Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (25 page)

One individual who was not happy at Reynolds’ return to the army in the fall of 1862 was George Gordon Meade. Like Reynolds, Meade had also first obtained brigade command in 1861 in the Pennsylvania Reserves—just one step beneath Reynolds in seniority. When Meade moved up to division command in the 1st Corps before Antietam, he was set to succeed to command of that corps after its commander was wounded, especially with Reynolds out of the way in Pennsylvania. But when Reynolds returned to the Army of the Potomac, the 1st Corps command Meade hungered for went to Reynolds. And it was Reynolds, not Meade, to whom Lincoln had first turned as a possible replacement for Joe Hooker. Meade remained cordial and polite with Reynolds, but privately his letters curdle with envy, even when corps command finally came Meade’s way after Fredericksburg.
¹⁰

Meade’s opinion of Reynolds would have turned darker still if he had had any inkling on June 30th that Reynolds was seriously planning to upset his calculations for a retreat to
Pipe Creek. Reynolds complained to
Abner Doubleday, who commanded one of the three divisions in the 1st Corps, that if Meade gave the rebels “time by dilatory measures or by taking up defensive positions they would strip” Pennsylvania “of everything.” For days, since crossing the Potomac, Reynolds had been impatient “to attack the enemy at once, to prevent his plundering the whole State,” and
Chapman Biddle, the colonel of the 1st Corps’ 121st Pennsylvania, heard Reynolds urge “striking them as soon as possible. He was really eager to get at them.” Meade’s June 30th order, directing the 1st Corps toward Gettysburg, might bring him close enough to engage; the follow-up dispatch at midday which told him that if “it is your judgment that you would be in a better position at Emmitsburg than where you are, you can fall back,” seemed to offer Reynolds the option to do as he pleased. Or at least, it told him that he could fall back to Emmitsburg if he wanted. Nothing was said that forbade him to advance on Gettysburg—although it did puzzle Meade that Reynolds’ acknowledgments of his communiqués seemed “to be given more with a view to an advance on Gettysburg, than a defensive position.”
¹¹

Thanks to
John Buford’s cavalry screen, Reynolds may have known more about the precise location of the
Army of Northern Virginia than the Union commanding general did. Buford “resembles Reynolds very much in his manners,” wrote
Charles Wainwright of the 1st Corps artillery, “reserved and somewhat rough.” He was also, like Reynolds, a Regular, born in Versailles, Kentucky, in 1826 (but raised in Illinois), from a long line of Bufords who had fought in the Revolution and the War of 1812. And he was a West Pointer, class of 1848, and was commissioned into the dragoons. Entering the army just months too late for Mexican War service, Buford had instead spent most of the 1850s tracking and fighting Indians on the Plains. The outbreak of the Civil War brought him a militia commission from the governor of Kentucky to serve in what was then a still undeclared border slave state. Buford refused: “I sent him word I was a Captain in the United States Army and I intend to remain one.” Still, for a solid year, Buford twiddled away his time behind a desk in the army inspector general’s office. He finally broke out of the paper ghetto when the ill-starred John Pope, who had known Buford in Illinois and could vouch unreservedly for his loyalty, wangled him command of a brigade of cavalry. After Pope’s debacle at Second Bull Run in August 1862, Buford was returned to staff duties. But in January 1863, he was once more put in charge of a cavalry brigade in the field, and in June he was promoted to major general and distinguished himself by his handling of one of Pleasonton’s divisions at Brandy Station. “He is a man of middle height with a yellow mustache,” wrote one of Meade’s staff, “and a small triangular eye,” as though he were capable of reading someone’s mind.
¹²

Click
here
to see a larger image.

