Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg (8 page)

Both armies settled down to an uneasy night interrupted by frequent firing from pickets alarmed by shadows and noises. Each side had suffered almost ten thousand casualties in what turned out to be perhaps the second bloodiest day of the war (the one-day battle of Antietam, with a combined total of 23,000 casualties, was the bloodiest). Confederates had made some gains at great cost, but had failed to achieve a breakthrough. Southern attacks had lacked coordination. Lee had followed his customary practice of issuing general orders but letting his corps commanders execute them as they thought best. The usual skills of
generalship in the Army of Northern Virginia seem to have gone missing this day, especially on Ewell's front against Culp's and Cemetery Hills. On the Union side, by contrast, officers from Meade down to regimental colonels acted with initiative and coolness. They moved reinforcements to the right spots and counterattacked at the right times.

Despite the stout Yankee resistance, Lee believed that his indomitable veterans had won the day. One more push, he thought, and the enemy would break. Pickett's division and Stuart's three cavalry brigades had finally arrived and would be available on the morrow. (Across the way, Union Major General John Sedgwick's Sixth Corps had also arrived, more than balancing the Confederate reinforcements.)

Lee's mood and physical condition at Gettysburg have been the subjects of some controversy. He seemed unusually excited by the supposed successes of these two days. At the same time he may have been weakened by a touch of diarrhea. Or perhaps, as the novelist Michael Shaara suggested in
The Killer Angels
, a flare-up of Lee's heart condition left him by turns belligerent and indecisive, gnawed by the conviction that he had little time left.

Historians have tended to discount Shaara's interpretation. But two surgeons at the University of Virginia medical school, who also happen to be Civil War
buffs, have offered evidence to support it. In March 1863 Lee suffered what was probably a myocardial infarction. By his own account, Lee did not feel he had fully recovered and reported himself “more and more incapable of exertion.” Piecing together Lee's own references to his health and those of his physician, these two surgeons suggest that Lee had ischemic heart disease—an inadequate supply of blood to the heart—which eventually killed him in 1870 at the age of sixty-three. “This illness,” the doctors concluded in a medical journal article, may have “had a major influence on the battle of Gettysburg.”

Precisely
what
influence is not clear. Did illness cloud Lee's judgment? Perhaps. But what we might call the “Chancellorsville Syndrome” may have been more important than Lee's health in this regard. Lee continued to think that he could win at Gettysburg as he had won two months earlier against greater numerical odds—by attacking. He had hit the Union flank at Chancellorsville and followed it up with a frontal assault, which had worked. He intended to try similar tactics at Gettysburg. He had come to Pennsylvania in quest of a decisive victory; he was determined not to leave without trying to achieve it. He believed that Meade had weakened his center to reinforce the flanks that were attacked on July 2. With Pickett's fresh division as a spearhead, he would send three divisions against the enemy center. He would
also have Stuart's cavalry circle around and come in on the Union rear, while Ewell would again assail the Union right to clamp the pincers when Pickett broke through the front. With proper coordination and leadership, his invincible troops could not fail.

Over on the Union side of the lines, Northern officers pondered the day's events and wondered what would come on the morrow. Meade called a meeting of his corps commanders in the small farmhouse that served as his headquarters. (The house is still there, about three hundred yards east of the equestrian monument to Meade just behind the scene of the next day's fighting at the climax of Pickett's charge.) Meade asked for a vote by his generals on whether to retreat or to stay and fight. They all voted to stay.

A myth long persisted that Meade wanted to retreat, but was only persuaded to the contrary by this vote. The origins of the myth lay with two Daniels: Dan Sickles and Major General Daniel Butterfield, Meade's chief of staff, whose main claim to fame was his composition, the previous year, of the bugle call “Taps.” Both Daniels were cronies of the deposed army commander Joe Hooker, and their loyalties lay more with Hooker than with his successor. When Meade took over the army on June 28, there was not time to replace the experienced Butterfield with a new chief of staff before the battle was upon him. Butterfield later claimed that on July 2 Meade had
instructed him to prepare orders for a retreat. What actually happened was that Meade asked Butterfield to draw a map of all the roads in the Union rear and to prepare contingency plans for a withdrawal
in case it became necessary.
This was only prudent, and Meade could be justly criticized if he had failed to prepare for every contingency.

