Gettysburg (4 page)

A professional soldier to the core, Reynolds had come to view almost all instruction from Washington as interference. He was firm in his belief, as he said, that “no one can conduct a campaign at a distance from the field or without being in the presence of operating armies.” Such conviction made it all the more ironic, then, that John Reynolds should find himself away from the Fredericksburg camps in early June on a visit to the very seat of that interfering power, being sized up by President Lincoln as Joe Hooker’s possible replacement.

In a later conversation with George Meade about this interview, Reynolds would indicate that it was wrong to think that Abraham Lincoln had been seeking to drop Hooker. According to Reynolds, Lincoln said “he was not disposed to throw away a gun because it missed fire once; that he would pick the lock and try again.” Nevertheless, Reynolds was clearly invited to state his conditions for taking over the Army of the Potomac. Not long after he returned to Fredericksburg, one of his aides was told that the major general had been offered the command and had “refused it on the ground that there was too much interference from Washington.”

Although he would later claim to have had no specific knowledge of these conversations, Hooker was too astute a political creature to have missed the signs. Brigadier General John Gibbon, who led a division in the Second Corps, believed that Hooker had entered the Chancellorsville campaign “possessed of the very decided confidence of both the officers and men of his army” but emerged with “a very decided loss of this confidence.” For his part, Gibbon began the month of June “with some apprehension [as] to the renewal of hostilities.”

Hooker, himself apprehensive about Lee’s next moves, turned all his energies toward divining them. From the commander of Union forces on the lower Virginia peninsula came word on June 2 that sizable bodies of Rebel troops were moving toward Fredericksburg, “and that the idea prevails over the lines that an invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania is soon to be made.” At the same time, Hooker’s own chief of cavalry was certain that Lee’s army “has been weakened by troops sent west and south.” Fortunately for Hooker, one of his first reorganizational steps upon taking over the Army of the Potomac had been to improve both the gathering and the assessment of military intelligence.

To this end, Hooker had established the Bureau of Military Information, headed by Colonel George H. Sharpe, a well-schooled New York lawyer and combat veteran who was fluent in several languages. Prior to
the creation of the bureau, intelligence regarding the enemy had come to headquarters through dozens of different channels, and there had been no systematic means for sorting the useful from the useless. An important part of the brief for sharpe and his staff was to collate these various sources, compare the information they provided, and weigh the veracity of interrogation subjects, all the while looking for patterns that might reveal enemy intentions. The colonel also directed a small group of “scouts” who operated in hostile territory. Like any truly new idea, Sharpe’s role was not well understood by many army officers, some of whom refused to cooperate with him or his agents.

Sharpe’s men were at present focusing on several assignments. They were trying to pin down the location of two of Lee’s divisions (Hood’s and Pickett’s) that had been noticeably absent at Chancellorsville and were now believed to be rejoining the Army of Northern Virginia. At the same time, they were working to compile a fresh table of organization for Lee’s army. Because units tended to operate in connection with their parent organizations—regiments with their brigades, brigades with their divisions, divisions with their corps—a precise knowledge of the Army of Northern Virginia’s “family tree” enabled union officers in the field to deduce the presence of a corps through the affiliation of prisoners taken from just a few regiments. Immediately prior to Chancellorsville, Sharpe and his staff had developed just such a chart, which had proved amazingly accurate. But now it was apparent that Lee’s army was undergoing major changes, so everyone at the bureau was scrambling to construct a revised Confederate organizational chart.

Sharpe had only just delivered his first strategic summary since Chancellorsville. Among its key points was a seemingly trivial tidbit offered by a Confederate deserter, who reported that Lee’s men had been warned to prepare for a “campaign of long marches & hard fighting.” Another task that Sharpe and his unit had yet to complete was drawing up an estimate of enemy strength. That pending status suited Joe Hooker just fine, since for the moment he preferred that there be no data contradictory to the numbers he was forwarding to Washington.

