America Aflame (48 page)

On June 16, the Army of Northern Virginia began to cross the Potomac, hoping to reach the Pennsylvania state capital in Harrisburg. A journalist in that city reported a “perfect panic” with citizens fleeing northward on packed trains. The state legislature boxed up everything they could and closed shop. The eroding confidence in the Union cause was apparent, as relatively few Pennsylvanians answered the call to enlist and fight the invading army. They demonstrated much more alacrity in running off their livestock out of Confederate reach.

Lincoln replaced Hooker with Major General George G. Meade. Meade, a tall, scholarly, bespectacled man who looked like “a good sort of a family doctor,” was a classmate of Lee's at West Point and had fought alongside Lee during the Mexican War. Lee had counted on Hooker as his opponent. Meade, he noted to an aide, “will commit no blunder in my front.” He then added, “And if I make one he will make haste to take advantage of it.”
41

The Confederates marched through Pennsylvania “requisitioning” food, clothing, and precious shoes, as well as greenbacks from local residents. Lee had issued an order forbidding plundering and attacks on civilians, but Confederates issued receipts for the requisitioned items in a currency that was worthless in the North. The Confederate bounty was substantial and included twenty-six thousand cattle and twenty thousand sheep promptly driven into Virginia. A Virginian wrote that he was capturing “horses and cattle by the hundreds” and plucking “anything we wanted in the eating line” from the farms along the way. Confederates also scoured the countryside for blacks, capturing those they found, with no distinction as to whether they were free or runaway slaves. One observer recalled a wagon full of captured blacks, mostly women and children, being driven to Virginia.
42

In some towns, women jeered at the passing soldiers, held their noses to signify their stench, sang Union songs, waved Old Glory, and remarked how the Confederates resembled Pharaoh's army marching to the Red Sea. The women's conduct shocked officers. “They were not ladies in the Southern acceptation of the word,” noted one officer. “They are a very different race from the Southerner.”
43

Meade and the Army of the Potomac moved swiftly through Maryland into Pennsylvania pursuing Lee's scattered forces. When Lee learned of Meade's movements, he ordered three corps to depart for Cashtown on June 29. That the greatest battle of the war would occur at nearby Gettysburg was an accident. The footsore Confederates needed shoes, and a Rebel infantry brigade marched to Gettysburg for that purpose. On July 1, they ran into Union cavalry, who engaged the Confederates while each side sent out couriers for reinforcements. The Rebels pushed the Union troops back through the town. The Federals took positions outside the town on the high ground of Cemetery Hill, the most prominent feature of the area.

On the morning of July 2, both sides had drawn their battle lines: the Federals' line, in the shape of a fishhook running north to south, extended from Culp's Hill to Cemetery Hill along Cemetery Ridge, which sloped downward and then rose to Little Round Top and Big Round Top. These positions afforded Union officers a panoramic view over the surrounding fields. The Confederates massed about a mile away on a lower promontory, Seminary Ridge, directly across from the Federals, and through the town, a line about four miles in length, compared to the three-mile long Union line, an advantage for the Federals, who could communicate and move troops more quickly over a shorter distance. Lee ordered Longstreet to attack the federal left, the Round Tops, a plan Longstreet opposed. He would rather have gone around the Union left and cut Meade's communications with Washington. Lee remained steadfast in his belief that he must stand and fight at Gettysburg.

Generations of historians have debated whether Longstreet's opposition to the order led him to delay his attack and thus thwart the plan. Delays were common in most major Civil War battles, resulting from poor communication among officers or the difficulty of organizing and massing large numbers of troops on uneven terrain. There is no evidence that Longstreet deliberately dallied, and, in fact, he nearly pulled off a stunning victory. Longstreet's Republican politics after the war, and the desire to deflect criticism from Lee, account for some of the criticism.
44

