Gettysburg (5 page)

He shared none of these frustrations with his corps commanders. Nor did he likely give them any specific orders beyond designating routes for the first stage of the coming movement. Of the campaign’s overall shape, Longstreet recollected it thus: “The enemy would be on our right flank while we were moving north. Ewell’s corps was to move in advance to Culpeper Court House, mine to follow, and the cavalry was to move along on our right flank to the east of us. Thus by threatening his rear we could draw Hooker from his position … opposite Fredericksburg.” The bulk of Lee’s army would enter the Shenandoah Valley, taking full advantage of the screen provided on its right flank by the rugged Blue Ridge Mountains. In a communication sent to Richmond on June 2, Lee maintained the impression that he had not yet made up his mind whether or not to advance. Wrote Lee, “If I am able to move, I propose to do so cautiously, watching the result, and not to get beyond recall until I find it safe.”

At the less rarefied levels of the Army of Northern Virginia, life went on. John O. Casler was a private in the 33rd Virginia (Ewell’s Corps) whose easygoing view of army discipline had landed him on a work detail. This punishment turned out just fine on the evening of June I, when Casler and twenty others were sent to draw rations. While standing in the inevitable line, Casler and a buddy spotted a large and unguarded pile of hams. The two spread the word, and by the time the detail returned to camp, they had their own rations plus nine unauthorized hams. “We never let an opportunity pass to get extra rations,” Casler would later recall, “no matter if we had to steal them.”

For Robert T. Douglass, a private in the 47th Virginia (Hill’s Corps), the first days of June were pleasant ones; in his diary he recorded picking strawberries with a friend, playing baseball, and fishing in the river. An artilleryman whose battery was attached to the First Corps remembered how on these evenings “we listened to the music of [the Yankee] … bands, [and] at night could see the glow of their campfires for miles around.”

Near Fredericksburg, the encampments occupied by McLaws’ Division of Longstreet’s Corps were astir on June 3 with the arrival of orders putting the men in motion to Culpeper. Lee would wait no longer. Colonel E. P. Alexander, a gifted young artillery commander, would never forget “the hurried preparations, the parting with my wife & little daughter.” Alexander lingered as the column shuffled forward, “looking
back as long as even the tops of the locust trees & oaks about the house [where the family had wintered together] could be seen.”

As McLaws’s men marched, those in Ewell’s Corps were readying themselves to follow the next day. Among them was a Maryland staff officer named Randolph McKim. Before the war, his Baltimore family had befriended Lee, then a U.S. Army officer assigned to that post. That prior acquaintance had led to a recent dinner invitation from the army commander, which the young officer had happily accepted. Afterward they had taken a walk near the Rappahannock River. McKim noted the hungry look in Lee’s eyes as he gazed at the enemy’s campfires and then said quietly, “I wish I could get at those people over there.”

O
nce again Robert E. Lee was gambling on what he assumed his opponent would or would not do. The entire Army of the Potomac was encamped along the northern bank of the Rappahannock, opposite Fredericksburg. Facing it along the heights west and south of the town were two full infantry corps from Lee’s army, along with one division from his third corps. Following his orders, that lone division marched off toward Culpeper on June 3. On the night of June 4, Lee also began to move almost all of Ewell’s Corps to that same point, leaving only A. P. Hill’s men—perhaps 20,000 in all—to confront Hooker’s 80,000.

If Lee’s plan was to work, the Yankee observers had to be fooled. Most bothersome in this regard were the two balloons that soared up into the sky nearly every day, bearing officers with powerful telescopes who were intent on piercing the screen of secrecy that Lee had thrown over the operation. The best Lee’s men could do was to shoot at the balloons, which rarely ventured within easy range but whose operators nonetheless tended to be so skittish that even a wide miss might result in a rapid descent. The corps commanders also relied on other tricks to help cover the troops’ movement. George W. Nichols, a Georgia soldier in Ewell’s Corps, remembered setting out at midnight: “We marched all night and camped just before day in very thick woods,” he wrote. “We were not permitted to have any fire. Ewell did this to keep Hooker’s balloon spies from seeing us moving.”

