Gettysburg Read online

  GETTYSBURG

  GETTYSBURG

  THE TRUE ACCOUNT OF TWO YOUNG HEROES

  IN THE GREATEST BATTLE OF THE CIVIL WAR

  Iain Cameron Martin

  Sky Pony Press

  New York

  Author’s Note: This book was written drawing on a number of original and secondary sources. Because this book is intended for younger readers, citations have been limited to listing the works used in the bibliography. Almost no changes have been made to any original quotations, only a few minor edits were made on behalf of contemporary readers. Any errors within are entirely my own.

  Copyright © 2013 by Iain C. Martin

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Sky Pony Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Sky Pony Press books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Sky Pony Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Sky Pony® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.skyponypress.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [TK] ISBN: 978-1-62087-532-2

  Printed in China

  Editor: Julie Matysik

  Designer: Sara Kitchen

  Layout: Victoria Hughes Waters

  This book is dedicated to my father, Blair Robertson Martin,

  for teaching me a love of history—and to my own little rebels, Thomas and Sofia.

  Author’s Note: Words that may be new to readers are highlighted with bold text the first time they appear on this book. You can find definitions to those words in the glossary at the end.

  Contents

  CIVIL WAR ARMY ORGANIZATION

  CIVIL WAR ARMY RANKS

  INTRODUCTION The Crossroads of Our Being

  PROLOGUE Friday, June 26, 1863—Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, 3:15 PM

  CHAPTER ONE Lee’s Plan—Attack into Pennsylvania

  CHAPTER TWO The Armies March Toward Pennsylvania.

  CHAPTER THREE Wednesday July 1, 1863.

  CHAPTER FOUR Thursday, July 2, 1863

  CHAPTER FIVE Friday, July 3, 1863

  CHAPTER SIX Aftermath of Battle—“A Strange and Blighted Land” .

  CHAPTER SEVEN November 19, 1863—“The Gettysburg Address”

  EPILOGUE

  POSTSCRIPT

  APPENDIX A

  APPENDIX B

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  GLOSSARY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  Civil War Army Organization

  Military units of the Civil War varied greatly in size and composition. Army formations were often fighting under strength due to casualties, sickness, or desertions. In general, however, the following list explains the basic terms and size of Civil War army organization.

  Battery: 4–6 cannons commanded by a lieutenant

  Troop: 80–100 cavalry commanded by a captain

  Company: 100 men commanded by a captain

  Regiment: 800–1,000+ men, 10 companies commanded by a colonel

  Brigade: 3,000–4,000+ men, 4–6 regiments commanded by a brigadier general

  Division: 10,000–12,000 men, 3+ brigades commanded by a brigadier or major general

  Corps: 20,000–30,000 men, 2–4 divisions commanded by a major general or a lieutenant general (Confederate corps were larger than their Union counterparts.)

  Army: 1+ corps, led by a commanding general. (Union armies were typically named after the rivers in the territory where they operated. Confederate armies were named from the state or regions where they were active.)

  In 1863, the Union Army of the Potomac had seven infantry corps. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia had three infantry corps. All units were officially numbered but were often also identified by their commander’s name. By 1863, many units were operating by as much as 50 percent under-strength.

  Civil War Army Ranks

  private

  corporal

  sergeant

  lieutenant

  captain

  major

  lieutenant colonel

  colonel

  brigadier general

  major general

  lieutenant general

  general

  Introduction

  THE CROSSROADS OF OUR BEING

  I first became interested in the Civil War when I was fifteen, the year I began attending a small boarding school in southern Pennsylvania called Mercersburg Academy. I quickly learned that one of the girls’ dormitories—a brick structure well over a century old—was haunted. The building had been used as a field hospital during the Confederate army’s retreat from Gettysburg. The ghosts that wandered those halls were said to be the departed souls of Confederate soldiers. That’s when it dawned on me that just over forty miles to the east lay the greatest battlefield in American history.

  On a cloudy fall day that same year my father drove me to Gettysburg where I stood on Cemetery Ridge for the first time. Standing near a row of westward-facing cannons we looked out across Emmitsburg Road and toward the open fields stretching almost a mile to Seminary Ridge. Over a century earlier, on July 3, 1863, General Robert E. Lee had ordered 12,000 men to cross that field and to take the high ground where we stood. Forever known after as Pickett’s Charge, those brave Southern soldiers crossed that open mile under a lethal hail of cannon and musket fire to try to break the Union line.

  Looking out over that vast space, I began to realize the true meaning of courage. The entire American Civil War unfolded for me on this single field—two great armies, brothers and friends divided by a cause neither would yield, a gallant rush for victory. I was desperate to know more. Here was a history worth learning. Considered sacred ground, and consecrated by the blood of Americans, the battlefield has become a national monument to unity and peace. It is a timeless place that can help connect us, over a century later, to important deeds of the past.

