Captain Dahlgren’s Greencastle Raid July 1–2, 1863. (After Jespersen)
The next morning, at 7:00, the young signal officer recently attached to Buford was gazing intently from the cupola of the Lutheran Theological Seminary. Lieutenant Aaron B. Jerome had ridden in with the cavalry the previous day, having supported them on the ride with intelligence from observation and flag signals. Now through the lifting haze he could see the enemy pickets of Maj. Gen. Henry Heth’s Division of Hill’s Corps advancing from Cashtown. Jerome quickly sent a courier to Buford, who joined him in the cupola. It was a force considerably stronger than his, but he would have to hold them. He rushed down the stairs to organize his two brigades to meet the attack and sent a message to Reynolds to come up fast.1
Buford rejoined Jerome in the cupola to control the battle from the best observation point. Jerome identified a large Union infantry column approaching from the south as Reynolds’s I Corps came just in time. It was about 10:00 a.m. On his approach Reynolds had been kept informed of the situation at Gettysburg by his signal station on the flank of the mountain behind Emmitsburg. Now on the field Reynolds immediately threw in a bruising punch with his 1st Division that threw Heth’s men back, only to fall from a sniper’s bullet as he was waving the Iron Brigade into the attack. This elite unit inflicted heavy casualties on Heth’s men and took hundreds of prisoners, many from the regiments trapped in the railroad cut as they tried to use that sunken way to slip through Union lines. Those hundreds were quickly shunted into the hands of Babcock and McEntee, who had arrived on the field with Reynolds’s staff.
This engagement quickly took on a life of its own as it drew more and more forces from both sides into it. About 11:30 a.m. Jerome spotted Howard and his XI Corps command staff arriving on Cemetery Hill to the rear of the fighting. He immediately signaled him, “Over a division of the rebels is making a Bank movement on our right; the line extends over a mile, and is advancing, skirmishing… There is nothing but cavalry to oppose them.”2
Howard assumed overall command and deployed his corps to the right of I Corps just in time to stop another attack, this time by Ewell, with Robert E. Rodes’s Division attempting to lap around I Corps’ flank. At least twice that morning Jerome had supplied Union commanders with real-time intelligence that allowed them to counter Confederate attacks. But Confederate numbers were to eventually overcome the intelligence advantage, as Early’s Division of Ewell’s Corps arrived on the field from the north with the power of an avalanche to turn the XI Corps’ right flank, triggering a general collapse. Jerome moved his observation station to the steeple of the Gettysburg Courthouse as Union troops attempted to get away through the streets of the town. From his vantage, Jerome could see the XI Corps signal station set up on East Cemetery Hill. That signal station moved to West Cemetery Hill and became the main signal station through the rest of the day.3
Although Meade had identified Gettysburg as the enemy’s point of advance, he had great reservations about fighting there. He had already ordered his engineers to build field fortifications at Pipe Creek just over the Maryland line. It was there he preferred to fight. Sharpe, who was constantly at his side at the time, noted years later, “Nor had Meade designed or desired to fight at Gettysburg. The line of Pipe Creek between Middleburg and Manchester was better adapted to cover Baltimore and Washington, and his depot, Westminster, would be in the direct rear of this centre.”4
A half-hour after Howard’s Corps joined the battle, Meade, unaware that his two corps had become decisively engaged, issued a circular which ordered Reynolds to withdraw from Gettysburg and, along with the other corps, to pull back across Pipe Creek. He intended for Reynolds to conduct only a holding operation.
If the enemy assume the offensive, and attack, it is his [Meade’s] intention, after holding them in check sufficiently long, to withdraw the trains and other impedimenta; to withdraw the army from its present position, and form line of battle with the left resting in the neighborhood of Middleburg, and the right at Manchester, the general direction being that of Pipe Creek… The time for falling back can only be developed by circumstances.
He had concluded “from information received” that his maneuvering had caused Lee to abandon his further invasion of the north and that Lee would follow him to ground of Meade’s choosing. He also ordered his acting signal officer, Captain L. B. Norton, to extend field telegraph lines to points in northern Maryland along a general line of withdrawal. Norton promptly complied, which resulted in the field telegraph being unable to operate on the Gettysburg battlefield itself.5
When Buford’s news of Reynold’s death arrived, Meade sent his most reliable and able general officer, Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, commanding II Corps, to take overall command on the field and to ascertain whether to continue fighting at Gettysburg. Hancock arrived about 5 p.m. His powerful and charismatic personality quickly beat new life into the dispirited survivors of the fighting as he organized them for the defense of Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill. One of his first actions was to send his own signal officer out on two reconnaissance missions. Hancock’s report of the scale and importance of the fighting there and the critical nature of the ground now drew Meade as an unwilling participant from the ground he had chosen to offer battle. For that reason, he would leave most of his trains at Westminster, the nearest railroad terminus to Gettysburg, except for ambulances and ammunition. The army would fight hungry at Gettysburg for that.6 Had he pulled out as he originally intended, the one-day battle of Gettysburg would have gone down in history as another brilliant victory for Robert E. Lee.
When Hancock’s courier rode into army headquarters, Sharpe remembered:
I was laying on the ground in a corner of General Meade’s tent at Taneytown, when Hancock’s reply came, partially approving this line. The advantages of Pipe Creek were thought to be counter-balanced by the moral effect of joining our brave comrades who had fought here, instead of withdrawing them, and giving the impression of a retreat.
Meade boldly decided to advance his converging corps, and as soon as the orders could be written and forwarded, he mounted and with his staff rode rapidly to the front. It was a moonlight night. We started before midnight and covered the distance of fourteen miles by one o’clock in the morning. And I recall with distintness [sic] the solemnity of our reflections and discussions.7
Meade found the survivors of I and XI Corps had been hammered back into a defensive position on the high ground of Cemetery Hill. Hancock already had ordered the garrisoning of neighboring Culp’s Hill just in time to throw back a Confederate assault. As reinforcements arrived, the Union line started to extend down Cemetery Ridge. Following Sharpe was the rest of the BMI to join Babcock and McEntee, who had been at work with prisoner interrogations from the moment they arrived with Reynolds that morning. Prisoners were then passed to Provost Marshal General Patrick at Taneytown, who had spent the morning “overhauling trains [traffic control] & examining prisoners etc. sent down from Reynolds & Cavalry.” He would join Meade later that early evening after setting up a depot for prisoners. The fighting that day, especially the attacks of I Corps early in the day, netted 600 prisoners, and Babcock and McEntee had made good use of the time to begin filling out the enemy’s order-of-battle.8
Meade may not have realized it, but the value of the BMI would be multiplied because the comparable Confederate effort was dysfunctional. For Lee, Stuart embodied the intelligence function of the Army of Northern Virginia. Stuart’s famous absence until the late afternoon of July 2 effectively blinded Lee, who, because of his personal reliance on Stuart, made little reconnaissance use of the 800 cavalry that remained with him. Lee realized that he was in the midst of a hostile population, unlike Virginia, where the geography and people were on his side. In his eyes a darkness had fallen around his army that he felt he could not penetrate without Stuart, which explains his refusal to let Longstreet boldly maneuver around Meade’s flanks on the second day of the battle. When Stuart’s cavalry finally stumbled, exhausted, into Gettysburg from their ride around the Army of the Potomac, they were unfit for vigorous reconnaissance the next day. Lee had thus fixed himself to a battle of position. Lee was also suffering from a self-inflicted wound, the absence of his provost guard. There are few indications that any interrogations of Union prisoners were taking place at Lee’s headquarters that night nor any attempt to prepare a comprehensive order-of-battle other than the brief summary in Lee’s official report of the campaign:
It was ascertained from the prisoners that we had been engaged with two corps [I and XI Corps] of the army formerly commanded by General Hooker, and that the remainder of that army, under General Meade, was approaching Gettysburg. Without information as to its proximity, the strong position which the enemy had assumed could not be attacked without danger of exposing the four divisions present, already weakened and exhausted by a long and bloody struggle, to overwhelming numbers of fresh troops. General Ewell was therefore, instructed to carry the hill occupied by the enemy, if he found it practicable, but to avoid a general engagement until the arrival of the other divisions of the army, which were ordered to hasten forward.9
What information Lee was getting must have been that obtained by his subordinate corps and divisions and fed to his overworked staff. His intelligence picture was only barely further illuminated by the capture of a courier whose dispatch revealed the presence of another corps and the arrival of another Union corps early the next morning.10 The official reports of Lee’s three corps commanders revealed scarcely more order-of-battle information than Lee’s report, indicating that his headquarters had derived its information from these sources. Ewell reported that he had broken Barlow’s Division (XI Corps) on the first day and that the captured dispatch, mentioned by Lee, was from Major General Sykes, commanding V Corps, to Major General Slocum, commanding XII Corps. Hill’s report only stated that the first day’s fighting resulted in the total destruction of the Union I Corps, an exaggeration. Longstreet’s report contains no order-of-battle information at all. Thus the official reports of the commander and his corps commanders contained only information about four of the seven Union corps (I, V, XI, XII) and no information about the enemy’s Cavalry Corps.11 There are no indications that interrogations to build an order-of-battle took place on the next two days of fighting. While some efforts must have been taken on July 2 that surely revealed the presence of Hancock’s II and Sickles’s III Corps, Lee failed to mention any further discoveries of the Union order-of-battle in his official report. Sharpe could not have asked for more.