This was part of a dangerous game that Hooker was playing with his commander in chief and, more especially, with the president’s chief military adviser, Major General Henry
W.
Halleck. Hooker and Halleck were antagonists, neither liking nor respecting the other. Their mutual disdain predated the war, and the exigencies of the conflict had done little to mute them. On first taking command of the Army of the Potomac,
Hooker had insisted on reporting directly to Lincoln, bypassing Halleck in the chain of command. Hooker was convinced that Halleck so favored operations in the Western theater (where his career had been made) that neither the Army of the Potomac “nor its commander expected justice at his hands.” Although the dispute never erupted into a public squabble, men in the ranks sensed the unhealthy tensions between the two leaders. The chaplain of a First Corps regiment accepted as fact the “bad blood between Hooker and General Halleck,” while a German baron serving as an aide in the Eleventh Corps was told that Halleck “worked against” Hooker.

Halleck was now in a perfect position to impede what Hooker felt was the absolutely necessary reinforcement of his command. To bolster his case for more troops, and to offset what he saw as Halleck’s certain opposition, Hooker accepted without question estimates that made the Army of Northern Virginia larger than the Army of the Potomac. He did so in the personal belief, as he told his chief of staff, that “the rebellion rested upon that army, and when it was destroyed the end was at hand.”

The first day of June 1863 found Private Leander Huckaby of the 11th Mississippi on picket duty below Fredericksburg. His regiment was posted along the river’s southern bank, or what the young soldier referred to as the “Dixie side of the rappahannock.” Experience had taught the citizen-soldier how to gauge terrain, so he looked with pleasure on the broad, open river bottom that stretched before him. There was no place for the enemy to hide, Huckaby observed, and should the Yankees attempt to advance, he knew that the Confederate artillery would “shel them as they come across to death.” For the moment, though, it was live and let live. Continuing his improvisational spelling, Huckaby noted, “i can get up on our brest works an see the enemy on there brest works any time in the day.”

It would become common for postwar Southern writers to proclaim that Lee’s army was nearly bursting with confidence following Chancellorsville, and indeed, there were strong optimistic currents in the ranks. Major Charles Marshall reflected the view from Lee’s headquarters when, comparing the army that had marched into Maryland in 1862 with the one gathered around Fredericksburg in 1863, he judged the latter “better disciplined and far more efficient.” Private David E. Johnston of George Pickett’s division was certain that the Army of Northern Virginia
was then “composed of the best fighting material that General Lee ever led to battle.” A South Carolina surgeon fully expected that Lee’s men would henceforth “fight better than they have ever done, if such a thing is possible.”

Yet there were other, more sober perspectives as well. “I do not think it will be long before we will have another row here,” brooded a lieutenant in the 34th North Carolina. “I see no prospect for peace.” It was a view shared by one of Lee’s most promising young officers, Colonel Henry King Burgwyn Jr., who commanded the 26th North Carolina. “God alone knows how tired I am of this war,” he wrote to his mother, “& He alone knows when it will end.” Brigadier General William Dorsey Pender, the very capable commander of one of Lee’s brigades (who would soon be raised to divisional command), had “not much doubt but that a fight is on hand.” Unlike many of his colleagues, who dismissed the combat qualities of the Yankee army, Pender worried that when they met again, the enemy would “fight as well even as they did at Chancellorsville, which was bad enough.”

Since his return from Richmond, Robert
E.
Lee had been laboring with little rest to implement a plan he had been considering for some while, which called for his army to be reorganized from two infantry corps into three. As he had explained to Jefferson Davis, the old setup, in which each corps numbered about 30,000 muskets, gave the corps commanders “more than one man can properly handle & keep under his eye in battle.” Under Lee’s new scheme, as recalled by his aide Major Walter Taylor, each of the “corps embraced three divisions; one of the divisions of the Second Corps and one of the Third had five brigades; all the others had four brigades. The artillery was also reorganized. To each corps there were attached two or three battalions of four batteries each, under the command of a chief of artillery for that corps; these three divisions and the reserve artillery were under the command of the chief of artillery of the army.” Lee’s cavalry corps, though not reorganized to any significant degree, was meanwhile increased in size with the addition of six regiments and a battalion.

Lee met with his top leadership on June 1. The trio he had selected to head his restructured infantry corps would be vital to the success of his forthcoming campaign. When it came to his personal command style, Lee took a decentralized approach: his role, as he saw it, was to prescribe the overall shape, broad direction, and desired objectives of an operation, which his subordinates would then implement as the situation allowed.
Rather than issue direct orders, Lee preferred to suggest the most reasonable course of action, trusting that his generals would share his vision. Lee and the late Stonewall Jackson had been a well-matched pair; it remained to be seen if the new team would work together as well.

