Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (27 page)

O’Neal did not get very far. A rebel orderly came pelting after him and pulled him back to Pettigrew, who “reexamined me, asking whether there were any Yankees in town, when I left town and whether I had any newspapers.” O’Neal knew nothing about Yankees in Gettysburg, and so a second time Pettigrew released him. But this time, Pettigrew demanded that O’Neal ride with him into Gettysburg and go no farther out along the pike. They jogged only a short distance farther when, perched upon a steep ridgeline between them and the town, Pettigrew saw “about a half-dozen mounted men”—Union cavalry. “I understood you to say there were no Yankees in [the] town,” Pettigrew said irritably. “There are mounted men!” O’Neal was as surprised as Pettigrew, since there had been no Federal cavalrymen in Gettysburg when he left on his rounds that morning. More bad news soon came back to Pettigrew. Two Confederates—Heth’s division surgeon,
E. B. Spence, and Longstreet’s spy, Henry Harrison—had taken themselves ahead of Pettigrew that morning into town, Surgeon Spence to “procure some medical supplies” at “the first drug-store” he could find, and Harrison to look around the general area. Both of them were there when Buford’s troopers came riding up from below town, and both bolted back to warn Pettigrew “that a superior force of the enemy were moving on Gettysburg.” A few of Pettigrew’s officers claimed they could hear “drums beating on the farther side of town.” That meant infantry, and infantry very likely could mean the
Army of the Potomac.
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Bearing in mind Heth’s warning “not to bring on an engagement,” Pettigrew ordered a pullback for four miles, beyond
Marsh Creek, and went
to report to Heth, whom he found at Cashtown together with Powell Hill. According to Heth’s account in 1877, Hill dismissed any concerns about Union forces in or around Gettysburg. “The only force at Gettysburg is cavalry, probably a detachment of observation.” Hill had just come from Lee’s temporary headquarters up the road at Greenwood, and Lee had assured him that “the information he has from his scouts” indicated that “the enemy are still at Middleburg, and have not yet struck their tents.” (Although there were four Middleburgs or Middletowns along the general path of Lee’s invasion, Hill probably meant Middleburg,
Maryland
, just behind
Pipe Creek.)
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This assurance was all that Harry Heth needed to hear, and he promptly asked Hill if he might take his entire division back into Gettysburg the next day, July 1st, to “get those
shoes!” Did Hill have any objection? “None in the world,” Hill replied. Pettigrew was aghast at Hill’s nonchalant attitude, and he tried to get one of his staffers, Lt.
Louis Young, who knew Hill, to “tell General Hill what I had seen while re-connoitering.” The Union cavalry’s “movements were undoubtedly those of well-trained troops and not those of a home guard,” and Pettigrew was not sure that there might not be Yankee infantry somewhere close behind them. But Hill scoffed at Young’s intervention: he “still could not believe that any portion of the
Army of the Potomac was up; and in emphatic words, expressed the hope that it was, as this was the place he wanted it to be.” No wonder that, thirty-three years later, an accusing John Mosby believed on these grounds that Hill sent Heth “to Gettysburg just for an adventure.”
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But Hill may not have been as unconcerned as Mosby and Heth believed. Rumors flickered through Hill’s corps that “the enemy [are] reported in front,” with “a fight expected tomorrow.” Hill, in fact, sent off a courier to Lee to apprise “the general commanding” that “Pettigrew had encountered the enemy at Gettysburg (principally cavalry), but in what force he could not determine.” He also took care to order Richard Anderson’s division to close up on Cashtown in the morning, and sent a courier to Ewell, warning him not to move down on Gettysburg until Hill could “discover what was in my front.” In the larger scheme of Lee’s recall order, Hill was going to have to move on Gettysburg anyway on July 1st, if only to vacate the area around Cashtown for Longstreet, and to secure the Gettysburg crossroads to allow Ewell to move within connecting distance of Longstreet and Hill. And since Harry Heth’s division was first on the line of march, with its pickets already at
Marsh Creek, his job would be what Stuart’s normally was: “to ascertain what force was at Gettysburg, and if he found infantry opposed to him, to report the fact immediately, without forcing an engagement.”
