Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (14 page)

Considering their unprecedented assignment to act, in the absence of cavalry, as reconnaissance troops in a country they had never seen, the men were unrealistically relaxed—from the privates in the 1st South Carolina, the oldest unit in point of organization, to the corps commander. When A. P. Hill rode into Cashtown at the end of the day and Harry Heth reported that Pettigrew’s brigade had encountered some Yankee horsemen around Gettysburg, the corps commander was no more concerned than Heth had been. There was nothing about a scouting cavalry force to indicate the presence of the main Union army, which reports placed many miles away.

Actually, separated from the Confederates by low hills in the rolling farm country, the van of the Army of the Potomac was gathering in the same area, somewhat farther south of Gettysburg than Hill’s corps was to the west of it. Nobody was looking for a battle. The two armies were looking for each other, each to discover the other’s intention.

Meade did have his cavalry about him—although two of the divisions were off in the wake of Jeb Stuart, who that night was riding northward away from the gathering armies. The mounted division working out from the Union infantry was commanded by a rough fighter named Buford, and it was Buford’s division that had run into the Confederate infantry brigade. A sound cavalry officer as well as a stout fighter, Buford had sent back the intelligence which caused three Union corps to be hurrying toward what might be a point of spontaneous contact. General Meade, with his army widely scattered, ordered these advanced corps to take the defensive if they encountered Lee’s people.

Although none of this was known to the Third Corps officers on that summer night outside a Pennsylvania village, Powell Hill was also under orders from Lee to avoid a “general engagement” if he encountered the enemy, because of the dispersal of the Army of Northern Virginia. Thanks to Buford’s cavalry, however, the Federals did know of the presence of Confederate infantry. Hill and his officers, made carelessly confident by the easy success of the invasion, rather lightheartedly assumed that the Union horsemen were unsupported by infantry in force.

(As of June 30 they were not. With a night march of nine miles Hill’s men could have occupied what became the Union bastion of Cemetery Hill.)

Because no officer in Hill’s corps anticipated real action in that immediate area, Harry Heth kept uppermost in his mind the quartermaster aspects of the invasion. Thus it was that he mentioned to General Hill his desire to get shoes for his men while discovering what troops might be in their front. Years later, in remembering that quiet conversation with his former West Point classmate, Heth quoted Napoleon as saying that “a dogfight can bring on a battle.” But on that summer night in Cashtown military maxims were far from his mind.

He said to A. P. Hill: “I will take my division tomorrow and go to Gettysburg and get those shoes, if there is no objection.”

Hill replied without a second thought: “one in the world,” and unknowingly gave the order for the Battle of Gettysburg.

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The next morning Powell Hill showed the strain of his new responsibility. He awakened feeling very ill, too sick to mount his horse. Men noticed his extreme pallor. Although no diagnosis was made, he was probably suffering from overstrained nerves. This indisposition was to recur frequently after that warm morning of July 1.

Perhaps during the night, after his offhand conversation with Heth, Hill had done some thinking about what might be hidden beyond the rough swells of farmland and woodland rolling eastward from the base of the mountain. He had sent word back to Lee that he was pushing out eastward in the morning, and also to Ewell, then hurrying southward from Carlisle, and said nothing whatsoever about shoes. To Ewell, who might get up to collaborate with him if he struck an enemy in force, he wrote (as he reported) “that I intended to advance the next morning and discover what was in my front.”

In this probing action Hill was restrained by Lee’s orders from bringing on a general engagement. Restraint was foreign to Hill’s impulsive nature and strange to his experience as a division commander who had operated under the clearly specified objectives of Stonewall Jackson. It was not that soundly trained Hill lacked the skill to avoid commitment while making contact, but in some cases that was a hard thing to do. For the first time his was the sole responsibility for twenty thousand men, on whom the rest of the army was forming. In any event, Hill’s sudden disability made it impossible for him to assume personal responsibility on July 1, 1863. He gave the field responsibility to Harry Heth because Heth’s troops happened to be farthest advanced along the pike.

