Gettysburg (13 page)

The Rebel cavalry that ambushed Hancock’s men near Haymarket was in fact the head of Stuart’s 4,000-man column. After transiting Glasscock Gap, Stuart had intended to march through that hamlet to Gum Springs, where he expected to find John Mosby and information about usable
Potomac fords. In place of a clear road, however, he encountered what one aide described as “long lines of wagons and artillery; and behind these came on the dense blue masses of infantry, the sunshine lighting up their burnished bayonets.” As Stuart later reported, “I chose a good position, and opened with artillery on his passing column with effect, scattering men, wagons, and horses in wild confusion.” According to another aide, the artillery fire “was continued until the enemy moved a force of infantry against the guns. Not wishing to disclose his force, Stuart withdrew from Hancock’s vicinity after capturing some prisoners and satisfying himself concerning the movement of that corps.”

Scouts sent out to ascertain the extent of the Federal column returned with disheartening news. Instead of the widely spaced deployment of relatively stationary units that he had hoped to exploit, Stuart was facing an entire corps on the move, one that was filling the available roads with men and materiel, making it impossible for him to slip through as he had planned.

Stuart sent off a sighting report to Lee
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and pondered his options. He could sit tight until the enemy troops cleared the roads, or he could backtrack into the Shenandoah Valley and try to squeeze past Longstreet’s men, or he could swing farther east in the hope of finding an open route to the Potomac. “He consulted with no one concerning the decision,” recalled an aide, “and none is authorized to speak of the motives which may have presented themselves to his mind.” In his official report, Stuart wrote that he “determined to cross Bull Run lower down, and strike through Fairfax for the Potomac the next day.”

In Washington, Major General Samuel P. Heintzelman was fuming. As the officer responsible for defending the capital, he had fought a losing bureaucratic skirmish against Hooker, who was successfully using the current emergency to appropriate as many of Heintzelman’s troops as possible. “Since Hooker’s appearance on my front,” the general scratched in his diary, “he had taken from me 6,000 cavalry and at least 15,000 infantry.” His sense of injury made the rumors Heintzelman had heard about Hooker all the more satisfying. One officer swore that Hooker had been seen drunk at his headquarters that very day. “I learn also that when
he left town the day before that, he was not sober,” Heintzelman noted with smug piety.

At almost the same time, Lincoln’s navy secretary, Gideon Welles, was responding to public fears excited by Lee’s raid. Officials at Havre de Grace, Maryland, near the mouth of the Susquehanna River, were worried for the safety of government property; they had asked for, and now got, a gunboat to protect the town. Welles had also heard stories that had Ewell’s and Longstreet’s corps passing through Hagerstown, headed north. His pen inscribed the burning question that was on everyone’s mind: “Where, in the mean time,” Welles asked, “is Genl Hooker and our army?”

The rain had finally subsided, but the mood was no less dismal, thanks to the sound of a band playing the death march. In a large open field near Hagerstown, Maryland (their bivouac for the night), the men of George Pickett’s division formed a hollow square with one side left open. A member of the 18th Virginia, one John E. Riley, a hired substitute
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and convicted deserter, had been condemned by a court-martial and was now to pay the price. A soldier in the 18th’s Company E was unlucky enough to be selected for the firing squad. “It was very trying to me,” he confided in a letter written a few days later, “but I am here for duty.” The sad procession circled the drawn-up division, then halted while a chaplain offered “a long and beautiful prayer.”

Just before the condemned man was blindfolded, he looked at his executioners and said, “Good-bye boys.” Then the firing squad did its duty. “In twenty seconds the prisoner was dead,” the soldier recalled. A staff officer who heard the shots from a comfortable distance was told that there were “four like executions” that took place at this time. Another observer suggested that the spectacle had a deterrent effect that was “beneficial to other substitutes, whose only object was to secure the pay and desert.”

“Every one is asking, Where is our army, that they let the enemy scour the country and do as they please?” wrote Gettysburg resident Sarah Broadhead in her diary. The promised militia troops had been held up
when their train engine struck a cow and derailed. No soldiers were injured, but neither was the unit going to get any closer this day. The mood throughout Gettysburg was tense. Sharp-eyed citizens spotted a smattering of campfires in the hills framing the Cashtown Pass. Those distant, flickering flames spoke louder than any headline.

I
n his official report of the operation, Jeb Stuart wrote of this Friday, June 26, “We marched through Brentsville to the vicinity of Wolf Run Shoals, and had to halt … in order to graze our horses, which hard marching without grain was fast breaking down. We met no enemy to-day.” Stuart’s animals found little relief. “Had very poor grazing for horses,” recorded a Virginian riding under Fitzhugh Lee, “this being a miserably poor country & the armies having entirely consumed it.”

Some forty miles to the west, the two cavalry brigades under Beverly H. Robertson stolidly watched over Ashby’s and Snicker’s gaps. Before setting off, Stuart had left Robertson with very detailed instructions directing him to “hold the Gaps” as long “as the enemy remains in your front.” Robertson, taking his time completing this determination, kept his units immobile. One of his troopers noted that “there were no skirmishes, [and] no enemy in sight.”

Armed men in blue uniforms marched through Gettysburg this morning. There were 743 in the ranks, a militia unit designated the 26th Pennsylvania Emergency Infantry. “The men upon whom this duty was imposed, coming from the field, the college, and the home, had been in the service just four days,” remembered one of them: “not long enough to have acquired a knowledge of the drill, hardly long enough to have learned the names of their officers and comrades.” Commanding them was Colonel William W. Jennings. The militia regiment reached town at about 9:00
A.M.
to find that the forewarned citizens had prepared a tasty breakfast of pies, sandwiches, and coffee for the novice soldiers.