Meade could not have asked for more as well. From his statement above, Lee as much as admitted that he was fighting blind. He had gathered from prisoners that the rest of the Army of the Potomac was on its way to the battle, but the timing of the arrival of its corps was so complete a mystery as to induce a case of severe caution in one of the boldest risk-taking generals in American history. Only four of his nine infantry divisions were on the field, and he feared to continue the fighting to storm the heights behind Gettysburg held by the already-beaten survivors of I and XI Corps, because a much larger Union force might arrive to surprise and overwhelm his exhausted divisions. That fear had settled upon him because Stuart’s superb reconnaissance capabilities were entirely absent. Had Stuart been with Lee on July 1, his cavalry would have been actively probing the approaches to Gettysburg, drawing for Lee a clear picture of the arrival of the rest of the Army of the Potomac. With that in hand, he surely would have been bolder in driving the Union from Cemetery Hill that night.
As the Army of the Potomac concentrated at Gettysburg early on July 2, the Cavalry Corps’ mission became to guard the army’s flanks. The next two days would see Meade’s intelligence assets shrink largely to the efforts of the BMI and the Signal Corps because the cavalry was devoted to flank security rather than reconnaissance. All day Meade would employ Sharpe as a primary staff officer to help him fight the battle. Such a senior staff officers is charged with carrying the commander’s instructions to the corps commanders and giving orders in the commanding general’s name, just such a role Sharpe himself describes below and which was mentioned in a eulogy after his death: “At Gettysburg he was Meade’s mouthpiece, his representative…” The BMI staff was on its own, but the team Sharpe had created was fully capable of operating without a chief in a crisis.12
As Edwin Fishel described the situation early on the second day of battle, the men of the BMI were diligently at work:
Sharpe, Babcock, and McEntee began their battlefield labors expecting that the face-to-face proximity of the enemy would enable them to fill in most or all of the gaps in their organizational records. Some of the recently added regiments were still unidentified; the brigades to which many regiments belonged were still unknown; and this dearth of information may have extended to the division assignments of a few brigades. These were not mere bookkeeping problems … the presence of a mere regiment would indicate the presence of an entire corps, provided its subordination to the larger units—brigade, division, corps—had been determined.13
As the fighting men surged across the field and men fell by their thousands, a stream of Confederate prisoners was flowing to the rear that at the end of the day would add another 660 to the bag of prisoners, a further rich opportunity for Babcock to flesh out his order-of-battle. As their signal counterparts struggled amid shot and shell to keep communications open to transmit operational information and intelligence, the BMI men worked patiently and deftly, taking one man at a time from the long lines of Confederate prisoners into the seclusion of an interrogation tent. In addition to the interrogations conducted on the field by Sharpe’s staff, interrogations were also being conducted by BMI staff and provost guards at the prisoner collection point, established by Patrick at the army’s base at Taneytown the day before.14
The weight of intelligence collection and analysis fell on Sharpe’s staff because the head of the BMI was being used by Meade as senior staff officer to help him fight the battle. Messages delivered by such senior staff officers carried more authority than notes carried by couriers or aides-de-camp. Equally important were the practiced observations they made, as well as the decisions they could make in the commander’s name. That left the order-of-battle analysis to Babcock, McEntee, and Manning. It was in good hands.
That morning Meade was looking to attack Ewell’s II Corps on his right, facing the army’s positions on Culp’s Hill. He wanted to employ his XII, and V Corps and VI Corps as it came up from Manchester. But his information that Ewell was attacking was dead on and was confirmed by a Signal Corps observation report at 9:30 a.m. “The enemy are moving a brigade of five regiments from in front of our center to our right, accompanied by one four-gun battery and two squadrons of cavalry, at a point east-southeast of Second Division, Twelfth Corps, and in easy range. A heavy line of enemy’s infantry on our right. Very small force of infantry … visible in front of our center.” Major General Slocum, commanding XII, also conducted a reconnaissance of the proposed ground of attack and recommended against it. In the decision and planning to conduct this attack, both corps and army commanders were fully supported by an all-source system that included order-of-battle and signals intelligence as well as reconnaissance. This support prevented Meade from making an attack over unfavorable ground against a strong enemy.15
If any word other than professionalism described the efforts of both groups, it was initiative. That characteristic would be found throughout the Army of the Potomac during the battle and would be one of the chief causes of its victory.
The night before, Butterfield had directed the signal officer to report to headquarters at Gettysburg with the signal officer reserve. He would report:
On July 2, I reported at an early hour at the point selected for headquarters of the army for that day, but found the signal officers who had been previously assigned to the different army corps, already on the field, and that through their exertions the general commanding had been placed in communications with nearly all the corps commanders.
Before 11 a.m. every desirable point of observation was occupied by a signal officer, and communications opened from General Meade’s headquarters to those of every corps commander.16
These desirable points of observation included the Culp’s Hill spur now known as Steven’s Knoll, Power Hill (where Slocum had his wing headquarters), Cemetery Hill, Little Round Top, and the Widow Leister’s house (behind Cemetery Ridge), which Meade was using for his headquarters. Because these signal stations could reach his headquarters so easily, Meade was to become attached to it as a hub of information and the point from which he could best stay informed. In addition to the active signal party at Leister House, a constant stream of couriers was arriving and departing. The efficiency of the signal stations made an effective substitute for the missing field telegraph.
This day would see some of the most desperate fighting of the war, in which the army fended off one Confederate hammer blow after another. Meade acquitted himself with great distinction as he fulfilled the primary role of the commander in battle—the allocation of the reserves that time and time again blunted an enemy advance on the point of a breakthrough. A vital part of his ability to do so was due to the timely reports of enemy movements rapidly sent to him by signal corps officers. Probably the greatest warning he received was from the station on Little Round Top.
Lieutenant Jerome was there with his signal team. By 11:45 a.m. he was reporting to Butterfield, “Enemy skirmishers are advancing from the west, one mile from here.” Ten minutes later he reported that the Confederates were driving Union skirmishers back and that 1 mile from his station the woods were full of the enemy. These were men from Anderson’s Division of Hill’s III Corps. Unfortunately, he departed soon thereafter as Buford’s Division, to which he was attached, was departing the battlefield.
It was not long before Captain Norton arrived on his tour of the battlefield signal stations accompanied by Captain P. A. Taylor, the junior XI Corps signal officer. They found the site unoccupied and quickly began to search the field for the enemy. They signaled information on the enemy, also from Anderson’s Division, to the senior corps signal officer, Capt. James Hall, stating it was “a good point for observation.” Hall then joined them on Little Round Top. Norton now departed, and Hall assumed command of the signal station as the senior officer present.
Hall and his flagman, Sgt. John Chemberlin, were watching the field to their front just as two divisions of Longstreet’s I Corps were making their approach march to strike the Union left-center. Longstreet was not happy about this assignment, fearing a direct assault on Union high ground. He had taken thoroughly to heart the lessons of slaughter in marching troops across wide open ground against strong defensive positions manned by determined defenders armed with rifled weapons. Malvern Hill and Fredericksburg, the first a Confederate bloodbath and the second a Union one, had made indelible impressions. He had preferred to maneuver completely around the Union flank, but Lee had pointedly refused and directed him to attack in the direction of Cemetery Ridge. Lee had made this decision upon a poor reconnaissance conducted by a member of his staff, Capt. Samuel R. Johnston, which produced, in Stephen Sears’s words, “utterly false intelligence on the Union position.” Johnston “left an indelible impression that the Yankees’ left flank was exposed, in the air, without an anchor, susceptible to being rolled up. This immediately roused memories of Chancellorsville and another unsuspecting Yankee flank in the air. No sooner than Johnston confirmed the target’s vulnerability than Lee turned to Longstreet and said, ‘I think you had better move on.’”
