v1.1.2 / chapter 52 of 93 / 01 oct 09 / greg goebel / public domain
* With the failure of Pickett's Charge, Lee had obviously lost the Battle of Gettysburg. Now his concern was not to destroy the Federal Army of the Potomac, but to get his injured army back to Virginia and relative safety. Fortunately for Lee, Meade failed to follow up his advantage and the Confederates managed to escape, much to Lincoln's frustration.
* The bloody defeat the Army of Northern Virginia had suffered on the slopes of Cemetery Ridge seemed to snap Robert E. Lee out of the muddle that had possessed him for the last three days. He realized that he had done badly, and went around to his men that evening saying: "It's all my fault." "The blame is mine." "Don't be discouraged, I need your help."
It was not like him to simply wring his hands, however, and even as he was trying to brace up his demoralized men he was laying detailed plans for evacuation. There was no alternative. His army was low on food and ammunition; the fighting had worn his troops down; and if the Yankees realized that they possessed a force superior in numbers and with vastly greater access to supplies, the Army of Northern Virginia might well be wiped out.
Lee wrote out detailed orders outlining how the retreat was to be conducted and then went around to his senior generals to ensure that they were properly briefed on what they had to do the next day. Although he was used to giving his commanders plenty of leash and had won great victories in the past on that basis, at Gettysburg the result had been a fiasco. Now he was taking no chances. Longstreet and Ewell were to set up a defensive line along Seminary Ridge while the wounded were put on the road during the day. Once the sun went down, the entire position was to be evacuated in the dark. The wounded would move due west over South Mountain to Chambersburg, then south to Williamsport, a few miles upstream from the old Sharpsburg battlefield, where a pontoon bridge would be waiting for them. The rest of the army would march directly southwest toward Williamsburg, passing through Hagerstown on the way.
It was well after midnight when Lee met one of his cavalry brigadiers, John B. Imboden, in the dark. Imboden saw that Lee was clearly sad and weary, and said to him: "General, this has been a hard day on you." Lee replied: "Yes, this has been a sad, sad day to us." He fell silent, then praised Pickett and his men, concluding: "Too bad, too bad. Oh, too bad!" He asked Imboden, who was to guard the wagon train carrying the wounded, into his tent to look over a map to establish the route of the retreat. Lee gave the last word on the battle: "We must now return to Virginia."
* The Confederates expected an attack all the next day, the 4th of July 1863, but the Federals remained idle in the morning. That afternoon, the rain poured down, dampening further prospects for an attack. The rain also bogged down the rebel withdrawal, but by sunrise on 5 July they were gone.
The Confederates made good time despite the muddy roads, though the wagon train carrying the wounded was a ghastly scene of misery. Most of the wagons didn't even have a layer of straw for the maimed soldiers to lie on; there were no medical supplies to speak of; and the rain soaked them to the skin. The injured men moaned and cried out, some praying for death, others asking to be killed and put out of their misery. Yankee cavalry harassed the wagon train but Confederate troopers managed to drive them off. The column reached Williamsport late on 5 July, only to find out that the Army of Northern Virginia now faced total disaster: Federal cavalry had destroyed the pontoon bridge at Williamsport and the rains had swelled the Potomac beyond fording.
Imboden spent the next day fending off attacks by Union cavalry and waiting for the rest of the army to arrive. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia reached the river himself on the morning of 7 July. Lee realized that he was in a terrible predicament, with nowhere to run and the Army of the Potomac presumably in hot pursuit. Lee ordered a defensive perimeter six miles (ten kilometers) long set up around Williamsport, while his engineers worked frantically to throw a pontoon bridge across the river, which was still rising. He also had his men scrounge up boats to take the wounded across in the meantime.
* The Army of the Potomac was in fact in pursuit, but calling it "hot" would be an exaggeration. Meade remained cautious; in fact, Lee had done everything he could to encourage that caution. Brigadier General Francis Barlow, who had been in the care of the rebels after being seriously wounded on the first day of fighting, was left behind for the Yankees to recover, and reported that he had overheard Confederates talking about their plan to pretend to retreat and then catch the Federals in an ambush. How much faith Meade took in such an obvious ruse is hard to say, since Meade had plenty of common sense and nobody with any intelligence could have failed to notice how conveniently such a conversation had taken place within earshot of a Federal prisoner who was about to be left behind.
