Gettysburg (19 page)

Another member of Longstreet’s staff, Colonel G. Moxley Sorrel, brought the scout around. According to Sorrel, Lee listened to what Harrison had to say “with great composure and minuteness.” After questioning him closely, the general felt convinced that the man was proffering an honest and perceptive analysis. He called in his chief of staff, Charles Marshall, who had only just sent off orders to Ewell and Hill concerning the movement against Harrisburg. Remembered Marshall, “I found [Lee] … sitting in his tent with a man in citizen’s dress, whom I did not know to be a soldier, but who, General Lee informed me, was a scout of General Longstreet’s, who had just been brought to him. He told me that this scout … had brought information that the Federal army had crossed the potomac, and that its advance had reached Frederickstown, and was moving thence westward toward the mountains.”

The intelligence supplied by Harrison was significant, but it was also flawed. It suggested that the Union army was attempting to break into
the Shenandoah Valley and from there come up behind Lee. If that was true, he risked being caught at a disadvantage, with fully one third of his army (Ewell’s Corps) spread off to the east. Lee now needed to accomplish two objectives: he must stop the enemy from pushing westward, and he must bring his own army together. There would be more work for Marshall this night.

As the chief of staff later summarized these new instructions, Lee “determined to move his own army to the east side of the Blue Ridge so as to threaten Washington and Baltimore, and detain the Federal forces on that side of the mountains to protect those cities. He directed me to countermand the orders to General Ewell and General Hill. … He ordered General Longstreet to prepare to move the next morning, following Hill.” In addition to calling off Ewell’s advance, Lee instructed his Second Corps commander to “move your forces to this point”— meaning Chambersburg.

E
very decision Jeb Stuart made on June 29 cost him a measure of his most important commodity: time. After leaving Rockville the previous evening, he had marched slowly with his men, prisoners, and captured wagons. The procession had covered only a few miles when the cavalry commander gave in to entreaties by Federal officers among the POWs and decided to parole the lot. It took hours to record the name of each of the more than four hundred Yankees and to issue parole slips for everyone. The job was not finished until early in the morning, at which point the column again headed north.

At a place called Hood’s Mill, Stuart’s riders crossed the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad line running east-west. Stuart now knew, as he would later admit, that the supposedly inert Union army had in fact been “ascertained to be moving through Frederick City northward.” Nor had he forgotten that his orders were to “reach our [main] column … [in order to] acquaint the commanding general with the nature of the enemy’s movements.” Still, there were temptations along the way. The tracks, station buildings, and miscellaneous rolling stock at Hood’s Mill proved just too inviting to resist, so Stuart set his troops to the task of destroying them—an activity that would keep them occupied until midday. All of this was taking its toll. As he led his men forward again, the cavalry chief fell asleep in the saddle, noticeably swaying from side to side as his horse plodded on.

Other large columns of Confederate cavalry were also moving today. Beverly H. Robertson, having at last concluded that the enemy was no longer intent on passing through Ashby’s or Snicker’s Gap, was carrying
out the part of Stuart’s orders that instructed him to “follow the army, keeping on its right and rear.” Even though fully two thirds of Lee’s infantry had crossed the Potomac at Shepherdstown, Robertson set his own route via Berryville and Martinsburg, bound for a more distant crossing at Williamsport. In following this course, the cavalryman swung over to the left and rear of Lee’s army—a track that would later inspire a critical John S. Mosby to quip that “Stuart had ridden around General Hooker while Robertson was riding around General Lee.” For his part, Robertson would never waver from his contention that he had obeyed Stuart’s instructions “literally and promptly.”

The orders from Henry Halleck placing George Meade in charge of the Army of the Potomac had also granted him a free hand to “appoint to command [any officers] you may deem expedient.” Meade exercised that prerogative today by promoting three promising young officers in one jump from the rank of captain to brigadier general. They were Elon J. Farnsworth, Wesley Merritt, and George Armstrong Custer. “George A. Custer was, as all agree, the most picturesque figure of the Civil War,” recollected a trooper in the Michigan Cavalry Brigade, which Custer now took over. The same soldier noted that the colorful boy general “acted like a man who made a business of his profession; who went about the work of fighting battles and winning victories, as a railroad superintendent goes about the business of running trains.”

George Meade also began dramatically to reposition his army. With confirmed reports of a Confederate presence as far east as the Susquehanna River, Meade felt he had to move his forces in such a way as to challenge the enemy advance while at the same time protecting Washington and Baltimore. That meant deploying his troops across a broad front up to the Pennsylvania line—no small task for a force this large, requiring Meade to spend much of his time on June 28 charting the routes and drawing up the orders. Long marches lay ahead for everyone, as Meade was hoping to close in one day a distance that it would normally have taken his infantry two to cover.

The eastern edge of this new line was assigned to the Sixth Corps, which had more than twenty-five miles to travel. The men were roused at 2:30
A.M.,
given no time for breakfast, and forced to tramp seventeen miles before a stop was ordered for coffee. “This was taking morning exercise with a vengeance,” reflected a Maine volunteer. Each soldier walked this distance, recalled another Sixth Corps member, “carrying rifle, knapsack and contents, accouterments, haversack containing rations and sixty rounds of cartridges—over fifty pounds.”

