The anguish of Charles Francis Adams, Jr.—Colonel Fremantle meets Robert E. Lee—The view from the oak tree—The Federals hold—Lawley’s painful duty
The train carrying the English colonel Arthur Fremantle pulled into Richmond on the morning of June 17, 1863, while more than a hundred miles away the Army of Northern Virginia was crossing the Blue Ridge Mountains into the Shenandoah Valley. Francis Lawley had already left Richmond, hoping to reach Lee before the army disappeared entirely. Lawley was weighed down by a sense of foreboding, even though his reports maintained their jaunty tone. His boast that “Vicksburg will never fall” was simply propaganda, he had admitted to the Marquess of Hartington in a confidential letter of June 14. It looked increasingly doubtful that the besieged town could withstand Grant for much longer. “If it falls the Confederacy may hold out and will strive to hold out for years,” he wrote. “But bisected & perforated everywhere by its enemies its fortunes will be at zero. No successes which Lee can gain in Virginia will be set off against the fall of Vicksburg.” Mindful of Hartington’s new position as undersecretary for war, Lawley appealed to his military instincts, urging him to lobby for Southern recognition so that Britain would have an ally if the North turned its million-strong army toward Canada.1
“I hear everyone complaining dreadfully of General Johnston’s inactivity in Mississippi, and all now despair of saving Vicksburg,” Fremantle wrote in his diary. He had spent his first day in Richmond visiting with as many government officials as would receive him.22.1 2 He eventually managed to gain access to the Confederate secretary of state, Judah P. Benjamin—“a stout dapper little man” in Fremantle’s opinion—whose anteroom was crowded with supplicants waiting for an audience. Benjamin gravely pressed upon him England’s moral responsibility in allowing the bloodshed to continue—one word about recognition and the war would end, he claimed. When Fremantle brought up the specter of Britain’s losing Canada if she grappled with the North, Benjamin laughed at the possibility: “They know perfectly well you could deprive them of California … with much greater ease.” This was a novel idea that Fremantle was too polite to pursue.3
After their interview, Benjamin escorted Fremantle to Davis’s house. The president served him tea, the first that Fremantle had seen during his travels, while they discussed the risks to England if she supported the Confederacy. Although Davis avoided talking about the current fighting, he alluded bitterly to the suffering wrought by Union armies. His own family had been made homeless after Federal soldiers torched his brother’s plantation in Mississippi, having forced the tearful occupants out onto the lawn to watch the destruction. He defended the behavior of Confederate soldiers and denied that they shot men who surrendered. (The fate of Negro regiments at Charleston and also Port Hudson in 1864 would put the lie to this claim.) This gave Fremantle the opportunity to question him about Colonel Grenfell’s legal trouble with the state authorities. “He was very sorry when I told him,” wrote Fremantle, as “he had heard much of his gallantry and good services.”4 But Davis was not unduly troubled by Grenfell’s departure; there seemed to be no shortage of foreign volunteers.22.2
“When I took my leave about 9 o’clock, the President asked me to call upon him again,” wrote Fremantle. He felt sorry for him; Davis looked much older than his fifty-five years. He face was lined and emaciated, his eyes were evidently hurting him, yet “nothing can exceed the charm of his manner, which is simple, easy, and most fascinating.”6 This was an uncharacteristic description of a man who was generally considered to be haughty and cold, and too enamored of his military record during the Mexican-American War to listen to the advice of his generals. On the night of June 19 there was an explosion of thunder and lightning over Richmond. The clattering of rain followed by a rush of cool air made a pleasant end to Fremantle’s last hours in the city. He was packing in preparation for a dawn departure by train to Culpeper, where he hoped to obtain a horse and ride to Lee’s headquarters at Berryville.