The Rebels might have taken Little Round Top were it not for the heroism of the 20th Maine commanded by Joshua L. Chamberlain. Running low on ammunition, the Union soldiers charged down the hill at their startled opponents, who retreated and left the key landmark in federal hands. Two hours later, General Richard S. Ewell attacked the Union right and nearly seized Cemetery Hill before Union troops repulsed the assault. The second day of battle closed with both armies essentially back where they began. Better coordination between Longstreet and Ewell might have resulted in a different outcome. Also, Lee's orders left considerable discretion to his corps commanders, a practice that had worked well with Stonewall Jackson, but less so with Longstreet and Ewell. The absence of J. E. B. Stuart and his cavalry, “the eyes of the army,” limited Lee's intelligence on federal troop strength and movement. Stuart had taken off to ride around the Army of the Potomac, as he had the previous year. While he frightened a few Federals and destroyed some supplies, he did not appear at Gettysburg until July 2, almost too late to assist the Confederate cause.

Lee had failed to budge the Union left and right flanks. Believing that the concentration of Union troops on their flanks had weakened the center, he decided to attack there. Lee proposed to throw fifteen thousand Rebels, commanded by Major General George E. Pickett of Longstreet's corps, against the Union center on Cemetery Ridge. Stuart's cavalry would attack the center from the rear. At a midnight meeting with his generals, Meade predicted, “[Lee] has made attacks on both our flanks and failed and if he concludes to try it again, it will be on our center.”
45

At 1:00 P.M., July 3, another hot, cloudless day, Confederate artillery opened up on Union positions. Federal batteries responded in kind. The duel lasted nearly two hours until the federal guns suddenly fell silent. Thinking their artillery had weakened the Union line, the Rebels prepared their assault. Longstreet gave the order at 3:00 P.M., and Pickett and his men marched out of the woods in a line extending a mile and a half. For a moment the Union infantry, now flat on their stomachs, watched in awe as Pickett's men moved forward in perfect formation, their bright red battle flags waving gently in the summer breeze, while the faint strains of “Dixie” wafted down from Seminary Ridge. Two hundred pieces of Union artillery boomed out, cutting huge holes in the Rebel lines, yet still Pickett's men advanced, filling in the gaps and holding their line. Union infantry, protected by a stone wall, one portion of which jutted out at an angle (henceforth known as the Bloody Angle), opened fire. Pickett's men continued forward, now on double-quick through the hail of bullets, balls, and shells, returning the fire.
46

Union soldiers, watching the destruction before them, cheered wildly and shouted, “Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!” Some of Pickett's men got close enough to see the sooty faces of the federal infantrymen, and a few breached the wall to engage the enemy in desperate hand-to-hand combat. Federal reserves, however, closed in on the insurgents and pushed them back into full retreat while Union artillery and infantry fire continued to pound the Confederates. In the rear, Stuart never got close to his target. Union cavalry led by twenty-three-year-old General George Armstrong Custer repulsed his attack. The charge cost Pickett two thirds of his army, including every senior officer. Looking across the field of dead Confederate soldiers, Lee muttered, “All this has been my fault.” The Battle of Gettysburg was over. Major Henry Abbott of the 20th Massachusetts summarized the feelings of his comrades: “By jove, it was worth all our defeats.” On July 4, the remainder of the Army of Northern Virginia filed down from Seminary Ridge and headed for the Potomac, unmolested by Meade's drained troops.
47

The casualty figures were astonishing, even after Antietam and Chancellorsville. Of the eighty-five thousand federal troops in the battle, there were twenty-three thousand casualties. The Confederacy put sixty-five thousand men onto the field and suffered twenty-eight thousand casualties. The meadow below Cemetery Hill was so strewn with Confederate dead that, as a Union soldier noted, you “could have walked across it without putting foot upon the ground.” One soldier tried after an all-night rain. “I was going so fast that when I fell on my face I slid the whole length of this dead body, and a sort of slimy matter peeled off and stuck to my face.” Arms, legs, and body parts were scattered across the landscape, with entrails, flesh, brains, and hair sticking to rocks and tree trunks. It took four to five days after the battle to bury the dead. Summer heat bloated bodies and turned them black, emitting a stench that wafted over Gettysburg for days. There was no time for proper interments. Burial parties dug trenches and placed bodies one on top of another. The corpses sometimes ruptured during these maneuvers, worsening the stench. Or they just disintegrated when crews moved them. Identification was often impossible, which is why American soldiers began wearing dog tags in World War I.
48

