CHAPTER 35
Lancaster is in a state of agitation and alarm.
—JAMES BUCHANAN
Lincoln ~ Buchanan
After gathering his forces, confronting heavily armed Confederates and swollen rivers, General Ulysses S. Grant had finally fought his way to Vicksburg. That mighty city and the Mississippi stood between him and his supply lines. “But,” he said, “I was on dry ground on the same side of the river with the enemy. All the campaigns, labors, hardships, and exposures, from the month of December previous to this time, that had been made and endured, were for the accomplishment of this one object.”
Grant’s men had won five battles, including the capture of Jackson, the state capital, took control of four hundred miles of the Mississippi River, survived constant skirmishing, and had traversed an average of 180 miles to reunite at this place. The city was too powerful to attack head on, a lesson Grant initially learned the hard way. Instead, he and his forces dug in for a siege. Vicksburg would not fall until the city ran out of food.
Grant thought his greatest concern was a Confederate effort to lift the siege, but in fact, he had completely lost support in Congress, with persistent calls for his removal, including from his longtime friend and sponsor. But Grant had the confidence of the one man who mattered. A senator angrily told Lincoln that he was “the father of every military blunder that has been made during the war. You are on your road to hell, sir . . . and you are not a mile off this minute.” Lincoln asked, “Senator, that is just about the distance from here to the Capitol, is it not?” Lincoln would stick by his general.
As the Union gained ground in the west, they would find themselves under an unprecedented threat in the east.
As the critical summer of 1863 began, James Buchanan noted that his life was “tranquil and monotonous,” his “evenings are rather solitary,” and that he was resigned “to the privations inseparable from old age.” Soon the conflict that began during his presidency would find its way almost to his doorstep.
“Something of a panic pervades the city,” Welles noted from Washington on June 15. “Singular rumors reach us of Rebel advances into Maryland. It is said they have reached Hagerstown, and some of them have penetrated as far as Chambersburg in Pennsylvania.” There were no straight answers to be found from the War Department. Lincoln made an emergency call for one hundred thousand volunteers to be raised in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, and West Virginia.
On June 26 Buchanan wrote to Harriet, his niece, “Lancaster is in a state of agitation and alarm,” ordering her to remain at her Uncle Edward’s and not to come home. Confederates marched on Wrightsville, intending to head east, putting them within miles of Wheatland. Union soldiers burned the bridge, marking the easternmost advance of the Confederate army. “They were within eleven miles of us,” Buchanan wrote in horror.
General George Meade of the Army of the Potomac was asleep when destiny, in the form of a messenger, arrived at his tent. Seeing the War Department officer in front of him, Meade initially thought he was going to be arrested, though he was not sure for what. Instead, he was put in command. Meade attempted to protest. He was not familiar enough with the army and its positions. The men would prefer General Reynolds, a good friend of his. But the Army of the Potomac, which had passed through the hands of McDowell, McClellan, Burnside, and Hooker, was now his. His lofty task was to locate General Lee and defeat him.
The land around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, can be said to have chosen its combatants rather than the reverse. It was a pastoral, tranquil town, as evidenced by the place-names in and around it that would later become famous: the peach orchard, the wheat field, Little Round Top, Culp’s Hill, Spangler’s Spring. Neither army had intended to make their stand here. But throughout the day on June 30, unbeknownst to either, Union and Confederate forces were hurtling toward one another. When the sun set, the extreme left of Meade’s line was several miles south of Gettysburg; the extreme right was thirty miles away in Maryland.
On the first of July, detachments of Confederate and Union forces encountered each other west of the city, quite inadvertently, and began fighting around 6:00 a.m. Each would send for reinforcements, until all of the fighting forces on both sides converged. The first reinforcements arrived around noon. Union forces were pushed back, beating a bloody withdrawal through the streets of Gettysburg and to the south. They concentrated on Cemetery Hill, final resting place of the town’s founders.
General Lee arrived in the afternoon on the first day, establishing his base on Seminary Ridge, to the west of Union forces. He ordered General Ewell to attack Cemetery Hill “if practicable.” Ewell decided to wait for reinforcements, despite superiority of numbers. Confederate chances of taking Cemetery Hill would never be greater.
Standing on the summit of Seminary Ridge, surveying the Union forces with Lee, Longstreet remarked that “All we have to do is throw our army around by their left, and we shall interpose between the Federal army and Washington.” They could find a strong defensive position and wait for the attack.
“No,” Lee responded, “the enemy is there, and I am going to attack him there.”