The drought also broke at Middleburg, near the northern Virginia border, finally ridding the countryside of its pervasive smell of rotting horses.7 Water flowed through the camp of the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry, flooding the tents, many of which stood empty. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., was alone in his, struggling to make sense of the past forty-eight hours. Only four days ago he had been studying William Howard Russell’s published diary for accuracy and bias, wondering if the authorities had forgotten the regiment’s existence. After the Battle of Brandy Station, General Pleasonton had ordered the cavalry to pursue the Confederate army into the Blue Ridge Mountains and bring him definitive intelligence of its direction. Jeb Stuart had placed his troopers in front of the three mountain gaps to hold the Union cavalry off. Both he and his men were trying to blot out their recent near humiliation; Pleasonton’s cavalry were no less determined to prove that they were the Confederates’ equals or better. The 1st Massachusetts Cavalry had always previously ended up on the sidelines or been held in reserve, but this time they were assigned to Kilpatrick’s brigade and sent to break the Confederate hold at Aldie, the northernmost gap in the Blue Ridge. They roared into the village on the morning of the seventeenth, easily driving off the rebel pickets, but when they turned back for another sweep, they were hit by a countercharge of Confederate reinforcements. Charles Francis Jr.’s squadron became trapped at the foot of a hill. “My poor men were just slaughtered and all we could do was to stand still and be shot down,” he wrote in anguish to his brother Henry. “In twenty minutes and without fault on our part I lost thirty-two as good men and horses as can be found in the cavalry corps. They seemed to pick out my best and truest men, my pets and favourites. How and why I escaped I can’t say, for my men fell all around me.”8 He was racked by guilt and grief over his losses. The army’s leaders were butchers, he wrote bitterly to Henry; the “drunk-murdering-arson dynasty” of Hooker and the rest had to be expelled before they did Lee’s work for him.
Ill.41 General Longstreet’s corps crossing the Blue Ridge from the Shenandoah to the Rappahannock, by Frank Vizetelly.
Jeb Stuart succeeded in driving the Federals away from the passes, but he could not prevent General Pleasonton from obtaining the information sought by Hooker. By June 22 the Federals knew for certain that Pennsylvania and not Washington was Lee’s objective. Stuart was unsure what Lee wished him to do in the face of so many threats—should he guard the gaps, follow the Confederate army up the Shenandoah Valley, or create a diversion and try to maintain the deception that the capital was in danger? Lee sent him two notes, on June 22 and 23, which the cavalry commander interpreted to mean that he could use his own judgment, provided he rejoined the main body of the army in good time. Stuart decided to go riding and raiding in between the Federal army and Washington.9
Fremantle at last arrived at Lee’s headquarters at 9:00 A.M. on June 22. He recognized the general immediately but refrained from going up to him; the expression on Lee’s face discouraged frivolous interruption. Instead, Fremantle asked a member of the staff where he might find Francis Lawley. After introducing him to Lee’s aides, Lawley invited Fremantle to join them for breakfast. There was another guest at the table, a Prussian captain named Justus Scheibert, who was an official observer from the Royal Prussian Engineers. The conversation centered mostly on Jeb Stuart and his successful repulse of Pleasonton’s cavalry at the mountain passes. For the moment, at least, Stuart’s reputation was on a reprieve. But he had lost one of his most popular volunteers—the Prussian soldier Heros von Borcke, who had been severely wounded at Aldie.
Lawley understood Fremantle’s desire to meet Lee, but persuaded him to wait until the atmosphere was less frenetic. He suggested they leave the camp and deposit themselves ten miles farther north, at Winchester, where there would be decent lodgings and a blacksmith for Fremantle’s suffering horse. They spent the next couple of days together, exploring the battle-scarred countryside and staying out of the Confederates’ way. The houses looked bleak and dilapidated, with those still inhabited being used as hospitals for the wounded. The travelers visited the mud hole that had once been Commissioner Mason’s elegant plantation. “Literally not one stone remains standing upon another,” wrote Fremantle, surprised at the vitriol behind the Federal attack.
On June 24, leaving Lawley to write his Times dispatch, Fremantle went foraging for their horses without success. He eventually found virgin grass four miles outside town, but all the hay and corn had been seized long ago. He was experiencing on a small scale one of Lee’s greatest anxieties: how to feed his army. As usual, Lawley hid the situation from his readers. He conceded that the Southern army was “still ragged and unkempt” but declared that all had good shoes and that the animals were “for the most part sleek and fat.” Lawley was unable to finish his report that day or the next. He became so ill, probably with dysentery, that they had to stay behind in Winchester even though the Confederate army had resumed its northward progress. On June 25, Lawley forced himself to mount his horse and they rode all day in the rain, trying to catch up with Lee. They managed to pass some divisions of Longstreet’s corps, but the generals had already crossed the Potomac.
