Gettysburg Page 11

  On only the third day after entering the Shenandoah, Dick Ewell had completely cleared away the enemy facing him in the Valley, with immense captures, and opened the passage to the Potomac and Maryland. Rodes had seized Martinsburg and he and Jenkins’s cavalry were already across the river. The few Federals left in the Valley were huddled defensively at Harper’s Ferry. The Army of Northern Virginia was greatly impressed. As Captain Charles Blackford put it, “Ewell won his right to Jackson’s mantle at Jackson’s game on Jackson’s ground. This success will give the corps more confidence in Ewell.”

  The next day, June 16, there was a ceremony in the main fort at Winchester, now renamed Fort Jackson. The ladies of Winchester had stitched together a makeshift Confederate flag, made from two U.S. flags, and it was run up the flagpole to the accompaniment of a 13-gun salute. The ladies then raised three cheers for General Ewell. Ewell thanked them for the honor, and said mischievously, “now call on General Early for a speech.” Quickly came the cry, “Speech from General Early!” Jubal Early, a confirmed bachelor and a notorious misogynist, was equal to the occasion. “Ladies,” he said, with a tip of his hat, “I never could find courage to address one of you—of course I can’t speak to a hundred.”

  The troops feasted on captured Yankee commissary stores and sutlers’ stocks and looked forward to more such easy conquests. The one regret was the escape of the vandal Milroy. There was much relief among the citizens of Winchester, who regarded themselves as literally liberated. A Virginia gentlewoman and longtime resident wrote a friend, “You may imagine the happiness of the people here to be relieved from the arrogant Tyranny of those wretches….” 29

  MILROY’S WEARY BOYS pushed waves of rumor and panic ahead of them as they stumbled into Harper’s Ferry and on into Maryland and even Pennsylvania. The Rebels, they cried, were right on their heels. Newspapers in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and Pittsburgh picked up these cries and raised the alarm. Pennsylvania’s Governor Curtin beseeched the president to call out the militia. On June 15, in Washington, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles entered in his diary, “Something of a panic pervades the city this evening. Singular rumors of Rebel advances into Maryland. It is said they have reached Hagerstown, and some of them have penetrated as far as Chambersburg.“30

  Soon enough these rumors acquired a certain weight when a small party of Albert Jenkins’s Virginia cavalrymen slipped across the Pennsylvania line and briefly occupied Chambersburg. The roads became choked with dusty columns of refugees, many of them runaway slaves and free blacks trying to evade these outriders of slavery. Those who did not flee quickly enough were ridden down and rounded up by Jenkins’s troopers. Some fifty blacks were formed into a coffle and marched south to be sold into bondage. Albert Jenkins’s men are best described as irregulars, and they seem to have undertaken these lucrative captures for their own accounts. There is no evidence that the practice was officially sanctioned, but numerous Confederate officers obviously looked the other way. Nor did the practice end with this Chambersburg episode.31

  A railroad executive named Ambrose Thompson bought into the general panic and became the first (of many) to demand that Mr. Lincoln call up General McClellan to lead an army of home guards against the invaders. The magic of Little Mac’s name, Thompson claimed, would rally 50,000 men to the colors within twenty-four hours.

  In official Washington, at least, there was relief when it was found that some of this panic had been self-generated. Word came, wrote Secretary Welles, “that the stragglers and baggage-trains of Milroy had run away in a fright, and squads of them, on different roads, had alarmed each other, and each fled in terror with all speed to Harrisburg.” This revelation left the president, Welles noted, “delighted and in excellent spirits.”

