Gettysburg: The Last Invasion Read online

  Books about battles are not in high fashion, since they frequently engender suspicion in prominent places that an interest in war—even a war as distant as the American Civil War—panders to an unhappy streak of destructiveness in the American psyche, and by rights should be stuffed into some genie’s bottle lest it entice more of the naïve to serve it. By contrast, in the middle of the nineteenth century, war was considered (and not just by unbalanced psychotics) to be “the highest, most exalted art; the art of freedom and of right, of the blessed condition of Man and of humanity—the Principle of Peace.” A century and a half later, the lure of the Civil War remains strong, but dealing with its battles has acquired among my academic peers a reputation close to pornography. This, despite the nagging reality that aggression is an instinctive form of human self-preservation; despite the curiosity, for those of a Marxist bent, that no more efficient repudiation of liberal individualism (another ideology now on-the-town) exists than the collectivity of war and combat; and despite Susan Sontag’s ironic reminder that “war was and still is the most irresistible—and picturesque—news.” However, a generation of professional historians whose youth was dominated by the Vietnam War has not been eager to embrace any war after that experience, except perhaps for the purpose of demonstrating the atrocious malevolence with which American soldiers are habitually supposed to wage it or the pitiful pall of death which it spreads across the land.

  This book will not offer much comfort to those persuasions, if only because we cannot talk about the American nineteenth century without talking about the Civil War, and we cannot talk about the Civil War without acknowledging, even grudgingly, that the Civil War era’s singular event was a war, and that all the other issues hung ineluctably on the results achieved by large numbers of organized citizens attempting to kill one another. But even more contrary to the grain, the American Civil War—and the battle of Gettysburg in particular—were conducted with an amateurism of spirit and an innocence of intent which would be touching if that same amateurism had not also contrived to make it so bloody. And it was remembered by its veterans as the occasion for a great ratification “of freedom and of right.” Although it has become commonplace to speak shudderingly of the Civil War as the “first modern war” or the “first total war,” there are few things more impressive than the sheer lack of totality in both the battle of Gettysburg and the Civil War as a whole, and few things more humiliating than the bewildered, small-town incompetence with which American soldiers addressed themselves to the task of managing, directing, and commanding the mammoth citizen-armies they had called forth.

  The best testimony to that lack of totality is the silent witness of places like Gettysburg, where almost all of the buildings that sat in the path of the battle are still here. The technology of nineteenth-century warfare, even as advanced as it was over that of the Napoleonic Wars, was simply too limited to knock them down. It is difficult to understand the “modernity” of a war fought with single-shot muzzle-loading weapons, under the direction of commanders whose chief credential was a diploma from a military engineering school, and on battlefields where it was still reasonably safe to stand up. The principal historical cognates of Gettysburg and the American Civil War are not the Western Front or My Lai, but the Crimean War, the North Italian War of 1859, the Schleswig-Holstein War of 1864, the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian Wars, and the Taiping Rebellion—none of which are more modern than high-button shoes and pince-nez. The same is true of the concept of war which still prevailed among the Civil War armies, a concept which still accepted the “bracketing” of war from civil life as a sort of idealized joust between sovereigns who possessed a monopoly on state violence. Because the sovereigns in the Civil War were the peoples of the Union and the Confederacy, the Civil War holds the portents of mass, popular wars in which no result could be acceptable but the total defeat of an enemy. But these were still only portents, just as the popular resistance of the French people after the debacle at Sedan in 1870 made the Franco-Prussian War a similar portent of such conflicts.

