Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (13 page)

The fight around Brandy Station was a reasonably good example of what happened when large numbers of light cavalry pitched into one another at full tilt—which was to say, not very much, apart from killing eighty-one of Pleasonton’s officers and troopers and leaving fifty-one dead among the Confederates. For what was otherwise the largest cavalry-on-cavalry battle of the entire war, this amounted to less than one percent of all those in action. Although numerous stories of hand-to-hand fighting emerged out of Brandy Station—including a joust of sorts between Capt.
Wesley Merritt of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry and Robert E. Lee’s son “Rooney” Lee—there were also less well-publicized stories about cavalry units who displayed a noticeable reluctance to come to close bloodletting quarters. A lieutenant in the 6th U.S. Cavalry wrote in irritation three days after Brandy Station about urging his squadron to charge with the sabre “but [I] could not get those cowboys to come on.” The 2nd South Carolina and the
4th Virginia Cavalry broke and ran “like sheep,” and in his official report, the colonel of the 4th Virginia, unable to evade what he frankly termed the regiment’s “disgraceful” conduct, added humbly that he was ready for “any inquiry” Stuart “may see fit to institute.” But Stuart had problems of his own after Brandy Station. The first reports in
the Richmond newspapers announced in stinging terms that “All seemed to concur in the opinion … that our forces were surprised, and did not know of the presence of the enemy until reports of his artillery were heard.” Elsewhere, the newspaper criticisms were even more severe: “a disastrous fight,” a “needless slaughter.” Even within Lee’s staff, the best that could be said was that “It was nearly an even fight … neither can be said to have made a great dent.”
²³

What was bad news for J.E.B. Stuart, though, did not necessarily become good news for Joe Hooker. Hooker wired Lincoln the following afternoon to announce that Pleasonton’s “affair with the rebel cavalry yesterday near Brandy Station” had clearly forced Stuart to abandon “his contemplated raid into
Maryland,” and would the president now finally authorize him to take the offensive and cross the Rappahannock with the Army of the Potomac to attack Richmond?

The answer came back as a flat
no
that evening, accompanied the next morning by a terse
amen
from Halleck. The fact was that, even though Lincoln remained “partial to Hooker,” Lincoln, Halleck, and War Secretary
Edwin Stanton were already preparing to replace him. But only preparing: firing Hooker outright would be politically perilous because of Hooker’s connections with the antislavery
Radical Republicans in Congress. Inducing Hooker to turn in a resignation himself was preferable but would require some very adroit painting into a corner. In the meantime, Lincoln had begun quietly interviewing the corps commanders of the Army of the Potomac as a replacement for Hooker, beginning with Darius Couch on May 22nd, then Henry Slocum of the
12th Corps,
Winfield Scott Hancock of the
2nd Corps, and
John Sedgwick of the
6th Corps, and finally John Reynolds of the
1st Corps on June 2nd.
²⁴

Nothing had as yet emerged from this, first because Hooker turned a blind eye to any signals that a resignation would be welcomed, and then because command of the army had by now become such a bull’s-eye for political combat that none of the army’s senior major generals wanted the job. The Radical Republicans in Congress had already shown their mistrust of the prevailing McClellanism in the army in 1861 by creating the
Joint House-Senate Committee on the Conduct of the War with full powers to investigate the decisions and the politics of the army’s commanders, and no officers with Democratic or McClellanite leanings were eager to put their necks into the Joint Committee’s noose. Hancock, in particular, had rebuffed the idea of succeeding Hooker precisely because “I do not belong to that class of generals whom the Republicans care to bolster up. I should be sacrificed,” the same way McClellan had been. So for the moment, Hooker would remain in command, but only by default, and any notions of galloping wildly off toward Richmond would stay firmly collared by Lincoln and Halleck.
²⁵