  Taking the longer view as was his habit, the president had some reason to be in excellent spirits. On May 24 General Grant had telegraphed, “The enemy are now undoubtedly in our grasp. The fall of Vicksburg and the capture of most of the garrison can only be a question of time,” and nothing in Grant’s dispatches since had suggested a lesser eventual outcome. Now it appeared certain that General Lee had taken the offensive in some fashion or another, and in that Mr. Lincoln saw opportunity beckoning should the Confederate army venture out of Virginia. All eyes turned to Joe Hooker and the Army of the Potomac. 32

  For General Hooker, however, discovering where this enemy offensive might be headed was proving uncommonly complicated. As Daniel Butterfield, his chief of staff, put it, “We cannot go boggling round until we know what we are going after.” The Bureau of Military Information found it inherently more difficult to track and evaluate the Rebel army on the move than when it was encamped. The enemy’s security was tighter, and it was hard to infiltrate spies into marching columns. To further complicate matters, when Pleasonton’s cavalry picked up prisoners or deserters, it usually neglected to turn them over to the skilled B.M.I. interrogators, thereby losing much useful intelligence. The Federal troopers, in fact, were generally inept at intelligence-gathering, and proved unable to penetrate Jeb Stuart’s cavalry screen for a direct look at the Army of Northern Virginia. General Pleasonton himself was easily misled. For some days, for example, he insisted that Lee’s target was Pittsburgh, far to the west; citizens there frantically threw up barricades in the streets.33

  Should it indeed be Lee’s intention to march north on either a raid or an invasion, Hooker had told the president on June 10, and if he were permitted “to operate from my own judgment,” he would seize this opportunity to strike at Richmond—“the most speedy and certain mode of giving the rebellion a mortal blow.” According to Hooker’s information, hardly more than a provost guard now defended the Confederate capital. He argued that in case Lee should attempt a counterstroke against Washington, the garrison there could hold the fortifications long enough for “all the disposable part” of his army to “be thrown to any threatened point north of the Potomac at short notice….”

  It was an intriguing proposal, and if executed with the sort of imaginative planning that Hooker had employed in the opening of his Chancellorsville campaign, it would almost certainly have forced Lee to cancel his Pennsylvania incursion. President Davis was as sensitive about Richmond’s safety as President Lincoln was about Washington’s; surely Davis would summon Lee to the rescue the moment a Yankee army appeared before the gates of Richmond. As it happened, however, it was the sensitivity about Washington that decided the question. Within ninety minutes of receiving Hooker’s telegram, the president quashed the idea.

  “I would not go South of the Rappahannock, upon Lee’s moving North of it,” the commander-in-chief told his general. “I think Lee’s Army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point.” He then delivered a crisp directive: “If he comes toward the Upper Potomac, follow on his flank, and on the inside track, shortening your lines, whilst he lengthens his. Fight him when opportunity offers. If he stays where he is, fret him, and fret him.” When it came to his concurring with the president’s views, General-in-Chief Halleck said simply, “I do so fully.” Consequently, on June 11, Joe Hooker put the Army of the Potomac on alert to march. Robert E. Lee had thrown down the gauntlet … and it was Abraham Lincoln who picked it up.34

  Yet essential questions remained. March where? Where were the three main elements of the Army of Northern Virginia (the B.M.I. had discovered Lee’s new three-corps organization), and where was each bound? Answers now reached the B.M.I. from an exceptional discovery, a bright young contraband from Culpeper named Charley Wright, who had been a servant in Lee’s army and who displayed a remarkable knowledge of its units and their whereabouts. On June 12 intelligence officer Captain John McEntee could report with confidence that Ewell and Longstreet had marched through Culpeper; that Ewell had set off for the Shenandoah, with Longstreet to follow; and that A. P. Hill was still at Fredericksburg. “I think statement reliable,” said McEntee. Here finally was firm enough evidence to act on, and on Saturday, June 13, Joe Hooker started
the Army of the Potomac in pursuit. It was a more than timely move, and it actually stole a march on the Rebels—not until the 15th would Longstreet start from Culpeper and Hill start from Fredericksburg.

