Gettysburg (9 page)

Albert Jenkins was endowed with a quality not usually associated with dashing cavalrymen: an excess of caution. He eased his brigade along the road from Williamsport to Chambersburg, taking great care whenever they encountered any sign of resistance. The undefended town of Green-castle was captured by two columns, one charging in while the other swept through from the flank. A small Federal patrol caught there was
easily routed, and its officer taken prisoner. Hermann Schuricht, riding in one of Jenkins’ regiments, recorded this day’s events in his diary, from “destroying the railroad depot” to “cutting the telegraph wires.” He also indicated that the Rebel advance “had several skirmishes with the retreating enemy.” The Yankee force comprised only about forty riders, but Jenkins was a cautious man. It took his mounted column ten hours to cover the twenty-two miles between Greencastle and Chambersburg. The sun set long before the first of his scouts poked into the latter town.

While certain chronicles of the Gettysburg campaign have held that Pennsylvania’s citizens meekly capitulated to the Rebel raiders, events in Chambersburg on the evening of June 15 suggest that some, at least, gave them a different sort of welcome. Two Confederate officers who galloped in first to intimidate the civilian population into compliance were instead taken prisoner by a pair of residents recently discharged from military service. The Southerners might have been hustled off for interrogation had they not been freed by the large squadron following them, whose arrival suddenly filled the main street with sweating, darkly threatening men.

Watching it all from the second floor of his now empty store, merchant Jacob Hoke found few to argue with him when he declared that June 15 brought Chambersburg “the greatest excitement which had occurred up to that time during all the history of the war.”

A. P. Hill, still headquartered in Fredericksburg, continued his disengagement on June 15 by sending Heth’s Division off to follow Anderson’s toward Culpeper. Before they left, some of Heth’s men scouted the opposite bank. Private G. W. Bynum and two others from the 2nd Mississippi waded the river near where Hooker’s headquarters had been. “When we appeared in the streets of Falmouth I never saw a happier people,” Bynum later recalled. “The old men and ladies happily met us with a cordial handshake, their eyes brimming with tears of joy.”

Heth’s departure meant that only Pender’s Division was left to watch over the largely empty Union encampments on the Rappahannock’s northern bank. This gave Pender time to compose a note to his wife. “Thus far Gen. Lee’s plans have worked admirably, so says Gen. Hill who I suppose knows them,” he wrote. “May God in his goodness be more gracious than in our last trial. We certainly may be allowed to hope as our mission is one of peace altho’ through blood.”

With Hill’s men converging on Culpeper, it was time for Longstreet’s command to join Ewell’s. “My corps left Culpeper on the 15th,” recorded the general, “and with a view of covering the march of Hill and Ewell through the [Shenandoah] Valley, moved along the east side of the Blue Ridge.” His men were no more immune to the weather than were their foes. “The heat is frightful,” noted Virginian John Dooley, “and the road in many places is strewn with the sunstruck.” Colonel William C. Oates of the 15th Alabama affirmed that: “A good many of the men fainted or had sunstroke on the march, yet the morale of the army was never better.”

Still monitoring matters from Culpeper, Lee sent a situation report to Richmond at 7:00
A.M.
In it he recapped Ewell’s success at Winchester, adding somewhat disingenuously that he presumed that Ewell had subsequently “advanced toward the Potomac.” Relaying Hill’s information about the enemy’s pullout from Fredericksburg, he confirmed that large numbers of union troops were known to be in the Warrenton area. Then, reviving his argument with Richmond, Lee complained that the reluctance of the government to bring troops up from North Carolina to enable him to complete his divisions “has caused delay in the movements of this army, and it may now be too late to accomplish all that was desired.” A message that Lee sent to Ewell at the same time conveyed a very different outlook: “Longstreet started today,” Lee informed his Second Corps commander. “Hill is in motion. Push on.”

G
eorge Sharpe was stumped. After locating most of Lee’s army near Culpeper, he and his staff had been flooded with conflicting reports that put paralyzing question marks at the end of what had lately seemed to be conclusive statements. Provost Marshal Marsena Patrick tracked the confusion in his diary entry for June 17: “There seems to be doubt as to Lee’s Movements and it is understood that A. P. Hill remains near Frederic[k]sburg, Ewell’s Position undetermined, and Longstreet investing Harper’s Ferry.”

Most of Hooker’s men, having marched hard to reach blocking positions southwest of Washington, had lesser distances to cover on June 16 and 17, giving many time to ingest the latest rumors. “News that the ‘Rebs’ are in Pennsylvania [causes] great sensation,” wrote a Sixth Corps staff officer on Tuesday, June 16. The same information reached the Third Corps. “Reported rebbels in Md. & Pa.,” noted a diarist in the 86th New York. An officer in that corps’ Second Division recorded the rumor as fact: “The Rebels are in Pennsylvania,” he scribbled. “We seem to be completely Isolated from the world …,” complained an officer in the 154th New York (Eleventh Corps), “as we get neither mails or Newspapers here. … To be thus cut off from the world at a time when of all others one wants to know what is transpiring outside, When each day is developing anew what may decide the fate of a World, is to say the least anything but pleasant.”