On the Fourth of July, Meade's most assertive action was to issue a congratulatory message to the troops, which concluded by encouraging "the army for greater efforts to drive from our soil every vestige of the presence of the invader." The message was read that evening, but there was little enthusiasm in response. The men had been fought out, and the Fourth had been spent mostly in dealing with the wounded and disposing of the dead. A sergeant with a New Jersey regiment wrote later:
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Upon the open fields, likes sheaves bound by the reaper, in crevices of rocks, behind fences, trees and buildings; in thickets, where they had crept for safety only to die in agony; by stream or wall or hedge, wherever the battle had raged or their weakening steps could carry them, lay the dead. Some, with faces bloated and blackened beyond recognition, lay with glassy eyes staring up at the blazing summer sun; others, with faces downward and clenched hands filled with grass or earth, which told of the agony of their last moments.
Here a headless trunk, there a severed limb; in all the grotesque positions that unbearable pain and intense suffering contorts the human form, they lay. Upon the faces of some death had frozen a smile; some showed the trembling shadow of fear, while upon others was indelibly set the grim stamp of determination.
All around was the wreck the battlestorm leaves in its wake -- broken caissons, dismounted guns, small arms bent and twisted by the storm or dropped and scattered by disabled hands; dead and bloated horses, torn and ragged equipments, and all the sorrowful wreck that the waves of battle leave at their ebb; and over all, hugging the earth like a fog, poisoning every breath, the pestilential stench of decaying humanity.
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The heavy rains had done nothing to improve the men's morale. Besides, most of them had enough of hurrahs and cheers and such nonsense; they were veterans now, not naive recruits.
Most of the army's corps commanders were feeling just as cautious as Meade. That night they voted to hold their ground until they knew Lee was retreating. The next day the rebels were gone, but Meade and his generals remained uncertain. Sedgwick moved out with VI Corps in the afternoon and promptly got stuck in the mud.
The next day the Army of the Potomac moved out in mass, advancing on an arc through Frederick, Maryland, to the east of Lee's columns, to ensure that Washington and Baltimore remained protected. When Meade himself reached Frederick on 7 July, he checked into a hotel, got a hot bath, and put on fresh clothes. He wrote his wife that since he had taken command he had "not a regular night's rest, and many nights not a wink of sleep, and for several days did not even wash my face and hands, no regular food, and all the time in a state of mental anxiety. Indeed, I think I have lived as much in this time as in the last thirty years."
Meade was too exhausted to be aggressive. Halleck was sending him telegrams, pressing him to hurry. Meade irritably replied that he was hurrying, but his troops were raggedy and barefoot, and added that he did not believe that Lee was quite the pushover now that Washington seemed to assume that he was. To be sure, Meade was getting supplies, plenty of them, while Lee was not, but refitting an exhausted army on the move was no trivial task.
By 9 July, the Army of the Potomac was at Middletown, just to the east of South Mountain, in a position to move over the mountain and engage Lee's forces. The rains had died down, the roads were drying, and Meade had been receiving reinforcements. In fact, the Army of the Potomac was effectively back up to full strength. Two days later, Meade was in position to attack, but his own corps commanders discouraged him from doing so. Lee's engineers had thrown up formidable defenses and the generals wanted to study them before sending their men against them.
* Lee was expecting to be attacked at any moment, and every hour Meade delayed was a gift. While the rebels had received some supplies of ammunition, they were in no position to withstand a determined Yankee assault.
Meade did not attack. On the evening of 13 July, the Army of Northern Virginia began to cross the river in heavy rain on a ramshackle pontoon bridge that Lee's engineers had built by tearing down local houses and the like for materials. Meade did not finally move against the rebels until the morning of 14 July, and by that time most of them were gone. Only a rearguard of a few hundred men were swept up in the Federal attack. However, one of the casualties included rebel Brigadier General Johnston Pettigrew, killed in a shootout with Union cavalry. Pettigrew had been an inspiring officer, as were many of the officers who did not return from Lee's thrust north of the Potomac. So many of the Army of Northern Virginia's bravest and best were now dead, maimed, or in Yankee hands that performing such a major offensive into the North again was probably out of the question.
President Lincoln was at his wit's end with Meade. Lincoln had been appalled to read Meade's Fourth of July message to his troops that had spoken of "driving the invader from our soil". This might have been a natural thing for a Pennsylvanian to say concerning an enemy on Pennsylvania soil, but to Lincoln it seemed clueless: "Drive the invader from our soil!? My God! Is that all?!" He elaborated a bit later: "This is a dreadful reminiscence of McClellan ... Will the generals never get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil." He said to his personal secretary John Hay: "We had them in our grasp. We had only to stretch forth our hands and they were ours. And nothing I could say or do could make the army move." He told his son, Robert Todd Lincoln: "If I had gone up there, I could have whipped them myself."