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It was the role of pickets to act as a trip wire, alerting the rest of a command in camp or at rest to the probing presence of an enemy. For that reason, infantry units whose officers liked going by the book would post two or three “concentric lines” of pickets, “disposed in
a fan-shaped order
.” The outermost line could be posted as much as three miles in advance of an encampment, with each outpost composed of four men not “farther apart than 600 paces,” or farther in advance of the next line than “300 paces.” The third line would be sited another “200 paces” behind the second, so that a reasonably thick curtain of pickets could snare and contain any but the most large-scale attack. An officer in overall charge of the pickets was responsible for keeping small patrols moving along the outpost lines (if only to keep the pickets awake and alert).
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Cavalry pickets (or, to use their own term,
videttes
) had more flexibility in setting distances, and
John Buford would need to push that flexibility to the limit. Only two of the three brigades of his cavalry division were with him when he rode into Gettysburg at midday on June 30th (the division’s Reserve Brigade was lagging behind with the division’s supply train at Mechanicsburg, Maryland, four miles south of Emmitsburg), so he was compelled to spread his vidette posts—about 700 men—very thinly. They prescribed a wide arc reaching from the
Black Horse Tavern, south and west of Gettysburg on the
Fairfield Road, then along
Knoxlyn Ridge to the west, then across the Mummasburg and
Carlisle Roads to the north, and finally ending east of the town on the York road. Buford used the point where the
Cashtown Pike crossed the Knoxlyn Ridge as a rough dividing line, posting details from the
8th New York Cavalry and the
8th Illinois Cavalry along the line that ran from Black Horse Tavern to the Cashtown Pike, and then squads of the
12th Illinois Cavalry,
6th New York Cavalry,
17th Pennsylvania Cavalry, and the
9th New York Cavalry along the outpost lines running back to the north and east of Gettysburg. Buford put
William Sackett, the colonel of the 9th New York, in overall charge of the outposts for the night, and set up his own headquarters in the
Eagle Hotel in Gettysburg. The rest of his two brigades made up camp on the west side of the town, just beyond the fields surrounding Pennsylvania College.
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It was a jumpy night, and the lowering clouds “poured down a drenching rain.” Buford’s videttes were “in sight” of the Confederate outposts Pettigrew had left along
Marsh Creek, and he was certain that he would be facing all of “A.P. Hill’s corps, composed of Anderson, Heth, and Pender.”
W. C. Hazleton, a captain in the 8th Illinois Cavalry, “having charge of a reserve picket-post out on a turnpike near a farmer’s house,” was invited (with his pickets) to dinner, but had to refuse, being “on duty.” The old farmer offered to stand watch for them while they ate, and when Hazelton apologized and turned
that offer down, too, the amiable farmer “came out and chatted with us till late at night.” Before darkness fell, a patrol from the 9th New York collided with a squad of Confederate cavalry on the northeast-running Hunterstown road, and captured one of them before the rest took off. The prisoner turned out to be one of Ewell’s corps, which hinted at yet another problem brewing to the north. Later, a farmer was passed through the videttes of the 17th Pennsylvania, north of Gettysburg, in order to warn the 17th’s colonel that the rebel Ewell’s corps was somewhere just to the north and intended marching on Gettysburg the next day.
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If it really was rebel infantry coming his way, there was no point for Buford to even think of a mounted action like Brandy Station.
William Gamble’s brigade had only “about 1,600” men for any fight Buford was contemplating; Devin may have had another 1,600 men available. Besides, massed infantry fire would riddle a light cavalry charge before any horseman even came close. At best, he could dismount his cavalry and fight them as infantry with their
carbines. But the vast mix of carbines his troopers were armed with—top-loading Merrills, lever-action Sharps, Burnsides, and Gallaghers, and break-open Smiths—lacked both the punch and range of infantry
rifles, and the need to detail horse holders while the men were dismounted would take one out of every four of his available men off the firing line. Even worse, both “men and horses” were “fagged out” by the time they arrived in Gettysburg; he could get no fodder for the horses and “Early’s people seized every shoe and nail,” so he had neither materials nor facilities for reshoeing them. Buford could screen for Reynolds; and if Reynolds wanted to secure Gettysburg before the rebels could, he could even fight a small-scale delaying action to give Reynolds some time. But if John Reynolds wanted Gettysburg, he needed to get the 1st Corps and whatever other infantry was at hand up from
Marsh Creek the next morning to do the work himself.
