The Congressional Hearings on Meade at Gettysburg in 1864 (Lecture)

I'm Ranger Troy Harman, how many of you know me or I know you? Okay, fantastic! I see some smiles out there which is good. You knew me and you still came out! Well this is part, of course, of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, it's another installment, it's the next to the last installment, Bill Hewitt will be going tomorrow at 1:30 talking about railroads in the South, how the North won the war through railroads. Today I'm going to be talking about the Committee Hearings. Everything that we've done this winter has to do with the 150th anniversary, or the year 1864. And the Committee Hearings sounds like a boring title, doesn't it, the Committee Hearings? Maybe I could come up with a little more sexy, exciting sort of title. For people like you, for this audience, this is it. You don't really need any more do you? It's a chance for all of us to get together and this is a day when we know we're in the majority and that encourages all of us. But now the Committee Hearings, what were they? The Committee Hearings really had everything to do with Congress trying to gain some control over decisions that were being made in Civil War battles ahead of time by climbing into the head of generals that would serve on Civil War Battlefields, knowing that they would later on have to testify. The Committee wanted to plant that seed, that in real-time decisions, later on you're going to have to answer for this. So it was a way for Congress to gain some kind of control over what was going on in the field. The Committee came into existence right after the Battle of Ball's Bluff and December 5th of 1861, the Committee started to assemble. So they would review battles. Some of you remember when General Patraeus had to appear before the Senate a few years ago. Either good, bad, or in between, Congress ultimately funds wars, and even though these hearings across time and space become a little bit politicized, that's Congress's role. Even though it's torture for the person that's being cross-examined in a setting like that, and it certainly always doesn't seem fair to the person that's having to answer the questions because they sometimes don't even know the source of the question, but in any case, it's good for historians, isn't it? Painfully, some good information is extracted that can be used later on for time immemorial. So the Congressional hearings, then, as it regards to the Battle of Gettysburg, had to do with General Meade after the Battle of Gettysburg being perceived by some of his competitors, if not enemies, that maybe he was a little bit too timid after the battle, that he let Lee's army get away. The perception was there, there was enough stirring of the pot behind the scenes that the things that he didn't do, that Commanding Union General Meade did not do in this battle that became the source of a full and fair investigation, so the committee could get involved. I'm going to gradually go through the hearings. They're more intriguing than maybe listeners on TV would think. You see "Committee Hearings," and you think, "Oh, well," but there's a lot of intrigue, so I'm going to gradually reveal it as we go along. And then we always have to see whether the equipment works the way we want it to, and it does. Okay, fantastic. Alright, why would General Meade have to testify before a Congressional sub-Committee in Congress eight or nine months after the battle? Let's give a little backdrop for that, a little bit of context. One of the reasons is the Emancipation Proclamation had changed the stated aim and purpose of the war, and you and I both know the war would never have been fought without slavery and that slavery was always connected with the source of strife and war. But the Federal government did not officially declare the ending of slavery as the official war aim until January 1st, 1861, with the Emancipation Proclamation. I'm sorry, 1863. January 1st, 1863. What did I say, 1861? As early as September 22nd of 1862, right after the Battle of Antietam, Abraham Lincoln went to the field at Antietam, you all know that, to speak to General McClellan and the Federal government at that point, through Lincoln, through the Executive branch, leaked the notion that the president might go forward with an Executive Order for the Emancipation Proclamation. And that was to give the Confederate government time to respond. The implication was, look, it's a limited war, here's the implication, the overture, the inferences after September 22nd, 1862, shortly after Antietam, the inferences were from the Lincoln Administration to the Confederates; look, we've been fighting a limited war, but things are going to change dramatically. Here's your chance to come to the bargaining table and make a deal. Because once the official war aim was to end slavery, that meant total war. And so that's why there was a lapse of time between September 22nd, when the Lincoln Administration floated the political balloon as we would say today of emancipation, and the actual edict signed on January 1st of 1863. Lincoln gave the Confederate government time to think about what this meant. So what did it mean? The Emancipation Proclamation, at its source, means the forever ending of slavery, and we celebrate that, but there were political ramifications to that as well. One of them is that political solutions to an early end to the war are off the table. Right? What Southern planter is going to go for emancipation in a peaceful way? There's nothing for Southerners to debate on that; for Southern planters, that was their control over the economy, that was their source of power. So political solutions to an early end to the war are off the table; what else does the Emancipation Proclamation mean? It means, if necessary, destruction of Southern property. Whatever it takes to bring the South to their knees. Because you have to implement emancipation because the South was not going to willingly do that, so that means ramping up the war effort. Third, the destruction of Southern armies. A political solution might allow the Southerners to save face, but emancipation required that there needed to be clearing and purging of the element that would oppose the new program. It's not a coincidence that the Emancipation Proclamation and the first draft in U.S. history coincided. It's not an accident. The draft that would take effect in installments beginning in March of 1863, that's when the enrollment act was passed and it would be implemented in July of 1863. That draft was to create what? A substantially larger Union army for postwar occupation of the South so that emancipation could be followed up by the Federal government and to make sure that the Confederate armies were literally destroyed, removed, so that this new program of emancipation could take effect. Most voters understood what the Emancipation Proclamation meant, it meant a lengthy postwar occupation of the South, maybe ten, twenty years; to rebuild infrastructure involving construction and reconstruction of road, rail, and canals; to integrate the South with the North's market economy, towards a capitalist society. The North was leaning that way; full-blown capitalism would become recognizable within twenty or thirty years after the Civil War. The North was headed that way; the South was still stuck in a plantation economy that resembled something from the Middle Ages. This required, we call it, Reconstruction; emancipation required that the Federal government take on a role that it had never taken on before and that is remaking the South in the North's image. Emancipation also meant long-term commitment by the Federal government to civil rights and social change. You and I, if we look with a big perspective, we know that the resistance on the ground, the KKK and other groups that resisted implementation of civil rights in the South eventually frustrated Northerners long enough, and there were enough changeovers through elections, that people in the North lost the political will to follow through in this category. And that's why the generation that you live in now is just now handling issued that were postponed a hundred years. People that fully thought about emancipation, including Lincoln, understood that it meant all of the above. And then redistribution of wealth, that would be the modern term for forty acres and a mule. These were controversial things, you and I applaud them today, but at the time, this was considered much further than the Federal government had ever gone to try to remake America. So how does that relate to our topic here today? You have to understand that General Meade was operating in a different milieu than General McClellan, or Pope, or Burnside; the stakes were much higher. He couldn't let Lee get away. It was not enough just to hold his own in a defensive battle with Lee like his predecessors might have done; he had to destroy Lee's army. That's why the committee, who saw themselves as an extension of the Lincoln Administration, they were anti-Democrat. I'll say more about that in a few minutes. So they didn't like the army which was led by a lot of Democrat generals, but the Committee on the Conduct of War wanted to make sure that the war was prosecuted successfully towards this outcome, towards emancipation. And so the best way to do that then was to become involved through hearings and try to gain control of the generals in the field. Now, we also have to talk about background; why does Meade get drug to these hearings? One reason is that emancipation raises the stakes; you can no longer fight a limited war, you have to destroy the opposition, which means Meade has to pursue and destroy Lee's army. Secondly, another reason why Meade is drug into these hearings, eight or nine months after the battle is because seeds of discontent towards Meade's generalship at Gettysburg began with professional jealousies and bruised egos lying dormant within the Army of the Potomac. His rivals simply needed a spark in the right circumstances to reveal their true feelings. It is not widely known today, except among historians, that Meade's opponents