Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (8 page)

Such desperate need as Lawyer Merrick’s was required to evade the unusually strict discipline under which the Army of Northern Virginia marched on the invasion. On their own land the men of this most informal of armies had never behaved so well.

With whole communities of their homeland in ashes behind them and thousands of dispossessed families crowding into its cities, they did not burn a single house. They were Lee’s soldiers, and his chivalric code decreed that they should fight only armed men. It was a code that would soon belong to the past. Not knowing that, the soldiers took simple enjoyment in the victuals of a countryside which had not been fought over.

With the lowest percentage of stragglers in the army’s history, the men marched over the hard Northern roads well closed up in columns of four, in brigade units, which numbered usually from 1,200 to 2,000 men. Officers rode ahead and especially trusted men marched out as flankers. Behind each regiment, averaging around 350, marched a group of personal body servants and a group of stretcher-bearers, and last came the brigade wagons, each drawn by four horses or mules. There were a few bands to play “Dixie” and “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” South Carolina’s secession song, but there was little singing.

As a Chambersburg citizen saw them, “The Confederate infantry … presented a solid front. They came in close marching order … [and] … their dress consisted of every imaginable color and style, the [government-issue] butternut predominating. … Hats, or the skeletons of what once had been hats, surmounted their partly covered heads. Many were ragged, shoeless, and filthy …” but all were “well armed and under perfact discipline. They seemed to move as one vast machine.”

The men were not, as Northern observers insisted, “trying to overthrow the government.” The men had volunteered to defend their land, and now they were taking the war to the invaders. They were really very simple people who loved their own ways and were fighting for the right to preserve them.

The issue of slavery was remote to most of them. Something over ten per cent of the Southern white population were slaveowners, while as many as twenty-five per cent of Southern white families were associated with the institution of slavery. The large slave-operated plantations were mostly in the Tidewater regions, and many of the mountaineers had never seen Negroes until they saw the body servants of the young bloods in their regiments.

George Wills, the North Carolina preacher’s son, had one of these personal servants, who acted as chef, valet, and forager. This Wash was one of the Negroes whom well-intentioned Pennsylvania housewives tried to induce to steal away from their masters. One woman, trying to get at Wash’s loyalties, asked him if he were treated well. “I live as I wish,” he replied politely, “and if I did not, I think I couldn’t better myself by stopping here. This is a beautiful country, but it doesn’t come up to home in my eyes.” Wash spoke fairly accurately for all the men who followed Lee into Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley, west of the northern extension of the Blue Ridge.

With pauses here and there, the troops had been on the road for twenty-four days when on Saturday, June 27, the two corps, Longstreet’s and Hill’s, forming the middle and rear columns, concentrated at Chambersburg. Communication lines were established with Ewell farther north at Carlisle and with his division under Early at York. The spirit and the condition of the troops, the casualness with which the men accepted their fine march and safe arrival in the enemy’s country, should have gladdened the heart of any commander.

But General Lee was burdened by responsibility for the life of every man who made camp in the strange countryside, and he knew their lives were endangered by the mysterious absence of the cavalry that should be covering the mountain passes on their flank.

5

On Sunday, June 28, while Lee at his camp outside Chambersburg was trying to conceal his apprehension over Stuart’s absence, a young staff officer rode northward alone through the enemy’s country. He was Captain James Power Smith, once an aide to Stonewall Jackson. When Jackson died, his staff officers selected Captain Smith to escort Mrs. Jackson and her seven-month-old baby to the home of her father in North Carolina. Having completed this mission, Captain Smith, like most of Stonewall’s other staff officers, was invited to join the staff of his successor, General Ewell. By the time the “invitation” reached him in Richmond, Ewell’s corps was already crossing the Potomac. Captain Smith set out after the army alone.

About sunset on Sunday he reached Greencastle, Pennsylvania, where groups of young farmers and their ladies were gathered on the street corners. Smith was halfway through town before he grew aware of his conspicuousness “in the uniform of a Confederate captain, with side-arms rather ornamental than useful.” Suddenly apprehensive, he covered his fear by elaborately bowing to the farmers and lifting his cap, as he said, “to the astonished ladies” until he was on the open road again. There he shook his horse into a quick gallop and did not stop riding until daybreak the next morning, when he saw Confederate sentries guarding the well-built houses in Chambersburg.

Passing the public square, Captain Smith pushed his exhausted horse on the less than a mile to the woods on Mr. Messersmith’s farm. There the commanding general’s headquarters tents loomed in the grove through the mist of a cloudy Monday morning. Captain Smith was looking for someone to report to when General Lee, drawing on his gauntlets, came out of his tent and approached his gray horse, Traveler, held by an orderly.

Recognizing the staff officer of his late lieutenant, the General beckoned Captain Smith toward him. After asking the young officer solicitously about Mrs. Jackson, he inquired if Smith, so recently from Virginia, had any knowledge of General Stuart.

