Upon the Altar of the Nation (42 page)

As great as the hatreds were, they could not extend to dead, wounded, and helpless soldiers, who were “brothers” once more.

Northerners died no less grimly than Southerners. One destined to die at Gettysburg was Sergeant Charles Ward of the Thirty-second Massachusetts Volunteers. Like many soldiers, Ward had written, “I hope I may come home again but life here is uncertain,” and wondered “how I shall conduct myself if called to fight.” He found out soon enough as his brigade charged the wheat field and absorbed 50 percent of the casualties. Sergeant Ward fell, wounded by a sharpshooter. After lingering for seven days, he died on July 9. In his last letter to his mother, written after he was wounded, he wrote: “Dear Mother, I may not again see you but do not fear for your tired soldier boy. Death has no fears for me. My hope is still firm in Jesus. Meet me and Father in heaven with all my
dear friends.
I have no special message to send you but bid you all a happy farewell. Your affect and soldier son, Charles Ward.”
⁸

For the Confederates, devastation prevailed. Longstreet had predicted the disaster and consoled himself with the knowledge that he had minimized the numbers of soldiers committed to the assault (to the criticism of later Lost Cause Confederate historians). But Pickett would not be consoled. As he watched the butchery from Emmitsburg Road, tears filled his eyes as he cried, “Great God, where, oh! Where is my division?” Pickett never forgave Lee. Later he claimed, “[T]hat old man had my division slaughtered.” Lee did not disagree, and in a letter to President Davis accepted full responsibility and offered to resign. Davis refused to accept Lee’s resignation. Nevertheless, the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia would never again go on the offensive.

T
he final assault of the three-day Battle of Gettysburg lasted little more than half an hour. Of the fourteen thousand Confederates who braved the assault, only half returned. Pickett lost 42 percent of his men and all of his senior officers. The heaviest casualties in Longstreet’s advance occurred in General Richard B. Garnett’s Brigade (65 percent, including Garnett), including the Eighth Virginia’s astounding 92 percent casualty rate. One eyewitness account described the final day’s battle in stark terms:

The numbers proved accurate. After three days of battle, Federal losses totaled 23,049 and Confederate losses 28,063. Depending on whether the three days are counted as three battles (in which case the Confederacy arguably won two) or one, the Confederacy had reached its high-water mark and never returned to the North in force.

Nothing illustrated more starkly the symbolic quality of the war than flags soaked in blood.
²
Reports circulated throughout the North about “Rebel Battle Flags”: “Thirty-one new rebel flags, captured by the Union forces in the recent battle at Gettysburg, have been deposited in the War Department,” wrote one reporter. “Most of them were much torn by balls, and many are very bloody.”
³

Newspaper vendor and cart in camp, 1863. Newspapers became a fixture for both sides on the battlefields and were often exchanged by Union and Confederate soldiers during times of inactivity. The governments provided horses and wagons to transport the papers, and allowed journalists an “embedded” presence with armies in the field. This vendor prepares to distribute papers to General George Gordon Meade’s Army of the Potomac.

Both Northern and Southern presses continued to monitor the enemy’s papers very closely and comment on them. Of these, none were read more closely than Richmond’s papers. Hence it was with some glee that one Northern writer observed how “[t]he Richmond papers are terribly doleful over the recent disasters.”
⁴
Horace Greeley confidently predicted that Lee would soon be vanquished: “We ought now to be near the end of our great struggle, and our Government may, without compromising its dignity ... openly invite proposals from North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, and other revolted States, for a peaceful restoration of the Union.”
⁵

Contrary to Greeley’s optimism and much to Lincoln’s dismay, Lee lived to fight another day—indeed another year and a half. With inclement weather and a badly mauled army of his own, Meade failed to press his advantage with a wholesale pursuit of Lee’s fleeing forces. The Army of Northern Virginia remained formidable, and Lee himself maintained his mythic status, minus the air of invincibility that had carried the South through earlier battles.

With minds set like flint on the task at hand, no question arose of proportion or acceptable losses. One suspects that the casualties could have numbered one hundred thousand instead of fifty thousand and the response would have been the same. One writer for the
Independent
noted how numbed Americans had become to bloodshed. In the opening, relatively benign, military encounters, “every early dash in the war was turned into fame.... Our first defeats threw the whole community into panics, for men were then unused to stern times.” But that changed profoundly for the worse: “We have since become so familiar with war, that Gettysburg, a greater battle than Waterloo, made no such impression upon the popular mind as the first few flashes of powder from [Fort] Moultrie, at daybreak of April 19, 1861.”
⁶
The moral brake linings had sheared, leaving only reflexive endorsements of a cause that knew no limits.

