Read Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation Online
Authors: Clifford Dowdey
So on Saturday the 27th, when Lee arrived with the rear guard of the infantry at Chambersburg, and Ewell thirty-five miles farther north at Carlisle was preparing to take the capital of Harrisburg, the army’s cavalry was creeping ahead in the Washington area, averaging fewer miles a day than the foot soldiers.
That morning the troopers came into Fairfax Court House, and their spirits arose as they sighted several well-stocked shacks of sutlers, those traveling merchants who followed the Union armies with dainties. Confederates regarded sutlers’ stores the same as enemy wagons, and before the stricken gazes of the pedlars they pounced on every article in sight. Young Beale wrote home: “There were many things taken there and speedily consumed by
us ravenous rebs.’”
Stuart wisely permitted the tired men to indulge themselves, while the horses, still without grain, grazed again. With enlivened spirits, the troopers pushed on, at last approaching the Potomac for a crossing. As they neared the river late Saturday afternoon, the men came upon the still smoldering campfires of Sedgwick’s Federal corps. The Federals had moved out that morning toward the good crossing at Edward’s Ferry. Union stragglers, picked up, revealed that all of Hooker’s army was northwest of them, crossing the river. Militia units had moved southeast back to Washington.
These were close quarters for tired men on worn-out horses, and in the darkness Stuart sent Wade Hampton ahead with his brigade to find the best of the poor fords available. Rowser’s Ford, the least bad, offered a rough crossing from rugged banks out over rocks and quicksands, and when the first brigade made it Hampton sent word back that the crossing was “utterly impossible” for the guns.
There in the blackness Jeb Stuart revealed that iron determination which could never accept defeat in any project. “I,” he reported, “determined not to give up without trial, and before 12 o’clock that night, in spite of the difficulties, to all appearances insuperable, indomitable energy and resolute determination triumphed.” These are not the words of a modest, self-effacing man, nor a man of sophistication, but in unconsciously revealing his old-fashioned personal credo in that report Stuart was a totally truthful man.
The water came up to the saddle skirts, sometimes over the seats, and to Colonel Beale the river seemed a quarter of a mile wide. One of Stuart’s officers wrote his wife: “The guns and caissons went clean out of sight in the rapid torrent, but all came out without the loss of a piece or a man. … On the morning of the 28th of June we all stood wet and dripping on the Maryland shore.”
Such triumphs of will and cold nerve formed the episodes that colored the career of Jeb Stuart; yet in this particular triumph Stuart’s cavalry were, for all practical purposes, conducting a private war of their own.
It was not that Stuart was in any sense unmindful of his mission to fall in on the army and make contact with Ewell’s right. But, when the sun rose on Sunday the 28th, Stuart, having ridden around Hooker’s army, did not know where Ewell was.
He knew from Lee’s instructions that Dick Ewell, with the advance corps of the army, was supposed to head for the Susquehanna, and that one column would “probably” move by the Emmitsburg road. He also knew that, with Hooker moving into Frederick, Maryland, his cavalry’s direct route to the Emmitsburg road was blocked. Hancock’s corps had caused the time-consuming swing back in Virginia; now Hooker’s whole army caused him to ride north, instead of cutting northwest, in heading for the Susquehanna and Ewell’s presumed destination.
If Stuart’s reports reflect his true state of mind (and he was not given to brooding self-analysis), he quite casually accepted the fact that at best he would not reach Ewell until the infantry had completed its march. Hence, he could not possibly follow Lee’s orders to “guard his [Ewell’s] flank, keep him informed. …” Yet, caught up in his ride, Stuart seems to have been curiously detached from the element of urgency in providing the infantry with its cavalry on an invasion of hostile country. For on that Sunday the 28th, while Lee struggled to hide his apprehension in Chambersburg, Stuart diverted his men to chase an enemy wagon train almost to the outskirts of Washington.
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The weary men in Stuart’s cavalry knew nothing of his orders and no details of their mission. There was a good deal of rivalry, not at all good-natured, between the cavalry and other branches of the service. Whenever the horsemen passed an infantry unit, foot soldiers would point at their spurs and yell: “How long does it take to grow them things out’n yoh heels?” At Stuart’s grand cavalry review before the campaign began, the hard-visaged Texans with Hood had to be restrained from shouting: “Here’s yoh mule!”