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The one advantage Buford held was that he knew what was likely coming against him in the morning. Powell Hill and Harry Heth did not; or at least, Hill was unsure enough to warn Heth not to get tangled in a fight with Union forces from which he could not extricate himself safely, and decided to authorize what would have otherwise been a signal of serious action ahead—a tot of
whiskey to any man in the corps who wanted one. Orders went out from Heth to have the division ready to march at five the next morning, and given that Pettigrew’s brigade had done the hard work the previous day, the lead brigades on the march would be a newly organized brigade of
Mississippians (plus one
North Carolina regiment) under President Davis’ stuffy and ambitious nephew,
Joseph Robert Davis, and
James J. Archer’s mixed brigade of
Tennesseans and Alabamians. Archer was a Marylander, a Princeton graduate and a lawyer, but one who abandoned law for a second career in the old
Army. In battle, he was a “little gamecock” who “had no sense of fear,” and at Fredericksburg Archer led the
5th Alabama Battalion in a counterattack that saved the Confederate hold on
Prospect Hill. But his officers found him an “enigmatical man … very noncommunicative, and … for a time, one of the most intensely-hated of men.” He was neither “a politician or aristocrat,” which went some way toward explaining why Harry Heth, an intellectual lightweight but a pet of Lee’s, had been promoted over Archer’s head to division command.

Pettigrew’s brigade would fall in behind Archer and Davis, followed by Heth’s least reliable brigade,
John Mercer Brockenbrough’s four
Virginia regiments. Brockenbrough had begun the war as the colonel of one of these regiments, and inherited command of the brigade when its commander,
Charles W. Field, was taken out of action in 1862. A wealthy but rough-looking Virginia planter, Brockenbrough had never managed the brigade well, especially at Fredericksburg, and Lee briefly returned him to regimental command and promoted Harry Heth to put some spirit back into the brigade. But when Heth went up to division command in the post-Chancellorsville reshuffle, Brockenbrough, by default, resumed command of the brigade (although without any recommendation from Lee about promotion to brigadier general). The four regiments that made up Brockenbrough’s brigade had been “sadly reduced in numbers” and in morale, and one man in the 47th Virginia wrote fearfully that “we know not what will befall us for some of our soldiers have done mity bad.”
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Joseph Davis’ brigade suffered from a similar crisis of confidence. The 2nd and 11th
Mississippi had been organized in 1861 under a galaxy of local worthies (one of whom was William C. Falkner, the great-grandfather of novelist William Faulkner) and had gone through blood and fire together from the Peninsula through Antietam. But after Antietam, they were spliced together with two newly raised regiments, topped with an inexperienced brigadier general in the form of Joe Davis, and sent off to the backwater of North Carolina until after Chancellorsville. Davis had been a lawyer before the war, and briefly colonel of the 10th Mississippi. Most of his service had been as an aide on the staff of his president-uncle, and the principal force behind his promotion to brigade command was simon-pure nepotism. The Confederate Senate had actually rejected President Davis’ nomination of his nephew for promotion; the president bought off a few objectors with promises of patronage, and Joe Davis got his star. It was harder, though, to buy the affections of a brigade where two of the regiments mistrusted not only the commander, but the reliability of two of its as yet untested units. What was worse for Joe Davis was that, as his brigade shuffled out into the Cashtown Pike to follow Archer’s brigade, they were minus one of their two veteran outfits—the 11th Mississippi had been detailed to guard the corps supply train, still parked at Cashtown.
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The “misty rain” continued till dawn, but as Heth’s division fell regiment by regiment into the Cashtown Pike, the rain stopped, leaving a fleecy, light cloud cover and temperatures already in the 70s. The “rains during the night had laid the dust,” recalled one of the officers Pettigrew had left on the Confederate picket line. “I never saw troops in better spirits, everybody seemed lively.” A brigade at the head of a column of march would usually have a small advance party of skirmishers and axemen (or “pioneers”) to clear obstructions, fanning out in open order and about “a thousand paces” ahead, accompanied by skirmishers along the flanks of the advancing column, and led by a mounted staff officer. Most of the division assumed that this morning’s movement was simply one more part in the army’s overall concentration of forces, and John Brockenbrough told one of his colonels,
William Christian of the 55th Virginia, that “we probably might meet some of Ewells command or Stuarts.” But Heth sent a staffer down the column to the brigade and regimental commanders, warning them that there might be a fight up the road and convincing Brockenbrough that they were all surely in for fireworks. The colonel of the 13th Alabama “rode back to the colorbearer” of the regiment “and ordered him to uncase the colors, the first intimation that we had that we were about to engage the enemy.” Otherwise, as one of the crew of the four-gun
Fredericksburg Artillery remembered, “we moved forward leisurely smoking and chatting as we rode along.”
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