  Lieutenant Colonel Rufus Dawes, commanding the 6th Wisconsin, explained to his fiancée that should the Rebels “envelop themselves around our right the inevitable ‘apron string’ will probably draw us back to old Bull Run. This Army seems to bear pretty much the same relation to the city of Washington that I do to you.” His was an apt observation. It was made clear to General Hooker that whatever else he did, he must always commit the Army of the Potomac to the care and protection of the capital.35

  The concealing topography of the region greatly favored Lee’s offensive operations. Three parallel ranges, running north by northeast, slanted through central Virginia to the Potomac, crossing the narrow waist of Maryland and extending into Pennsylvania. The Blue Ridge and the westernmost of the three ranges, the Alleghenies, framed the Shenandoah Valley. To the east, between the Blue Ridge and the Bull Run Mountains, lay the Loudoun Valley. Key to the safe passage of armies through these valleys was control of the various passes or gaps in the ranges. Securely holding the gaps in the Blue Ridge, for example, would turn the Shenandoah Valley into a veritable “covered way” to the Potomac, at which point a Rebel army might continue northward into Maryland and Pennsylvania, still sheltered by the mountains, or turn eastward to threaten Washington and Baltimore. In August 1862, in the Second Manassas campaign, Lee had employed the Loudoun Valley to advance his forces, sending Jackson’s corps and then Longstreet’s through Thoroughfare Gap in the Bull Run Mountains to fall on Pope’s army at Manassas Junction, outside Washington. Now, in June 1863, Lee was planning to use both the Shenandoah and Loudoun valleys to conceal his forces and confound his enemies.

  General Hooker, for his part, would be following what Mr. Lincoln termed the inside track, marching due north from Falmouth, keeping his army always between the Rebels and Washington. The movement required shifting the Army of the Potomac’s supply line from Aquia Landing on the Potomac to the Orange & Alexandria Railroad running out of Alexandria, close by the capital. For the opening of the march Hooker split his forces into two major columns. The westernmost column was to aim initially for Manassas Junction, to secure the army’s left flank and to block any sudden advance by Lee on Washington by way of Thoroughfare Gap. The second column, after withdrawing the bridgehead across the Rappahannock, would march in parallel to the east, acting as a rear guard and protecting against a sweep around the army’s right. Headquarters would travel with this easternmost column—the Second, Sixth, and Twelfth corps, and the reserve artillery. Hooker’s choice of a commander for the other column reflected his continuing problems with the officer corps.

  Following Chancellorsville, Hooker had named George Meade as his ablest corps commander. But now, a month later, he and Meade were hardly on speaking terms. Furthermore, Hooker had certainly learned of Meade being put forward as his successor by the dissident corps commanders. So he chose instead John Reynolds to manage this wing of the army—First, Third, Fifth, and Eleventh corps, along with Pleasonton’s cavalry. Hooker also surely knew of Reynolds being summoned to the White House on June 2, and could easily guess why. Since ten days later he remained general commanding, Hooker must have concluded that Reynolds was without ambition for the post and could be trusted with this important independent command. However that may be, Hooker would express himself as entirely satisfied with his choice. Speaking afterward of Reynolds’s role in the campaign, he was fulsome in his praise: “I never had an officer under me acquit himself so handsomely.” 36

  It was not yet certain just how far north the point of the Rebel advance might have reached, and the order went to Reynolds to make forced marches to reach Manassas as quickly as possible. The June weather had turned very hot and very dry, and the march was grueling. Colonel Charles Wainwright, the First Corps’ chief of artillery, thought he would suffocate passing through one stretch of particularly dense woodland. “The sides of the road were lined with men, who had dropped from exhaustion,” he noted in his diary. “There must have been near a thousand of them, many of whom had fainted entirely away. The surgeons had their hands full….” From close by Manassas on Monday, June 15, Colonel Dawes of the 6th Wisconsin wrote of the ordeal to his fiancée: “We marched Sunday morning and all day Sunday and all night, and until the middle of the afternoon to-day, when we reached this point, tired, sore, sleepy, hungry, dusty, and dirty as pigs…. Our army is in a great hurry for something.“37

  WITH THE CAMPAIGN against General Lee now under way, Joe Hooker found himself, at the same time, at war against General-in-Chief Henry Halleck. The stake in their behind-the-scenes battle was nothing less than Hooker’s continued command of the Army of the Potomac, and both men knew it.