  A book on the battle of Gettysburg will also lose contact with fashion because Gettysburg does not touch on emancipation and has almost nothing to say on the subject of African-American agency. There were, to be sure, several thousand black people involved in the campaign, perhaps as many as thirty thousand. But they came as slaves, as the logistical underpinning of the rebel army, and left only the most passing traces. Nor is there much agency to be celebrated in slaves who were compelled to work for those who were defending slavery. There were no black troops at Gettysburg, and most of the free black inhabitants of the town of Gettysburg had fled to avoid capture and enslavement by the Confederate invaders. (If there was malevolence anywhere in this story, it was here—but it was the sort of malevolence which had been going on for 250 years, and not an expression of some newfound embrace of “total war.”) A few black Gettysburgians would end up serving in the Union armies—and I call the roll here of Andrew Meads, James Russell, and Stewart Woods, the latter serving in the 54th Massachusetts and miraculously surviving both the 54th’s decimation at Battery Wagner two weeks after Gettysburg and the Confederate prison camp at Andersonville—but otherwise, Gettysburg was almost univocally a battle for the Union, and it was made all the more so by Lincoln’s famous address, which contains no allusion to slavery, and casts the battle entirely in the context of the preservation of liberal democracy.

  Of course, for many of the Civil War’s cultured despisers, the Union is old hat and liberal democracy the listless desert of history’s last—and very dull—man. Emancipation makes a better story for our times. But emancipation cannot be so easily detached from union (which is another way of saying that racial justice and liberal democracy rise or fall with each other). Lincoln insisted that the Civil War was being fought by the United States in order to restore the constitutionally mandated union of those states, and the Gettysburg Address was his most eloquent declaration that the ultimate purpose of the war was the test it afforded of the practical viability of democracy. This was not because race, slavery, and emancipation were unimportant to Lincoln, but because the Union (and the liberal democracy it represented) and emancipation were not, after all, mutually exclusive goals. Unless the Union was restored, there would be no practical possibility of emancipation, since the overwhelming majority of American slaves would, in that case, end up living in a foreign country, and beyond the possible grasp of Lincoln’s best antislavery intentions.

  But by the same token, restoring the Union would be a hollow accomplishment unless the blot of race-based slavery was wiped from the Union’s escutcheon, and in that there was as much black agency at work at Gettysburg as on any other Civil War battlefield, because no democracy worth its name could continue to drag the burden of slavery around after it. “Under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy and sell and torture?” asked a sarcastic Sydney Smith, from his English perch, a full forty years before the war,

  what right has the American, a scourger and murderer of slaves, to compare himself with the least and lowest of the European nations?—much more with this great and humane country, where the greatest lord dare not lay a finger upon the meanest peasant? What is freedom, where all are not free? where the greatest of God’s blessings is limited, with impious caprice, to the colour of the body?

  This was the question which chilled the blood of every American who was not actually a slaveowner, and more than a few who were. It was the best of news to European aristocrats who looked upon the United States as the one disturbing testimony against the Romantic revival of absolutism. “If the United States go wrong what hope have we of the civilized world in our turn?” asked Richard Cobden, the figurehead of the Manchester School and the principal star (along with John Bright) of English liberalism.

  Preventing that wrong turn was what the preservation of the Union was about. Emancipating American slaves would remove the caus
e of that wrong, and make the Union worth preserving. But neither of them would be possible without the triumph of the Union armies. And Gettysburg would be the place where the armies of the Union would receive their greatest test, and the Union its last invasion.

  Prologue

  ANYONE WHO TOOK THE TROUBLE on one of the few fair days in late June of the year 1863 to climb the winding forest trail to the old Indian lookout on South Mountain would have enjoyed a sweet reward for his trouble. Looking to the east and north, across central Maryland and south-central Pennsylvania, a watcher at the lookout stood high above a plain, full of pleats and tucks, rolling effortlessly eastward to the Susquehanna River. Only a last chain of hills in the blue distance hid the vista that led southeast, down to Washington, or northeast, to Harrisburg. Laid across this expanse were spinneys of forest—white and red oak, black walnut, sycamore, chestnut, hickory, alder, elm—whose tree crowns would have shimmered in the humid, golden sunlight. Between the fingers of forest lay green and gold patches of grassy farmland, irregularly dotted with small white barns and houses.

