Address of Isaac R. Pennypacker entitled "Meade in Command." Made at the unveiling of memorial marker near Frederick, Maryland, June 28, 1930, where General Meade assumed command of the Army of the Potomac, three days before the Battle of Gettysburg.

The marker erected by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania upon ground given by the Hon. Joseph Hendrix Himes is a granite block from the vicinity of Devil's Den, Gettysburg battlefield, bearing a bronze tablet designed by Paul P. Cret of Philadelphia. The Misses Marilynn and Katrina Himes unveiled the marker in the presence of Governor John S. Fisher, Chairman William H. Stevenson and other members of the Pennsylvania Historical Commission; Emory L. Coblentz, representing Governor Richie of Maryland; Mr. George Gordon Meade and other descendants of General Meade, and many men and women, all the large assembly being the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Himes at tables upon the lawn of their Maryland home, "Prospect Hall."

On this knoll, overlooking, in the words of a beloved American poet, "the clustered spires of Frederick" and a region "fair as the garden of the Lord," sixty-seven years ago, by order of President Lincoln, George Gordon Meade, Major General, United States Volunteers, commanding the Fifth Army Corps, assumed command of the Army of the Potomac.

Consideration of our country's crises in more than a century and a half will not reveal another instance where suddenly so great a responsibility was thrown upon an American. The preparation of Washington and Lincoln for their great work was gradual through a succession of preliminary events leading up to determinant action.

In the colonial and later national periods this vicinity has been the scene of memorable occurrences. Near-by is the route of Braddock's little army leading to the disaster at Braddock's Field. Washington and Franklin, Stonewall Jackson and other famous men with their share in shaping historical events have traversed the streets of Frederick. The town is celebrated in song and story — but, measured by results, the most momentous occurrence in or near Frederick was General Meade's taking over the command of the Army of the Potomac three days before the Battle of Gettysburg.

In the night of June 27-28, 1863, an officer from the War Department caused some excitement in the camp of the Fifth Corps at Ballinger's Creek, near Frederick, in his effort to find General Meade's tent. Meade was aroused, and the messenger, General [then Colonel James A.] Hardie, presented the peremptory order for him to take command of the army of which General Hooker had been relieved. Meade objected that the order was unjust to General Reynolds, Meade's senior in rank, and unjust to himself, as he had not that knowledge of the number of troops in the army, of the location of some of its parts and other facts so essential to a proper exercise of so important a command on the approach of battle, and had scant time to learn these facts.

Meade also objected to the discourtesy to Hooker in being required to go to Hooker's tent to take over the command instead of Hooker sending for him in accordance with the professional precedent established at previous changes in the command. Hardie explained that all Meade's possible objections had been considered at Washington. The order required that Meade should take command immediately upon Hardie's arrival. Accepting Hardie's opinion that he had no option in the matter, but that as a soldier he must obey the order, Meade summoned his son and aide-de-camp, Colonel [then Captain] George Meade, and rode silently through the dark to Hooker's Headquarters. As he approached, the flaps of Hooker's tent were thrown back and General Hooker appeared clad in full uniform, from which it was inferred that he had received notice of the change. Until the afternoon when Hooker departed, without communicating any army plan for the future, Meade insisted upon being considered as a guest at Headquarters. The intervening hours were spent in arriving at a knowledge of the location of the different corps and other essential facts and in the transfer of the command, announced to the army by formal orders. Because of the knowledge of details possessed by General Butterfield, Hooker's chief of staff, Meade asked him to remain in that position for a time. Subsequent events showed that the invitation and its acceptance, at the moment seeming essential, were to be regretted.