Hill ordered Heth to move out with caution, prepared for any eventuality. Heth was told that Pender’s division also would be ordered on through Cashtown as a reserve to be available if Heth ran into serious trouble.

Between five and six o’clock, at full daylight on a sultry morning, Harry Heth, on his first battle assignment as a major general, pushed out his four brigades in routine deployment for contact. In taking elementary precautions, Heth gave no indication of sensing an impending clash of any consequence.

The brigades were sent into motion according to the positions where the men had slept during the night. Because of this the troops deployed on the south of the turnpike were the smallest brigade (1,048 officers and men) in the division. Heroes of Chancellorsville, Archer’s Alabama and Tennessee veterans had not had their heavy losses made up. Since the formation of the Light Division, the brigade had been commanded by James Archer, a forty-six-year-old Marylander with a fine combat record. Archer was a slight man with a thin face elongated by a dark, narrow beard, and it would seem that on that July morning he was suffering from some debilitating ailment.

By the same chance deployment, to the left of the turnpike went the new Mississippi brigade under the president’s inexperienced nephew, Joe Davis. Only two of the regiments were veterans. One of these, the 11th Mississippi, formed around the nucleus of a company of University of Mississippi students, had fought with distinction in Virginia during the first year, but all of the troops were strangers to Lee’s army.

Behind these advanced brigades, Pettigrew’s and Brock-enbrough’s troops deployed in reserve. Along the narrow, fence-lined road rumbled the twenty guns of a reserve battalion commanded by bespectacled Willie Pegram, a greatly loved and highly accomplished young Richmonder.

In orthodox Confederate fashion, the two leading brigades sent out skirmishers in three lines, bouncing on rope-muscled legs through wheatfields and over stubble, studying each rise as they approached with their bright rifles ready. The sun climbed higher, the day grew hot, and the skirmish lines had covered five miles before the first shots crackled ahead of them. At the whine of Miniéballs, the men saw the separate spurts of smoke that come from a line of pickets, and they identified the light firing as carbine fire. This was the cavalry the Confederates expected.

The skirmish lines moved ahead more slowly, more warily, and the deployed regiments came up in closer support. Buford’s dismounted troopers, apparently unsupported, fell back firing before the steady advance.

By ten o’clock the lead brigades had moved ahead two more miles and were within one mile of Gettysburg. Then guns began to roar and shrapnel hurtled through the air, tearing past the men and thudding into trees and into the rich earth. There were six guns of regular army artillery, firing in sections. Heth did not know that these cannon were the only ones Buford had with him. The Confederates looked for depressions in the ground, fence posts, any slight cover where they could wait for their own artillery to open up and develop the enemy’s situation.

After tearing down the fence railing, Willie Pegram got his pieces unlimbered across the road. His experienced gunners soon found the range of the enemy guns and began raining metal among the Federal gun crews.

The enemy’s artillery was posted on a low ridge on the far side of a wooded ravine that cut between the two lines. At the bottom of the ravine ran a brook called Willoughby Run. On the right of the road the hill leading up to the Union position was covered with a thick growth of trees. As a routine precaution, Willie Pegram shelled the woods. The answering fire grew no heavier. General Heth concluded that he was facing nothing more than the Federal cavalry that Pettigrew had encountered on the previous day. He ordered his two leading brigades forward.

The men grew aware of the increasing warmth of the day as they lunged down the lull to Willoughby Run. On the right of the road the men of Archer’s thinned-out brigade encountered a fence to be climbed before they crossed the run. Their order became a little loose as the whole brigade started scrambling up the hill.

Ahead the underbrush suddenly blazed out at them. The heavy oyster-white Miniéballs tore through the ranks, many lodging in lean bodies. Amid sudden groans wrenched from the wounded and the startled calls of officers, the men burrowed close to the earth, sought shelter behind trees, and began to return the fire.

