網頁圖片
PDF
ePub 版

Second Brigade: Colonel Patrick Kelly. Third Brigade: Brigadier-General Samuel K. Zook. Fourth Brigade Colonel John R. Brooke.

Second Division.-Brigadier-General John Gibbon. First Brigade: Brigadier-General William Harrow. Second Brigade: Brigadier-General Alexander S. Webb. Third Brigade: Colonel Norman J. Hall.

Third Division.-Brigadier-General Alexander Hays. First Brigade: Colonel S. Sprigg Carroll. Second Brigade: Colonel Thomas A. Smyth. Third Brigade: Colonel George L. Willard.

Artillery Brigade.-Five batteries. Captain John G. Hazard.

The Corps Staff included Morgan, Inspector General and Chief of Staff; Walker, Assistant Adjutant General (absent, wounded); Batchelder, Chief Quartermaster; Smith, Chief Commissary; Dougherty, Medical Director; Bull, Provost Marshal; Mitchell, Miller, and Parker, aids; Bingham, Judge Advocate; Brownson, Commissary of Musters; Livermore, Chief of Ambulances.

The day which followed the long march to and beyond Uniontown was passed by the troops of the Second Corps in a welcome quiet, no orders to march disturbing their peaceful rest, no booming of distant cannon presaging the fierce encounter soon to take place. The morning of Wednesday, July Ist, found the corps still in camp; and Hancock

[ocr errors]

sat down to address a general order to his troops urging them by all considerations of honor and patriotism to do their utmost in the impending struggle. The rough draft of this order lies before me as I write. I quote the concluding sentence:

"To the patriotic and brave I have said enough. Upon those who desert their posts in the hour of trial let instant death be inflicted by their comrades. "WINFIELD S. HANCOCK, Commanding."

It was not usual for Hancock to address his troops or to appeal to them in general orders. On this occasion perhaps some little excitement proceeding from the newness of his command, his intense feeling as a Pennsylvanian at seeing his native soil invaded and the very home of his childhood threatened with fire and sword, the general stir and clash of arms in the marching columns, had wrought his mind up to the point of taking this step. But the gist of the projected order lay not in the appeal to the patriotic, but in the threat to the base and cowardly. Hancock was sternly resolved that the betrayal of good troops by bad in the crisis of battle should, so far as his command was concerned, cease then and there; and that the faint-hearted soldier should find it safer to do his duty on the line than to run away.

But even while Hancock sat writing, shaping his address to his troops, changing one word for an

other, his very rank as yet casually omitted from the draft, the order came to march at once to Taneytown. By the hour the corps reached that place all thoughts of a general order had vanished. The time had arrived for action, not words. Great news had come-news which in the telling made rhetoric and argument alike trivial. The left wing of the Army of the Potomac, consisting of the First and Eleventh Corps, with Buford's division of cavalry, the Third Corps following, all under command of Major-General John F. Reynolds, had been pushed up to Gettysburg-name then little known!—to see if haply anywhere might be found the main body of the enemy, thus far hidden away amid clouds of raiding parties which covered no small part of the fair State of Pennsylvania. Here at Gettysburg the intrepid, vigilant, enterprising Buford, searching every avenue by which the enemy might approach, suddenly experienced the onset of Heth, coming in from Chambersburg upon his left, the first of Lee's widely scattered divisions to arrive in a general movement of concentration at that point ordered on the 29th of June, in ignorance of Meade's advance northward. Hastily sending word to Reynolds, Buford prepared to hold the enemy back until the Union infantry could come up. Twelve months earlier a Confederate division would have driven the Union cavalry before them like chaff; but the mounted service had now reached the same degree

of hardiness, tenacity, and endurance which the infantry acquired a year earlier. Posting his men along the banks of Willoughby Run, a mile or more to the northwest of Gettysburg, Buford, with the utmost courage and address, holds back the advancing Confederates until the head of the infantry corps, under Reynolds in person, comes rapidly up to the sound of the firing.

What shall be done in view of the fast-proceeding concentration of the enemy? Lee has, in ignorance of Meade's whereabouts, pitched upon Gettysburg; and this fortunate choice has given him a full twenty-four hours' start in a contest for that position. Shall the Army of the Potomac, thus put at disadvantage in point of time, relinquish Gettysburg and fall back upon Pipe Creek, which down to this moment has mainly been in view by the headquarters staff as the true defensive line? This is the question Reynolds is called to decide. The decision costs him his life but wins for him an immortality of glory. Without hesitation he orders up his foremost division (Wadsworth's) and throws it into action, to contest the advance of the Confederates and give time for the rest of his own troops and Howard's to come up. Here within a brief space he falls dead, paying with his life the price of holding Gettysburg for the Union arms. It needs not to tell of the fight which for hours raged along Willoughby Run and Semi

nary Ridge, as the divisions of the First Corps successively arriving, and the Eleventh Corps following, sought to beat back the Confederate columns now fast coming upon the field from the northwest, from the north, and finally from the northeast. At last, in spite of the most gallant resistance, our troops are swept from the field in overwhelming numbers; Seminary Ridge is lost; the enemy, closing in, capture thousands in the streets of Gettysburg; the feeble remnants of the Union corps are obliged to retreat to Cemetery Hill and Cemetery Ridge. Of the sixteen thousand taken into action, scarce five thousand remain with the colors; the rest have been left upon the field, killed or wounded, or prisoners in the hands of the Confederates, or are scattered over the hills and plains, panic-stricken, broken, and in flight.

Return we now to Taneytown. Thither had been borne the news of the first engagement of the morning conflicting news of gain and loss, and, at last, the tidings that Reynolds had fallen. Whether killed or only severely wounded was not yet known. Thus inauspiciously had the battle opened. The enemy, so eagerly sought, had been found only too well. General Meade had grave reason to believe that his left wing was in dire peril. The point where the collision had taken place intimated strongly that the Confederates were already there in vastly superior force. He could not himself go to the front, for he

« 上一頁繼續 »