Gettysburg (68 page)

Lorenzo Crounse of the
New York Times
, one of the first reporters to reach the battlefield, did not rest much after the fighting ended this night. “I visited some portions of the line by moonlight and can bear personal witness to the terrible ferocity of the battle,” he would write. “In front of some of our brigades, who had good protection from stone walls or fences, the rebel dead laid piled in lines like windrows of hay.” “Every one is exhausted,” recorded G. W. Hosmer of the
New York Herald
,”and there is great misery for want of water.”

Units that were positioned near where they had seen action did their best to take care of their own. A soldier in the 1st Minnesota later remembered how he and his unwounded comrades had “stumbled over the field in searching for our fallen companions, and when the living were cared for, laid ourselves down on the ground to gain a little rest …[,] the living sleeping side-by-side with the dead.”
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Close by, Mississippi soldiers belonging to Posey’s Brigade performed a similar duty. “Flitting forms a few feet off showed us our foe engaged in the same task,” one of them recalled. “A whisper above the breath would call for a shot from our foe on picket, a shot called for a volley and a volley meant death. So in quietness, disturbed only by the groans of the stricken wretches, we finished our work.”

Near the peach orchard, South Carolina soldiers “gathered the dead and wounded,” recollected one of the lucky ones. “It was a melancholy task, for they were very numerous.” A Georgian riding past the place this night remarked on the “groans of the wounded which the Enemy has not been able to remove.” J. W. Duke, of Barksdale’s Brigade, at last located his brother, whose presentiment that “’something is going to happen today’” had been genuinely prophetic: he was lying, mortally wounded, in the peach orchard. “‘Thank God! my prayers are answered,’” he gasped at Duke. “‘1 have asked him to take me in place of you, as I am prepared and you are not.’”

Taken solely on its own merits, the July 2 fight at Gettysburg was one of the Civil War’s most intense battles. In retrospect, it was the day on which Robert E. Lee came closest to achieving the “concert of action” he believed to be necessary for victory, with more troops engaged according to an overall scheme than were employed on either July 1 or July 3. It was very much a soldier’s battle, during which individual courage was commonplace and the level of personal effort, especially given the weather and the day’s exhausting preliminary movements, was nearly fictional in its accountings.

July 2 laid bare the failings of Lee’s command style and the dysfunctional nature of his army’s operational culture. The broad front position Lee acceded to effectively isolated each corps, demanding even greater coordination on the part of his principal officers, few of whom rose to the occasion. There was no unity of purpose among Longstreet, Hill, and Ewell, only an ambiguous understanding of events that was replete with shades of interpretation. Lacking any clear direction from the top, division and brigade commanders were left on their own to determine how the overall assault was proceeding and what role they were meant to play in it.

From Hood’s “digression” (which modified a modification of a busted plan) to Robert Rodes’ inability to act with celerity or clarity, the contributions of Lee’s division commanders were clouded by a fog of misunderstanding and miscommunication that muffed opportunities and needlessly squandered lives. Lee’s responsibility for this miasma is painfully obvious. He did not impose his will upon his corps commanders, but neither did he convey a sufficient sense of purpose to enable them to operate according to any commonly understood objectives.

The breakdown of Confederate field intelligence this day was astounding. It resulted in an entire battle plan (such as it was) based on fatally incorrect information. Compounding the initial misinformation was an abject failure on the corps and divisional levels to confirm and refine the original data as events unfolded. The surprise expressed by James Longstreet when McLaws discovered the Union position in his front spoke volumes about the lack of adequate information gathering.

On this day of his greatest martial trial, George Gordon Meade operated more as a sort of supernumerary corps commander than as an army leader. Once Daniel Sickles’ insubordination had derailed his defensive scheme, Meade began to behave like a fireman, always drawn to the flames and ignoring wisps of smoke portending danger elsewhere. He was
courageous and forthright in his efforts to blunt the Rebel assaults against his left flank, but the situation he was trapped in compelled him to commit his forces in a piecemeal fashion that negated much of their value. He became so fixated on the crisis on his left that he knowingly stripped his right of troops who would prove to be largely unneeded where they were sent yet desperately missed in the positions they had abandoned. That he survived Lee’s offensive was due as much to the compact nature of the Federal position, adroit leadership at the regimental, brigade, and divisional levels, failings on the enemy’s part, and sheer luck as to any efforts of his own in shaping an overall response to the threat he was facing.

Ironically enough, had Meade and Sickles worked in tandem—that is, had the line taken by the Third Corps been shared with the Fifth, and had command matters been resolved and fallback plans established—Longstreet’s troops would have been hard pressed to achieve any of their goals. Given the personalities involved, however, that kind of teamwork was impossible. Still, it was not what Daniel Sickles did that nearly destroyed the Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg; it was the manner in which he did it.

The roughly 9,000 Federal soldiers who had been killed, wounded, or captured on July 1 were joined by some 10,000 more on July 2, perhaps 1,200 of whom were in the prisoner category. Just as the first day of fighting had seriously damaged the First and Eleventh Corps, so the combat on July 2 marked the beginning of the end for the Third, which would never recover from its losses this day. With some 593 officers and enlisted men dead, 3,029 wounded, and 589 reported missing, Daniel Sickles’ command suffered a casualty rate approaching 30 percent.