Lee then asked Maj. Gen. Lafayette McLaws, commanding a division in Longstreet’s Corps, “I wish you to get there if possible without being seen by the enemy. Can you do it?” McLaws said it was possible, but he wanted to conduct his own reconnaissance with Captain Johnston, but was forbidden by an increasingly disgruntled Longstreet who insisted that McLaws stay with his division. Longstreet then directed McLaws to place his division in a specific location along the Emmitsburg Pike. Lee intervened to give him his own orders to position it perpendicular to the Pike. McLaws once again asked to be allowed to conduct a personal reconnaissance, but “General Longstreet again forbade it.” Lee did not contradict him. As they left, McLaws noted that “General Longstreet appeared as if he was irritated and annoyed.” Longstreet was going to launch the major Confederate attack of the day, but that plan was based on false intelligence accepted by Lee. Longstreet had also brushed aside an opportunity to correct that mistake with another reconnaissance by McLaws out of a sense of pique at Lee’s disregard of his advice.17
For some reason, Lee did not employ his initial reconnaissance elements of Jenkins’s Cavalry Brigade, which had accompanied Ewell on the march into Pennsylvania to screen his movements and gather information. That brigade remained guarding Ewell’s flank. That morning, Imboden’s Brigade of cavalry, which had been guarding the army’s western flank, was ordered to relieve Major General Pickett’s Division of Longstreet’s Corps in garrisoning Chambersburg. Robertson’s and Jones’s brigades had been ordered to rejoin the army as soon as it was learned that the Union army had passed into Maryland. They arrived on the field on July 3, in time only to guard the rear from a cavalry raid but too late to add weight to Stuart’s attack on the Union rear that same day. One of the great mysteries of the campaign was Lee’s reluctance to use the considerable cavalry assets he still had under his control to enhance his intelligence picture.18
Another mystery is why signal parties were not used in the reconnaissance of Longstreet’s route. Their employment would have certainly shortened the time taken in reconnaissance and improved its quality. Throughout the battle the preferred method of communication for the Confederate commanders was by courier, transmitting either a written or verbal message. For an army that was occupying exterior lines, it meant that the distance covered was twice that faced by their counterparts in the Army of the Potomac. Only three signal messages survive from the Confederate side as opposed to hundreds from the Union side. Of course, “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence,” but a message from Ewell indicates there was, indeed, an absence of flag signal communications between corps.
Before the beginning of my advance, I had sent a staff officer to the division of the Third Corps, on my right, which proved to be General Pender’s, to find out what they were to do … I then wrote to him (it being too late to communicate with the corps commander) that I was attacking with my corps, and requested that he would co-operate. To this I received no answer, nor do I believe that any advance was made. The want of co-operation on the right made it more difficult for Rodes’ division to attack, though, had it been otherwise, I have every reason to believe, from the eminent success attending the assault … that enemy’s lines would have been carried.19
Meade had his own difficult subordinate in Daniel Sickles. The III Corps commander was unhappy at the position Meade had assigned his corps along Cemetery Ridge tying into Little Round Top. From his vantage point, the position appeared to be lower ground than that to his front and presaged a replay of Chancellorsville, where Hooker had pulled his corps off dominant terrain. The enemy had quickly occupied that high ground and savaged his corps with massed artillery. He was not about to allow that to happen again and violated Meade’s specific orders by advancing his corps into a salient that reached three-quarters of a mile to the Emmitsburg Pike. His corps now had a frontage that was double what it should have been defending. Unfortunately, Sickles’s observation had been deceiving; his new position was not on dominant terrain but was exceptionally vulnerable. Longstreet’s approach march was taking his two divisions directly against the flank of Sickles’s salient.
McLaws was still wary of the route that had been designated for his approach march. Lee had sent the feckless Captain Johnston with him as a guide. As soon as the head of his column approached Herr Ridge, he rode to the top and ordered his column to stop. He had seen the Union signal station on Little Round Top and Sergeant Chemberlin waving his large white signal flag. Unable to find another nearby route, he found Longstreet and said, “Ride with me, and I will show you that we can’t go on this route, according to instructions, without being seen by the enemy.” If there was any man in the Confederate army other than E. Porter Alexander who was as aware of the danger posed by the signal station, it was Lafayette McLaws. Before the war he had commanded the unit that had conducted the western field trials of Major Myers’s new flag signal system. Longstreet agreed with McLaws that a countermarch was the only solution. Longstreet would write in his after-action report, “Engineers, sent out by the commanding general and myself, guided us by a road which would have completely disclosed the move. Some delay ensued in seeking a more concealed route.” “Some delay” was an understatement. The fear instilled by the single signal station on Little Round Top would now add another two hours to the march and allow Sickles’s III Corps to establish its salient. Initially, Longstreet had simply wanted to reverse the order of march and have Major General John Bell Hood’s Division, which was following McLaws’s Division take the lead. By simply having his two-division column do an about face, much of that ensuing delay would have been cancelled. McLaws objected so strongly that Longstreet let the order of march stand, which added a great deal of time to the countermarch.20 For just such a situation of self-induced friction, the great German field marshal, Helmuth von Moltke, had coined a famous aphorism—“Order, counter-order, disorder.”21
Longstreet’s precaution to travel by a concealed route was in vain. Captain Hall observed the countermarch and sent off to Butterfield a message that said, “A Heavy column of enemy’s infantry, about 10,000 strong, is moving from opposite our extreme left toward our right.” Forty minutes later, he sent another message updating Butterfield on Longstreet’s movements. “Those troops were passing on a by road from Dr. Hall’s house to Herr’s Tavern, on the Chambersburg Pike. A train of ambulances is following them.”22 What Hall had described in both messages was Hood’s Division in its countermarch. From Hall’s vantage, it looked as if it was marching from the Union left to the right. What the signal officer did not see was its turnabout that took it back toward the Union left.
Unwittingly, the signal station was sowing confusion in both armies in what must be a classic case of friction in war. The station’s very presence had already thrown off Longstreet’s plans and caused him to countermarch. That countermarch had been observed by the signal station but only that part that gave the misleading impression that the large column was heading to the Union right. By the time the column had turned to the Union left, it was marching by a concealed route. It is no wonder that Butterfield did not take the message too seriously. Nor did Meade, who would later state that he had no advance notice of an imminent threat to that flank.23
Meade’s signal officer, Captain Norton, would later report a third message: “… at 3:30 p.m., the signal officer discovered the enemy massing upon General Sickles’ left, and reported the fact to General Sickles and to the general commanding.” By then, Longstreet was only minutes from launching his attack on the Union left from the point of Sickles’s salient at the Peach Orchard to Little Round Top.24
Meade’s chief engineer, Brig. Gen. Gouverner Warren, was worried about Little Round Top. From an engineer’s point of view, it was evidently dominant terrain, and it was unguarded. He may also have been aware of the messages from the signal station there. He requested Meade’s permission to investigate as Meade’s command group was riding to Sickles’s salient. Meade replied, “Warren, I hear a little peppering going on in the direction of that little hill off yonder. I wish that you would ride over and if anything serious is going on, attend to it.”25
Riding up the hill, Warren found only Hall’s signal party and was briefed on what had been observed. Warren concluded that Little Round Top was the key to the entire Union position and that Sickles’s men positioned below in the salient would be taken unawares by an enemy approaching through the woods. He ordered a gun fired into the woods, which caused the enemy’s line of battle to be revealed. Another account has Captain Hall arguing with him, unable to convince him that the enemy lay to the front of the Round Top. A shell burst near the party, wounding Gouveneur Warren, whereupon Hall said, “Now do you see them?”26
In any case, Warren sent a captain for immediate help to Sickles, who should have been holding Little Round Top as Meade had ordered. Sickles refused, and the captain rode back to find the V Corps commander, Major General Sykes, who was conducting his own reconnaissance in order to place his units in support of Sickles. Sykes promptly wrote out an order to Brig. Gen. James Barnes, commanding the corps’ 1st Division, to send a brigade. The captain dashed off with it. The division commander, as usual, was nowhere to be seen on the field that day, but luckily the 26-year-old Col. Strong Vincent, commanding the lead brigade of Barnes’s Division, saw the excited exchange with Sykes and the messenger and rode out to intercept the captain. It would be one of the most dramatic exchanges of war.