“It was a dreary day! The rain was falling in torrents,” recalled Francis Dawson. “General Lee, General Longstreet and General Pickett were riding together, followed by their staffs. When we reached the Maryland shore we found several patriotic ladies with small feet and big umbrellas waiting to receive the Confederates who were coming a second time to deliver downtrodden Maryland.” One of the four women held an enormous wreath that had been intended to adorn the neck of Lee’s horse, Traveler, but its size frightened the animal and it was handed to one of the general’s aides to carry. More ladies greeted them at Hagerstown, just south of the Pennsylvania state line. This time one of them asked for a lock of Lee’s hair, which he refused, offering one of General George Pickett’s instead. “General Pickett did not enjoy the joke,” wrote Dawson, “for he was known everywhere by his corkscrew ringlets, which were not particularly becoming when the rain made them lank in such weather as we then had.”10
Lawley and Fremantle rode into Hagerstown late at night on Friday, June 26. They had almost caught up with the army, but Lawley was so weak that he slumped alarmingly on his horse. Fremantle’s had gone lame; “by the assistance of his tail, I managed to struggle through the deep mud and wet,” he wrote, until after seventeen very long miles they bribed a Dutchman with gold to let them stay the night. “I dared not take off my solitary pair of boots, because I knew I should never get them on again,” recorded Fremantle. Twenty-four hours earlier, in England, the Times’ managing editor, Mowbray Morris, was writing optimistically to Lawley to keep going just a little bit longer. The only real hardship was the blockade, he asserted; once that was raised, “your position will be comparatively easy and your work pleasant.”11
The following day Lawley was too ill to be moved. Deciding that his friend required medical attention, Fremantle took Lawley’s horse, which seemed marginally less likely to collapse, and set off in search of Longstreet. He found him after only an hour. Longstreet immediately sent an ambulance to fetch Lawley, and invited Fremantle to join his mess during the campaign. He informed the surprised Englishman that they had already crossed into Pennsylvania, Maryland being only ten miles wide at that point. They were heading toward Chambersburg, a small town twenty miles from Hagerstown.
After a couple of days’ observation, Fremantle realized that he was witnessing a rare event in military history: an invasion unaccompanied by mass rape and murder. Northern blacks were being robbed, assaulted, and in some cases forced at gunpoint into slavery. But since these crimes happened along the fringes of the army, Fremantle saw only minor infractions such as fence breaking or Northern whites being forced to accept worthless Confederate dollars for their goods. Fremantle thought they were remarkably ungrateful for the army’s restrained behavior “and really appear to be unaware that their own troops have been for two years treating Southern towns with ten times more harshness.”12 Francis Dawson felt proud to be riding in Longstreet’s corps. “The army behaved superbly in Pennsylvania,” he declared. “The orders against straggling and looting were strict.” He saw Lee dismount in front of a field of broken rails and tidy them up himself: “It was the best rebuke that he could have given to the offenders.” When the army entered Chambersburg, Dawson was surprised to see young men lolling on street corners. Suddenly Lee’s invading army of sixty thousand seemed small and vulnerable; there were no such “spare” men in Virginia. Dawson visited the prison where he had been held after the Battle of Antietam. There were Yankee prisoners in the yard, and for a brief moment he wanted to pelt them with stones, as had been done to him.
To maintain order, Lee had decreed that only generals and their staff were allowed into Chambersburg without a special pass. But this official reassurance was not enough to calm the townspeople: all the shops and hotels were closed and shuttered. The commissary officers could not find anyone willing to sell provisions, though they threatened to seize them by force if necessary. Lawley was recuperating at the Franklin Hotel, which was kept locked to casual passersby. Fremantle had to hammer on the doors, shouting that he was an English traveler, until they were cautiously opened.
Fremantle went to Lawley’s room to give him the latest news and discovered that the journalist was not alone. An Englishman dressed in the full uniform of the Hungarian hussars was sitting in the chair, recounting his journey through the lines. He had crossed into the South in late May, aided as usual by the Maryland journalist W. W. Glenn, in the hope of meeting the famous Robert E. Lee. Fremantle could not stop himself from smiling; the thirty-eight-year-old Captain Fitzgerald Ross had spent the past thirteen years in Austria and had succumbed to the country’s fondness for military pomp. He was dressed as though on parade, and brushed aside Fremantle’s warning that the Confederates would tease him mercilessly.
All day during the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth, Fremantle walked quietly among the Confederates, observing their unhurried preparations to move farther north. The army corps was dispersed for miles around, employed in the unending search for food and water. The Confederate army had marched more than ninety miles from its base at Fredericksburg. Every bullet and shell had been brought with them in long wagon lines. Despite these difficulties, Longstreet’s headquarters had a relaxed air about it. The normally taciturn general passed the early part of the evening with Fremantle, reminiscing about his time in Texas. But shortly after the Englishman departed, Longstreet received another visitor, a scout, who brought devastating news. The Union army had crossed into Maryland and was only days, if not hours, behind them.
