* The third day of fighting at Gettysburg was the last; Lee had thrown his bolt, and had to withdraw back to Virginia, ending his invasion of the North. The Federals, badly injured themselves in the battle, didn't have the energy to pursue the Confederates, and they escaped with little further injury -- much to the distress of President Lincoln. Nonetheless, it was a significant Union victory, which not incidentally led to another foundation document of American democracy: Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
* The bloody defeat the Army of Northern Virginia had suffered on the slopes of Cemetery Ridge seemed to snap Robert E. Lee out of the muddle that had possessed him for the previous three days. He realized that he had done badly, and went around to his men that evening saying: "It's all my fault." "The blame is mine." "Don't be discouraged, I need your help."
It was not like Lee to simply wring his hands, however, and even as he was trying to brace up his demoralized men, he was laying detailed plans for evacuation. There was no alternative but to withdraw. His army was low on food and ammunition; the fighting had worn his troops down; and if the Yankees realized that they possessed a force superior in numbers and with vastly greater access to supplies, the Army of Northern Virginia might well be wiped out.
Lee wrote out detailed orders outlining how the retreat was to be conducted, and then went around to his senior generals to ensure that they were properly briefed on what they had to do the next day. Although he was used to giving his commanders plenty of leash and had won great victories in the past on that basis, at Gettysburg the result had been a fiasco. Now he was taking no chances. Longstreet and Ewell were to set up a defensive line along Seminary Ridge while the wounded were put on the road during the day. Once the sun went down, the entire position was to be evacuated in the dark. The wounded would move due west over South Mountain to Chambersburg, then south to Williamsport, a few miles upstream from the old Sharpsburg battlefield, where a pontoon bridge would be waiting for them. The rest of the army would march directly southwest toward Williamsburg, passing through Hagerstown on the way.
It was well after midnight when Lee met one of his cavalry brigadiers, John B. Imboden, in the dark. Imboden saw that Lee was clearly sad and weary, and said to him: "General, this has been a hard day on you." Lee replied: "Yes, this has been a sad, sad day to us." He fell silent, then praised Pickett and his men, concluding: "Too bad, too bad. Oh, too bad!" He asked Imboden, who was to guard the wagon train carrying the wounded, into his tent to look over a map to establish the route of the retreat. Lee gave the last word on the battle: "We must now return to Virginia."
The Confederates expected an attack all the next day, the 4th of July 1863, but the Federals remained idle in the morning. That afternoon, the rain poured down, dampening further prospects for an assault. The rain also bogged down the rebel withdrawal, but by sunrise on 5 July they were gone.
The rebels made good time despite the muddy roads, though the wagon train carrying the wounded was a ghastly scene. Most of the wagons didn't even have a layer of straw for the maimed soldiers to lie on; there were no medical supplies to speak of; and the rain soaked them to the skin. The injured men moaned and cried out, some praying to die, others asking to be shot and put out of their misery. Yankee cavalry harassed the wagon train, but Confederate troopers managed to drive them off. The column reached Williamsport late on 5 July, only to find out that the Army of Northern Virginia now faced total disaster: Federal cavalry had destroyed the pontoon bridge at Williamsport, and the rains had swelled the Potomac beyond fording.
Imboden spent the next day fending off attacks by Union cavalry and waiting for the rest of the army to arrive. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia reached the river himself on the morning of 7 July. Lee realized that he was in a terrible predicament, with nowhere to run and the Army of the Potomac presumably in hot pursuit. Lee ordered a defensive perimeter six miles (ten kilometers) long set up around Williamsport, while his engineers worked frantically to throw a pontoon bridge across the river, which was still rising. He also had his men scrounge up boats to take the wounded across in the meantime.
* The Army of the Potomac was in fact in pursuit, but calling it "hot" would be an exaggeration. Meade remained cautious; and Lee had done everything he could to encourage that caution. Brigadier General Francis Barlow, who had been in the care of the rebels after being seriously wounded on the first day of fighting, was left behind for the Yankees to recover, and reported that he had overheard Confederates talking about their plan to pretend to retreat and then catch the Federals in an ambush. How much faith Meade took in such an obvious ruse is hard to say; Meade had plenty of common sense, and nobody with any brains could have failed to notice how conveniently such a conversation had taken place within earshot of a Federal prisoner who was about to be left behind.
