Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (7 page)

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The Wednesday morning of June 3, 1863, was pleasantly warm, and the commanding general on his familiar gray horse gave every outward appearance of calm confidence. The troops, after a month’s rest, were pleased to be leaving the desolate, ravaged countryside, and cheerful at the prospects of getting to the enemy’s wagons. Although the men were beginning another risky operation of dividing their forces in the presence of an enormous enemy, they were not students of the military maxims of what should not be done and they felt confidence in any movement ordered by Uncle Robert The very fact of repeating earlier successful maneuvers gave the troops a sense of reassurance.

Leaving the three divisions of A. P. Hill’s new corps across the river from Fredericksburg to guard against sudden thrusts at lightly protected Richmond, Lee marched his other five divisions in an arc around Hooker’s flank to Culpeper, in the rolling blue country of central Piedmont. From there, midway between Fredericksburg and the passes into the Shenandoah Valley, Lee could either march westward over the Blue Ridge or, if Hooker moved, recontract at the Rappahannock River. His caution reflecting his irresolution, Lee halted at Culpeper, writing more appeals to the war office while he waited for Pickett’s brigades.

The land was great horse country, and the day before Lee decided to move on westward he permitted General Stuart to indulge his vanity with a cavalry review. Jeb Stuart had built his mounted force to the highest strength it was ever to know, 9,500 troopers, and on a vast grassy plain the young cavalryman enjoyed a re-enactment of a time when knighthood was in flower, preceded and followed by dances in the red-hot Rebel neighborhood. The trouble with this “military foppery and display,” as a tough-bitten captain called the grand review, was that the cavalry regarded their assignment of screening Lee’s infantry as mere routine.

The result was that, on the day Ewell’s corps started for the Blue Ridge, Stuart’s cavalry was caught in a surprise attack by an even larger Federal force, led by capable young Pleasonton. At Brandy Station (June 9) Jeb Stuart experienced the hardest fight of his life in the largest mounted action that had ever taken place on the continent. He emerged from the close call badly shaken and was very sensitive to the jibes of newspapers and rivals about his humiliation following the pageantry.

As one of the proved dependables, Stuart had not given much assurance in this engagement that he would “do more than formerly,” but Lee did not seem especially disturbed. To offset Stuart’s bad day, General Richard S. Ewell, the new Second Corps commander and one of the doubtfuls in Lee’s mind, acted like a reasonable facsimile of Jackson in his first contact with the enemy.

Despite the cavalry’s difficulties on June 9, Lee had permitted Dick Ewell to start for the Blue Ridge as planned. The commanding general remained with Longstreet’s two divisions at Culpeper, still waiting for Pickett, and A. P. Hill held alertly at Fredericksburg. On June 14, one month after the day Lee had gone to Richmond for the conference, Ewell’s corps fell on a Union force at Winchester and disposed of it, with the usual welcome acquisition of stores and guns.

The consequences of this action bore out Lee’s belief in forcing the enemy to constrict instead of dispersing to meet his numerically superior dispersals. The Union’s Milroy had been waiting at Winchester to join another Union force from the western mountains and threaten the fertile Valley, in the expectation that Lee would detach forces to save his “breadbasket.” Instead, with Milroy gobbled up in passing and Lee headed north, the western force abandoned the Valley project. Also, because of Lee’s counterthreat, a hostile force approaching Richmond from the east was withdrawn and turned to defense. Finally, Hooker acted as Lee had anticipated: he broke camp to move northward, shifting to place his army between Lee and the city of Washington.

Having seized the initiative from the enemy, Lee sent Longstreet after Ewell into the Valley and northward, and directed A. P. Hill to follow Longstreet. By mid-June, Virginia was left exposed save for Davis’s scattered garrisons.

Riding with Longstreet’s corps along the Shenandoah Valley northward out of Virginia, Lee was still depressed about those scattered garrisons and continued to importune Davis and the war office with pleas for support of his total plan. In his anxiety, he wrote Davis instructive essays on the rudiments of military strategy. The letters were not answered.

