordon's brigade of Major General Jubal Early's division when they came through Gettysburg five days earlier.

  The shoe story claim these historians, was concocted by General Heth (pronounced Heath) to explain why he blundered into a firefight contrary to Lee's orders not to bring on a battle until the army was concentrated. Heth said that he thought the Union pickets he encountered on the Chambersburg Pike were merely local militia who could be brushed aside, so he kept going to “get those shoes.”

  The revisionists have made one good point: there were no shoes in Gettysburg except those worn by the inhabitants still in town (many had fled). But that does not necessarily discredit the shoe story. The Confederates may well have thought there were shoes; several of them later said so. In any case, the anecdote serves an important purpose because it illustrates that the battle of Gettysburg began as a “meeting engagement,” or “encounter engagement.” Neither commander intended to fight at Gettysburg; the battle built up step by step from that first encounter on the Chambersburg Pike. Let us concede that the shoe story can neither be proved nor disproved; let us follow the current fashion and call Heth's advance a “reconnaissance in force” to probe toward the enemy; the end result was the same.

  For these were no militia that Heth's infantry ran into; they were troopers from John Buford's cavalry division who had fought so well at Brandy Station three weeks earlier. Scouting ahead of the re
st of the Union army two of Buford's brigades (about 2,700 men) had entered Gettysburg the day before and discovered signs of the enemy on the road several miles to the northwest. Buford sized up the terrain of ridges and hills around Gettysburg, and the road network that would facilitate concentration of the army there. He sent word south to Major General John Reynolds, commander of the nearest Union infantry (First Corps) near Emmitsburg, Maryland, that he intended to hold those ridges as long as he could against the enemy force he sensed was coming. He asked Reynolds to get his infantry there as soon as possible in the morning. Thus it was Buford who made the crucial decision that led to the battle being fought at Gettysburg. For that distinction he earned one of the statues on the battlefield, portraying Buford on foot with binoculars in hand looking toward the northwest. There are seven equestrian statues at Gettysburg, all of infantry commanders (including army commanders Lee and Meade); the most prominent Union cavalry commander is memorialized in bronze on foot. Go figure.

  The bronze Buford stands on McPherson Ridge (named after a local man whose farm was located there—no relation to me) a mile and three-quarters back toward Gettysburg from where Lieutenant Jones fired the first shot. Jones sent back word of his encounter, and then skirmished with the enemy in a fighting withdrawal to Buford's first line on Herr Ridge. This line held for a time as Heth, recognizing that he was not confronting militia, deployed two brigades to run over these pesky Yankee horsemen. Before this could happen, those horsemen pulled back across Willoughby Run to McPherson Ridge, where Buford had established his main line, with one brigade south of the Pike and the other north of it. Let's walk east across a swale south of the white barn (the only structure of the McPherson farm that survives) to the slight ridgeline marked by several monuments and cannons along Reynolds Avenue. This was the final line held by Buford's cavalry.

  Heth's division numbered seven thousand men, but he deployed only half of them. Most of Buford's cavalry fought dismounted, a tactic increasingly prevalent during the Civil War, when the greater range and accuracy of the new rifled muskets over the old smoothbores made mounted charges against infantry suicidally obsolete. One of every four troopers held four horses about two hundred yards to the rear while his comrades fought. Although outnumbered, Buford's men had one advantage. Like most Union horse soldiers, they were armed by this stage of the war with Sharps single-shot breechloading carbines. Infantrymen carried single-shot muzzle-loading rifled muskets. These weapons had a longer range and greater hitting power than cavalry carbines, but even a good infantryman could get off only two or three shots a minute while a trooper armed with a breechloader could fire twice as fast.

  As Heth built up more and more power, Buford climbed to the cupola of the Lutheran seminary building (still there) on the next ridgeline, appropriately named Seminary Ridge. He looked anxiously to the south for Reynolds and his promised reinforcements. As Buford's tired troopers were about to give way, Reynolds came galloping across the fields, followed at double time by two brigades of his leading division. One of them was the famous Iron Brigade, containing one Indiana, one Michigan, and three Wisconsin regiments, and considered the toughest unit in the army. As Reynolds personally led this brigade into line at about 10:30 A.M., he suddenly slumped in the saddle and fell from his horse with a bullet through the base of his skull—the first and highest-ranking general killed at Gettysburg. A small monument on the east side of the Herbst Woods (now usually called McPherson's Woods or sometimes Reynolds’ Woods) marks the spot where Reynolds fell.

  A quarter-mile to the north, across the road and next to Buford's monument, is a large equestrian statue of Reynolds. It introduces us to another dispute about a supposed Gettysburg myth. Two of the hooves of Reynolds's horse are raised. Generations of battlefield guides have explained that this pose conforms to a pattern indicating that the rider was killed in the battle. If one hoof is off the ground, the rider was wounded—and that is true of the equestrian monument to Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, who was wounded at Gettysburg. If all four of the horse's feet are on the ground, the rider was unharmed in the battle—and that also is true of all the rest of Gettysburg's monuments (save the newest one—of which more later). Some park personnel and guides, however, now debunk this “myth” as well, and insist that the relationship between hooves and the rider's fate is purely coincidental. But that strikes me as unlikely. For centuries a convention has existed among sculptors of equestrian statues to symbolize the rider's fate in battle by the placement of the horse's hooves. So I will continue to tell that story about the equestrian monuments at Gettysburg.