Once Meade took command of the
Army of the Potomac, Buford’s cavalry division was posted well to the west of the Army of the Potomac, so that his two brigades would provide a screen for John Reynolds and the three-corps “wing.” Buford’s brigades moved on June 29th to spread out and check the
South Mountain gaps between Boonsboro and Monterey, and then cross the state line on up to Fairfield (where Buford would be, north and west of the head of Reynolds’ infantry at
Marsh Creek). As his troopers slumped wearily into Fairfield that evening, Buford was met by two scouting reports, one from
David McConaughy in Gettysburg “giving the locality of Confederate troops” and the other from a
Maryland Unionist who reported “a rebel camp one mile above Cashtown.” Buford and several of his officers rode to the top of
Jack’s Mountain and saw in the distance an unwelcome sight: a multitude of campfires along the roads west from Fairfield, which could only mean Confederate infantry, and lots of it. Early the next morning, Buford decided to feel them out, “exchanging a few shots” and brushing up against what he described as “two
Mississippi regiments of infantry and two guns.” Buford had no desire to try consequences with what were, in all likelihood, elements of Powell Hill’s corps, and instead sent off a galloper to Reynolds at 5:30 on the morning of June 30th to warn him that Confederate infantry was as close to him as Cashtown.
¹³

Staying across the head of Reynolds’ column, Buford then took his brigades into Gettysburg, and an hour and a half later reported driving off some of Hill’s infantry outside the town. The people in the town were ecstatic to see Buford’s troopers, especially after
Jubal Early’s whirlwind clean-out of the town three days before. Two regiments of Federal cavalry had passed through Gettysburg on the 28th, but they were bound for service with Couch and the defense of Harrisburg, and they only stayed through the night outside town. Buford, on the 30th, was bringing two entire brigades, and he seemed determined to stay. A captain in the
8th Illinois Cavalry was amazed at how “men, women and children crowded the side walks and vied with each other in demonstrations of joyous welcome. Hands were reached up eagerly to clasp the hands of our bronzed and dusty troopers. Cake, milk, water and beer were passed up to the moving column.”
¹⁴

That afternoon, Buford himself rode four miles south to Reynolds’ camp on Marsh Creek, then that night sent another galloper back to Reynolds, warning that “A.P. Hill’s corps is massed just back of Cashtown, about 9 miles from this place,” with Confederate infantry pickets planted for the night only four miles west of Gettysburg, on the
Cashtown Pike. Reynolds was “convinced that the enemy would attempt to interpose between Gettysburg … and the main part of the army by way of Fairfield,” and “seeing the importance of Gettysburg as a position … ordered Buford to hold onto it to the
last.” If Buford could buy enough time, he might be able to get his infantry into line “before the enemy should seize the point.” Ten minutes later, Buford sent another courier off to find the chief of cavalry,
Alfred Pleasonton, so Pleasonton could report these encounters to Meade.
¹⁵

One of Buford’s brigade commanders, a former carriage-maker-turned-soldier from New York named
Thomas Devin, tried to deflect any unease by suggesting that whatever the Confederates were likely to send in the direction of Gettysburg on the next day could be handled quite easily by the Yankee cavalry. “No you won’t,” growled Buford. “They will attack you in the morning and they will come booming—skirmishers three deep. You will have to fight like the devil to hold your own.” And why? Because, Buford continued, “the enemy must know the importance of this position and will strain every nerve to secure it, and if we are able to hold it, we will do well.” Two signals officers had been detached for service with each corps, and
Aaron Jerome, an Alabama-born signals lieutenant who had originally signed up with a
New Jersey infantry regiment and then transferred to the Signal Corps, had been assigned to Buford’s division. Buford told him “to look out for campfires, and in the morning for dust.”
¹⁶

Both Robert E. Lee and John Reynolds had particular reason to want to secure control over Gettysburg. “Gettysburg was of considerable importance to General Lee,” wrote one Union veteran, “as it was the first point he could reach after crossing the
South Mountain.” If Lee wanted to concentrate his three corps, Gettysburg would be the easiest place to do it, since ten roads radiated from the town diamond, drawing in traffic from all points of the compass. In addition, the undulating waves of ridgelines which swam eastward from South Mountain to the Susquehanna created a series of lovely defensible lines for infantry to seize and hold against any attacker coming from the west, through the
Cashtown Gap. Alfred Pleasonton was one of the few senior Union officers who knew the Gettysburg area reasonably well, since the year before he had been selected by George McClellan to survey the area against the possibility of Lee getting loose in
Pennsylvania, and he was “satisfied … that there was but one position in which for us to have a fight, and that was Gettysburg.” But in addition to the topography and road network, Gettysburg possessed one other advantage, and that was
Cemetery Hill, the gentle 505-foot height just south of the town that accommodated the town’s
Evergreen Cemetery and the farms of
Thomas Miller and
David Zeigler.
¹⁷

