Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (12 page)

One notion which kept nagging at Joe Hooker was the possibility that Lee’s mysterious departure for Culpeper might not be a serious movement at all, but instead a cover for a large-scale cavalry raid by the Army of Northern Virginia’s cavalry and its flamboyant J.E.B. Stuart. “It may be that they have only intended a cavalry raid,” Hooker wondered hopefully, “and moved their infantry in the vicinity of Culpeper to support it.” That, at least, would seem to explain why Lee was leaving an entire corps’ worth of his infantry—A. P. Hill’s—still in place around Fredericksburg. If Hooker launched a preemptive strike of his own and broke up whatever cavalry raid might be in the offing, he could have something to offer Halleck and Lincoln which might justify a release from the tight leash they had buckled around his neck. On June 6th, Hooker casually informed Halleck that a “heavy rebel force of cavalry about Culpeper may mean mischief,” and that he was taking steps to nip the “mischief” in “its incipiency.” What he was actually planning to do was to take all three divisions of the Army of the Potomac’s cavalry, “stiffened by about 3,000 infantry,” lunge across the Rappahannock upriver at Kelly’s Ford, and deliver a thumping surprise to the Confederate cavalry in its camps around Culpeper.
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This was not as easy an assignment as it seemed. The cavalry of the Army of the Potomac was suffered as the poor relation of the infantry, with the result that “this arm of our service has been of little account heretofore.” Rebel cavalrymen laughed their Union counterparts to scorn: “Most of the Federal cavalry of the Army of the Potomac in 1861 was inefficient, awkward, uncouth horsemen,” wrote a captain in the
1st Virginia Cavalry. “I have seen raw Dutchmen strapped on the horses by straps buckled around their waists and legs and fastened to the saddle.” Old
Winfield Scott had no use for cavalry units larger than a company or an ad hoc battalion. The cavalry McClellan had taken with him on his great campaign up the peninsula formed by the
James River, to the doors of Richmond, in 1862 amounted to less than 4,000 out of 98,000 Union troops, and had been parceled out among the big infantry corps for escort and provost guard duties, except for a small two-brigade “reserve.” McClellan eventually concentrated his cavalry into a single division before Antietam, and placed it under Brigadier General
Alfred Pleasonton, a West Pointer of the class of 1844 with service in the 2nd Dragoons under
Zachary Taylor in Mexico. But Pleasonton’s and the division’s actual contribution to McClellan’s blandly managed battle at Antietam was minimal: while the rest of the Army of the Potomac submitted to the loss of 2,100 lives in that single day in September, the entire cavalry division reported 4 killed and 20 wounded—one of them being Pleasonton, who was deafened in the right ear by the concussion of artillery.
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It was really Joe Hooker who took the Yankee cavalry firmly in hand, reorganized it into a full-fledged corps of three divisions, and placed it all in the hands of
George Stoneman. “I give you full power over your officers,” Hooker warned, “arrest, cashier, shoot—whatever you will,” but get them working as a useful unit. Hooker’s principal mission for Stoneman was raiding “remote from the supporting army … in which the aim was not to encounter the enemy in force and fight him, but rather to avoid serious conflicts of arms and expend all possible energy in the destruction of lines of communication and depots of military supplies.” In that expectation, George Stoneman turned out to be a colossal disappointment, riding his cavalry corps almost entirely out of contact with Hooker at Chancellorsville and only doing “easily repaired” damage along the Virginia Central Railroad between Richmond and the Rappahannock. The crestfallen Stoneman sheepishly removed himself from Hooker’s wrath by taking medical leave for “the cavalryman’s complaint”—hemorrhoids—and command of the cavalry fell back to Alfred Pleasonton, who had assiduously undermined Stoneman and positioned himself to replace him.
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Pleasonton was a kid-glove-wearing dandy, a ladies’ man, a vivid talker, with a full, placid face, a sharp eye for the main chance, and an open door for reporters who might obligingly puff his name in the papers. Charles Francis
Adams, in the
1st Massachusetts Cavalry, moaned that Pleasonton was “a newspaper humbug … a bully and toady” who “does nothing save with a view to a newspaper paragraph,” and that view was shared pretty broadly by the rest of the cavalry corps. But Pleasonton had seniority, and he had political pull—he was closely tied to
John Franklin Farnsworth, a
Radical Republican representative from Illinois’ 2nd District, and Farnsworth’s nephew, Elon, was one of Pleasonton’s staff officers—and so the task of popping whatever bubble J.E.B. Stuart and the rebel cavalry were developing around Culpeper would go to Pleasonton.
