Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (11 page)

I
F THERE WAS ONLY
one lesson to be learned from Robert E. Lee’s first try at an invasion northward in 1862, it would be about Harpers Ferry. Lodged tightly between the confluence of the Shenandoah and the
Potomac rivers, some fifty miles northwest of Washington, Harpers Ferry was ringed by the limestone ridges of
Maryland Heights (on the north bank of the Potomac),
Loudoun Heights (on the east, overlooking the
Shenandoah River), and Bolivar Heights (west of the town). These tall ridges didn’t make Harpers Ferry into some kind of natural fortress; rather, it became the deep center of a bowl that was too wide to be defended. On that assumption, Lee decided in 1862 to cross the Potomac into Maryland downstream from Harpers Ferry, where he could move the
Army of Northern Virginia easily up to Frederick, and from there into the Cumberland Valley of
Pennsylvania, and left Harpers Ferry in his rear to be snatched up by Stonewall Jackson. But it did not surrender as easily as Lee expected. The tiny Federal garrison put up just long enough of a fight that Stonewall Jackson only barely caught up with Lee in time to fend off the
Army of the Potomac’s fast descent at Antietam. Once Lee fell back into Virginia, Harpers Ferry was blithely reoccupied by Federal forces as though the Confederates had never passed that way.

Harpers Ferry was not enough of a prize to be worth a second risk of that sort. So in the summer of 1863, Lee’s plan for another invasion of the North would point farther westward, bypassing Harpers Ferry entirely. He would pull away from the lines along the Rappahannock where the two armies had been glowering at each other since Chancellorsville, and shift north and west over the Blue Ridge, entering the great tunnel formed by the Shenandoah
and Cumberland Valley, and crossing the Potomac at points between ten and twenty-five miles above Harpers Ferry. Once across the Potomac, Lee would make Hagerstown, in the Cumberland Valley, his first objective (instead of Frederick), and then begin a long curl north and east, down the valley, through Greencastle, Chambersburg, Shippensburg, Carlisle, and finally to Harrisburg and the banks of the Susquehanna. Along that entire line, there was only one Federal outpost of any size worth worrying about, and that was Winchester, at the lower end of the Shenandoah Valley and just twenty-five miles from the Potomac. But there were fewer than 7,000 Federal soldiers there, and the town had changed hands so often during this war that it was not likely to put up much resistance to changing hands again.

It seems odd to modern eyes that Lee wrote out none of these plans, gave no precise timetables, and specified no schedule of objectives. (If anything, Lee was still fiddling with the realignment of the army’s artillery, and still haggling with Secretary of War Seddon for the addition of five more brigades of infantry from
North Carolina and the defenses of Richmond.) Nothing of that nature seems to have survived apart from two operational orders issued to A. P. Hill on June 5th and June 16th, and even these are merely directives to move and occupy certain points, without any specifics about how or when.
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But this was not unnatural in the mid-nineteenth century, when the movement and communication of armies were still surprisingly haphazard affairs, especially through the broad expanses of the American landscape. In 1863, twenty-five miles represented a full day’s travel—the experiential equivalent of, say, a coast-to-coast flight—so that a trip from Philadelphia to Chicago in 1863 would feel like going halfway around the world. Within those limits, campaign plans were always going to be full of improvisation, with plenty of loose room left for unanticipated encounters, unforeseen obstacles, and raw happenstance.

