Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (41 page)

If these men were going to be rallied, Otis Howard would have to do it personally. The first 11th Corps regiment to work its way up to the gatehouse was the 45th New York. At its head was the disheartened
Georg von Amsberg, who muttered something to Howard “in German—his English was not at his command just then.” Howard may not have understood the words, but he caught the meaning clearly enough, and standing at a “stone wall, near the edge of the city,” Howard called out to the regiment’s color sergeant, “Sergeant, plant your flag down there in that stone wall.” The sergeant looked at him dumbly, then collected his wits and said, “All right, if you will go with me, I will!” And so the one-armed Howard grasped the flag with his remaining hand, tucking the staff under his stump, and “the regiment seeing the General with difficulty carrying their colors under his one arm, raised a hearty shout and followed upon the double quick” to set the flag in the wall.

Adelbert Ames, whose brigade had been crushed on
Blocher’s Knoll, came up next, and remarked almost as woefully that Barlow was probably dead and Barlow’s division was “all cut to pieces.”
That’s no way to talk
, Howard curtly reined him in: “Do what you can, Ames, to gather the fragments and extend the line to the right.” A colonel with “a very wilted and drooping appearance” ignored Howard’s order; Howard “promptly put him under
arrest and put another officer in charge of the regiment.” Gradually, as they came dribbling in, Howard posted the remains of the
11th Corps to the right of
Orland Smith’s brigade, so that they all formed a north-facing crescent around Cemetery Hill, backed up by the artillery and protected in front by what was left of the 25th Ohio—some sixty men—as skirmishers “in the outskirts of the town.”

Otis Howard had made as many mistakes as anyone else that day, but he did two things which were incontestably right: he fixed on Cemetery Hill as the point to hold from his first moment at Gettysburg and he made the wrecked debris of two infantry corps, who should have been reduced to nervelessness, stop and dig in. There was “no hurry, no confusion in his mind,” wrote one admiring veteran of the 25th Ohio. And no more Chancellorsvilles, either. It was Otis Howard’s finest hour, and he was taking the first steps on the path that would make him (in
William Tecumseh Sherman’s estimate) a corps commander of “the utmost skill, nicety, and precision” by the end of the war. “I have seen many men in action,” wrote a journalist afterward, “but never so imperturbably cool as this General of the Eleventh Corps.”
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Otis Howard’s hour, however, would prove, almost literally, to be not much more than an hour.
Winfield Scott Hancock, bearing George Meade’s directive “to assume command,” arrived on Cemetery Hill sometime in the late afternoon, although the estimates of exactly
when
he showed up vary to the point of suspicion. Thirteen years after the battle, Hancock insisted that he rode up to the cemetery gatehouse “by 3:30 P.M., having had over two hours in which to travel the thirteen miles” between Gettysburg and Taneytown. What Hancock wanted, in the years after the battle, was the credit for having taken command and organized Union resistance on Cemetery Hill all by himself, and saving the
Army of the Potomac from having the insult of rout added to the injury of defeat. But an arrival this early would have put Hancock on Cemetery Hill even before Early’s attack on Blocher’s Knoll, and Hancock undermined his own claim by describing how he found “our troops retreating in disorder and confusion from the town” and “General Howard … endeavoring to stop the retreat of his troops, many of whom were passing over the hill and down the Baltimore pike.” Hancock’s own first dispatch back to Meade is timed at 5:25, and refers to Hancock’s having “arrived here an hour since.” Organizing “a position in the cemetery” had been well
under way, Hancock added, which could not have been so if Hancock had arrived any earlier than five o’clock. Howard actually noted Hancock’s arrival time as “4 p.m.,” and
Charles Howard, likewise, fixed Hancock’s arrival “at about 4:25,” so that Hancock found Charles Howard’s one-armed brother “already occupying Cemetery Ridge.” But even an arrival time of 4:25 may be too early, since the last of the
1st Corps refugees do not seem to have reached Cemetery Hill until sometime between five and six o’clock.