Jeb Stuart was meant to be Lee’s eyes and ears, but at this moment the cavalryman was fifty-five miles away, his progress slowed by 125 captured wagons. He was rather pleased with his expedition; on June 28 he had come within six miles of Washington, sending tremors down Pennsylvania Avenue. Lord Lyons ordered his staff to pack their bags in case they needed to make a hasty departure. Since being hustled back into duty, Sir Percy Wyndham had succeeded in rounding up three thousand riders. But he had found horses for only two-thirds of them. (In his search for more, some of his actions had bordered on outright theft, earning him powerful enemies in the capital.)
Lee had no means of sending a message to Stuart, but he dispatched hurried instructions to his generals, who were spread out in a forty-five-mile radius, to collect their scattered corps and meet outside the village of Cashtown, eight miles west of Gettysburg. On June 30, Lee heard that “Fighting Joe” Hooker had resigned after a petty quarrel with General-in-Chief Henry Halleck and been replaced by George Gordon Meade. Lee was not happy with the change: Hooker would have been a far weaker opponent. Meade was a Mexican War veteran, a no-nonsense professional soldier whose hair-trigger temper had earned him the nickname “the Old Snapping Turtle.” Fremantle traveled with Longstreet to join Lee, who was in the midst of moving his headquarters closer to Gettysburg. Ten different roads went through the town, making it a useful launch site for a confrontation with the Federal army. The general betrayed no sign of anxiety to Fremantle, who thought him “the handsomest man of his age I ever saw.” He was wearing his customary long gray jacket and Wellington boots, both of which were surprisingly clean.
One of the Confederate brigades had spotted Union cavalrymen lurking around Gettysburg. When Lee received the news, all knew that a battle was imminent. Still elated by the recent victory at Chancellorsville, Lee’s officers had no doubt about the outcome. Lawley was equally optimistic. Though weak, he had managed to eat breakfast in the hotel dining room in Chambersburg with Captain Ross on July 1. The complaints and anti-Southern comments of the other diners, all locals, so irritated Lawley that, to Ross’s acute embarrassment, he held a twenty-dollar Confederate bill aloft and declared “in a month it would be worth more than all their greenbacks in the North put together.”13
As Lawley and Ross were eating their breakfast, four Confederate infantry brigades set off in search of a warehouse reported to be full of shoes. Three miles from Gettysburg they stumbled into the 1st Cavalry Division of the Union army. Thus began the Battle of Gettysburg, without the orders or knowledge of the two commanders. It was eleven o’clock when the faint echoes of artillery fire alerted Lee to the battle taking place. He was furious at this unexpected development, which added to the difficulties forced upon him by not knowing where his enemy lay or how many he faced. At this moment there were in fact more Confederates than Federals at Gettysburg—a massed attack by the Southerners could have captured the town.
An hour later, at noon, Longstreet was marching at the head of his corps toward Gettysburg. Fremantle followed on horseback while Lawley and Captain Ross traveled at the back of the wagon line. “At 2 P.M. firing became distinctly audible in our front,” wrote Fremantle. Soon they passed a ghastly parade of stretchers and the walking wounded coming the other way. The soldiers were so accustomed to such scenes that they barely glanced at them. Finally, at 4:30 P.M., the travelers found General Lee on the top of Seminary Ridge, observing the battle below.
Fremantle climbed to the top of an oak tree in order to obtain a better view of the Federal defense. The town lay within an undulating basin, surrounded by ridges and boulder-strewn hills. Lee had realized that control of these ridges was paramount; as at Fredericksburg, whoever held the high ground outside the town had the advantage. General Ewell’s orders were to drive the Federals from Cemetery Ridge “if possible.” Fatally for Lee’s plans, as the next two days would prove, Ewell decided it was not possible, and remained where he was.14 Nevertheless, when the firing dwindled away at dusk, the Confederates appeared to have won the day. They had lost six thousand men compared to the almost nine thousand casualties suffered by the Federals, and Gettysburg was theirs.
Map.16 Gettysburg, July 1–3, 1863
Click here to view a larger image.
The Union army, however, had seized the best defensive positions around the perimeter of hills and ridges south of town, near the local cemetery. That evening Fremantle and Lawley witnessed a tense debate between the Confederate generals. “The enemy’s new position,” reported Lawley later, made Longstreet fear that a direct assault would be too dangerous. He wanted Lee to move the army to a better location and force Meade to come after them. But Lee disagreed. “The enemy is here,” he argued; “if we do not whip him, he will whip us.” They would renew the attack the following day. Lawley thought Longstreet was right, ignorant as he was of the risk. The Confederates had no intelligence of Meade’s numbers or position other than what they could see with their own eyes.
