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  PRAISE FOR BRUCE CATTON

  AND GETTYSBURG: THE FINAL FURY

  “No one ever wrote American history with more easy grace, beauty and emotional power, or greater understanding of its meaning, than Bruce Catton. There is a near-magic power of imagination in Catton’s work that seemed to project him physically into the battlefields, along the dusty roads and to the campfires of another age.”

  —Oliver Jensen,

  former editor of American Heritage

  “[Catton combines] a scholar’s appreciation of the Grand Design with a newsman’s keenness for meaningful vignette.… Catton created an ‘enlisted man’s-eye view’ of the war that treated humanely the errors on both sides.”

  —Newsweek

  “All [of Catton’s Civil War books] are remarkably good books, distinguished by a vivid, fast-moving style.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “One of the most skillful old pros that the craft [of historical narrative] has ever known.”

  —Saturday Review of Books

  ALSO BY BRUCE CATTON

  The War Lords of Washington

  Mr. Lincoln’s Army

  Glory Road

  This Hallowed Ground

  A Stillness at Appomattox

  U. S. Grant and the American Military Tradition

  Banners at Shenandoah:

  A Story of Sheridan’s Fighting Cavalry

  This Hallowed Ground

  America Goes to War

  The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War

  The American Heritage Short History of the Civil War

  Grant Moves South

  The Coming Fury

  Terrible Swift Sword

  Two Roads to Sumter

  Four Days: The Historical Record of the

  Death of President Kennedy

  Never Call Retreat

  Grant Takes Command

  Waiting for the Morning Train

  Michigan: A Bicentennial History

  The Bold and Magnificent Dream:

  America’s Founding Years, 1492–1815

  BRUCE CATTON

  GETTYSBURG: THE FINAL FURY

  Bruce Catton was born in Petoskey, Michigan, in 1899. A United States journalist and writer, Catton was one of America’s most popular Civil War historians. He worked as a newspaperman in Boston, Cleveland, and Washington, and also held a position at the U.S. Department of Commerce in 1948. Catton’s bestselling book, A Stillness at Appomattox, earned him a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1954. Before his death in 1978, Catton wrote a total of ten books detailing the Civil War, including his last, Grant Takes Command.

  FIRST VINTAGE CIVIL WAR LIBRARY EDITION, JUNE 2013

  Copyright © 1974 by Bruce Catton

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1974.

  Vintage Civil War Library and colophon are

  registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  All photographs, drawings, and paintings reproduced in this book are from the collections of the Library of Congress, except the two on this page and this page, which are reproduced by courtesy of The Bettmann Archive, Inc. The maps are by Rafael Palacios.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition

  as follows:

  Catton, Bruce.

  Gettysburg: the final fury / Bruce Catton.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: 1974.

  1. Gettysburg, Battle of, 1863.

  I. Title.

  E475.53.C32 1990 89-23554

  973.7′349—dc20

  eISBN: 978-0-345-80606-2

  Cover design by Linda Huang

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Map

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Illustrations

  One

  The Road to Gettysburg

  Two

  First Day: Collision

  Three

  Second Day: Fighting by Compulsion

  Four

  Third Day: Climax

  Five

  Long Remember

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  1.1 General Robert E. Lee and his generals

  2.1 Major General George Gordon Meade

  2.2 Cavalrymen fighting on foot

  2.4 Death of Major General John F. Reynolds

  2.5 Brigadier General James J. Archer’s brigade captured

  2.6 Major General Winfield S. Hancock

  3.1 Lieutenant General James Longstreet’s attack on the Union left

  3.2 Federal defeat at Devil’s Den

  3.3 A Confederate fatality

  3.4 Union defenses on Little Round Top

  3.5 Confederate advance on Little Round Top

  3.6 The Round Tops

  3.7 Three views of Little Round Top

  3.8 Captain John Bigelow’s 9th Massachusetts battery

  3.9 Union artillerists withdrawing a gun by hand

  3.10 Culp’s Hill on July 2

  3.11 Butler’s battery at Cemetery Ridge

  3.13 Louisiana brigade charging Cemetery Hill

  3.14 After the fight for Little Round Top

  3.15 A Union defender

  3.16 General Meade’s council of war

  3.17 Defense of Cemetery Hill

  3.18 Evening of July 2

  3.19 Brief respite

  4.1 General Hancock directing Union defense

  4.2 The “little clump of trees” on Cemetery Ridge

  4.3 Cemetery Ridge today

  4.5 Lee’s attempt to break Meade’s line

  4.6 Caissons and horses after Major General George Pickett’s charge

  4.7 Confederate Brigadier General Lewis A. Armistead

  4.8 Waiting for the burial squads

  5.1 General Robert E. Lee

  5.3 Lee’s retreat

  5.4 En route to a Northern prison camp

  MAPS

  col.1 Area Around Gettysburg

  1.2 Afternoon of June 28

  2.3 Morning of July 1

  3.12 Afternoon of July 2

  4.4 Afternoon of July 3

  5.2 Lee’s Retreat

  One

  THE ROAD TO GETTYSBURG

  It took a strange combination of forces to bring about the terrible battle of Gettysburg. No one of these, taken by itself, was strong enough to cause such a cataclysm. Only when they were arranged together in proper sequence did these forces become deadly. The elements that make up gunpowder are harmless enough, separately; in combination they become explosive, needing only a spark or a sudden jar to set them off. The battle of Gettysburg was like that.

