Gettysburg (88 page)

In the sanctuary of her room, Sarah Broadhead closed her diary entry for this “dreadfully long day. We know … the Rebels are retreating, and that our army has been victorious. I was anxious to help care for the wounded, but the day is ended and all is quiet, and for the first time in a week I shall go to bed, feeling safe.”

One of Sarah’s neighbors had opted to move out of her house for the latter part of the occupation, leaving just her father behind to watch over things. Upon returning to her home, she ran up to her room and was relieved to see that it remained much as she had left it. A second glance, however, revealed a “little pile of gray rags” that on closer inspection proved to be “the remnant of pants and a hat.” Guessing what this meant, she pulled out the trunk in which her husband kept his best blue suit. The clothes were gone: “I suppose those gray rags were left in exchange,” she reflected. Not caring for her end of the deal, she recalled, “I gathered them up on a stick and threw them out in the street.”

F
or the final time, Robert E. Lee reread the letter that he believed signaled the end of his professional career. It was a document so explosive in its contents that Lee had handwritten it himself instead of relying on his clerical staff to produce a first draft. Behind him now were the pressure-filled days following the Battle of Gettysburg, when it had seemed that God was bent on testing him to the utmost. The withdrawal that began early on July 5 had been difficult in every way. While the great wagon train of the wounded struggled on muddy roads leading it due west through the Cashtown Gap, then southward (avoiding Chambersburg) toward Williamsport, the infantry marched south along the eastern side of the mountains, passing through that barrier at Fairfield on the shortest route to Hagerstown. The rains that so dogged the ranks’ efforts, desperately slowing their progress, also swelled the Potomac, with the result that crossing points that had been easily fordable on the march into Pennsylvania were now rendered impassable. A temporary pontoon bridge that Lee had maintained at Falling Waters had been destroyed by a Yankee raiding force on July 4, leaving the army commander with no other alternative than to knit his command, beginning on July 6, into a defensive line stretching from just below Hagerstown to Falling Waters, its back to the flooded Potomac. His engineers did a magnificent job of positioning the defenses and constructing earthworks at key points. Also magnificent was Jeb Stuart, whose cavalry effectively bought Lee sufficient time to get his infantry into this position.

Despite some sharp attacks on his wagon train and several Yankee cavalry thrusts (which looked more threatening than they actually were), Lee held his position through the night of July 13. His men had managed to erect some emergency bridges, and starting late that night, the bulk of his army at last succeeded in crossing to the Virginia side. The final two divisions to reach the bridge approaches were caught unprepared by a pair of Union cavalry divisions across from Falling Waters, and before the confused fighting ended, the Confederates had lost some 700 prisoners. Ironically, the parting shots of this campaign were fired by the command that had opened the battle on July 1, Henry Heth’s division.

Following this “success,” there were the painful tasks of measuring the cost and assessing the great damage inflicted upon the army’s command structure. And as if that were not an unpleasant enough prospect, Lee found himself under attack from another quarter, as segments of the Southern press railed against the entire operation. To cap it all off, news of his withdrawal from Gettysburg coincided with word that Vicksburg had fallen, surrendered on July 4.

Some two weeks after returning to Virginia, Lee submitted his report on the Gettysburg campaign. In it he noted the deaths of J. Johnston Pettigrew, mortally wounded in a last action covering the army’s crossing, and Dorsey Pender, from wounds received on July 2. “The conduct of the troops was all that I could desire or expect, and they deserve success so far as it can be deserved by heroic valor and fortitude,” Lee’s report read. The personal letter he had written to Jefferson Davis would close out all accounts.

“We must expect reverses, even defeats,” the letter allowed. “They are sent to teach us wisdom and prudence, to call forth greater energies, and to prevent our falling into greater disasters.” Then Lee got to the point: “The general remedy for the want of success in a military commander is his removal. … I … propose to Your Excellency the propriety of selecting another commander for this army.” Continuing in this vein, he cited the “growing failure of my bodily strength” and expressed his confidence “that a younger and abler man than myself can readily be attained.” He signed his resignation note with “sentiments of great esteem.”

The reply from the Confederate president was not long in coming. Writing on August 11, Jefferson Davis rejected Lee’s request. “To ask me to substitute you by some one in my judgment more fit to command, or who would possess more of the confidence of the army, or of the reflecting men of the country, is to demand an impossibility,” he declared. The matter of Robert E. Lee’s resignation was closed. The war would continue.

B
y this point in the war, George Meade had confronted some of the best field officers in the Confederate army. As a corps commander, he had fought against Stonewall Jackson, and after his promotion to chief of the Army of the Potomac, his very first battle had pitted him against Robert E. Lee. At least on those occasions, Meade had known his ground and understood his foes. Now, sitting in a basement hearing room in Congress, Meade was clearly out of his element. Those facing him here were the antitheses of military display, though all the more powerful for their strength’s concealment.

The two men questioning Meade this day represented the joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War. Created in December 1861 and renewed in January 1864, it operated under a broad mandate to investigate every aspect of the conflict, from supply procurement to the management of individual campaigns. Although possessed of little actual authority, the committee could recommend action to its parent bodies and, perhaps even more important, throw the bright light of public scrutiny on the military’s handling of the war. Motivated by a mixture of patriotic and highly politicized agendas, the committee served to expose corruption and poor administrative practices while at the same time providing a platform for politicians to pillory officers who were out of favor for one reason or another.