Lee’s anchor in the reorganized army was Lieutenant General James Longstreet. Under the previous system, he and Jackson had each commanded half of Lee’s force, and Longstreet retained most of his old units in the newly shaped First Corps. Born in South Carolina and raised in Georgia, the forty-two-year-old officer had initially favored tolerating a stalemate in the East while reinforcements were sent west. A lengthy discussion with Lee, however, had changed his mind. Even as Lee traveled to Richmond for his showdown with Davis and Seddon, Longstreet was advising an influential Confederate senator that “we can spare nothing from this army to re-enforce in the West.” Longstreet tried to persuade Lee that the upcoming campaign ought to be essentially defensive in nature. It would be unwise to wage offensive operations, he thought, because “our losses were so heavy when we attacked that our Army must soon be depleted to such an extent that we should not be able to hold a force in the field sufficient to meet our adversary.” He argued that instead, “we should work so as to force the enemy to attack us, in such good position as we might find in his own country … which might assure us of a grand triumph.” Longstreet would later summarize his conception of the campaign as “one of offensive strategy, but defensive tactics.” Lee listened to Longstreet’s arguments but made no firm commitment either way—though Longstreet believed otherwise.

The Army of Northern Virginia’s revamped Second Corps was basically Jackson’s old command. To lead it, Lee tapped Virginian Richard Stoddert Ewell, a forty-six-year-old professional officer who had served with distinction under Jackson, and had in August 1862 suffered a wound that had cost him his left leg in fighting near Manassas. An artilleryman recalled Ewell as being “a queer character, very eccentric, but upright, brave and devoted. He had no high talent but did all that a brave man of moderate capacity could.” Lee himself publicly described his Second Corps commander as an “honest, brave soldier, who had always done his duty well.” Privately, though, he worried about Ewell’s state of mind, specifically his periods of “quick alternations from elation to despondency.” Lee made it a point to speak “long and earnestly” with Ewell about the great responsibilities he was accepting. Partly because Ewell’s prewar U.S. Army service had included a posting to
southern Pennsylvania, Lee decided that Jackson’s old corps would lead the way in the upcoming operation.

The new Third Corps was constructed of elements drawn from the First and second, along with other units that had recently been added to the Army of Northern Virginia. Ambrose Powell Hill, the thirty-seven-year-old Virginian picked to command the corps, had a reputation as a hard fighter, both on and off the battlefield. He had locked horns more than once with Stonewall Jackson; for a short while a malicious rumor even circulated that Jackson had used some of his last words to blackball Hill as his successor. In Lee’s opinion, however, A.
P.
Hill was simply “the best soldier of his grade with me.”

The restructuring of the Army of Northern Virginia from two corps into three was just part of the transformation that Lee completed in record time. Out of the nine infantry divisions in the new scheme, three were led by men untried at that level, and out of the thirty-seven brigades within the nine divisions, thirteen were entrusted to officers with no previous command experience. At any other juncture, such wholesale changes would have required an extended shakedown period before the army was committed to a major campaign. But Lee could not wait. The situation at Vicksburg had continued to deteriorate, and the possibility that Jefferson Davis might revisit his decision not to send reinforcements to the West loomed larger with each passing day.

Caught between events that he could not control and the struggle to rebuild his army, Lee felt stymied, and his diplomacy and tact began to wear thin. Two days before he met with his corps commanders, he fired off a pair of petulant notes to Richmond. To Jefferson Davis, he complained that Major General Daniel Harvey Hill had refused his request to release troops to him from those assigned to defend North Carolina. This action, Lee claimed, had so compromised his buildup that should the Federal army again come at him, there “may be nothing left for me to do but fall back [toward Richmond].” To Secretary of War Seddon, Lee griped that some of the troop transfers that
D. H.
Hill had approved were nothing more than administrative smoke screens. An experienced brigade in Pickett’s Division had been replaced by a makeshift one that had in turn been dispersed back to its original command, leaving Pickett with three brigades instead of four.
^*
“I … dislike to part with officers & men
who have been tried in battle and seasoned to the hardships of the campaign in exchange for wholly untried troops,” Lee grumbled.