“Captain, what are your orders?”
The captain replied, “Where is General Barnes?”
Vincent said, “What are your orders? Give me your orders.”
“General Sykes told me to direct General Barnes to send one of his brigades to occupy that hill yonder,” shouted the captain.
Vincent said, “I will take the responsibility of taking my brigade there.”27
Vincent rode ahead to reconnoiter the hill while his brigade followed quickly. They were just in time to stop Hood’s Division from overrunning Little Round Top.
Had the Confederates been only minutes earlier, the entire Union position at Gettysburg would have become unhinged and the army’s line of retreat threatened. The army’s signal intelligence capability had delayed the attack by its very presence, forcing Longstreet into a time-consuming countermarch. But pure chance caused the observation of the countermarch to be misinterpreted, thus allowing Longstreet’s attack to be delivered with little warning. Ultimately, III Corps collapsed under Longstreet’s bludgeoning blows, and its survivors fled over Cemetery Ridge. By that time the mighty Confederate I Corps had exhausted itself and was unable to break over the ridge in the face of Union reinforcements.
On balance, the countermarch delay for Longstreet was the more serious of the consequences emanating from the signal station on Little Round Top. The lost two hours were irreplaceable. Had a competent reconnaissance been conducted that provided a covered route of approach, he would have struck Sickles half deployed and rolled right over his corps and then crested over Cemetery Ridge into the Union rear. Meade’s and Butterfield’s confusion as to the meaning of the signal station messages prevented a timely intervention by the army commander to repair that flank’s building vulnerability. But Meade’s tardy presence was enough to ensure that strong reserves would be fed into the battle to make it one of attrition. Patrick played an important role by throwing his provost guards across the rear of the fighting front to “[K]eep the Troops from breaking.—It was hot work & I had several lines formed, so that very few succeeded in getting entirely through.” It was not until early evening that he could set up a local POW holding area. By early evening when Sickles’s III Corps finally broke, Longstreet’s own corps had shot its bolt and could do no more.28
The rapid acquisition and transmission of intelligence on the Union side was in bright contrast to the poor use of intelligence made by the Southern leaders. Lee based his major blow on this day on amateurish reconnaissance. Stuart’s absence was telling. On no other field with Stuart present would Lee have resorted to such a careless reconnaissance. Inexplicably, Lee also failed to use the cavalry brigade guarding Ewell’s flank, which would have provided a much faster and practiced reconnaissance. Compounding this, both he and Longstreet refused to allow McLaws to conduct his own, despite his request. Hood would indeed make his own reconnaissance that showed Little Round Top empty and the enemy trains vulnerable right behind the hill. In the face of this priceless information, Longstreet refused to use his initiative to alter Lee’s orders, and the opportunity vanished.
Longstreet’s frustration at having come within an ace of smashing through the Union left would have been intense. Yet he probably would have been amused to learn that the Confederate prisoners were telling their interrogators that he had been killed, with his body in Union hands. It was convincing enough to be passed up to Meade, who had it included in a dispatch he sent off at 11:00 that night. Longstreet would have been less pleased at the accurate admission of his captured men that his corps and A. P. Hill’s “were both much injured … and that many general officers were killed. Gen. Barksdale, of Mississippi, is dead. His body is within our lines.”29
The story of Longstreet’s death spread quickly. The next day Brig. Gen. Herman Haupt, chief of U.S. Military Railways, reported at Westminster, Maryland, the terminus of the railroad supporting the army, that information had arrived that Longstreet had been killed. The press picked this up in a flurry of articles. On the 4th Meade sent a dispatch in which rebel prisoners claimed that Lt. Gen. A. P. Hill had been killed in the fighting of the 3rd. As of the 5th, the press was saying that “reports concerning the death and capture Generals Longstreet and A. P. Hill are still conflicting. By the 6th the BMI had been able to ascertain that both generals were still alive. The National Republican’s retraction on the 6th noted with some chagrin that the reports of Longstreet’s death “were apparently well authenticated, and fully believed.” This chain of events is a good example of how initial reporting, even though seemingly authenticated, can be wrong.30
While the BMI labored through its interrogations, another intelligence operation was playing itself out with a bang that would be heard in Washington. On the 30th Captain Dahlgren, as he recorded in a small notebook, approached Meade with a proposal, “to take some men and operate on the rebel rear. He, then anxious about the movements of the army, did not give the matter much attention. Then applied to General P[leasanton] who ordered a sergeant and fifteen men to report…”31
It was apparent that Sharpe and Dahlgren, being in close proximity on the staff, had come to know each other well. Dahlgren was the son of Rear Admiral John Dahlgren, already known as the father of naval ordnance. He was a good friend and advisor to Lincoln and on good terms with Stanton, who the year before had given the 19-year-old Ulric a captain’s commission based on his leadership and initiative in the Philadelphia Home Guard and in conveying naval ordnance to reinforce the garrison at Harper’s Ferry.
Dahlgren was more than worthy of the rank. He was an impressive young man, a beau sabre with dash, brains, and an instinct for the main chance. Tall, lithe, with fine features and blond hair and bright blue eyes, he was a magnificent horseman and the epitome of vigorous young manhood. He was assigned to Major General Sigel’s Corps as an aide but so quickly proved his knowledge of artillery that Sigel requested his appointment as chief of corps artillery with a promotion to major, but as so often happens, it was lost in the limbo of army administrative routine.
Dahlgren had a nose for a fight and repeatedly volunteered to accompany the cavalry into action or on outpost duty. In early November 1862, Burnside ordered Sigel to conduct a reconnaissance to ascertain Confederate strength in Fredericksburg; Dahlgren led 160 cavalrymen in stealthy approach, forded the Rappahannock unseen, and rode into town with such audacity as to scatter much larger Confederate forces and take 35 prisoners from the 9th and 15th Virginia Cavalry Regiments.32 At Brandy Station, he had rallied the 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry to cut its way through the surrounding Confederates. He was also what would be called today a perfect “special operator”. On such a small headquarters staff, Sharpe naturally would have been well aware of Dahlgren’s unique talents. Just as naturally, Dahlgren would find in Sharpe’s activities the opportunity for action. That opportunity arrived in the guise of Sergeant Cline, “who had by some stratagem ridden out of Salem with Stuart’s raiders on 25 June.” He slipped away and rode hard to report to the army at Frederick with exciting news.33
Cline related to Sharpe that important dispatches from Richmond for Lee would be carried by a courier across the Potomac at a specified hour on July 2. The courier and escort would then ride north up the Confederate main supply route through Greencastle. The timing could not have been more perfect for Sharpe. The day before he had been ordered by Meade, “to send to Gettysburg, Hanover, Greencastle, Chambersburg, and Jefferson to-night and get as much information as you can of the numbers, position, and force of the enemy, with their movements.” It was important enough for Sharpe to keep as a personal souvenir.34 That Sharpe approved the attempt to intercept the courier is evidenced by the next line in Dahlgren’s diary, “with these [the 10 cavalrymen] and four scouts under Sergeant Cline, we started out.”35 Sharpe was not about to part with five of his best scouts at this critical moment, especially Cline, if he had not been a party to the plan. He especially would not have parted with them had he not had great confidence in Dahlgren.