Benjamin Wade, who chaired the committee, was one of the two senators on hand to question Meade. The Massachusetts lawyer and judge was a vigorous advocate for women’s rights, workers’ rights, and abolition, a liberal who viewed the social conservatism of most West Point graduates as an impediment to victory. Sharing the bench with him today was Zachariah Chandler, a Michigan businessman and past mayor of Detroit. Like Wade, Chandler was a fervent enemy of disloyalty, which
quality he attributed to those West Point generals who exhibited a reluctance to obliterate the slave powers.

The committee’s interest in George Meade had begun with Lincoln’s removal of Joseph Hooker, a favorite of several of its most powerful members. Its direct focus on Meade had a great deal to do with the ambitious lobbying done by former congressman Daniel sickles during his long recuperation in Washington. Under the pretext of undertaking a general investigation into the Army of the Potomac’s 1863 operations, the committee had summoned Sickles and others to testify in late February 1864. The list of those eventually called was decidedly stacked against Meade. Besides Sickles, it included Abner Doubleday, still smarting over Meade’s decision to put John Newton in charge of the First Corps; Alfred Pleasonton, anxious to burnish a tarnished reputation ex post facto; and Daniel Butterfield, Meade’s inherited chief of staff,
^*
still intensely loyal to his former commander, Hooker.

sickles and Doubleday had preceded Meade before the committee. Sickles was the more damning of the two, asserting that Meade’s intention on July 2 had been “to fall back to Pipe creek, or to some place in that neighborhood”; only the combat initiated by the Third Corps’ advance to the Emmitsburg Road had compelled him to stay and fight at Gettysburg, sickles insisted. He was seconded on this point by Doubleday, whose bitterness had merely increased with time. Bolstered by this accusation and by the statement of a Sixth Corps divisional commander who had disapproved of his lackluster pursuit of Lee after Gettysburg, Wade and Chandler had met with Lincoln and Edwin Stanton on March 3 to press for Meade’s removal. Their preferred candidate to replace him was the man
he
had replaced: Joe Hooker. The senators received no satisfaction from the president, however, so, upon learning that Meade himself would be in Washington on March 5, they issued a summons for him to appear before them and testify in his own behalf.

Much of Meade’s testimony related to events that had occurred before and during the battle, but he was also pressed regarding decisions he had made following the repulse of the Cemetery Ridge assault on July 3. He recounted his efforts to locate Lee’s new line on July 4 and expressed certainty that the heavy rains of that day would have “interrupt[ed] any very active operations if I had designed making them.” On being informed on
July 5 that Lee’s army had withdrawn, he had ordered his cavalry toward Cashtown and detailed an infantry force from the Sixth Corps to the mountain pass at Fairfield. Not until July 6 had he concluded, based on John Sedgwick’s reports, that any attempt to follow Lee could be readily frustrated by a small Rebel rear guard holding the passes. With his cavalry already assigned to pursue and harass the enemy, he therefore began to shift his infantry southward, establishing his new headquarters in Frederick, Maryland, on July 7.

There Meade had resolved to suspend all infantry operations for a day, as he explained to the committee, in order to “obtain the necessary supplies, and put my army in condition, and give them some rest.” On July 8 and 9, the Army of the Potomac marched west through the South Mountain passes. Halts were interspersed with skirmishes as the army felt its way toward the enemy, finally fixing Lee’s infantry in defensive lines below Hagerstown on July 12. “So soon as my troops were in line … and ready for offensive operations,” Meade told Wade and Chandler, “although I had had no opportunity of examining critically and closely the enemy’s position, … it was my desire to attack him in that position.”

That night, he had convened his corps commanders and asked for their opinions (“I never called those meetings councils,” Meade declared; “they were consultations”), which he summarized as being “very largely opposed to any attack without further examination.” July 13 was accordingly spent scouting Lee’s defenses, though the rain and mist meant that “not much information was obtained.” Meade’s orders for July 14 were nonetheless to attack, but then dawn brought the bitter news that “during the night of the 13th the enemy had retired across the river.”

Questions put to Meade by the committee raised several issues that had been made much of by previous witnesses or in the press. He spoke to these one by one. He was convinced, he said, that Lee’s army had been amply resupplied with ammunition by the time he caught up with it. Nor did he believe that the Army of Northern Virginia had dissolved into a disorganized rabble: “I doubt whether it was any more demoralized than we were when we fell back to Washington in 1862, after the second battle of [Bull Run],” he opined.

As to the reinforcements he had received in the course of his march to the Potomac, Meade discounted most of them as having been either “in a very unsuitable moral condition to bring to the front” or “totally undisciplined.” With the exception of some more experienced units that had joined him from the Harper’s Ferry garrison, he observed, he “was in
front of the enemy at Williamsport with very much the same army that I moved from Gettysburg.” Given that, an advance undertaken on either July 13 or July 14 would have replicated the Battle of Gettysburg, but in reverse—that is, with Lee on the defensive and Meade attacking.

After continuing his narrative through the end of 1863, Meade was asked if there was anything more that he wished to add to his testimony. “I would probably have a great deal to say if I knew what other people have said,” he replied pointedly. Left unmentioned, either in direct testimony or in the questions posed by committee members, was the general’s attempted resignation at the end of the campaign. Stung by a series of messages from Henry Halleck suggesting that the president had lost faith in him, Meade had stung back the only way he could. “Having performed my duty conscientiously and to the best of my ability, the censure of the President conveyed in your dispatch of 1
P.M.
this day,” Meade telegraphed at 2:30
P.M.
on July 14, “is, in my judgment, so undeserved that I feel compelled most respectfully to ask to be immediately relieved from the command of this army.”