“The universal feeling in the army was one of profound contempt for an enemy whom they have beaten so constantly, and under so many disadvantages,” wrote Fremantle. But never before had the disadvantage been one of terrain or information. When General Meade arrived at Cemetery Hill that night, he was relieved to find that his army held the high ground. The ridge occupied by the Federals was several miles long and in some parts more than 140 feet high. Lee’s army was spread out in a thin semicircle below.
The four European observers nevertheless shared the Confederates’ optimism. Lawley’s malady had returned, but he insisted on breakfasting at 3:30 A.M. with the Prussian observer Scheibert, Fremantle, and Captain Ross, who had shaved his beard and waxed his mustache in anticipation of the day’s battle. He made silly comments about Mars calling, which the others accepted in good humor.
They returned to Fremantle’s oak tree on Seminary Ridge and there found Lee and his generals discussing the plan of attack. Longstreet was still trying to persuade Lee to retire from Gettysburg. Fremantle was amused to see Generals Longstreet and John B. Hood whittle at sticks while they talked. The habit struck him as peculiarly American. Ross soon lost interest in the Confederates’ conversation and stared at the Federal positions through his field glasses. He experienced a jolt when he saw them looking straight back at him through their own.15
In the morning, despite being ordered to move his troops into attack formation, Longstreet procrastinated for several hours, giving Meade more time to prepare. Federal reinforcements had been arriving throughout the night, including the 7th Maine Infantry (and the English runaway Frederick Farr), which was sent to shore up the extreme end of the Union line. “Order from General Gibbon read to us,” recorded a private in one of the Minnesota regiments occupying Cemetery Ridge. “He says this is to be the great battle of the war and that any soldier leaving the ranks without leave will be instantly put to death.”16
The concentration of troops now numbered 60,000 Confederates and 85,000 Federals, yet all was quiet during July 2 until late afternoon. Bored with waiting, Ross and Fremantle left the other two by the tree and went exploring. They bumped into two members of Longstreet’s staff. One of them, Colonel James B. Walton, was in charge of the reserve artillery. The Confederates shared their cherries with them, and afterward they all went for a dip in the stream. When the Englishmen returned to the oak tree, Jeb Stuart had at last reappeared with the missing cavalry. Lee was so angry he could barely acknowledge him.
“No one would have imagined that such masses of men and such a powerful artillery were about to commence the work of destruction,” wrote Fremantle. “We began to doubt whether a fight was off to-day at all.” The sudden explosion of Confederate artillery at 4:45 P.M. gave the answer. An hour later, Longstreet ordered his corps to storm the Federal defenses. Fremantle was amazed by Lee’s behavior once the fighting began. The general sat by himself on a tree stump. No one spoke to him. He received only one report and sent just one message. He had become an observer in his own battle. “I know not whether I am mistaken,” Lawley wrote later; “Lee struck me as more anxious and ruffled than I had ever seen him before, though it required close observation to detect it.”17 In previous battles, Lee had encouraged his subordinates to use their initiative, but at Gettysburg the practice allowed for increased confusion. Without a leader to coordinate its movements, the Confederate assault was like a random firecracker display. To add to the strangeness of the scene, a Confederate marching band “began to play polkas and waltzes, which sounded very curious, accompanied by the hissing and bursting of shells.”18
The cannonade sounded “one deep prolonged bellowing roar,” wrote Lawley. “A thick canopy of smoke, constantly rent by bright darting flashes of flame, cast its dense pall over the struggling, bleeding thousands who toiled and died in its centre.”19 Lee’s plan called for a specific type of attack known as “en echelon,” meaning that the divisions were to attack in sequence, parallel to one another—first hitting the south side of Meade’s line, which held Little Round Top hill, and then the north side, which overlooked the cemetery near the town. En echelon assaults were complicated, requiring precision timing and execution; it would have been a risky maneuver for Lee under the best of circumstances, and to attempt one now, when two of his three corps commanders were new and untried, was asking a great deal. The Federals had orders to hold Little Round Top “at all hazards”; Father William Corby, one of the chaplains of the Irish Brigade, climbed to the top of a boulder and called out that any soldier killed on the battlefield would be given a full Christian burial, but God help those who ran away.22.3 20 Almost half the brigade was killed or wounded that day, shot to pieces in the infamous Wheat Field, which lay near the bottom of Little Round Top. Meanwhile, General Ewell’s attacks against Meade’s northern lines along Cemetery Hill teetered on the brink of victory, but fierce Federal counterattacks drove the Confederates back to the town. When the sun went down, each army had suffered almost ten thousand casualties.