This term of contempt came from a song about a farmer who visited a camp to sell some produce and then spent his time hunting for his vanished mule. The verse went:
Come on, come on, old man,
Don’t be made a fool
By everyone you meet in camp,
With “mister, here’s your mule.”
On Sunday morning the 28th, after the night crossing of the rough ford, the troopers felt they deserved a breather in Rockville, Maryland, little more than ten miles from Washington and today almost a suburb of the city. Even though the advance brigade had exchanged shots with some enemy horsemen and part of the command remained in line of battle, their nearness to the enemy’s capital excited the bravado of the younger men. While they waited for any enemy force that might develop, the young horsemen preened themselves before the girls of a female academy, who displayed the most winsome Southern sympathies.
In the midst of this interlude the officers received the happy news that a large wagon train was on its way from Washington to the Federal army, which that day became General Meade’s. (Despite his celerity and soundness in countermovement against Lee, Fighting Joe Hooker had not been forgiven Chancellorsville. Feeling that his superiors lacked confidence in him, he had offered his resignation and it had been promptly accepted.)
Stuart’s cavalrymen could be aroused from the deepest stupor at the prospect of enemy rations, and in their relaxed humor at Rockville they went after the wagon train as if on a lark. The brand-new wagons, with harness and fat mules in use for the first time, stretched for four miles. As Colonel Beale of the 9th Virginia said, “Such a train we had never seen before and did not see again.”
The train’s small guard took alarm at the sight of the tattered butternut uniforms, and got the wagons turned and headed back for Washington before the leading troopers reached it. The chase began. The fresh mules, four or six to a wagon, could move under the whip as fast as the tired cavalry horses. When the troopers fired pistols at the drivers, the crackling shots only urged the mules on faster. Drivers, some of them Negroes, began to jump from the wagons, and the cavalry got to laughing at the spectacle they were a part of. Colonel Beale’s son wrote his mother that “the chase was the most interesting, exciting and ludicrous scene I ever witnessed or participated in.”
Finally one of the careening wagons failed to round a curve. Wagon and mules, with legs churning in the air, sprawled across the road, and the next dozen wagons piled up before the train could be brought to a halt. Another dozen wagons had already made it around the curve. So caught up in the spirit of the chase were the men that even responsible officers kept going just for the excitement of it. Colonel Blackford, Stuart’s staff officer, who had said his poor horse “looked as thin as a snake,” wrote his wife that “it was as exciting as a fox chase for several miles, until when the last [wagon] was taken, I found myself on a hill in full view of Washington.”
Then began a feast of ham and crackers, with whisky chasers, before the quartermasters could collect the stocks of bread, bacon, sugar, and, most important of all, oats. After the horses were fed grain for the first time in six days, the men crowded oats into their saddlebags along with stores of such victuals as they particularly hungered for.
Next came the chore of reassembling units scattered over an area of five miles, and the time-consuming work of having 400 Federal prisoners sign their names to parole papers (which stipulated that they could not fight again until exchanged for Confederate parolees). Finally, there was the problem of the 125 wagons and the hundreds of magnificent mules.
Looking at these “best United States model wagons” and their teams “with gay caparisons,” Stuart decided to take his prize capture to the Army of Northern Virginia. That the well-stocked wagons had been captured at the gates of Washington added a gaudy fillip to the adventure which he could not resist. Having already involved his command in the long ride to the Susquehanna, the cavalry leader now burdened the movement of his troopers in enemy country with the guardianship of a cumbersome wagon train.
This was how Jeb Stuart spent Sunday, June 28, while General Lee waited for news of him in Chambersburg and the spy Harrison was riding hard from Frederick with information of the Federal army’s whereabouts.