But Meade, like his corps commanders, wanted to stay and fight. Butterfield's motive for stating the contrary was probably a desire to discredit Meade in order to make Hooker look better. As for Sickles, while recovering from loss of his leg he smarted at criticism of his move forward to the Peach Orchard contrary to orders. He continued to believe that this move had saved the army and won the battle—and also that by precipitating the fighting on July 2, it had undercut Meade's intention to retreat.

Sickles lived long enough to argue this case many times. Elected to Congress in 1892, he introduced the bill that created Gettysburg National Military Park in 1895. He made sure that the park boundaries included the area where his Third Corps had fought, so that visitors would always be able to see why he took them forward to the higher ground at the Peach Orchard and along the Emmitsburg Road. In 1897, after persistent lobbying, the army belatedly awarded Sickles the Congressional Medal of Honor for gallantry at Gettysburg. In his ninety-fourth year, Sickles attended
the huge fiftieth anniversary commemoration of the battle at Gettysburg, still insisting that his move had set the stage for victory. Sickles died the following year, having outlived every other corps commander at Gettysburg.

Having decided to stay and fight, Meade made his preparations for the morrow. Two divisions of Hancock's tough Second Corps held the Union center just forward of Meade's headquarters. One of those divisions was commanded by General John Gibbon, a native of North Carolina who had remained loyal to the flag under which he had served for twenty years while three of his brothers went with the Confederacy. Looking back years after the battle, Gibbon recalled that Meade told him on that night of July 2 that “if Lee attacks tomorrow, it will be in
your
front,” because he had tried both flanks and failed. Gibbon gritted his teeth and told Meade that he would be ready if Lee came his way.

J
ULY
3
DAWNED
warm and humid—normal for midsummer in Gettysburg. As the light strengthened, firing broke out and grew louder on the Culp's Hill lines, where it had died away only seven hours earlier. The Union Twelfth Corps brigades that had departed to reinforce the left had returned during the night and were determined to regain their lost trenches in the morning. We return now to the Spangler's Spring area to discuss what happened there on that morning of July 3.

Ewell had also reinforced the Confederate units at Culp's Hill, doubling their numbers overnight. Both sides planned to attack there at first light—the Federals to regain the trenches they had abandoned, the Confederates to renew their effort to capture the hill. The Yankees struck first, at 4:30
A.M.
, with an artillery barrage against the Confederates in those captured
trenches on the southern slope of the hill. Soon after, Confederate infantry renewed their attack on the higher slopes where the fighting had taken place the previous evening.

Once again the 137th New York found itself in the thick of the action, but this time it had plenty of help. Back and forth for several hours on this line came attacks and counterattacks, in the woods and in a small clearing called Pardee Field. Some fifty monuments and markers crowded into the half-mile from Spangler's Spring up to the observation tower testify to the intensity of fighting for nearly seven hours on this hot morning. Most of the time it was the Confederates who attacked, but each time they were driven back.

One dramatic Union assault in late morning by the Second Massachusetts and Twenty-seventh Indiana against the Confederate left was also repulsed with heavy loss, a story told by the interpretive marker and the monuments of these two regiments near Spangler's Spring. Both were elite regiments; most of the Second Massachusetts's officers were Harvard alumni. In a few minutes, about 250 men in the two regiments were shot down, ninety-five of them fatally.