Lee was hemorrhaging men, yet he still believed that one more assault would dislodge the Federals and allow him to pick off the fleeing divisions one by one. He wanted all 65 batteries and 282 guns ready and primed for action for the next day, July 3. Longstreet had argued against fighting the Federals at Gettysburg, and he now vehemently protested against Lee’s proposal to attack the Union center, which, as far as he could tell, would simply be a repeat of Fredericksburg, only this time with the Confederates on the plain and the Federals firing at them from above. Lee was confident that if he sent Jeb Stuart to attack Meade from behind at the same time as the assault in the front, the Federals would be too confused to repel both.
General Meade sensed that Lee was going to throw at him everything within his grasp. Conscious that he was the sixth general to lead the Army of the Potomac, he invited all the generals to a war council at the little white farmhouse that served as his headquarters. The dozen or so commanders discussed whether to retire or continue the battle and then took a vote: they would remain at Gettysburg for one more day and, since they held the higher ground, allow Lee to launch another attack.21
The Confederate reserve artillery was ordered into position, facing the center of Meade’s line. One of the English volunteers who had run the blockade in the spring, Captain Stephen Winthrop, was assigned a battery and told to take it to Captain Charles W. Squires of the Washington Artillery. Although he had been appointed to Longstreet’s staff in late April, Winthrop had arrived at his headquarters only a day or so before the battle, and the order flummoxed him. He tried to memorize the directions, but it proved impossible to navigate the country roads without a map. He became lost and did not arrive until midnight. Squires was so angry that he had Winthrop placed under arrest. The unlucky Englishman was held under arms until the morning, when Colonel Walton came to his rescue.22
Early in the morning the four observers joined Lee’s and Longstreet’s staff as they reconnoitered the battleground, the first time the Confederates had done so since the battle erupted. It was unnerving for Fremantle to walk past the bodies of fallen soldiers, some of whom turned out to be still alive, opening their eyes as they heard him approach. The conspicuous party attracted the attention of a sharpshooter, which led to an encounter with a hidden battery. A few shells whizzed over their heads. One landed on a Federal field hospital, trapping the wounded inside when the building went up in flames.
Although Lee had wanted simultaneous artillery and infantry attacks, Longstreet was inordinately slow in placing his men. As a result, all the fighting that morning took place in one location around Cemetery Hill. By noon, there were 3,500 casualties. Hundred of horses were dead or dying, including sixteen killed by a shell in the yard next to Meade’s farmhouse. Then the battlefield went silent for a while, which allowed the midday sun to clear the enveloping smoke, and the next stage of Lee’s mangled plan went into motion. Francis Dawson was recovering from dysentery, but even in his weakened state he worked feverishly to transport ordnance to the 164 artillery crews facing the Federal center line: “Every arrangement was made to shell the enemy’s position, on Cemetery Hill, and follow this up by an attack in force,” he wrote. “Three or four hundred pieces of artillery were being fired as rapidly as the cannoneers could load them. Being in the centre of the front line, I had an excellent view of the fight.”23
Leaving Lawley and Scheibert at their post by the oak tree, Fremantle and Ross went down into the town, thinking that the view from the cupola above Ewell’s headquarters would offer a spectacular panorama. The idea became less attractive as shells began bursting from all directions. They had managed to reach the tollgate when flying shrapnel sliced into their guide. A little boy who had latched on to them began screaming and laughing hysterically each time another shell burst. Fremantle realized they had to get away as quickly as possible. But at the next explosion the child darted off before they could stop him. “I never saw this boy again, or found out who he was,” wrote Fremantle sadly.24
The two observers were still dodging shells when Longstreet finally ordered his corps to prepare for the attack. The Federal guns had stopped firing, leading him to assume that his own barrage had successfully destroyed their defense. He did not know that his artillerists’ aim had been slightly off, or that the Federals were simply conserving their ammunition for the expected assault. The Confederates, on the other hand, had used up all their long-range shells. Longstreet’s artillery chief, Edward P. Alexander, begged him to call the charge before the Federal guns started up again.