On the Fourth of July, Meade's most assertive action was to issue a congratulatory message to the troops, which concluded by encouraging "the army for greater efforts to drive from our soil every vestige of the presence of the invader." The message was read that evening, but there was little enthusiasm in response. The men had been fought out, and the Fourth had been spent mostly in dealing with the wounded and disposing of the dead. A sergeant with a New Jersey regiment wrote later:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
Upon the open fields, likes sheaves bound by the reaper, in crevices of rocks, behind fences, trees and buildings; in thickets, where they had crept for safety only to die in agony; by stream or wall or hedge, wherever the battle had raged or their weakening steps could carry them, lay the dead. Some, with faces bloated and blackened beyond recognition, lay with glassy eyes staring up at the blazing summer sun; others, with faces downward and clenched hands filled with grass or earth, which told of the agony of their last moments.
Here a headless trunk, there a severed limb; in all the grotesque positions that unbearable pain and intense suffering contorts the human form, they lay. Upon the faces of some death had frozen a smile; some showed the trembling shadow of fear, while upon others was indelibly set the grim stamp of determination.
All around was the wreck the battlestorm leaves in its wake -- broken caissons, dismounted guns, small arms bent and twisted by the storm or dropped and scattered by disabled hands; dead and bloated horses, torn and ragged equipments, and all the sorrowful wreck that the waves of battle leave at their ebb; and over all, hugging the earth like a fog, poisoning every breath, the pestilential stench of decaying humanity.
END_QUOTE
The heavy rains had done nothing to improve the men's morale. Besides, most of them had enough of hurrahs and cheers and such nonsense as they had entertained in the early campaigns; they were veterans now, not naive recruits.
Most of the army's corps commanders were feeling just as cautious as Meade. That night, they voted to hold their ground until they knew Lee was retreating. The next day the rebels were gone, but Meade and his generals remained uncertain. Sedgwick moved out with VI Corps in the afternoon and promptly got stuck in the mud.
The next day the Army of the Potomac moved out in mass, advancing on an arc through Frederick, Maryland, to the east of Lee's columns, to ensure that Washington and Baltimore remained protected. When Meade himself reached Frederick on 7 July, he checked into a hotel, got a hot bath, and put on fresh clothes. He wrote his wife that since he had taken command he had "not a regular night's rest, and many nights not a wink of sleep, and for several days did not even wash my face and hands, no regular food, and all the time in a state of mental anxiety. Indeed, I think I have lived as much in this time as in the last thirty years."
Meade was too exhausted to be aggressive. Halleck was sending him telegrams, pressing him to hurry. Meade irritably replied that he was hurrying, but his troops were raggedy and barefoot, and added that he did not believe that Lee was quite the pushover now that Washington seemed to assume that he was. To be sure, Meade was getting supplies, plenty of them, while Lee was not, but refitting an exhausted army on the move was no trivial task.
By 9 July, the Army of the Potomac was at Middletown, just to the east of South Mountain, in a position to move over the mountain and engage Lee's forces. The rains had died down, the roads were drying, and Meade had been receiving reinforcements. In fact, the Army of the Potomac was effectively back up to full strength. Two days later, Meade was in position to attack, but his own corps commanders discouraged him from doing so. Lee's engineers had thrown up formidable defenses, and the generals wanted to inspect them before sending their men against them.
BACK_TO_TOP* Lee was expecting to be attacked at any moment, and every hour Meade delayed was a gift. While the rebels had received some supplies of ammunition, they were in no position to withstand a determined Yankee assault.
Meade did not attack. On the evening of 13 July, the Army of Northern Virginia began to cross the river in heavy rain on a ramshackle pontoon bridge that Lee's engineers had built by tearing down local houses and the like for materials. Meade did not finally move against the rebels until the morning of 14 July, and by that time most of them were gone. Only a rearguard of a few hundred men were swept up in the Federal attack. However, one of the casualties included rebel Brigadier General Johnston Pettigrew, killed in a shootout with Union cavalry. Pettigrew had been an inspiring officer, as were many of the officers who did not return from Lee's thrust north of the Potomac. So many of the Army of Northern Virginia's bravest and best were now dead, maimed, or in Yankee hands that performing another a major offensive into the North again was effectively out of the question.
President Lincoln was at his wit's end with Meade. Lincoln had been appalled to read Meade's Fourth of July message to his troops that had spoken of "driving the invader from our soil". That might have been a natural thing for a Pennsylvanian to say concerning an enemy on Pennsylvania soil, but to Lincoln it seemed clueless: "Drive the invader from our soil!? My God! Is that all?!"
