Upon the Altar of the Nation (41 page)

In addition, Lee faced a familiar Union general in tough-talking Fighting Joe Hooker. From Chancellorsville, he knew that tough words rarely translated into tough stands. In fact, ever since Chancellorsville, General Hooker had been on thin ice and he knew it. His fellow officers distrusted his abilities, and his commander in chief doubted he could navigate the rough waters generated by Lee’s legions. Hooker himself had lost something at Chancellorsville that he never regained—his confidence.

On June 3 Lee’s audacious move north commenced, to the horror of Pennsylvania residents and the unrestrained joy of Virginians, thankful at last to have the war in the lap of the enemy. Mindful of Northern papers and public opinion, Lee forbade all pillaging in hopes of a counterexample to the behavior of invading Union armies. At Chambersburg Lee declared: “No greater disgrace can befall the army and through it our whole people, than the perpetration of barbarous outrages upon the innocent and defenceless. Such proceedings not only disgrace the perpetrators and all connected with them, but are subversive of the discipline and efficiency of the army, and destructive of the ends of our movement.”

While these orders undoubtedly had a restraining effect, in practice he was no more able to prevent random soldiers’ raids on Northern property than were Union officers. Lee succeeded in saving towns from the torch, however, and prevented wanton theft and destruction of civilian property.
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Lee’s army considered railroads and former slaves fair targets, and black escapees (free and former slaves) in Pennsylvania were forcibly sent back to the South. One Confederate officer, William Christian, confessed that despite his orders to protect property, “there is a good deal of plundering going on, confined principally to the taking of provisions. No houses were searched and robbed, like our houses were done by the Yankees.” As for blacks: “We took a lot of Negroes yesterday. I was offered my choice, but as I could not get them back home I would not take them.” Then, in an odd moment of compassion, he added: “In fact, my humanity revolted at taking the poor devils away from their homes. They were so scared that I turned them all loose.”
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When Hooker learned of Lee’s movement north, he began to position his army in Lee’s rear around Frederick, Maryland, to prepare an attack on undefended Richmond. The plan made sense. But a skeptical General Halleck, lacking all confidence in Hooker, countermanded his orders. Betrayed and humiliated, Hooker had no choice but to proffer his resignation on June 28, which President Lincoln accepted on the spot. General George Gordon Meade, the battle-hardened former commander of Fifth Corps, assumed command of the Army of the Potomac at its most critical hour and reversed course to engage Lee in Pennsylvania.

Deprived of his usual intelligence by a stymied Stuart and marching in unfamiliar terrain, Lee was surprised to learn in late June that Hooker had been replaced by Meade. He learned, too, that Meade had abandoned his base south of the Potomac to close in with his army. By sheer coincidence, the two armies arrived around the farming village of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on July 1. Immediately it became clear to both commanders that this quiet village offered ideal terrain for a pitched battle. The ground sloped and rose in valleys and small hills strewn with heavy rocks and caves that afforded perfect defensive protection. Added to these formidable defensive positions were open fields begging for heroic frontal assaults. The stage was set for a perfect battle.

 

At 10:00 a.m. on July 1, scattered fighting began outside of Gettysburg. Several skirmishes had already been fought and it was not immediately apparent to commanders on either side that this one would be any different. But as both sides rushed to secure strategic defensive positions from which they could launch offensive thrusts, the stakes quickly grew higher. Knowing Lee’s location, Meade appointed his best young general, John F. Reynolds, to command the left wing of the army with trusted veterans from the First Corps (the Iron Brigade of midwesterners), Oliver Howard’s Eleventh “Dutch” Corps, and Daniel Sickles’s Third Corps. Immediately they established a strong defensive position near the town of Emmitsburg, just west of Gettysburg.

“Field Where General Reynolds Fell.” This photograph taken by Alexander Gardner, originally titled “A Harvest of Death,” shows the bodies of Federal soldiers killed on July 1, 1863, near the McPherson Ridge, on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Events quickly took on a momentum of their own. General John Buford’s Federal cavalry encountered heavy resistance from two divisions of A. P. Hill’s Third Corps advancing rapidly on Gettysburg. Recognizing immediately the strategic location of the junction at Gettysburg, Buford dismounted his cavalry and ordered them to hold McPherson Ridge, on the route to Seminary Ridge, “at all costs” (meaning no retreat, no surrender). Reynolds bravely led his First and Eleventh Corps in to reinforce Buford, but was promptly shot dead, leaving command of the wing to Abner Doubleday, who continued the attack. Soon Ewell’s powerful Second Corps arrived to support Hill and the Battle of Gettysburg was launched.