It was Robert E. Lee who really made the question of Hooker’s movements moot. Every indication he had from Ambrose Powell Hill’s corps, still at Fredericksburg, confirmed in Lee’s mind that the bulk of the
Army of the Potomac was sitting inertly on the Rappahannock and not devoting serious resources to tracking Lee’s movement to Culpeper. The way was now clear for Lee’s great invasion plans to unfold. On June 11th, the day George Pickett’s division finally caught up with the rest of Longstreet’s corps at Culpeper, Dick Ewell’s corps began the first leg of its march north. His lead division under
Robert Rodes swiftly passed over sixteen miles to
Flint Hill, arriving the next day at
Chester Gap in the
Blue Ridge Mountains and entering the Shenandoah Valley at Front Royal, where, as one
North Carolina soldier in Rodes’ division wrote, “the ladies treated us very good.” The rest of Ewell’s corps was hard on Rodes’ heels—
Jubal Early’s division arrived at Front Royal on the 12th, followed by Edward Johnson’s division, and by the 13th all of Ewell’s corps was in the Shenandoah. Longstreet’s corps, with
Lafayette McLaws’ division in the van, took up the march parallel to Ewell, on the east side of the Blue Ridge, covering the other passes into the Shenandoah—
Manassas Gap,
Ashby’s Gap,
Snicker’s Gap—from any potential interference.
²⁶

Lee was already anticipating that his invasion plans were likely to have far more than just a military impact. “Recent political movements in the United States … have attracted my attention,” Lee wrote to
Jefferson Davis even as he was preparing for this next movement northward. In the first half of June, the Northern newspapers that Lee regularly gleaned for information were full of uproar over the arrest and imprisonment of
Clement Vallandigham, an uproar that included a gigantic antiwar meeting in Albany and a peace rally at New York City’s
Cooper Institute. Vallandigham’s arrest was promptly followed by the sensational shutdown by Federal troops under the disastrously impulsive
Ambrose Burnside of the anti-administration
Chicago Times
(followed by a protest assembly of 20,000 people in Chicago). “Under these circumstances,” Lee urged, “we should neglect no honorable means of dividing and weakening our enemies,” even if it meant stretching the truth a little by offering to negotiate a restoration of the Union. Once the negotiating began, “the war would no longer be supported” in the North, and at that point “the desire of our people for a distinct and independent national existence” could be put forward without much fear that the negotiations would be suspended or the war resumed. The final straw for Lincoln-weary Northerners would be a successful invasion of the North.
²⁷

With Lee’s urging in mind, Davis wired
Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice president, to come to Richmond for a briefing on a special mission. Stephens, curiously, had also written Davis, on June 12th, urging the opening of some kind of discussions in Washington about a “general adjustment” based on “recognition of the Sovereignty of the States.” Whether Stephens was prepared to insist on Confederate independence was uncertain, but he was willing to try, and Davis was willing to authorize him. Stephens arrived in Richmond on June 26th, where Davis handed him a letter he was to present under a flag of truce to Abraham Lincoln. Ostensibly, Stephens’ mission was “to arrange and settle all differences and disputes which may have arisen or may arise in the execution of the cartel for exchange of prisoners of war.” But if the circumstances provided an opening for a more freewheeling discussion of issues of reconciliation, Stephens had the latitude to proceed. And the circumstances would in large measure be shaped by what Robert E. Lee would accomplish somewhere north of the Potomac.
²⁸

Click
here
to see a larger image.

The Shenandoah Valley, not Harpers Ferry, would be the route to the
Potomac in 1863, and the Army of Northern Virginia would cross the river at
Boteler’s Ford (near Shepherdstown) and at Williamsport. To get there, the Federal garrison in Winchester would have to be evicted, and that would mean tackling the three brigades stationed there and the fortifications they occupied under the command of Robert Milroy. These 6,900 Union soldiers—mostly Ohio and
West Virginia recruits—had done little since their enlistments but guard duty on the
Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and their fortifications were badly sited to resist a determined attack. Above all, Brigadier General Milroy was a man of big mouth and small talent as a soldier. An Indiana lawyer, an unbuttoned
abolitionist, and (perhaps most to his advantage) a political ally of Lincoln’s secretary of the interior,
John P. Usher, Milroy won his brigadier general’s star in September 1861, and did some minor but undistinguished campaigning in the western Virginia mountains and the Shenandoah Valley.
²⁹
Apart from that, Milroy’s energies had been turned toward nominating himself to be emancipation’s missionary to the Shenandoah. This did little beyond antagonizing a populace already ill-disposed to Union occupation, and painting a large target on Milroy’s back. “Everywhere we hear the same talk of [the] oppression and cowardly cruelty of Milroy,” wrote one of Longstreet’s staff officers. “The reign of Milroy,” proclaimed the Richmond papers, was a lesson in “brutality and robbery,” and the “one prayer in Winchester … is ‘Oh, God, how long, how long!’ ” The Virginia legislature branded Milroy an “outlaw” and it was rumored in Winchester that “the Confederacy (some people in the Confederacy)” had put a price of $100,000 on Milroy’s gray-bearded head. Even Robert E. Lee, in a rare moment of vindictiveness, branded Milroy “atrocious” and suggested to Secretary of War Seddon in January 1863 that “prisoners from his command captured by our forces be not exchanged but that they be held as hostages for the protection of our people against the outrages which he is reported to be committing.”
³⁰