The 10 cavalrymen given to Dahlgren were from the 1st, 2nd, 5th, and 6th US Cavalry Regiments, the best men on the best horses. Early on the 1st, Dahlgren and his group departed from army headquarters in Frederick at daybreak disguised in civilian clothing.36
Captain Dahlgren’s Greencastle Raid July 1–2, 1863. (After Jespersen)
Carefully wending their way through Confederate patrols through Monterey Pass to Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, Dahlgren was able to learn of the fighting of July 1 and the death of Reynolds. That same day they picked up a local guide, a recently discharged Union soldier and a native of Greencastle, who agreed to guide Dahlgren there. The next morning, now back in uniform, the group entered the town. Seeing blue uniforms for the first time in two weeks, the population poured into the streets in celebration. “If a band of angels had come down into town, they could not have been more unexpected or welcome,” one resident wrote. Another would note that, “though a mere youth, he [Dahlgren] had the entire confidence of his men, and seemed to handle them with perfect ease and skill.”37
Dahlgren cut short the adulation and ordered the people back into their homes and positioned his men around the Dutch Reformed Church in the town center. He climbed to the belfry to discover he was just in time. To the south he saw a cavalry company riding toward town—the couriers and escorts. He rushed down to join his men when, to his surprise, a Confederate wagon train, escorted by several infantry companies and loaded with the loot of Pennsylvania, entered the town from the north at the same time as the cavalry. Dahlgren realized that with the train guards and the cavalry he was outnumbered many times over. He told his men that there was something important in the approaching Confederate party, and then asked, “Boys, how shall we take them? Will we take them with the saber or shall we depend upon our pistols and carbines?” Every man drew his saber and shouted, “We will take them with this!”38
When the two columns met in front of the church Dahlgren attacked. The quiet scene was suddenly rent with shouting horsemen hacking with their sabers. Dahlgren led the charge in among the wagons as Cline rode into the cavalry pistol in hand and captured the couriers. The panicked Confederates fled without a fight, leaving 17 prisoners to the 16 Federals.39
Dahlgren’s exultation quickly gave way to disappointment as he emptied mailbags of nothing but soldiers’ mail. Then he noticed one of the couriers nervously looking at his saddle. Dahlgren found the official dispatch case hidden under the saddle. He opened it immediately and found two letters for Lee, one from President Davis himself and the other from the adjutant general of the Confederate army, General Samuel Cooper. He broke the seals and read them on the spot. In this he was doing exactly what any good intelligence officer should do, for the knowledge of their import is necessary to guide the next step. So stunning was the information in the letters that he said, “Boys, here is an important dispatch from Jeff Davis to Gen. Lee. I must leave you and endeavor to place it in Gen. Meade’s hands as quickly as possible. Serg’t Cline, take charge of these men; make your way to Emmitsburg and deliver all the prisoners to the nearest Union force. If any of these fellow attempt to escape, shoot them.”40
He alone would ride the 30 miles around the Confederates to bring the prize to Meade. He rode relentlessly through the afternoon and evening and into the night, asking civilians along the way where the army headquarters had moved to until he arrived at Gettysburg about midnight and turned the dispatches over to Butterfield.
The New York Times correspondent attached to the army reported the incident differently, giving the entire credit to Cline. “A party of Col. Sharpe’s gallant scouts, only nine in number, headed by Sergt. M. W. Kline [sic], dashed into Hagerstown this morning, in the very rear of the enemy, and captured ten prisoners and large rebel mail, which was on its way from the South to Lee’s army.” If Cline was the source of the story, he was careful not to mention the capture of the dispatches to Lee among the mail.41
While Dahlgren was still in the saddle several hours from headquarters, another meeting was taking place. It was in the lull after the day’s horrific fighting, when the body’s adrenalin is drained. Meade was in his headquarters, a single farmhouse room in Leister House, as his exhausted staff arrived one by one. Sharpe left a vivid account:
I think the hardest day I ever experienced during my entire service in the civil war was the second day at Gettysburg. We were kept from daylight until darkness, and were all over the extensive battlefield, taking General Meade’s directions to the various army corps. But of the stirring and awful sights that I beheld that day none comes to me more vividly than an unchronicled little scene that occurred when the fighting was over for the day.
In the evening, just after dark, we of the staff came straggling in one after another to General Meade’s headquarters, a plain little farmhouse. When I entered the room the general was seated at a table, with his chin resting in his hand, and evidently deep in thought. He returned my salute, but said nothing.
In a few minutes another of the staff came in, then another and so on until we were all present. We were all covered with dust, and my face felt as though it had a thick incrustation of mud on it.
Presently the servant came in and spread upon the table a few crackers or hardtack, some pieces of bacon, and if I recollect, a little fruit—perhaps they were cherries, although where he could have got them I do not know.
General Meade looked smilingly although it was rather a dry smile, at our humble repast. Then, doubtless realizing how worn out we all were, he said: “This is one of the occasions when I think a man is justified in taking a drink of whiskey.”
General Meade was himself a very abstemious man, rarely drinking any spirituous liquor, and the same was true of every member of the staff.
“I will see if there is any whisky here,” he added. Again he spoke to the servant, who, a moment or two later, brought in a bottle of whiskey and set it upon the table.
General Meade glanced casually at the bottle.
“General [sic—Colonel at the time] Sharpe,” he said, won’t you take a glass of whisky? I think it will do you good.”
I took up the bottle and a tumbler, although I never knew how that tumbler got upon the table at that time. Without pouring out any whisky, I said to General Meade, “General, I think you ought to take a drink. You need it more than any of us.”
General Meade, without taking the bottle, looked at it, and, in the dim light of the two candles that were on the table, was able to see exactly how much whisky it contained. There was not enough for one moderate drink.
The general again glanced casually at the bottle. “NO,” he said, “I don’t think I care for any whisky. I would like a cup of coffee.”
Then he urged one of the staff to take a drink, but he, also having discovered by this time that there was only one drink in the bottle, shook his head and passed the bottle along. In similar fashion the whiskey was refused by each member of the staff, and in the middle of this table the bottle stood, with its scanty contents, untouched while we ate our hardtack and bacon.
To me that bottle has always told a perfect story of the devotion and unselfishness of the commanding officer and the members of his staff. I don’t remember any incident of the war that more impressed me with the real unselfishness which desperate experiences develop in a true military man than this renunciation of the drink by General Meade and his staff under conditions that would have warranted a teetotaler in foregoing his pledge.42
Eventually most of the staff except Sharpe left the commander alone. On the table the plate of hardtack for Meade and the whiskey remained, all still untouched. The hardtack was Meade’s dinner, his punishment of sorts for leaving his supply trains at Winchester.43 Major Generals Hancock and Slocum came in and found a seat on a cot. Slocum promptly fell sound asleep. Meade had called for a meeting of all his corps commanders at nine that evening, and these two were the first to arrive. Before the meeting, though, he wanted to talk to Sharpe again. The ability of his army to continue fighting after the terrible ordeal it had gone through that day was uppermost in his mind. Tugging at this mind was the option of pulling out to the prepared positions at Pipe Creek. He had arrived on the field deeply unhappy with this battlefield. He had even had Butterfield prepare a contingency plan for withdrawal. Major General Doubleday, who met him when he arrived on the field at one in the morning of this very day would write later that “It was an open secret that Meade at that time disapproved of the battle-ground Hancock had selected.” Meade’s circular of the day before had made that clear.44
Nevertheless, by the time the fighting had ended on July 2, Meade felt himself committed to fighting at Gettysburg. Too much was at stake, but his confidence in the outcome was anything but sure. He wired Halleck at eight in the evening, “I shall remain in my present position to-morrow, but am not prepared to say, until better advised of the condition of the army, whether my operations will be of an offensive or defensive nature.”45
The condition of the army hinged on that of the enemy. He turned to Sharpe and said, “I must have more detailed information of the strength of the enemy. Can you get reliable information of the number of troops that were engaged today and whether he has any fresh troops in reserve? Can you also get information of one of our own corps which is expected?” Sharpe excused himself to confer with Babcock, telling Meade he would have the information within an hour or two.46
Two hours later Sharpe was back and produced a report prepared by Babcock on the enemy’s order-of-battle that he had signed for Sharpe. It was astounding, the results of interrogations of hundreds of prisoners by Sharpe’s staff. Seldom in all of military history has a commander received such a golden report. It read:
Prisoners have been taken today, and last evening, from every brigade in Lee’s Army excepting the four brigades of Pickett’s Division. Every division has been represented except Picketts [sic] from which we have not had a prisoner. They are from nearly one hundred different regiments.47
Babcock had signed for Sharpe.48 Sharpe summarized it by saying, “All of the Confederate troops have been in action except Pickett’s division and a small body of cavalry. Pickett’s division has arrived.” Sharpe explained the painstaking efforts Babcock had made to compare the information taken from prisoners against his order-of-battle charts. He also added, “Our own corps has come up and is now in bivouac and will be ready to go into action fresh tomorrow morning.”49
With that, Hancock rose from the cot and announced forcefully, “General, we have got them nicked!” He was loud enough to rouse Slocum from his sleep.50
Hancock had seized the essence of the situation. Sharpe had answered that question that hovers over the mind of every senior commander in battle—what does the enemy have left to throw onto the scales of battle? Such a question unanswered breeds doubt, and with doubt comes lack of resolve. A commander who is ever looking over his shoulder for a way out is half-defeated.
