Gettysburg – John Buford and Brief Comment of Five Days
June 30 – July 4, 1863
On Tuesday June 30th in 1863, thirty-seven year old John Buford, a US cavalry officer, was commanding two brigades of about 2,600 men. They were the eyes and ears of the Union (Federal) army shadowing the Confederates (Army of Northern Virginia), then marching northeast, somewhere between the mountains of central Pennsylvania. John was convinced that the Confederate general, Robert Lee, was planning to gather his disjointed forces and concentrate them at the strategic hub of the town of Gettysburg. Lee planned to destroy the Federal forces one by one as each of their six corps arrived separately (corp = 10,000 to 15,000 soldiers). Once destroyed, Lee could march unopposed to Washington. The end of the war and victory for the slaveholding Confederacy, appeared within reach.
John quickly formed a battle plan to slow down Lee concentrating his forces, long enough for Federal reinforcements to arrive. John’s plan worked better than he expected and worked against overwhelming odds. What was at stake was the defining battle of the war, that should it produce yet another Federal defeat and Confederate victory, the north could not be expected to support the Federal war effort. Resistance to the war was rising rapidly – about to erupt in violent anti-Union riots in the largest cities in the north. Papers for a permanent cease-fire had already been drawn up and were waiting to be placed on President’s Lincoln’s desk for his signature, should the federals be defeated once again.
Speaking to his men (and half aloud to himself), John criticized the politicians urging the army to strike – strike; regardless of the practical realities in the field. John told his junior officers that even though they were outnumbered seven-to-one, they must hold against Lee’s infantry until reinforcements arrived. That was the only chance they had to prevent Lee from seizing the high ground adjacent to the town. Conferring with his junior officers was good leadership. It ensured buy-in of his chain of command. John explained that the commanding high ground could be secured if …they can hold back the enemy, and if …reinforcements arrive in time, and if …ammunition holds out – three ‘IFS’ on which they gambled their sacred duty.
John’s men adored him, tolerating his thinking out loud to himself. He had gotten them to throw away their swords that he said were useless and their pistols as well. Carry extra rifle ammunition for the same weight he preached, and his men enthusiastically agreed. Occasionally the question has been raised: did Buford obtain repeating rifles for his men. There is no evidence or mention of this anywhere to date. We do know that single shot, rear-loading short rifles (carbines) were standard issue to the cavalry. These weapons, modern in their day, had three times the firepower of the muskets of Lee’s infantry. Additionally, they could be loaded while lying down. John’s men took up positions behind wood and stone fences strengthened with whatever rocks, logs and earth they could find.
In opposing John’s troopers, Lee’s infantry had three distinct disadvantages: attacking upright in a tight line formation, using slow firing muskets that could only be reloaded while standing up, and having little or no cover while firing. The two battle lines were at times only one hundred to one hundred fifty yards apart.
More importantly, John quickly sent correct intelligence to the infantry nearest to him: the 1st Corps and the 11th. John sent requests for all possible speed and reinforcement. He simultaneously did the same through the night to four other corps; to come to Gettysburg where he was “…in possession of good ground.” He slept little, off and on perhaps an hour and less than two. He woke his men well before first light on Wednesday morning the first of July – the first day of the battle of Gettysburg.
Even though by the end of that first day, the Federal 11th Corps broke and ran, but because of the dogged toughness of the 1st corps, despite this mixed situation, the Federals secured the commanding high ground and reinforced their position throughout the night. Possessing the high ground was the principal deciding factor of the military situation at Gettysburg. Although Lee could have, (should have?) abandoned his position and forced the Federals to give up their advantage of the high ground, Lee did not; although he was advised by his highly respected second in command, General James Longstreet, to do exactly that.
Lee hesitated at the end of the first day and failed to pursue the Federals to the high ground they had run to. In all likelihood Lee could have taken it, before the Federals had time to entrench. Lee could have possessed the high ground at Gettysburg. On the second day, Lee was slow to move his forces and failed to coordinate them. He also failed to go around the Federals’ left side which was exposed, despite repeated calls to do so, by both his Generals Longstreet and John Hood. Lee also failed to get into position during the night for the early morning of July 3, as he had so often done in the past. Lee’s sluggishness and poor judgment were out of character, as his previous battlefield record shows. It cannot be fully explained away by Lee’s cavalry commander, Jeb Stuart’s absence, that left Lee without his cavalry the first two days; the eyes and ears of an army. Lee’s decisions were unexplainable at the time and have been debated down to this day.
On July 3rd, General Lee ordered General Longstreet, (over Longstreet’s strenuous objections), to make a frontal assault against an estimated 45,000 Federal troops perched on top of a section of the high ground called Cemetery Ridge. The Federals were behind a stone wall, and had superior artillery. Longstreet was given less than 17,000 infantry to do this. Those infantry had to start by marching in plain sight across a mile of open fields, subject to deadly artillery fire before reaching musket range less than a quarter mile from the top. By the time Lee’s men reached the stone wall at the top, estimates of 3,000 to only 2,000, were left to fight. The few who made it over the wall and into the Federal lines, were quickly surrounded and most were captured rather than shot. Also some 500 to 700 of the Confederate infantry had turned back on the way to the top, and straggled back to their own lines, in relatively good order. It was reported that in the aftermath, as General Lee rode past General Longstreet, Lee was recorded as saying, “It is all my fault, it is all my fault.” His owning up to his responsibility was immediate and without any excuse.
The next day, the fourth of July, in a drenching downpour, Lee’s shattered army mournfully retreated south out of Pennsylvania and back to Virginia. The ambulance train was described by reliable eyewitnesses as being ‘nose-to-tail’ unbroken for twelve miles and leaving a trail of blood. The Confederate army’s confidence in their general, ‘Bobby Lee,’ as well as in themselves, had been shaken. The casualty lists that were being calculated and drawn up, then published in the papers both north and south, stunned civilians and military alike in both halves of the country. The tide of the Confederate ‘Great Rebellion’, with its string of victories and successful maneuvers up to and including July 1, came to a standstill on July 2nd and was reversed on July 3rd. General Lee never again held the initiative as he had throughout the war up until Gettysburg. The turning of the grim fortunes of war were terribly and mercilessly decided man to man, company to company and brigade to brigade on the fertile fields, shaded woods and long ridges of the fruitful Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
On that same fourth of July, the Confederate fortress on the Mississippi river at Vicksburg, surrendered to General Ulysses Grant and the fledgling nation was cut in half. The desperately needed horses, mules and hogs; sulfur and nitrate (for gunpowder production), arms and leather goods; everything west of the Mississippi that was produced for the war effort, was now beyond reach of the Confederate forces that needed them. The viable soundness of the Confederacy was no more and it could only linger, floundering amidst dwindling hope and escalating shortages. The final collapse which would bring peace to all and freedom to millions of bound slaves, was still twenty-two long, bitter and bloody months away.