Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (17 page)

This was the message which trickled down to staffers and junior officers who were now convinced that “Harrisburg was Lee’s objective point.” Line officers in
John Bell Hood’s division were assured “that General Lee was going to [Pennsylvania] to subsist his army [and] that he would probably remain there two months.” Or maybe longer: one North Carolinian assured a Maryland family that “we have no idea of taking a back track across the Potomac; we have come to stay.” Nor would the Confederates necessarily stay put in Harrisburg, since it appeared to one Texas captain that “the way will be clear to Baltimore Philadelphia Washington and so on.” Another North Carolinian even “felt like going on to New York.”
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But always at the back of Lee’s mind had been the possibility of the so-far-elusive Napoleonic battle, the winner-take-all, annihilating victory which would shut the entire war down at once. Everything had gone so providentially well thus far. They had given Hooker the slip, overrun Winchester, gotten across the Potomac without opposition, and were now within reaching distance of Harrisburg. Assuming that this would “draw Hooker” in pursuit, Hooker would then be so late in starting and in such a hurry to catch up that the
Army of the Potomac would soon find itself strung out and panting on the roads into Maryland. That might give Lee the chance to turn on the disjointed and jaded Federals somewhere “on the Monocacy” River and deliver the war’s knockout blow. “We have again out-maneoeuvred the enemy, who even now don’t know where we are or what are our designs,” Lee confided to old
Isaac Trimble, in an expansive moment on June 24th. The Union Army would be “obliged to follow us by forced marches” and wear themselves into exhaustion and disorganization, and that might allow the Confederates to “crush them, beat them in detail, and in a few hours throw the whole army into disorder.”
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Three days later, he was still more confident, and more specific. Distracted by “hunger and hard marching,” the Army of the Potomac’s seven infantry corps would allow themselves to become “strung out on a long line and much demoralized.” And when they did, Lee would turn and pounce with every man he had on the isolated lead corps, “crush it, follow up the success, drive one corps back on another, and by successive repulses and surprises … create a panic and virtually destroy the army.” And where would this likely occur? Trimble testified that Lee traced his map of south-central Pennsylvania to a crossroads town which at that moment was the center point
of the vast arc which the Army of Northern Virginia was occupying in the Cumberland Valley. “He laid his hand on the map, over Gettysburg, and said hereabout we shall probably meet the enemy and fight a great battle, and if God gives us the victory, the war will be over and we shall achieve the recognition of our independence.”

He offered a glimpse of the same plan to Dorsey Pender: “Hooker has a small army and that very much demoralized,” Pender wrote on June 23rd. “The General says he wants to meet him as soon as possible and crush him and then … our prospects for peace are very fine.” The mapmaker
Jedediah Hotchkiss had it directly from Dick Ewell that “the battle would come off near Frederick City or Gettysburg,” which suited Hotchkiss nicely, since “the land is full of everything, and we have an abundance.”
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There were, however, two problems, and not just about foraging. The first was,
Where is Joe Hooker?
The second was more plaintive:
Where is Jeb Stuart?

