Gettysburg: The Last Invasion Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2013 by Allen C. Guelzo

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-385-34964-2

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-59408-2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Guelzo, Allen C.

  Gettysburg : the last invasion / by Allen C. Guelzo.—First edition.

  pages cm

  “This is a Borzoi book”—Title page verso.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-307-59408-2

  1. Gettysburg, Battle of, Gettysburg, Pa., 1863. I. Title.

  E475.53.G875 2013

  973.7′349—dc23 2012047013

  Cover image: Three Confederate prisoners, July 1863, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, right half of an original glass stereograph.

  Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  Cover design by Joe Montgomery

  Maps by Robert Bull

  v3.1

  To 2nd Lieutenant Jonathan E. Guelzo, U.S. Army,

  in remembrance of all the days we have walked

  the fields of Gettysburg together

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  PART 1 The March Up

  CHAPTER ONE People who will not give in

  CHAPTER TWO There were never such men in an army before

  CHAPTER THREE This Campaign is going to end this show

  CHAPTER FOUR A perfectly surplus body of men

  CHAPTER FIVE Victory will inevitably attend our arms

  CHAPTER SIX A goggle-eyed old snapping turtle

  CHAPTER SEVEN A universal panic prevails

  CHAPTER EIGHT You will have to fight like the devil to hold your own

  PART 2 The First Day

  CHAPTER NINE The devil’s to pay

  CHAPTER TEN You stand alone, between the Rebel Army and your homes!

  CHAPTER ELEVEN The dutch run and leave us to fight

  CHAPTER TWELVE Go in, South Carolina!

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN If the enemy is there to-morrow, we must attack him

  PART 3 The Second Day

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN One of the bigger bubbles of the scum

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN You are to hold this ground at all costs

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN I have never been in a hotter place

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The supreme moment of the war had come

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Remember Harper’s Ferry!

  CHAPTER NINETEEN We are the Louisiana Tigers!

  CHAPTER TWENTY Let us have no more retreats

  PART 4 The Third Day

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE The general plan of attack was unchanged

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Are you going to do your duty today?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE The shadow of a cloud across a sunny field

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR As clear a defeat as our army ever met with

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE There is bad faith somewhere

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX To Sweep & plunder the battle grounds

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Index

  Illustration Credits

  A Note About the Author

  Photo Insert

  Large Map Images

  Other Books by This Author

  Gettysburg

  O Pride of the days in prime of the months

  Now trebled in great renown,

  When before the ark of our holy cause

  Fell Dagon down—

  Dagon foredoomed, who, armed and targed,

  Never his impious heart enlarged

  Beyond that hour; God walled his power,

  And there the last invader charged.

  He charged, and in that charge condensed

  His all of hate and all of fire;

  He sought to blast us in his scorn,

  And wither us in his ire.

  Before him went the shriek of shells—

  Aerial screamings, taunts and yells;

  Then the three waves in flashed advance

  Surged, but were met, and back they set:

  Pride was repelled by sterner pride,

  And Right is a strong-hold yet.

  Before our lines it seemed a beach

  Which wild September gales have strown

  With havoc on wreck, and dashed therewith

  Pale crews unknown—

  Men, arms, and steeds. The evening sun

  Died on the face of each lifeless one,

  And died along the winding marge of fight

  And searching-parties lone.

  Sloped on the hill the mounds were green,

  Our centre held that place of graves,

  And some still hold it in their swoon,

  And over these a glory waves.

  The warrior-monument, crashed in fight,

  Shall soar transfigured in loftier light,

  A meaning ampler bear;

  Soldier and priest with hymn and prayer

  Have laid the stone, and every bone

  Shall rest in honor there.

  —HERMAN MELVILLE

  Acknowledgments

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS are supposed to be the altar of gratitude. However, I cannot help noticing how often they serve more or less the same purpose as the cocktail party to the social climber, as a place to issue noisy salutes to a checklist of celebrities with whom one is eager to be associated. I have no such parade of cultural mandarins to wave up onto my little stage, and probably not even much of a stage. But this makes me all the more uncommonly grateful to those from whom help has unstintingly come. I single out in particular my office staffers in Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College: Cathy Bain first, and then my faithful note-card transcribers, Lauren Roedner and Tim Koenig. I have benefited delightfully from discussions and exchanges of documents with John Rudy, Eric Wittenberg, Scott Mingus, and Charles Tarbox. Troy Harman, John Heiser, and Scott Hartwig of the Gettysburg National Military Park have been unflaggingly helpful. And for patience beyond the measure of Job, I must thank the happy few who read through each chapter for me as they appeared, and commented on them: Scott Bowden, Joe Bilby, Charles Teague, Gregory Urwin, and Ted Alexander. Zach Fry and Jason Frawley freely allowed me to use research material that is, as yet, unpublished by them. William A. Frassanito not only provided me with access to a number of the rare photographs in his collection, but also gave highly useful advice on the selection of images as a whole.

