Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (19 page)

None of this prevented Meade from finally winning corps command after leading the only near-successful Union attack at Fredericksburg in December 1862, and he continued to serve as commander of the
5th Corps throughout the Chancellorsville Campaign. But the decision to appoint Meade as Hooker’s successor was anything but a foregone conclusion. It was four in the morning when Hardie (disguised in civilian dress in case Confederate guerrillas ambushed his train to Frederick) arrived at Meade’s tent, carrying the orders. He startled Meade by woefully announcing, “General, I am the bearer of sad news.” This induced Meade to think for a moment that he was being put under arrest, since he and Hooker had been at violent loggerheads over the blame for Chancellorsville to the point where
Alexander S. Webb (who would shortly have a brigade in the
2nd Corps thrust into his hands to command) feared that “a court martial might ensue.” The orders, when Meade tore them open, told an entirely different tale, and his first instinct was to wire Halleck and decline. His next impulse was to protest that he was being vaulted over the heads of three other senior major generals in the
Army of the Potomac, Reynolds, Sedgwick, and Slocum, and that would create an unholy amount of resentment on the part of career professionals who might not enjoy taking orders from their junior. Above all, he balked at Hardie’s proposition to walk over to Hooker’s tent and inform Hooker face-to-face of his deposition.
Protocol dictated that Meade should first be recalled to Washington and commissioned directly by the president or Halleck. Hardie had to tell him that each of these objections had been anticipated, and the answer was, in each case,
no
.
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Meade finally relented, mounted up, and rode with Hardie to break the news to Hooker. Fighting Joe had been puzzled by the abrupt response Halleck gave his ultimatum of the previous afternoon, and by the time he went to bed he had convinced himself that the ensuing silence meant that he beaten Halleck. “It was a bitter moment” to be awakened by Hardie and Meade to learn the opposite, and Hooker “could not wholly mask the revulsion of feeling.” Neither could Hooker’s allies in the army, chief of whom was Dan Sickles of the
3rd Corps. Sickles “knew [Meade] was hostile, dating from several incidents in the Chancellorsville campaign,” and Sickles’ own staff recommended he resign on the spot. Meade’s first concern, however, had to be for the army, since as one corps commander out of seven, he had hardly the faintest idea of where to find the rest of the army which was now presumably his to direct. Hooker called in Dan Butterfield (who had his own reasons for disliking Meade), and Meade characteristically said the first thing that came to his mind, which was that “he was shocked at the scattered condition of the army.”

Once the conference was over, Meade drew up a quick note to Halleck, stating with a certain woodenness that “the order placing me in command of this army” had been received and that “as a soldier, I obey it”—as though he regarded his appointment as an ambush and he was being sent on a suicide charge. The only thing he would say for sure about his intentions was that he would at once break off Hooker’s plan to send Reynolds, Sickles, and Howard across
South Mountain to attack Lee. “I can only now say that it appears to me I must move toward the Susquehanna, keeping Washington and Baltimore well covered, and if the enemy is checked in his attempt to cross the Susquehanna, or if he turns toward Baltimore, to give him battle.” Until he could get himself properly and comfortably in the seat of command, he would play a game of observation and defense.
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Meade had good reason for caution. He was the fourth commanding general the Army of the Potomac had seen in less than a year, and word of his appointment did not set off spontaneous demonstrations of joy in the army. Beyond Meade’s own
5th Corps, “the army knew but very little about Meade,” and his “appointment … in place of Hooker, just on the eve of battle, was any thing but a pleasant surprise to the whole army.” But a larger reason for caution was Meade’s political self-consciousness: he was clearly not Lincoln’s first choice, something which was surely traceable to his identification with George McClellan. If he was successful in protecting Washington and Baltimore or if he somehow defeated Lee and drove the Confederates back across
the Potomac, he would receive precious little credit from the Lincoln administration; if he failed, even for the most plainly military reasons, he expected to be pilloried without mercy as a halfheart and a traitor. No Democratic officer in the Army of the Potomac could forget the fates of
Charles Stone or
Fitz-John Porter—court-martialed, cashiered, and disgraced—and it was not difficult for Meade to conclude that if this was the way Lincoln wanted to run the war, then he would have no one to thank but himself when his generals played the safest hand they could.