were numerous among the higher levels of command in the army. The commanding general had to remain on guard during and after battle. In particular, there were four senior officers with grievances against Meade even before the first shots were fired. Now how many of you have ever heard, "Arrows in the back means you're still ahead of the pack?" You can't be a leader of any sort without taking shots; if you can't stand the heat, you get out of the kitchen. These individuals in particular, though, were outspoken. Meade would have been aware of them. The one on the far left is Alfred Pleasonton, the Cavalry Chieftain. His loyalties were to Joseph Hooker who had just been relieved of command. Hooker had realigned the cavalry into one grand corps and restructured as a lean, mean machine that would become equal to Stuart and then would eventually surpass Stuart's cavalry. So his loyalties, Alfred Pleasonton's loyalties, were with Hooker, and he would eventually rejoin Hooker in the lower South, and he would fight in the lower South. By the time he appeared before the Committee Hearings, he had sort of soured on Meade, but he was, at best, skeptical towards Meade during this battle. His loyalties were to the man that had promoted him and helped create the cavalry corps that he led. Who's the next person in line? Daniel Butterfield, Meade's chief of staff. Meade went to him right after he took over command on June 28th of 1863 and said, "I'm going to keep you, I need you." In other words, "I need a continuum; I need someone in your position that's been handling all the correspondences to continue to do that. I don't need to break with continuity. I know you were Hooker's man, but I'm going to keep you as my chief of staff. You're going to handle all my memorandums, all my orders, you're going to see to it that all my orders are carried out, and you're going to be my chief secretary." This individual beside him did not like Meade all that much and this is who? Abner Doubleday. Now there's some hints, General Meade was a gentlemen so he would only overture or hint or allude to how he felt about people, on occasion, maybe never allude negatively towards someone, but Meade said of Doubleday when Doubleday took over the Pennsylvania Reserves, a command that Meade had had before, Meade said of Doubleday, "The Reserves will think better of me now." You and I both know that Howard sort of aggravated the situation, at the end of the first day of the battle, by implicating (this was sometime after two o'clock on July 1st, 1863) he indicated in a memorandum that crossed Meade's desk in Taneytown, that the reason that the Federal troops broke north and west of town is because Doubleday had been instrumental in that. But why would Meade be open to that idea? It's because Meade had doubts about Doubleday too. And Doubleday, after Meade's death in 1872, Doubleday would continue to hound Meade's sons and grandsons, he continued to write publicly in newspapers a complaint about Meade at Gettysburg. Just below the surface, he felt that he wasn't really high on Meade. And the last person we know was not supportive of Meade was Daniel Sickles. If you go through the correspondences, this is Volume 27 Part 3 of the O.R.s, the after action reports, you go to correspondences, you look at the time sequences, you see that Sickles received an order from Meade telling him, implying that he did not move fast enough on July 1st towards the Gettysburg Battlefield; that Hancock's 2nd Corps had move faster up the Taneytown Road than Sickles's had up the Emmitsburg Road. That deeply offended Sickles. Sickles's loyalties were with who? Hooker. And Hooker had been responsible for his promotions and for his rise to Corps Commander; he was not happy at the way Hooker suddenly disappeared from command of the army three days before the battle. He already was bruised down inside for that. He was skeptical of Meade at best and then when Meade suddenly suggested that he didn't march quick enough to the battlefield, that by comparison that Hancock's 2nd Corps moved a lot better, that did not settle well. And then things would continue to break down, wouldn't they? I don't want to get into that just now. These individuals, then, were at best skeptical of Meade, they were not pro-Meade, if anything, most of them were pro-Hooker. Meade had that working against him when the hearings were being considered. Another reason why Meade found himself in some hearings on the Battle of Gettysburg was that Meade leaped ahead of the pecking order. Professionally, Lincoln set the stage for disharmony by giving army command to Meade when several others were ahead of him in time and grade. Major General Darius Couch ranked first in line for the promotion, but he left the army to oversee Pennsylvania emergence defenses in Harrisburg, so he took himself out of the selection process. The army's 12th Corps commander, Major General Henry Slocum, here's Couch, here's Slocum, graded second for the appointment but had informed the war department in advance that he did not want the job. Major General John Sedgwick of the 6th Corps landed third on the list but politely declined to be considered. Reynolds, fourth, and Reynolds in on our far right, fourth in the order of advancement, turned down the direct offer after Hooker's resignation. That left Meade who was ordered to take command on June 28th, 1863. So we have four individuals that were in time and grade in front of Meade. So Meade, who was seen as a junior officer compared to them, suddenly leaped over in front of them at the top of the pecking order. That set the stage for disharmony; don't forget that, those are important things. Now, Reynolds may very well have failed the litmus test which led to him not being named army commander. Let's just go with the text here: It is not known whether Reynolds failed the administration's litmus test that included questions on how the commander felt about emancipation, occupation of the South after the war, destruction of Southern property. As a Northern Democrat, Reynolds likely had a different view on how the war should be conducted. Though emancipation was unarguably the right policy from a human rights standpoint, as a war aim, it required a long-term commitment to social and political integration, along with repair to Southern infrastructure, and a lengthy occupation of the South. Yes to emancipation meant no to political solution to the end of the war. Because of his tragic death at Gettysburg, Reynolds did not have an opportunity to elaborate on the details or to write memoirs. General Reynolds, then, likely went through a series of questions by someone representing the Lincoln Administration and that's been lost because Reynolds passed. But series of questions like, "Before Mr. Lincoln gives you the keys to his Army of the Potomac, how do you feel about the new direction of the war? How do you feel about destruction of the Southern armies? How do you feel about, if necessary, destruction of Southern property? How do you feel about occupation of the South for ten or twenty years to make sure that reconstruction takes effect socially as well as literally? How do you feel about integration of the races?" Those kinds of things. We don't know how he answered, but apparently he didn't answer those questions well enough to be given the army. Those things would have factored in too. You have to remember politics do factor in. Reynolds would then be passed over for Meade. One of the kind of exciting titles I threw out there on this talk was, "Witch Hunt or Fair Play?" And so I'm picking up on that title now, an earlier title that I had for this program. Were the hearings a witch hunt? Well, notably disturbed, Meade divulged, "When I reached Washington I was greatly surprised to find the whole town talking of certain grave charges of General Sickles and Doubleday that had been made against me..." this is our chance to laugh a little bit. Then with some aggravation he added, "The only evil that will result is the spreading over the country certain mysterious whisperings of dreadful deficiencies on my part, the truth concerning which will never reach the thousandth part of those who hear the lies." So Meade knew that there were these stirrings going on in the background. The things that I just described to you that were part of the context, he was aware of those things, he was not born yesterday, he knew that there were people in the background that wanted to see Hooker restored to command. When I was researching for this program, I saw that there was some correspondence between Henry Halleck and Meade in mid-March of 1864, and it would have been right after Daniel Butterfield had testified. This is the point I really wanted to make; under a pseudonym name Historicus, someone was writing on behalf of General Sickles, you all know about this, anonymously, but everyone believes that it was Sickles behind it, and it appeared in several issues of New York newspapers did Historicus, criticizing Meade's conduct at Gettysburg. And right after Butterfield's testimony, Butterfield would suggest that Meade wanted to retreat at Gettysburg, Historicus publicly declared through the papers that yes, Meade did want to retreat, and declared that Meade was prepared to retreat and those kinds of things. So Meade wrote to Henry Halleck and they corresponded, this is the chief of staff in Washington D.C. the man who directly reports to Lincoln on the war. Halleck advised him, he said you will lose in that public arena, stay out of it. He said, I agree, Sickles is probably behind it too, he said you can't win that battle, he said stay out of the press. Meade did not respond through the press but he would appear a second time before the Committee Hearings to try to set the record straight. So there's this public case being built through Historicus through the newspapers at the same time the hearings were going, so there was all this swelling and controversy that was taking place. And so Meade is picking up on that and he's thinking, how can I combat this? The testimonies would begin in March of 1864, they would be in March and April and there would be