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In the backwash of their sport and logy with unaccustomed feasting, the cavalrymen started north that night on horses to which the desperately needed grain had scarcely compensated for the hard gallop of the chase. On the next day, Monday the 29th, while Captain Smith gave Lee the shocking news of Stuart’s whereabouts, Stuart ordered another halt so that his tired men could tear up some tracks of the B. & O. Railroad. Considering the excellence of the Federal railroad-engineering units, this brief annoyance to the enemy chiefly served to reveal Stuart’s preoccupation with the raiding aspects of his ride. Although he made efforts to discover the whereabouts of his own army from sympathetic Marylanders and Northern newspapers, there was no urgency in his inquiries.
Late that afternoon the cavalry moved into Westminster, where the railroad station yielded more food for the men and grain for the horses. That night, with the van at Union Mills, the men slept for a few hours. They moved out early the next morning, Tuesday, June 30, the day when A. P. Hill’s corps—acting as reconnaissance troops—poked through the winding mountain passes into Cashtown and the van pushed on eight hilly miles farther east toward Gettysburg.
Around ten o’clock that morning Stuart came within sight of Hanover, eleven miles east of Gettysburg. At this moment he and Hill were less than twenty miles apart.
Stuart had come upon two-day-old papers which announced that Early’s division of Ewell’s corps was at York, as indeed Jubal Early had been on the 28th. Now, on the 30th, Early was maching back westward toward Gettysburg. Everybody was heading for Gettysburg except Stuart, and he, who had been playing it by ear until now, definitely made York his destination.
Two factors prevented his pushing ahead. Judson Kilpatrick had cavalry in some force in Hanover, blocking Stuart’s way, and the captured wagon train, whose mules were no longer fresh and spirited, was miles to the rear.
Taking first things first, Stuart attacked Kilpatrick, and his men never fought more poorly. Hampton was absent with the wagons, Fitz Lee was out covering the flank, and Chambliss’s men were too tired to be alert after an initial success. An unexpected counterattack by the brigade of newly promoted Federal Brigadier Farnsworth scattered Chambliss’s troopers, and General Stuart and his staff were nearly captured. Only a fifteen-foot jump over a guUy by Stuart’s mare took the general away from pursuers who were not quite up to that kind of riding.
Yet that flash of personal heroics added luster to the Stuart legend among those who loved him. Staff officer Blackford wrote his wife: “I shall never forget the glimpse I then saw of this beautiful animal away up in midair over the chasm, and Stuart’s fine figure sitting erect and firm in the saddle.”
This glory was lost on the exhausted riders. Farnsworth’s flurry was contained and Kilpatrick slowly driven westward from Hanover, but Stuart’s men grew apprehensive when that night they moved still farther north. They knew that neither they nor their horses were in physical condition for extended action, and they sensed the enemy all around them.
Clinging grimly to the captured wagons, Stuart diverted the train eastward around Hanover before rolling north toward York. He was anticipating Lee’s pleasure at receiving the large wagons, with which provisions could be collected from the Dutch farmers.
When Stuart’s men, moving in a fog of fatigue, started nervously northward in the darkness, the prelude of the battle had taken place at Gettysburg. Pettigrew’s North Carolina brigade of A. P. Hill’s corps had encountered Union cavalry about the town. As Stuart had gathered no information about the enforced convergence of Lee’s army, he began the night ride that completed the removal of his cavalry from the Gettysburg campaign.
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To the men on stumbling horses who made that ride in the very dark night, the final phase of Stuart’s adventure held the quality of a nightmare. Men slept on their horses, and some fell off without awakening. Young Beale wrote his mother: “It is impossible for me to give you a correct idea of the fatigue and exhaustion of the men and beasts. … Even in line of battle, in momentary expectation of being made to charge, they would throw themselves upon their horses’ neck, and even the ground, and fall to sleep. Couriers in attempting to give orders to officers would be compelled to give them a shake and a word, before they could make them understand.”
Daylight brought no relief. When they approached what had come to loom as the haven of Jubal Early’s infantry at York, advance riders brought the shocking information that Early had left York and was proceeding westward. Whatever the effect of this gloomy intelligence on the general, he showed no uncertainty. Impervious himself to the toll of physical strain, Stuart gave the only orders possible in the circumstances. He sent staff officers westward to pick up Early’s trail, and started his cavalry northward toward Carlisle, which, according to the latest news, was occupied by Ewell.