Gettysburg Read online

  Gettysburg

  Stephen W. Sears

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  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Boston/New York 2003

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  A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July 1863

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  Copyright © 2003 by Stephen W. Sears

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South,

  New York, New York 10003.

  Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sears, Stephen W.

  Gettysburg / Stephen W. Sears.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-395-86761-4

  1. Gettysburg, Battle of, Gettysburg, Pa., 1863. I. Title.

  E475.53.S43 2003

  973.7‘349—dc21 2002191259

  Printed in the United States of America

  QUM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Book design by David Ford

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  For Sally, in loving memory

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  Contents

  List of Maps [>]

  Introduction [>]

  1 We Should Assume the Aggressive [>]

  2 High Command in Turmoil [>]

  3 The Risk of Action [>]

  4 Armies on the March [>]

  5 Into the Enemy’s Country [>]

  6 High Stakes in Pennsylvania [>]

  7 A Meeting Engagement [>]

  8 The God of Battles Smiles South [>]

  9 We May As Well Fight It Out Here [>]

  10 A Simile of Hell Broke Loose [>]

  11 Determined to Do or Die [>]

  12 A Magnificent Display of Guns [>]

  13 The Grand Charge [>]

  14 A Long Road Back [>]

  Epilogue: Great God! What Does It Mean? [>]

  The Armies at Gettysburg [>]

  Notes [>]

  Bibliography [>]

  Index [>]

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  Maps

  Brandy Station, June 9, 1863 [>]

  The March North, June 3–19, 1863 [>]

  Winchester, June 13–15, 1863 [>]

  The Armies, June 28, 1863 [>]

  The March North, June 29–30, 1863 [>]

  Roads to Gettysburg, July 1, 1863 [>]

  Gettysburg: A Meeting Engagement, July 1, 10:00 A.M. [>]

  Gettysburg: First Blood, July 1, late morning [>]

  Gettysburg: Battle for McPherson’s Ridge, July 1, afternoon [>]

  Gettysburg: Federal Defeat, July 1, late afternoon [>]

  Gettysburg: Longstreet’s Offensive, July 2, 4:00 P.M. [>]

  Gettysburg: Longstreet’s Attack, July 2, late afternoon [>]

  Gettysburg: Battle for Little Round Top, July 2, late afternoon [>]

  Gettysburg: Anderson’s Attack, July 2, late afternoon [>]

  Gettysburg: Ewell’s Attack, July 2, evening [>]

  Gettysburg: Johnson’s Attack, July 3, morning [>]

  Gettysburg: The Artillery, July 3 [>]

  Gettysburg: Pickett’s Charge, July 3, afternoon [>]

  The Retreat, July 5–14, 1863 [>]

  Maps by George Skoch

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  Introduction

  CAPTAIN SAMUEL FISKE, 14th Connecticut, soldier-correspondent for a New England newspaper, seated himself in the shade of an oak tree on a Pennsylvania hilltop and prepared “to task my descriptive powers” to report the fighting he expected would open at any moment. It was midafternoon, July 2, 1863. The enemy, wrote Fiske, “are arrogant and think they can easily conquer us with anything like equal numbers. We hope that in this faith he will remain, and give us final and decisive battle here….”

  Just a day earlier, in the Confederate camps a mile or so to the west, a foreign visitor, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur J. L. Fremantle of Her Majesty’s Coldstream Guards, had observed in the Rebel army that same arrogant attitude. In his journal Fremantle made note that “the universal feeling in the army was one of profound contempt for an enemy whom they have beaten so constantly….”

  What happened in the three days of Gettysburg, July 1–3, 1863, was in some measure a result of that arrogance. To be sure, there was good reason for Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia to be contemptuous of the Yankees. At Fredericksburg the previous December they had beaten them easily, and two months ago at Chancellorsville they had beaten them again, less easily this time but against longer odds. General Lee marched into Pennsylvania in the confident expectation of winning a third battle—but now in the enemy’s country and with the promise of a considerably more decisive outcome.