By chance, Captain Smith had crossed the Potomac the day before with two troopers bearing dispatches for detached cavalry units, and they had casually told him that on the preceding day (Saturday the 27th) they had left the main body of cavalry under Stuart in Prince William County back in northern Virginia. When Smith passed on this information, General Lee, he said, “was evidently surprised and disturbed.”

Captain Smith moved away to join friends on Lee’s hospitable staff for rest and refreshment before continuing on to report to General Ewell. It became his turn for surprise when the General’s A.A.G, Captain Walter Taylor, also pressed him for information about Stuart’s cavalry. Then Smith was told that not since Lee wrote Stuart a message on the night of the 23rd, six days earlier in Virginia, had there been any communication between the army and its cavalry.

Even now, Taylor said, A.P. Hill was warily moving his corps through the winding passes of South Mountain in the rain to discover the whereabouts of the enemy on the other side of the low range of hills. Ewell had been ordered back from Carlisle and Early from York, and the separated corps of the army were to recontract east of the mountains in the area of Cashtown and Gettysburg. No one could even guess what had happened to Stuart. General Lee was worried both about the fate of his former cadet and about having to concentrate in unfamiliar country without cavalry.

For not only had Stuart disappeared with the three most experienced brigades, but Lee did not know the whereabouts of any of the cavalry units he had scattered for screening on the northward march.

The brigades of Beverly Robertson and Grumble Jones were to have guarded the mountain passes in Virginia until the army had crossed the Potomac, and then followed it. Before the spy Harrison had reported the night before, Lee could assume that those brigades remained away because Hooker was still in Virginia. Now he knew that Hooker’s army, under Meade, was across the mountains from him and that it was Stuart who was still in Virginia. The Union army separated Lee from his own cavalry. This disturbing intelligence only deepened the mystery of why Jones’s and Robertson’s brigades had lingered south of the Potomac after the enemy had crossed the river.

Even the raiders under Imboden, borrowed for the occasion and ordered to close in from the west, had not appeared.

Jenkins’s raiders, another unit that General Lee had pried loose from President Davis’s scattered detachments for the invasion, were north with Ewell, and Lee placed little trust in them. They had reported at only half their paper strength, 1,800 effectives showing up. Leading the invasion into Pennsylvania, the lightly disciplined riders had not behaved like veteran cavalry. They were accustomed to long rides, swift strokes, and quick loot, and neither by nature nor training were they fitted for reconnaissance.

With a potential support of more than 12,000 troopers, the largest cavalry force ever at his disposal, Lee spent a dismal Monday hoping for the sight of one unit of them, while Hill’s infantry, substituting for the horsemen, pushed eastward through the rough mountain passes. Two divisions of Long-street’s corps prepared to follow the next day. The three-brigade division of George Pickett would wait at Chambersburg as a rear guard until some cavalry showed up from somewhere.

During the anxious hours General Lee kept his thoughts to himself. His report, written later, revealed nothing of his mental torment. Characteristically without the use of a single “I,” he wrote simply: “In the absence of the cavalry, it was impossible to ascertain his [the enemy’s] intentions … [and] … it was determined to concentrate the army east of the mountains.”

Although he communicated his troubles to no one, the general was manifestly under great strain. He could not stay in his tent. He walked up and down in the picnic grove, powerful and erect, his handsome face clouded. This was one of the few times during the war when Lee’s effort to keep self-control was apparent.

During the afternoon he was visited by one of Longstreet’s division commanders, General John B. Hood. An immense blond man of thirty-two, Hood, a West Pointer, was a Texan by adoption and a very literal-minded man of action. The presence of General Hood shook Lee out of his brooding. With his innate consideration of others and of the commanding general’s duty to give assurance to his men, Lee managed a smile and said half humorously: “Ah, General, the enemy is a long time in finding us; if he does not succeed soon, we will go in search for him.”

Then he prepared to leave Chambersburg with two of Longstreet’s divisions the next day. Pickett’s weakened division, as rear guard, would comprise the only approximation of a line of communication with home.

The next day, Tuesday, June 30, would mark a full week since Stuart had disappeared, and the commanding general could wait no longer for his cavalry.

That night his camp chest was packed for the trip through the circuitous mountain pass that led to the turnpike village of Cashtown and, eight miles beyond, the unimportant crossroads town of Gettysburg.

“All Is Vanity.…”

T
HE TWO
troopers on detached duty who chanced to encounter Captain Smith at a river crossing were accurate in reporting General Stuart’s cavalry back in Prince William County, southwest of Washington, on Saturday, June 27. The two cavalrymen would have disturbed the commanding general even more deeply if their report had included the sorry condition of men and mounts.

On the 27th the command was forced to halt while the horses grazed and the attenuated men supplied themselves from captured Union sutlers’ stores. At this moment Hooker’s army was in Maryland with the corps pointed toward South Mountain.

Even this early in the campaign Jeb Stuart was failing in his mission, with apparent unawareness of his failure. Judg?ing from his reports, his mind was sharp and his conscience was clear.