Gettysburg Page 5
In the first weeks of the war, two Northern states, New York and Maine, had signed up volunteer regiments for two years of service rather than the three-year standard in other states. Spring 1863 saw these two-year men—thirty-one regiments of New Yorkers and two regiments from Maine—scheduled for mustering out. At the same time, 16,700 short-termers—nine-months’ men from Pennsylvania and New Jersey, enlisted for service during the Peninsula-Second Manassas crisis times in August and September of 1862—were also preparing to start for home. “The dull monotony of camp life,” Corporal James Latta entered in his diary on May 24, was enlivened by “the occasional distant shouts of troops whose terms of enlistment has expired and may be heard day after day.” According to General Sedgwick, every day, day after day, a thousand men were leaving the army.17
In mid-May, as Hooker and the president discussed the pros and cons of renewing the offensive on the Rappahannock, Hooker observed that his former numerical superiority over the enemy was shrinking alarmingly. “My marching force of infantry is cut down to about 80,000…,” he explained on May 13. This reflected both the casualties of Chancellorsville and the tidal wave of departing men whose time was up, and the downward spiral of the numbers was not finished. No fewer than twenty-five regiments were due to be mustered out during June. Even an immediate advance would still leave troops of dubious motivation in the ranks. As General Sedgwick had observed of the same situation before Chancellorsville, “No troops with but a few days to leave are going to risk much in a fight.” Unless it was reinforced, the Army of the Potomac, on July 1, would have nearly 48,000 fewer men than it had had on May 1.
Artist Edwin Forbes sketched a trainload of mustered-out Yankee soldiers heading for home on May 20, 1863. (Library of Congress)
These departures produced serious gaps in the army’s organization. In the First Division of the First Corps, for example, an entire brigade, five regiments of nine-months’ men, was slated for mustering out, and a second brigade in the division would lose three of its four regiments. The Second Corps saw nine regiments depart, resulting in the loss of a brigade and a general pruning. The Third Corps was reduced from three divisions to two as a result of its Chancellorsville losses and losing men whose time was up. Meade’s Fifth Corps was hardest hit, losing thirteen regiments of short-termers and two-year men. Meade had to break up one of his divisions as a result, losing its commander, Andrew A. Humphreys, to another corps. “I am very sorry to lose Humphreys,” Meade told his wife. “He is a most valuable officer, besides being an associate of the most agreeable character.“18
Hooker requested reinforcements to make good at least some of these losses, but that only produced a steady diet of haggling with General Halleck. Of cordial cooperation between general-in-chief and general commanding there was none. The enmity between the two men dated back to their days in the old army in California, and when he assumed command of the Army of the Potomac in January, Hooker had made but a single stipulation—that he not have to deal with Halleck, but only with the president. He told Lincoln that neither he nor his army “expected justice” at Halleck’s hands. This awkward arrangement had worked well enough, so far as Hooker was concerned, while he was reforming and reinvigorating the Potomac army and planning his Chancellorsville campaign. Now, however, stigmatized by defeat and with few allies, Joe Hooker had lost that upper hand.
General-in-Chief Henry W. Halleck schemed to displace Hooker as head of the Army of the Potomac. (National Archives)
Henry Halleck was a master of bureaucratic subterfuge and circuitous paper-shuffling, talents he displayed when asked by Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton what replacements the Department of Washington might furnish to the depleted Army of the Potomac. After numerous paragraphs of hedging and cautionary foreboding, Halleck’s answer was … not a man could be spared. There was, to be sure, a “movable force” of 8,600 men attached to the Washington garrison, but in the general-in-chief’s opinion, no matter which direction General Hooker might move (or, indeed, which direction General Lee might move), this force must stay where it was. After all, should it go on active service, “we should then have no movable force to throw upon any point which should be seriously threatened.” In due course, there would be reinforcements for the Army of the Potomac, but not all in time to be put to use, and none in time for Hooker’s benefit. In the meanwhile, General Halleck quietly laid his snares for an unwary Fighting Joe. 19
ONE OF THE MAJOR reforms of the Hooker regime had been the consolidation of the cavalry into a single corps. This belatedly matched the way the Confederates operated their cavalry, but more important, it gave the Yankee horse soldiers for the first time a unified strategic and tactical command. In the organization of the army’s artillery, however, Hooker had gone in exactly the opposite direction. Brigadier General Henry J. Hunt, the Potomac army’s outspoken, highly skilled chief of artillery, had argued for grouping batteries into brigades under centralized control for better flexibility on the battlefield. On the eve of the Chancellorsville campaign Hooker elected to decentralize instead. He reduced Hunt to a mere artillery adviser and scattered tactical control of the batteries among the army’s twenty infantry-division commanders.