  The Confederacy was greatly in need of such a victory in that early summer of 1863. Vicksburg was besieged and almost certainly beyond saving, thereby endangering the entire Confederate position in the western theater. Lee gained Richmond’s approval for the Pennsylvania expedition not in any expectation of changing matters at Vicksburg, but rather with the hope of offsetting disaster there by a compensating victory in the East—particularly a victory of real consequence won in the Northern heartland. The stakes were therefore high indeed.

  Lee’s Pennsylvania gambit, of course, failed, and failed dramatically, and the Army of Northern Virginia had to beat a hasty retreat back across the Potomac. For General Lee, Gettysburg was a defining defeat, and in the fourteen decades since 1863 much effort has been expended to try and explain it. For the most part Lee succeeded in shielding himself and his wartime actions (as the poet Stephen Vincent Benet put it) “From all the picklocks of biographers.” Yet at Gettysburg Lee’s actions were uniquely uncharacteristic of him and they spoke volumes. Why he did what he did can therefore be deciphered.

  With so much attention paid to the losers, and for so long, it is easy to lose sight of the victors. When General Pickett was asked to explain the failure of his charge, he famously remarked, “I think the Union army had something to do with it.” George Gordon Meade and the men of the Army of the Potomac came to Gettysburg without contempt for their opponents, and as a consequence they never deceived themselves about the impending battle.

  General Meade’s accomplishments on the Gettysburg battlefield were remarkable, all the more so considering that July 1 was his fourth day of army command. As it happened, Meade fought the battle defensively just as he intended (if not in the place he intended). His fighting men were as remarkable as he was. At Gettysburg, wrote Captain Fiske on July 4, “the dear old brave, unfortunate Army of the Potomac has redeemed its reputation and covered itself with glory….”

  Gettysburg proved to be both the largest battle fought during the war and the costliest. The two armies between them lost more than 57,000 men during the Pennsylvania campaign, including some 9,600 dead. Repelling the Confederates’ offensive and stripping the initiative from General Lee were the immediate consequences. The longer-term effects would not be so easily seen or felt; still, Gettysburg marked the turning point of the war in the East. As Winston Churchill said of El Alamein, another turning point in another war, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

  1. We Should Assume the Aggressive

  JOHN BEAUCHAMP JONES, the observant, gossipy clerk in the War Department in Richmond, took note in his diary under date of May 15, 1863, that General Lee had come down from his headquarters on the Rappahannock and was conferring at the Department. “Lee looked thinner, and a little pale,” Jones wrote. “Subsequently he and the Secretary of War were long closeted with the President.” (That same day another Richmond insider, President Davis’s aide William Preston Johnston, was writing more optimistically
, “Genl Lee is here and looking splendidly & hopeful.”)1

  However he may have looked to these observers, it was certainly a time of strain for Robert E. Lee. For some weeks during the spring he had been troubled by ill health (the first signs of angina, as it proved), and hardly a week had passed since he directed the brutal slugging match with the Yankees around Chancellorsville. Although in the end the enemy had retreated back across the Rappahannock, it had to be accounted the costliest of victories. Lee first estimated his casualties at 10,000, but in fact the final toll would come to nearly 13,500, with the count of Confederate killed actually exceeding that of the enemy. This was the next thing to a Pyrrhic victory. Chancellorsville’s costliest single casualty, of course, was Stonewall Jackson. “It is a terrible loss,” Lee confessed to his son Custis. “I do not know how to replace him.” On May 12 Richmond had paid its last respects to “this great and good soldier,” and this very day Stonewall was being laid to rest in Lexington. Yet the tides of war do not wait, and General Lee had come to the capital to try and shape their future course.2

  For the Southern Confederacy these were days of rapidly accelerating crisis, and seen in retrospect this Richmond strategy conference of May 15, 1863, easily qualifies as a pivotal moment in Confederate history. Yet the record of what was discussed and decided that day by General Lee, President Davis, and Secretary of War James A. Seddon is entirely blank. No minutes or notes have survived. Only in clerk Jones’s brief diary entry are the participants even identified. Nevertheless, from recollections and from correspondence of the three men before and after the conference, it is possible to infer their probable agenda and to piece together what must have been the gist of their arguments and their agreements—and their decisions. Their decisions were major ones. 3