  If the watcher shifted and looked to the west, the slopes of South Mountain fell away into the lengthening shadows of the Cumberland Valley, before pitching sharply upward again to the ranges of the Tuscarora and Blue mountain and the vast, pine-covered spines of the Appalachians, now turning cobalt in the late afternoon haze.

  South Mountain is the first outlier of the Appalachians, and it runs on an axis that tilts northeast from the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia (another outlier chain of the Appalachians) to the west bank of the Susquehanna near Harrisburg. On the western side of South Mountain, the fertile Shenandoah and Cumberland valleys could take a traveler without too much difficulty from Lexington, Virginia, down to the Potomac and across into the Cumberland Valley and to Carlisle or Harrisburg—some 220 miles. But on South Mountain’s eastern face, the ground drops sharply to the rich green farmlands of the plain. This plain itself subsides into a series of low-lying ridges that parallel South Mountain itself as though they were undulations from the mountain’s upthrust, until one by one they gradually expend their height and their force sixty miles away at the Susquehanna. The roadways which cut across the plain conformed themselves to the undulations, and ran mostly north to south. Only two major east–west roads bored their way horizontally through South Mountain, one stretching from Philadelphia, through Lancaster and York, to the Cashtown Gap, and the other reaching up from Washington, across Maryland to Turner’s and Fox’s gaps, and thence to Harpers Ferry.

  Those upfolded north–south ridges were really the jammed-together lips of great cracks in an enormous underlying sill of granitelike rock. In places, the jamming had been so violent that ungainly masses of stone, gray and coarse-grained, pushed up through the soils, sometimes forming cone-shaped hills that punctuated the ridgelines. But the soils themselves were soft, thick loam, and in 1863 a farming family could support itself on as little as 150 acres. A long time before, the heirs of William Penn, the original feudal proprietor of Pennsylvania, struggled to prevent the dissipation of this rich, wrinkled plain into a sprawl of small farms, and even tried to set aside a 43,500-acre tract as a manor. But as so often happened to the Penn family’s plans for Pennsylvania, the German Lutherans and Scots-Irish Presbyterians who overleaped the Susquehanna simply dismissed the proprietors’ restrictions. The Penns had neither sufficient interest nor sufficient power to curb the demand for cutting up their “manor” into disposable farmland, and by the 1760s the broad plain between the Susquehanna and South Mountain had passed into the hands of the farmers and speculators. In 1797, the new Pennsylvania state government dissolved all title to the “manor” in favor of those who had squatted on it.1

  One of these farmers’ sons, James Gettys, turned speculator himself. Sizing up the growth of the region and the prospects for trade between the mountains and the Susquehanna, Gettys shrewdly bought 116 acres from his father at the point where the principal north–south road to Harrisburg crossed the east–west road heading toward South Mountain and the Cashtown Gap. There were already two taverns there, doing a roaring business, and it seemed to James Gettys that a good deal more could be made out of this intersection. He laid out 210 lots for a town, built around a central square (or “diamond”), and without any excess of modesty named it for himself.2

  From the vantage point of the watcher on South Mountain, Gettysburg lay at the north edge of the horizon, although a good brass naval telescope could bring it pretty easily into view. But on that late June afternoon, the watcher’s attention would be captured, not by James Gettys’ distant town, or by the newly cut mounds of grass and hay, or by the fields of full-grown wheat and the knee-high cornstalks, spread out like yellow aprons on the plain below. Instead, if the watcher looked to the west in the oncoming twilight, the darkening shadows over the Cumberland Valley quickly became pinpricked with a carpet of fire lights. Or, if the watcher looked east, what caught the eye was an interminably long snake of traffic—white canvas-topped wagons, horses, men on foot, ambulances, more and more men on foot with the sun glinting sharply off the rifle barrels perched on their shoulders, big-wheeled cannon, flags (some huge and square, some small and swallow-tailed, the Stars and Stripes, state flags, headquarters flags)—all stopping and starting, and stopping again, and then sluggishly moving again, and all of it headed north, toward Gettysburg. The watcher was beholding something never seen before from this spot, and never seen again—two great armies, bound for the greatest and most violent collision the North American continent had ever seen.