some follow-up in May of 1864. There were three senators on the sub-committee hearing panel and four representatives. The three senators were Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, Benjamin Franklin Harding of Massachusetts, and Benjamin Franklin Wade. Excuse me, Benjamin Franklin Harding had moved west and he was actually representing California, Zachariah Chandler was a senator for Michigan, and Benjamin Wade was originally from New England, but he had moved out and to Ohio and he was a senator from Ohio. So you had Wade, Chandler, and Harding, then you also had to bring some balance, you had some representatives from the House of Representatives and I'll mention their names gradually as we go along. The three senators, two of them, Chandler from Michigan and Benjamin Wade from Ohio, they were strongly involved. Harding resigned, he retired, just days before the hearings began, so really drop Harding from the mix. Wade, Harding, and Chandler, though, were all staunch Republicans, staunch abolitionists. This is how the hearings proceeded; they proceeded from the perspective that there were two entities that needed to be prosecuted. And by the way, if you want to read more on this, pick up Bill Hyde's book called "Union Generals Speak." How many of you have heard Hyde's book, "Union Generals Speak?" He goes into some of this detail. And the two entities that the committee felt that they needed to go after that were responsible for the war were one, Democrats. They felt that not only were Southern Democrats were waging the war in the South, but they felt that some of the Northern Democrats were waiting in the wings for the war to end so their party could be reunited, so their party could not be trusted. And in some ways, they saw themselves, did the committee, as an extension of Lincoln's arm and an extension of the Emancipation Cause, the cause that the Republican Party represented. The other group that they targeted was West Point-ers. They felt that West Point-ers trained a good many officers that were waging the war, and that if West Point had never existed, the committee felt, this war would never have been fought. So, West Point had to be brought under the guiding arm of Congress. And so keep that in mind, that's the mindset; all West Point-ers are suspect as it relates to the war going on and then certainly all Democrats are suspect, so keep that in mind. And the three Senators who were leading the way were Republican. And don't get that confused with Republicans and Democrats today. There have been up to five party systems; at that stage in American history, they were in the third party system and the party platforms were very different than today, although they still fought and argued. Okay, the hearings revolved on four central questions. So if you look at the "Army of the Potomac" part one and part two, forget Bill Hyde's book "Union Generals Speak," that's an abridged version, it's a wonderful resource, but if you want to go back to the original source, look at "Army of the Potomac" part one and two, it's two volumes so we're probably talking about 800 to 1,000 pages. If you want a summary those 800-1,000 pages, it really comes down to four basic questions that are asked over and over by the panel to Meade and the other Corps commanders that are summoned to Washington, and I have them here. There were many follow-up questions and various re-phrasings of original queries, and a few unique inquires altogether, but everything centered on these four questions. Try to remember that, it will organize 1,000 pages for you. One; did Meade intend to fight at Gettysburg? That question came up over and over and over. And the second question; did Meade indicate that he wanted to retreat? Really, at any time, but especially at a council of war held the night of the third and final day of the battle. A third question that came up to everyone that was summoned to appear for a two month period was: why didn't Meade counterattack after the grand assault, that we know call Pickett's Charge, on the final day. And then lastly: Why did Meade permit the Confederate Army to escape across the Potomac into Virginia?" And so these questions are almost laden, and they're laced, and their hidden, and there are different questions that come out over those 800-1,000 pages, but these four are coming back like a drum beat. It's because that committee, in some ways they are putting Meade on trial. These are the four sore spots right here. A variation on the first question is "Did Meade intend to fight at Gettysburg? I'll make it more specific, "Did Reynolds make Meade fight in Pennsylvania?" So this is how the hearings kind of looked. Now I dressed it up a little bit, I keep it moving, but I do want to give you the substance of the hearings here and there. Alright question from Benjamin Wade, the chairman, one of the senators from Ohio, "There has been a great deal said whether he intended," that is, Meade intended, "to fight the battle where it was fought or somewhere else?" That's a loaded question. And these generals that appeared, these corps commanders that appeared, they were walking right into a minefield. Answer. General Seth Williams, assistant adjutant for Meade, he actually assisted General Butterfield in handling correspondences and reproducing memorandums. He was part of the communications center for the Army of the Potomac. He directly met with Meade around the clock. "I think," said Williams, "that as soon as General Meade heard the enemy was moving in the direction of Gettysburg, and as soon as he learned the general result of the engagement on the 1st of July in front of Gettysburg, and of the character of the ground at Gettysburg, he made up his mind to fight the battle at that place, and he concentrated his army there with all possible rapidity. I think his orders were all in accordance with that idea." What a friend, that's fantastic! That's one sample, we'll keep it moving. Daniel Butterfield, I indicated this earlier, aimed to do harm to Meade regarding July 1st, and really regarding everything about Meade at Gettysburg. But here he says, the committee asks, "Can you tell us what those intentions and purposes were?" That is, intentions for General Meade wanting to fight at Gettysburg. "The orders brought to me," this is on June 30th, 1863, "was in his own handwriting, " that is, in Meade's own handwriting, "and somewhat different from the one issued, of which this is a copy. When General Meade presented this order to me, I stated to him that I thought the effect of an order to fall back would be very bad upon the morale of the army, and that it ought to be avoided if possible. General Meade seemed to think that we were going ahead without any well-understood plan, and that by reason of that we might meet disaster. I spoke to General Hancock, and I think to some others." There was this essentially metaphoric bomb dropped in the Committee Hearings, and two of those senators were happy to hear this; this played right into what they wanted to hear, that Meade never intended to fight at Gettysburg, that he was planning on falling back before the attack even began. Hancock would have something to say about falling back, and this has to do with General Meade's contingency plan of defending Washington from Pipe Clay Creek. So the chairman, Benjamin Wade from Ohio says, "Go on with your narrative of the operations of the Army of the Potomac after General Meade took command of it." Hancock replies, "On the morning of the 1st of July I received an order to march to Taneytown. I arrived there about eleven o'clock and massed my troops. I then went to the headquarters of General Meade and reported to him. While I was there he told me all his plans. He said he made up his mind to fight a battle on what was known as Pipe Creek." And then he goes on to say, "Shortly after that conversation Meade received a message from General Reynolds, who at Gettysburg was really a mask," you've all heard this before, how many of have heard all of this before? That the fighting at Gettysburg was really to make contact with Confederates to draw them down from Harrisburg and then to fall back on a stronger position around Westminster, just northeast and west of Westminster known as Pipe Clay Creek. So he goes on to explain, does Hancock that Meade - this is in testimony now, hand on the Bible, testifying before a panel, for posterity - testifying that I really don't think Meade intended to fight at Gettysburg. If you want to try to add the sights, sounds, and smells, I'll spare you the smells, but they were meeting in the basement of the Capitol Building in the Committee on Territories room, so as best as we can imagine that, it was probably not well-refined. Can you hear the echoes, and can you hear someone sipping water out of a glass and then setting it on the table and then hearing that sound reverberate through the room? Then hearing someone periodically clear their throat, and then hear another interrogative question, and maybe some squirming in the chair, and the sound of the legs of the chair sliding awkwardly across the floor, creating a screech sound. That's my best attempt to create the mood, that was the setting for these hearings. This is long after the shots were fired but, as you know, we're still debating all of this. Another intriguing question was, did Meade intend to retreat on the second day of the battle? After the battle was already fully begun and into its second day, did Meade intend to retreat? Sickles claimed, his testimonies would claim, Historicus would claim, anonymously claim, that Sickles claimed his advance to the Peach Orchard tabled a retreat order, that Meade had already written a retreat, and that it was in staff hands, but it had not been circulated. But there was this order, Sickles would go so far as to say that he had a copy of it, and that Sickles's advance to the Orchard, Sickles would argue, prevented Meade from retreating, that Meade was about to retreat. How many of you have heard that before? We're not promoting it, we're just talking about witch hunt or fair play? In the CCW, that is, the Committee on the Conduct of