  It was the Vicksburg conundrum that triggered this May 15 conference. The Federals had been nibbling away at the Mississippi citadel since winter, and by mid-April Mississippi’s governor, John J. Pettus, was telling Richmond, “the crisis in our affairs in my opinion is now upon us.” As April turned to May, dispatches from the Confederate generals in the West became ever more ominous in tone. In a sudden and startling move, the Yankee general there, U. S. Grant, had landed his army on the east bank of the Mississippi below Vicksburg and was reported marching inland, straight toward the state capital of Jackson. On May 12 John C. Pemberton, commanding the Vicksburg garrison, telegraphed President Davis, “with my limited force I will do all I can to meet him…. The enemy largely outnumbers me….” Pemberton offered little comfort the next day: “My forces are very inadequate…. Enemy continues to re-enforce heavily.”

  Grant’s march toward Jackson threatened to drive a wedge between Pemberton in Vicksburg and the force that Joseph E. Johnston was cobbling together to go to Pemberton’s support. On May 9 Johnston had been put in overall charge of operations against the Federal invaders of Mississippi, and by the 13th Johnston had grim news to report. He had hurried ahead to Jackson, he said, but the enemy moved too fast and had already cut off his communication with Vicksburg. “I am too late” was his terse verdict.4

  Thus the highly unsettling state of the war in Mississippi as it was known to President Davis and Secretary Seddon as they prepared to sit down with General Lee to try and find some resolution to the crisis. To be sure, the Vicksburg question had been agitating Confederate war councils since December, when the Yankees opened their campaign there to clear the Mississippi and cut off the westernmost states of the Confederacy. At the same time, a second Federal army, under William Rosecrans, threatened Chattanooga and central Tennessee. For the moment, Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee had achieved a standoff with Rosecrans. Bragg, however, could scarcely afford to send much help to threatened Vicksburg. The defenders of the western Confederacy were stretched very close to the breaking point.

  Early in 1863, a “western concentration bloc” within the high councils of command had posed the argument for restoring the military balance in the West by dispatching reinforcements from the East. Most influential in this bloc were Secretary of War Seddon, Senator Louis T. Wigfall of Texas, and Generals Joe Johnston, P.G.T. Beauregard, and one of Lee’s own lieutenants, James Longstreet. It was Longstreet, in fact, who had been the first to offer a specific plan to rejuvenate affairs in the West.

  In February, responding to a Federal threat, Lee had detached Longstreet from the Army of Northern Virginia and sent him with two of his four First Corps divisions to operate in southeastern Virginia. Taking fresh perspective from his new assignment, casting his eye across the strategic landscape, Longstreet proposed that the First Corps, or at the very least those two divisions he had with him, be sent west. It was his thought to combine these troops, plus others from Joe Johnston’s western command, with Bragg’s army in central Tennessee for an offensive against Rosecrans. Once Rosecrans was disposed of, the victorious Army of Tennessee would march west and erase Grant’s threat to Vicksburg. All the while, explained Longstreet rather airily, Lee would assume a defensive posture and hold the Rappahannock line with just Jackson’s Second Corps.5

  General Lee was unimpressed by this reasoning. He thought it likely that come spring the Federal Army of the Potomac would open an offensive on the Rappahannock, and he had no illusions about trying to hold that front with only half his army. Should the enemy not move against him, he said, he intended to seize the initiative himself and maneuver to the north—in which event he would of course need all his troops. In any case, Lee believed that shifting troops all across the Confederacy would achieve nothing but a logistical nightmare. As he expressed it to Secretary Seddon, “it is not so easy for us to change troops from one department to another as it is for the enemy, and if we rely upon that method we may always be too late.“6

  Longstreet was not discouraged by rejection. After Chancellorsville—from which battle he was absent, there having not been time enough to bring up his two divisions to join Lee in repelling the Federals—he stopped off in Richmond on his way back to the army to talk strategy with Secretary Seddon. In view of the abruptly worsening prospects at Vicksburg, Longstreet modified his earlier western proposal somewhat. As before, the best course would be to send one or both of the divisions with him—commanded by George Pickett and John Bell Hood—to trigger an offensive against Rosecrans in Tennessee. But after victory there, he said, a march northward through Kentucky to threaten the Northern heartland would be the quickest way to pull Grant away from Vicksburg.

