Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (2 page)

L
EE AND
H
IS
M
EN

AT

GETTYSBURG

Rendezvous with Disaster

T
HE SUBSTANTIAL
market town of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, seemed unusually quiet, even for a Sunday, after the noisy passage of troops of the Army of Northern Virginia during the week. The houses and stores were shuttered, and the front doors of the Franklin Hotel were locked. Citizens dressed for the Sabbath moved with wary curiosity about the streets.

They were hostile but not apprehensive, as the Confederate soldiers had not committed acts of vandalism or abused the inhabitants. On the contrary, the troops had been highly good-humored in the face of taunts and insults.

Despite the good-humor of the soldiers and the strict discipline maintained by their officers, Lee’s army had levied heavily on the storekeepers and the citizens of the bountiful Pennsylvania countryside. They had been orderly about it, all very businesslike, giving scrip in their own money for everything they confiscated. These items included boots, suits, shoe leather, horseshoes, bacon, flour, coffee, sugar, sauerkraut, and neat’s-foot oil. The list was endless.

The enemy troops seemed in need of every necessity for living, and the enlisted men displayed a passion for stealing hats which defied the most rigid supervision. The soldiers would put up with anything—patches, ill-matching clothes, broken shoes or none—except the absence of a hat. Marching through the Northern towns, the men became very adept at snatching hats from the heads of civilians standing on the sidewalk. They would quickly ball the hats up and tuck them under their arms. Even if an officer tried to recover the property of an outraged civilian, he could not well stop several miles of soldiers to search under each arm.

The Chambersburg citizens had also seen hundreds of cattle and horses that, by their silkiness in comparison to the Confederates’ animals, they recognized as having belonged to their own people.

Yet in Chambersburg all had not been taken. As the requisitioning officers had been courteous, the citizens surrendered only what was visible, and stores still remained in locked cellars. The natives knew from rumors that the last of the enemy troops had passed through the town.

Six divisions of infantry were now camped outside of Chambersburg on farms along the roads to the north and northeast. There the hard-bitten troops were taking their own Sunday ease—bathing their sore feet in the creek, mending their poor clothes, and eating more heartily than they had in months. They carried very little equipment, far less than the civilians had seen on any of their own soldiers. Some carried only a canteen and knapsack stenciled with the faded letters of V
ERMONT
, M
ASS
., or N.J.—relics of old battlefields. Filling their knapsacks from the quartermaster wagons, the lean men looked very unwarlike, and no stranger coming upon their cheerful camps would have suspected them of being an invading army in the enemy’s country.

Closer to town, their headquarters camp was pitched informally in the roadside grove called Shetter’s Woods, where picnics and Fourth-of-July celebrations were held in the shade. Canvas-topped wagons marked “U.S.” were parked without order beside a group of tents. The picketed horses of the staff officers, better mounts and in better condition than those in the cavalry that had come through town, foraged for grass. To and from one of the tents, indistinguishable from the others, officers and couriers came and went all through that warm Sunday of June 28, 1863.

There was no air of urgency about their visits. Inside the tent, the gray-bearded general received the messengers calmly and talked with apparent good cheer. He was a powerfully built man in his mid-fifties, dressed neatly in a long gray jacket that had seen its best day, dark trousers in high black boots, and a medium-brimmed light-gray hat. There was no ornamentation on the simple uniform, and only the three stars of gold braid embossed on his collar suggested anything military. He wore neither sword nor revolver. His handsome, classically carved face was characterized by dignity and a vast composure, and there was in his presence an unmistakable bearing of leadership. Any stranger would have recognized Robert E. Lee on sight.

Captain James Power Smith, a staff officer who visited Lee’s headquarters, said: “He was a kingly man whom all men who came into his presence expected to obey.” Lee’s young son Robert added to that: “I always knew it was impossible to disobey my father.”

Shortly after noon the sound of axes on hardwood dimly reached the general’s camp. Under orders of his chief commissary officer, soldiers were breaking down the locked doors to the Chambersburg cellars, to levy on the secreted caches of supplies. Lee did not like to do things this way. But his people needed the food, especially for the sick, and Federal troops had ravaged his country until their own cupboard was bare. The enemy’s people would have to suffer some, too. General Lee stepped outside the stuffy tent, as if attracted by the crashing noises from town.

Colonel Charles Marshall, his bespectacled aide, watched him intently. He knew the signs of worry beneath the general’s air of calm. For two days Lee had been concealing his anxiety over the absence of any news from his cavalry. Lee’s army was farther north than any Confederate army had ever come, farther from any base, and for the first time since he assumed command General Lee had lost contact with his cavalry—the “eyes” of his army.

Thirty-year-old J. E. B. Stuart, a cadet at West Point when Lee was superintendent there, had served the Army of Northern Virginia as no other cavalry leader had served an army during the war. Skillful, meticulous, and aggressive in reconnaissance, Stuart, Lee said, had never brought him a piece of wrong information, and his screening of the army was flawless. Perhaps Stuart liked fighting for its own sake a little too much, and a tendency to vainglory led him occasionally into rather gaudy exploits, but he was a dedicated Confederate and an instinctive soldier, and he knew his role in this desperate invasion.