War, testimony of General John Gibbon, April 1st, 1864, this is Gibbon talking, "General Butterfield did not say that General Meade did intend to leave, he merely said something to the effect that it was necessary to be prepared, in case it should be necessary to leave, or some remark of that kind. He then showed me the order, and either he read it over and I pointed out the places on the map, or I read it over and he pointed out the places to which each corps was to go. When he got through, I remarked that it was all correctly drawn up." Continuing, Gibbon testifies, "Until very recently I supposed that the order which General Butterfield showed me was an order in regard to the army falling back to a position which I heard General Meade had selected on Pipe Clay Creek. But I am satisfied now that order must have been some different order from the one I had been thinking it was. Being firmly convinced, as I was at the time, that General Meade had no idea of falling back from the position there, it struck me as very remarkable that his chief of staff," that's Butterfield, "should me making out an order to retreat, and I still think so." So what was this order? I'm writing something now and so I don't want to talk too much about it now, with good fortune, it'll come out in print, where this contingency order called for a fallback but not Pipe Clay Creek. It was a withdrawal that still maintained a presence on the battlefield, but in a slightly different position. And that's all I'm going to say for now. But why would Meade allow an order like this? He may never have written it, Butterfield may have written it without his knowledge. But if he did approve of it, it's smart to write a contingency. You should always have backup plans, you should never put all your eggs in one basket. Let me see a show of hands if you agree with that. I'll digress for a second; I coached 6th grade basketball this winter and we practiced foul shots for the end of a game where we might win or lose by a point or two, but we had no guarantees we would be in that situation. We practiced breaking the press when we thought we might be ahead, but there was no guarantee we would be ahead. We practicing pressing to try to come from behind but there would be no guaranteeing in the next game that we would need to come from behind. You always build contingencies because you don't know what the circumstances are going to be. It would have been foolish for Meade not to plan out where the wheeled vehicles should go if a panic set in or in some worst case scenario, you'd better have your backup. You know, the Pentagon now has plans set up for potential wars with every hotspot in the world. If suddenly there was a war that America had to have some involvement in, there's already some rudimentary plan written up. It's a matter of going back, modifying it, maybe changing it altogether, but you have to have plans and then you alter them to fit the situation, there have to be contingencies. But Sickles and other, Butterfield in particular, who wanted to see Hooker restored to command, wanted to turn it into more than it was. "As Seth Williams, who was kind to me, stepped in and said before the hearings in April, in regard to the order of the 2nd of July, to the best of my recollection and belief, the chief of staff," that's Butterfield, "either handed to me, or to my clerk, looking to a contingency which possibly might happen of the army being compelled to assume a new position. The particular order was never distributed, no vestige of it to be found among any of the records of my office, and it must have been destroyed within a day or two after it was prepared. The order was never recorded or issued in any sense. I do not remember the exact tenor of the order, but to the best of my belief which, if carried out, would have involved a retrograde of the army." There was this contingency that was out there that either Butterfield wrote without consulting Meade or Meade agreed, yes it's good to have a backup plan. Later on, the witch hunt sort of hysteria caused it to be a preferred plan by Meade, at least among his enemies. Now, I've never presented this before publicly, so I'm a looking at the time now to see how things are going. If you want to read more on this, Google "did Meade begin a counteroffensive after Pickett's Charge?" and I have a forty-page article that I wrote. I wrote it for Lehigh University for a seminar class there, it's called "Did Meade Begin a Counteroffensive after Pickett's Charge?" It's fully footnoted, it's forty pages, and it's online through NPS and it's connected to a Library of Congress site. "Did Meade Begin a Counteroffensive after Pickett's Charge?" and it has some if this, if you're interested and you want to read more, it's my version. I recommend Bill Hyde's book "Union Generals Speak." Highly recommend that. The July 2nd council of war was the centerpiece of the controversy. How many of you are aware of this controversy? They met in the humble abode of the widow Lydia Leister. You can go over and visit if you want, after this program is over, and you want to go over and hear the tour in the cemetery, meander over to Meade's headquarters and look in there and think on these things. It's a way to kind of reflect and gain closure before you go off to your weekend dinners and those kind of things. I'm going to ask you to please don't raise your hand, just think to yourself, we're taught, we're trained to make emotional as well as intellectual connections, so here's my attempt at emotional connection. Don't raise your hand but think to yourself, have you ever been in a job, in an occupation, in a setting where the person who hired you, or a person who looked to you as someone they relied on left, they transferred, or they passed away, or they retired. And so naturally there was a committee that picked someone new and this person came in and they were highly qualified, they spent their whole life grooming for that position, and naturally they brought in their own people over time that had been loyal to them through the course of their career. This happens everywhere, so you might have experienced it sometime in your life. They bring in their own people, but the people that are there all along are loyal to the person that just left, and nowadays I suppose they start to email the people that have left and say, these new people don't know what they're doing. Then the new people are trying to build bridges and make connections and a lot of those connections are made, but early on there's an awkward juxtaposed position where the person in charge sees the people that are already there as not their people and they want patronage and they want loyalty. Well I started to build this case at the beginning that most of the people in corps command were loyal, if to any one person, it would be to who? Hooker. And then Hooker was gone, it happened in a confused mess and Meade was suddenly in command. Their loyalties were with him; Meade was suspect at best. Meade needed loyalty, he needed patronage, he needed people to look to him, he needed people not to question him, so who did he look to? Junior officers, right? Hancock had just been promoted to 2nd Corps command, so he was the junior officer, he was the newest corps commander. He was a Pennsylvanian too, and Meade was a Pennsylvanian; don't miss those connections. John Gibbon is another person that Meade looked to and was incredibly loyal to him, not only in the testimonies, but after the war. Gibbon was second in command, now I know he had lived in North Carolina much of his life, but he was originally from Pennsylvania and that's where his loyalties lie. Another person, Reynolds; Pennsylvania. Meade was looking, not only to Pennsylvanians, maybe it's a big coincidence, but I want you to look for patterns. When you're doing history at a higher level, you're looking for patterns across time and space, it tells you something deeper about the past, and about the present. Meade was looking to people that would be loyal to him, and that meant when he stood in the widow Lydia Leister's house the night before the last day of the battle, he was sitting in a room with people that were, except for Hancock and Gibbon, people that were not looking to him. They were still thinking about what happened back yonder a few days ago with Hooker. He also knew that he was in a room with people like Slocum, for instance, who we can see kind of off to the right in the back, who had helped bring down Hooker by criticizing Hooker after Chancellorsville to Halleck, so he contributed to his downfall. Meade would have been aware of that; it's probably not a coincidence that Slocum, the 12th Corps commander, was out of the army after the Battle of Gettysburg. Remember the 11th and 12th Corps combined to become the 20th Corps and they would fight in the Western Theater. They were out of sight and out of mind from Meade's army, but as long as Slocum was in the Army of the Potomac, there was that danger that he might do the same thing to Meade that he had done to Hooker. In that room, Meade had to be very careful. Let me try to pain the sights and sounds - I'm going to paint the smells too. You would have heard the nervous tick of a clock on a mantle, the widow Lydia Leister's clock was nervously ticking in the background. The conditions were cramped, it's July, it's the time before air conditioning so it's hot. The furniture was pretty crude and primitive, wasn't it? Not a lot of ergonomic furniture sitting around. And the smell of cigar smoke, sweat. Any time you put men together in a room that are all seeking promotion, you've got egos clashing, and they're all kind of jockeying for position. Then I'll add another little splash of color; sitting over in the corner, not feeling very well with a blood-soaked rag on his neck was Gouverneur Warren, the chief engineer. A piece of a shell had whizzed and caught him in the neck on the top of Little Round Top that afternoon. The room was packed with high brass and Meade had to be very careful to bring about a consensus without stepping on toes of people that outranked him in time and grade, and people that