With the best informed and most experienced element in the Army the appointment of Meade ended doubt and anxiety and re-established confidence. When General Gibbon was told that Hooker was relieved, and almost breathlessly asked who was in command, he gave a sigh of relief when answered, "General Meade." Colonel Haskell, in his contemporary narrative, wrote: "The providence of God had been with us; we ought not to have doubted it. General Meade commanded the Army of the Potomac. From that moment my own mind was easy concerning results." A number of prominent officers, among them Reynolds, Hancock and Gibbon, rode to the Headquarters that day to express the same confidence and to pledge hearty support. The evidence of contemporaries, wisely says the philosopher, Bertrand Russell, is of more value than written records by non-actors, for the reason that the latter are liable to two misinterpretations, one of the recorder and a second one by the reader. The officers, who had respect for and confidence in Meade, included the most skillful and intelligent corps, division, and brigade commanders of the Army of the Potomac. That army was the best officered, the best disciplined, the most effective of all the Union armies. It had been opposed by the ablest officers and the best army of the Confederacy. Its steel was tempered in a long series of the greatest battles of the war. The losses in Grant's fighting about Vicksburg, Sherman's on the march to the sea, and Thomas's at Nashville, reveal how light were these contests in the west and further south, Chickamauga alone excepted, compared with the battles in Virginia, at Antietam and above all at Gettysburg.

The confidence in Meade, when supreme responsibility was suddenly thrown upon him on June 28, 1863, was based upon personal knowledge of his mentality, his character, his soldierly attainments, upon the knowledge that during McClellan's change of base to the James River and the severe fighting on the way, Meade as a Brigadier, by his topographical knowledge and promptness in battle had saved the army from being cut in two; that at Second Bull Run his military judgement had won the commendation of his superiors; that a South Mountain in Maryland his flank movement up the height had compelled the retirement to Antietam of the Confederates; that at Antietam, regardless of the ranking claim of another, he had been placed by McClellan in command of a corps; that at Fredericksburg he had won the only success of the battle, advancing with his division over a plain wider than that of Gettysburg to a height similar to that held by the Union army at Gettysburg, had penetrated Stonewall Jackson's line in greater force and more deeply than was later done by the miscalled Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, and that if Meade's success had been supported promptly by his superior officers, Fredericksburg might have been a victory for the North instead of the failure in which it resulted. They knew that at Chancellorsville Stonewall Jackson's celebrated flank march took him across the fronts of Meade and Reynolds, who, if they could have obtained from the bewildered Army commander authority to attack, would have routed Jackson's command, and made impossible the praise of so unsound a movement in battle as a flanking movement terminating in an advance across the opponent's front. Some of Meade's admirers, when Hooker's earlier order had come for his army to retire from a good position to an inferior one without fighting, had heard Meade exclaim, "Great God! If we cannot hold to top of a hill, we certainly cannot hold the bottom of it," — the exclamation coming from a devout member of the Protestant Episcopal Church, who as opportunity offered arranged to have religious services at his headquarters, he himself partaking of the communion, as did General Humphreys, General Seth Williams and others of his staffs. They knew that at Jackson's advance, without orders, Meade had covered promptly the river ford in the rear of the Army, and that he had opposed Hooker's retirement across the Rappahannock. And now here, on June 28, 1863, to their relief and with their confidence, which continued all the way to Appomattox, Meade was in command of the Army of the Potomac, but it must be remembered not in supreme command.

There was a higher military authority at Washington in General Halleck, in the War Department, and in the President. Warfare is most successfully waged when a great General is also head of the state, as Napoleon was, or when the military operations are so remote that the military commander cannot be communicated with, as was the case with General Taylor and General Scott in our war with Mexico. With modern governments, unless Italy be excepted, and with modern means of communication, neither of these conditions is possible. Neither existed as to the Army of the Potomac in the Civil War. Often what appeared to be uncertainty or hesitation upon the part of Army commanders until the last year of the war, was due to directions from Washington.

Simultaneously with the order to take command of the Army came instructions to Meade that he was expected to cover the cities of Baltimore and Washington and to relieve Pennsylvania of the invasion by Lee's army which involved the defeat of Lee in battle, a threefold undertaking.

