Never Call Retreat (28 page)

Conservative men believed it because they had to, for their own peace of mind. The war had changed immeasurably in two years, it had finally become what Mr. Lincoln long ago had hoped it would not become-—a remorseless revolutionary struggle—and at its revolutionary heart lay precisely this decision to free the slave and so to create a new sort of America. To believe that this decision was all that stood between the old republic and a lasting peace was to do no more than make a profession of faith: the orthodox American faith, sorely beset now by diverse heresies. These conservatives were not in any real sense a peace party. They were simply a party of moderates in a revolutionary situation, faring about as moderates always fare in revolutions, ground pitilessly between two extremes. One extreme, of course, was the Lincoln administration, in the White House and in the Capitol. The other, unmistakably, was the Army of Northern Virginia, which was about to go into battle on the rolling hills surrounding the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

6. Encounter at Gettysburg

THE COMMANDING GENERALS never meant to fight at Gettysburg. The armies met there by accident, led together by the turns of the roads they followed. When they touched they began to fight, because the tension was so high that the first contact snapped it, and once begun the fight was uncontrollable. What the generals intended ceased to matter; each man had to cope with what he got, which was the most momentous battle of the war.

On June 28 Lee's army was loosely arrayed in a forty-five-mile crescent. Longstreet's corps was at Chambersburg, Hill's was eight miles to the east, and Ewell’s was far in front at York and Carlisle. The army was much too dispersed to fight, but as long as Meade's army remained south of the Potomac—it must be there, because vigilant Stuart had sent no warning of any move—this dispersion could do no harm. Until the Yankees came north, Lee's army could roam across southeastern Pennsylvania at will, alarming the government at Washington and collecting the supplies whose abundance had been one of the prime reasons for invasion.

But on the night of June 28 Lee learned that things had gone terribly wrong. Somewhere, somehow, Stuart had been blocked out of the play, and the Yankees had stolen a long march; their army now was at Frederick, Maryland, nearer to the scattered pieces of Lee's army than those pieces were to each other, arid for its life's sake the Army of Northern Virginia must concentrate. Lee sent off galloping couriers with orders: Ewell was to retreat, Longstreet was to advance, and the army would reunite at or near Gettysburg, which was a convenient road center. Lee was worried, but as always he seemed calm, and he remarked lightly that it was time for him to go to Gettysburg and see what Meade was up to. (The same scout who told him that the Federals were in Maryland had also brought news of the change in command.)
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Meade's plans as June came to an end were somewhat like Lee's: sketchy, subject to instant change, tinged strongly by wait-and-see. He had been shifting to the east, to keep Lee from crossing the Susquehanna and striking down toward Philadelphia, and when he learned about Ewell's retreat Meade felt that this part of his job had been done. Now he had to bring Lee to battle and defeat him, and it seemed that the best way to do this was to get between Lee's army and Washington and await Lee's attack. He probably would not have to wait long, because Lee was deep in hostile territory, had no real supply line, and could not remain inactive. With Meade's army in his immediate front, Lee must either fight or go back to Virginia, and the chance that he would go back without first fighting a battle was too small to think about twice.

So while Lee was concentrating Meade chose what looked like a strong defensive position behind a stream called Pipe Creek, in northern Maryland some fifteen miles south and a little east of Gettysburg, and notified his corps commanders to prepare to go there. To mask this movement, he ordered John F. Reynolds to take his I Corps up to Gettysburg, which was lightly held by John Buford and three brigades of Federal cavalry. Behind this screen the rest of the army would have time to assemble at Pipe Creek, and if at Gettysburg Reynolds saw something that would make a different course advisable he could notify Meade without delay.