They were facing the first brigade of Doubleday’s division of Reynolds’s I Corps, rushed hastily onto the field at the urging of Buford. Appropriately called the “Iron Brigade,”the Midwesternerswere hard-bitten troops with justifiable pride in their prowess. The Iron Brigade was down to under two thousand in strength, but at the point of contact they heavily outnumbered the one brigade they met, Archer’s.The Alabama and Tennessee boys recognized the black hats affected by the men ofthe Iron Brigade. Whatever the high command of Lee’s army thought, the men of Archer’s brigade now knew that thev had stumbled into the Army of the Potomac.

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While the Confederate field officers were trying to bring order to the four thin regiments on the wooded slope of the ravine, a reserve regiment of the Iron Brigade worked around in the woods to the Confederates’ right: overlapping them. Suddenly they came rushing out of the obscuring brush on Archer’s flank, hurrahing and shooting. The experienced Southern soldiers knew that it was time to get out of there.

No veteran troops on either side, by this stage of the war, had any shame about the manner of their leaving an uncomfortable spot. They had often proved the adage about the runner living to fight another day, and they would fight on another day or in another hour, for that matter—as soon as conditions were favorable. Archer’s men went pell-mell down the hill and across the brook. Some piled up at the fence.

While the last were scrambling over, the black-hatted Federals swooped down along their flank and captured a number of the disgusted Rebels. Most humiliating of all, Archer, suffering his curious exhaustion, was waiting tohave a try at the fence when he was pounced upon by a burly Union private and wrestled into submission. When Archer was led off, as mad as a wet hen, his capture marked another ominous portent for the reorganized army: he wasthe first general officer taken prisoner since Lee had assumed command thirteen months before. Archer remained in prison more than a year and died in October 1864, shortly after his release.

While Archer’s leaderless men scrambled up the safe slope of the wooded ravine, things were going even worse on the other side of the Cashtown turnpike.

There Joseph Davis’s Mississippians had made their contact with Union infantry in the open and had not suffered the surprise of Archer’s men. Nor had they struck anything quite the likes of the Iron Brigade. As a consequence, they had enjoyed a gratifying local success. They drove before them all except one Union regiment. This, failing to receive orders to retreat, held its ground with the support of a fresh six-gun battery whose gunners simply refused to quit.

In working forward to clear the last remaining obstacles, Joe Davis by ill chance discovered the deep cut of the unfinished railroad bed. This cut ran parallel to the road and passed at right angles to the skimpy remnants of the Union line. It seemed to inexperienced Davis a heaven-sent cover for getting on the enemy’s flank without exposure.

General Abner Doubleday, with everything working to his advantage in the extemporized action, hurriedly brought up a reserve regiment to support his flank. They arrived at the railroad cut, where they found the Confederates lined up below them. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.

The sudden helplessness froze the green troops in the brigade. They huddled against the dirt wall of the cut until triumphant yells of “Surrender!”allowed them to throw down their arms and save their lives. The veterans tried to run the gauntlet to safety. Those who were not shot in the backs escaped, but the unit was too disorganized to be of any further use in the immediate action.

Harry Heth had not exercised the close field command by means of which Doubleday had won the brief, furious action. But when Heth saw his two brigades stagger back up the ravine, with Davis’s temporarily wrecked, he acted in soldierly fashion.

He reformed Archer’s stung veterans, placed Colonel Fry in command, and shifted them farther to the right, stretching beyond the point where they had been overlapped. Davis’s brigade was pulled out on the left and its segments were sent to the rear to reform. Brockenbrough’s veterans took their place near one of the huge stone barns that were a constant wonder to the Southerners. These men stretched somewhat farther to the left, or north, side of the turnpike than had Davis. In the center, between the two brigades, Johnston Pettigrew moved up his North Carolinians.

Willie Pegram’s guns continued to bang away, and David Mcintosh’s battalion from the reserve artillery galloped up and unlimbered their pieces.