In European warfare, the new technologies of the railroad and the
telegraph were rapidly closing these distance gaps, and annihilating the delays in travel and information which had previously made mischance and make-it-up-as-you-go part of the normal play of war. The fifteen state-owned
railroads and thirty-one private railroads in the kingdom of
Prussia had been severely subordinated to a military railroad commission and a section of the Prussian general staff in the 1850s, and elaborate mobilization timetables had been developed to govern the concentration and movement of Prussian troops in any eventuality. In 1855, the
British Army experimented with constructing a military railroad in the Crimea to supply the siege lines at Sevastopol, and in the
North Italian War in 1859, Napoleon III moved 130,000 French troops at unprecedented speed into the war zone.
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But Robert E. Lee had nothing like these rail systems at his disposal. His main railroad support consisted of a cluster of lines which came up from the Carolinas to Petersburg and Richmond, and even these were inadequate to the supply needs of the Army of Northern Virginia. From Richmond, only two major rail lines were strung northward to the Potomac—the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac, which was controlled by the Federals north of the Rappahannock River, and the combined lines of the Virginia Central and Orange & Alexandria, which passed out of Confederate control north of Culpeper Court House. The only effective rail link between Lee and the Shenandoah Valley in 1863 ran westward through Charlottesville to Staunton, way at the upper head of the Shenandoah, and that was ninety miles from Harpers Ferry. Even if Lee had wanted to devise a tight plan of campaign operations, the tools needed for such a plan simply didn’t exist for him or the Army of Northern Virginia.
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Once the parades and reviews of the three infantry corps of the
Army of Northern Virginia were complete, Lee began the first stage of the long journey northward on June 3rd, with
Lafayette McLaws’ and
John Bell Hood’s divisions of Longstreet’s corps discreetly packing up and marching south (in order to disappear from Federal sight) through the green groves of locusts and oaks toward Spotsylvania Court House and then turning westward, across the
Rapidan River, to Culpeper Court House, on the
Orange & Alexandria
Railroad. (Longstreet’s third division, under George Pickett, was waiting on
two of the brigades Lee was struggling to shake loose from Secretary Seddon; those two units, under
Micah Jenkins and
Montgomery Corse, would finally stay put, north of Richmond, to protect the capital.)
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Turning to look back over the artillery battalion he commanded,
Edward Porter Alexander felt a surge of “pride & confidence … in my splendid battalion, as it filed out of the field into the road, with every chest & ammunition wagon filled, & every horse in fair order, & every detail fit for a campaign.” Few of these Confederate soldiers, however, stayed splendid for long. The weather was “beautiful” and “bright” on the 3rd, but the next day, when it became the turn of Dick Ewell’s corps to begin slipping away toward Spotsylvania, it became “very warm & we were in a cloud of dust most of the time.” The marching was kept easy—ten-minute rest breaks every hour, and camp by 3:30 in the afternoon. Ewell’s corps followed Longstreet’s across the Rapidan at noon on June 7th and camped by four o’clock near Culpeper. Neither of them entirely evaded Union observation. The
Army of the Potomac began experimenting in late 1861 with hydrogen-filled
observation balloons supplied by the ingenuity of
Thaddeus Sobieski Coulincourt Lowe. A number of the balloons were still operational, and on June 5th Ewell’s corps noticed the ascent of “the Yankee balloon” over
Banks’ Ford on the Rappahannock.
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Lee kept A. P. Hill’s corps in position on the Rappahannock and thinned it along the south bank, “making such disposition as will be best calculated to deceive the enemy, and keep him in ignorance of any change in the disposition of the army.” But thanks to the balloon, Hooker was already notifying Lincoln that the Army of Northern Virginia was on the road and that Lee must be intending “to move up the [Rappahannock] river, with a view to the execution of a movement similar to Lee’s of last year.” That would mean either a move “to cross the Upper Potomac” above Harpers Ferry “or to throw his army between mine and Washington” by lunging around Hooker’s flank and reoccupying the old Bull Run battlefield.