  It was compounded partly of geography, which is to say that the armies fought at Gettysburg because the roads led them there. Sheer chance played its part in this; if various circumstances had been just a little different the unremarkable Pennsylvania market town would have remained at peace and the armies would have gone elsewhere. Military logic was responsible, in part, and so was plain human miscalculation, because it is not always easy to interpret the date that logic brings you.

  Finally, the battle was fated, in that it grew out of what the war for two years had been. It was a battle that had to be fought, and the forces that produced it were so stupendous that the battle became the great hinge of the war, the turning point where it began to swing in a different direction. But even though destiny was at work, it is still worth while to see why this great fight took place at Gettysburg instead of in some other town
, on the first three days of July 1863 instead of at some other time.

  Gettysburg came just two months after the most dazzling of all Confederate victories, the battle of Chancellorsville, where the Army of Northern Virginia under Robert E. Lee, who was brilliantly aided by Stonewall Jackson, defeated the Federal Army of the Potomac under Major General Joe Hooker. The Federals outnumbered the Confederates here, two to one, but Lee and Jackson between them were more than a dozen Joe Hookers could have handled, and the Federal offensive which had been supposed to capture Richmond ended in an ignominious retreat. Yet if this Confederate triumph was a work of high military art, it was actually worth less than it seemed to be worth. For one thing, Jackson was killed, and Lee’s army was never again the instantly responsive precision instrument it had been. In the second place, Lee was still badly outnumbered, and the Federal army had great recuperative power; left to itself it would inevitably renew the offensive and the whole job would have to be done over again. Chancellorsville had settled nothing; it had simply set the stage for a further struggle.

  In addition, if things had been going well for the Confederacy in Virginia, they had been going very badly in the Mississippi Valley. While Lee was defeating Hooker, Major General U. S. Grant was forcing his way into the open country behind the great Confederate fortress of Vicksburg, and by the end of the third week in May he had the Confederate Lieutenant General John Pemberton and his army firmly locked up in Vicksburg, isolated and under siege. Unless somebody came to Pemberton’s rescue and forced Grant to raise the siege, Vicksburg was bound to fall, and when it fell the Federals would control the entire Mississippi River. If that happened the Confederacy would be well on its way toward final defeat.

  So when the Confederate authorities took stock, late in May of 1863, they could see dire emergency taking shape in the West, and that fact was bound to affect any plans that might be made for the use of Lee’s army. The Secretary of War proposed that Lee detach a division of infantry and send it off to Pemberton’s rescue. The division suggested for this move was one commanded by young Major General George Pickett, attached to the I Corps commanded by Lieutenant General James Longstreet. Longstreet was a solid, dependable fighting man, Lee’s most trusted lieutenant now that Jackson was gone, and Longstreet considered Pickett’s his best division. Lee strongly objected to this proposal, and he warned the Secretary of War that if this was the only way to save Vicksburg, the government would have to make up its mind whether it wanted to lose Mississippi or Virginia; and the fact that the Confederacy could not under any circumstances afford to lose either state simply added to the load carried by President Jefferson Davis, who would have to make the decision. Lee believed that Hooker was being reinforced and would soon resume the offensive; his own responsibility was the defense of Virginia and the Confederate capital, and he naturally did not think he ought to be weakened.

  As a matter of fact, some of President Davis’s advisers thought that Vicksburg ought to be saved even if that meant taking long chances in front of Richmond. The distinguished General P. G. T. Beauregard, now commanding in South Carolina, urged that Lee be sent to Tennessee, taking Longstreet’s corps with him, to take command of the Confederate army near Chattanooga commanded by General Braxton Bragg. Using Bragg’s army thus augmented, Beauregard believed, Lee could stage an offensive in Tennessee that would compel the Federal government to recall Grant from Mississippi. As for Virginia—the Army of the Potomac was notoriously slow to act, and the depleted Army of Northern Virginia could probably hold it off until Lee and Longstreet’s corps returned. Longstreet advanced a similar plan, except that his plan did not involve sending Lee himself to Tennessee.

  In the end none of these proposals was adopted. The Confederates in the West would have to get along as best they could, and Lee—well, Lee had a daring plan of his own. He would invade Pennsylvania.

  It was a bold move, bound to bring the war to a climax, and yet the reasons for it are somewhat obscure.

  Then and afterward it was argued that Lee’s invasion would relieve the desperate situation in Mississippi by forcing President Lincoln to withdraw support from General Grant. This argument simply does not stand up. The siege of Vicksburg began on May 19. Lee could not put his army in motion before June, and it would be the end of June before he could hope to cross the Potomac. This was giving General Grant altogether too much time; and if Lincoln wanted reinforcements to meet Lee’s thrust, he would not have to reach all the way to Mississippi to get them.