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Stuart struck many people as a mirror image of Pleasonton. “There were few men produced by the war whose character was so mixed with gold and dross as Stuart,” remembered an officer in the
4th Virginia Cavalry. He could be “brave as his sword,” but “frivolous to the point of ridicule,” as though he was always (in the words of one staffer) “on stage.” Like Pleasonton again, he owed much of his rapid advancement to command of the cavalry of the
Army of Northern Virginia to his assiduous cultivation of the powerful—in this case, of both Joseph Johnston and Robert E. Lee. He met Lee while still a cadet at West Point in the 1850s, and he had the exquisite good fortune to be in the secretary of war’s office in October 1859 when the secretary called for a volunteer to take an urgent message about
John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry to Lee. Stuart took command of the 1st Virginia Cavalry at the outbreak of the war, and so impressed Joe Johnston as having “by nature … the qualities necessary for an officer of light cavalry” that he earned his brigadier general’s stars that September. (That impression was strengthened by Stuart’s considerable talent for flattery: “Johnston is in capacity head and shoulders above every general in the Southern Confederacy,” Stuart announced, including Lee, with whom Stuart was now “disappointed.”) But when Lee succeeded Johnston in command, Stuart at once reintroduced himself and proposed a cavalry raid which would ride a circle around George McClellan and the Army of the Potomac. Lee was dubious. But Stuart pulled it off by sheer audacity, and from that moment his reputation as the Confederacy’s—and Lee’s—favorite cavalryman was sealed. Stuart returned the compliment by appointing Virginians to command four of his division’s five brigades, including a son and a nephew of Robert E. Lee.
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There would always be some question about the real value of Stuart’s raid. Porter Alexander groused that the raid only “alarmed McClellan for his rear” and thwarted Lee’s larger goal of cutting off McClellan’s retreat. It was so bloodless (the great raid cost Stuart’s 1,200 troopers exactly 1 dead and 4 wounded) and so limited that it never quite proved to the infantry’s satisfaction that cavalry had a job worth doing. “I call them a perfectly surplus body of men,” snorted a
Georgia infantryman. “The real fighting must be and is
done by our foot cavalry.” In a fight, sneered another Georgian, “the bravery of one man is rarely sufficient to overcome the running propensities of six legs.” There was, however, one singular lesson which Stuart took away from the raid, and that was raiding would easily garner headlines in the Richmond papers.
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Raiding was, therefore, what both the newspapers and Joe Hooker expected Stuart to do, sooner or later. Hooker gave Alf Pleasonton unusually explicit instructions about blighting any cavalry raid while it was still in the bud: move up to
Warrenton Junction on June 7th, scout the area, and then in the early hours of June 9th cross the Rappahannock at Kelly’s and
Beverly fords “and march directly on Culpeper.” There, Pleasonton should “disperse and destroy the rebel force assembled in the vicinity of Culpeper, and … destroy his trains and supplies of all description to the utmost of your ability.” Even if Pleasonton did no more than give the Confederate cavalry a good running off, Joe Hooker would be satisfied and Washington would be impressed. One of Hooker’s aides, Captain
Ulric Dahlgren, would act as Pleasonton’s overall guide and (since Pleasonton seems to have had no more fixed notion of where Culpeper was than he did Mecca) Dahlgren would “hand you some maps of the direction in which you are operating.”
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What actually happened on the 9th held surprises for both Pleasonton and J.E.B. Stuart. The day before, Stuart scheduled the last of the Army of Northern Virginia’s great campaign reviews for Robert E. Lee on the broad 2,200-acre plantation of the unhappy Virginia Unionist
John Minor Botts. A captain in the
6th Virginia Cavalry remembered how “Gen. Lee, with his staff, first rode rapidly along the front of the line, around the left flank, then along the rear, around the right flank to his position on the hill in the front,” and then “at the sound of the bugle, taken up and repeated along the line, the corps of horsemen broke by right wheel into columns of squadron, and moving south for a short distance, the head of the column was turned to the left, and again to the left, moving in this new direction, whence it passed immediately in front of the commanding general … ten thousand sabres flashing in the sun light … before the greatest soldier of modern times.” The most dour of Stuart’s five brigade commanders, the aptly nicknamed
William “Grumble” Jones, was heard muttering about Stuart’s “horse show and sham fight,” and predicted that Stuart would soon enough “have a fight without the sham.” But Robert E. Lee was well pleased with Stuart’s review: “It was a splendid sight,” he wrote to Mary Custis Lee. “Stuart was in all his glory.”