wouldn't mind later on testifying against him. And the testimonies, time and time again, return to that council of war. What was the council of war central discussion? There were three over-arching options to discuss at the council of war. The first one was, and by the way, this is from Meade's notes, they're from Meade's notes, originally from the Meade Papers. Fall back, adjust. John Gibbon and John Newton, 2nd Corps, 6th Corps, both wanted to correct the position of the army but would not retreat. They wanted to fall back or adjust, but mainly stay in Gettysburg with some corrections to the line. Attack, General Meade writes down in his notes, no one wanted to attack as a first option, but Alpheus Williams as 12th Corps commander, he was a substitute for Slocum in 12th Corps command, David Birney of 3rd Corps, George Sykes of 5th Corps, Oliver O. Howard 11th Corps, John Sedgwick 6th Corps thought it an option after waiting one day. So they didn't want to attack right away but they wouldn't rule it out. For the next twenty four hours then, these folks agreed they should fight on the defense, not attack. Howard specifically said wait until 4:00PM tomorrow, so Howard had a specific time in his mind. Hold the same line was a third option discussed, that is, to keep the same fish hook, as we call it today, pretty much the way it was. John Newton of 6th Corps, Winfield Scott Hancock 2nd Corps, worried about the enemy cutting our line or our communications. Henry Slocum said stay and fight it out, this became the final agreement for everyone. And I'll add just a little bit of drama; one of my favorite stories in this battle is when the council of war wrapped up, it went on from sometime between seven o'clock and began to wrap up sometime after 10 o'clock, maybe closer to eleven, which coincided with the fighting on Culp's Hill, so it must have been incredibly loud. That would have been disturbing to hear that kind of noise. There were fewer trees between here and Culp's Hill then, so there was nothing to buffer that noise; that would have been intimidating. It could have caused the whole council to lean towards wanting to retreat. But they didn't flinch during those four hours, did they? They decided to stay and fight it out. But one of my favorite stories in the whole battle has to do with the conclusion of this meeting. After all the corps commanders gradually left, mounted their horses, rode out under a full moon, back to their respective sectors of the line, two people lingered in the room. One was Meade. Have you ever been so tired that you nodded at the wheel when you were driving? Or so tired that when you slept, you woke up fourteen hours later and you're not sure what happened? That kind of tiredness, Meade, other than one nap, went three days without sleeping. A lot of times when you don't sleep well, that leads to hallucinations and hysterias and imagining things, it throws off your ability to hear correctly, but Meade was not only watching after his own career and watching his back, as we've been discussing here, but the fate of the country was in his hands. He didn't know the future like we do, he might have had a good plan, but he had to watch it play out and be either a hero or a goat. So Meade went back, after a three-and-a-half, four hour meeting, to pouring over maps on a primitive table in the widow Leister's house. Can you see him there? Can you see his round glasses, nestled down over his nose? Can you see him nodding, trying to read the maps by lamplight? The other person still in the room was John Gibbon. Gibbon, second in command, of the 2nd Corps, Cemetery Ridge, watched Meade for whatever reason, he stayed long enough until he thought Meade did not realize he was there and he studied Meade, and then he carefully walked to the Leister door and was startled to hear, "General Gibbon," ooh, I'm getting chills up and down my back now! Meade knew he was in the room. "If Lee is here tomorrow, he will strike your front." That's Pickett's Charge. He knew it. He let Butterfield go through all the proceedings and discuss all the options so they would be on the same page, but he knew where the attack was coming. This is the last phase of our presentation. Why did Meade not counterattack after the last great assault on July 3rd? The committee wanted to know that. Why either tactically or operationally did he not either attack on the battlefield or before the Confederate army crossed the Potomac? They wanted to know that, and so the committee hammered that question with everyone that was summoned to speak in front of them. General Meade did have an offensive plan on July 3rd, according to several of the generals that served with him at Gettysburg, including Hancock who was central to the plan. As questions unfolded during the hearings, a picture began to emerge of the commanding general warning others of where Pickett's Charge would likely hit, and of preparing other commanders where to follow up their success. Testimonies bore out in-depth conversations on likely scenarios Meade offered his subordinates, and of arrangements to strike back. In the center of the planning was Hancock, who was given operational charge of the army's entire left wing for such a purpose. Hancock informed Congress that, this is his testimony, that Meade told him before the fight, that's on July 3rd, "That if the enemy attacked me, he intended to put the 5th and 6th Corps on the enemy's flank" to take the Confederates from behind. Elaborating a bit, Hancock said that A "gap" of "one mile" opened up on Lee's line after the destruction of Pickett's division, and that while lying wounded, Hancock, while lying wounded in repulsing Pickett's Charge, scribbled a note urging Meade to follow through. So he told Congress, what, eight or nine months after the fact, that Meade not only did not want to retreat, not only did he intend to fight at Gettysburg, but he planned a counteroffensive charge involving the 5th and 6th Corps. Hancock's wounding and Gibbon's wounding and some other factors, Reynolds's death two days earlier, had created a scenario where Meade really had no one left to take the counterattack. But, now, what do we mean by a gap in the line? I need to explain this. Hancock was thinking there was a gap in Lee's line, created by the destruction of whose division - Pickett, right, and part of Pettigrew and Trimble. Alright, so if there's a gap, watch this now, I want you to see this, if there's a gap, then that means Hancock was supposed to march out with the 2nd Corps followed by the 12th Corps, because Alpheus Williams was there on the Taneytown road, they were to march into the gap, that's towards the Virginia memorial, North Carolina memorial, Georgia memorial, mainly the Louisiana and Mississippi memorials, you know where those are on west Confederate. They were to march out into that gap. That would cause McLaws’s and Hood's divisions, that were facing the Round Tops on the Wheatfield to have to what, shift down to try to cover to cover the gap, which would allow 5th and 6th Corps at Round Top to advance out and take them in reverse. The chain reaction would start by Hancock's 2nd Corps. Meade had already discussed those things with Hancock the night before, that's why he was in charge of the left wing. When Reynolds was in charge of the left wing of the army on the first day, Slocum was in charge of the right wing and probably on the second day of the battle in the early morning. 12th, 6th, and 5th Corps were operationally under his command. Meade gave command to a right or a left wing, which was multiple corps, when there was to be an offensive, really for no other reason. The only other reason you'd be in a left wing or right wing commander is if you were in an operation with two or three corps in your charge. So Hancock, by mere fact that he was the left wing commander means that Meade had planned an offensive. That alone tells us that it was. For the sake of losing a minute or two. When you have a fish hook line like the Union army had, a wedge-shaped line, an A-shaped line, you have an army shape line that looks like a wedge. That attacker, like a fly going to light or to paper, or as medical particles go to magnets, an army that's attacking a wedge-shaped line like the Union army had here is always attracted to what part of the line? The apex because they can create what there? Converging fire, which is crossfire, which is maximum fire power which is always the goal. That's why there's so many battles fought at Bloody Angles and salients, because you can create crossfire. The defender at the apex, the salient, the point, the wedge point, the apex, is at half strength because all his fire is scattered like the sun's rays going in so many directions, his fire is not concentrated. Now, if an attacker over-commits on the apex, to try to blow it up, to cut an army in half, it's tempting with all their artillery and infantry, what is the remedy to that if you're the defender? If he over-commits to the center, you take your wings, as a defender, and do what? Wrap around him like a bow would wrap around a Christmas package, you extend your wings and double envelop him. So when Lee attacked Seminary Ridge, Cemetery Hill, the natural place for a counterattack would be to put your reserves out on the wing and wrap the bow around from behind him. Does that make sense? Okay, so that's why 5th and 6th Corps doubled up around the Round Tops. It was not necessarily that they wanted to capture the Wheatfield or whatever, they were looking to go out and envelop, because the Confederates had over-committed against the center. Type in and Google, "Did Meade Begin a Counteroffensive after Pickett's Charge?" it's a pretty decent article that I wrote, okay? It has a lot of these things in there. Gouverneur Warren who was the army's chief engineer stated, "General Meade had so arranged his troops on our left during the third day that nearly one-half of the army was in reserve in that position." He added, "It was a good sheltered position, and a convenient one from which to re-enforce other parts of the line." If you go down to the Round Tops later today on your way out, you'll