Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (35 page)

Soon enough, “orders were received from General Hill” for Anderson to “move forward to Gettysburg,” and just after noon Lee and his staff “quickly followed.” A courier from Ewell caught up with them at a crossroads beyond Cashtown, informing Lee that Ewell was turning down toward Gettysburg. This only brought on a new round of irritation from Lee: he had been repeating to all of his corps commanders that “a general engagement was to be avoided until the arrival of the rest of the army,” and yet here was not only Hill, but Ewell as well, about to leap blindly into the mess up ahead. Lee’s vehemence surprised the courier (who happened to be Ewell’s stepson,
George Campbell Brown), knowing “Lee’s habitual reserve.” But Lee’s reddest wrath was reserved for Stuart, who—from what Lee had gleaned from the newspapers—was on the other side of Meade’s army and coming to no good end.
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It took Lee about two hours to work his way up the
Cashtown Pike, through the thick backward-flowing stream of wounded, stragglers, couriers, and teamsters, until, around two o’clock, he caught up with Powell Hill on
Herr Ridge, and was joined by Harry Heth. “Turning into a grass field on his left he sat on his well-bred iron gray, Traveller, and looked across the fields eastward, through the smoke rising in puffs and long rolls,” wrote a staff officer. “He held his glasses in his hand and looked down the long slope by the Seminary, over the town to the rugged heights beyond.” Rodes’ division was just breaking off its mangled attempt to dislodge the
1st Corps, and Heth begged Lee for permission “to go in … as Rodes appeared to be heavily engaged.” This proposal did not enchant Lee at all. “On arriving at the scene of battle,” Walter Taylor wrote, “General Lee ascertained that the enemy’s infantry and artillery were present in considerable force.” That led him to an immediate conclusion: “I do not wish to bring on a general engagement today,” he declared. “Longstreet is not up.” And without all of his infantry within close reach, Lee wanted to run no risk of clamping down on the 1st Corps, only to discover that it was connected to the rest of the Army of the Potomac.
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That, at least, was Lee’s initial assessment. But the longer he pondered the situation, and the more he and Hill received reports from prisoner interrogations, the more it began to seem that—perhaps—the coveted opportunity
to pinch off pieces of the Federal army and crush them one by one might be exactly what was happening after all. All that was in front of him was the
1st Corps; the
11th Corps was deploying north of the town. But apart from that, there was no word from the prisoners of any other Union infantry within striking distance. If he broke off the action, it would be a bad sign to his own men, that in fact they had been defeated. And while Lee could see that the Yankees were holding their ground pretty stoutly, Harry Heth’s pestering for a second chance was an indication that the two repulses the Confederates had sustained had done nothing to dampen rebel self-confidence. At least for this afternoon, there were also far more Confederates soldiers within easy call than Yankees. Dorsey Pender’s division of Hill’s corps, 6,000 strong, was moving up behind Heth; and Heth still had Pettigrew’s and Brockenbrough’s brigades (another 3,700 or so) unbloodied. Rodes, likewise, still had
Stephen Dodson Ramseur’s brigade in reserve, and both Daniel’s and Doles’ brigades had plenty of fight in them. And there was still the entirety of Jubal Early’s division, closing in somewhere along the road from Heidlersburg. Was this not what he had prayed for?
Had not God delivered the Philistines into his hands?
Who was he, then, to pull back? “It had not been intended to fight a general battle” on July 1st, Lee explained afterward, but a battle began anyway, and it “became a matter of difficulty to withdraw.” When Heth came up a second time asking for permission to attack, Lee had a different answer: “Wait awhile and I will send you word when to go in.”
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He would not have to wait long.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN  

A
BNER
D
OUBLEDAY
was well aware that the
1st Corps had only survived two serious Confederate attacks because of extremely bad Confederate management. They were not likely to give Doubleday such gifts again, nor had they actually left him in a particularly enviable position. The corps had been pulled like taffy along a line that had to protect the
Fairfield Road on the left, the
Cashtown Pike in the middle, and the
Mummasburg Road on the right. Starting at the Fairfield Road, one brigade of Doubleday’s original division was strung thinly across the Herbst farm, barely managing to link hands with the
Iron Brigade in
Herbst’s Woods. On the other side of the Iron Brigade, Doubleday’s other brigade (under
Roy Stone) formed an elbow around the McPherson house and barn, with the 149th and 143rd
Pennsylvania bent backward along the Cashtown Pike. Cutler’s brigade, which had been rejoined by the 95th New York and 14th Brooklyn after their fight over the
railroad cut, permanently abandoned any attempt at holding on to the north extension of
McPherson’s Ridge and were backed up against
Sheads’ Woods, where they connected with
Henry Baxter’s brigade at the Mummasburg Road. Doubleday had only one brigade left in reserve, and Buford’s cavalry brigades, one posted to the north and east of the town and the other below the Fairfield Road, and neither would be able to offer much in the way of assistance if the rebels looked like they would overrun Doubleday’s positions. There was clearly no hope that the
11th Corps could move up on the other side of the Mummasburg Road, because Rodes’ rebels, however unsuccessful they had been on the attack, held the knob of
Oak Hill in greater strength than the 11th Corps could bring up to drive them from it. At least
Doubleday had plenty of artillery. All six batteries of the 1st Corps’ artillery were now up and in place, evenly balanced between 3-inch
Ordnance Rifles for distance and 12-pounder Napoleons for short-range work.