  It was also held that the invasion would support a Southern peace offensive. There was much war-weariness in the North, and the presence of a Confederate army in Pennsylvania would add to it—perhaps to the point where Lincoln would be forced to concede Southern independence. (The invasion might also enable the Confederacy to grasp that elusive will-o’-the-wisp British recognition.) But this would work only if Lee won an overwhelming victory in Pennsylvania. Anything short of that would only stimulate Northern energies. After all, Lee had invaded the northland in September of 1862 and had won neither a negotiated peace nor recognition by London. Instead he had been thrown back at Antietam (Sharpsburg) and Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation as a direct result.

  Actually, Lee’s reasons for marching north seem to have been fairly simple. Sooner or later the Army of the Potomac would resume its drive on Richmond; to move north would disrupt the enemy’s war plans and throw Hooker off balance; it might very well delay the renewed Yankee invasion until the following year. The Confederacy was hard pressed, and that would be a gain worth making.

  In addition, the move would at least give Virginia temporary relief from a strain that had become almost intolerable. The constant struggling of the rival armies had laid much of the state waste; if the war could be moved north for a time that would be a distinct advantage, and Lee’s army could draw its supplies of meat and grain from the lush farmlands of Pennsylvania. Let the North support the war for a while; Virginia needed a chance to catch its breath.

  In plain English, then, the invasion was a matter of limited objectives, which might be summed up in the remark that since Lee’s army was going to have to fight somewhere this summer, it might better fight north of the Mason and Dixon line than south of it.

  The only trouble with this was that because Lee and his army were what they were, an invasion with limited objectives was not possible. If this army went north of the Potomac, its venture was going to be an all-or-nothing thrust simply because both friend and foe were bound to look at it that way. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia had won too many battles; they had begun to seem invincible, both to their enemies and also to themselves. When they went north they carried the undeveloped climax of the war with them. Win or lose, this march was going to take them to the high-water mark.

  The one strategist who realized this most clearly was that untaught, awkward, non-military man Abraham Lincoln.

  Lincoln had had no military education before he entered the White House, but he was a man who could learn fast, and by the summer of 1863 he could understand a military equation as well as any man in America. In the late spring of 1863, when something like panic went across the North at the news that Lee was invading Pennsylvania, Lincoln saw in the move a bright opportunity for the Federals. Coming north, Lee was exposing his army to destruction. The Federals always had the advantage in numbers; now they would have the advantage in position as well, and if they maneuvered skillfully they could cut this invading army off, hem it in, and destroy it utterly.… That, at any rate, is the way Lincoln saw it, and his hopes rose. Grant obviously was going to take Vicksburg. If at the same time the great Army of Northern Virginia could be taken off the board, the war would be about over.

  Lee’s army at the end of May lay south of the Rappahannock River, in and near Fredericksburg, with Hooker’s army just north of the river keeping watch. Contrary to Lee’s expectation, Hooker was not being reinforced; actually, he was losing strength because the time of a number of his v
olunteer regiments was expiring and thousands of good soldiers were being paid off and sent home. He still had an advantage in numbers, but his army and Lee’s were more nearly on a parity in strength than they had ever been before or would be again. Lee had probably 75,000 men of all arms; Hooker may have had between 85,000 and 90,000, and Hooker’s men were much better equipped and fed. As a counterweight to this, Lee’s men had the habit of victory, and Hooker’s had never been able to acquire that habit. All in all, the armies were fairly close to equal.

  Lee’s march began on June 3, when Longstreet’s I Corps faded back from the Rappahannock crossings and marched northwest toward Culpeper Courthouse, to be followed a day or so later by the II Corps led by Lieutenant General Richard Ewell. Ewell was a bald, peppery little man with a wooden leg—he had been maimed during the preliminaries to the second battle of Bull Run—and when the army was on the march he rode in a buggy. In battle he mounted his horse, game leg and all, and had himself strapped to the saddle.

  For rear guard at Fredericksburg, Lee left his III Infantry Corps under Lieutenant General A. P. Hill, one of the Confederacy’s fabulous fighting men. It was not long before Hooker saw what was happening and proposed to attack Hill in force, driving him off and moving directly on Richmond. President Lincoln overruled him, pointing out that Lee’s army rather than the Confederate capital was Hooker’s proper objective now. Hooker began to move northwest on a course roughly parallel with Lee’s, keeping the Army of the Potomac always between Lee and Washington.

  Lee’s plan was simple. He would move beyond the Blue Ridge, cross the Potomac, and then march toward the east, threatening Philadelphia and Baltimore, cutting Washington’s communications with the rest of the country, and putting on pressure that would force Hooker to attack him; in effect, he would blend offensive strategy with defensive tactics, compelling his opponent (as he had so often done before) to fight his kind of fight. At Chancellorsville Hooker had shown himself to be erratic when the heat was on. When the armies met in Pennsylvania the heat would be greater than anything Hooker had experienced before. Limited objectives or no, the possibilities for Lee were dazzling.