  “ In great deeds, something abides. On great fields, something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear; but spirits linger, to consecrate ground for the vision-place of souls. And reverent men and women from afar, and generations that know us not and that we know not of, heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them, shall come to this deathless field, to ponder and dream ... ”

  —Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

  But why should we care about history that is 150 years in our past? America has moved onward. We are a modern nation of the digital age, with smartphones and hybrid cars. Why do we need to learn about these dusty old stories from our past? Is it really all that important to retell them to new generations? What do we benefit from doing so? And why do we care about a single battle from a nineteenth-century war? These are all valid questions.

  Bruce Catton was a great Civil War historian who won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1954. As a young boy growing up in the small town of Benzonia, Michigan, he would sit on the front porch of his neighbor’s house and listen to the stories of Union veterans. Speaking in 1961 on the meaning of the Civil War, Catton noted, “It was the biggest single event in our national history. In a way it is the central theme of our existence as a people; it is our Iliad, our Odyssey, the one tremendous legend that expresses what we are and what we mean. We can no more ignore it than we can ignore the American Revolution itself. Here was ou
r most significant and tragic experience.”

  If we are to understand ourselves as Americans and as a unified nation, we must have an understanding of the Civil War. Shelby Foote, an eminent historian from Mississippi, put it this way: “The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things ... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.”

  Gettysburg was one of the great turning points of American history. Certainly there were other battles and other turning points of equal importance that decided Union victory. Yet Gettysburg is the one battle Americans seem to remember the most. For the South, it was a supreme moment of honor, courage, and sacrifice for their cause of independence. For the North, it was another step toward what Lincoln called “a new birth of freedom.” What ultimately emerged from the Civil War was a united country free of slavery. Today, looking back, we understand that the war between North and South is the American story and in every way worth knowing so that we might better understand ourselves and our country.

  GETTYSBURG

  The Emmitsburg road had been the last long mile for many men—for handsome John Reynolds riding to meet an unknown Southern sharpshooter in a farmer’s barn, for the black-hatted Western regiments with their fife-and-drum corps playing them into battle, for many unheard-of men who stepped off it into unmarked graves on slanting rocky fields—and for a few days it had been a famous military highway, pumping a stream of troops off to the unfathomable chances of war. Now it would be a quiet country road again, with a farmer’s load of hay or drove of cattle as its most exciting wayfarers, the mountain wall to the west dropping long shadows across it on the blue summer evenings, the dust and the clamor and the rumbling guns gone forever. It was over at last, this enormous battle with its smoke and its grimness and its unheard-of violence, and here again was a simple road leading from one country town to another, with a common-place little name that would ring and shine in the books forever.

  —Bruce Catton

  Prologue

  FRIDAY, JUNE 26, 1863—GETTYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA, 3:15 PM

  “The Rebels are coming!

  The Rebels are coming!”

  Matilda “Tillie” Pierce looked up from her schoolwork as the shout went from room to room. Rushing to the door, she and the other girls gathered on the front portico of their school. In plain view, marching toward Gettysburg on the Chambersburg Pike, was a dusty mass of Confederate infantry. The teacher, Mrs. Eyster, turned to her students and ordered, “Children, run home as quickly as you can!”

  Tillie ran for her father’s house on Baltimore Street as Confederate riders entered the town. As she reached the front door, men on horseback appeared on her street.

  Tillie Pierce’s home on Baltimore Street as it stands today, restored to its 1863 appearance. Photo credit: Ken Gloriando.

  Tillie Pierce in 1863 at age fifteen. Photo credit: Adams County Historical Society.

  I scrambled in, slammed shut the door, and hastening to the sitting room, peeped out between the shutters.

  What a horrible sight! There they were, human beings! Clad almost in rags, covered with dust, riding wildly, pell-mell down the hill toward our home! Shouting, yelling most unearthly, cursing, brandishing their revolvers, and firing right and left.

  I was fully persuaded that the Rebels had actually come at last.

  Soon the town was filled with infantry, and then the searching and ransacking began in earnest.

  They wanted horses, clothing, anything and almost everything they could conveniently carry away.

  Nor were they particular about asking. Whatever suited them they took. They did, however, make a formal demand of the town authorities, for a large supply of flour, meat, groceries, shoes, hats, and ten barrels of whiskey; or, in lieu of all this, five thousand dollars.

  But our merchants and bankers had too often heard of their coming, and had already shipped their wealth to places of safety.

  —Tillie Pierce

  The soldiers rounded up all the horses in town, including the one owned by Tillie’s father. Then they returned to the house and asked for something to eat. Mrs. Pierce scolded them, saying, “Yes, you ought to come back and ask for something to eat after taking a person’s horse!” She nevertheless gave them some food. As Tillie recalled, “Mother always had a kind and noble heart even toward her enemies.”