Then, as his widely separated forces stretched out in Pennsylvania, General Lee became preoccupied with a more immediate and acute problem-the continued and unexplained absence of Stuart’s cavalry.

Stuart had guarded the Blue Ridge passes against the probing enemy until Lee’s infantry marched northward. In the cavalry’s movement, Stuart was given the choice of moving north on the east side of the mountains or of following the infantry to the Potomac crossings and then pushing eastward through the passes. In either case, his orders were to guard the passes and the army’s flank, and to provide information about the enemy’s movement. As it was evident that Stuart had not followed the infantry west of the mountains, Lee expected daily that the cavalry would appear through one of the passes to the east. But each night when the commanding general went to his tent there had been no sign of his troopers and no word from Stuart.

Nothing like this had ever happened before. It was incredible that a commanding general, burdened with the responsibility of directing an invasion of the enemy’s country, should have his attention distracted and his energies diverted by wondering where his own cavalry was. While his men marched confidently northward, an apprehension settled on Robert E. Lee which conditioned all of his actions on the campaign. His concern over the loss of Jackson, over the size of his force, over the halfhearted support from the government, and over the strange disappearance of one of his most trusted subordinates unsettled Lee inwardly as he had never been unsettled on any previous campaign.

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The commanding general’s forebodings were not communicated to the army. The men walked the strange roads under their red battle flags in the highest spirits. Indeed, such was their faith in Lee that the soldiers marched northward away from their own land, with their army divided into three parts, in the mood of tourists.

Shielded by the ramparts of the Blue Ridge, the men walked a steady fifteen or twenty miles a day in good order through the Virginia counties (now West Virginia) north of the Shenandoah Valley. “This country enchants me more and more,” artillerist Ham Chamberlayne wrote his mother. After a year among the war-made barrens of middle Virginia, the twenty-five-year-old lawyer stared in admiration at the untouched land “covered with the richest green; clover and timothy knee high and thick as the best wheat.…”

His battery, with Ewell’s corps, crossed the Potomac into Maryland at Shepherdstown. Henry Kyd Douglas, another young lawyer, had grown up in that region. A former staff officer with Stonewall Jackson, Douglas now served on the staff of division commander Edward Johnson in the old corps.

When Ewell’s advance forces reached John Bloom’s toll-gate, the old gatekeeper recognized the neighborhood boy and said to Douglas: “Who is going to pay for all the horses and wagons I see coming?”

“I am, Mr. Bloom,” the staff officer answered. “I’ll give you an order on President Davis. Take it to Richmond and get the money.”

“Jeff Davis! I’ll see him in hell!” the old man spluttered. Then he resignedly told Douglas to take “this crowd” on through and said: “I’ll charge the toll to profit and loss.”

Longstreet’s First Corps, accompanied by General Lee on his gray horse, crossed the Potomac farther north, at Wil-liamsport. The men took off their shoes, socks, and patched pants, made them into bundles on their rifle barrels, and waded across the river in a steady rain. They were leaving Confederate territory, but there were still many friends about, and the citizens were as curious about the Confederates as the soldiers were about the country. Especially, the people wanted to see General Lee.

Beyond Hagerstown the troops soon marched into Pennsylvania. Lieutenant Caldwell, of the 1st South Carolina, said: “This was, we felt, our really first invasion of Federal soil.” Maryland they did not regard truly as enemy country. At the beginning of the war the Southern states had hoped that Maryland would join the Confederacy, and, though the state remained with the Union, many of its citizens joined Lee’s army. “But,” wrote Lieutenant Caldwell, “Pennsylvania was quite another thing.”