Dawson watched as 14,000 Confederate soldiers assembled in the woods. One division, led by the ringleted George Pickett, was almost exclusively Virginian. Prayers were read to the brigades, almost as though the men were receiving the last rites. “This is a desperate thing to attempt,” Dawson heard one of the brigadier generals remark. “Just then,” Dawson continued, “a hare which had been lying in the bushes, sprang up and leaped rapidly to the rear. A gaunt Virginian, with an earnestness that struck a sympathetic chord in many a breast, yelled out: ‘Run old heah; if I were an old heah I would run too.’ ”25
The Federals could not see the Confederates massing in the woods across from them. “From our position the eye ranged over a wide expanse of uneven country, fields broken by woods, showing nowhere any signs of an army movement, much less of conflict,” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., wrote in his memoirs. Even at the height of the battle, Gettysburg seemed pleasingly pastoral: “a quiet, midsummer, and champagne country. Neither our lines nor those of the enemy were visible to us; and the sounds of battle were hushed.” When the Confederate artillery fire began, Charles Francis Jr. and the survivors of the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry had been lying on the grass, near their horses, while they waited for orders. The thick heat and soft buzzing of insects acted as a kind of soporific. “Lulled by the incessant roar of the cannon,” he recorded, “while the fate of the army and the nation trembled in the balance, at the very crisis of the great conflict, I dropped quietly asleep. It was not heroic; but it was … war.”26
Forty-seven Confederate regiments spaced over the distance of a mile began advancing across the 1,400-yard field that lay in front of Cemetery Ridge. Francis Lawley—too ill to climb the tree himself—shouted up to Justus Scheibert to describe the charge to him. The Prussian started a running commentary full of technical descriptions, prompting Lawley to bellow at him in frustration to use layman’s terms, but Scheibert was at a loss for further words, having never witnessed such butchery. The closer the Confederates stumbled toward the concave Federal line, the easier targets they presented. Fremantle entered the wood where Pickett’s division had gathered only a few minutes before. Federal shells were bringing down huge tree limbs, and yet the wood was full of gray-clad soldiers, “in numbers as great as the crowd in Oxford Street in the middle of the day.” Then he saw that every single one was wounded.27
The woodland scene confused Fremantle. When he found Longstreet, who was sitting on a rail at the edge of the wood, he made an exceptionally thoughtless comment. “Thinking I was just in time to see the attack,” he wrote contritely, “I remarked to the General that ‘I wouldn’t have missed this for any thing.’ ” Longstreet gave a hollow laugh. “The Devil you wouldn’t! I would like to have missed it very much; we’ve attacked and been repulsed; look there!”28 Longstreet asked wearily for a drink, and Fremantle offered him a sip of rum from his flask. Scattered in heaps and fragments below were nearly seven thousand Confederate soldiers. George Pickett had lost two-thirds of his division, including all thirteen colonels. “I suppose that I was the first man to whom Pickett spoke when he reached the line,” wrote Francis Dawson. “With tears in his eyes, he said to me: ‘Why did you not halt my men here? Great God, where, oh! where is my division?’ I told him that he saw around him what there was left of it.”29
Fremantle was surprised by Longstreet’s calm demeanor. A Federal charge at this moment would have smashed the Confederate army into pieces. When one general protested that he could not gather his men, Longstreet sarcastically told him not to worry, the enemy would do it for him. Lee came riding up the hill to help rally the soldiers. “His face, which is always placid and cheerful, did not show signs of the slightest disappointment,” wrote Fremantle. His only concern was to ready a line of defense. Lee asked Colonel Edward Alexander whether they had enough ammunition to repel a Federal attack. The artillerist gave a bleak answer. Lee bravely acknowledged his part in the failed charge. “It was all my fault this time,” Lee told the dazed fugitives from Pickett’s charge; “form your ranks again when you get back to cover.”30 At 7:30 P.M., when he was certain that there would be no more fighting that day, Fremantle returned to camp to describe the recent events to Lawley.
