Read CHAPTER XII - GETTYSBURG: HIGH TIDE AND EBB of Charles Carleton Coffin, War Correspondent, free online book, by William Elliot Griffis, on ReadCentral.com.

When Lee and his army, leaving the front of the Union army and becoming invisible, when President and people, general and chief and privates, Cabinet officers and correspondents, were wondering what had become of the rebel hosts, and when the one question in the North was, “Where is General Lee?” Carleton, divining the state of affairs, took the railway to Harrisburg. Once more he was an observer in the field. His first letter is dated June 16th, and illuminates the darkness like an electric search-light.

General Lee, showing statesmanship as well as military ability, had chosen a good time. The Federal army was losing its two years’ and nine months’ men. Vicksburg was about to fall. Something must be done to counterbalance this certain loss to the Confederates. Paper money in the South was worth but ten per cent. of its face value. Recognition from Europe must be won soon, or the high tide of opportunity would ebb, nevermore to return. Like a great wave coming to its flood, the armed host of the Confederacy was moving to break at Gettysburg and recede.

Yet, at that time, who had ever thought of, or who, except the farmers and townsmen and students in the vicinity, had ever seen Gettysburg? At first Carleton supposed that Harper’s Ferry might be the scene of the coming battle. Again he imagined it possible for Lee to move down the Kanawha, and fall upon defenceless Ohio. He wrote from Harrisburg, from Washington, from Baltimore, from Washington again, from Baltimore once more, from Frederick, where he learned that Hooker had been superseded, and Meade, the Pennsylvanian, put in command. On June 30th, writing from Westminster, Md., he described the rapid marching of the footsore and hungry Confederates, and the equally rapid pedestrianism of the Federals. He revels in the splendors of nature in Southern Pennsylvania, which the Germans once hailed as a holy land of comfort and liberty, and which, by their industry, they had made “fair as the garden of the Lord.” As Carleton rode with the second corps from Frederick to Union Town, and thence to Westminster, he penned prose poems in description of the glorious sight, so different from his native and stony New Hampshire.

“The march yesterday was almost like passing through paradise. Such broad acres of grain rustling in the breeze; the hills and valleys, bathed in alternate sunlight and shade; the trees so green; the air so scented with clover-blossoms and new-made hay; the cherry-trees ruby with ripened fruit, lining the roadway; the hospitality of the people, made it pleasant marching.”

Thus like the great forces of the universe, which make the ocean’s breast heave to and fro, and send the tides in ebb and flood, were the great energies which were now to bring two hundred thousand men in arms, on the field of Gettysburg, in Adams County, Pennsylvania. Forty years before, as it is said, a British officer surveying the great plain with the ranges of hills confronting each other from opposite sides, with many highroads converging at this point, declared with admiration that this would be a superb site for a great battle. Now the vision of possibility was to become reality, and Carleton was to be witness of it all. Since mid-June he had been on the rail or in the saddle. He was now to spend sleepless nights and laborious days that were to tax his physical resources to their utmost.

With his engineer’s eye, and from the heights overlooking the main field, he took in the whole situation. From various points he saw the awful battles of July 2d and 3d, which he described in two letters, written each time after merciful night came down upon the field of slaughter. He saw the charges and defeats, the counter-charges and the continued carnage, and the final cavalry onset made by the rebels. He was often under fire. An impression that lasted all his life, and to which he often referred, was the result of that great movement of Pickett’s division across the field, after the long bombardment of the Federal forces by the Confederate artillery. Retiring before the heavy cannonade, Carleton had remained in the rear, until, hearing the cheers of the Union soldiers, he reached the slope in time to see the gray and brown masses in the distance.

As the great wave of human life receded, that for a moment had pierced the centre of the Union forces, only to be hurled back and broken, Carleton rode out down the hill and on the plain into the wheat field. Then and there, seeing the awful debris, came the conviction that the rebellion had seen its highest tide, and that henceforth it would be only ebb.

When is a battle over, and how can one know it? That night, Friday, and the next day, Saturday, Carleton felt satisfied that Lee was in full retreat, though General Meade did not seem to think so. Carleton’s face was now set Bostonwards. Not being able to use the army telegraph, he gave his first thought to reaching the railroad. The nearest point was at Westminster, twenty-eight miles distant, from which a freight-train was to leave at 4 P. M.

