Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (3 page)

Lee had marched his three corps of thirty-seven brigades, with over 250 guns and miles of wagons, widely strung out, west of the mountains that ran from Virginia across Maryland into Pennsylvania. As cavalry chief, it was Stuart’s job to learn what the enemy was doing east of the obscuring mountains, and to prevent Federal troops from popping through any of the passes to surprise Lee. Stuart’s orders had been clear. Although some discretion had been allowed him, as was natural in operating with a trained and zealous cavalryman, there was nothing to explain Stuart’s disappearance, leaving Lee to grope blindfolded through a hostile country.

All other units were accounted for. Part of Ewell’s corps was at Carlisle, thirty-odd miles north, preparing to take Harrisburg. Jenkins’s cavalry, a group of raiders borrowed for the invasion, were already at the capital of Pennsylvania. Early’s division of Ewell’s corps, paralleling his line of march thirty miles to the east, were entering York. A. P. Hill’s corps, having passed through Chambersburg, were camped on the road to Cashtown, and Longstreet’s veteran corps were camped on the farms outside Chambersburg.

Lee could feel that all his lieutenants were accounted for—except the one from whom he most longed to hear. His own army was under his watchful eye, but only Stuart could tell him where the enemy was.

General Joseph Hooker, commanding the Union army that Lee had defeated at Chancellorsville two months earlier, was an aggressive leader not likely to sit idly in middle Virginia while Lee’s army moved North. In the soaring confidence that victory had given Lee’s subordinates, the younger officers regarded General Hooker very lightly, and some of them assumed that the Union Army of the Potomac had indeed remained inactive far behind them. With the sole responsibility of the invasion burdening him, the rapidly aging Lee could assume nothing. He did not know whether he was the hunter or the hunted.

2

The sound of axes in Chambersburg ceased, to be replaced by the thinner sounds of barrels rolling onto wagons. The commissary officers had got a poor yield from the cellars— chiefly molasses and whisky for their sick.

In his tent, Lee was asked by an aide if he would receive a Chambersburg lady who had come on an urgent mission about bread. She wanted to see the commanding general personally. Although Lee had been in command of the Army of Northern Virginia little more than a year, the one successful Confederate force had become known to the world as “Lee’s army.” Having grown up in Virginia’s patriarchal, aristocratic tradition, he understood the impulse of individuals who wanted to see only the chief, and his innate courtesy demanded that the lady be admitted to his tent, where she was seated on a campstool.

Mrs. Ellen McLellan had come because the prominent men of the town were in hiding, fearful that Lee’s soldiers might make reprisals in Pennsylvania for the desolation brought to Southern homes. She told the general simply that a number of families faced starvation because of the levying on provisions by his troops. The general appeared astounded that anyone could suffer in such a fertile countryside. She reminded him that the grain was some weeks from harvest and that General Ewell—the first of the Confederates to pass through—had done a thorough job in his polite requisitioning

Lee said: “We requisitioned to provide food for our troops, so that the men could be kept from coming into your houses themselves. God help you if I permitted them to enter your houses.” He did not add: “as your people entered ours,” but each knew what the general meant. Then he suggested that a miller come and tell his commissary officers the amount of flour required for the emergency, and he promised to have it provided.

Thanking him, Mrs. McLellan arose and then paused, studying, as she said, “the strength and sadness” in his face. Impulsively she asked for his autograph.

“Do you want the autograph of a Rebel?” he asked.

“General Lee,” she replied, “I am a true Union woman, and yet I ask for bread and your autograph.”

Murmuring that it might be dangerous for her to have his autograph, he wrote “R. E. Lee” on a scrap of paper and passed it to her. Then, mentioning the cruel thing that the war was, he said: “My only desire is that they will let me go home and eat my own bread in peace.”

Late in the Sunday afternoon all sounds ceased in Chambersburg. Long shadows fell across the diamond-shaped public square. Confederate sentries shifted restlessly at their posts, protecting the houses against soldiers who might slip the cordon and steal into town to forage on their own. On the farms outside the town, colored cooks began to prepare mess fires, grumbling at the forbearance of Lee in refusing to allow his soldiers to bring retaliation on the enemy for the ravages in the South. The Negroes had looked forward to a continual feast, but Lee’s published order had read: “It must be remembered that we make war only upon armed man, and we can not take vengeance for the wrongs our people have suffered without … offending against Him to whom vengeance belongeth… .”

At Lee’s camp, his personal servant prepared his skimpy supper—the cornbread flavored by the confiscated molasses—and served it with a certain flair on the pewter dishes from the camp chest. When supper was over, dusk was deepening. Officers began to visit back and forth. In some of the camps, bands began to play “Nellie Gray” and “Lorena” and “Home, Sweet Home.”

Perhaps the songs reminded the silently worrying Lee of Sweeney, the banjo-player who used to ride with Jeb Stuart, when Stuart’s golden voice would join with those of young Pelham and Lee’s own son Rooney and nephew Fitzhugh in singing “Kathleen Mavourneen.” Now young Pelham was dead; Lee’s son Rooney, wounded at Brandy Station just before they started north, had been left behind; and nephew Fitz and his brigade were off somewhere with the missing cavalry.