Sharpe had answered that question with a precision and surety that was hard to match. So impressed was Meade that he exclaimed, “By God, I’ll stay here.” Babcock proudly recorded these words in a summary of his military service. It had been a virtuoso performance under conditions of the highest stress for Babcock, who was known to have been wounded in the battle but on which day was not certain. As a civilian no records were kept of his injury.51
Meade realized that his own reserves, in the shape of the uncommitted VI Corps and other elements, far exceeded the strength of Pickett’s Division, which was the weakest in Lee’s army. It was actually weaker than Babcock realized. The latest update of his order-of-battle on June 22 showed Pickett’s Division with four brigades. It had actually had five brigades, but two had been transferred to Lieutenant General D. H. Hill’s command in North Carolina before the Gettysburg Campaign began. But without prisoners or deserters from this division, Babcock would not have known that Pickett had only three brigades of fewer than 5,000 men on the field. In contrast, VI Corps, which Meade had in reserve, numbered almost 16,000 men present for duty in the returns of June 30. One V Corps Division and two brigades of XII Corps had not been heavily engaged as well. Meade could look forward to the next day’s fighting with at least four times as many fresh men in reserve as Lee.52
A great weight was lifted from Meade. He could fight tomorrow’s battle with confidence, even though there was only one day’s worth of supplies, and some corps had none at all. Meade used the conference with his corps commanders that followed to test the fighting spirit of his senior officers. That fighting spirit, already strong from the conduct of their men that day could only have hardened as Meade shared Sharpe’s information. Slocum typified the response of these men when he said, “Stay and fight it out.”53 The army would indeed fight it out to victory the next day. Six of the officers present at the meeting would later state that “Meade never uttered any word about wanting to retreat or even gave the appearance of being unsure of what to do.”54
But the night was not finished. About midnight Dahlgren rode his exhausted horse into the headquarters and delivered his captured dispatches to Butterfield. Upon examination, Meade’s new confidence in the outcome of the next day’s struggle became adamantine. Where Sharpe’s intelligence had filled in the tactical situation, these dispatches supplied the operational and strategic-level intelligence that presented an unprecedented look at the enemy’s capabilities and vulnerabilities.
The letter from General Cooper, dated June 29, gave Meade a priceless look at the operational level of the campaign. Cooper denied Lee’s request for reinforcement with the stray brigades left in Virginia because of an imminent threat to Richmond by Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler’s army on the Peninsula. “Every effort is being made here to be prepared for the enemy at all points, but we must look chiefly to the protection of the capital.” He continued, “I would suggest for your consideration whether, in this state of things, you might not be able to spare a portion of your force to protect your line of communication against attempted raids by the enemy.” It was a cogent and most unintentionally ironic comment in light of the loss of the dispatches to lack of security on Lee’s main supply route. With this information, Meade now knew that Lee would be receiving no reinforcements. There was nothing in the pipeline. Lee would have to fight with just what Sharpe had told him was on the field.55
The letter from Davis, dated June 28, filled in the strategic picture. Davis reviewed the situation with the armies in the west, the threat to Richmond, and the evident need to keep all the remaining brigades in the region.
Do not understand me as balancing accounts in the matter of brigades; I only repeat that I have not many to send you, and enough to form an army to threaten, if not capture, Washington as soon as it is uncovered by Hooker’s army. My purpose was to show you that the force here and in North Carolina is very small, and I may add that the brigades are claimed as property of their command. Our information as to the enemy may be more full and reliable hereafter. It is now materially greater than when you were here.56
Meade’s eyes must have become saucers as he read further as Davis listed all of the remaining brigades in the eastern theater and their missions, to justify their retention. After reading these letters, Meade turned to Dahlgren and asked what he could do for him in the way of reward. The captain asked to be given a hundred men and be sent out again to raise hell among the rebels.57
Arrayed alongside Babcock’s order-of-battle report, these two dispatches gave Meade an unprecedented look at his enemy at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. Meade now knew that Lee not only had a small, uncommitted reserve but also that there were no theater reserves coming to him. This would allow him to fight the next day with complete confidence and without reservation in his ability to meet any challenge. It also gave him the confidence to think that he could even ruin Lee the next day should the opportunity arise. Meade had achieved the priceless moral ascendancy in his contest with Lee. He had come a long way from distrusting the battlefield and preparing contingency plans for withdrawal. It would be a crucial addition to his moral armor—the ability to commit himself and his army wholeheartedly. The evidence suggests strongly that he would have stayed and fought it out in any case, but then it would have been a decision based on the shifting ground of desperation.
The dispatch from Davis gave him another sort of peace of mind. Few things can undermine the confidence of a commander in the field than an anxious and interfering political authority. Lee’s invasion of the North and the rumors of Beauregard’s army threatening Washington from Culpeper had succeeded in driving Meade’s political superiors to a state of near hysteria. On July 3 the New York Herald reported that a member of Longstreet’s staff had been captured on his way to Culpeper, “to ascertain what had become of Beauregard’s army.”58
The last thing Meade needed to worry about was fighting both front and rear. Davis’s dispatch was telegraphed to Halleck probably from Winchester. Their effect can be judged by Stanton’s awestruck comments as he retransmitted Cooper’s and Davis’s letters to all senior Union commanders in the eastern theater: “We have sure information … Davis’ dispatch is the best view we have ever had of the rebels condition, and it is desperate. They feel the pressure at all points, and have nothing to spare in any quarter, so that Lee must fight his way through alone, if he can.” One of the first to see the telegrams was Maj. Gen. Samuel P. Heintzelman, who commanded the forces in the defenses of Washington. He noted in his diary the very next day, July 4, “The news from General Meade is good … We captured very important dispatches from Jefferson Davis to Lee and from General Cooper. The letters go into minute details of the situation. With the knowledge we have of our situation and this information of theirs, our prospects are decidedly flattering.”59
A burden of grief had fallen on Sharpe that day. His beloved 120th New York had been in the forefront of the fighting in Sickles’s III Corps and had paid the price of its courage in holding off attack after attack. Of the 383 men that had deployed with the corps that afternoon, 203 had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner—a loss rate of 53 percent. At the crisis of the fighting, as the rest of III Corps gave way, the acting corps commander, Brig. Gen. Andrew A. Humphreys, stayed with his men:
[He] placed himself in the rear of our ranks, standing alone on a line which had been stripped for the salvation of others, he proclaimed in the most affirmative manner that this was then the vital point; and while he was powerless to afford relief except by his presence and example; while death stared him in the face, and it did not seem possible to those who watched him slowly riding in the rear of our formation, that he should escape, he chose to take his part with “the men that held the line.”
Lieutenant Colonel Westbrook had fallen with two severe wounds, and would carry the bullet from the second for more than 10 years. At the Peach Orchard, Major Tappen was in command. He fought the regiment back to Cemetery Ridge in a stubborn and skillful fighting retreat as the corps rearguard, to the cheers of the “scattered remains of other regiments.”60
The regiment had been Sharpe’s child, and even though detailed to the army staff, he had stayed in close touch with the men, helping them with their problems, advancing money in need, and making sure families were supported.
