Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (14 page)

Robert Milroy, who had a great deal more to answer for than most Union soldiers if he was captured, convened a hasty conference at nine o’clock with his three brigade commanders, and decided to make a run for it. It was too late. Dick Ewell guessed that the Federals would bolt down the turnpike
toward Martinsburg or Harpers Ferry, and in the night he directed Allegheny Johnson to march three of his brigades around Winchester and position themselves athwart the turnpike at
Stephenson’s Depot, where a railroad embankment for the
Winchester & Potomac Railroad cut across the pike. Milroy’s would-be escapees barged into Johnson’s brigades in the predawn light, and tried to run over them. But after three attempts “to storm and capture their batteries,” Milroy gave every regiment leave to look out for itself, and what had once been Milroy’s command broke up in desperately fleeing fragments. Some made it to safety in Martinsburg, others—including the hapless Milroy—to Harpers Ferry. But 2,500 fell prisoner to Johnson, and another 1,500 were taken in Winchester by
Jubal Early when his brigades entered Winchester that morning and tore down the huge garrison flag which had waved over Milroy’s main fort. If Ewell had had more than just one company of cavalry with his corps, he might have bagged still more of the running Yankees; as it was, the few horsemen he had at his disposal spent “two days after the defeat of Milroy … actively engaged in pursuing and harassing the enemy” and running down bands of fugitives “who were retreating in great disorder.”
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It was one of the most swift, total, and bloodless Confederate victories of the war. Only 42 out of the 23,000 men of Ewell’s corps had been killed; in return, Ewell had surprised and obliterated 3 Union brigades (which would, in fact, never be reconstituted), captured 23 pieces of Union artillery, and gobbled up “ammunition and a large number of wagons and teams.” A “gentleman from the Valley” estimated that Ewell had acquired between 6,000 and 7,000 Union prisoners, 2,800 horses, 400 to 500 wagons, and stores worth $1.5 to $2 million. There was enough captured material for “the Qr. Master” to reequip Early’s division with “all necessaries … from this post, and everybody is now completely equipped for the campaign.” The artillery officer detailed to inventory the captured Union guns did a little gobbling of his own “among the plunder” and “found myself possessed of a nice pair of oil cloth pants and writing materials sufficient to stand a 12 mos siege,” while Sam Pickens in the 5th Alabama supplied himself with “a good Havre sack, almost new & … an abundance of good soap & some nice toilet soap.”
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For the moment, it appeared that any concerns Robert E. Lee had nursed about Ewell’s fitness for independent action—and especially for filling Stonewall Jackson’s boots—had been triumphantly erased. The egg-headed Ewell now became “our glorious Ewell” in the
Richmond Daily Dispatch
, which announced that Jackson’s former division commander “has indeed caught the mantle of the ascended Jackson. Brilliantly has he re-enacted the scenes of the spring of ‘62, on the same theatre.” When the news reached Longstreet’s corps on the other side of the Blue Ridge, they were inclined to cheer the same
way. “Ewell won his right to Jackson’s game on Jackson’s ground,”
Charles Blackford, one of Jackson’s veteran officers, wrote to his wife, Susan, on June 16th. “This success will give the corps more confidence in Ewell.” Or,
almost
more confidence. The shadow of Jackson did not dissipate quite so easily. A Virginian who had served in Stonewall’s old brigade in the Shenandoah in 1862 acknowledged that Ewell “did well in routing Milroy from Winchester.” But if Jackson had been in command on June 14th, he added, Jackson “would have had his line of battle around Winchester, and captured the whole command”—especially Robert Milroy. “If he had been captured by some of our men he would have fared badly.”
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  CHAPTER FIVE  

M
ILROY DID NOT
, in fact, fare badly at all, despite the dissolution of his command. He admitted that he had been surprised by the speed with which the Confederates had reached Winchester from the Rappahannock. “I believed that Lee could not move his large army, with its immense artillery and baggage trains, and perform a six days’ march in my direction, unless I received timely notice of that important fact.” But that, in Milroy’s mind, only thrust the real blame onto his superiors—onto Henry Halleck as general in chief and onto
Robert Schenck as his department commander—who, presumably, had access to the latest news on Lee’s movements and should have given him more than the ambiguous directives he had received from Washington and Baltimore. Halleck was infuriated, and on June 20th he ordered Milroy’s arrest. But a court of inquiry that fall cleared Milroy of responsibility for the Winchester debacle, and he went on to take command of another backwater railroad district in
Tennessee, where he once again set the civilian population’s teeth on edge and invited another price on his head.
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One person who might have derived some bleak satisfaction from seeing Halleck tagged with blame for the Winchester debacle was Joseph Hooker. The day before Winchester was attacked, Hooker warned Halleck that “my sources of information” indicated that “Longstreet’s and Ewell’s corps” were on the march “toward the Valley.” The next day he coyly wired Lincoln to ask whether “anything further” had been “heard from Winchester.” Lincoln, of course, had lost all communication with Winchester, and anxiously asked Hooker whether, “if they could hold out a few days, could you help them.” Surely, Lincoln reasoned uneasily, “if the head of Lee’s army is at Martinsburg and the tail of it on the Plank road between Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, the animal must be very slim somewhere. Could you not break him?” But the slim part would lie in the Shenandoah Valley, and the valley lay in someone else’s military department, and after Chancellorsville, Halleck and Lincoln had limited any discretion Hooker had to give orders anywhere outside the
Army of the Potomac. So it pleased Hooker only too well to be able to say—and to say directly to Halleck—that “the instructions of the President, approved by yourself, and your original letter of instructions, compel me” to stick close to the line of the Orange & Alexandria Railroad in order to protect Washington, not Winchester.