In a confirmation of precisely how personal and petty Halleck’s quarrel with Joe Hooker had been, Halleck went out of his way to inform Meade, in a covering letter with Lincoln’s order placing him in command, that as of that date, “Harper’s Ferry and its garrison are under your direct orders,” and that “your army is free to act as you may deem proper under the circumstances.” But the safest thing Meade could imagine doing now was to recall the army’s moving parts to Frederick, and then find a defensible position beneath the arc of Lee’s invasion into
Pennsylvania which would allow him to shield Baltimore and Washington and keep the Army of the Potomac from losing any more battles. Fifteen miles north of Frederick was
Pipe Creek, a tributary of the
Monocacy River, which in turn flowed down into the Potomac. The ravines and bluffs of the stream offered the kinds of defensive opportunities dear to an engineer’s heart, and less than ten miles behind Pipe Creek was the railhead town of Westminster, where he would have a direct supply link over the Western
Maryland Railroad to Baltimore and Washington. That would be the place to plant the Army of the Potomac—on the defensive, protective of the capital, and demanding of no sort of risk, at least until some other plan became clear in Meade’s mind.
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Until the Pipe Creek line was laid out and marked by his engineers, Meade wanted the army to stay within at least observation distance of Lee’s army in the Cumberland Valley. To keep contact, Reynolds, as the senior major general of the 1st, 3rd, and
11th Corps, would move up from Frederick to Emmitsburg, using the cavalry division which had been riding with him well out to the north and west, near Fairfield and Gettysburg, to track Lee’s movements on the other side of
South Mountain. Henry Slocum’s
12th Corps would also move northward to the east of Reynolds, across Pipe Creek and into Pennsylvania through Littlestown and Two Taverns. The 2nd, 5th, and
6th Corps would begin securing the Pipe Creek line, while Meade planted his headquarters at Taneytown, Maryland. With a little cooperation from Robert E. Lee, Reynolds and Slocum would bait the hook and lure the Army of Northern Virginia down to its destruction along the banks of Pipe Creek. Or perhaps not: but in that event, Meade would still have at least saved Washington. Lincoln should be satisfied with that.
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This would still require a great deal of hard marching by the Army of the Potomac. John Reynolds and the
1st Corps crossed the Potomac on the pontoon bridge at Edwards’ Ferry on June 25th at five in the morning, and marched up to Poolesville,
Maryland, and on to Barnesville. The
11th Corps also crossed the Potomac at Edwards’ Ferry on June 25th and marched eighteen miles that day; by June 28th, it had reached Frederick and “marched straight through to Emmettsburg, making a distance of thirty-seven miles in twenty-four hours,” even in pouring rain. Equipment wore out; uniforms were snagged into tatters. “Men who had left the Rappahannock twelve days before with new shoes on their feet were now practically bare-footed,” wrote a soldier in the 1st Minnesota, “and there were quite a number with feet so badly bruised or blistered that they walked like foundered horses.”
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But for all the pounding of the march, the men’s spirit rose by steady notches as the columns forged northward through Maryland. As the first company of the 157th New York stepped off the pontoon bridge onto Maryland soil, the men began to cheer and sing an old Sunday School hymn:

Which was about what one in six of them would be doing in approximately one week. But that was veiled by the newly felt roll of the hills, the familiar lay of the farms, the evidence of a world that approached
normal
, untouched by war. They joked, they sang, swinging along at an Olympic pace of “five miles an hour, as indicated by the milestones we passed.” They had been defeated, but they had risen anew, and it helped to have a sympathetic populace to line the roads. “One thing that is noticeable since our entrance into Maryland”—or at least Maryland on the eastern side of
South Mountain—“and that is the loyalty of the people … There is not that sourness in the countenance of every passers-by which greeted us in our wanderings over the ‘sacred soil’ of the ‘old Dominion.’ ” When the
3rd Corps marched through Frederick on June 28th, the “enthusiastic reception they received” prompted
David Bell Birney to put his division in neat marching order, “preceded first by orderlies with drawn sabers, a band playing
John Brown’s Body
, and then he marched with his staff.” One “pretty child” was pushed out in front of one of Birney’s brigadiers, the transplanted Frenchman
Philippe Régis de Trobriand, and held up a bouquet “full of flowers” with the cry, “Good luck to you, general!”
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“Our new commander is determined not to let the grass grow under his feet,” wrote
Charles Wainwright in the
1st Corps, “and his dispositions would indicate that he has some pretty certain ideas as to where Lee is, and what he ought to do himself.” At the beginning of the campaign, a number of these ideas came from Professor Lowe’s balloons. But Lowe was in the process of shutting down his balloon operation, and the army had hardly left the Rappahannock before Lowe’s “aerial ship was folded up and stowed away” and “that was the last we saw of ballooning in the army of the Potomac.” Another, less direct, source of information on Confederate movements would be
Alfred Pleasonton and the army’s three cavalry divisions. Pleasonton’s principal task, after Brandy Station, was to penetrate the screen of mountains behind which the Confederate army was moving and report on Lee’s progress northward. This was, however, easier said than done. Pleasonton tried repeatedly to force a passage through the principal gaps in the Blue Ridge. But Stuart’s cavalry were harboring a slow burn of resentment after their embarrassment at Brandy Station, and the Confederate horsemen stymied three attempts by Pleasonton—at Aldie on June 17th–18th, at Middleburg on June 18th, and at
Upperville on June 21st–22nd—to force his way through the gaps for a look-around after the Confederate infantry.
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In the end, Lee, Hooker, and Meade alike would rely far more on civilian informants and scouting detachments to pierce the fog of war than their cavalry.
George Sharpe’s Bureau of Military Information deployed at least fifteen enlisted operatives who faded in and out of Confederate lines in civilian clothes to garner stray pieces of information, as well as a larger weir of deputized civilians who could furtively watch (and count) the passing of Confederate troops and report themselves or through Sharpe’s professionals. “Nine thousand men and sixteen pieces of artillery passed through Greencastle yesterday,” reported
John Babcock, Sharpe’s chief assistant, on June 24th; two “gentlemen of undoubted veracity” counted Early’s division “with twelve regiments of infantry and two of cavalry and sixteen pieces of artillery” as it passed through “Smithsburg toward Greencastle and Chambersburg” later that day. An informal detachment of volunteer scouts under a lawyer named
David McConaughy operated out of Gettysburg and reported on the movements of Albert Jenkins’ Confederate cavalry around Hagerstown and Greencastle. “Contrabands,” prisoners, and deserters—all of them turned over to Sharpe’s bureau for interrogation—provided still more sources of intelligence.
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The Army of Northern Virginia ran the same sorts of agents, although in a much less coordinated fashion. The Confederacy’s primary intelligence bureau was headquartered in Richmond and relied on resident agents and couriers in Northern cities to collect strategic information which might have little or nothing to do with Lee’s immediate tactical situation on the ground. There was no chief signals officer among Lee’s general staff, so that Lee often turned to his staff engineers for reconnaissance. But Lee’s corps commanders—particularly Longstreet—maintained scouts for their own staffs, and they proved remarkably adept at slipping in and around the covert corridor that lay between Washington and Richmond, eavesdropping in Washington saloons and clipping volumes of reports from Northern newspapers whose correspondents cheerfully announced every move of every Union unit. Sometimes, even ordinary Confederate soldiers could pick up all they needed to know about Union troop movements from captured newspapers. For all that the cavalry was spoken of as “the eyes and ears” of the armies, their real task was to seal off the incursions of enemy scouts and spies—sometimes with a drumhead court-martial and a rope, as Federal cavalrymen did at Frederick on June 27th when they captured a Confederate spy named
Will Talbot—and to
prevent
the gathering of intelligence, rather than do that work themselves.
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