Navy Secretary Gideon Welles wrote in his diary that he had rarely seen the President so distraught. Lincoln wrote Meade an exasperated and confused letter in which he tried to simultaneously pat him on the back and give him a kick in the ass, but having completed it and vented his frustration, Lincoln saw the foolishness of it and filed it.
Meade received little thanks from the President for his victory at Gettysburg. On receiving more telegrams from Halleck indicating general dissatisfaction with his performance, Meade finally snapped and submitted his resignation. The President knew it would not do to accept the resignation of a general who had just won a clear victory. Halleck, as always, backtracked and Meade withdrew the resignation.
The Army of the Potomac moved over the river at Harper's Ferry and Berlin on the 17th, 18th, and 19th of July. III Corps, now under Major General William H. "Old Blinkey" French after the abrupt retirement of Dan Sickles by a cannonball, tried to engage the Confederates in the Shenandoah Valley, but French was as out of his depth in corps command as he had been when he rode his horse into a sinkhole on the Peninsula, and the rebels escaped.
By early August, the two forces were once again arrayed along the Rapidan, with the rebels in Culpeper and the Federals in Warrenton. There they remained. After two months of marching and fighting, the campaign was over. For the immediate future, the only fighting was in the form of occasional skirmishes and small cavalry raids. With the Army of the Potomac back in northern Virginia, John Mosby returned to his custom of hit-and-run raids on Federal outposts, striking fast and then disappearing. The Yankees could never catch him.
As a footnote to the Gettysburg campaign, Brigadier General John Buford, whose Union cavalrymen exchanged the first shots with the rebels at Gettysburg, died six months later of what doctors called "sheer exhaustion", though in hindsight it appears to have been cholera. The Union lost another valuable cavalryman who could match the skill and boldness of his Confederate counterparts.
* The battle of Gettysburg had involved 160,000 men, with more than 50,000 of them killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. Casualties for the Federals were about 25% of their force, while Confederate casualties were about 40% of their force. About 22,000 wounded men were left behind on the battlefield as the two armies went south. Only a minimal number of doctors and helpful hands could be left behind to care for them, and the task was overwhelming. The caretakers were soon joined by workers from the Sanitary Commission and Christian Commission, but they were still short of the supplies needed to care for so many injured men.
The rail line into Gettysburg had been cut during the course of the fighting. Union General Hermann Haupt, in the charge of the railroads, had his people fix it quickly, but it had never been anything more than a spur line to begin with and it could not bear the necessary traffic. Haupt quickly brought it up to capacity, and soon supplies were flowing to Gettysburg in quantity. War Office clerks wired frantically all over the North, looking for the resources needed to care for the men. Although wounded were still being picked up as late as 10 July, within a few more days the worst of the task was over, with such wounded as could be moved sent to hospitals elsewhere.
There was also the parallel problem of dealing with the massive numbers of dead. Disposing of the stinking corpses was obviously a high priority, but at the same time simply throwing all the dead into a pit and covering them up was unacceptable treatment for men, Yank and rebel, who had fought so heroically. Temporary graves could be dug, but there had to be a more permanent solution.
Pennsylvania Governor Curtin hired a local businessman to deal with the matter, who contacted all the governors of the Northern states at the end of July. By mid-August, he had managed to raise enough money to buy 17 acres (7 hectares) of land on Cemetery Hill to properly bury the dead. By agreement among the governors, the dead would be buried in sections assigned to each of the states.
* Even among those who survived physically unharmed, such a violent event could not have failed to have had a great influence on their lives. George Pickett never forgot the destruction of his division at Gettysburg and never forgave Lee for it. After the war, he and John Mosby visited Lee, and the meeting was chilly. After the two men left Lee, Pickett said bitterly: "That old man slaughtered my troops." Mosby thought for moment, and then answered: "Well -- it made you immortal." Mosby was more right than he realized. Even in the 21st century, Pickett's Charge remains the grandest moment of the Confederacy, a glorious, futile action of a long-lost cause.
The battlefield was also immortalized in photographs. Although most people think of Matthew Brady when they see Civil War photographs, Brady and his team were not the only battlefield photographers of the war. In fact, Alexander Gardner and his assistants were the first on the battlefield, on 5 July. The photographers arrived before all the dead had been attended to, and left behind memorable photographs of the corpses strewing the battlefield. It is suspected that in some cases the photographers moved the bodies to obtain a better dramatic effect.
Brady and his crew arrived much later, on 15 July. Most of the debris of war had been cleaned up by then, and so he and his photographers had to satisfy themselves with panoramic shots of the critical scenes of the battlefield. In any case, the photographers left behind a detailed testimony for later generations of one of the most important battles in American history.
