Gettysburg (14 page)

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Georgia soldier in Longstreet’s Corps would recall the sojourn in Chambersburg as having been devoted to “testing the qualities of Pennsylvania poultry, which proved to have a very palatable flavor. Many of the men seemed to consider the private impressment of supplies an imperative duty incumbent upon us in retaliation for the marauding of the Yankees in our country.” In some cases, officers tried to offset the chilling effect of the rain by letting their men help themselves to the whiskey that was freely offered and readily available. Another of Longstreet’s Georgians thought that the drunken boys made for a “jolly set.” A member of one unit that began its day in Virginia and ended it near Chambersburg bragged that the men “marched in four states that day, the fourth in a state of intoxication.”

By the time Longstreet’s Mississippi soldiers of Brigadier General William Barksdale’s brigade reached the Pennsylvania line, they were far from being the first of Lee’s legions to enter the North. Nonetheless,
Sergeant C. C. Cummings, whose friend had jokingly called Robert E. Lee a bushwhacker, decided that some sort of ceremony was in order. Marching at the head of the column as it entered the town of Middleburg,
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through which the Mason-Dixon line ran, Cummings spotted an old man watching the troops pass and instructed him to drag his cane across the dirt street to replicate the border. “He did so,” Cummings related, “and with a running jump I bounded over into Pennsylvania.”

With Longstreet’s and Hill’s men now arriving in Chambersburg, it was time for Ewell to push on. Contrary to the modern perception that Lee’s infantry vanguard was groping blindly forward in Stuart’s absence, Ewell was in fact operating with cavalry covering his front. A mounted brigade from western Virginia, under the command of Albert Jenkins, had been riding with the Second Corps since June 12. Jenkins’ Brigade, comprising three regiments, two battalions, and a horse battery, may have lacked the combat experience and discipline of Stuart’s outfit, but it performed generally effective advance duties as Ewell moved deeper into Pennsylvania. Extra help had arrived on June 25 in the form of the 35th Battalion Virginia Cavalry, under the capable Colonel Elijah V. White, detached from “Grumble” Jones’ command. Ewell appended White’s men plus one of Jenkins’ regiments to Early’s Division, while the rest swept ahead of Rodes and Johnson.

Ewell’s advance was planned along two different axes. Two of his divisions—Rodes’ and Johnson’s—pressed northward to the town of Shippensburg. One of Johnson’s brigades, commanded by Brigadier General George R. Steuart, had been dispatched westward to gather supplies around McConnellsburg. That unit was now hustling to catch up with its parent division, bringing along with it, as staff officer Randolph McKim noted approvingly, “60 head of cattle, 40 horses, [and] a few mules.” A Tarheel soldier under Rodes penned a brief eulogy for the bountiful harvest being decimated: “Our camp was in a wheat field,” he explained. “What a pity for the wagons, artillery, the horses and ourselves to destroy it. [But] it could not be avoided.”

Jubal Early’s division was sent off in a different direction, due east. As his columns entered the western approaches to the Cashtown Gap, their route took them past a sizable iron foundry owned and operated by the
abolitionist U.S. congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Stevens’ outspoken advocacy of a vigorous prosecution of the war was well known to Early, who decided to exact a little Southern justice of his own. He ordered the iron works burned and the supplies stored there seized, then turned a blind eye to his troops’ vandalism of workers’ housing. Early believed that these actions were more than justified. In part they were simple retaliation for the “various deeds of barbarity perpetuated by Federal troops in some of the Southern states,” and in part they were a message aimed right at Stevens for his “most vindictive spirit toward the people of the South.”

Once through the pass, Early learned that a Yankee force of unknown composition was holding position west of Gettysburg. He decided to flank the Federals by sending three of his brigades on a northerly swing through Mummasburg, while ordering the remaining one (John Gordon’s) plus Elijah White’s cavalry to push ahead and develop the enemy’s strength, location, and intentions.