Tweny-six years later, Sharpe would describe that sacrifice in more graphic terms. “The eye could not be turned in any direction along our line without seeing men fall at every moment. All the details to those colors … were successively shot down, yet none shrank from the honor of carrying them.” But that would be long in the future. This evening he focused on the duty before him—the report he must deliver to Meade.61
While Lincoln and Stanton rejoiced in this coup, Meade was planning to take full advantage of it the next day. As the council had broken up about midnight, he took Brig. Gen. John Gibbon, commanding a II Corps division on Cemetery Ridge, by the arm and said, “If Lee attacks to-morrow, it will be upon your front.” Taken aback, Gibbon asked why. “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.”62 But Meade’s thoughts were already moving on to the counterblow. The next day, before Lee attacked, he spoke with Hancock of “the probability of an attack by the enemy on the center of the Union line, and decided, in the event of such an attack being made and repulsed, to advance the V and VI Corps against the enemy’s flank.”63
The man who had not wanted to fight at Gettysburg had been so bolstered by his precise knowledge of his opponent’s capabilities that he was now planning on taking the offensive. As the Confederates retreated on the 4th he attempted to put the army in readiness to counterattack but found his corps and divisions so mixed up due to exigencies of the battle that he concluded the moment had passed before he could properly organize such a major effort.64 History can only speculate what a powerful Union attack into Lee’s disorganized, depleted, and demoralized center would have achieved.65
Early on the morning of the 3rd, Butterfield sent Babcock a hurried note: “Are you satisfied that there are only two Divisions of Ewell in front of Slocum and how strong do you think they are—If the General was pretty sure of this he would make an attack there. Write me soon.” Babcock and Sharpe replied in a report written on the back of Butterfield’s note at 8:00 a.m. Babcock listed the number of prisoners taken from all of Ewell’s three divisions. As good as Babcock’s information was, it did contain one error and that was based on sheer chance. According to Edwin Fishel:
Babcock’s reply named twelve brigades in Ewell’s Corps, four to a division. But Rodes’s Division, like only one other in Lee’s army, had five brigades; the fifth was missing from the bureau’s records. This was Junius Daniel’s North Carolina brigade, 2,200 strong, one of the three brigades Lee had added shortly before marching north. That Babcock had received no deserters from Daniel’s ranks in those weeks of tightened picketing is not surprising, but the brigade also suffered no losses from captures in the two days’ fighting; none of its members turned up on the lists of prisoners the provost marshal officers were turning over to Babcock.66
Babcock also listed the estimated strength of each of Ewell’s three divisions computed from prisoner accounts of the strengths of their own regiments and brigades:
However, Babcock and Sharpe thought these figures were far too high based upon their understanding of the enemy’s order-of-battle balanced against the estimated number of casualties. In other words, they employed analysis to reach a much more accurate conclusion. They appended a note to the report “expressing the opinion that the figures they had been given were exaggerated. Those figures probably represented pre-battle strengths. Overall, those figures were within fewer than 100 men of Ewell’s overall corps strength on July 1, an order-of-battle bullseye.67 A look at the actual numbers at the beginning of the battle showed their skepticism as to the current strength of Ewell’s Corps to be justified.
Table 6.1. BMI Estimates of Ewell’s Corps Based on Prisoner Estimates
| Division | Strength |
| Early | 7,000 |
| Johnson | 7,000 |
| Rodes | 7,200 |
| Total: | 21,200 |
Table 6.2. Pre-Battle Strength and Casualties of Ewell’s Corps Based on Confederate Returns68
| Division | Strength | Casualties |
| Early | 5,458 | 1,188 |
| Johnson | 6,308 | 1,873 |
| Rodes | 7,499 | 2,853 |
| Artillery Res | 644 | 22 |
| HQ Escort | 125 | 0 |
| Total: | 20,034 | 5,936 |
Sharpe added an appraisal to the report on the damage done to the other two Confederate Corps on July 2: “A further examination shows that Ewell’s whole corps was on our right yesterday—is now attacking. All prisoners now agree that their whole army is here, that A. P. Hill & Longstreet’s forces were badly hurt yesterday, & that several general officers are injured.”69
That morning, Capt. E. C. Pierce and Lieut. George J. Clarke, signal officers attached to VI Corps, had taken over the signal station in the rocks of Little Round Top occupied by Captain Hall the day before. The Confederate sharpshooters in Devil’s Den made the normal use of the station lethal. Seven men near the station would be killed or wounded that day. They were joined by Lieutenants J. C. Wiggins and N. H. Camp from I Corps, and together the four officers used their couriers to relay the information gathered from the station. About two in the afternoon, just as the great Confederate artillery bombardment of Cemetery Ridge was concluding, Warren returned to the hill and ordered the signal officers to closely observe their front and report directly to Meade. Shortly thereafter, they observed Longstreet’s regiments appear in preparation for the charge that would bear Pickett’s name. Their couriers sped away to Meade.
At the same time, the commanding general had reluctantly abandoned his headquarters at Leister House. The Confederate artillery, which was largely passing over the II Corps defenders of Cemetery Ridge, was falling over the ridge to land among the reserve artillery and trains, and directly around Leister House. At his staff ’s urging, Meade very reluctantly transferred his headquarters to Slocum’s XII headquarters at Power Hill which had a signal station.
However, the friction of war intervened again. At Power Hill Meade immediately sought out the signal officer to get back in contact with his Leister House headquarters signal officer, Capt. David Castle. The XII Corps signal officer reported he could not communicate with Leister House. Meade assumed Castle had abandoned his position and immediately returned there. There he found Castle, who was still at his post; unfortunately, Castle’s staff with their signal equipment had ridden off with Meade’s entourage. The signal officer attempted to use a makeshift bed sheet as a substitute. Meade returned despite the danger because he realized that with modern signal intelligence and communications, he could effectively control the battle from that spot. As soon as the Confederate artillery ceased fire in preparation for the advance of the infantry attack, the Leister House signal station was back in operation.70
Although Meade did not realize it amid the shot and shell falling around Leister House, he was the first commander in history to tie himself to a modern signal intelligence and communication system in order to more closely control a battle, a system that did not rely on the speed of a man on foot or horseback to relay information and one that, in fact, provided near real-time information.
At the crisis of the battle Meade rode forward to Cemetery Ridge. As he came up the reverse slope, he was stunned to see a column of Confederates double-timing toward him. His first thought was to order up reserves until he noticed they were unarmed and guarded by men in blue. He arrived at the top to see the II Corps men waving their fists at the retreating survivors of the attack as they yelled, “Fredericksburg, Fredericksburg!”—the field where they had been slaughtered in as hopeless a charge. Meade took in the entire scene. At this moment, victory offered even greater laurels. Sharpe had told him the night before of how slim were Lee’s reserves. Now he saw its ruin. He had 20,000 fresh men. The unblooded, tough VI Corps waited. Twenty-five years in the future, at the reunion of the blue and gray on that same field, Longstreet would gaze upon it and remark:
That was a fatal error. After the failure of Pickett’s charge—and there were some of us who expected it to fail—there were men who stood on Seminary Ridge who expected to see a general advance by Union forces. We were for a time in great trepidation. Our lines were very thin; they were in no condition to withstand an attack if it were made with any vigor. I am convinced that had we been then vigorously attacked there would have been an end to the war.71
How generals command is one thing. How the men in the ranks fight is another. Sharpe’s old friends in the men of the 20th New York State Militia were in the direct path of Pickett’s Division as it made its immortal charge across the mile of open ground in front of Cemetery Ridge. The New Yorkers flung them back from their toehold on the fence line, cheering as they advanced, and fired. It had been three hard days for the Ulster Guard. Of the 287 men Colonel Gates had taken into battle on July 1 he would lose 35 killed, 111 wounded, and 24 prisoners for a total of 170 or 59 percent. Added to those of the 120th New York, Sharpe would mourn many friends.72
Four days after the battle Sharpe penned a painful letter attaching to a report for the local newspaper of the losses of the two Kingston regiments.
MY DEAR ROMEYN—I send you the enclosed memoranda by our surgeon of the losses in the 120th, in the late battles. It is not complete, except as to officers, but is correct as far as it goes. I shall try and send you more full accounts by tomorrow.
I send you by same mail a letter from Col. Gates, with the losses of the 20th.
Our Regiments have fought together upon a field of great glory, but the counties of Ulster and Greene have sadly contributed to its accomplishment.