Only a few months before, Hooker had been riding a tide of success so neatly that he was allowed to report directly to Lincoln, and would hardly have needed to signal Lincoln at all in order to deal with a Confederate movement. But Hooker’s stock had fallen so flat after Chancellorsville that when he suggested a countermove across the Rappahannock, he met with the president’s stony disapproval: “It does not appear probable to me that you can gain any thing by an early renewal of the attempt to cross the Rappahannock.” The more Hooker persisted in asking for authorization to respond, the more irritable Lincoln became, and on June 5th, he curtly notified Hooker that henceforward he would report to Major General
Henry Wager Halleck, the general in chief of all the Union armies. This was bad news for Hooker, since
Halleck had rarely ever used his role as general in chief to do more than act as a glorified liaison officer, and because Halleck and Hooker had known each other before the war, and on the worst possible terms.
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Hooker pressed Halleck to allow him to cross the Rappahannock in force, overwhelming whatever rebel force had been left at Fredericksburg, and then lunging down the line of the Virginia Central toward an almost undefended Richmond. “Will it not promote the true interest of the cause,” Hooker was reduced to pleading, “for me to march to Richmond at once?” And Hooker went so far as to push across the Rappahannock at
Franklin’s Crossing (three miles below Fredericksburg) with a division of John Sedgwick’s 6th Corps while the Army of the Potomac’s engineers hurriedly built a pontoon bridge. The Yankee division cleared about a mile of the far bank of the Rappahannock, with skirmishers keeping up “a sharp firing all day,” and the other two divisions of the 6th Corps took turns over the next few days occupying the newly conquered pocket around the crossing. As he had suspected, a great many of the rebels were gone.
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Establishing this little bridgehead was Hooker’s way of demonstrating that the road to Richmond was demonstrably open, but it merely drew from Halleck and from Lincoln the immediate and frosty reminder that a move toward Richmond would leave the field open for Lee to trade queens by attacking an almost undefended Washington. Besides, those generals animated by “the true interest of the cause” would be seeking out a decisive confrontation with the
Confederate Army, not Richmond. Hooker had been selected for command by Lincoln because he was supposed to be “Fighting Joe,” the perfect anti-McClellan who would wade in and land the jaw-crushing blow to the
Army of Northern Virginia that the McClellan lovers refused to throw. But not only had Hooker allowed his own jaw to be crushed at Chancellorsville, he was now bleating for permission to betake himself to Richmond while the rebel army held the entire
Potomac River to ransom. “I think Lee’s army, and not Richmond, is your sure objective point,” Lincoln replied coolly on June 10th. “If he comes toward the Upper Potomac, follow on his flank and on his inside track.” And that was that.
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Hooker must have known by this point that he had been weighed in the balances and found wanting by Lincoln, and that Halleck would welcome any opportunity to make the balances weigh even heavier against him. “I think & know that Hooker feels very bad,” the army’s excitably vigilant provost marshal, Marsena Patrick, wrote in his diary. Yet, there was also vanity enough in Hooker to make him hope that, somehow, he had the wherewithal to redeem himself from the irredeemable depths. On June 11th, Hooker’s staff adjutant, Brigadier General
Seth Williams, circulated orders to all corps commanders
“for all civilians to leave the Army at once, all extra baggage to be sent to the rear, and the men’s extra luggage reduced to the lowest possible amount.”
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The
3rd Corps would jump off first, heading twenty-five miles north to
Catlett’s Station (on the
Orange & Alexandria
Railroad) and from there up the line to old familiar battlegrounds around
Manassas Junction; John Reynolds’
1st Corps would follow, and behind Reynolds would come Otis Howard and the
11th Corps. The
6th Corps’ bridgehead over the Rappahannock was quietly abandoned after darkness on June 12th, and the next day the remaining four infantry corps of the Army
of the Potomac—Hancock’s 2nd Corps, the 6th under Sedgwick, George Meade’s 5th Corps, and Henry Slocum’s 12th Corps—were on the roads, swinging slightly to the east of the others and headed for Fairfax Court House. It was “a terrible suffocating march.” A sergeant in the 28th Pennsylvania counted only nine men present in his company when they reached Fairfax, and he “was completely faged out, almost sick.” But at least this way, the Army of the Potomac would always be interposed between Lee and Washington. It was not the kind of campaign Joe Hooker really wanted to carry on, but by this point, as Marsena Patrick sadly wrote, “Halleck is running the marching and Hooker has the role of a subordinate.”
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