  Michael Jacobs, a professor at Pennsylvania College, witnessed the arrival of Confederate soldiers. Of the 5,000 troops of Brigadier General John B. Gordon’s brigade, most of them “were exceedingly dirty, some ragged, some without shoes, and some surmounted by the skeleton of what was once an entire hat, affording unmistakable evidence that they stood in great need of having their scanty wardrobe replenished; and hence the eagerness with which they inquired after shoe, hat, and clothing stores, and their disappointment when they were informed that goods of that description were not to be had in town.” In exchange for supplies that could be found, the troops often paid with Confederate money— printed bills not worth the paper they were cut from, unless of course, the South won the war.

  By evening the raiders had moved all the freight cars near Gettysburg out to the railroad bridge east of town, then set it all on fire. In the morning the infantry was gone, marching twenty-five miles northeast toward York where General Ewell hoped to capture a bridge over the Susquehanna River. The townspeople wondered if they would return. Were other Confederates likely to pass through Gettysburg? And where was the Union army?

  Baltimore Street in Gettysburg. Photo credit: Ken Gloriando.

  Chapter One

  Lee’s Plan—

  Attack into

  Pennsylvania

  War consists not only in battles, but in well-considered

  movements which bring the same results.

  —John C. Fremont

  The soldiers who occupied Gettysburg that day were from Lieutenant General Richard S. Ewell’s Second Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia. Advancing with two other corps from Fredericksburg, Virginia, through Maryland and into Pennsylvania, the Confederate army under General Robert E. Lee was on the offensive. Confident from victory over the Union’s Army of the Potomac at Chancellorsville in May, Lee had championed the idea of a new invasion of the North. It was a bold plan to win Southern independence in a single campaign, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis was behind the initiative. Robert E. Lee was the Confederacy’s greatest military commander. Graduating second in his class at West Point in 1829, Lee went on to serve in the corps of engineers. A protégé of General Winfield Scott, Lee served with valor and distinction under Scott during the Mexican War from 1846 to 1848. By the start of the Civil War, in April 1861, Lee was still only a colonel but already his reputation accorded him great respect.

  BIRTH NAME: Robert Edward Lee, General the Confedente Army

  BORN: January 1807, Stratford Hall, VA

  DIED: October 12, 1870, Lexington City, VA

  General Robert E. Lee photographed in 1862 by Julian Vannerson. Photo credit: Library of Congress; illustrated by Ron Cole.

  Robert Edward Lee was born on January 19, 1807, to Revolutionary War hero and Virginia Governor Henry “Light Horse” Harry Lee III and Anne Hill Carter at Stratford Hall Plantation, Virginia. One of six children, Lee began life in difficult times, losing his father when he was only eleven years old. With the help of relatives, Anne Carter raised the children herself and saw to their education.

  A promising student of mathematics at an early age, Robert secured an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point when he was seventeen. There he distinguished himself by graduating second in his class in 1829. Two years later he married Mary Anna Randolph Custis, great-granddaughter of Martha Washington. They would have seven children over the years, three boys and four girls. All three of Lee’s sons became officers in the Confederate army. Robert inherited his father’s estate in 1857, including the Arlington plantation across the Potomac from Washin
gton, DC.

  Lee served as a lieutenant of engineers at a number of civil projects until the Mexican War in 1846. That year he served as an aide to General Winfield Scott on his triumphant march from Vera Cruz to capture Mexico City. It was in this campaign that Lee earned commendation from the commanding general for his skill and courage as a scout. He also met and served with Ulysses S. Grant, to whom he would eventually surrender at Appomattox in 1865.

  After the war Lee was promoted to colonel and served as the superintendent of West Point for three years. He finally received a combat command when he was assigned to the Second Cavalry regiment in Texas in 1855, where he faced off against Apache and Co-manche raiders. He later commanded the detachment that put down John Brown’s uprising at Harper’s Ferry in 1859. After Texas seceded from the Union in February 1861, Lee returned to Washington and was appointed Colonel of the First Regiment of Cavalry in March.

  Of utmost importance to Lee was adherence to duty. The idea that the South would attempt to leave the Union and form a new country troubled him deeply. He wrote to his son William Fitzhugh in 1861, “I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country than a dissolution of the Union.” When asked by a friend if he intended to resign from the army to join the Confederacy he replied, “I shall never bear arms against the Union, but it may be necessary for me to carry a musket in the defense of my native state, Virginia.”

  Robert E. Lee, around age forty-three, when he was a Brevet Lieutenant Colonel of Engineers, c.1850. Photo credit: Matthew Brady.

  The same day the Virginia state government met to debate joining the Confederacy on April 18, 1861, Lincoln offered Lee the rank of major general and command of the Union army. Yet, Lee knew that Lincoln was raising an army of volunteers to invade the South, and that Virginia would join the Confederacy. He refused to accept command of an army that would be ordered to invade his home.