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Whatever the exact timing of Hancock’s arrival, Howard was looking for Slocum, not Hancock, at that moment, and he was even more surprised when Hancock proceeded to announce that “he had been ordered to assume command.”
Command?
Hancock later insisted that Howard “acquiesced in my assumption of command” and from that point “gave no orders save to the troops of his own corps.” Hancock’s chief of staff even added that Howard “was pleased that Hancock had come,” and declined Hancock’s offer to show him the written directive from Meade. But this was not how Howard remembered the moment. Very much to the contrary, he was “deeply mortified,” principally because Howard enjoyed a healthy amount of seniority over Hancock in the Volunteer service, and as far as Howard was concerned, Meade’s orders only designated Hancock “to represent Meade as Butterfield, the chief of staff, would have done on the field of battle.”

But there was more behind Howard’s mortification at Meade “superseding me in command of the field by a junior in rank” than just the technicalities of seniority: it would be missed by no one that an order to Hancock to supersede Howard was a gesture of political contempt for the army’s senior Republican. In the ranks of the
11th Corps, Hancock’s appearance was interpreted as something even more ominous: that Hancock had been sent by Meade “to withdraw his forces, and not attempt to hold the position he had chosen.” (This, said an officer in the 25th Ohio, “was talked about and believed by nearly all the officers in the corps.”)
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Rather than happily surrendering responsibility to Hancock on Cemetery Hill,
Abner Doubleday remembered that Howard immediately burst out in protest: “Why, Hancock, you cannot give any orders here! I am in command and rank you!” Hancock had evidently anticipated that this would not be easy, and replied, “I am aware of that, General, but I have written orders in my pocket from General Meade which I will show you if you wish to see them.” Howard would not budge: “No. I do not doubt your word, General Hancock, but you can give no orders while I am here.” By now, the silliness of arguing over precedence while two badly mauled infantry corps were struggling to dig themselves into Cemetery Hill began to dawn on both Howard and Hancock, although it is not clear which one was the first to offer a face-saving compromise. Abner Doubleday’s chief of staff later claimed that Hancock
(who had nothing but his own staffers around him to enforce his authority) gave in first, saying, “Very well, General Howard, I will second any order that you have to give,” as if duplicating orders was sufficient to preserve the authority of each general. But he also added a comment which must have chilled Howard. “General Meade has also directed me to select a field on which to fight this battle in rear of
Pipe Creek”—something which appeared nowhere in Meade’s orders to Hancock and which no one afterward would admit having heard Meade say. What pulled the stinger on that warning was Hancock’s hasty assurance that he was willing to endorse Howard’s stand on Cemetery Hill as “the strongest position by nature upon which to fight a battle that I ever saw, and if it meets your approbation I will select this as the battlefield.”
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Less than half a mile to the east, Hancock could see the thickly wooded eminence of another hill, named for the farmer, Henry Culp, whose house and barns lay at its north foot. Howard had no opinion that
Culp’s Hill could be turned into a second artillery platform to match Cemetery Hill. But Culp’s Hill did overlook the
Baltimore Pike, which linked Gettysburg to the railhead at Westminster, Maryland. If he was indeed going to make a fight of it here, he would need that pike secured. So Hancock took it upon himself to order the woozy remnants of the
1st Corps over to Culp’s Hill, with Stevens’ 5th Maine battery posted to cover the saddle between Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill. Hancock sent his report back to Meade with
William Mitchell, “informing him that I could hold the position until nightfall, and that I thought that the place to fight our battle.”
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Otis Howard was writing to Meade, too, although his message was a complaint about Hancock’s usurpation of his seniority, the opening gun in an ongoing war of words between Howard and Hancock which lasted for the rest of their lives. “I believe I have handled these two corps to-day from a little past 11 until 4,” Howard complained, and all that Hancock did after that was to assist “in carrying out orders which I had already issued.” Hancock’s assertion that he had been sent to rescue the 1st and
11th Corps from disaster “has mortified me and will disgrace me.” In an army with a heavy McClellanite tilt at the top, and stacked against a corps commander with as enviable a reputation as Hancock’s, this was a debate the overstigmatized Howard was doomed to lose. But looked at closely, it was Howard, and not Hancock, who saved Cemetery Hill as the Army of the Potomac’s redoubt, and who (in all likelihood) carried out John Reynolds’ determination to compel George Meade to fight at Gettysburg.
