Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg (3 page)

This confrontation introduces the first of many supposed “myths” about Gettysburg that continue to provoke arguments to this day. Generations of historians—and battlefield guides—have said that the advance brigade of Heth's division was heading to Gettysburg to find a rumored supply of shoes in town. Young people especially are captivated by the story that the battle of Gettysburg started because of shoes. Recently, however, some historians have debunked this anecdote as a myth. There was no shoe factory or warehouse in Gettysburg, they point out; the twenty-two shoemakers listed in the 1860 census as living in
Gettysburg were barely sufficient to make or repair the footwear worn by county residents. And if there
had
been a surplus of shoes in town, they would have been cleaned out by Brigadier General John Gordon's brigade of Major General Jubal Early's division when they came through Gettysburg five days earlier.

The shoe story claim these historians, was concocted by General Heth (pronounced Heath) to explain why he blundered into a firefight contrary to Lee's orders not to bring on a battle until the army was concentrated. Heth said that he thought the Union pickets he encountered on the Chambersburg Pike were merely local militia who could be brushed aside, so he kept going to “get those shoes.”

The revisionists have made one good point: there were no shoes in Gettysburg except those worn by the inhabitants still in town (many had fled). But that does not necessarily discredit the shoe story. The Confederates may well have
thought
there were shoes; several of them later said so. In any case, the anecdote serves an important purpose because it illustrates that the battle of Gettysburg began as a “meeting engagement,” or “encounter engagement.” Neither commander intended to fight at Gettysburg; the battle built up step by step from that first encounter on the Chambersburg Pike. Let us concede that the shoe story can neither be proved nor disproved; let us follow the current fashion and call Heth's advance a “reconnaissance
in force” to probe toward the enemy; the end result was the same.

For these were no militia that Heth's infantry ran into; they were troopers from John Buford's cavalry division who had fought so well at Brandy Station three weeks earlier. Scouting ahead of the rest of the Union army two of Buford's brigades (about 2,700 men) had entered Gettysburg the day before and discovered signs of the enemy on the road several miles to the northwest. Buford sized up the terrain of ridges and hills around Gettysburg, and the road network that would facilitate concentration of the army there. He sent word south to Major General John Reynolds, commander of the nearest Union infantry (First Corps) near Emmitsburg, Maryland, that he intended to hold those ridges as long as he could against the enemy force he sensed was coming. He asked Reynolds to get his infantry there as soon as possible in the morning. Thus it was Buford who made the crucial decision that led to the battle being fought at Gettysburg. For that distinction he earned one of the statues on the battlefield, portraying Buford on foot with binoculars in hand looking toward the northwest. There are seven equestrian statues at Gettysburg, all of infantry commanders (including army commanders Lee and Meade); the most prominent Union cavalry commander is memorialized in bronze on foot. Go figure.

The bronze Buford stands on McPherson Ridge (named after a local man whose farm was located there—no relation to me) a mile and three-quarters back toward Gettysburg from where Lieutenant Jones fired the first shot. Jones sent back word of his encounter, and then skirmished with the enemy in a fighting withdrawal to Buford's first line on Herr Ridge. This line held for a time as Heth, recognizing that he was not confronting militia, deployed two brigades to run over these pesky Yankee horsemen. Before this could happen, those horsemen pulled back across Willoughby Run to McPherson Ridge, where Buford had established his main line, with one brigade south of the Pike and the other north of it. Let's walk east across a swale south of the white barn (the only structure of the McPherson farm that survives) to the slight ridgeline marked by several monuments and cannons along Reynolds Avenue. This was the final line held by Buford's cavalry.

Heth's division numbered seven thousand men, but he deployed only half of them. Most of Buford's cavalry fought dismounted, a tactic increasingly prevalent during the Civil War, when the greater range and accuracy of the new rifled muskets over the old smoothbores made mounted charges against infantry suicidally obsolete. One of every four troopers held four horses about two hundred yards to the rear while his comrades fought. Although outnumbered, Buford's men had one
advantage. Like most Union horse soldiers, they were armed by this stage of the war with Sharps single-shot breechloading carbines. Infantrymen carried single-shot muzzle-loading rifled muskets. These weapons had a longer range and greater hitting power than cavalry carbines, but even a good infantryman could get off only two or three shots a minute while a trooper armed with a breechloader could fire twice as fast.