notice there's Big Round Top, Little Round Top, there's lesser known hills like Munshower Knoll, Patterson, Weikert Hill, Wildcat Hill, Bushman Hill, those are the hills that Warren is talking about. They don't resonate through American history, but all those hills, combined with Little and Big Round Top, created almost like a Great Wall of China down there where you could conceal, as it turns out, Meade eventually, by the time the 6th Corps got over, after Pickett's Charge, to the left side of the battlefield for that envelopment, there were close to 10,000 Federal troops ready to move out. But they would have been concealed and you can see some lanes here that I found pictures of, that these are lesser known lanes - Weikert Lane, Trostle Lane, Slider Lane - these are lanes on the left part of the battlefield that would allow Federal troops to move out from behind the shield of hills up to the Peach Orchard and then maneuver to Seminary Ridge and take the Confederates in their rear at Fairfield Road. Hancock wrote later, "I have never seen a more formidable attack, and if the 6th and 5th Corps have pressed up, the enemy will be destroyed." Actually, he wrote that on the battlefield. With Hancock wounded and his acting 2nd Corps commander Brigadier General John Gibbon also injured, Meade needed to take a more hands-on approach if the counteroffensive proceeded. Hancock also testified that Meade confided to him later that he had "ordered the movement," that is, the counteroffensive on July 3rd after Pickett's Charge, "but the troops were slow in collecting and moved so slowly that nothing was done before night, except some of the Pennsylvania reserves went out and met Hood's division." Now Alfred Pleasonton, the cavalry chieftain, who was loyal to Hooker, testified before the committee, he also before that wrote an after action report, and then much later he wrote a damning article to the Philadelphia Weekly News about what he really thought about Meade in later years. Starting with the official report, written at the time of the event, and working forward to the CCW hearings in March 1864, and much later Philadelphia Weekly Times article published circa 1879, one finds that Pleasonton's, the cavalry commander, earliest version favors Meade, giving the cavalry a role in a counterattack after Pickett's Charge. Crediting Meade with taking action, the cavalry chief recorded, "The grand attack of General Lee's army on July 3rd, on the left of our line at Gettysburg, having been successfully repulsed and defeated, orders were given for the cavalry to gain his rear and line of communication and harass and annoy him as much as possible in this retreat." Isn't that fascinating? The cavalry was to attack Hood's division near the Round Tops, Warfield Ridge, and well behind Confederate lines at a place called Fairfield, and these multiple attacks were to entangle Confederate infantry while Meade pressed forward 2nd, 5th, and 6th Corps. So when the cavalry, according to the earliest account that Pleasonton gave about the cavalry's role, the cavalry was not playing around behind Confederate lines, they were trying to entangle, disrupt lines of communication, maybe burn lines of wagons, create disruptions, so that Meade could attack on their front and perhaps, in the process, panic would set in. But Pleasonton's version changes by the time of the testimonies before the committee hearings in the basement of the capitol in March of 1864. He testified, "The rebel army was finally repulsed on the 3rd of July. Immediately after that repulse, I rode out with General Meade on the field, and up to the top of the mountain," that's up to where? So Pleasonton and Meade went to the top of Little Round Top after Pickett's Charge, how many of you knew that? Isn't that neat? "and I urged him to order a general advance of his whole army in pursuit of the enemy." Pleasonton added, "I was satisfied the rebel army was not only demoralized, but that they must be nearly, if not quite, out of ammunition, that our army, being in fine spirits with this last repulse, could have easily defeated and routed the enemy." This is just, what, eight months after the battle; look at how his tune has changed. Pleasonton writes with some admonishment, "But General Meade ordered me to send my cavalry to the rear of the rebels to find out whether they were really falling back. This took some time." Now remember, Pleasonton liked Sickles, he liked Hooker, by the time that he was speaking before the committee, his tune was changing. A counteroffensive after Pickett's Charge looked more like a reconnaissance mission by the cavalry. And then as an older man, he took the gloves off. In 1879, Pleasonton wrote that after Pickett's Charge, while Federal troops were cheering all up and down Cemetery Ridge, Pleasonton rode up to Meade, probably in the vicinity of the Copse of Trees, not far from the angle, and he yelled in his ear, "Congratulations on a great victory, now show yourself to be a great general." Now this is really sad because in 1879, this is what, seven years after Meade's death, and he's writing to a Philadelphia newspaper, Meade's hometown? That's a cheap shot and Meade's not around to respond, obviously. These are some juicy excerpts; Pleasonton said, "but asked me to ride up to the Round Top with him, " that's with Meade, "and as we rode along the ridge for nearly a mile, the troops cheered him in a manner that plainly showed they expected him to advance." Ooh, he's reading into the cheers now! "When we reached the Round Top...I was so impressed with the idea that Lee was retreating that I again earnestly urged General Meade to advance the army, but instead of doing so he ordered me to send some cavalry to ascertain the fact." Now the story's gotten worse and worse, Meade's looking progressively weaker with time. He claimed Meade said, "How do you now Lee will not attack me again, we have done well enough." Meade testified, Meade's critics believed he had a lot to answer for, yet he did not evade the issue with the CCW, boldly claiming, "I went immediately to the extreme left of my line," this is after Pickett's Charge, "with determination of advancing my left, and making an assault on the enemy's line." This is what he's saying before the committee. Then with some detail he explained, "So soon as I arrived at the left, I gave the necessary orders for pickets and skirmishers in front to be thrown forward to feel the enemy and all preparations to be made for the assault." And then there was a council of war, did you all know there was an unofficial council of war held on Little Round Top? How many of you went with me on that tour years ago? I haven't done it in years now, but I did do a "Did Meade begin a counteroffensive?" and it was filmed and someone is selling it on Amazon, if you want to look at it, I'm not getting any royalties from it. Major Generals Sykes, that's the 5th Corps commander, Pleasonton, Warren, and Sedgwick, along with Samuel Wylie Crawford were all present to join Meade and staff in discussion of the situation. Obviously Sickles was wounded, Hancock was wounded, Slocum was on the right making a security sweep to Benner's Hill. Absent those three generals, you had five generals with Meade, plus his staff, Meade's son was there with him, and the Union army's major players were present. It had the ingredients of an official council of war. So we see Sykes on your far left, Pleasonton, who had just said show yourself to be a great general, that's what he would claim, Warren, and then Samuel Wylie Crawford who commanded the Pennsylvania Reserves. Now the council occurred in a rocky pen, how many of you have been to this rocky pen before? Next time you're on Little Round Top, move south, there's a little path that leads you from the Warren statue through some crevices in the rocks down to a plateau most people never find, school groups seem to find it a lot. Anyway, Lieutenant A.P. Case of the 146th also remembered, "As the hill made an excellent outlook over the field of the third day's fight, General Meade and his staff, with a signal corps, were there occupying a rocky pen in a line held by the 146th New York." If you read Samuel Wylie Crawford's account, because he was there, he describes them being in that rocky pen. Isn't that neat? There was a council of war, I don't think Gallon or Kuntzler or any of those people have done a painting of Meade's unofficial council of war before a counteroffensive after Pickett's Charge, isn't that great? After Pickett's Charge we usually put in subtitles "The End" and the music plays but Meade was still busy, life is a run-on sentence sometimes with very few periods. He was there and they met in that rocky pen, and on the 146th New York monument it says, "General Meade watched part of the battle on July 3rd from this spot." Isn't that neat? Now he was up there around twelve noon trying to get a bird's eye view with Hunt of all the Confederate artillery to see where they were going to concentrate fire. The only time he watched a battle from up there was during this council of war that led to the advance of the Pennsylvania Reserves, if you cross reference it. Meade saw Farnsworth's cavalry charge; he saw Merritt's troops on the Emmitsburg road; he saw the Pennsylvania Reserves advance out against McLaws in the Wheatfield; he saw all that from Little Round Top. Isn't that fascinating? Meade to Sykes to Crawford. Sykes is the 5th Corps commander, in place of Meade who had been promoted to army commander, and then Crawford was the division commander. Crawford recounted the specifics of the impromptu council of war on Little Round Top years later, describing Meade's irritability as enemy bullets whizzed around. They were coming from Devil's Den. Meade stayed calm and cool but these bullets were flying around and he eventually told Crawford to clear those guys out down there; he was becoming irritable by the Confederate sharpshooters. The threat to his safety, Crawford recalled, made him even more determined to drive the Confederates from his immediate front. Following strict protocol, Meade began the meeting by talking directly past