Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg Read Free Page B

shoemakers listed in the 1860 census as living inGettysburg were barely sufficient to make or repair the footwear worn by county residents. And if there
had
been a surplus of shoes in town, they would have been cleaned out by Brigadier General John Gordon's brigade of Major General Jubal Early's division when they came through Gettysburg five days earlier.
    The shoe story claim these historians, was concocted by General Heth (pronounced Heath) to explain why he blundered into a firefight contrary to Lee's orders not to bring on a battle until the army was concentrated. Heth said that he thought the Union pickets he encountered on the Chambersburg Pike were merely local militia who could be brushed aside, so he kept going to “get those shoes.”
    The revisionists have made one good point: there were no shoes in Gettysburg except those worn by the inhabitants still in town (many had fled). But that does not necessarily discredit the shoe story. The Confederates may well have
thought
there were shoes; several of them later said so. In any case, the anecdote serves an important purpose because it illustrates that the battle of Gettysburg began as a “meeting engagement,” or “encounter engagement.” Neither commander intended to fight at Gettysburg; the battle built up step by step from that first encounter on the Chambersburg Pike. Let us concede that the shoe story can neither be proved nor disproved; let us follow the current fashion and call Heth's advance a “reconnaissancein force” to probe toward the enemy; the end result was the same.
    For these were no militia that Heth's infantry ran into; they were troopers from John Buford's cavalry division who had fought so well at Brandy Station three weeks earlier. Scouting ahead of the rest of the Union army two of Buford's brigades (about 2,700 men) had entered Gettysburg the day before and discovered signs of the enemy on the road several miles to the northwest. Buford sized up the terrain of ridges and hills around Gettysburg, and the road network that would facilitate concentration of the army there. He sent word south to Major General John Reynolds, commander of the nearest Union infantry (First Corps) near Emmitsburg, Maryland, that he intended to hold those ridges as long as he could against the enemy force he sensed was coming. He asked Reynolds to get his infantry there as soon as possible in the morning. Thus it was Buford who made the crucial decision that led to the battle being fought at Gettysburg. For that distinction he earned one of the statues on the battlefield, portraying Buford on foot with binoculars in hand looking toward the northwest. There are seven equestrian statues at Gettysburg, all of infantry commanders (including army commanders Lee and Meade); the most prominent Union cavalry commander is memorialized in bronze on foot. Go figure.
    The bronze Buford stands on McPherson Ridge (named after a local man whose farm was located there—no relation to me) a mile and three-quarters back toward Gettysburg from where Lieutenant Jones fired the first shot. Jones sent back word of his encounter, and then skirmished with the enemy in a fighting withdrawal to Buford's first line on Herr Ridge. This line held for a time as Heth, recognizing that he was not confronting militia, deployed two brigades to run over these pesky Yankee horsemen. Before this could happen, those horsemen pulled back across Willoughby Run to McPherson Ridge, where Buford had established his main line, with one brigade south of the Pike and the other north of it. Let's walk east across a swale south of the white barn (the only structure of the McPherson farm that survives) to the slight ridgeline marked by several monuments and cannons along Reynolds Avenue. This was the final line held by Buford's cavalry.
    Heth's division numbered seven thousand men, but he deployed only half of them. Most of Buford's cavalry fought dismounted, a tactic increasingly prevalent during the Civil