Longstreet pushed back, arguing that his plan would give them control of the roads to Washington and Baltimore.
But Lee was firm. “They are in position, and I am going to whip them or they are going to whip me.”
Meade arrived after midnight, inspecting his Union lines by the light of a full moon. Throughout the night, troops continued to arrive at Gettysburg.
At the beginning of July 2, Union forces were arrayed along the high ground south of town in a fishhook formation, which curved north and east before coming back south.
General Daniel Sickles, a former congressman who had murdered his wife’s lover in front of the White House,* was ordered to hold a position on the Union left flank, near the base of the hook. Sickles moved his men west to a peach orchard, which he believed would be more defensible. In so doing, however, he created a bulge in the Union line and invited the thrust of the Confederate attack, which would ultimately cost him his right leg. Meade was forced to pour in men behind Sickles to prevent the line from being broken.
* Sickles was acquitted after his lawyer, Edwin Stanton, made the first successful “temporary insanity” argument to the jury. Sickles was a favorite of then-president James Buchanan, who had written him a letter while in jail.
Little Round Top, a hill on the southernmost part of the battlefield, south of the Union lines, was undefended. Noticing Confederates about to seize this critical position, one Union general frantically searched for men to contest them. He succeeded without a second to lose, and the two forces met at the summit. Hundreds of Union soldiers were gunned down in their charge, and soon they had exhausted their sixty bullets. Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, formerly a rhetoric professor from Maine, gave the order, “Fix bayonets. Charge!” Many were killed on both sides, while others scattered “like a herd of wild cattle.” But Little Round Top was secure.
At the end of July 2, the Union “hook” was intact, from Little Round Top in the south, north along Cemetery Ridge, and northeast along Cemetery Hill, until it curved south along Culp’s Hill.
That evening, twelve Union generals gathered in a council of war at Meade’s headquarters, most of whom had to stand due to a lack of seats. They decided to retain their defensive position and wait for an attack. As the meeting dispersed, Meade said to General John Gibbon, whose men occupied the center, “If Lee attacks tomorrow, it will be in your front.” Meade said this was “Because he has made attacks on both our flanks and failed, and if he concludes to try it again it will be on our center.” General Gibbon said he hoped so, and that if Lee did, he would defeat him.
Around 10:00 a.m. outside Vicksburg, white flags appeared along the Confederate works. Two officers, a general and a white-flag-wielding colonel, brought a letter to Grant from John Pemberton, their commander, proposing an armistice while negotiations could take place. Grant responded that “The useless effusion of blood” cited by Pemberton could abate at his discretion, with the surrender of his garrison and the city. Declining to appoint commissioners, he said “I have no terms other than those indicated above.” While Grant was reaching the end of his siege, the nation itself was fighting for its life in the east.
From Seminary Ridge, the heights opposite the Union lines occupied by Lee’s forces, 130 artillery pieces at midday announced the next movement in the struggle for Gettysburg. Seventy Union cannon responded for the next hour. One witness to the largest artillery battle in North America described the hills “capped with crowns of flames and smoke,” while the guns “vomited their iron hail upon each other.”
Half a mile across from the Union center of Cemetery Ridge, General Pickett’s men appeared from where they had been hiding and formed a column. Fifteen thousand men in all made the charge. If they succeeded, they would break the Union lines, divide them in two, and crush the Army of the Potomac. But such a great reward would not come without tremendous risk. Longstreet had issued the command under protest. “I have been a soldier,” he told Lee, “I may say, from the ranks up to the position I now hold. I have been in pretty much all kinds of skirmishes, from those of two or three soldiers up to those of an army corps, and I think I can safely say there was never a body of fifteen thousand men who could make that attack successfully.” Yet it fell to Longstreet to explain to General Pickett that this charge, across fourteen hundred feet of open field and up Cemetery Ridge, under artillery and musket fire against the Union center, was his to make. “I could see the desperate and hopeless nature of the charge and the cruel slaughter it would cause,” Longstreet remembered. “My heart was heavy when I left Pickett.”
Pickett was once a young law student in Springfield, where Lincoln’s law partner had recommended him for his position at West Point. If successful with his charge, he could cost Lincoln the war. The Confederates were exposed to heavy fire, but many made it to the low stone wall protecting Union forces. Union soldiers now closed in on the right and left of the Confederates in a pincer movement, cutting them down on all sides. The Union lines had held; the “high water mark of the Confederacy” had receded.
At the end of the day—July 3, 1863—Lee and his army were back along Seminary Ridge, where tomorrow would bring a new battle or a retreat.