Dick Ewell drew the ticket to carry the torch to Milroy. This only seemed appropriate, given that the sixty-four infantry regiments of Ewell’s corps included twenty-five who had fought under Stonewall Jackson and won Jackson’s most spectacular victories at Front Royal and Winchester in 1862. And if the unusual concentration of eccentric division and brigade commanders in the corps was any proof, the stamp of Stonewall Jackson was still very deep on Ewell’s command. His senior division commander,
Jubal Early, was the army’s most caustic and opinionated curmudgeon. Edward Johnson (who ranked just behind Early) commanded the next division, and “always carried a big hickory club or cane” which he preferred as a weapon to a saber or revolver. (Johnson, known affectionately as “Allegheny Ed” and “Old Allegheny,” had the distinction of crossing swords with Milroy in western Virginia back in 1861 and again in 1862.) Early’s senior brigade commander, Harry Thompson
Hays, commanded five
Louisiana regiments who had collectively borrowed the “Louisiana Tigers” label from its original owners in 1862. Early’s second brigade was commanded by William Smith, who won the sobriquet “Extra Billy” from the surcharges he had skimmed for carrying government mail on his stagecoach line during the presidency of
Andrew Jackson. Although Extra Billy would be sixty-six in September and candidly admitted that he was “wholly ignorant of drill and tactics,” he had just been elected (for the second time) governor of
Virginia, and for that reason alone no one in this Virginia-besotted army was eager to dispute his place at the head of a brigade.
³¹

The confidence Lee put behind Ewell’s corps was richly rewarded. Ewell hurried his corps for twenty-three miles, fording the Shenandoah without giving the men “time to stop & take off shoes & socks,” and arrived within three miles of Winchester before noon on the 13th. He then split his divisions, with three brigades of Jubal Early’s division swinging away to the west of Winchester, Early’s remaining brigade and Allegheny Johnson’s division deploying beside the turnpike south of the town, and
Robert Rodes’ remaining division out to the east (where they cleared one of Milroy’s brigades out of an advanced post at Berryville).
³²

Startled at the sudden appearance of masses of Confederate infantry, Milroy hastily manned Winchester’s defensive lines and spent most of the afternoon hours of the 13th looping shells at the rebel infantry he could see south of the town. Neither he nor anyone else in the defenses caught sight of Jubal Early’s three brigades as they moved quietly into position west of the town “by a blind and circuitous road” and “spent the night in a drenching rain.” On the morning of the 14th, Harry Hays and his adjutant were able to creep up “to the edge of the woods” near one of Milroy’s outlying artillery emplacements and “discovered several men lying on the ground under the shade of a tree” while “sentinels lazily paced their rounds, and everything betokened a total ignorance of our proximity.” That was enough to persuade Jubal to attack, and at 6:00 p.m. Early’s artillery battalion (plus one battery from Allegheny Johnson’s division) began firing shells at the Federal emplacements and trenches on the west side of Winchester. After forty-five minutes, the brigades of Hays and Extra Billy Smith, and the
North Carolina brigade of
Isaac Avery, burst from the treelines that had concealed them, and “in a few minutes they were over the breastworks, driving the enemy out in great haste and confusion.” Only the fall of night kept the Confederates from swarming into the streets of Winchester itself.
³³