Trusting Reynolds implicitly, Meade gave him a free hand. He also gave him command of the left wing of the army, the three corps nearest Gettysburg—Reynolds' own I Corps, which was just south of the town, Howard's XI Corps a few miles to the rear, and Sickles' III Corps, east of nearby Emmitsburg. Reynolds would be strong enough to stay on the scene until he saw what the Confederates proposed to do. If attacked, he could retire slowly. Meanwhile, Meade would not definitely commit himself to the Pipe Creek plan until he heard from Reynolds in detail.
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Reynolds led his army corps into Gettysburg on the morning of July 1 and found that the shooting had already started. A Confederate battle line was coming in astride the Chambersburg Pike, west of town: Henry Heth's division of A. P. Hill's corps, with other troops on the road behind it. Buford had several regiments of dismounted cavalry and a few fieldpieces drawn up on a low ridge to contest this advance. There was a good deal of noise, and there was a rising cloud of smoke, but the fighting was not especially serious. Infantry could always push dismounted cavalry out of the way and everybody knew it, and Heth's men were performing a routine task in a routine way.

There was no very good reason why these Confederates had to get into Gettysburg, except that A. P. Hill was a pugnacious man who liked to fight whenever he had a chance; and there was no especial reason why Yankee cavalry should try to keep them out of Gettysburg, except that Buford felt the way Hill felt about fighting. Now Reynolds, as pugnacious as either of these two, looked at the firing lines and heard Buford's situation report: the Rebels' main body lay westward, but Ewell's corps was off to the north and east and would probably show up before long. Reynolds sent a staff officer pelting back to Meade with a message which said, in effect, that there was going to be a big fight at Gettysburg and that every Federal soldier Reynolds could lay his hands on was going to be in it. Reynolds would oppose these oncoming Confederates: "I will fight them inch by inch, and if driven into the town I will barricade the streets and hold them as long as possible."
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He notified Howard to hurry forward with his XI Corps, and then he put his leading division into line, relieved Buford's troopers, and smashed into Heth's infantry head-on.

Nobody had told Reynolds to fight for Gettysburg, inch by inch or otherwise, any more than Hill had been told to seize the place. By his orders Reynolds would have been justified in falling back, watching the Confederates and delaying them until Meade was securely posted at Pipe Creek, and the story of the next few days would have been different if he had done this. The end result would probably have been much the same, and about the same number of men would have been killed; but they would have been killed at a different place in a different way, and the ifs and might-have-beens that seem so important today would be replaced by other ifs and might-have-beens, and there is no point in speculating about it. Reynolds did what was in character for him to do. He was an instinctive, inch-by-inch fighter, and now he rode up to the battle line to see that his men struck the blow that he wanted them to strike. As they surged forward a bullet hit him and he toppled from his saddle, dead . . . and the Battle of Gettysburg had begun, brought on without choice of Lee or Meade by the fact that the roads that crossed here brought together men possessed by a blind, driving urge to fight.
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The flame fed itself. The Confederate attack was beaten back, and Hill put a fresh division into action. The Federals, led now by Abner Doubleday, spread out along the crest of their ridge, facing west, to receive this new attack, and suddenly found themselves under fire from the north. Ewell's corps was coming in, exactly as Buford had predicted, and its leading division began to attack Doubleday's right and rear. Just in time, Howard's corps came into Gettysburg— sadly under strength, and in bad repute because of Chancellorsville, but most welcome in this crisis. By seniority Howard took general command. He sent most of the XI Corps north of Gettysburg to stave off Ewell's assault, the Federal lines stiffened—and at this moment Lee himself, riding east from Chambersburg to the sound of the guns, came up in rear of Hill's battle line.

Lee was not ready for a general engagement. He had less than half of his army on the field, he still did not know where the bulk of Meade's army was, and his first impulse was to suspend the attack. But a Confederate victory was taking shape before his eyes. Off to the northeast the second of Ewell's divisions was coming into action, hitting Howard's line in flank and rear, striking the right place at the right moment entirely by accident but as effectively as if it had been planned that way. If Howard's men were driven off, which obviously was about to happen, Doubleday's men could not hold their ground in front of Hill. This was the moment of opportunity, and Lee quickly reversed himself and ordered a general advance.