  I want also to hail the cooperation of a number of libraries and collections in accessing manuscript collections, including the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Library of Congress, the Museum of the Confederacy, the New-York Historical Society, the Virginia Historical Society, Special Collections in the Musselman Library at Gettysburg College, the Adams County Historical Society, the Western Reserve Historical Society, the library of the Gettysburg National Military Park, and Bowdoin College. Gettysburg College and Princeton University united in funding a yearlong sabbatical during the 2010–11 academic year, during which I served as the William Garwood Visiting Professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton. Bringing the manuscript out of its c
hrysalis state and into full wingspread has been the unceasing labor of my glorious agent, Michele Rubin of Writers House, and Andrew Miller, my editor at Random House. The Gettysburg Magazine published an early version of some of my thinking on the tactical context of the battle as “Some Unturned Corners of the Battle of Gettysburg” in its July 2011 issue.

  Above all, I salute as gracefully and handsomely as I can the patience and good humor of my beloved wife, Debra, and our three now-grown children, Jerusha Mast, Alexandra Fanucci, and Jonathan Guelzo, all of whom have tolerated days, weeks, and months of an unresponsive and abstracted paterfamilias, his mind wandering somewhere over rocky hills and golden fields, toward a small knot of trees on a distant horizon.

  This is a book about a nineteeth-century battle. That fact alone calls forward a number of caveats, beginning with the arrangement of hours and minutes in these chapters. America in the 1860s knew nothing about synchronized time. Clocks and watches were set by light and dark; there were no time zones, no standardized time-measurement schemes. Even meticulous timekeepers relied on the sound of church bells or public clocks for uniformity. Of course, in the middle of the battle, few people were noticing bells, if they were being rung at all, and few were likely to be listening for the cheerful chiming of a courthouse clock. Soldiers set their personal watches by their own estimates, and in battle, those lacking watches were reduced to little more than a hazardous guess about the time. This is a long way of saying that the times cited in this book are entirely the reckoning and responsibility of the author; but the vagaries of timekeeping in 1863 were so great that even I must protest having to share too much of the responsibility. The participants themselves tried to establish some rough sense of the timing of the battle’s events, and sometimes I have accepted their estimates or time notations, but always with the question in mind: Could this really have happened at that time?

  The same is true concerning the maps that appear in this book; they, too, are entirely the reckoning and responsibility of the author. But they, too, suffer from the uncertainties of the battle’s participants about where they were and what landmarks were nearby. Maps in both armies were in short and uncoordinated supply, and local place-names were swapped around by soldiers with an unsteady abandon (it is estimated that Little Round Top was called by as many as nine different names in after-action reports, simply because the officers composing those reports had only the most slender information about what names the locals attached to them). Names for local landmarks shifted from telling to telling: the Lutheran Theological Seminary was frequently mistaken for Pennsylvania College, and vice versa; the road leading southwest from Gettysburg is usually known as the Fairfield Road, but sometimes is referred to as the Hagerstown Road, while the road leading west to Cashtown is frequently called the Cashtown Pike and the Chambersburg Pike; the road from the northeast used by Jubal Early’s division on July 1st was alternately referred to as the Old Harrisburg Road and the Heidlersburg Road (I have opted to use the latter); Baltimore Street in the town of Gettysburg becomes the Baltimore Pike as soon as it leaves the environs of Gettysburg, just as York Street becomes the York Pike. The greatest confusion is liable to occur concerning the Cashtown Pike versus Chambersburg Pike usage, so let me say here that I have simply settled on calling the west road the Cashtown Pike. Other geographical points also suffer from name-swapping: Herbst’s Woods is frequently spoken of as McPherson’s Woods, but in fact, the woods belonged to John Herbst and only bordered the Edward McPherson property. Oak Hill is a large prominence north and west of Gettysburg, but it has a south-running spur known as Oak Ridge which is geologically distinct, and so I have rigorously segregated the Hill for the hill and the Ridge for the ridge. The same distinction applies to the more famous Cemetery Hill and Cemetery Ridge.

  The vagaries of postwar memory did not help this uncertainty. The 1,324 monuments, markers, statues, and plaques which dot the six thousand acres of the modern Gettysburg battlefield look like they ought to offer some reliable guidance to the placement of soldiers on the ground. But for a variety of reasons, even these fixed stars of the battlefield are not entirely to be relied upon. Veterans wishing to erect monuments to their stand frequently petitioned the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association for locations near the battlefield’s roadways, rather than where they actually fought, so that their monuments would be more easily visible to tourists (so that Freeman McGilvery’s artillery line is marked by placements along modern-day Hancock Avenue, some two hundred yards east of where they surely parked themselves in the desperate twilight combat of July 2, 1863). One unit’s veterans (those of the 72nd Pennsylvania) actually waged a successful battle in the Pennsylvania courts to have their monument placed on a spot which reflected better their claims to valor and courage rather than the rear-echelon position the GBMA planned for them. Although there are at least three atlases devoted exclusively to maps of the Gettysburg battlefield (by Bradley Gottfried, Philip Laino, and Steven Stanley), none of the unit positions marked in these volumes can possibly hope to claim absolute accuracy, and so neither will I. My maps must serve as general guides to the reader, alongside the text, and not be viewed as testimony worth fighting over.