  After Reynolds's death, Major General Abner Doubleday took command of the Union First Corps. (Doubleday did not invent baseball—that indeed is a myth.) The Iron Brigade counterattacked one of Heth's brigades through the Herbst Woods and down the slope to Willoughby Run. These woods were open and parklike at the time, even more than they are today after the Park Service's effort to cull the woods to something resembling their 1863 character. The yelling bluecoats smashed into the right flank of Brigadier General James M. Archer's brigade of Tennesseans and Alabamians, capturing many of the men plus Archer himself, the first of Lee's generals to suffer this ignominy. Grinning, a big Union private named Patrick Maloney escorted a scowling Archer to the rear. Behind the lines they ran into General Doubleday, who had known Archer well in the prewar army. “Archer! I'm glad to see you,” said Doubleday as he strode forward to shake hands. “Well, I'm not glad to see you by a damn sight,” growled Archer as he turned away.

  Just north of the Iron Brigade fought Colonel Roy Stone's “Bucktail Brigade” of three Pennsylvania regiments, including the 150th. That morning, one of those twenty-two shoemakers listed in the census, seventy-two-year-old John Burns, left home and headed out to the scene of fighting on McPherson's farm. Incensed by this invasion of his town, he picked up a musket from a wounded soldier of the 150th and fought part of the day with that regiment and later with the Iron Brigade. Burns sustained three wounds and became a local legend in Gettysburg for the remaining nine years of his life. After his death, Burns gained the distinction of being the oldest person to be memorialized by a Civil War monument, which stands on Stone Avenue halfway between the monuments to the 150th Pennsylvania and Seventh Wisconsin.

  About the time Archer was captured, other Union regiments trapped and captured a couple hundred Mis-sissippians in the cut of an unfinished railroad bed just north of the Chambersburg Pike. In March 1997 a ranger from Yellowstone National Park was on a busman's holiday, touring the Gettysburg battlefield. As he walked along this railroad cut, he noticed bones protruding from the bank where it had been washed away by heavy winter rains. They turned out to be the remains of a soldier who was killed by a massive head wound in the fighting there on July 1. No clothing or anything else that might have identified him as Union or Confederate could be found.

  Four months later, in a solemn ceremony on the 134th anniversary of his death, this unknown soldier was interred in the national cemetery with full military honors. I was privileged to pronounce his eulogy and to receive from the U.S. Marine Corps unit that served as his honor guard the American flag that had covered his casket before burial. The most notable feature of this event was the attendance of two genuine Civil War widows—the last of their kind—women who had been married as teenagers in the 1920s to elderly Civil War veterans. Both were now in their nineties, and watched the ceremonies from their wheelchairs. One was white, from Alabama; the other was black, from Colorado.

  Back to July 1, 1863. By early afternoon, Heth's attack had spent itself. Union lines had held firm along the Chambersburg Pike. Meanwhile two divisions of the Eleventh Corps had followed the First Corps onto the field and taken up positions in open fields due north of town to confront two divisions of Ewell's corps reported to be approaching from that direction.

  Neither Lee nor Meade was yet at Gettysburg. But, contrary to their intentions, what had started as a skirmish had developed into a f
ull-scale battle. Lee was riding toward Gettysburg that morning. As he approached a gap in the South Mountain range at Cashtown, eight miles northwest of Gettysburg, the alarming sound of artillery reached his ears. Puzzled, and frustrated by the lack of cavalry to keep him informed of what was happening, he spurred forward. “I cannot think what has become of Stuart,” he said in irritation. “I am in ignorance of what we have in front of us here. It may be the whole Federal army, it may be only a detachment. If it is the whole Federal force, we must fight a battle here.” Lee bid farewell to Longstreet, whose corps brought up the rear, and rode ahead toward the guns of Gettysburg to find out what was going on.

  Lee arrived a little after 2:00 P.M. to find Heth preparing for a new attack. From a mile to the north came additional sounds of battle. One of Ewell's divisions had arrived and gone into action against the right flank of the Union First Corps, and a second was preparing to attack the Eleventh Corps position. Another of A. P. Hill's divisions, commanded by Major General Dorsey Pender, was ready to go in behind Heth. Lee was still reluctant to commit these divisions until Longstreet, several miles away, could bring up his corps. But the battle was out of Lee's hands. The four Confederate divisions at Gettysburg outnumbered the five Union infantry divisions (Confederate divisions averaged 70 percent larger than Union divisions). As Ewell's attack developed, Lee finally told Hill to go in with everything he had.

  We next head north on park roads, Reynolds Avenue and Buford Avenue, across open fields where the Union First Corps still held firm as the long, bloody afternoon of July 1 wore on. Our objective is the Eternal Light Peace Memorial crowning Oak Hill where McPherson Ridge and Seminary Ridge come together. This striking monument was dedicated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to “Peace Eternal in a Nation United” on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the battle, in July 1938. Attended by more than 1,800 actual Civil War veterans (most in their nineties), this four-day event was the last reunion of Blue and Gray. It culminated a half-century in which reconciliation between old foes was the dominant theme in Civil War memory and in the numerous joint reunions of Union and Confederate veterans.