Gettysburg, a town of twenty-four hundred residents, now dealt with twenty-two thousand wounded soldiers. A Union nurse described the streets of the town in the days after the battle. “It seemed impossible to tread the streets without walking over maimed men.… They lay on the bloody ground, sick with the poisons of wounds, grim with the dust of long marches and the smoke and powder of battle, looking up with wild haggard faces imploringly for succor.” Flies, smells, and polluted wells plagued Gettysburg residents until the first frost in October. An estimated six million pounds of human and animal carcasses baked in the summer sun. Relatives of dead soldiers descended on the battlefield in the weeks following the conflict, digging up graves to find their loved ones. Their actions, though understandable, added to the foul conditions in the area. Death also touched the civilian population. Twenty-year-old Jennie Wade was kneading dough to make bread for wounded soldiers when a bullet tore through her front door, and then through her head.
49

Gettysburg residents attempted to make sense of the carnage through their faith. A Presbyterian minister sermonized that the “bloodstained fields” would inspire everyone to “have their patriotism and gratitude to God kindled anew.” For many northerners, the hand of God in the battle was obvious. “Who shall ever stand on these heights which marked the highest tide of the invasion,” the
Cincinnati Gazette
wrote of Pickett's failed charge, “without hearing the voice of the Lord, sounding above the din of the well remembered battle, saying: ‘Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.'”
50

In hindsight, always a better vantage point, Lee had few options at Gettysburg. His army was living off the countryside. Either he had to engage in battle quickly or withdraw. Union forces had superior defensive positions, and frontal assaults against rifled muskets reduced the chances of an attacking army. Even had the Confederates taken Little Round Top or Cemetery Hill, the fighting so decimated their ranks and reserves were so distant that fresh Union troops would have likely overwhelmed the Rebels in a counterattack. Meade, unlike Hooker, gave Lee no opportunity for a flanking maneuver. While Lee regretted the losses, he did not regret the strategy. He wrote to Jefferson Davis at the end of July, “I still think if all things could have worked together it [Pickett's assault] would have been accomplished.”
51

Some officers noted later that Lee looked fatigued at Gettysburg. He confided to Jefferson Davis after the battle, “I sensibly feel the growing failure of my bodily strength. I am becoming more and more incapable of exertion, and am thus prevented from making the personal examinations and giving the personal supervision to the operation in the field which I feel to be necessary.” The cocky optimism that followed Chancellorsville had fled. “I believed my men were invincible,” he said of his decision to attack Meade's center.
52

On August 21, the day Jefferson Davis had set aside as a national day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer, Lee issued a proclamation to his troops. He placed the defeat in a theological context as both an explanation and an inspiration to continue the fight: “Soldiers! We have sinned against Almighty God.… We have not remembered that the defenders of a just cause should be pure in His eyes, that ‘our times are in his hands,' and we have relied too much on our own arms for the achievement of our independence. God is our only refuge and our strength. Let us humble ourselves before him.”
53

For many northerners, the end of the rebellion seemed more imminent now than at any time since the first few months of the war when a false euphoria gripped the North. A new nation would emerge from the conflict, ordained by God. A Baptist minister, preaching in Philadelphia after Gettysburg, connected Revelation to a reborn America. He saw the time coming that the Founding Fathers “pictured and dreamed about, and prayed for. It will come with blessing, and be greeted with Hallelujahs, it will be the Millennium of political glory, the Sabbath of Liberty, the Jubilee of humanity.” God and nation were one.
54

Despite the Union victory at Gettysburg, Lincoln was furious with Meade, who, like McClellan before him, had allowed Lee to escape across the Potomac. “If I had gone up there, I could have whipped them myself,” the frustrated president howled. “Our army held the war in the hollow of their hand and they could not close it.” Robert Lincoln, home from Harvard, stopped by his father's office and found him “leaning upon the desk in front of him, and when he raised his head there were evidences of tears upon his face.” Lincoln dashed off a pointed letter to Meade. Though congratulating him on his “magnificent success,” he scolded, “My dear general, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee's escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely.… Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.” Lincoln placed the letter in his desk drawer. He never sent it.
55