As Heth built up more and more power, Buford climbed to the cupola of the Lutheran seminary building (still there) on the next ridgeline, appropriately named Seminary Ridge. He looked anxiously to the south for Reynolds and his promised reinforcements. As Buford's tired troopers were about to give way, Reynolds came galloping across the fields, followed at double time by two brigades of his leading division. One of them was the famous Iron Brigade, containing one Indiana, one Michigan, and three Wisconsin regiments, and considered the toughest unit in the army. As Reynolds personally led this brigade into line at about 10:30
A.M.
, he suddenly slumped in the saddle and fell from his horse with a bullet through the base of his skull—the first and highest-ranking general killed at Gettysburg. A small monument on the east side of the Herbst Woods (now usually called McPherson's Woods or sometimes Reynolds’ Woods) marks the spot where Reynolds fell.

A quarter-mile to the north, across the road and next to Buford's monument, is a large equestrian statue of Reynolds. It introduces us to another dispute about a supposed Gettysburg myth. Two of the hooves of Reynolds's horse are raised. Generations of battlefield guides have explained that this pose conforms to a pattern indicating that the rider was killed in the battle. If one hoof is off the ground, the rider was wounded—and that is true of the equestrian monument to Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, who was wounded at Gettysburg. If all four of the horse's feet are on the ground, the rider was unharmed in the battle—and that also is true of all the rest of Gettysburg's monuments (save the newest one—of which more later). Some park personnel and guides, however, now debunk this “myth” as well, and insist that the relationship between hooves and the rider's fate is purely coincidental. But that strikes me as unlikely. For centuries a convention has existed among sculptors of equestrian statues to symbolize the rider's fate in battle by the placement of the horse's hooves. So I will continue to tell that story about the equestrian monuments at Gettysburg.

After Reynolds's death, Major General Abner Doubleday took command of the Union First Corps. (Doubleday did
not
invent baseball—that indeed is a myth.) The Iron Brigade counterattacked one of
Heth's brigades through the Herbst Woods and down the slope to Willoughby Run. These woods were open and parklike at the time, even more than they are today after the Park Service's effort to cull the woods to something resembling their 1863 character. The yelling bluecoats smashed into the right flank of Brigadier General James M. Archer's brigade of Tennesseans and Alabamians, capturing many of the men plus Archer himself, the first of Lee's generals to suffer this ignominy. Grinning, a big Union private named Patrick Maloney escorted a scowling Archer to the rear. Behind the lines they ran into General Doubleday, who had known Archer well in the prewar army. “Archer! I'm glad to see you,” said Doubleday as he strode forward to shake hands. “Well, I'm not glad to see you by a damn sight,” growled Archer as he turned away.

Just north of the Iron Brigade fought Colonel Roy Stone's “Bucktail Brigade” of three Pennsylvania regiments, including the 150th. That morning, one of those twenty-two shoemakers listed in the census, seventy-two-year-old John Burns, left home and headed out to the scene of fighting on McPherson's farm. Incensed by this invasion of his town, he picked up a musket from a wounded soldier of the 150th and fought part of the day with that regiment and later with the Iron Brigade. Burns sustained three wounds and became a local legend in Gettysburg for the
remaining nine years of his life. After his death, Burns gained the distinction of being the oldest person to be memorialized by a Civil War monument, which stands on Stone Avenue halfway between the monuments to the 150th Pennsylvania and Seventh Wisconsin.

About the time Archer was captured, other Union regiments trapped and captured a couple hundred Mis-sissippians in the cut of an unfinished railroad bed just north of the Chambersburg Pike. In March 1997 a ranger from Yellowstone National Park was on a busman's holiday, touring the Gettysburg battlefield. As he walked along this railroad cut, he noticed bones protruding from the bank where it had been washed away by heavy winter rains. They turned out to be the remains of a soldier who was killed by a massive head wound in the fighting there on July 1. No clothing or anything else that might have identified him as Union or Confederate could be found.

