The Battle of Gettysburg 1

The Battle of Gettysburg 1

The Battle of Gettysburg 1863

Author: Samuel Adams Drake

CONTENTS.

 

 

CHAPTER PAGE

I. GETTYSBURG 9

 

II. THE MARCH INTO PENNSYLVANIA 23

 

III. FIRST EFFECTS OF THE INVASION 34

 

IV. REYNOLDS 46

 

V. THE FIRST OF JULY 60

 

VI. CEMETERY HILL 81

 

VII. THE SECOND OF JULY 97

 

VIII. THE SECOND OF JULY--_continued_ 112

 

IX. THE THIRD OF JULY 132

 

X. THE RETREAT 150

 

XI. THINGS BY THE WAY 160

 

 

 

 

THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG

 

1863

 

 

 

 

I

 

Gettysburg[1]

 

 

[Sidenote: The Town.]

 

Stripped of the glamour which has made its every stick and stone an

object of eager curiosity or pious veneration, Gettysburg becomes

a very plain, matter-of-fact Pennsylvania town, of no particular

antiquity, with a very decided Dutch flavor in the names and on the

tongues of its citizens, where no great man has ever flourished, or

anything had happened to cause its own name to be noised abroad,

until one day in the eventful year 1863--the battle year--fame was

suddenly thrust upon it, as one might say, not for a day, but for

all time. The dead who sleep in the National Cemetery[2] here, or

who lie in unknown graves about the fields and woods, and counting

many times more than the living, help us to understand how much

greater was the battle of Gettysburg than the town which has given

it its name.

 

Gettysburg is the market town--or borough, accurately speaking--of

an exclusively farming population, planted in one of the most

productive sections of the Keystone State. It is the seat of justice

of the county. It has a seminary and college of the German Lutheran

Church, which give a certain tone and cast to its social life. In

short, Gettysburg seems in all things so entirely devoted to the

pursuits of peace, there is so little that is suggestive of war and

bloodshed, even if time had not mostly effaced all traces of that

gigantic struggle,[3] that, coming as we do with one absorbing idea

in mind, we find it hard to reconcile the facts of history with the

facts as we find them.

 

[Sidenote: The Landscape.]

 

There is another side to Gettysburg--a picturesque, a captivating

side. One looks around upon the landscape with simple admiration.

One's highest praise comes from the feeling of quiet satisfaction

with which the harmony of nature reveals the harmony of God. You

are among the subsiding swells that the South Mountain has sent

rippling off to the east. So completely is the village hid away

among these green swells that neither spire nor steeple is seen

until, upon turning one of the numerous low ridges by which the

face of the country is so cut up, you enter a valley, not deep,

but well defined by two opposite ranges of heights, and Gettysburg

lies gleaming in the declining sun before you--a picture to be long

remembered.

 

Its situation is charming. Here and there a bald ridge or wooded

hill, the name of which you do not yet know, is pushed or bristles

up above the undulating prairie-land, but there is not one really

harsh feature in the landscape. In full view off to the northwest,

but softened by the gauzy haze of a midsummer's afternoon, the

towering bulk of the South Mountain, vanguard of the serried chain

behind it, looms imposingly up between Gettysburg and the Cumberland

Valley, still beyond, in the west, as landmark for all the country

round, as well as for the great battlefield now spreading out its

long leagues before you; a monument more aged than the Pyramids,

which Napoleon, a supremely imaginative and magnetic man himself,

sought to invest with a human quality in the minds of his veterans,

when he said to them, "Soldiers! from the summits of yonder Pyramids

forty ages behold you." In short, the whole scene is one of such

quiet pastoral beauty, the village itself with its circlet of fields

and farms so free from every hint of strife and carnage, that

again and again we ask ourselves if it can be true that one of the

greatest conflicts of modern times was lost and won here.

 

Yet this, and this alone, is what has caused Gettysburg, the obscure

country village, to be inscribed on the same scroll with Blenheim,

and Waterloo, and Saratoga, as a decisive factor in the history of

the nations. Great deeds have lifted it to monumental proportions.

As Abraham Lincoln so beautifully said when dedicating the National

Cemetery here, "The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here

have consecrated it far above our 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."

 

Those noble words ought to be the guiding inspiration of every one

who intends adding his own feeble impressions of this great battle

to what has been said before.

 

[Sidenote: Strategic Importance.]

 

[Sidenote: Playing at Blind-Man's-Buff.]

 

The strategic importance that Gettysburg suddenly assumed during

Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania, in July, 1863, first demands a

little of our attention. Yet it seems certain that neither Meade nor

Lee had thought of it as a possible battle-ground until accident

thrust it upon them. At his first setting out on this campaign Lee

had not been able to say, with the map before him, "I will fight

a battle either in this or that place," because he had marched

not toward, but away from, his adversary, and, so far as can be

known, without choosing beforehand a position where Meade would

have to come and attack him. For his part, so long as Meade was

only following Lee about, the Union general cannot be said to have

had much voice in the matter. It was Lee who was really directing

Meade's march. True enough, Meade did select a battlefield, but

not here, at Gettysburg; nor do we know, nor would it be useful to

inquire, whether Lee could have been induced to fight just where

Meade wanted him to. As Lee fought at Gettysburg only because he

was struck, it is probably beyond any man's power to say that if

this had not happened, as it did, Lee would have marched on toward

Baltimore, knowing that Meade's army lay intrenched in his path.

There is a homely maxim running to the effect that you can lead

a horse to water, but cannot make him drink. The two generals,

therefore, merely launched their columns out hit or miss, like men

playing at blind-man's-buff.

 

Gettysburg lies at the apex of a triangle of which Harrisburg and

Baltimore form the base angles, at north and south--Harrisburg being

only thirty-six and Baltimore about fifty miles distant. York and

Carlisle also lie either on or so near this triangle as to come

within its scope as a basis for military operations. Placed at

Gettysburg, an army threatened all of these points.

 

[Illustration: Diagram showing strategic value of Gettysburg.

H., Harrisburg; G., Gettysburg; P., Philadelphia; Y., York; B.,

Baltimore; W., Washington.]

 

[Sidenote: Topographical Features.]

 

[Sidenote: Baltimore and Taneytown Roads.]

 

[Sidenote: Cemetery Hill.]

 

From a military point of view there are but two features about

Gettysburg on which the eye would long rest. These are the two

ridges, with a broad valley between, heaved up at east and west and

running off south of the town. They stand about a mile apart, though

the distance is sometimes less than that. As it nears Gettysburg

the easternmost ridge glides down, by a gentle slope, into what

may be called a plain, in comparison with the upheavals around it,

although it is by no means a dead level. Yet it is open because

the ridges themselves have stopped short here, forming headlands,

so to speak, above the lower swells. On coming down off this ridge

the descent is seen to be quite easy--in fact, two roads ascend

it by so gradual a rise that the notion of its being either high

or steep is quite lost, and you are ready to discard off-hand any

preconceived notion about its being a natural stronghold. It is

mostly on this slope that Gettysburg is built, its houses extending

well up toward the brow, and its cemetery occupying the brow itself.

Hence, although the centre of Gettysburg may be three-fourths of a

mile from the cemetery gate, the town site is in fact but a lower

swell of the historic ridge which has since taken the name of its graveyard--Cemetery Ridge.