 

As the second day dawned, Lee’s extended lines were spread thin around the outside of Meade’s defenders with Ewell to the north, Hill in the center, and Longstreet to the south. Despite the Union’s formidable defenses, Lee did not intend to be denied. The burden of attack fell on Lee’s least enthusiastic but most valuable “Old War Horse,” General James Longstreet, who faced Sickles’s Third Corps. Assuming that the greatest Federal strength lay alongside the Emmitsburg Road, with its flank near the Wheat Field, Lee ordered Longstreet to hit the flank with two divisions and then turn north to roll up the supposed enemy strength along the road.

Battles raged up and down the entrenched Federal line as Lee probed for weak spots to strike and vanquish. The perfect spot of attack, of course, was the disconnected Union line at Little Round Top, still miraculously unoccupied. If Longstreet could get artillery to the top of that mound, the entire Union left would be exposed to a withering crossfire and the battle determined. But Lee, bent on massive destruction, had other ideas, and assigned only a token force of five hundred men from the Fifteenth Alabama to take Little Round Top.

Five hundred men were not many, but still the strategic position would have sufficed had not Meade’s chief of engineers, General Gouverneur K. Warren, spotted the unprotected hill. Instantly he recognized the mortal danger that Confederate artillery on Little Round Top would pose to exposed Federal lines. Without delay he rang the alarm to the Federal Fifth Corps commander General George Sykes, and elements from the First Minnesota and Twentieth Maine were immediately dispatched to save the hill. The Twentieth Maine, led by the former Bowdoin College professor of rhetoric, Colonel Joshua L. Chamberlain, held the extreme left of the line with orders to hold the position “at all costs.”

For nearly two hours, Chamberlain’s down-easters held off desperate assaults from the Fifteenth Alabama. No sooner would one charge cease than another began. With one-third of his men down and ammunition all but out, Chamberlain made one of the most intrepid moves in Civil War annals. Instead of retreat or surrender, he ordered his men to fix their bayonets sans ammunition and charge down the hill into the teeth of the Alabamians. Unnerved by the savage roar of the oncoming troops and unaware of their desperate straits, the Confederates surrendered en masse, leaving Little Round Top in Federal hands.
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In a later memoir, Chamberlain described the successive attacks in words befitting a professor of rhetoric:

With the Round Tops secured, a Union line now extended without gaps. While nothing was settled after the second day, the losses were enormous. Each side suffered nine thousand casualties, bringing the two-day totals to thirty-five thousand—far more than any previous two days in the war. Lee’s prospects for victory were bleak. But that was nothing new, and the outcome was still at issue. For a supremely confident Lee, that meant one more throw of the dice.

 

Having already struck unsuccessfully at both of Meade’s flanks, Lee determined that night, again over Longstreet’s vehement but loyal objections, to attack the center in a frontal assault. Again Lee selected Longstreet to lead the assault, augmented with a fresh third division under the recently arrived General George Pickett and his five thousand Virginia veterans—all, Pickett bragged, aching for a good fight. The historian Bruce Catton described the scene:

The sight did not deceive the Yankees. General Winfield Scott Hancock’s Second Corps held their fire, patiently awaiting the lambs about to be sacrificed. Many must not have believed what a perfect target Longstreet’s courageous divisions made. Perhaps they thought back to their own annihilation at Marye’s Heights. Sergeant John Dunn of the First Delaware later recalled: “This would be our Fredericksburg, and it required no effort on our part to hold our fire until they crossed the [Emmitsburg] road.”

Pettigrew’s and Pickett’s divisions converged at “the angle” near the center of Meade’s line. At two hundred yards, artillery and infantry fire erupted frontally and on both Confederate flanks. As the rebels continued to advance closer, Federal artillerymen switched their ammunition from case shot and shell to murderous canister and then to golf ball—sized double canister. Longstreet’s brave soldiers fell in waves. Pettigrew’s already mauled division actually led the legendary Pickett’s charge and took the hardest hit. Confederate infantry pulled down their caps over their eyes and bowed their heads, in one observer’s words, “as if meeting a hail storm.”
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Confederate dead at Gettysburg, 1863. Northern photographers Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan took these photographs on July 5, three days after the soldiers had been killed, and just hours before burial crews began the grisly task of burying the bloated corpses.

For the oncoming Confederates, the choice was stark: retreat and possibly survive or move forward and die. Amazingly, many continued to press forward over the bodies of their fallen comrades. A few hundred actually breached the Federal line and engaged their foes in close combat. Confederate General Lewis Armistead led the advance through the angle and fell mortally wounded over the muzzle of a Federal cannon, ironically marking “The High Tide of the Confederacy.”

John Emerson Anderson of the Second Massachusetts retraced the battlefield the following day. The sight filled him with an odd sympathy: