Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (33 page)

Hoping to link up with Reynolds, Howard sent off his aide (and younger brother)
Charles Howard to find Buford or Reynolds, and then rode up into the town, along
Baltimore Street, looking for a useful eminence from which to take his bearings. His first notion was to use the steeple of the county courthouse; but that steeple turned out to be a closed box, with only slits to see through, and anyway, no one could find a ladder. Looking up from the street, one of Howard’s staffers noticed Henry Fahnestock’s wife and two teenaged boys on the widow’s walk above the Fahnestock store. One of the boys,
Daniel Skelly, went down to let Howard into the store by the side entrance on Middle Street, and guided Howard and “a staff officer, who seemed to be a Captain and a German … with a large field-glass” up to the “observatory.”
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The “General with only one arm … took the glass and swept the field long and anxiously.” Howard could see the network of roads radiating outward from Gettysburg toward “Bonnaughtown, York, Harrisburg, Carlisle, Shippensburg, Chambersburg, and Hagerstown.” But closer at hand, he could also see “Wadsworth’s division of infantry, fighting near the
Oak Ridge
railroad cut” and “Doubleday’s division beyond the Lutheran seminary, filing out of sight beyond the Oak Ridge to the south of west, a mile away.” He would have no time to reflect on these observations, because “as I stood there” an officer clattered up Middle Street, saluted, and shouted something to Howard: “General Reynolds is wounded, sir.” Howard did not, at first, want to believe this. “I am very sorry,” Howard shouted back. “I hope he will be able to keep the field.” Any hope of that was soon banished when another rider followed, this time the ubiquitous Major Riddle: “General Reynolds is dead, and you are the senior officer of the field.”

A sense of cold misery crept over Howard. “Is it confessing weakness,” he asked years later, “to say that when the responsibility of my position flashed upon me I was penetrated with an emotion never experienced before or since?” He had walked into a battle begun by someone else, in the presence of an enemy whose numbers he could not estimate, and with help far enough away that “it seemed almost hopeless that Meade could gather his scattered forces in time for any considerable success to attend our arms”—and he, of course, would be held to account for it all.
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And then the iron entered into him: “God helping us, we will stay here till the army comes.” He had already sent off requests to Slocum and Sickles, so there was nothing more he could do, until they arrived, to shore up the
1st Corps apart from getting his own corps into action. His first order was to make sure that Steinwehr and the corps artillery brigade stayed put on
Cemetery Hill, then “rode slowly” back to the gatehouse, where he met Schurz, coming in ahead of his own division. They would have half a chance, Howard decided, if he could get Schurz’s and Barlow’s divisions through the town and up onto
Oak Hill, on Wadsworth’s right flank, and thus present a stable line of defense for over a mile against whatever the Confederates might choose to send at them during the afternoon. If the 1st Corps and
11th Corps together could hug that long ridgeline, with the
McPherson farm at its center, then Meade and the others would have time to collect the rest of the
Army of the Potomac and stride to their rescue; if not, there was always Cemetery Hill (and Steinwehr’s division) as the fallback. “I directed Schurz to move forward and seize a woody height in front of his left, on the prolongation of Oak Ridge.” As soon as Barlow came up, Howard would send Barlow’s division in support. By the clock in the courthouse tower, it was 11:15.
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Carl Schurz “briskly” hurried through the town with his division, its two big brigades under Alexander
Schimmelpfennig, a liberal Prussian Army captain from Posen who had fled Germany with Schurz after the failure of the 1848 Revolution, and the sinister-faced Wladimir Krzyzanowski, a cousin of Frederic Chopin’s and yet another refugee from the ‘48 who had signed up to crush the “terrible trade in human flesh.” The morose and small-statured Schimmelpfennig’s name sounded faintly ludicrous in American ears—as frizzy-sounding as the stereotypical German was supposed to be frizzy-minded—and Lincoln had quipped that commissioning someone named Schimmelpfennig would probably win him the German vote even if Schimmelpfennig knew nothing about soldiering. “His name will make up for any difference there may be, and I’ll take the risk of his coming out all right.” Schimmelpfennig actually had more military experience than almost anyone else in the
Army of the Potomac, and it took him aback to discover that American-born generals “have no maps, no knowledge of the country, no eyes to see where help is needed.” Unlike Moltke’s Prussian general staff, the Americans select staff officers from among their “relations, sons of old friends, or men recommended by Congressmen” who then “lose their heads and are unable to control, assist or manoeuvre their corps” in combat. He told one of his fellow Prussian aides, the continent-hopping Baron
Otto Friedrich von Fritsch, that Lincoln was a “great President,” but he lacked “a commander who possesses some of Naploeon’s or Moltke’s genius,” and if they ever got into a fight, “let us look out for ourselves, and never expect outside help.”
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In the lead of Schimmelpfennig’s brigade were
Georg von Amsberg’s 45th New York (organized back in 1861 as the 5th German Rifles) and Battery I of the
1st Ohio Light Artillery, commanded “at a trot” by yet another German, Captain
Hubert A. C. Dilger, an adventure-seeking officer in the Duchy of Baden’s horse artillery. Once beyond the railroad north of town, the Germans angled north and east, past the buildings of Pennsylvania College, heading up the
Mummasburg Road to connect with Wadsworth’s division. Far to the rear, on
Cemetery Hill, Howard was anxiously waiting for Barlow’s division to arrive on the
Emmitsburg Road, so that they could be put in alongside Schurz’s Germans. Barlow sent ahead an aide, Lt.
Edward Culp, when the division was only four miles away, and when Howard finally saw the head of Barlow’s column come into view, he trotted off with “a couple of orderlies” to meet him. “The air was lively with bursting shells” from artillery over beyond the town, and that left Barlow with little to ask in the way of questions except “Where now, General?” Howard was just as direct: “Straight through the town, on to the right.” Barlow slackened pace only to allow two batteries of artillery to pass to the front of his column, and from there, he and Howard rode together up
Baltimore Street and through the diamond as Howard hastily briefed him on what had happened so far.
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But neither Schurz nor Barlow were ever to make their linkup with Robinson and the dangling right flank of the
1st Corps. As Schurz’s division moved “outside the town and north and east of the Pennsylvania College,” artillery began speaking from beyond the distant knob at the north end of Oak Ridge, and Dilger’s battery stopped and unlimbered to reply. Amsberg threw out four companies of the 45th New York as skirmishers to feel ahead. But by the time they reached the base of the knob, where
Moses McLean’s T-shaped farmhouse and red barn sat beside the Mummasburg Road, it was plain for all to see that Confederate artillery was unlimbering and perching on the knob, and Confederate skirmishers were swarming down the hill toward them. They were
Georgians and Alabamians from George Doles’ and
Edward O’Neal’s brigades and they were the announcement that Richard S. Ewell’s corps had arrived on the scene.
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One division of Dick Ewell’s corps, under
Robert Rodes, reached Heidlersburg on the evening of June 30th after a thumping-hard march of twenty-two miles through rain, and camped there with
Jubal Early’s division, fresh from the occupation of York, just three miles to the east. (Ewell’s other division, under Allegheny Johnson, was off to the west, escorting the corps trains through the village of Scotland.) Ewell, who was still traveling with Rodes, fully expected to arrive within supporting distance of Powell Hill’s corps somewhere between Cashtown and Gettysburg on the next day, although it annoyed Ewell that the orders Lee had issued for this concentration failed to specify whether he was to move on Cashtown
or
Gettysburg, and he wondered out loud (for all to hear) why someone on Lee’s headquarters staff couldn’t learn to write understandable orders. He assumed that Cashtown was the desired point. With Hill heading for Gettysburg, it would be logical for Ewell
to take over Hill’s bivouac at Cashtown as part of Lee’s concentration plan. In the morning, Rodes’ division, with the one-legged Ewell in his carriage, headed for Cashtown by way of Middletown. Early’s division would be ready to move along after them through Heidlersburg. But Rodes and Ewell had only gotten as far as Middletown at around ten o’clock when a courier came panting up with “word from General Lee or Hill to march to Gettysburg, to which point the latter had moved.” The Newville Road led directly down to Gettysburg, so all that Ewell had to do was turn Rodes’ division left at the Middletown crossroads, and then order Early to make the same turn at Heidlersburg; the roads would bring them together, eight miles to the south, at Gettysburg.
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It was not an easy eight miles for Rodes and Ewell. The country between Middletown and Gettysburg rolls and pitches deeply, and short as the line of march may be, it is all sharply up hill and down dale, with the first hard on the men and the second hard on the horses. “We marched thirteen miles in quick time that morning … without resting,” complained
Jeremiah Tate of the 5th Alabama, “many was broke down before going in to the fight.” Even worse, Ewell had no good information on what Hill’s situation at Gettysburg was, and he sent off couriers to Hill and to Lee. But by 11:30, they were close enough to begin hearing the rumble of artillery, so that it was clear that Powell Hill’s people had run into something troublesome. Two miles short of Gettysburg, Rodes sent an aide to explore the ground ahead, then deployed
Thomas H. Carter’s artillery battalion and the first of the division’s five big brigades into line of battle (followed by the other four in column) and gingerly pressed his skirmishers forward.
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Neither Ewell nor Rodes seem to have realized it, but they could not have arrived at a better place or at a better time for the Army of Northern Virginia. The
1st Corps was still panting from its exertions on
McPherson’s Ridge over the last two hours, and on the corps’ right flank
Lysander Cutler’s battered brigade stuck straight north along the ridge without any cover. Schurz’s
11th Corps division was on its way through the town to join that exposed flank and extend it along the ridge and over the knob of
Oak Hill, but it wasn’t there yet, and it had no inkling that a large body of Confederate infantry was moving toward them from the north with plans of its own for Oak Hill. Ewell had it within his power to roll over the knob of Oak Hill, driving into the gap between the 1st Corps and the 11th Corps like a maul, and send both Union corps fleeing in disarray.
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The first people to discover that an entirely new set of players was about to arrive were Union cavalry. While
John Buford had been spending his morning arranging
William Gamble’s cavalry brigade as obstacles in the path of Harry Heth’s division on the
Cashtown Pike, Buford’s other brigade, under Tom Devin, had been maintaining its picket lines in their semicircle north of Gettysburg. Even as Gamble’s troopers were staging their slow pullback to McPherson’s Ridge, Devin ordered his regiments to saddle up and move out to thicken his pickets, as a precaution. Sure enough, by eleven o’clock, Devin’s outposts to the northwest reported that “long and strong” lines of skirmishers, backed by “heavy columns of infantry,” were now visible “over the hills and across the fields.” One of those outposts, belonging to the 9th New York Cavalry, let the new arrivals come close enough to confirm that they were indeed Confederates, then let off a few shots from their carbines and wheeled their horses around for a fast getaway. Soon, Devin had more notice: the 17th Pennsylvania Cavalry, posted on the Carlisle Road straight north, had traded shots with another sizable force of Confederate infantry, moving toward them from that direction as well.
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