The men became acutely aware of being on foreign soil. Jacob Hoke, the observant merchant in Chambersburg, believed that the Confederates were awed “at the rich and beautiful country,” and commented that “the evident superiority of the country north of the Potomac to that south of it … exercised a discouraging effect upon the soldiers. …”

This was a hopeful assumption. From Mr. Hoke’s city, Captain Blackford, of Lynchburg, Virginia, recently transferred from cavalry to Longstreet’s staff, wrote his wife: “We are now in the Cumberland Valley, and a fine country it is, that is as yankees count fineness-small farms divided into fields no larger than our garden, and barns much larger than the houses in which live their owners, their families and laborers. The land is rich and highly cultivated, much more highly than the men who own it. …”

Among the people, Blackford wrote, “while I note physical comfort, I see no signs of social refinement. All seem to be on a dead level, like a lot of fat cattle in a clover field. … You never saw a country so densely populated. …” And: “Never in my life have I seen as many ugly women since coming to this place. … The men are not remarkable either way. They have an awkward, Dutch look. …” The Dutch appearance of the stolid men who observed the Confederates caused the soldiers to yell: “Och, mine contree.”

Impressed they were by the richly cultivated land, but, like Captain Blackford, the men were more oppressed than awed by the smallness of the farms. They commented on the closeness of the farms to one another, the lack of timber and of shade, and the cramped atmosphere in comparison to the breadth of their land-holdings. In a North Carolina regiment there was a preacher’s son, twenty-year-old George Wills, a tall and quiet boy who had grown up on a farm. He wrote home: “Their quantity of land is so limited, that they haven’t the woodland to spare for groves, but have a small yard without trees.”

These soldiers were warm and volatile people, given to emotional excesses, and their own land reflected their carelessness about bookkeeping. Mr. Hoke was wrong in assuming that the tidy husbandry of his fellows discouraged a more profligate people. The Southerners were impressed by all the grain and vegetables, stock and dairy products and fruits, not because such cultivation suggested the might of the enemy but because the yield promised good eating that day and perhaps the next.

There was some private grumbling about Lee’s orders against pillaging, and, despite the strictly enforced orders, individuals managed to evade the cordon and undertake private foraging parties. The more guileful evolved a system by which they stole way during the brief confusion when camp was being pitched and before the night guards were posted.

Away from the eyes of the sentries, they strolled up to any likely-looking house and asked for food. The natives found the soldiers rather frightening. Although Lee’s published orders had been intended to reassure the Pennsylvanians, the men were a fearsome-looking lot and appeared less disciplined than they actually were. Most had long since stopped shaving, and camp barbers scarcely brought a “trim look” to their hair. The results, combined with their gaunt, weather-stained faces and rough, nondescript clothes, their swagger and bold eyes, gave Lee’s men as individuals a curiously lawless look. Then, they
were
“Rebels,” and proud of it.

Usually the house-owners supplied them with food in order to get rid of them, though on occasions the men had to be ravenous to eat under hostile silent stares. Sometimes the inhabitants, finding no harm in the men, became cordial and even friendly. They asked questions about the South and discussed the war. Twenty-year-old Edward Moore, who had enlisted in the Rockbridge Artillery during his freshman year at Washington College, visited a house with three pretty daughters who actually encouraged him on the invasion. “They said,” he reported, “they did not dislike rebels, and if we would go on to Washington and kill Lincoln, and end the war, they would rejoice.”

In Moore’s four-gun battery there was a Maryland volunteer from Hagerstown, Private Merrick, a lawyer who had been educated abroad and who had become the battery scarecrow. Campaigning in Virginia, he had been too far from home to supplement his uniform with old civilian clothes, as did the others, and a particularly skinny six-foot frame made it impossible for Merrick to get a fair fit from the government issue or battlefield gleanings. His coat and pants always failed to meet by several inches, and, in the space between, his soiled white cotton shirt looked like some kind of raffish sash. Merrick insisted on covering his thin hair with a gray cap, and his shoes somehow got to be the color of rust.

On the trip northward the beggarly-looking scholar disappeared from camp without a word. Later a handsome carriage drove up to the battery’s bivouac, and three stylishly dressed gentlemen stepped out. One of these fashion-plates was Merrick. He introduced his friends, who passed a bottle around, and the Rockbridge battery-composed almost entirely of former college students from the Lexington, Virginia, area-never spent a more pleasant evening. Then the elegant friends departed, and Merrick, still without a word of explanation but still in his fashionable clothes, returned to his place on the gun-limber as the guns and caissons rolled northward.