  Hooker’s first designs for countering Lee’s offensive—striking at the rearmost third of the Confederate army still at Fredericksburg, or marching on Richmond to pressure Lee to turn back—had been rejected by the president, but, Hooker suspected, mostly on the advice of the general-in-chief. Halleck sensed that confidence in Hooker’s generalship had slackened enough that now was his opportunity to erase Hooker’s special arrangement with the president whereby Lincoln dealt with the Army of the Potomac (“ran the machine himself,” as Halleck phrased it) without reference to the general-in-chief. Halleck’s mistrust of Hooker ran deep, and he set as his goal, using whatever means came to hand, to maneuver Hooker out of the command. Three issues dominated Hooker’s relations with Washington in these critical mid-June days, and General Halleck left his mark on Fighting Joe in each of them.

  The first issue was manpower. Since April the Potomac army had been steadily losing men by the thousands due to expiration of the nine-month and two-year enlistments. During June, twenty-five more regiments were scheduled to be mustered out. By July 1, unless reinforced, the Army of the Potomac would be down to 89,200 men of all arms present for duty. If nothing was done about this, Hooker projected that in the campaign ahead he would be outnumbered—cavalryman Pleasonton estimated each of the three Confederate corps at 30,000, plus some 10,000 cavalry. There seem to have been no B.M.I. estimates of Confederate strength for this period, to act as a corrective for Pleasonton’s overcounting, but Hooker could hardly be blamed for expressing his frustration so long as Halleck refused to strengthen the Potomac army from any of the other commands. 38

  The second issue between general and general-in-chief was the question of unified command. At the first signs of a Confederate offensive, Hooker had spoken of “the necessity of having one commander for all of the troops whose operations can have an influence on those of Lee’s army.” Any march northward by the enemy was bound to affect General Heintzelman’s Department of Washington and General Schenck’s Middle Department (of which Milroy’s division was a part) in addition to the Army of the Potomac, and a unified command, even if only temporary, had the force of logic. “I trust that I may not be considered in the way to this arrangement,” said Hooker modestly, but by suggesting it he clearly expected it. (Ironically, when taking the army command in January, Hooker had applauded making the Washington command a separate department.) Halleck’s reply sidestepped around the issue without touching it. Department heads would be directed “to forward military information” to General Hooker, and any movement of their troops “you may suggest” would be ordered—“if deemed practical.” General Halleck very rarely deemed a Joe Hooker suggestion practical.39

  The third issue involved the exercise of command. “Your army is entirely free to operate as you desire against Lee’s army, so long as you keep his main army from Washington,” Halleck assured Hooker, but with each new report from the beleaguered Federal forces in the Shenandoah, Washington pressed Hooker to take immediate action. The president’s advice was general and strikingly put. “If the head of Lee’s army is at Martinsburg and the tail of it on the Plank road between Fredericksburg and C
hancellorsville,” he telegraphed Hooker on June 14, “the animal must be very slim somewhere. Could you not break him?” Halleck took that generality and made it into specifics. He urged that any Confederate raiding force be pursued, and he insisted that Hooker do something to save Harper’s Ferry from capture. In short order Harper’s Ferry became a bone of contention between the two men—and the issue Halleck was looking for to bring down Joe Hooker.

  General Hooker grew petulant. All his plans for meeting the enemy threat had been rejected, he told a colleague, and he could detect little evidence of support from any direction. Henceforth he would act only on direct orders from Washington, taking no responsibility for the consequences. Giving President Lincoln his view on how best to meet Lee’s threat, he added, “I do not know that my opinion as to the duty of this army in the case is wanted.” He began another dispatch with the disclaimer, “Please accept my suggestions in regard to what should be done in the spirit with which they were given.” Whether intended or not, Fighting Joe Hooker began to radiate an impression of indecisiveness. Gideon Welles, after a talk with the president one evening, entered in his diary, “I came away from the War Department painfully impressed. After recent events, Hooker cannot have the confidence which is essential to the success, and which is all-important to the commander in the field.”

  On the morning of June 16, while the Confederates were taking the salutes of the citizens of liberated Winchester, General Hooker unburdened himself. “You have long been aware, Mr. President,” he telegraphed, “that I have not enjoyed the confidence of the major-general commanding the army, and I can assure you so long as this continues we may look in vain for success, especially as future operations will require our relations to be more dependent upon each other than heretofore.“40