On the following day, July 4, the battlefield was soaked by a long, steady downpour. “Many dear friends had yielded up their young lives during the hours which had elapsed,” wrote Charles Francis Jr., “but, though twenty thousand fellow creatures were wounded or dead around us, though the flood-gates of heaven seemed open and the torrents fell upon the quick and the dead, yet the elements seemed electrified with a certain magnetic influence of victory, and, as the great army sank down over-wearied in its tracks, it felt that the crisis and danger was passed—that Gettysburg was immortal.”31
Lee now had just one aim—to retreat with the remnants of his army before Meade attacked. In all, 70,000 Confederates had fought at Gettysburg; only 48,000 were leaving. The Federal army had one field hospital for every 12,000 soldiers; the Confederates simply gathered as many of the injured as they could and loaded them onto wagons. Thousands were left behind, and countless men died from their wounds or starved to death waiting for someone to rescue them. Two weeks after the battle, a civilian stumbled upon one of the abandoned camps. A party was sent to collect the survivors. A shocked witness wrote:
One boy without beard was stretched out dead, quite naked, a piece of blanket thrown over his emaciated form, a rag over his face, and his small, thin hands laid over his breast. Of the dead none knew their names, and it breaks my heart to think of the mothers waiting and watching for the sons laid in the lonely grave on that fearful battlefield. All of those men in the woods were nearly naked, and when ladies approached they tried to cover themselves with the filthy rags they had cast aside. The wounds themselves, unwashed and untouched, were full of worms. God only knows what they suffered.32
Lincoln would never forgive Meade for not driving after Lee. But the Union commander had lost a quarter of his army; 23,000 men were dead, wounded, or captured. His generals supported his decision to wait until they were sure of Lee’s movements. A temporary halt while the injured were removed and the supply trains arrived did not seem like an intolerable delay. The Federal cavalry caught up with the Confederates two days later. “As we approached Hagerstown, we heard some fighting ahead, between our cavalry and a cavalry force of the enemy. I rode ahead to see if any artillery was needed,” wrote Colonel Alexander.
During the day I had an accession to my staff. Capt. Stephen Winthrop … on the march from Gettysburg [had] negotiated with Gen. Sorrel, Longstreet’s adjutant, to be transferred to me. Sorrel asked me if I would consent—which I did very willingly, and he joined me about noon on the 6th. He was well built, stout & very muscular, good grey-blue eyes, a full, oval face, with a British mouth and nose, good natured, jolly, & brave. He was an excellent and admirable representation of his country.… That very afternoon he got a chance to show the stuff he was made of.33
Winthrop was returning with a fresh horse from Alexander’s reserve when he rode into one of Jeb Stuart’s regiments as it prepared to attack a Federal battery. He introduced himself and asked to carry their colors. The Confederates were too surprised to decline his request. He positioned himself at the front of the charge and leaped forward. “Winthrop’s horse was killed by a canister quite close to the guns, but the charge was repulsed. He got another horse, and went in a second charge,” recalled Alexander. Though armed with only his saber, he rode into the body of the Federal cavalry and plunged his sword into one of them, “coming out with his sabre bent & bloody all over.” Winthrop went off to look for Alexander, satisfied that his honor had been redeemed after his humiliating arrest at Gettysburg.
“The March back to the Potomac was dreary and miserable indeed,” wrote Dawson. “The rain fell in torrents. The clothing of the men was worn and tattered, and too many of them were without shoes. It was a heart-breaking business, and gloom settled down upon the army.” A trail eighteen miles long slowly ground through the mud toward Hagerstown in Maryland. During the journey, Longstreet talked to Fremantle and Lawley about the reasons for the Confederate defeat, placing the failure on numbers rather than tactics.34 “He said the mistake they had made was in not concentrating the army more, and making the attack yesterday with 30,000 men instead of 15,000,” reported Fremantle. “The advance had been in three lines, and the troops of Hill’s corps who gave way were young soldiers, who had never been under fire before.” Longstreet would retract this opinion after the war, however, writing in his own memoirs that forty thousand men “could not have carried the position at Gettysburg.”35
Lawley, Fremantle, Ross, and Scheibert arrived at Hagerstown on the seventh and took rooms together at the Washington Hotel.36 Lawley had a hard task ahead of him and was left alone by the others so he could write in peace. He could not disguise the grief in his heart: “For the first time during my residence in Secessia,” he began, “it is my province to record, as having happened under my own eyes, a failure of the Confederate arms.”37
22.1 Despite not having met a single Southerner who was prepared to free his slaves under any conditions, Fremantle wrote after his visit to Charleston: “I think that if the Confederate States were left alone, the system would be much modified and amended.”
22.2 Only the week before, on June 9, a letter from Lieutenant Sydney Herbert Davies had appeared on his desk. Davies had resigned from his regiment in Canada in order to carry secret dispatches to the South. “I have now the honour to apply for a major’s commission in the CSA,” he wrote. “I am in possession of a first class certificate as an instructor of musketry and am not ignorant of warfare.” He was rewarded with a commission of first lieutenant.5
22.3 Gettysburg, like Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville, had its own lexicon of horrors where thousands died contesting a patch of ground: the Wheat Field, Devil’s Den, and the Peach Orchard.