Rain was falling heavily, but with Whitelaw Reid as companion, Carleton rode the twenty-eight miles in two hours and a half. Covered with mud from head to foot, and soused to the skin, the two riders reached Westminster at 3.55 P. M. As the train did not immediately start, Carleton arranged for the care of his beast, and laying his blanket on the engine’s boiler, dried it. He then made his bed on the floor of the bumping car, getting some sleep of an uncertain quality before the train rolled into Baltimore.

At the hotel on Sunday morning he was seized by his friend, E. B. Washburn, Grant’s indefatigable supporter and afterwards Minister to France, who asked for news. Carleton told him of victory and the retreat of Lee. “You lie,” was the impulsive answer. Washburn’s nerves had for days been under a strain. Then, after telling more, Carleton telegraphed a half-column of news to the Journal in Boston. This message, sent thence to Washington, was the first news which President Lincoln and the Cabinet had of Gettysburg. After a bath and hoped-for rest, Carleton was not allowed to keep silence. All day, and until the train was entered at night for New York, he was kept busy in telling the good news.

The rest of the story of this famous “beat,” as newspaper men call it, is given in Carleton’s own words to a Boston reporter, a day or two before the celebration of his golden wedding in February, 1896:

“Monday I travelled by train to Boston, writing some of my story as I rode along, and wiring ahead to the paper what they might expect from me. When I reached the office I found Newspaper Row packed with people, just as you will see it now on election night, and every one more than anxious for details.

“It was too late, however, for anything but the morning edition of Tuesday, but the paper wired all over New England the story it would have, and the edition finally run off was a large one.

“I locked myself in a room and wrote steadily until the paper went to press, seeing no one but the men handling the copy, and, when the last sheet was done, threw myself on a pile of papers, thoroughly exhausted, and got a few hours’ sleep. I went to my home in the suburbs, the next day, but my townspeople wouldn’t let me rest. They came after me with a band and wagon, and I had to get out and tell the story in public again.

“The next day I left for the front again, riding forward from Westminster, where I had left my horse, and thus covering about 100 miles on horseback, and 800 miles by rail, from the time I left the army until I got back again.

“Coffee was all that kept me up during that time, but my nerves did not recover from it for a long time. In fact, I don’t think I could have gone through the war as I did, had I not made it a practice to take as long a rest as possible after a big battle or engagement.”

In his letter written after the decisive event of 1863, Carleton pays a strong tribute of praise to the orderly retreat which Lee made from Pennsylvania. He was bitterly disappointed that the defeated army should have been allowed to escape. With the soldiers, he looked forward with dread to another Virginia campaign. Nevertheless, he was all ready for duty. Having found his horse and resumed his saddle, he spent a day revisiting the Antietam battle-field. It was still strewn with the debris of the fight: old boots, shoes, knapsacks, belts, clothes all mouldy in the dampness of the woods. He found flattened bullets among the leaves, fragments of shells, and, sickening to the sight, here and there a skull protruding from the ground, the bleaching bones of horses and men. The Dunkers’ church and the houses were rent, shattered, pierced, and pitted with the marks of war.

Even until July 15th, when he sent despatches from Sharpsburg, he nourished the hope that Lee’s army could still be destroyed before reaching Richmond. This was not to be. Like salt on a sore, and rubbed in hard, Carleton’s sensibilities were cut to the quick, when, on again coming home, he found the people in Boston and vicinity debating the question whether the battle of Gettysburg had been a victory for the Union army or not. Some were even inclined to consider it a defeat. Carleton’s letter of July 24th, written in Boston, fairly fumes with indignation at the blind critics and in defence of the hard work of the ever faithful old Army of the Potomac, “which has had hard fighting, terrible fighting, and little praise.” He lost patience with those staying at home depreciating the army and finding fault with General Meade. He wrote: “Frankly and bluntly, I cannot appreciate such stupidity. Why not as well ask if the sun rose this morning? That battle was the greatest of the war. It was a repulse which became a disastrous defeat to General Lee.” He sarcastically invited critics, “instead of staying at home to weaken the army by finding fault, to step into the ranks and help do the ‘bagging,’ the ‘cutting up,’ and the ‘routing’ which they thought ought to have been done.”