Approaching cashtown, the head of Gordon’s column was fired upon from an ambush staged by four locals. Only one of them was armed, but he mortally wounded a Georgia soldier, so infuriating Jubal Early that he dispatched White’s troopers to find the bushwhackers. Although the quartet successfully eluded capture, the shooter, one Henry Hahn, would come to regret his act of murder so deeply that when he died, in 1879, many would say it was his conscience that had killed him.

Back along Marsh Creek, William Jennings became convinced that the trouble headed his way was more than his raw militiamen could handle. “It has always seemed to me that the situation had in it much of the heroic,” one of the emergency soldiers would later suggest. “Untrained, untried, and unused to war, they were sent to meet an overwhelming and disciplined force, not in some Grecian pass …, but in the open field with the certainty that they could make no effectual resistance.” “Our colonel, left to his own resources, wisely decided to make an effort to return to Harrisburg, and immediately struck off from the [Chambersburg] pike,” remembered another militiaman. Jennings left behind a picked squad to serve as a rear guard while the bulk of his command hurried off to the northeast at various speeds. It was this delaying force, along with Robert Bell’s mounted squadron, that White’s cavalry encountered at around 2:00
P.M.

It was no contest. Bell’s thin screen was ripped to tatters, while many in Jennings’ rear guard were overrun and captured. “It was well that the regiment took to its heels so quickly,” an amused Jubal Early later reported, “or some of its members might have been hurt.”

The twelve companies that Jennings had withdrawn regrouped on Bailey’s Hill, four miles north of Gettysburg. There they made a last stand, holding against Early’s infantry and cavalry for perhaps thirty minutes before retreating for good. Those not captured or felled by exhaustion (about a hundred men) eventually made it back to Harrisburg. “I never thought I could bear what I have gone through,” one survivor wrote afterward. “Old soldiers, nine-month men, say they never experienced anything like it.”

Once through Jennings’ ineffective roadblock, the Virginia cavalrymen continued along the pike. Deciding that shock tactics would suppress any further opposition, they charged into Gettysburg yelling and firing their pistols in the air. The strategy worked, for the most part: “It seemed as if Pandemonium had broken loose,” recalled townswoman Lydia Catherine Ziegler. Sarah Broadhead thought it was “enough to frighten us all to death.” “We were all scared,” avowed Elizabeth Thorn, then six months pregnant, “and wished for them to go.” A few, however, took it less seriously: in the house where Gates D. Fahnestock lived, the “boys looking through the slatted shutters [from the] second story saw and enjoyed it as they would a wild west show.”

White’s riders had a brief skirmish with a company that had been detailed from Jennings’ emergency regiment and posted on the eastern side of town, along Rock Creek. This small force was scattered, and a few of the hapless Yankees were taken prisoner. The “wild west show” turned deadly when some of the Virginia troopers flushed out a couple of Bell’s pickets, left behind when the squadron rode west. Two tried to escape on horseback, but one of them was thrown off at a fence, and when he confronted his pursuers with a pistol in hand, he was gunned down. Private George
W.
Sandoe thus earned the doleful distinction of being the first Union soldier to die by enemy action at Gettysburg. A hired substitute, he had been in the company just three days.

For a while, the Rebel cavalry had free rein in everything. A woman resident vividly recollected the raiders’“ransacking the barns, stores and chicken coops.” Fourteen-year-old Tillie Pierce ran home from school and arrived in time to see a Confederate lead away her favorite mount. “I began to plead for the horse,” she would write years later. “As I stood there begging and weeping, I was so shocked and insulted, I shall never forget it.” Young Leander Warren’s mother got the surprise of her life when a mounted Rebel banged on the house shutters and demanded some matches. “‘Oh, are you going to burn the old barn?’” she asked. “‘No,’” replied the Confederate, “‘we want to shoe our horses in the Blacksmith Shop.’” Leander “was not long in getting him some matches.”