  More or less the same plan was already familiar to Seddon as the work of General Beauregard, who from his post defending Charleston enjoyed exercising his fondness for Napoleonic grand designs. Emboldened by these two prominent supporters of a western strategy, and anxious to do something—anything—about the rapidly deteriorating situation in Mississippi, Secretary Seddon telegraphed Lee on May 9 with a specific proposal of his own. Pickett’s First Corps division was just then in the vicinity of Richmond; would General Lee approve of its being sent with all speed to join Pemberton in the defense of Vicksburg?7

  Lee’s response was prompt, sharply to the point, and (for him) even blunt. He telegraphed Seddon that the proposition “is hazardous, and it becomes a question between Virginia and the Mississippi.” He added, revealing a certain mistrust of Pemberton’s abilities, “The distance and the uncertainty of the employment of the troops are unfavorable.” Lee followed his telegram with a letter elaborating his arguments. He pointed out that it would be several weeks before Pickett’s division could even reach Vicksburg, by which time either the contest there would already be settled or “the climate in June will force the enemy to retire.” (This belief—misguided, as it turned out—that Grant’s Yankees could not tolerate the lower Mississippi Valley in summer was widespread in the South.) Lee then repeated his tactful but pointed prediction that Pickett’s division, if it ever did get there, would be misused by General Pemberton: “The uncertainty of its arrival and the uncertainty of its application cause me to doubt the policy of send
ing it.”

  But Lee’s most telling argument was framed as a virtual ultimatum. Should any troops be detached from his army—indeed, if he did not actually receive reinforcements—“we may be obliged to withdraw into the defenses around Richmond.” He pointed to an intelligence nugget he had mined from a careless Washington newspaper correspondent to the effect that the Army of the Potomac, on the eve of Chancellorsville, had counted an “aggregate force” of more than 159,000 men. “You can, therefore, see the odds against us and decide whether the line of Virginia is more in danger than the line of the Mississippi.” When Mr. Davis was shown Lee’s response, he endorsed it, “The answer of Gen. Lee was such as I should have anticipated, and in which I concur.” Pickett’s division was not going to Vicksburg. 8

  Robert E. Lee was photographed by Julian Vanerson in Richmond in 1863. (Library of Congress)

  YET THAT HARDLY marked the end of the debate. On the contrary, Secretary Seddon’s proposition for Pickett initiated a week-long series of strategy discussions climaxed by Lee’s summons to the high-level conference in Richmond on May 15. To prepare for the Richmond conference, Lee called Longstreet to the army’s Rappahannock headquarters at Fredericksburg, and over three days (May 11–13) the two of them intensely examined grand strategy and the future course of the Army of Northern Virginia.

  With the death of Stonewall Jackson, Lieutenant General James Longstreet was not only Lee’s senior lieutenant but by default his senior adviser. The nature of their relationship in this period would be much obscured and badly distorted by Longstreet’s self-serving postwar recollections. The truth of the matter, once those writings by “Old Pete” are taken with the proper discount—and once the fulminations of Longstreet’s enemies who inspired those writings are discounted as well—is that on these May days the two generals reached full and cordial agreement about what the Army of Northern Virginia should do next. The evidence of their agreement comes from Old Pete himself.9

  On May 13, at the conclusion of these discussions, Longstreet wrote his ally Senator Wigfall to explain the strategic questions of the moment and what he and Lee had agreed upon in the way of answers. A second Longstreet letter, written in 1873 to General Lafayette McLaws, covers the same ground with a candor and a scrupulousness too often absent in the recollections dating from Longstreet’s later years.10