This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [162]
Gettysburg was a dot on the map marking a place where all the roads crossed; a pleasant little town lying amid rolling hills and broad shallow valleys, a blue mountain wall rising a score of miles to the west, rival armies moving toward it without design, as if something in the place drew them irresistibly. All of Lee’s army was north of the Potomac by now, connected with its southern bases by the thinnest of threads; it was on its own in a strange land, scooping up supplies from the fat Pennsylvania farming country, driven by an inexorable compulsion — lacking a supply line, it must eternally keep moving, because if it did not it would starve, and whenever and wherever it found its enemy it must strike without delay, no matter how the odds might look.
Hooker’s army was above the river too, although Lee did not know it; Jeb Stuart, most famous of cavalrymen, had slipped the leash and gone off on a wild, meaningless raid that took him out of the play and left Lee groping in the dark, condemned at last to fight a battle in which he could not maneuver. But the Army of the Potomac was not Hooker’s army any longer. As June ended, the War Department at last extorted from Hooker the thing it desired but hardly dared ask for — Hooker’s resignation; and now Hooker was off in retirement and George Gordon Meade was in charge, his army loosely spread out across western Maryland, cavalry patrols groping north and west to see where the Confederate strength might be.
Confederate strength was coming together fast, and it was all heading for Gettysburg. Lee had finally learned that the Army of the Potomac was north of the border, looking for him, and when the news reached him his own troops were strung out along sixty miles of Pennsylvania highway, from Chambersburg in the west to the neighborhood of York and Harrisburg in the east. It was necessary for him to concentrate east of the mountains and to do it at once, and couriers had been riding hard to call the scattered divisions together. The Gettysburg area was the handiest place for them to meet, and so to Gettysburg they were coming; and at daylight on July 1 a Union cavalry division that had bivouacked on a low ridge just west of town saw the head of a Confederate infantry column coming toward it.
Stolid General John Buford, who commanded the cavalry, put his dismounted troopers in line, unlimbered his artillery, sent riders pelting south to notify Meade that the Rebels had been found, and opened fire. And from the moment when cavalry and infantry began to exchange long-range shots — firing tentatively, as if they were probing this embryonic battle to see what it might amount to — the two armies were committed to their most terrible fight.
Gettysburg was an act of fate; a three-day explosion of storm and flame and terror, unplanned and uncontrollable, coming inevitably (as the war itself had come) out of the things that hard-pressed men had done in the light of imperfect knowledge, the end result of actions that moved with an inexorable logic toward a fundamental and astounding goal. It would come to symbolize all the war, as if the blunders and the heroism, the hopes and the delusions, the combativeness and the incomprehensible devotion of all Americans had been summed up once and for all in one monstrous act of violence. It was enormously destructive, its significance was not seen until long after it had ended, and — to make it finally and perfectly characteristic — it opened and closed with moments of heartbreaking drama.
Buford’s cavalry had to hold the ridge until some of Meade’s infantry could come up. The Confederates got an infantry division in line and began to move forward, and ragged smoke clouds hung over the ridge as the firing grew heavier; then, in the middle of the morning, the leading brigade