Another poignant event took place on this flank that morning. Twenty-two-year-old Wesley Culp was a private in the Second Virginia Infantry, which took position as skirmishers on the Confederate left across
Rock Creek, about four hundred yards east of Spangler's Spring. Culp had grown up in Gettysburg where, like Henry Wentz, he had learned the trade of carriage-maker. Also like Wentz, he had gone to Virginia before the war, when his employer moved the carriage-making business to Shepherdstown. Young Culp had joined the local militia there, which became Company B of the Second Virginia when the war broke out. Now he was back at Gettysburg, fighting near the hill named after his great-grandfather, who had established a farm near the hill now owned by Wesley's cousin Henry Culp. As a boy, Wesley had splashed in the local swimming hole in Rock Creek; now as a soldier he was taking potshots at Yankees along the creek; one of them took a shot at him and the bullet went home. No monument marks the spot where Wesley Culp was killed; no one recorded where he was buried; it may have been in land owned by his cousin.

Wesley Culp was not the only native of Gettysburg killed on July 3. In the town itself, Confederates had barricaded Baltimore Street three blocks south of the square. From there and from houses nearby, sharpshooters traded shots with Union skirmishers on Cemetery Hill. Most residents of Gettysburg hid in their cellars to get out of the line of fire. One who did not was Mary Virginia Wade, known as Jenny, a comely twenty-year-old lass who was at her sister's
house on Baltimore Street that day to help take care of her sister's newborn baby. Jenny Wade was engaged to Corporal Johnston Skelly of the Eighty-seventh Pennsylvania, which she knew was somewhere in Virginia. She too wanted to do her part for the war effort, so, despite warnings, she went to the kitchen that morning to bake biscuits for Union skirmishers. Suddenly a bullet from a Confederate rifle smashed through two doors and lodged in Jenny's back. She died not knowing that a few days earlier her fiance had also died of a wound he received in the battle of Winchester on June 15—a battle in which Wesley Culp had fought as his regiment was moving north toward Pennsylvania. Jenny Wade was the only civilian death in the battle of Gettysburg. The house where she was killed is still there to be visited, immediately south of the Holiday Inn.

The exchange of sniper fire between Rebels in Gettysburg and Yankees behind stone walls on Cemetery Hill never ceased during daylight hours. But on Culp's Hill the firing died away about 11:00
A.M.
The Confederates pulled back to count their killed and wounded, which were at least double those of the two Union divisions defending the hill. If the Army of Northern Virginia was to win the battle of Gettysburg, it would not do so at Culp's Hill. One part of Lee's three-pronged effort on July 3 had failed. The second part was about to begin.

Early that morning, Jeb Stuart rode east from Gettysburg at the head of six thousand Confederate cavalry. He intended to circle south about three miles east of Gettysburg, and then turn west to come in on the Union rear along Cemetery Ridge. We will follow the route of Stuart's troopers to what is today called East Cavalry Field. Returning from Culp's Hill to Baltimore Street, we turn north to the traffic circle in downtown Gettysburg, then turn right on York Street (U.S. Route 30) and proceed almost three miles to a right turn onto Cavalry Field Road. Another mile brings us to a sharp right along a ridgeline (Confederate Cavalry Avenue) from which we gaze southward over open, rolling farmland with the historic Rummel farm in the near distance. At about 1:00
P.M.
the Confederate horsemen advanced south along this ridge, dismounted skirmishers leading the way. So far they had spotted no enemy. The way to the Union rear seemed open.

They soon encountered plenty of Yankees, however, about five thousand of them in three brigades. One was a Michigan brigade commanded by Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer, who had been jumped several grades to that rank only four days earlier. Having graduated last in his West Point class, Custer had proven in the war's first two years that there was no necessary correlation between class rank and fighting ability. Custer is remembered today mainly
for his foolhardy decision at the Little Bighorn in 1876 that led to his death and that of all the men with him. But he should be remembered also for his successful hell-for-leather record as a cavalry commander during the last two years of the Civil War, starting on this hot afternoon at Gettysburg.