  That uncertainty also reaches through to the sources I have used for this book. The literature on the Gettysburg battle is enormous—the 2004 edition of Richard Sauers’ The Gettysburg Campaign, June 3–August 1, 1863: A Comprehensive, Selectively Annotated Bibliography lists 6,193 books, articles, chapters, and pamphlets on the battle; an entire biannual magazine, The Gettysburg Magazine, has been published since 1989 focusing in exacting detail on various facets of the battle, and ponderous volumes have appeared from distinguished university presses, dividing the story of the battle into single days, parts of days, and finally to quarter hours or so. I have spent most of my time in pursuit of the accounts written by the veterans of the battle themselves, in the form of autobiographies, lectures, pamphlets, dedicatory speeches, ill-tempered newspaper articles, self-aggrandizing memoirs, and that most peculiar of American literary genres, the regimental history. The further in time from the battle these recollections were written, the less reliability is sure to be attached to these reminiscences. But that is not a fixed rule. There are regimental histories published immediately after the war which show little sign that the authors saw or understood most of the battle they had fought through, whereas numerous writers, even long after the fact, came up with nuggets of reminiscence so vivid that time has clearly been no dimmer of them.

  Nor is there any easy refuge from false lead to be found in self-limiting one’s curiosity to unpublished manuscripts. There is no authoritative census of Gettysburg-related manuscript sources, although Sauers includes a fifty-two-page listing, by unit, of letters, papers, and diaries. But even letters written from the field frequently betray little comprehension of what had been happening around the writers, and an old soldier can be as forgetful of detail after a day as after a decade. And, as Richard Holmes discovered as a correspondent during the Falklands War in 1982, it took no long time before veterans, hearing other veterans, incorporated a certain agreed-upon story line into their own accounts. Holmes was amazed to interview Falklands veterans, and discover how “a carapace of accepted fact hardened almost before my eyes.” The temptation would always be to make the experience of battle more reasoned, more synchronous with others’ experiences, than it had ever seemed at the moment. One of the greatest collections of manuscript materials on the battle is the vast heap of letters and accounts (mostly Union) solicited by John Badger Bachelder, the battle’s first great remembrancer, and finally published in 1994–95 as The Bachelder Papers by David and Audrey Ladd in three volumes. But even within The Bachelder Papers, the old veterans advance conflicting accounts, rehearse old grievances, debate large-scale tactical pictures which they could never have known about at the time, and defend pet theories with only slightly less vehemence than that which they employed in the battle itself. The same is true of John War
wick Daniel, who essayed to be the Confederate Bachelder. In the end, the chronicler of Gettysburg has little to take for a final guide than the refined twitching of common sense, and a willingness to endure the arrows of outraged fortune hunters who have planned to make that fortune from this or that presumably pristine version of events. Again, the same question posed to me by timing has to be posed about sources, no matter how immediate: Could this really have happened at that time?

  Nor is there any way that these sources could finally settle the great controversies of the battle:

  • Did J.E.B. Stuart lose the battle before it even started by galloping off on a senseless joyride with the Confederate cavalry, and thus deprive the Confederates of intelligence-gathering capacity?

  • Did Richard Ewell lose the battle because he lacked the energy and the ruthlessness to press his successes on July 1st to the point of driving the battered Union forces off Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill?

  • Did Dan Sickles force George Meade to stay and fight at Gettysburg on July 2nd, as Sickles claimed after the war?

  • Was James Longstreet criminally negligent by insolently refusing to mount the Confederate attacks on July 2nd and 3rd with the appropriate spirit Lee demanded?

  These are only the most prominent of the Gettysburg controversies, and I put forward the answers I do with the resigned confidence that neither reason nor reasonableness is guaranteed certainty of success over self-interest and braggadocio.

  Occasionally, I have taken my own counsel as the only way to make sense of certain problems in the Gettysburg narrative. It puzzles me why the ridgeline which forms the western boundary of John Rose’s wheat field is routinely called “the Stony Hill,” when it is perfectly obvious to the naked eye that it is a ridge, like the other undulating waves of ridges running eastward from South Mountain, and so I have determined to call it “the stony ridge.” Likewise, it makes no sense to replicate the ethnic tone-deafness of nineteenth-century Americans in spelling Alexander Schimmelpfennig’s name as Schimmelfenning or Schimmelfennig (or, as his grave monument indecorously renders it, Schimmelfinnig), and so Schimmelpfennig he stays.