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But Hooker now had more to do than snicker darkly at his nemesis in Washington. The fall of Winchester removed the one serious obstacle in Robert
E. Lee’s path down the valley to the Potomac, and with that gate open, there was no longer any need to conceal his intentions so closely. Powell Hill’s corps, which had kept the Army of the Potomac pinned uncertainly to the Rappahannock, was on the march for Culpeper by the afternoon of the 14th, and by the 19th, they, too, were in the Shenandoah. Ahead of them, Longstreet abandoned his shielding position east of the Blue Ridge gaps and concentrated his three divisions at Winchester on the 15th, while Ewell sent
Robert Rodes’ untried division, which Ewell had kept in reserve at Winchester, to clear out Martinsburg and secure the upriver Potomac ferry at Williamsport. Fanning out on the other side of the Potomac were two cavalry brigades, one under
John Imboden and the other under
Albert Gallatin Jenkins. These cavalrymen were little better than local rangers, but for the purpose of setting off a confusing cloud of alarms in south-central
Pennsylvania they would do very nicely. Jenkins, in particular, would start across the Potomac on June 15th, heading for Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, the first major town on the valley route into Pennsylvania. There, he would spend three days, torching bridges, wrecking
railroad equipment, burning warehouses, cutting
telegraph wires in Chambersburg and throughout the nearby towns of McConnellsburg, Mercersburg, and Greencastle—and diverting attention from Lee’s crossing of the Potomac.
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Lee still preferred to keep any discussion of ultimate objectives under wraps. “From orders read out at dress parade this evening,” one Virginia private in Longstreet’s corps guessed that “there is some great move on hand, but I do not know what it is, or where we are going.” The adjutant of
Joseph Kershaw’s
South Carolina brigade “came around with orders” and relayed the headquarters gossip that “we were on our way to
Hagerstown, Md.” Another new division commander in Hill’s corps, the North Carolinian Dorsey Pender, wrote to his wife that “tomorrow morning we start as I suppose for Penn[sylvani]a,” something he had long believed “the large majority of the Army would like to” do. But that gave no joy to his wife,
Fanny Pender, who was convinced that any kind of war which was not strictly a defense of
North Carolina’s hearths and homes was unjust and illegitimate, and tempted God. She was not alone. In the 26th North Carolina, nine men deserted on June 16th, and five more three days afterward. “Our men are deserting fast,” wrote a private in the 26th, “and a great many more talks of leaving.” What kept more of them from deserting was the prospect that this would be the last campaign—that “the South is going to gain her independence during this campaign,” as one soldier in the 8th Virginia wrote, with another adding, “So far Gen. Lee’s campaign has been very successful and I hope that a few weeks may bring the war to a happy conclusion.”
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Having moved so swiftly from Culpeper to Winchester, Ewell’s corps
was already showing “unmistakable signs of exhaustion.” The Confederates now slowed their pace to the Potomac, spending three days covering the forty miles between Winchester and the river. Once again, Ewell’s corps took the lead, with the 14th
North Carolina being the first of Ewell’s regiments to cross. The two divisions of Allegheny Johnson and
Jubal Early used
Boteler’s Ford, just below Shepherdstown, to cross the Potomac between June 18th and 22nd. The river there “was very high,” which forced the men to strip, sling “their clothing and accoutrements” over their rifles, and carry everything “above their heads to keep them dry.” One Louisiana Tiger thought it made for no end of comedy “to see the long lines of naked men” fording the river; the chill of the water added to the amusement, since it made “the men as they entered it … scream and shout most boisterously.” A Virginian saw the soldiers’ spirits lift as they crossed into
Maryland: “The health of the troops was never better and above all the
morale
of the army was never more favorable for offensive or defensive operations … Victory will inevitably attend our arms in any collision with the enemy.”
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The same skylarking spirit appeared when
Robert Rodes’ division from Ewell’s corps waded the Potomac on June 19th, fifteen miles upriver near the ferry at Williamsport. From there, Ewell’s and Rodes’ troops marched the ten miles up to Hagerstown, Maryland, where the
regimental colors were uncased and the bands blared “The Bonnie Blue Flag” through the streets. Longstreet’s corps caught up to the Potomac at Williamsport on June 25th, crossing as though it was a holiday, with bands playing “Maryland, My Maryland,” and men singing the dirgelike popular song “All Quiet Along the Potomac To-night.” Lee was traveling with Longstreet, and out of deference to the commander and “the ladies who came down to see the sight,” Longstreet’s divisions “waded into the water without stopping to roll up their pantaloons.” But they “came over in good order as if on review, cheering at every step” and took up the parade through Hagerstown “in columns of companies.”
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