For half an hour or an hour—no one counted minutes very carefully that day—there was a desperate fight on the open plain to the north and the long ridge to the west. This battle that involved only fractions of the armies grew far beyond its size, and like the war itself it became bigger and more destructive than anyone intended. The right half of the Federal line collapsed first; taken in front, flank and rear by the expanding Confederate offensive, Howard's Dutchmen finally broke and ran off, victims of sheer bad luck and of their own low morale. Brigadier General Francis C. Barlow, one of Howard's division commanders, wounded and captured in this fight, wrote a few days later that the Confederate soldiers "are more heroic, more modest and more in earnest than we are," and felt that "their whole tone is much finer than ours"
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; and however this may have been, the right half of the Union line folded up and the downfall of the left half soon followed. The prodigious fight the Federals made on the western ridge—some regiments here lost 75 percent of their strength this afternoon—went for nothing, and by half-past three or thereabouts the survivors of the two defeated Federal corps were going helter-skelter back through Gettysburg to take refuge on the high ground south of town, where Howard had posted a brigade of infantry and some artillery to stem the rout.

The flight through town was confused and costly. Federal and Confederate regiments ran into each other unexpectedly, stray field pieces pulled up at intervals to blast canister down smoky streets, and Ewell's exultant Confederates rounded up so many Yankee prisoners that their own ranks were all disordered. A measure of the general confusion was the unhappy plight of one of Howard's brigade commanders, Brigadier General Alexander Schimmelfennig—a good man who deserved better of fate—who was trapped by armed foes, clambered over a high board fence to get away, and to avoid capture had to take refuge in a pigpen, staying there for the rest of the battle, living on what the prodigal son lived on during his dreary exile. . . . Late in the afternoon most of the Federals had reassembled in the new position. Meade had sent Major General Winfield Scott Hancock up to take charge, Hancock put a new battle line together, fresh troops began to come up, and the Confederates did not press their advantage. In killed, wounded, and captured the Federals had lost 9000 men, half of all they had put into action: the Confederates, with substantial losses of their own, had swept the field, and this first, unplanned encounter between the two armies had been a smashing victory for General Lee.
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But the victory meant little except that it robbed both Lee and Meade of their freedom of action. They had to finish what had been so violently begun and they had to finish it here. When darkness came on July 1 each commander accepted this fact and ordered the rest of his troops forward, Lee planning to resume the offensive as soon as possible, Meade planning to make his fight here rather than at Pipe Creek. Meade himself reached the field late that night. He found that his army had a powerful defensive position— from Culp's Hill, southeast of Gettysburg, west to Cemetery Hill and then south two miles along Cemetery Ridge to a rocky knoll called Little Round Top—and he knew that all of his army except John Sedgwick's big VI Corps would be on hand ready for action by the middle of the morning. Sedgwick, driving his men hard on a thirty-mile march, could not come up until late afternoon, but even without him Meade had enough men to hold his ground and it even seemed to him that with good management he might take the offensive himself. The qualms that had paralyzed Joe Hooker when he found himself facing the Army of Northern Virginia had no place in Meade's makeup.
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Lee had won the first round, but he was under a profound handicap. None of his other battlefields had given him a problem like this one. The pressure of time and circumstance was on him, not on his opponent, and the Federal army—larger than his own. as always—was for the first time standing on the defensive on its own soil. The old equalizers were not available here. Lee could use neither the dogged defensive that had served so well at Antietam and Fredericksburg nor the dazzling shifts and feints that had won the Seven Days and Chancellorsville. He was on the offensive, but he did not quite have the initiative: this time, Lee's antagonist could not be compelled to fight Lee's kind of battle. The armies were bound together by the first day's fight, without room for maneuver, and to resume the battle— inescapable, all things considered—was simply to engage in a slugging match, the one kind of fight which when the campaign began Lee hoped to avoid.

Longstreet, to be sure, proposed that the army circle to its right to get into Meade's rear, but Lee quickly dismissed the idea. He no longer had Stonewall Jackson, the one man who could have led such a move; furthermore, in Stuart's absence he did not know just where Meade's rear was or what he might run into if he tried to go there. He answered Longstreet in the only way that was open to him: "The enemy is there and I am going to fight him there."
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He at last knew in general terms where Stuart was—northeast, somewhere near Carlisle—but the knowledge was not helpful. Stuart and his cavalry would rejoin the army in twenty-four hours, and that would be twenty-four hours too late. Lee needed Stuart now, and because he did not have him now he had to go on with this battle where it had begun—with the odds against him.