Hallowed Ground - James M. McPherson [35]
Meade has his defenders, however. They point out that a heavy load of responsibility weighed on his shoulders. He had been in command for only six days, three of them fighting for his army's survival. Could he jeopardize his victory by risking a counterattack against an enemy that still had sharp teeth and might bite back as hard as it had been bitten? “We have done well enough,” said Meade to a cavalry officer eager to do more. Meade later explained that he did not want to follow “the bad example [Lee] had set me, in ruining himself attacking a strong position.”
Out on the Union left flank more than two miles south of Meade's headquarters, however, one Union officer anticipated an order for a counterattack. He was Brigadier General Judson Kilpatrick, commander of a Union cavalry division. Learning at about 5:00 P.M. of the repulse of the Pickett-Pettigrew assault, Kilpatrick ordered a combined mounted and dismounted attack by two brigades against the Confederate right flank west of the Round Tops. Unsupported by infantry, this attack was a bloody fiasco. From a point near the monument to Major William Wells of the First Vermont Cavalry on South Confederate Avenue, we can view the scenes of the mounted attack through the fields of the Slyder farm. Before the Park Service cleared out twenty-seven acres of woods west of the Slyder farmhouse that were not there in 1863, and before a hundred-acre woodlot south of the road was culled, it was impossible to visualize how cavalry could operate in this area. Now, happily, we can understand the tactics of Kilpatrick's attack—faulty and foolhardy though it proved to be.
Next day—the Fourth of July—Union infantry from the Fifth and Sixth Corps moved out from the vicinity of the Round Tops to probe Confederate positions in that area. Was this the beginning of a Union counterattack? Impossible to say, for in late morning a drenching rain began to fall and continued intermittently for several days, bringing operations to a halt. Lee had already decided to retreat, and that evening his army started to pull out and head for Virginia. The rain hindered both the retreat and Meade's snaillike pursuit.
Heavy rain fell after several Civil War battles. A widespread theory at the time held that the thunder of artillery somehow caused clouds to let loose their own thunder and moisture. I am unable to say whether this theory holds water.
Epilogue
THE CONFEDERATE RETREAT from Gettysburg turned into a nightmare. An ambulance train several miles long jounced over rutted roads and bogged down axle-deep in mud, causing untold agony for the ten thousand wounded men that the Army of Northern Virginia managed to take along on the retreat. They had to leave behind at least seven thousand wounded to be treated by Union surgeons, who had their hands full with fourteen thousand Union wounded. As well as farmhouses and barns on the battlefield, virtually every public building and many homes in town became hospitals. The medical corps set up numerous tent hospitals as well. Hundreds of volunteers flocked to Gettysburg to help care for the wounded. Burial details hastily interred more than three thousand dead Union soldiers and many of the almost four thousand dead Confederates. Four thousand of the wounded, about evenly divided between the two sides, subsequently died of their wounds. Five thousand dead horses were doused with coal oil and burned. For months the stench of hospitals, and of corpses unburied or buried in shallow graves, hung over the town and countryside.
Meanwhile the Army of the Potomac, prodded by President Lincoln and General-in-Chief Halleck, plodded through the mud in pursuit of Lee. Union cavalry captured the Confederate wagon train carrying the pontoons necessary to bridge the Potomac. Swollen by rain, the river was unfordable. Lincoln urged Meade to attack the Rebels while they were trapped north of the