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Lee and Stuart might have done better to have listened more carefully to Grumble Jones, because at five o’clock on the morning of the 9th, an entire division of Federal cavalry forded the three-and-a-half-foot-deep waters of the Rappahannock at Beverly Ford, emerging out of early morning river mists
and quickly pouring along the road toward Beverly Ford and Culpeper, ten miles away. Two regiments of Grumble Jones’ rebel cavalry who had been posted along the road turned hastily and bleary-eyed out of their blankets, recovering horses turned out to graze and sometimes only mounting bareback, and struggled to fight a series of delaying actions along the road. But what surprised the Federal troopers was that they were there at all, since the reports Alfred Pleasonton had collected the day before had no Confederate cavalry located between the river and Culpeper. But Stuart, after the review of June 8th, had camped most of his wearied cavalry east of Culpeper, nearer the river, and set up his own headquarters tent on a low ridge known locally as
Fleetwood Hill, and by the time the Federal cavalry had worked its way along the Beverly Ford road toward Fleetwood Hill, more than enough Confederate cavalry, along with sixteen guns from Stuart’s collection of light artillery, had collected itself at a small crossroads two miles west of Beverly Ford. There, by 7:30, the Federal advance slowed to a stop, and a headlong attempt by the 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry to overrun the rebel artillery collapsed into a melee of Union and Confederate horsemen, popping away with revolvers or hacking futilely at each other with sabers.
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Alf Pleasonton had another surprise in waiting. His two other divisions of cavalry crossed the Rappahannock eight miles below Beverly Ford that morning, also moving east and with the understanding that they would link up with the first division somewhere near Brandy Station before pushing on to Culpeper. This second arm of Pleasonton’s attack then divided itself, with one division under David Gregg angling northward toward the rendezvous at Brandy Station and the other, smaller division under a nervous French émigré (and Crimean War veteran) gloriously named
Alfred Napoleon Duffié moving straight west to the crossroads of Stevensburg to shield the main body of Pleasonton’s force from any possible interference from Confederate infantry away to the south. The appearance of yet more uninvited Yankee visitors perversely delighted Grumble Jones, who seemed pleased that Stuart would “damned soon see for himself” the folly of his ways.
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Gregg’s division heard the booming of Stuart’s horse artillery, and swung up toward the southern spur of Fleetwood Hill to hit the rebel horsemen from behind. After noon, a breathless Confederate courier spurred up to Stuart with a warning that Gregg’s troopers were already heading up the lower rise of the hill. Stuart at first refused to believe him. But a second courier with the same message finally got Stuart’s attention, and Stuart pulled an entire brigade of rebel cavalry back at an angle to fend off Gregg’s attack. The result was an even bigger melee in the open fields below Fleetwood Hill and east of Brandy Station, full of regiments and companies fighting with no particular direction amid dust clouds, “terrific, grand, and ludicrous” by one observer’s reckoning,
“acres and acres of horsemen sparkling with sabers, and dotted with brilliant bits of color where their flags danced above them.” Horses, “wild beyond the control of their riders,” carried men in and out of their opponents’ reach, and in one Federal unit several troopers “escaped because their clothes were so covered with dust that they looked like graybacks.” One of them was captured and recaptured three times, while another was so coated with grime that he “played secesh orderly to a secesh colonel for a while, and then escaped.”
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By the middle of the afternoon, it was obvious to Pleasonton that this was going nowhere. Robert E. Lee himself arrived “as calm and unconcerned as if he were inspecting the land with a view of a purchase,” and with him came an entire division of rebel infantry which Lee had detached from Dick Ewell’s corps around Culpeper. Pleasonton pulled his three divisions back across the Rappahannock, confident that he had done as much as either Joe Hooker or the circumstances had warranted. “I did what you wanted, crippled Stuart so that he can not go on a raid,” Pleasonton chirped to Hooker in a note written that evening, which was putting as good a face on a frustrated plan as possible. Lee bestowed accolades on Stuart for his “judicious and well planned” handling of his troopers—which could not quite disguise the fact that Stuart had not only been caught by surprise, but had been given the fight of his life. “The cavalry fight at Brandy Station can hardly be called a victory,” one of Longstreet’s staff officers wrote to his wife. “Stuart was certainly surprised and but for the supreme gallantry of his subordinate officers and the men in his command it would have been a day of disaster and disgrace.”
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