The fun part of this outing ended after about ninety minutes, when Major Granville O. Haller, acting on the authority of the Department of the Susquehanna commander Darius Couch, ordered a protesting William Jennings to march his regiment toward Chambersburg. The men fell into ranks, their dour mood not improved by the drizzling rain that began to fall. The little cavalry squadron under Robert Bell accompanied the foot soldiers. Three and a half miles passed slowly under the wet feet of these emergency troops before Jennings halted his column along a ridge overlooking Marsh creek, where he and Bell, finding a little high ground, peered through the mist toward the mountains. After a while they could make out some movement in the distance. Before very long, the tiny suggestions of activity coalesced into something larger and definitely more dangerous.

In Gettysburg, twelve-year-old Mary Fastnacht looked on in innocent wonder as the town’s handful of African American residents
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reacted to events. “They, of course, were badly frightened and, with their bundles tried to leave town,” she recollected. Two of the refugees, a widow and her daughter, appealed to Fastnacht’s mother because “they were alone and did not know what to do.” Recalling this moment many years later, Mary Fastnacht would be unable to restrain her pride as she related how “Mother told them to come to our house, that she would hide them in the loft over the kitchen, take the ladder away and they would be safe.”

The experiences of Gettysburg’s blacks were typical of those suffered by the thousands of African Americans
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who lived in the path of Lee’s advance. Although no formal orders were ever issued directing a general roundup of black civilians encountered in Pennsylvania, such actions were carried out with an openness and on a scale that suggest, at the very least, tacit knowledge at the highest command levels.

A
soldier-correspondent who went by the initials W.K., riding with Jenkins’ command, reported to the
Richmond Enquirer
that the Rebel troopers had appropriated “many ‘contrabands’ and fine horses.” An individual named William Brown was said by the Georgia soldier Alfred Zachry to have been “arrested … as a contraband, supposed to be a slave.” Perhaps most chilling were the words penned on June 28 by a Confederate officer named William
S.
Christian: “We took a lot of negroes yesterday,” he wrote. “I was offered my choice, but as I could not get them back home I would not take them. In fact, my humanity revolted at taking the poor devils away from their homes.”

The exodus of so many blacks before the advancing gray tide cast an eerie pall over the surroundings. “The free negroes are all gone,” wrote a surgeon in Hill’s Corps at the end of June. “My servant, Wilson, says he ‘don’t like Pennsylvania at all,’ because he ‘sees no black folks.’” Not all of those who fled were Northern freemen: a member of the 14th North Carolina (Ewell’s Corps) noted that right after his regiment entered Pennsylvania, “Ben, the negro cook of Lieutenant Liles, took French leave for the Yankees—never heard of him afterwards.” Most of the African Americans who stayed behind were those with little to fear. A Louisianian under Ewell reported that on the “entire line of march I saw only two negroes, and they were a very old couple, man and woman, standing on the roadside as the army passed. One of my company asked the negro man if he was ‘secesh,’ and he replied, ‘Yes, sir, massa; I sees you now.’”

Throughout this day, Joseph Hooker continued to move his Army of the Potomac across its namesake river, until, as darkness closed down operations, he had all but the Sixth Corps and his cavalry on the northern side. In the evening, he designated Frederick, Maryland, as his new concentration point by directing that all supplies be sent there. The army’s First, Third, and Eleventh corps remained grouped under John Reynolds, charged with covering the gaps piercing the South Mountain chain. “A steady and continuous rain has made the roads very disagreeable for marching,” observed a Michigan man in the Iron Brigade, “but has at the same time saved us from the heat and dust and consequent exhaustion of our previous march from the Rappahannock.” In the 136th New York, one of Howard’s regiments in the Eleventh Corps, the men resorted to odd tactics to ward off the rain. “We had our knapsacks on our shoulders and placed our rubber blankets over all,” remembered a New Yorker. “This shut out what little air we otherwise might have got.”

The toils of his soldiers must have been on Lincoln’s mind for at least part of this day. Using his presidential authority, he commuted six military death sentences that had been sent to him for review. He was also thinking about Joe Hooker. To Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, Lincoln said, “We cannot help beating them, if we have the man. How much depends in military matters on one master mind. Hooker may commit the same fault as [previous Army of the Potomac commander George B.] McClellan and
lose his chance. We shall soon see, but it appears to me he can’t help but win.” It was in these comments, Welles believed, that Lincoln first “betrayed doubts of Hooker, to whom he is quite partial.”

Robert E. Lee broke camp near Williamsport early this morning, rode through Hagerstown, crossed the Pennsylvania border, and reached Chambersburg at around 9:00
A.M.
Merchant Jacob Hoke was on hand to view the Rebel chief. “He was at that time about fifty-two years of age,” Hoke later recounted, “stoutly built, of medium height, hair strongly mixed with gray, and a rough, gray beard. … His whole appearance indicated dignity, composure, and disregard for the gaudy trappings of war.”

Hoke was convinced that the direction Lee took once he reached the town square would reveal much about his plans. If he continued northward, “then Harrisburg and Philadelphia are threatened,” Hoke told one of the town’s unofficial scouts. If, however, Lee turned east toward the Cashtown Gap, “Baltimore and Washington are in danger.” Lee made a right-hand turn to the east and the scout hurried away to take word of it to officials in Harrisburg. For the rest of his life, Hoke would feel certain that he had seen through to Lee’s real purpose, but it was really more a matter of hindsight. Lee rode only a short distance out of town before making camp. He set up his headquarters in a pleasant grove that was a local favorite for picnics. His only orders today for Longstreet and Hill were to rest their corps as the men arrived from the south.