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Doubleday sent off an aide, followed by his adjutant,
Eminel Halstead, to beg reinforcements from Howard, but there were none to spare. “Tell General Doubleday that I have no reinforcements to send him.” At two o’clock, Howard came up to the seminary to see Doubleday’s position for himself, and he frankly advised that if the two big Confederate forces that had attacked earlier came back again in strength, Doubleday would have to “fall back to
Cemetery Hill” and make a final stand there. Sickles and the
3rd Corps were somewhere on their way up from Emmitsburg, and Howard dispatched one his staff captains to find Sickles and hurry him up. But he was pinning his real hopes on the next nearest Union corps—Henry Slocum’s
12th Corps—which had started north from Littlestown and was now at Two Taverns, only five miles to the southeast. If Slocum could make Gettysburg in the next hour and a half, Howard could post the 12th Corps on the right flank of his own corps and firm up the defensive arc that now stretched west and north of Gettysburg. Almost as an afterthought, he sent another courier to Meade with “a report of the state of things as then existing.”
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In lieu of reinforcements, Doubleday’s regiments picked up some strange volunteers. The
9th New York Cavalry was approached by “a young man in citizens’ clothes who said his name was
James Watson” and “expressed a desire to go into the fight.” The troopers of Company A found him a blue sack coat, and “he rode with that company.” The 12th Massachusetts (in Baxter’s brigade) absorbed an enthusiastic local sixteen-year-old named
Charles Weakley on the march up from Emmitsburg, and equipped him with a borrowed “cap, blouse,
musket and roundabout … together with a supply of ammunition.” A twenty-three-year-old “photographist” named
Phineas Branson “went out to meet the Rebels,” as did a “gray-haired man, sixty years of age,” who turned out to fight alongside the 56th Pennsylvania in Cutler’s brigade “and fought with that Regiment all day.” Another “stranger to the regiment” took up a position “about fifteen paces to the rear” of the 16th Maine (in
Gabriel Paul’s brigade) and began “loading and firing independently,” until a lieutenant in Company G, convinced that the “stranger” would end up shooting his men in the back, “kicked him rapidly to the rear.”
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The strangest of all these impromptu fighters was
John Burns, a cantankerous sixty-nine-year-old shoemaker, former town constable, and veteran of the
War of 1812, who showed up behind the 150th Pennsylvania at the
McPherson farm in “a bell-crowned hat, a swallow-tailed coat with rolling collar and brass buttons and a buff vest,” and an 1812-vintage flintlock musket “on his shoulder.” Burns served with the Union Army as a teamster in 1861,
so it was not at all out of character for him to assume that this was an opportunity to impress both the neighborhood and the Army of the Potomac with his martial skill. He had showed up earlier behind
Lysander Cutler’s brigade, but Cutler, who wondered what on earth had dropped this apparition on them, shooed him off. Burns wandered over the
Cashtown Pike and made straightaway for an officer of the 150th Pennsylvania, demanding to “fight with our regiment.” The officer pointed Burns to the 150th’s colonel, who wickedly suggested that Burns might find things more interesting if he “went into the wood” and tendered his services to the
Iron Brigade (and became
their
problem). Relentlessly, Burns tracked down the lieutenant colonel of the 7th Wisconsin,
John Callis, who advised this village Don Quixote to “go to the rear or you’ll get hurt.” Up came all of Burns’ mock-offended bravado: “No, sir, if you won’t let me fight in your regiment I will fight alone … There are three hundred cowards back in that town who ought to come out of their cellars and fight, and I will show you that there is one man in Gettysburg who is not afraid.” Finally, Callis shrugged: if that was what Burns wanted, the lieutenant colonel of the 7th Wisconsin had better things to do than argue with garrulous old shoemakers. A sergeant found a
rifle captured from Archer’s brigade to replace Burns’ flintlock, and put Burns on the line, “as cool as any veteran among us.”
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It is difficult to piece together Robert E. Lee’s activities once he arrived from Cashtown that afternoon, but his injunction to Harry Heth to “wait awhile” makes sense if Lee’s mind was moving toward a massive, coordinated assault which would begin with the arrival of Early’s division on the
Heidlersburg Road, and then add Doles’ brigade and the rest of Rodes’ division, and finally Dorsey Pender’s division on the Cashtown Pike. Early, however, was taking his time. He had more miles to cover than Rodes had that morning, and while Lee waited, he inspected Ewell’s deployment, all the way over to where Doles’ skirmishers were popping away at the
11th Corps, “observing that the men were very much wearied … ordered the band of the 4th
Georgia to play for the men.”
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Finally, by 2:30, Early’s column arrived at a small intersection a mile north of Gettysburg, where the neatly tended farms offered “an open undulating” view straight down to where “we could see the battle raging on our right.” A courier from Ewell carried Lee’s directions to “attack at once,” and the sharp-tongued Early rode up “towards the front.” John Gordon’s Georgia brigade was in the lead that afternoon, and Early turned Gordon off to the right to link up with Doles (whom Lee now shifted eastward, to cement the link) and start skirmishing in earnest. Early then posted Harry Hays’
Louisiana brigade astride the Heidlersburg Road, and split
Isaac Avery’s
North Carolina brigade out to the left beyond Hays (keeping Extra Billy Smith’s
Virginians in column on the road as a reserve). Lastly, he directed the sixteen guns in his division artillery battalion into place, and “in quick sharp tones” ordered them to unlimber and open up. The guns, in turn, were the signal for Gordon and Hays to attack “at the double-quick.” Watching from Oak Hill, Campbell Brown remembered it as “one of the most warlike & animated spectacles I ever looked on—Gordon & Hays … sweeping everything before them … towards the Seminary [Pennsylvania College] & the town.”
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