  PART 1

  The March Up

  CHAPTER ONE

  People who will not give in

  THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR had been raging for just a little more than two years when the armies came into the view of the Indian lookout. “Neither party,” Abraham Lincoln would say later, “expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained.” Hardly ever has any nation fallen into the abyss of war less prepared to wage it, or with less foresight of the costs it would have to pay. From the moment they took a republic rather than a monarchy as the shape of their government, Americans prided themselves on being a nation of peace, dedicated to the arts of commerce rather than the rapacity of empire and “the spirit of war.” Americans hadn’t entirely given up on the call to arms—there was a war with Britain in 1812, then a war with Mexico in 1846, and ongoing flashes of conflict with uncooperative tribes of Creeks, Choctaw, Shawnee, Comanche, Kiowa, and Sioux. But none of these occurred on any great scale, and all of them could be explained away as regrettable but necessary defensive measures for the good of the republic. There would invariably be Americans who gloried in war and killing, just as there would be anywhere. But the numbers of the bloodlusters would not be great. Even one of the small cadre of professionally trained officers produced by the republic’s military academy at West Point, Oliver Otis Howard, admitted to deep religious uneasiness about the glorification of war. “We cannot well exaggerate … the horrors, the hateful ravages, and the countless expense of war,” Howard wrote long after the Civil War’s guns had fallen silent. And stories of war serve only one purpose, to “show plainly to our children that war, with its embodied woes and furies must be avoided.”1

  This ambivalence toward wars and soldiering lent strength to the penury of the Federal Congress, which routinely set military expenditures and military personnel to a level befitting a national constabulary. At the first shot of the Civil War, the United States Army comprised only 16,357 officers and men, almost none of whom were grouped together in one place in any formidable size. Nor was there any professional association equivalent to Britain’s Royal United Services Institution to foster thinking on new weapons and tactical schemes. “Nearly the whole of my eleven years’ service,” wrote one West Pointer of the class of 1850, “has been with my company on the frontier of Texas,” and Richard Stoddert Ewell, who would wear a Confederate lieutenant general’s stars at Gettys
burg in 1863, confessed that during his twenty years’ service as a cavalry officer, “he had learned all about commanding fifty United States dragoons, and forgotten everything else.”2

  Even this minuscule army was too much for Horace Greeley, the mad-hatter editor of the country’s most widely read newspaper, the New-York Tribune. “Of all solecisms, a Standing Army in a Republic of the XIXth Century is the most indefensible,” Greeley announced in 1858. “We have no more need of a Standing Army than of an order of nobility.”3 In the event of any national emergency, the states would put their part-time militias into Federal hands, like the Prussian Landwehr in 1813, and they would provide the manpower which the Regular Army could deploy. The officers would emerge, like Napoleon’s generals, as corporals with field marshals’ batons in their packs. “It was the fashion to sneer at those who had made the profession of arms their study,” complained a contributor to the Army and Navy Journal, and “experience in Congress was apparently regarded as a more essential qualification to command than a course of study at West Point.” One lonely voice, Henry Wager Halleck (who himself had left the army in despair and gone quite profitably into law and banking), warned that “disorganized and frantic masses” were not likely to provide “as good a defense against invasion as the most disciplined and experienced.” But it was easier to believe otherwise, and cheaper, too. In 1857, a Democratic-controlled Congress spent more money on Federal judges than on “armories, arsenals, and munitions of war,” more on customhouses and warehouses than on “Fortifications, and other works of defence,” and more on the General Post Office building in Washington than on West Point.4