He elaborated a bit later: "This is a dreadful reminiscence of McClellan ... Will the generals never get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil." He said to his personal secretary John Hay: "We had them in our grasp. We had only to stretch forth our hands and they were ours. And nothing I could say or do could make the army move." He told his son, Robert Todd Lincoln: "If I had gone up there, I could have whipped them myself."
Navy Secretary Gideon Welles wrote in his diary that he had rarely seen the President so distraught. Lincoln wrote Meade an exasperated and confused letter in which he tried to simultaneously pat him on the back and give him a kick in the ass -- but having completed it and vented his frustration, Lincoln saw the foolishness of it and filed it.
Meade received little thanks from the President for his victory at Gettysburg. On receiving more telegrams from Halleck indicating general dissatisfaction with his performance, Meade finally snapped and submitted his resignation. The President knew it would not do to accept the resignation of a general who had just won a clear victory. Halleck, timid as usual, backtracked, and Meade withdrew the resignation.
The Army of the Potomac moved over the river at Harper's Ferry and Berlin on the 17th, 18th, and 19th of July. III Corps, now under Major General French after the abrupt retirement of Dan Sickles by a cannonball, tried to engage the Confederates in the Shenandoah Valley, but French was as out of his depth in corps command, and the rebels escaped.
By early August, the two forces were once again arrayed along the Rapidan River, with the rebels in Culpeper and the Federals in Warrenton. There they remained. After two months of marching and fighting, the campaign was over. For the immediate future, the only fighting was in the form of occasional skirmishes and small cavalry raids. With the Army of the Potomac back in northern Virginia, John Mosby returned to his custom of hit-and-run raids on Federal outposts, striking fast and then disappearing. The Yankees could never catch him.
As a footnote to the Gettysburg campaign, Brigadier General John Buford, whose Union cavalrymen exchanged the first shots with the rebels at Gettysburg, died six months later of what doctors called "sheer exhaustion", though in hindsight, it appears to have been cholera. The Union lost another valuable cavalryman who could match the skill and boldness of his Confederate counterparts.
* Gettysburg was a decisive setback for the Confederacy. Early reports in Southern newspapers of the fighting at Gettysburg had spoken of a great Confederate victory, but as more reliable news arrived, the reports shifted to gloom and defeat. Robert E. Lee was himself not entirely displeased with the campaign. If he had intended to win the war for the Confederacy at a single stroke, he had failed, but though he had set this as a hopeful goal, it wasn't his only purpose in the campaign. He had successfully sidetracked the Army of the Potomac from offensive campaigns that summer and got the Federals out of Northern Virginia. Had he not moved, the Confederacy might have been even worse off.
That did not conceal the fact that Lee had been defeated -- and worse, on 4 July, as he was withdrawing the Army of Northern Virginia, the city of Vicksburg, Mississippi, had fallen to Union forces. With that, the Federals had complete control of the Mississippi, and had cut the Confederacy in half. Dissension among Confederate leadership was growing, the South's economy was collapsing, and hopes for foreign recognition of the Confederacy had vanished.
All in all, there was little to give hope to the defenders of the Southern cause that summer. In hindsight, after Gettysburg, the Confederacy had effectively lost the war -- and some far-sighted Southerners knew it then. At the end of July, Chief of Ordnance Josiah Gorgas wrote in his diary: "The Confederacy totters to its destruction."
BACK_TO_TOP* The battle of Gettysburg had involved 160,000 men, with more than 50,000 of them killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. Casualties for the Federals were about 25% of their force, while Confederate casualties were about 40% of their force. About 22,000 wounded men were left behind on the battlefield as the two armies went south. Only a minimal number of doctors and helpful hands could be left behind to care for them, and the task was overwhelming. The caretakers were soon joined by workers from the Sanitary Commission and Christian Commission, but they were still short of the supplies needed to care for so many injured men.
The rail line into Gettysburg had been cut during the course of the fighting. Union Brigadier General Hermann Haupt, in charge of railroads, had his people fix it quickly, but it had never been anything more than a spur line to begin with and it could not bear the necessary traffic. Haupt quickly brought it up to capacity, and soon supplies were flowing to Gettysburg in quantity. War Office clerks wired frantically all over the North, looking for the resources needed to care for the men. Although wounded were still being picked up as late as 10 July, within a few more days the worst of the task was over, with such wounded as could be moved sent to hospitals elsewhere.