The Confederate toll for July 2 was estimated at 6,800, slightly more than that for July 1, even though the number of men engaged on this second day was much greater. The losses fell most heavily on Longstreet’s Corps and Richard Anderson’s division, with the former taking a loss of nearly 30 percent and the latter (at least in Wilcox’s, Perry’s, and Wright’s Brigades) experiencing casualties of about 40 percent.

At day’s end, the gains that would prompt Lee to renew his offensive on July 3 were largely illusory. The artillery platform provided by the peach orchard offered no significant advantages for E. P. Alexander’s cannon, and the foothold gained by Johnson’s men on Culp’s Hill held more possibilities in the imagination than in reality. Yet it was on this basis that Lee committed his army to one more effort.

F
ranklin Aretas Haskell was a New England farm boy whose ticket out of the laboring, provincial life was his love of reading and thirst for knowledge. He followed his older brother, a lawyer, to the western frontier of Wisconsin, where he earned enough as a town clerk and school superintendent to pay his way through Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. There he drank deep of intellectual stimulation, determined to improve his lot. One astute professor evaluated him as being “ambitious as Lucifer and possibly mischievous and irregular.” A career in law beckoned after Dartmouth, taking Haskell back to Wisconsin, where he was when the war began.

Frank Haskell marched off with the 6th Wisconsin as a lieutenant and adjutant. His administrative skills eventually elevated him to the brigade level, and when John Gibbon took command of what would soon be called the Iron Brigade, Haskell became his aide de camp. His ambition was to command a regiment, but a combination of state politics, personality issues, and bad luck conspired to keep him stalled on Gibbon’s staff.

At thirty-four (he would turn thirty-five on July 18), Haskell was somewhat older than most aides, and downright elderly for a lieutenant. He had an air of authority about him that some admired and others found irritating. A wartime photograph of him shows a balding, officious-looking figure tending toward plumpness. His curiosity remained active at Gettysburg, and his eye for detail was excellent, as was his memory, but his willing acceptance of rumors and hearsay could mislead him.

Haskell had arrived at the battlefield with the Second Corps on the morning of July 2. His work with John Gibbon kept him busy but also in a position to see lots of things. At one point, while intently watching some of the fighting around the Bliss farm from horseback, he was targeted by a distant Rebel sniper, who let fly a bullet that, as Haskell recollected it, “hissed by my cheek so close that I felt the movement of the air
distinctly.” He was a witness to the terrible struggle of the Third Corps (“What a Hell is there down that valley!” he exclaimed), then a participant in another storm as the waves of Anderson’s Division broke against the shore of the Second Corps on Cemetery Ridge.

“All senses for the time are dead but the one of sight,” Haskell afterward wrote, trying to explain what it felt like to be in the midst of combat. “The roar of the discharges, and the yells of the enemy all pass unheeded; but the impassioned soul is all eyes, and sees all things, that the smoke does not hide.” Then, reflecting on the battle’s aftermath, he described the strange silence and the desolation of once-fertile fields that had been trampled underfoot by fighting men and were now littered with the castoffs of their contest. He found striking, too, the sharp contrast between the dead or wounded and the survivors, the former arranged in a thousand unnatural poses or bewildered by their fate, the latter “quite mad with joy.”

His duties as a staff aide kept Haskell waiting outside the Leister house until Meade’s nighttime conference with his key generals ended. From there he made his way back to Second Corps headquarters, leading his usually even-tempered horse, who seemed oddly agitated. Only after reaching the hitching line, where he could strike a light, did he realize that his favorite mount had been badly wounded in the course of the day’s fighting. Dogged by that sad realization, Frank Haskell stretched out on a blanket tossed onto the ground and for the next four hours lost himself to the “delicious, dreamless oblivion of weariness and of battle.”

Perhaps two miles west of where Frank Haskell slipped into an exhausted slumber, a twenty-five-year-old Mississippi farmer of equal rank was himself hoping that sleep would erase some of the images of this day. Lieutenant William Peel and his regiment, the 11th Mississippi, of Joseph R. Davis’ brigade, not only had missed the July 1 fighting but had been little more than observers of the July 2 actions. Like Haskell, Peel had enlisted in 1861, and like that Yankee he was unmarried, dedicated to his cause, and hardworking. Unlike Haskell, he had never aspired to do anything more than farm his family’s land, near Okolona, Mississippi, nor had he evidenced much of the pen-and-paper skill so amply demonstrated by the Wisconsin clerk and administrator. Yet something had moved Peel, at the outset of the present campaign, to begin a journal in which he faithfully chronicled his odyssey from Fredericksburg to Gettysburg.

Peel was sufficiently respected by the men of his company (who styled themselves “The Prairie Rifles”) that they had elected him their lieutenant. At his place in the line of battle at Second Bull Run, he had taken a serious wound. He had been absent, recovering, when his regiment got chewed up at Antietam, losing nearly half of its number who entered the fight. He had rejoined the 11th in December in the North Carolina theater, which posting had kept the unit away from Chancellorsville.

The 11th had been held up watching supply wagons in Cashtown on July 1 and so had avoided the fighting along the railroad cut. Along with the much-reduced remnants of Davis’ Brigade, William Peel and his regiment comprised the unused reserve on July 2. Even as Frank Haskell was drawn to the afterimages of battle, so was William Peel, whose own contemplation must have been nearly simultaneous with the union lieutenant’s. “Implements of war were scattered in every direction, while here & there lay horses & men in every conceivable degree of mutilation,” Peel noted. “There are perhaps few stages of suffering of which the imagination may conceive, that were not here represented.”