With the coming of night, the camp sounds faded. For a while candles stuck into bayonet loops flickered over scraps of paper as soldiers cramped all the words possible on the limited space in letters home. In A. P. Hill’s corps a newly promoted division commander, twenty-nine-year-old Dorsey Pender, was writing his wife in North Carolina. A reflective and religious man, Pender wrote: “I am tired of invasion, for although they have made us suffer all that people can suffer, I cannot get my resentment to that point to make me indifferent to what goes on here.”

Then the candles began to be snuffed out, and lanterns went out in the tents. In the commanding general’s tent the lantern burned on. Uneasy, Lee could not go to bed in this alien land.

His apprehension over Stuart’s absence had not yet been generally perceived. In one of the tents in his headquarters group, Walter Taylor, his good-looking young assistant adjutant general, was writing: “With God’s help, we expect to take a step or two toward an honorable peace.”

At ten o’clock that night a worn and dirty civilian appeared out of the shadows and approached the Confederate camp. Challenged by a sentry, the bearded man said wearily that he brought an important message for General Longstreet, commander of Lee’s First Corps. The sentry summoned the provost marshal, who immediately arrested the stranger. Under the man’s urgent protestations, the provost sent an orderly to the tent of Colonel Moxley Sorrel, Longstreet’s chief of staff, who was already asleep. Rousing himself, Sorrel recalled a civilian scout named Harrison whom Long-street had sent out from middle Virginia just as the invasion was starting, and he left his tent to interview the civilian.

The travel-stained man was of middle height, muscular and well-formed except for a stoop in his shoulders, and beneath the signs of hard wear his clothing indicated an unpretentious respectability. His beard and hair were brown, and his hazel eyes belonged to a man of action. He had come, Harrison told Sorrel in his tired voice, all the way from Frederick, Maryland, more than fifty miles distant beyond the mountains. He had hurried because the Union army, rapidly following Lee from Virginia, was at Frederick and headed for the mountain passes.

Not waiting to hear more, Sorrel hurried the man to Longstreet’s tent. At once Longstreet decided that the news should go directly to the commanding general. Curiously, he sent the information to Lee’s headquarters by an aide, Major Fairfax.

Lee, fully dressed, answered the tap on his tent pole, and Fairfax blurted out the spy’s information.

Lee listened skeptically. “I have no confidence in any scout,” he said.

Yet, troubled, the general asked Fairfax what he thought of this Harrison. The major did not presume to offer an opinion, and Lee dismissed him.

Lee brooded over the irregular report. In his anxiety about the lack of information through regular channels, he decided to question Harrison personally. Twenty-five-year-old Colonel Sorrel escorted the weary spy into Lee’s tent. Harrison, originally recommended to Longstreet by War Secretary Seddon, told his story again.

With the gold provided him by Longstreet, Harrison said, he had frequented the Washington saloons, striking up casual intimacies with Union officers, from whom he had learned that Hooker’s army had crossed the Potomac. Although most spies were suspect because the gold of both sides looked the same to them, this doughty Harrison proved that his loyalty had been bought at least for the duration of the current campaign. From Washington he had walked the roads at night in order to mingle by day with the Union troops converging on Frederick. It was in Frederick that he, a supposed innocent, had quite casually learned that Lee’s army was at Chambersburg. That part of his story had to be accurate.

On his way to Chambersburg, Harrison added, he had learned that two Union corps were close to the mountains. Then, as an afterthought, Harrison mentioned that General Meade had replaced Hooker in command of the Union army.

This was more ominous news to Lee than the proximity of the enemy. Lee never minded pugnacious blusterers such as Hooker. They could be counted on to defeat themselves. But General George Gordon Meade, an old friend from the regular army and husband of a girl with Virginia connections, was of a different breed.

“General Meade will make no blunder in my front,” Lee said and prophetically added: “and if I make one he will make haste to take advantage of it.”

To Harrison and Sorrel the middle-aged gentleman showed only his usual composure, though he had questioned and listened with the most concentrated attention. Convinced that Harrison was telling the truth, Lee did not reveal even this conviction. However, as soon as Colonel Sorrel had left with the spy of good faith, the general summoned his staff officers.

His scattered northward movement into the fertile Cumberland Valley was placed in jeopardy by the movement of the Union army toward the other side of those mountains which, as they protected him, also concealed the enemy. The separated corps of the army must contract. In the baffling absence of Stuart’s cavalry, the infantry must cross the mountains and discover the intention of “those people,” as Lee invariably referred to the Federals.

Couriers were dispatched northward to Ewell at Carlisle, instructing him to abandon his attack on Harrisburg and return southward. The same orders went to Early’s division at York. Riders started south to bring up two cavalry brigades that had been left to guard the mountain passes in Virginia. Others went west to summon the semi-independent command of Imboden’s raiders, who had been pillaging farms while supposedly guarding the left flank a day’s march away. As no order could be sent to Stuart because his whereabouts were unknown, the last order went to the newly formed corps of A. P. Hill. General Hill, in the absence of cavalry, would move east of the mountains on a reconnaissance in force. The next morning Hill was to start eastward through a sinuous mountain pass that opened on the other side at Cash-town, and, eight miles farther on, at Gettysburg.

Having done all he could to meet the emergency, Lee went to bed late. He had confided to no one any sense of apprehension.But from its inception the invasion had been a desperategamble, undertaken half reluctantly, and the portents had been unfavorable from the first.

The Opening Phase