The system proved disastrous on the Chancellorsville battlefield. Time and again the Federal artillery, superior in numbers and materiel, found itself outclassed by the better-organized Rebel gunners. In the midst of the fighting Colonel Charles Wainwright, chief of artillery for the First Corps, complained to Hooker that the artillery was being managed as “badly as it well can. Batteries are being ordered in every direction, blocking up the roads; and no one seems to know where to go.“20
Within a week of the battle, while not acknowledging his mistake, Hooker quietly initiated a sweeping reform of the artillery. He called on Hunt for a new organizational scheme. Special Orders No. 128, dated May 12, removed the batteries from the divisions, regrouped them, and attached them to the army corps. The seven infantry corps would now each have one brigade of artillery. The Sixth Corps’ artillery brigade contained eight batteries, the Twelfth Corps’ brigade, four; the other five corps’ brigades had five batteries each. The cavalry corps had two artillery brigades. The artillery reserve’s five brigades contained a total of twenty-one batteries. Hunt put his best veteran artillerymen in charge of these brigades, and their deployment was in the hands of Hunt and the corps commanders. Looking back on this long-overdue reform, a Federal artillerist remarked, “If what was thus done as a restorative had previously been done as a preventative, the probabilities are that Chancellorsville would have had another and a very different ending.” Now that Henry Hunt again had something to say about it, the next campaign ought to see the Yankee artillery used to its full potential. 21
The artillery might finally be in good hands, but the state of health of the cavalry was diminished and its leadership uncertain. Hooker was unrelenting in his anger at cavalry commander George Stoneman for his dismal performance at Chancellorsville, and he granted Stoneman’s request for medical leave with unseemly haste. The general commanding let it be known, in appointing Alfred Pleasonton to temporary command of the cavalry corps, that he intended the change to be permanent. And so it was. Stoneman was shuffled off to a desk job in Washington, and Pleasonton became the Army of the Potomac’s new cavalry chief.
General Pleasonton was something of a dandy, with waxed mustaches and a rakish straw hat and a sly look. Originally a protégé of General McClellan’s, he had a gift for shameless self-promotion. As one of his colonels observed, “it is the universal opinion that Pleasonton’s own reputation and Pleasonton’s late promotions are bolstered up by systematic lying.” Pleasonton appeared willing enough to engage the enemy, but he had never revealed the slightest talent for intelligence-gathering, one of the major functions of the cavalry arm. Indeed, when it came to hearing of enemy forces, Alfred Pleasonton had a tin ear. Hooker promoted him on the basis of seniority and, in hindsight, regretted it.
The soldier H
ooker later said he wished he had made head of the cavalry was John Buford, whose commission postdated Pleasonton’s by eleven days. Buford advanced to Pleasonton’s old place as head of the cavalry’s First Division. He was unassuming and entirely competent, experienced as leader of the brigade of regulars and skilled at intelligence-gathering. The Second Division was under David McMurtrie Gregg, a trooper seemingly cut from the same bolt as Buford—able, reliable, imperturbable, in battle conspicuously taking the time to light up his meerschaum to calm his men. In due course a reinforcing Third Division would go to Judson Kilpatrick, who was not in the least like Buford or Gregg. Kilpatrick was all flamboyance and burning ambition. He was mindlessly reckless with the lives of his men, and their nickname for him—“Kill-Cavalry”—was not intended as a compliment.