 

In the North, Fourth of July celebrations extended into the following week. Washington was giddy with excitement. One account described the scene: “Bells are ringing wildly all over the city. Citizens grin at one another with fairly idiotic delight.”
⁷
Reports blended fact, rumor, and talk of greatness to the exclusion of any serious inquiry or chronicle. The
Philadelphia Inquirer
exulted: “Waterloo Eclipsed!!” adding, “The Rebel Loss Truly Frightful ... General Lee reported in full retreat, pursued by Gen. Meade’s Forces.”

Elsewhere, the
Inquirer
speculated on the “reported deaths of Hill and Longstreet” and praised the bravery of the soldiers: “It would take reams of paper and more time than we have at present writing, to tell of the gallant deeds done by detached bodies and individuals. Let it suffice to say that all did well and nobly, and fought with the desperation of tigers. Never were troops so well handled—neither have they ever gained for themselves so much glory and renown.” Throughout, the tones were dramatic and mythic in recounting “lightening” raids and “trembling” earth. Confederate losses were staggering, while “our loss was comparatively small.”
⁸

Glory could not compensate the emptiness for individuals who lost loved ones. One especially emotional account was provided by New York Times correspondent Samuel Wilkerson. After earlier describing the magnitude of the battle, he eventually reported the battle’s aftermath alongside the body of his dead son. In words almost too pure to bear, he wrote:

Music, while it could not capture the morality of war, effectively embraced the suffering. In the popular “Angel Mother I’m Coming Home,” the writer explained that the inspiration for the song was a soldier’s letter from Gettysburg: “A sweet smile o’er spread his features, his lips moved, and he whispered George I am dying, tell the boys we shall meet again where parting does not come.” Again he spoke of his happy childhood, his brothers, sisters, and his mother, who had died since his enlistment. His last words were, “Angel mother I’m coming home! After which he sunk back to rise no more.”
¹⁰
In song no less than speech, war’s horrors were submerged in a sea of romanticization that hid the starker realities from citizens in the North and South who did not want to know.

In response to a serenade on July 7, President Lincoln evidenced the germs of ideas he developed more fully at Gettysburg Cemetery in December. First Lincoln repeated the scripture on which his faith rested. July Fourth, he argued, was of unparalleled importance, because “for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’ ” For this reason, he continued, the date assumed a mystical significance, confirmed by the deaths of Adams and Jefferson on that date, and “another president, five years after, was called from this stage of existence on the same day.”

Now, in the midst of civil war,

But then he stopped: “Gentlemen, this is a glorious theme, and the occasion for a speech, but I am not prepared to make one worthy of the occasion.”
¹¹
Five months later he would be prepared, and on that occasion, he solidified Gettysburg’s reputation as the apotheosis of the Civil War and made his speech America’s greatest sermon.

In the weeks following, Lincoln’s ebullience waned as the failure of Meade’s army to seal the victory set in. By failing to pursue Lee, Meade had rendered Gettysburg inconclusive, a tactical success but a strategic bust. In a moment of unrestrained anger and frustration, Lincoln drafted (but wisely never mailed) a stiff rebuke to his general of the Army of the Potomac:

Others, lacking Lincoln’s grim appetite for greater short-term casualties in the interests of long-term ends, were more forgiving of Meade. After describing the glorious Northern victory, a writer for the
Christian Herald
praised all of the generals unstintingly and reprinted General Meade’s congratulatory address to the troops, in which he acknowledged God’s providential assistance to the Union cause. “It is right and proper,” he asserted, “that we should, on suitable occasions, return our grateful thanks to the Almighty Disposer of events, that in the goodness of His providence, He has thought fit to give victory to the cause of the just.”
¹³
Whatever the personal religious convictions of the generals, they contributed to their sacralization with purple providential prose claiming a God who smiled on the justness of their devastation.

Despite Lee’s escape, morale among Northern soldiers was high, and most supported Meade. As the ones slated to do the actual fighting and dying, many did not agree with Lincoln’s harsh assessment of Meade’s failings as general. John Emerson Anderson, who had earlier toured the desolate battlefield, considered the toll staggering and the idea of pursuit something only critical “northern newspapers” would entertain: “Without doubt if General Meade should advance now, we should be checked or repulsed, owing to our weakness in numbers and the advantage General Lee would have by placing himself on the defensive.”
¹⁴

In a letter to his father, Union soldier John Francis Gleason revealed that Confederates were not the only soldiers lacking shoes. Yet Union spirits were high: “We have now been on the move for fifty days, and six of those have been fighting days.... Human nature can endure wonderfully when inspired by an idea.... It was rather hard for some of the boys to travel over those macadamized turnpikes barefoot—the route was marked with their blood—but they did it cheerfully for the sake of the cause.”
¹⁵