Crawford to George Sykes. So Meade followed a strict order of command, he talked to the corps commander and then the corps commander would repeat to the division commander Crawford. Crawford was standing in the middle and they were talking past him. He had to wait for it to be repeated to him. The commanding general, as Crawford remembered, pointed down from the precipice to the edge of the Wheatfield only about 200 yards to the west to ask Sykes whose troops they were. Sykes replied, "They belong to Crawford." I'm getting chills again up and down my back and arms thinking Meade had to know who those boys were down there, they were the what? The Reserves. And who had been in command of the Reserves? Meade, at Fredericksburg and at other places. And not only that, but, as he looked down at them and saw that blue Maltese cross, as he looked at that powder blue Maltese cross, knowing it was McCandless's brigade, perhaps Crawford's division, as he looked down there, he also realized that as the former 5th Corps commander, if there's going to be a counterattack, you have to use your own corps to spearhead that attack, right? You don't send somebody else's people to death, into a fight, you send your people in. So the 5th Corps was going to spearhead the attack, because they were his guys. Continuing to instruct, Meade ordered Sykes to send Crawford's reserves forward on an "armed reconnaissance," to be supported by a brigade from Sedgwick's 6th Corps. And so they wore the blue Maltese cross, did McCandless's boys of the Pennsylvania Reserves. Sedgwick was there too at that same meeting, Sedgwick says in his council of war testimony that he was right there with him when they were having these discussions. But in any case, it was an armed reconnaissance. Now, if it was a reconnaissance, that's weak; if it's an armed reconnaissance, it's not weak. Armed reconnaissance means there is the option of firing back which could, once you entangle your opponent, that could escalate because they throw in troops to combat you, then you throw in more troops to combat them, and then after a while something swells into a much bigger fight. So it was to be an armed reconnaissance; armed reconnaissance looked to do three things. They determined enemy location, morale, and strength. Meade could not see pass the screen of trees that we now call Stony Hill on the west side of the Wheatfield, but that would be where some of McLaws division would be if they were still there, if they hadn't fallen back. Meade needed to know that before he sent the 5th and 6th Corps out, he needed a vanguard to go out and find the location, morale, and strength. Were the Confederates still ready to fight? Were they out of ammunition? They had quit firing during the cannonade, some of their cannons on the Peach Orchard ridge had disappeared already since the cannonade. Were any of them still in the vicinity; that's why the Pennsylvania Reserves had to be sent out. John Heiser professionalized part of this map for me in the article that I wrote that's online, but this is my original drawing which is a little more elaborate, showing the cavalry's role on the far left. The cavalry was to move; Farnsworth and Merritt, then, were not making unrelated attacks to celebrate their bravado, they were attacking Hood. The Confederates did not have any cavalry to speak of other than maybe a hundred cavalry of the 1st South Carolina; they had no cavalry to speak of on that part of the field. Where was most of Lee's cavalry? Lee had put all of his eggs in one basket; he put all of his cavalry on the other side of the battlefield in case there was a pursuit down the Baltimore Pike. The Federals were making Lee pay for the fact that he had no cavalry on his right flank by throwing Union cavalry, forcing Confederate infantry to play cavalry. The reason why, for instance, why Hood and McLaws didn't support Pickett is because they didn't have cavalry to protect the flank. Once Hood played the role of cavalry, he became entangled, that separated him from McLaws which meant McLaws couldn't go in with Pickett and leave Hood isolated. So there was a ripple effect and so the Union cavalry was entangling Hood's division in one direction while the infantry was exploring and attacking through the Wheatfield. They overran the 15th Georgia, captured their colors. Most of the Confederates were skedaddling out by way of Slyder Lane and trying to head back to Warfield, Seminary Ridge where Kershaw's men, for instance, would build breastworks all night long. General Lee set fire to those; did you know that most of Seminary Ridge was covered with breastworks after Pickett's Charge? Most of the survivors of Pickett's Charge and everyone else in Longstreet's corps built fortifications, just like the ones on Culp's Hill, all into the evening of July 3rd, and Lee had them set fire on July 4th to create a ten story smokescreen so their retreat to the mountains would be partially screened from signal stations on Little Round Top and Cemetery Hill. But the Federals, one of the reasons why Meade didn't counterattack, is that the Confederates right away were chopping like busy beavers here at Warfield Ridge, digging in, trying to cover their communications at Fairfield Road behind them, and in absence of cavalry, that's what they had to do. And the armed reconnaissance under McCandless supported by Nebbins's 6th Corps brigade went in the direction of the Peach Orchard, there was even a small encounter in the orchard. But as it turns out, the Confederates had already withdrawn, and the armed reconnaissance discovered that. The armed reconnaissance went out sometime after five o'clock and came back sometime around six o'clock. By then, a thunderstorm was starting to set in, it was even raining while Merritt's cavalry was attacking the Confederate flank and rear, they were actually trying to attack in an increasing rainstorm that had been coming from Pittsburgh, it had been coming in from the west, so it was getting unusually dark. They didn't have daylight saving time then, it was dark by 7:15 and with clouds and a storm coming in, and black powder doesn't do well in those situations. The enemies of General Meade didn't care about any of those details. We're down to just a few slides here, it's taking a little longer than I thought, none of you are surprised, are you? I've never presented it before like this. April 4th, 1864, a question from the panel: "Immediately after the final repulse of the enemy, on the 3rd of July, were we not in a condition to have attacked the enemy, and why was that not done?" And Henry Hunt, the chief artillerist for the Federals wrote, "But on the evening of the 3rd I did not feel so positive about it by any means, because I did not see a disposable force sufficiently large, immediately on the ground, to attack the enemy in position in the woods, where I knew, from my experience of that day, that they had more than one hundred guns in position." That's Manly and Cabell and Henry's guns of Longstreet's Corps. He was right. Hunt then, years later, to Century Magazine in New York, sometime between 1884 and 1887 he wrote, Hunt added, he said, "An advance of 20,000 men from Cemetery Ridge in the face of 140 guns then in position would have been stark madness; an immediate advance from any point, in force, was simply impracticable." He did not abandon Meade; he stayed with Meade all the way. Longstreet, you know, he was reading all these things from afar, and so the Confederate commander that had been on that part of the field wrote, "The Federals were advancing a line of skirmishers which I thought was the advance of their charge," who were these skirmishers? The Pennsylvania Reserves. "As soon as the line of skirmishers came within reach of our guns, the batteries opened again and their fire seemed to check at once the threatened advance." With a sense of reprieve, Longstreet added, "After keeping it up a few minutes the line of skirmishers disappeared, and my mind was relieved of the apprehension that Meade was going to follow us." So Longstreet saw the Pennsylvania Reserves under Crawford, McCandless, go out, and was apprehensive about it. Lee's thoughts about what was going on over there, Lee wrote in his after action report that Longstreet "deemed it necessary to defend his flank and rear with divisions of Hood and McLaws." McLaws and Hood did not go in with Pickett and we've already sort of discussed this, why Union cavalry had entangled them. But that's harsh language for Lee. Meade wrote to his wife, now if you really want to know what Meade was thinking, read his letters to his wife. He confided to his wife on July 5th that, "The Confederates waited one day," that's to the 4th, July 4th, "expecting that flushed with success, I would attack them, when they would play their old game of shooting us from behind breastworks." He went on to declare that he gave them the satisfaction of waiting, but that was all. Longstreet also described the ground that Meade would have to cross in front of the Round Tops as a "rocky fastness" and that it would take time to traverse. How many of you have walked through some of Plum Run Valley? Unless you're on Trostle Lane or the Wheatfield you dare not walk off of it, it's tough down there. The last part of the question, then, operationally was why didn't Meade counterattack before Lee crossed the Potomac? And so briefly, this is a Joe Ryan sketch, let's give proper credit, you can see in his sketch that as Lee's army retreated through passes like Cashtown Pass, Fairfield Pass, Monterrey Pass, Raven Rock Pass, and then further down, passes like Crampton and Fox and Turner Passes, and in those passes, Lee had used the mountain range like someone would use a median in the middle of a highway. You know how there's a median between the highway and there are chains that say authorized personnel only are allowed to park here, and occasionally you'll see a patrol officer sitting there checking speeds. Think of the South Mountain during Lee's retreat as a median between traffic on both sides of that median. And so once Lee's army went through these passes like a mouse going through a