By the time May turned to June, the cavalry corps had been recruited to some 10,200 men. Continuing his reorganization on the march, Pleasonton would advance youthful new faces—Elon Farnsworth, Wesley Merritt, George Armstrong Custer—to the command of brigades. The cavalry leadership was now apparently willing to take to heart Hooker’s earlier challenge to Stoneman: “Let your watchword be fight, and let all your orders be fight, fight, fight!” 22
The commanders of the Army of the Potomac’s infantry were likewise a mixture of the good and the indifferent, with at the moment the upper echelons of command generally united in their mistrust of Joe Hooker. At Chancellorsville, on the whole, the army’s foot soldiers had not gotten the leadership they deserved, and General Hooker had good reason to view certain of his lieutenants with a mistrust of his own.
The First Corps’ John F. Reynolds was an exception. Reynolds had not seen a great deal of battle-leading—he missed most of the Seven Days’ fighting as a prisoner in Richmond, for example, and during the Antietam campaign he was seized upon by Governor Curtin to drill the Pennsylvania militia. But Reynolds was universally respected for his high character and sterling generalship, and in the coming campaign Hooker would lean heavily on his command skills.
Reynolds’s three division commanders were not, on the record, regarded as overly distinguished. James’S. Wadsworth was a political general of the Republican stripe, earnest in his patriotism but lacking a background of military skills. John C. Robinson, an old regular whose flowing beard lent him the look of a biblical prophet, had seen considerable fighting but was yet to be tested as a division commander. The Third Division was led by Abner Doubleday, another old regular. Doubleday’s wartime career had been marked at every turn by abundant caution. Probably of most concern to Reynolds was the inexperience and lack of command continuity among his brigade commanders. The First Corps contained some first-rate troops—among them the celebrated Iron Brigade of westerners and the equally celebrated Bucktails of Pennsylvania—but the test would be in directing them. In due course the corps would gain the services of a rookie brigade of nine-month Vermonters, plucked out of the Washington defenses to fill the gap left by the earlier departure of nine-month and two-year men.
The gallant old Second Corps was awarded a new commander in the aftermath of Chancellorsville. When colorless, cautious Darius Couch refused any longer to serve under Joe Hooker, Winfield Scott Hancock, anything but colorless and cautious, was advanced from division to corps command. “Hancock the Superb”—the encomium had been applied by General McClellan during the Peninsula campaign—gave every evidence of being born to high command. As Lieutenant Frank Haskell, a Second Corps staff man, observed of him, “I think if he were in citizens clothes, and should give commands in the army to those who did not know him, he would be likely to be obeyed at once, and without any question as to his right to command.”
The Second Corps divisions were led by generals with ratings of good to excellent. Taking Hancock’s place at the head of the First Division was John C. Caldwell, not a professional soldier but well enough self-taught that Hancock advanced him without hesitation. John Gibbon led the Second Division, and he was as good as any in the Potomac army. “A tower of strength he is,” an admirer would say of Gibbon, “cool as a steel knife, always….” The Third Division had been commanded at Chancellorsville by William H. French, but at the end of June French would be put on special assignment. His replacement was Alexander Hays, fierce and combative and usually found leading from the firing line.
The high rating for divisional commanders extended well into the ranks of the Second Corps’ chiefs of brigade. Such brigade commanders as Edward Cross, Patrick Kelly (of the famous Irish Brigade), John Brooke, Samuel Zook, Norman Hall, Alexander Webb, and Samuel Carroll would make the Second Corps in this campaign the best led in the army. During the campaign the Second would be reinforced by a green brigade from the Washington garrison to partially make up for its nine mustered-out regiments.23
General Hooker’s sole loyalist, Dan Sickles, commanded the Third Corps, marking him as the highest-placed political general in the Army of the Potomac. Sickles was all noise and notoriety. In 1859, as a Tammany Hall congressman from New York, he had murdered his wife’s lover and then won acquittal in a lurid trial. With the coming of war, employing far more politicking than generalship, Sickles rose rapidly from recruiting a regiment to commanding a corps. As head of the Third Corps at Chancellorsville he blundered pugnaciously about the battlefield. “A ‘Sickles’ would beat Napoleon in winning glory not earned,” growled fellow general Alpheus Williams. “He is a hero without an heroic deed! Literally made by scribblers.” As a corps commander Dan Sickles was operating at a level far beyond his talents, and most everyone recognized it but Dan Sickles.