  CHAPTER SIX  

I
T WAS NOT UNTIL
Milroy’s garrison at Winchester was on the point of erasure that Joseph Hooker finally awoke to the dimensions of the march Lee and the
Army of Northern
Virginia had stolen on him. “I now feel that invasion is his settled purpose,” Hooker concluded—although almost at once he guessed wrongly about Lee’s probable direction. “He will be more likely to go north, and to incline to the west.” Hooker was, even at that moment, concerned less about Lee than about his quarrel with Halleck. “I do not know that my opinion … is wanted,” he sniffed, but he was still hoping that it might turn out to be a “cavalry raid” intended only to divert attention from the West. In that event, Hooker still dreamed that he might be able to seize the chance to launch a strike at Richmond. He could, for instance, slip behind the rear of Lee’s invasion in order to “threaten and cut their communications,” while the Federal garrison based at
Fortress Monroe could take advantage of the chaos to make yet another move, up the
James River peninsula, to Richmond.
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What Hooker also wanted was restoration to complete control over Federal troops everywhere in Virginia and
Maryland, and that was not what Halleck or Lincoln were going to give him. “You have long been aware, Mr. President, that I have not enjoyed the confidence of the major-general commanding the army,” Hooker pleaded with Lincoln on June 16th, “and I can assure you so long as this continues we may look in vain for success.” In particular, Hooker wanted control over the military department of Washington (which covered all the artillerymen manning the fortifications of the capital, plus two divisions of infantry and one of cavalry commanded by Samuel
Heintzelman) and the four infantry divisions of
Robert Schenck’s Middle Department (which was responsible for defending Baltimore, Annapolis, Harpers Ferry, and the
Potomac riverline). This was not an unreasonable request, and in fact Halleck grudgingly granted Hooker some limited call on Heintzelman’s and Schenck’s troops, if needed. And on June 20th, Treasury Secretary
Salmon Chase, the patron saint of the army’s
abolitionists, wrote privately to Hooker to assure him that “you will want nothing which can contribute to your success.” But Hooker quickly learned how little slack there was on this leash. Halleck only intended to place “the troops outside of Washington and Baltimore under your orders”—in other words, any stray units not already assigned to some duty within Heintzelman’s or Schenck’s departments—and when Hooker reached for the control he thought he had, he was frankly told that he would not be obeyed.
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As far as Halleck and Lincoln were concerned, Hooker’s one responsibility was to ensure that, wherever Lee was going (and the speculation in the War Department included Pittsburgh and Wheeling), the Army of the Potomac shielded Washington.
Daniel Butterfield, Hooker’s loyal chief of staff, groused that “since we were not allowed to cross [the Rappahannock] and whip A. P. Hill,” and then march on Richmond “while Longstreet and Ewell were moving off through Culpeper,” the army had “lost the opportunity of doing a thing which we knew we could accomplish with a certainty.” But as Lee had foreseen, Lincoln was more anxious about protecting Washington than capturing Richmond, and so on June 16th, a day after the fall of Winchester, Hooker issued orders to pull his seven infantry corps away from the Rappahannock and northward to Dumfries and
Manassas Junction for resupply by rail. Signal stations were to be established along the crests of
South Mountain to report on Lee’s movements, Pleasonton’s cavalry were to begin poking at the gaps in the mountains to see whether any view of the Confederates could be snatched, and Maj.
George Sharpe’s intelligence service was to activate its network of agents and scouts, borrowing “ten good scouts” from Schenck to watch central Maryland.
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The army itself would move in three groups to ease the flow of traffic on the roads of northern Virginia—the 1st, 3rd, and
11th Corps (in other words, John Reynolds, Dan Sickles, and Otis Howard) would aim directly for Manassas and then proceed to Leesburg on the Potomac and the crossing at Edwards’ Ferry. The
5th Corps (under George Meade) would be routed through Manassas Junction and follow the others to Leesburg via the old battlefields around Centreville and
Bull Run; and the rear would be brought up by the 2nd, 6th, and
12th Corps (under Winfield Hancock,
John Sedgwick, and Henry Slocum), coming through Dumfries and Fairfax Court House in order to cover the evacuation of the army’s supply base at Aquia Creek. Halleck
did at last release to Hooker some spare units from Baltimore and Washington—a brigade of
Vermonters under
George Stannard, who had actually only signed up for nine months’ duty and were now approaching the expiration of their enlistment, a brigade of
Maryland home guards under
Henry H. Lockwood, and the so-called
Pennsylvania Reserve Division under
Samuel Wylie Crawford. But this barely replaced the veteran two-year units whose time had expired in May and early June, and who had by now headed home and forced Hooker to do some last-minute rejuggling of officers and regiments whose brigades had been reduced to single regiments. And it did nothing to help Hooker’s equanimity that in at least two regiments—the 2nd Maine and the 36th New York—two-year men whose enlistments had expired mutinied when they discovered that they would be held in service “till the expiration of the full two years of the last company of their regiment mustered into the United States service.” In the
2nd Corps, “an immense crowd” rioted over “three wagon loads of stuff” brought into camp by a sutler from Washington, and officers only managed to restore order “with drawn revolver.”
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Unlike the Confederate Army, this march would not be remembered fondly by the Army of the Potomac. Hooker had a great deal of fast marching to do, with no time for planning and most of it during alternating intervals of baking dry heat and heavy rains. The officers of the 11th Massachusetts had been “playing a game of base ball, when the adjutant arrived with marching orders” that had them all in motion by one in the afternoon, ready or not. The
6th Corps was marched all day on June 14th to Stafford Court House, made camp, but then was tumbled back into the line of march at ten o’clock that night. “What a march was made that Sunday night; wagons, heavy guns, and soldiers, all contending for the road, such whipping and swearing, such pulling and hauling, such starting and halting.” The army’s provost marshal,
Marsena Patrick, raged in his diary at the poor planning and the worse results: “a badly managed march … the [supply] Train had a bad time in getting under way—I found the road blocked, with all sorts of obstacles—miserable
Officers in charge of Artillery … This made very great delays and I had to turn in several times to get Waggons out of the way.” The next day was even worse. “We had a most horrible march. 8000 men fell out from this Corps in sheer exhaustion,” wrote a soldier in the
3rd Corps. “This is the most of a scorcher we have had yet.”
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If the heat was sickening, so were some parts of the line of march. The 1st Corps passed “directly through the field of the
first Battle of Bull Run” and saw “hundreds of skeletons lying about,” washed out of “shallow graves.” Horse and mule carcasses gave off “a foul odor,” and even the trees and fences were still scarred by bullets and shell fragments. “The men were evidently affected and depressed at the sight,” wrote the colonel of the 116th Pennsylvania,
and “murmurings of discontent arose from the ranks.” In the 13th New Jersey, the situation might have turned bleaker still had not one “soldier with a penchant for absurd remarks” noticed a half-buried corpse with its arm sticking up toward the sky and turned it all to black laughter by shouting “Say, boys, see the soldier putting out his hand for back pay.”
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And then, on June 18th, the rains came down.
Oh! How it rains!
wailed a soldier in the 29th Ohio. In the 17th Maine, a soldier remembered that as night fell and the march kept on, “it was with the greatest difficulty that we could distinguish even a faint outline of each other marching side by side; and it was only by continually shouting to our comrades that we were enabled to keep our places in the ranks.” Virginia seemed to have been converted overnight into “one vast expanse of mud” in which “the heavily loaded wagons, and the ponderous wheels of the gun carriages sink,” while “the drivers whip and scream and swear—principally the latter—and infrequently the pressing infantry come in for a share of the maledictions.” If the adjacent fields were level enough, the infantry columns would “take to the fields” and bypass the mired wagons and artillery. But in the gloomy woodlands, “horses and drivers and tugging artillerists … occupy all the available room, and only now and then a common soldier can dodge past.” So when they were not cursing the teamsters and drivers, or being cursed by them, the sodden soldiers cursed their commander. “The boys here damn Hooker and wish for little Mac and any one that says Hooker is as popular as Mac is a damn liar.”
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