The night tramp not only hid Lee’s movements from enemy spotters but also kept his own men confused. The diary of a North Carolina soldier in Ramseur’s Brigade (Rodes’ Division, Ewell’s Corps) reads: “June 4 broke camp near Gracie’s church for God knows where.” Another Tarheel reported that “various were the conjectures among the men as to our probable destination.”

While still holding his cards close to his vest, Lee was providing Richmond with broad hints. From his headquarters at Fredericksburg, he sent a telegram to the War Department requesting that all convalescents and other soldiers returning from leave “be forwarded to Culpeper Court House instead of this place.”

“The rascals are up to something,” noted a staff officer in Reynolds’ First Corps on June 4. Even though most of Ewell’s men were waiting until dark, the passage of McLaws’ Division on June 3 had not gone unnoticed. “Balloon reports from Banks’ Ford two camps disappeared and several batteries in motion,” declared a headquarters circular issued at 10:00
A.M.
Another sighting recorded a “line of dust” just west of Fredericksburg and “20 wagons moving northerly.” Just in case, Hooker’s men were ordered to take down their tents and be ready to march. When the day brought no further signs of enemy activity, the soldiers, in the words of one Michigan man, “were directed to pitch tents and quiet ourselves down into the routine we have pursued for the past month.”

Hooker’s intelligence chief, George Sharpe, had one of his better agents posted to the cavalry headquarters of Brigadier General John Buford, then located near Warrenton Junction, some thirty miles north of Fredericksburg. “There is a considerable movement of the enemy,” Sharpe advised his agent on June 4. “Their camps are disappearing at some points. We shall rely on you to tell us whether they go your way or towards the [Shenandoah] Valley. You must be very active in the employment of everybody and everything.”

At ten o’clock in the morning on June 5, Robert E. Lee’s cavalry commander indulged himself in the pomp and pageantry of war by having his mounted command pass in review. Major General Jeb Stuart understood how the romantic currents of the age could help to mute some of the harsh realities of the soldier’s life. A formal review presented just such an opportunity, and besides, he wanted to take full advantage of the fact that, thanks to Lee’s efforts, the cavalry arm was larger than it had ever been before.

The review was held in a big open field near a stop on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad known as Brandy Station. “Behind the reviewing stand there was an audience of admiring ladies and gentlemen from all over the countryside,” a young North Carolina cavalryman recalled with forgivable pride. “They saw a magnificent sight: well-groomed horses mounted by the finest riders to be found on earth. Eight thousand cavalry … passed in review first at a walk and then at a thundering gallop. The massed horse artillery fired salutes.” A trooper in a Virginia regiment declared the whole affair “one of the grandest sights I had ever beheld.” Only when the horsemen returned to their camps did they learn that the guest of honor, Robert E. Lee, had not been able to make it, meaning that they would have to do the whole thing over again.

Closing on Culpeper were McLaws’ and Hood’s divisions of Longstreet’s Corps as well as all three divisions of Ewell’s Corps. It was a hard go for some of the artillery units, whose forage-starved horses were
barely up to the task. A cannoneer in the much-lauded Washington Artillery of New Orleans explained in his diary that because they had brought along only five pounds of corn for each of the horses, he and his comrades were compelled to “stop early to let them graze.” Major General Jubal Early’s division had marched just beyond Spotsylvania Court House on June 4, and the next day the cantankerous Virginian expected his men to do a lot better. It was not to be, however. At some point in the afternoon, as Early would later recount, “during the march, I received an order to halt and wait for further orders, as the enemy had crossed a force [over the Rappahannock River] at Fredericksburg in front of [A. P.] Hill.” Similar messages went to Johnson’s and Rodes’ divisions, stopping all of Ewell’s Corps in its tracks.

Robert E. Lee had remained at Fredericksburg even as the last of Ewell’s men (belonging to Major General Edward Johnson’s division) marched off. Early on Friday, June 5, Lee provided A. P. Hill, whose Third Corps alone faced Hooker’s entire army, with instructions: Hill was to do everything possible “to deceive the enemy, and keep him in ignorance of any change in the disposition of the army.” Should Lee’s bluff fail, and Hill be forced away from Fredericksburg’s heights, he was to fall back south to the North Anna River, where he would find Pickett’s Division.