The Third Corps had been severely battered at Chancellorsville, with two of its three divisional commanders losing their lives there. A major reorganization was required. The Third Division was folded into the other two, and Andrew A. Humphreys brought over from the Fifth Corps to fill the vacant divisional post. The Fifth Corps’ loss was the Third’s gain. General Humphreys was a thoroughly professional officer who got things done, when necessary by means of a spectacular command of profanity. He was an advocate of leadership by example. At Fredericksburg, ordered to conduct an attack, he turned to his staff and, in his blandest manner, remarked, “Gentlemen, I shall lead this charge. I presume, of course, you will wish to ride with me.”
The First Division provided the corps with a touch of continuity. David Bell Birney had led a brigade there since the early days of the Peninsula fighting, and succeeded to the divisional command after the fabled Phil Kearny was killed at Chantilly, during the Second Manassas campaign. A prominent lawyer in Philadelphia before the war, Birney brought intense study and close observation to the art of command. He also had an affinity for intrigue, and was among the leaders of the army’s anti-Hooker cabal. Birney’s three brigade commanders, Charles Graham, Hobart Ward, and Régis de Trobriand, promised sound leadership. However, Andrew Humphreys, new to his division, would be leading two (of three) officers entirely new to their brigades.24
General Meade’s Fifth Corps, too, required a thorough reorganization as a consequence of the loss of two-year and short-term men. one-third of the regiments in the First Division and three-quarters of those in the Third Division had to be mustered out; the latter division was broken up and its General Humphreys shifted to Sickles’s corps. When the First Division’s Charles Griffin went on sick leave after Chancellorsville his place was taken by James Barnes, the senior brigadier. Barnes was sixty-one and lacking in both combat and command experience, and it was hoped that the veteran Griffin would return before Barnes was tested in battle. of the division’s three brigade commanders, all new, Colonel Strong Vincent was considered the most promising. The Second Division was George Sykes’s, and included the brigade of regulars that Sykes had long commanded. Sykes was a slight, methodical, unimposing career army man whose nickname, “Tardy George,” dated back to his West Point days. He might not inspire, but once on the battlefield he was known to be reliable. Sykes’s regulars were led by colonels of limited combat experience
; his single brigade of volunteers was headed by former artillerist Stephen Weed, a highly regarded protégé of Henry Hunt’s.25
In February 1863 the division of Pennsylvania Reserves, which had fought in the Fifth Corps on the Peninsula and then in the First Corps during later campaigns, was posted to Washington for rest and recuperation. On June 25, with a new campaign heating up, the Reserves were finally dispatched to reinforce the thinly manned Fifth Corps. Even then, however, General-in-Chief Halleck held back from General Hooker one of the division’s three brigades.
The Sixth Corps was the largest in the Army of the Potomac, and “Uncle John” Sedgwick was beloved as no other general. “From the commander to the lowest private he had no enemy in this army,” a staff officer wrote. Sedgwick always took good care of his men, and on a battlefield he was a stalwart figure, leading by example. Yet the finer arts of command escaped him. A simple direct order satisfied John Sedgwick; a discretionary order perplexed him. Leading his First Division was Horatio G. Wright, an engineering officer newly appointed to both the corps and the Potomac army and therefore an unknown quantity. The other two divisions were led by Albion P. Howe and John Newton, as careful and conservative as Uncle John himself. Most of the heads of brigade were as safely competent as their superiors. The Sixth Corps’ high command was not the place for carrying out daring battlefield designs.
Before Chancellorsville a newly formed Light Division, five regiments and a battery, had been attached to the Sixth Corps. Designed to travel light and move fast, it was meant to be a sort of fire brigade for battlefield emergencies. As employed at Chancellorsville, however, the Light Division was made the spearhead of a frontal assault and badly mauled. In the subsequent restructuring triggered by the expiration of enlistments, the Light Division was disbanded and its regiments distributed to fill gaps in the corps. Between casualties and the mustering out, the Sixth Corps would go on campaign in June with almost 8,000 fewer men than it had in April.26