Those undulating ridges whose names have become the staple of Gettysburg lore—
Herr Ridge,
McPherson’s Ridge,
Seminary Ridge—may have
been valuable as defensive positions for infantry, but their crests lack the elevation required by nineteenth-century artillery (which was, ideally, one percent of the distance to the target and never greater than 7 percent of the distance). Likewise, their spines were almost all too narrow to support batteries of artillery with any ease, since artillery (unlike infantry) used a substantial back space to accommodate limber chests, caissons, horse teams, and battery wagons.
¹⁸
The chief exception to this geographical conundrum is
Cemetery Hill. Although modern visitors standing there can get no idea of this because of the foliage that has grown up since 1863, a four-negative panorama taken from Cemetery Hill in 1869 by the local Gettysburg photographers
William Tipton and
Robert Myers shows a dramatically uncluttered viewshed to the west and south. And since the hill is actually a broad flat plateau, Cemetery Hill constituted an artillerists’ ideal: a gun platform with plenty of room to accommodate at least three batteries of artillery plus their teams and chests, and at an elevation which would allow either an unobstructed arc to rifled guns firing
shell to the north or west; or, at 105 feet above the surrounding terrain, just the elevation prescribed to “graze” (or ricochet) solid
shot into oncoming attackers at 600 yards distance. It was “a battlefield to make an artilleryman grow enthusiastic,” wrote one Pennsylvania officer. “This high ground which dominated the town and the fields in all directions, save one” (to the east) gave to an artillerist’s eye “an unobstructed view of the rolling country open and accessible to the fire of our guns.” Even Confederate observers admitted that Cemetery Hill was “made, one might say, for artillery.”
¹⁹

John Reynolds was nothing if not “a most accomplished artilleryman,” and he could fully translate the meaning of Cemetery Hill for cannoneers. Even more, in the fall of 1862, Reynolds had been in command of the Pennsylvania militia, headquartered at Carlisle, and, “therefore, knew the importance of the Gettysburg pass.” It was Reynolds, agreed his adjutant,
Joseph Rosengarten, “who first appreciated the strength and value of Cemetery Hill.”

That made George Meade’s notion of pulling back to
Pipe Creek, seventeen miles south, all the more agonizing. On the evening of June 30th, Reynolds summoned the nearest of the other two corps commanders in his “wing,”
Oliver Otis Howard, to his temporary headquarters at the
Moritz Tavern, on
Marsh Creek. Howard presented an almost complete contrast to John Reynolds. Born in Maine in 1830, he was ten years Reynolds’ junior (although he was only two notches below Reynolds in seniority on the volunteers’ service list), graduated from Bowdoin College at age nineteen, then went on to West Point, where he graduated fourth in his class. It was there that Otis Howard met Reynolds, and it was there that the voluble Howard and the taciturn Reynolds somehow became “warm friends.” Howard, like Reynolds, had been commissioned into the artillery. But in 1857, he experienced a profound spiritual
conversion to evangelical Protestantism and seriously considered leaving the army “to preach the Gospel of Peace.” The cascade of events that led to the Civil War arrested that decision. “It is,” Howard concluded, “no time for a man who loves his country and has been educated by it, to desert her.” The question was whether his country, or at least the army, wanted Howard. As the Duke of Wellington had once remarked, an army was no place for “a man who has nice notions about religion.” The
U.S. Army was not much different. Regular officers were a tight-lipped, unemotional club; praying soldiers were at best the butt of jokes, and at worst the victims of social shunning. The prewar army employed only thirty post
chaplains, and not until August 1861 did Congress enact provisions for chaplains in each regiment, Regular and volunteer.
²⁰