hole, and went into the Cumberland Valley on the other side, it used the mountains like a chained up median, using the cavalry to chain the gaps, to keep the Federal from easily straddling over and catching up to him before he crossed into Maryland and into Virginia. Perhaps a more polished map, you can see on July 13th and 14th, rear elements of Lee's army was retreating at Williamsport, Falling Waters. Ewell's rear guard went across at Falling Waters. And so the committee was very interested in whether Meade let this opportunity slip away. Daniel Gooch of Massachusetts asked a question about why they didn't attack at Williamsport and then John Sedgwick, the 6th Corps commander said, well, we talked about it, we brought it to a vote, we discussed it, and so Gooch said what was that vote? Sedgwick says, "General Wadsworth representing General Newman, who was commanding 1st Corps. General Wadsworth, voted for an attack. General Howard also voted for the attack. Those were the only two corps commanders who did vote for it. The others all strongly opposed it. I think General Pleasonton, in command of the cavalry corps, voted for it. I believe General Meade expressed himself in favor of an attack, but, of course, he did not vote. He acquiesced in the decision of the council. Whether General Meade expressed himself so at the council or not, I am not positive, but I am sure he did in conversation with me." Look at these gnawing questions that the panel, that Daniel Gooch, a representative from Massachusetts asked - look at these gnawing questions, I mean this is relentless. He says, "What prevented our placing troops on the south side of the Potomac sufficient in number to so far impede the crossing?" And these are the questions that the panel is asking. You may not be able to read this very well. I put this in, this doesn't relate directly, but I had already marked it and it's still there. Pleasonton remarked that if Longstreet concentrated his fire from his batteries a little more and held on ten minutes longer, the Confederates would have been victorious and Meade did not dissent from this opinion. According to Herman Haupt, that's the cannonade before Pickett's Charge. How many of you though Pickett's Charge, the cannonade, was a complete waste, or failed completely? That's not what one of the chief engineers was saying and he said Meade agreed. But anyway, the witness here is, I'm going to hit just a couple of excerpts, this is a statement by Herman Haupt, who was in charge of the repair of the rail lines that would allow the Federal army to pursue, by way of the Cumberland Valley, along the Cumberland Valley rail line, or the B&O Line, or he repaired several branches of the B&O Line and did a remarkable duty. In that role, he was responsible for bringing 500 rail cars of medical and food supplies by July 3rd to Westminster by repairing rail, creating side rails, water stations, he just did this incredible job. How many about Herman Haupt's design of beanpole bridges in Virginia? This wizard, if you will, of engineering had this to say in 1904, and I know this is way after the fact, but, he writes to his son, I'll read this part to you. He said, "Meade would permit Lee to escape and the fruits of victory would be lost, whereupon they commenced a telegraph to Meade to move at once, and instead of obeying, he asked to be relieved from command," Haupt said of Meade. "If he had moved and taken possession with a small part of his force and a few batteries on the south side of the Potomac River, escape would have been hopeless. Lee would have surrendered the war, Meade would have been president," and he goes on to...I'm so glad you all laughed there! But then he goes on to say, and it's almost like fate's intervening here to crop it out, but this is just to give you an idea of the vitriol that Meade faced. He wrote, Meade was a weak character, Haupt wrote to his son, "He was a weak character and not equal to the occasion. He gave Lee time from July 4th to 14th, which was twice as long as was required to permit him to escape." So Haupt, along with Sickles, were talking in Lincoln's ear while the retreat was still going on. What was Sickles doing immediately after the battle? Yeah, and convalescing down in Washington, the President without bodyguards in those days, he just walked down and talked to him at the hospital and spoke with him, and Herman Haupt spoke with Lincoln as well, communicated with him, so Lincoln was receiving all this information that Meade was letting ten days go by while doing nothing, and that Lee was able to construct bridges and just walk right across the Potomac River while Meade was having a vote. Alright, now how many of you know about this letter that Lincoln never sent to Meade that he wrote? There's a book that's been number one on the best seller list of the New York Times, several times since the 1930s, it's called "How to Win Friends and Influence People," how many of you have heard of that book? This letter from Lincoln that he never sent to Meade during that retreat is a centerpiece of that book of how leaders should lead, and it is - I'll give you the answer after you look at the letter. I'm not going to go through the whole letter, but I want you to see a couple of excerpts. This is from the President, after he's heard Haupt and after he's heard Sickles say, "Meade won at Gettysburg and he's letting the Confederates escape." He goes on to say, he said, Lincoln now writes, "The case, summarily stated is this. You fought and beat the enemy at Gettysburg; and, of course, to say the least, his loss was as great as yours. He retreated; and you did not, as it seemed to me, pressingly pursue him; but a flood in the river detained him, till, by slow degrees, you were again upon him. You had at least twenty thousand veteran troops directly with you, and as many more raw ones within supporting distance," those are the troops from Darius Couch out of Harrisburg. He said, "all in addition to those who fought with you at Gettysburg; while it was not possible that he had received a single recruit; and yet you stood and let the flood run down, bridges be built," and this is Lincoln now, writing about Meade; even the President was upset. "Again, my dear general, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude and misfortune involved in Lee's escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war; as it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. If you could not safely attack Lee last Monday, how can you possibly do so south of the river, when you take...Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it." What happened to that letter? John Nicolay and Hay's papers, one of their papers, when they were being scoured through after Lincoln's death, they found this letter. He never sent it, and the point of leadership and "How to Win Friends and Influence People" is: sometimes as a leader, you're right in what you want to say, and then today, I suppose you hit "delete," but, you sleep on it. You have a good night's sleep. Oprah Winfrey said once, "There are few problems in this world that can't be solved without a good night's rest." Right? So you sleep on it after you've purged it in writing, and then not send it, and that's what he did. Because he thought about the morale of Meade and the army and it would undo all that had been done if he sent something like that. It might crush the spirit of the commander and cause him to second guess himself. Last two slides. Any merit to the charges? As for the accusation that Meade did not want to fight at Gettysburg, the best defense for him is, as a matter of fact, what? He did fight at Gettysburg! That's what he said when he went to his follow-up testimony, he said, "Not only did I not want to retreat," he said, "I had every opportunity to retreat if I wanted to, but I didn't." Secondly, he had several opportunities to retreat if he wanted to, but he did not. Thirdly, the committee hearings and official reports document orders for decisive attack on the Union July 2nd, and exploratory orders to consider the same on the left after Pickett's Charge July 3rd. And I have an article out there online, it's called "The Gap: Meade's Offensive Plan," Google that and there's a forty page article on Meade's offensive plans for his right. It explores in depth the idea that he also plans to attack on his right on July 2nd. As for Lee's July 13th-14th crossing of the Potomac, Meade brought the decision to attack to a vote amongst his corps commanders who advised against it. That's wise and smart. The legacy of the Committee on the Conduct of War hearings in relation to Meade's prowess. The questions that were raised by the CCW about Meade's aggressiveness and imagination on the battlefield would remain with him throughout the remainder of the war, and would establish his place in Grant's shadow. By the way, that term "Grant's shadow," I got that from Jim Huting, how many of you know Jim Huting? He's a licensed guide and he's writing a book on Meade and has been writing it for several years. It's entitled, "In Grant's Shadow" and it's about Meade, so that goes to Jim Huting. Though he was the first to defeat Lee, Meade's legacy then and now is tempered by the question of why he did not counterattack after Pickett's Charge, either tactically at Gettysburg or on the operational level during the retreat. The answer is that he did counterattack, but in measure degrees, with offensive measures developing in percentages toward full implementation. Meade permitted the circumstances to play out, and continued to nurture the option of counterattack until the risk finally outweighed the reward. That was Meade's answer before the CCW. Thank you all for being here today, thank you so much for everything you do for the park.

Channel: GettysburgNPS

Views: 83,012

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Keywords: United States Congressional Hearing, Battle Of Gettysburg (Event), George G. Meade, Gettysburg National Military Park, Winter Lecture, Winter Lecture Series, Troy Harman

Id: Qbx5awqa-gI

Length: 91min 1sec (5461 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 13 2014