Lee may have begun to have doubts around midday, when reports arrived that the enemy was massing a force just south of Fredericksburg, at a narrow point on the river. Shortly after 5:00
P.M.,
the hitherto quiet Union army was suddenly all sharp edges and thunder. Lee later described the action: “After driving back our sharpshooters [posted at the river’s edge], under a furious cannonade from their batteries, by a force of skirmishers, they crossed a small body of troops and occupied the [southern] bank of the river.”

Many of the Yankee soldiers camped near Fredericksburg were itching to move on. A member of the 4th Ohio (Second Corps) noted on June 5 that “our camp was becoming bare and dusty, and the leaves of the pine boughs dropping, became a nuisance, as they mixed too freely with rations and clothing; camp-life became once more intolerably monotonous.” Regiments, brigades, and divisions were called out several times and lined up to march, only to be told to stand down hours later. Sergeant Benjamin Hirst of the 14th Connecticut (Second Corps) complained about such false starts in a letter written this Friday. He also
mentioned the mosquitoes, and how much he hated waking up at night to “find them sucking away.”

Joseph Hooker was having his own problems. Shortly before noon he composed a telegram to President Lincoln outlining his dilemma. He had noted the changes in the enemy’s camps but was not sure what they meant. He reminded Lincoln of his standing instructions to shield Washington at all times, and wondered how loosely he might interpret this directive. If the enemy was moving northward and leaving only a small rear guard at Fredericksburg, Hooker believed he had an obligation to “pitch into” that force, even if that meant that the head of Lee’s column might threaten Washington without the Army of the Potomac to block it. Hooker respectfully asked for Lincoln’s opinion on the matter.

The president’s answer crackled back four and a half hours later. Given the Union army’s recent lack of success in attacking Fredericksburg’s heights, Lincoln was not keen on Hooker’s attempting that objective a second time. Hoping to make his point with one of his colorful analogies, Lincoln cautioned Hooker against becoming “like an ox jumped half over a fence and liable to be torn by dogs front and rear, without a fair chance to force one way or kick the other.” Then came words that were bitter ashes to Hooker: Lincoln added that he had passed his memo on to Henry Halleck for his comments.

The hated Halleck finished writing his own reply to Hooker forty minutes after the president. Reiterating that Washington’s defense depended upon the supporting presence of the Army of the Potomac, the Union general in chief suggested (it was not Halleck’s style to state things with specificity) that it would “seem perilous to permit Lee’s main force to move upon the Potomac [River] while your army is attacking an intrenched position on the other side of the Rappahannock.”

Even as these messages were being exchanged, Hooker was undertaking a Rappahannock crossing to determine the enemy’s disposition. Orders issued early this morning alerted Federal engineers, infantry, and artillery to be ready to move. The engineers set out first, stopping when they reached a somewhat sheltered bend in the river near a point they knew as Franklin’s Crossing. There they waited in the hot sun while Rebel pickets on the opposite bank jeered them. At around 4:00
P.M.,
the leading elements of Brigadier General Albion P. Howe’s Second Division of Sedgwick’s Sixth Corps arrived on the scene, and four artillery batteries (twenty-four guns) unlimbered for action. Shortly after 5:00
P.M.,
the cannon opened fire.

The Federal engineers tried to push a pontoon bridge across using preset sections, but Rebel sharpshooters drove them back. Under a heavy covering fire from the artillery, a storming party of Vermont and New Jersey troops paddled in pontoon boats to the opposite bank. A New York soldier standing in support watched in amazement as “the whole plain, on the further side, … [became] a sheet of flame from the bursting shells, and huge clouds of dust, plowed up by the shrieking missiles, rose so as to obscure [the river bluff].” The Federals landed and swept over the rifle pits dug along the river’s edge. Then, reinforced, they charged up the height to overrun a stronger series of Confederate works located there. By dusk, a shallow perimeter had been established, with pickets pushed out almost a mile from the river. At very little cost, Joe Hooker had grabbed a jumping-off point on the southern side of the Rappahannock River for whatever purpose he had in mind.