Things became a bit more orderly after John Gordon’s infantry marched into town. “These Confederates were very firm and businesslike in their attitude toward the townspeople,” reported Henry Jacobs, whose father taught at Gettysburg’s Pennsylvania College. Businesslike though they may have been, however, “I never saw a more unsightly set of men,” swore Fannie Buehler, a mother of six whose postmaster husband was in hiding. She described Gordon’s men as being “dirty, … hatless, shoeless, and footsore.” In hiding like Postmaster Buehler was spymaster David McConaughy, whose third son chose this day to be born.

Not long after Gordon’s men secured the area, Jubal Early rode in from Mummasburg, where he had parked the rest of his division. Early was feeling like a beneficent conqueror. The crestfallen survivors of the 26th Pennsylvania Emergency Infantry were gathered in the town square, where the Confederate general addressed them. According to one resident, “He suggested the propriety of returning them to their mothers.” Early provided the town authorities with a list of supplies that he expected to be furnished to him. If the foodstuffs were not available, he said, he would take five
thousand dollars instead. In a somewhat truculent response, Gettysburg’s borough council president, David Kendlehart, declared that neither food nor cash would be forthcoming, though the town merchants would open their doors “to furnish whatever they can of such provisions.”

Early had a timetable to keep and may have wanted to rehabilitate his image somewhat after burning Stevens’ ironworks. Rather than losing his temper, he sent squads off in a halfhearted search of the town that managed to turn up 2,000 military rations in a rail car intended for the militia. After seeing that Gordon’s men got the food, Early rode away to his headquarters to plan the next day’s march. Among the units spending this night in Gettysburg was the band attached to Gordon’s Brigade. Fifteen-year-old Albertus McCreary would never forget how “exasperating” it had been to hear those musicians “through the night playing ‘Dixie’ and other Confederate airs.”

Joseph Hooker took the offensive this evening—not against the men in gray but against Henry Halleck. After losing his special place in the president’s chain of command, Hooker had regained ground by using the urgency of Lee’s close passage to Washington to draw reinforcements from the capital’s garrison—troops that Halleck had promptly surrendered. Halleck had sent him the best units assigned to Washington’s protection, including a large brigade of short-term Vermont men under Brigadier General George J. Stannard; two brigades of Pennsylvania Reserves led by Samuel Crawford; another brigade commanded by Brigadier General Alexander Hays, an experienced combat leader; an entire division of cavalry; plus several batteries and other miscellaneous units. But even this infusion was not enough for Hooker.

Now he had set his sights on the Union forces holding Harper’s Ferry. Once more he made claims not supported by the intelligence he was receiving from George Sharpe’s bureau. At 7:00
P.M.,
Hooker wired Halleck seeking authority over the Harper’s Ferry troops. “It must be borne in mind that I am here with a force inferior in numbers to that of the enemy,” Hooker insisted, “and must have every available man to use on the field.”

Just one hour before sending Halleck this demand, Hooker had received a curious note from Abraham Lincoln, who wished to know if a news report placing the general in Washington on the night of June 25
was true. “You need not believe any more than you choose,” Hooker responded at 8:00
P.M.
He asked for Lincoln’s help in identifying the source for the story. Lincoln’s reply came twelve hours later: “It did not come from the newspapers,” the president wrote, “nor did I believe it, but I wished to be entirely sure it was a falsehood.”

J
eb Stuart continued his passage through the abandoned Union rear areas this Saturday, though the march was not without incident. Once across the Occoquan at Wolf Run Shoals, he divided his command, sending a brigade off on a side expedition with orders to rejoin the main body at Fairfax Court House. As that larger group approached the rail station servicing the courthouse, some of Stuart’s men bumped into a Federal cavalry patrol, which they overwhelmed, but at a cost: Major John H. Whitaker of the 1st North Carolina Cavalry, whom one of Stuart’s aides termed “a most gallant officer,” died in the action. During this brief melee, Stuart himself was surprised by a squad of Federal troopers and almost captured; it was not the first time that his superb horse-handling skills had saved him from harm.