Filling in the line to the west of the Sixth Corps were the Fifth and Second. The men of the Fifth had a march of some twenty miles. Captain
Francis Adam Donaldson of the 118th Pennsylvania was struck by the curious spectacle of it all: “The several divisions are stretched, one after another, along the road like a huge snake, and when the head of [the] column halts, the balance keeps closing in mass until there are thousands upon thousands of men jammed close together, stretched at full length upon the ground resting. … As the different regiments [in the rear] close up and rest, the head of the column [is] moving off again, so that both ends of the snake are moving at the time the other part is resting.” Another Pennsylvanian, this one with Hancock’s Second Corps, described it as a “hard, hard march. Many a brave boy was obliged to stop by the wayside to be driven up by wretched provost guards.” The men were subjected to extreme pressure from their commander, who was trying to make up for time lost when a mistake at his headquarters had resulted in the corps’ starting out several hours late.

Moving along parallel roads to the west of these two corps were the columns of the Twelfth and Third, which also had in excess of twenty miles to cover. The Twelfth was joined on its march by reinforcements sent out from Baltimore. The sight of the army in motion was unforgettable for these soldiers, most of whom had never seen any force larger than their regiment. One of the new men would remember that “as far as the eye could reach, the hills seemed to be covered with a moving mass of soldiers, together with horses, army wagons, artillery, and the general paraphernalia of an army, with flags flying at every quarter.”

The rank and file of the Third Corps were heartened by the return of their absent commander. “General Sickles …,” wrote a Massachusetts officer, “was welcomed with great enthusiasm by the old 3d Corps as he passed along the line.” More than a few of his supporters happily improved their reputations today as the bad boys of the Army of the Potomac: a Pennsylvania officer in charge of the rear guard recalled having to herd forward “a considerable number of the men [who] … got their canteens filled with whiskey [and] … were left behind because they were too drunk to travel.” For his part, Sickles himself was slow getting his wagon train moving, an oversight that provoked a sharp rebuke from Meade, who seemed to be especially impatient with the civilian general in the club. It was little wonder that one of Sickles’ staff observed that “Meade is not liked in the Corps.”

Taking up the line of advance farthest to the west, brushing along the foot of the Catoctin Mountains, were the First and Eleventh corps.
Because this portion of Meade’s long line was closest to the largest known concentration of the enemy, and Meade himself was miles away, at Middleburg, First Corps commander John Reynolds was given considerable latitude in controlling the movements of the two corps. Both of them moved up from Frederick, covering a distance of twenty miles or more. “Marched all day through the mud & rain,” griped a Connecticut soldier in the Eleventh, “very hard walking.”

Reynolds’ blue columns wound through some very rich farmland. A member of one of Howard’s (Eleventh Corps) Ohio regiments marveled that the civilians did not seem at all apprehensive; rather, “they only exhibited curiosity and wonder of seeing so many soldiers; and, from their remarks, evidently thought our force was abundantly able to annihilate the rest of the human family.” At day’s end, many of the weary soldiers found themselves near a Catholic convent. “The beauty and tranquility of the place, so strikingly in contrast with the military tumult which suddenly invested it, are vividly remembered,” wrote an Illinois officer.

Pennsylvanian John Reynolds was pushing his men. “Marched us too fast,” complained a New Yorker in the First Corps ranks. “Men played out.” Added another, “It rained all day, and many of the men were obliged to march barefoot for want of shoes.” The First Corps (and now left wing) commander rode ahead of his columns to reach Emmitsburg, Maryland, in the early afternoon. In a note sent from there at 3:15
P.M.,
he summarized for Meade the intelligence he had gathered. A scout in George Sharpe’s employ had located positions for Ewell’s Corps and placed Hill’s men near Chambersburg. Reynolds wrote that he planned to recruit some bold locals to slip through the Catoctin gaps and “learn what they can of the enemy.”

Even as Reynolds was assessing his information and planning the next day’s march, some of his men were in Mechanicstown,
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having bread tossed to them by a farmer and his wife. “Oh, boys, you don’t know what’s before you,” the woman sobbed as she worked. “I’m afraid many of ye’ll be dead or mangled soon, for Lee’s whole army is ahead of ye and there’ll be terrible fighting.” Seeing the effect the woman’s words were having on his men, one officer clambered onto the wagon and began tossing the loaves himself. “Walk up, boys, and get your rations!” he called out. “Bread and tears, tears and bread.”

Robert E. Lee was also making some moves this day. Couriers had left his headquarters early, bearing orders for Beverly H. Robertson, still in Virginia, to join the main body at Chambersburg. During the night, Lee had reconsidered his instructions to Richard Ewell and decided to modify them. Instead of marching his Second Corps to Chambersburg, Ewell was now to “move in the direction of Gettysburg, via Heidlersburg [, from where] … you can either move directly on Gettysburg, or turn down to Cashtown.”
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A. P.
Hill’s corps now began to ease its way through the Cashtown Gap, while Longstreet spread his units more evenly around the Chambersburg area. During this repositioning, some of George Pickett’s men passed through town in a southerly direction, brightening some civilian “faces thinking we were retreating.” When a woman in the crowd asked why they were not going on to Harrisburg, a Virginia soldier named William Henry Cocke felt compelled to reply. “I told her to keep quiet,” he recalled, “[that] we had not gone yet & it was too soon for her to crow.” A soldier-correspondent for the
Savannah Republican
, writing under the moniker “Tout le Monde,” mused this day that the townspeople’s attitude was the “offspring of an education from the miserable abolition sheets and anti-slavery speeches which had been ding-donged into them from time immemorial.”