There was also the parallel problem of dealing with the massive numbers of dead. Disposing of the stinking corpses was obviously a high priority -- but at the same time, simply throwing all the dead into a pit and covering them up was unacceptable treatment of men, Yank and rebel, who had fought so heroically. Temporary graves could be dug, but there had to be a more permanent solution.
Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin hired a local businessman to deal with the matter, who contacted all the governors of the Northern states at the end of July. By mid-August, he had managed to raise enough money to buy 17 acres (7 hectares) of land on Cemetery Hill to properly bury the dead. By agreement among the governors, the dead would be buried in sections assigned to each of the states.
The cemetery at Gettysburg was ready for dedication by late October. The dedication ceremony had to be noble and dignified, not only to honor the dead, but to give the governors an opportunity to put on an impressive appearance for the voters.
Governor Curtin was the host, and so he decided to invite the famous public figure and orator Edward Everett to speak at the ceremony. Everett replied that he would be glad to do so, but he had prior commitments and could not be at Gettysburg on the planned date, 23 October. If the dedication were postponed to November, he would be able to speak.
Telegrams went back and forth and the dedication ceremony was postponed to 19 November. General Meade was invited, but had to reply apologetically that the pressures of war did not allow him to attend. After a time, somebody suggested that the President be invited as well. To be sure, this was a states' matter, but it seemed appropriate to invite the Chief Executive as well. An invitation went out on 2 November, asking the President to attend and to say a "few appropriate remarks" after Everett's address, a soft hint that he should avoid length and the folksy, undignified stories for which he was notorious. Lincoln accepted, seeing in the ceremony a chance to make the goals of his administration better known to the public; he needed no hints to be somber, knowing that the dedication of a war cemetery was not the time nor place for clowning around.
There was some criticism of the President for attending the ceremony. A few hostile editors attacked Lincoln for what they felt was a cynical use of a solemn occasion to promote his own agenda. Some prominent Republicans commented on the matter with contrived indifference, hinting that they regarded the President as a political nonentity, that it made no difference what he did. Lincoln shrugged and went.
On 18 November, the President took a special train to Gettysburg, in the company of some of his cabinet secretaries and a few foreign ambassadors. The little town, now patched up from its battle scars as well as possible in the time available, was packed with dignitaries and the curious. Generals Doubleday and Gibbon were present. The ceremony was crowded. Everett gave his speech, which lasted for two hours, as a proper oration was supposed to in those more patient days. Although Everett was almost 70, he did not falter once during his speech. On completion, after a chorus had sung a song written for the occasion, the President rose and gave his short comments:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate -- we cannot consecrate -- we cannot hallow-this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion-that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
END_QUOTE
This is not quite the text that was delivered on 19 November 1863, since the President polished the speech a bit later for the records, and likely had improvised from his original written text anyway -- but it is essentially what was said. The speech went over flat, probably because the audience had been worn out by Everett, and the applause was minimal. Lincoln clearly thought it was a failure, saying it "didn't scour."
The next day, however, Everett wrote the President: "I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes." Lincoln, somewhat relieved, replied: "In our respective parts yesterday, you could not have been excused to make a short address, nor I a long one. I am pleased to know that, in your judgement, the little I did say was not entirely a failure."
Whether the speech went over with the public was one thing, but the opinion of Everett, who was president of Harvard, had been an ambassador to England, a secretary of state, and a governor of Massachusetts, carried weight. In time, others would share his opinion, and the Gettysburg Address would become familiar to every American born since that time. Indeed, it would become an extension of the Constitution, re-affirming the superiority of the Union.
At the moment, however, the only consolation to Lincoln was Everett's compliments. The President was sick in bed with cowpox, a mild but still contagious relative of smallpox, and was isolated. This was not entirely a bad thing, since it was one of the few times Lincoln had been able to lay back and rest since he had taken office. He also characteristically found some humor in the illness: "I now have something I can give everybody."
BACK_TO_TOP* This document was derived from a history of the American Civil War that was originally released online in 2003, and updated to 2019. It was a very large document, and I first tried to simply break it into volumes for publication in ebook format; however, that proved unsatisfactory, and I decided to break it into separate focused volumes. This stand-alone document was initially released in 2022.
As for sources:
Illustrations details:
Finally, I need to thank readers for their interest in my work, and welcome any useful feedback.
* Revision history:
v1.0.0 / jun 22 v1.0.1 / may 24 / Review & polish.BACK_TO_TOP