There was one arena where Union fact-finding was working well: Pennsylvania. Jenkins’ movement into Chambersburg had triggered a response by a variety of intelligence-gathering groups. Working in parallel to the traditional military patrols, operating as part of the Department of the Susquehanna, were a cadre of scouts deployed by the two railroads most threatened by the Southern incursion, the Pennsylvania Central and Northern Central lines. Included in this latter group were several specialists equipped with portable field-telegraph keys. To transmit information to Harrisburg, these operators had only to find a point clear of where the Rebels had cut the lines and patch in. Also reporting to the capital were another group of civilian spies, under the direction of a prominent Pennsylvania citizen named David McConaughy. McConaughy controlled this activity from his home, located in the town of Gettysburg.

June 16 brought a dramatic change in Joe Hooker’s command relationships. Shortly before noon, he sent a message to Abraham Lincoln in hopes of getting Henry Halleck off his back. “You have long been aware, Mr. President,” asserted Hooker, “that I have not enjoyed the confidence of the major-general commanding the army, and I can assure you so long as this continues we may look in vain for success.” At the same time, Hooker foolishly allowed himself to be maneuvered by Halleck into following a course of action that would undermine Lincoln’s support. It had to do with the Union garrison at Harper’s Ferry, which Hooker believed was about to suffer the same fate as Milroy’s unit at Winchester. The succession of messages sent on June 16 tells the story.

Throughout June 17, even though Hooker kept in close contact with Halleck, the two remained at cross purposes. For a while Hooker believed that Halleck was telling him that the Union post at Harper’s Ferry had been abandoned. It was early evening before Lincoln’s general in chief explained that he had been referring to a repositioning of troops in that location, not to the post’s abandonment.

Hooker’s focus on Halleck left his chief of staff, Major General Daniel Butterfield, to handle almost all other army communications. Alfred Pleasonton was told it was “better that we should lose men than to be without knowledge of the enemy.” Accordingly, horse soldiers from New York, Massachusetts, Maine, and Ohio were sent into the Loudoun Valley through the gateway village of Aldie. They were met on its outskirts by equally determined troopers from Virginia, who battled them throughout the day. At dusk the grim-faced Federals, still holding the valley portal, watched the sun set behind the Blue Ridge Mountains. In his final message to Halleck this day, Hooker pondered reports that no Rebel infantry had been spotted in the Loudoun Valley, and questioned whether all the cavalry fighting might not be “a cover to Lee’s re-enforcing Bragg or moving troops to the west.”

Hooker’s contretemps with Washington was costing him respect and credibility. Provost marshal and diarist Brigadier General Marsena patrick noted that “Halleck is running the Marching and Hooker has the role of
a subordinate—He acts like a man without a plan and is entirely at a loss what to do, or how to match the enemy, or counteract his movements.”

The marching on June 17 was especially hard on the Second Corps, which was still trying to close on the rest of the army. “The weather is very hot,” wrote a Pennsylvanian in the 140th, adding that the “Dust [is] shoe mouth deep.” Sergeant Benjamin Hirst, of the 14th Connecticut, was no longer edgy about mosquitoes; now it was the interminable marching that galled him: “We seemed to be suffocating at each step,” he related, “… strong men wilted as though blasted by something in the air.”

The movement into this area brought Army of the Potomac veterans into contact with some of Washington’s garrison troops, many of whom were on short-term enlistments. Private John Haley of the 17th Maine (Third Corps) took stock of some of these “sunshine” soldiers: “They look very nice, as if they are just out of the bureau drawer and intend to return there immediately,” he noted. “We are lousy and filthy and, curious to say, not ashamed of either condition.”

Even though Washington lay just to the east, the state was still Virginia, part of the Confederacy, and few Union troops felt any compunction about helping themselves to civilian property. When the colonel commanding the 24th Michigan (First Corps) wondered why his drummer was not beating the march cadence, he was shown the confiscated geese that were being stored in the instrument. “Well, if you’re sick and can’t play, you needn’t,” he said, securing himself a main course for that evening’s dinner. In the Eleventh Corps, a 136th New York foot soldier named John T. McMahon watched his regiment decimate a flock of sheep. “The boys went out and killed them without leave or license,” he remembered. In an effort to halt such practices, some officers spread stories about guerrillas’ murdering unsuspecting foragers. Although these contrived warnings would become enshrined as fact in some postwar writings, few soldiers took them seriously at the time: “They fear nothing so much as an empty stomach,” one averred.