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In the gray twilight, Henry Slocum’s
12th Corps finally swung into view on the Baltimore Pike, “arriving there in the evening.” Slocum would never adequately
explain why he had waited for three hours at Two Taverns, within earshot of what could have been heard as a major battle, before coming up to Gettysburg. “In the morning, or very soon afterwards, we heard rumblings of artillery,” wrote one man in the 27th Indiana, and the “firing early became so distinct and rapid that many were apprehensive that the decisive battle … might be on.” If Slocum had pressed on, “the distance … might have been traversed by noon.” But Slocum was operating under the
Pipe Creek Circular. As
Abner Doubleday put it, Slocum was anxious not to “antagonize the plans of the General-in-Chief,” and he would not take the chance of irritating Meade by leaving Two Taverns until Meade’s countermand arrived around four o’clock. But once on the road, Slocum pounded ahead till “men fell out of the ranks in squads by the roadside for a brief rest.” The advance guard of the 12th Corps finally reached Cemetery Hill around six o’clock, to the “notes of the bugle and the inspiring strains of bands.” One of Slocum’s divisions (under the onetime territorial governor of “Bleeding Kansas,” the six-foot, six-inch
John White Geary) was posted on the left of Cemetery Hill, where a gentle ridgeline dangled southward, and the other alongside the gnarled bits of the
1st Corps who had been sent to
Culp’s Hill. In the process, Slocum’s provost guard spread out across the Baltimore Pike to begin snagging nearly 1,500 stragglers and returning them to the ranks, while
George Stannard’s nine-months’
Vermont brigade and the 7th Indiana (on detached duty guarding the 1st Corps ammunition train) showed up to put some modest weight back into the 1st Corps.
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The arrival of Henry Slocum and the 12th Corps put a practical end to the jostling between Howard and Hancock, since Slocum outranked them both. Moreover, Meade had instructed Hancock to defer to Slocum when the 12th Corps finally arrived—although, even then, Hancock could not resist trying to take charge of Slocum’s lead division before Slocum himself galloped up to the gatehouse in the darkening twilight. (In his after-action report, a tight-lipped Slocum was at pains to claim that his first division was actually deployed “agreeably to suggestion from General Howard.”) Hancock had briefly worried that “the enemy will mass in town and make an effort to take this position,” and Doubleday was frantic that “there was nothing to prevent the enemy from encircling and capturing us all, for every division of the Confederate forces … was either in line of battle or very near the town.” But as the last light died away, “no very serious demonstrations were made against our new position.” Otto von Fritsch remembered that “everything remained quiet,” while “plenty of cartridges were distributed, and, now and then, a box of crackers was carried to a starved regiment.”
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In the twilight, Confederate skirmishers began peppering the Union positions on Cemetery Hill with sporadic fire. Union soldiers began knocking
down “headstones and iron fence” in the cemetery to clear fields of fire and make room for the artillery. But even that died away after dark, and in “a lower room of the gate house of the Gettysburg Cemetery … six or seven generals” gathered around a barrel with a “burning tallow candle stuck in the neck of a bottle on top of it.” They listened “to the accounts of those who had been in the battle of the day … discussing what might have been and finally all agreeing in the hope that General Meade … would decide to fight the battle of the morrow on the ground on which we then were.” This impromptu debriefing broke up, and the commanders wandered back to their units to “lay down, wrapt in our cloaks, with the troops among the gravestones.” None of them afterward remembered commenting on the irony of their position—whether the Army of the Potomac had been digging its own grave on that hill. There was nothing but “profound stillness in the graveyard, broken by no sound” but the snoring of the exhausted men, the nervous pawing of the artillery horses, “and sudden rumblings mysteriously floating on the air from a distance all around.”
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  CHAPTER THIRTEEN