When you look over the list you will see that my heart is too full to write more.73
After the collapse of Pickett’s Charge on the 3rd, Meade moved quickly to occupy Gettysburg as the Confederates withdrew. Sharpe had unleashed his scouts, who reported that night that the enemy was already retreating by the Greencastle road toward Hagerstown.74
The Army of the Potomac greeted Independence Day while trying to shelter from a great downpour that descended upon the battlefield and the entire region. Through the rain they could see Lee’s wounded army withdrawing back the way it came. Meade, already forewarned of the withdrawal, had prepared for the pursuit. This was the cavalry’s moment, and Meade sent them in pursuit at first light. With them went Dahlgren, leading the hundred men Meade had given him. He was to play a daring role in the pursuit of Lee’s army through the mountains over the next few days where he suffered the wound that resulted in the loss of his leg. “Among the first to sit by his bedside, with kindly words of heart-felt sympathy is Mr. Lincoln.” As a reward for his intrepidity, he was jumped three grades to full colonel. Stanton personally came to present him with his promotion. When he found him so ill that he could not understand, Stanton closed off the street to wheeled traffic so as not to disturb his recovery and posted a military guard to turn away all visitors except medical personnel.75
And with the cavalry went Sharpe’s scouts to follow Lee’s every move. Their reports flowed back in almost real time, and Sharpe was at Meade’s elbow with them, figuratively waving opportunity under his nose. But Meade was spent. Since assuming command on June 28, Meade had slept hardly at all and then gone through the enormous stress of the battle. He was in desperate need of rest and recovery. His pursuit was not conducted with all the vigor of a fresh man. In justice, his victory had been at such a cost as to lay a heavier burden on him. His best and most aggressive corps commanders were dead or wounded—Reynolds, Sickles, Hancock. His best corps were broken or badly cut up—I, II, III. And XI Corps had been broken beyond redemption. Reinforcement units and commanders were not up to the standards of the men they replaced. He would be justified in feeling that it was a blunt sword now in his hands. And if the sword was blunt, the swordsman himself was tired and slow, and that meant caution loomed more and more important in his mind.
Nature had conspired at this time to present this tired, cautious man with a priceless opportunity. The deluge of July 4–5 had swelled the Potomac River to make it impassable at just the time Lee needed to get his army across it at Williamsport. The rearguard of his army had closed on Hagerstown on the morning of July 7, and he immediately began to inspect with an engineer’s careful eye the approaches to the river on the Williamsport-Hagerstown Pike for the defenses he knew he would need with a swollen river at his back.76
By the next morning, Sharpe had received information from his scouts on the enemy’s preparations for crossing. Scout Greenwood reported that at Williamsport the river had risen 9 feet, and the current was running rapidly. The enemy was reduced to crossing with only two boats. At Shepardstown the enemy was trying to man a ferry and had set up a new rope the night before. Sharpe noted, “Our scouts will cut it at all hazards to night unless a force is sent to destroy it.”77
The next day he presented two more reports that detailed the enemy’s dire problem at Williamsport. The Confederates were desperately trying to cross their wounded on two flat-bottomed boats—“and making poor progress. Mules and horses saddled are occasionally coming down the river drowned.” “The current has increased so since yesterday that crossings are made with difficulty, & the flat boat is unable to make the opposite point so as to connect with the road on the other side & the boat had to be towed up stream after crossing on both sides.” The scouts accurately identified the main body of the enemy between Boonesboro and Hagerstown. Sharpe also threw in that the scouts, for want of the requested force, cut the new ferry rope at Sherpardstown.78
On the 10th Sharpe reported that the river’s level had fallen a foot but “must fall three feet more until it is fordable.” He also noted that no pontoons had arrived at the crossing. The enemy was still passing its wounded to Virginia over the slow flatboats, and tellingly, bringing ammunition over on the return trips. It was a hint that Lee might need to fight things out on the Maryland shore. The clock was ticking for Meade, who was more worried by any surprise Lee might have for him than on the opportunities Sharpe was reporting.79
It was only the next day, the 11th, that Lee’s engineers began marking out the defenses extending from Downsville to 1 ½ miles south of Hagerstown around the bridgehead at Williamsport. The Confederates threw themselves at the task with great energy. Edward Coddington noted tartly, “By the morning of 12 July the Confederates had almost finished preparing their fortifications, and at this exact time Meade finally brought up his forces to confront them.” Within the next two days Lee had brought all of his army within the fortifications, as Meade hesitated.80
The night of the 12th, Meade held another council of war at which the loss of his fighting corps commanders was felt. The majority of corps commanders were adamantly against assaulting such strong positions. Meade went with the majority, an act from which his reputation never recovered and which threw Lincoln into despair. Lee’s opinion the next morning when he saw that the Union troops were digging entrenchments was brutal. “That is too long for me; I can not wait for that.” Then, he added, “They have but little courage.” Within hours Lee’s engineers, in a superb achievement, had repaired the pontoon bridge, and the river had fallen to a fordable level. Lee ordered an immediate retreat. By the next morning almost everyone but the rear guard was over the river. The cavalry fell on this force as it was waiting to cross the river and took about 500 prisoners. How Sharpe felt at this meager trophy, when his intelligence reporting had presented Meade with the entire Army of Northern Virginia, he kept to himself.81
Sergeant Cline was rewarded for his role in seizing the dispatches with the honor of conveying them to Washington, where he was “showered with praise (and gold) by Secretary of War Stanton.”82 The men of the BMI could not refrain from recognizing their contribution:
All their lives Sharpe and Babcock believed it was their reports that brought the decision to remain at Gettysburg. Former intelligence officers would not have been as much given to telling “war stories” as other veterans, and neither man is known to have told relatives and friends a great deal about his intelligence service … but neither man held back this one story. They both seem to have regarded the night of July 2, 1863, as the high point of the secret war they fought.83
It would be hard to disagree. In the fewer than 120 days of its existence the BMI had become, from a standing start, a fully functioning all-source intelligence operation, a professional and personal triumph for all involved. Unfortunately, it would be an accomplishment that would not be replicated again by the U.S. Army at field army level until 1918 in World War I.84 Sharpe and his staff played a decisive role in two major campaigns by providing the commanders of the Army of the Potomac with consistently accurate all-source intelligence on the strength, movements, intentions, and vulnerabilities of the enemy. That Sharpe was able to find so many talented people, coordinate their efforts so efficiently and harmoniously, and create a fully functioning all-source intelligence operation in so short a time where nothing comparable had existed anywhere before, in the United States or worldwide, makes him a major, albeit unsung, hero of the art of intelligence, even had he resigned after the battle.
To Hooker goes the credit for having a keen nose for intelligence and the sense to recognize the powerful synergy of a gathering together of all sources of information to create all-source intelligence. To Hooker also goes the credit for the creativity to formalize that function as a primary staff function. It is important to realize how truly innovative this step was, because heretofore generals had been their own intelligence officers. George Washington was the last commanding general in U.S. history to be able personally to fulfill such a task well.
Hooker’s great achievement was to realize the army’s intelligence function would have to be raised to a state of professionalism comparable to the improvements in logistics, ordnance, and communication—all hallmarks of the industrialization of war. In doing so, Hooker was responsible for an American innovation unequalled elsewhere in the world of intelligence gathering. He was truly a transformational figure. Such individuals are extremely rare who are able to step boldly from an exhausted paradigm into another, racing along the crest of change. History is littered with the ruins left by those who could not.
Hooker could not have stressed the importance of the BMI more than when he ordered that Sharpe report directly to him. He established the principle that the commander is an active participant in the intelligence effort. That Hooker failed to fully exploit the advantages given him by the BMI at Chancellorsville did not invalidate his creation. And it reflected nothing on the achievement of Sharpe and his men. Hooker’s nerve failed him at the crisis of his life, and no amount of intelligence could steady a man already beaten in his own mind. Nevertheless, in the balance of Hooker’s service to the Republic, a reasonable observer would conclude that the creation of the BMI would more than balance the loss at Chancellorsville.85
Meade, however, was made of plainer but sterner stuff than Hooker. He assumed command on June 28 of an army that had been repeatedly beaten by a veritable Mars—Lee—whose reputation alone had undone his predecessor. He took that army into the greatest battle of the Civil War three days later, fought that terrible three-day battle, and broke the heretofore irresistible tide of Southern valor. In all this time he hardly slept and ate little. It would have been natural for his confidence to have shown the strain. And it is true he did not want to fight at Gettysburg and would have preferred to fall back to Pipe Creek even as the battle of Gettysburg bled into its second day.
But here Meade surpassed Hooker. In one day Meade had to bring himself up to date on the situation, learn the capabilities of the BMI, and then determine to trust it. To Meade’s credit he immediately grasped the value of his intelligence staff and assumed that direct hand in its mission guidance that marks a successful commander. On the terrible field of Gettysburg Meade would prove himself a great commander. He was the first commander in history consciously to tie himself to modern signals and all-source intelligence in order to control and fight the battle. Of equal importance, he steeled his nerve because Sharpe and his staff came through for him—they cast a bright and revealing light across the battlefield, and on that would hang the fate of the Republic.