Four months later, in a solemn ceremony on the 134th anniversary of his death, this unknown soldier was interred in the national cemetery with full military honors. I was privileged to pronounce his eulogy and to receive from the U.S. Marine Corps unit that served as his honor guard the American flag that had covered his casket before burial. The most notable feature of this event was the attendance of two genuine
Civil War widows—the last of their kind—women who had been married as teenagers in the 1920s to elderly Civil War veterans. Both were now in their nineties, and watched the ceremonies from their wheelchairs. One was white, from Alabama; the other was black, from Colorado.

Back to July 1, 1863. By early afternoon, Heth's attack had spent itself. Union lines had held firm along the Chambersburg Pike. Meanwhile two divisions of the Eleventh Corps had followed the First Corps onto the field and taken up positions in open fields due north of town to confront two divisions of Ewell's corps reported to be approaching from that direction.

Neither Lee nor Meade was yet at Gettysburg. But, contrary to their intentions, what had started as a skirmish had developed into a full-scale battle. Lee was riding toward Gettysburg that morning. As he approached a gap in the South Mountain range at Cashtown, eight miles northwest of Gettysburg, the alarming sound of artillery reached his ears. Puzzled, and frustrated by the lack of cavalry to keep him informed of what was happening, he spurred forward. “I cannot think what has become of Stuart,” he said in irritation. “I am in ignorance of what we have in front of us here. It may be the whole Federal army, it may be only a detachment. If it is the whole Federal force, we must fight a battle here.” Lee bid farewell to Longstreet, whose corps brought up
the rear, and rode ahead toward the guns of Gettysburg to find out what was going on.

Lee arrived a little after 2:00
P.M.
to find Heth preparing for a new attack. From a mile to the north came additional sounds of battle. One of Ewell's divisions had arrived and gone into action against the right flank of the Union First Corps, and a second was preparing to attack the Eleventh Corps position. Another of A. P. Hill's divisions, commanded by Major General Dorsey Pender, was ready to go in behind Heth. Lee was still reluctant to commit these divisions until Longstreet, several miles away, could bring up his corps. But the battle was out of Lee's hands. The four Confederate divisions at Gettysburg outnumbered the five Union infantry divisions (Confederate divisions averaged 70 percent larger than Union divisions). As Ewell's attack developed, Lee finally told Hill to go in with everything he had.

We next head north on park roads, Reynolds Avenue and Buford Avenue, across open fields where the Union First Corps still held firm as the long, bloody afternoon of July 1 wore on. Our objective is the Eternal Light Peace Memorial crowning Oak Hill where McPherson Ridge and Seminary Ridge come together. This striking monument was dedicated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to “Peace Eternal in a Nation United” on the seventy-fifth anniversary of
the battle, in July 1938. Attended by more than 1,800 actual Civil War veterans (most in their nineties), this four-day event was the last reunion of Blue and Gray. It culminated a half-century in which reconciliation between old foes was the dominant theme in Civil War memory and in the numerous joint reunions of Union and Confederate veterans.

This uniting of North and South in a renewed American nationalism was a fine thing, to be sure, but all too often it was characterized by forgetting what the war had been about. Absent from these reunions were black Union veterans who, with their white brothers in arms, had fought a war not only to preserve the nation as the
United
States but also to give that nation a new birth of freedom. And the very spot on which the Eternal Light memorial stands is the location where Major General Robert Rodes's division— the largest in either army, with five brigades—deployed on the early afternoon of July 1 to launch an attack intended to destroy that “Nation United.”

From the memorial we head southeast on Double-day Avenue across the Mummasburg Road and past an observation tower, to stop at a stone wall alongside Doubleday Avenue. Here fought part of one Union brigade and all of another commanded by Brigadier General Henry Baxter of New York. Lying behind the stone wall, they rose to pour a devastating fire into
an Alabama brigade, stopping it cold before its attack had gone more than thirty yards. Then Baxter's men jumped to the other side of the wall and almost wiped out a North Carolina brigade commanded by General Alfred Iverson, killing and wounding more than 450 and capturing three hundred. More than a hundred of Iverson's men were buried in a couple of mass graves in a farm field, called Iverson's Pits ever since, where they lay until disinterred in 1873 by Confederate memorial associations and taken to North Carolina for reinterment in local Confederate cemeteries. Gettysburg residents insist that the associations did not find all of the remains, whose spirits rise from Iverson's Pits every July 1 to haunt the battlefield.