On that early morning of the twenty-eighth day of June, of Meade's army, the First Corps (Reynolds), the Third Corps (Sickles) and the Eleventh Corps (Howard) were at Middletown, Maryland. The Second Corps (Hancock) was at Barnsville, the Fifth Corps (Sykes succeeding Meade as Corps Commander) was on Ballinger Creek. The Sixth Corps (Sedgwick) was at Poolesville, and the Twelfth Corps (Slocum) at Knoxville. Buford's Cavalry division was near Jefferson, Gregg[']s was on the march by way of Frederick to New Market, and Kilpatrick's was near Frederick. The second corps was about fifteen miles away to the south; the sixth corps seven miles south of the second corps or about twenty-two miles from Headquarters. The twelfth corps at Knoxville, on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, east of Harpers Ferry, was approximately seventeen miles from Frederick. The fifth corps (formerly Meade's, now Sykes's) on Ballinger's Creek was four or five miles from Frederick. It has been said that Meade expressed to Hooker a degree of dismay on learning that parts of the army were so widely separated.

A later generation of critics, among them Mark Twain, found fault with the civilization of the South, asserting that it was based upon Walter Scott's novels. There remains a substantial body of Americans who still hold that the ideals and characters presented in Scott's novels are better models for imitation than the self-expression of weaklings set forth in thousands of present-day novels, who still believe that humanity needs competent leadership, who maintain that it is through such leadership that progress has been made, and who remember that what the Frenchman, [Aristide] Briand, is today tentatively proposing is what Napoleon sought to establish more than a century ago. No doubt the Southern leaders read Scott's novels, as most intelligent Americans did in that day, and were familiar with the exploits of the great military leader, the Marquis of Montrose, as depicted in Walter Scott's novel "Montrose." That skillful leader, of the Royal cause in Scotland, with small, irregular, uncertain and poorly equipped troops, so skillfully played hide and seek among the mountain ranges of Scotland, descending suddenly where he was not looked for, and winning victory after victory, that for a time he stamped out the opposition in Scotland to King Charles.

It was the war game of Montrose that the Confederate leader, Forrest, played as well in Tennessee, and that Lee, Longstreet, Jackson and Jubal Early played among the forests and mountains of Virginia, Maryland, or Pennsylvania, combining military skill and imagination against General Pope at the second battle of Bull Run and against Hooker at Chancellorsville, and if unsuccessfully against McClellan at Antietam, and Meade in the Gettysburg campaign, and again later in what is called the campaign of manoeuvers [sic] in the autumn of 1863, at least always with inventive audacity. They were not the only directors of this form of the war game, for Meade also attempted it in the Mine Run movement in the early winter of 1863-64, failing of success only through the failure of a corps commander, who for all his verbal direction and maps, lost his way, and brought on an undesired, unexpected and isolated battle, as Hill and Heth did for General Lee on the first day at Gettysburg.

Once more, in June, 1863, General Lee had used the gaps and range of the Blue Mountains to hide and shield his movements northward. Longstreet had suggested moving a force from the Army of Northern Virginia to the west to break Grant's investiture of Vicksburg. The view has been advanced that Confederate success at Gettysburg would have had that effect. Other results of such success were among the possibilities, among them recognition of the Southern Confederacy by England and France, an ensuing weakening or end of the blockade of southern ports, a desire in the north to make peace if Lee could have crossed the Susquehanna, and reached the fertile fields and wealthy towns of Lancaster County, or the city of Baltimore, or Philadelphia or the national capital.

On June 3rd and 4th, leaving one corps in front of the Army of the Potomac along the Rappahannock, Lee moved his two other corps by screened routes to Culpepper. Stuart's cavalry was already there. Hooker wished to cross the Rappahannock, and attack Lee's isolated corps. President Lincoln forbade, his assigned reason being the danger of being caught astride the stream. Unexpressed in the President's refusal was the distrust of General Hooker, felt within the Army itself by its ablest soldiers, and shared at Washington since Hooker's failure at the battle of Chancellorsville. Practically, President Lincoln's refusal prevented Hooker from making any attack in Virginia since the stream which he was forbidden to cross came from the mountains, a cover to the Confederates, and thereafter the mountain afforded protection. Lee's advance corps (Ewell) left Culpepper June 10th, entered the Shenendoah by Chester Gap; on the 14th captured Winchester with many prisoners and munitions of war; crossed the Potomac at Williamsport, his leading division on the 15th, his rear on the 22nd, and on the 23rd was at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Longstreet's corps left Culpepper June 15th with three brigades of Stuart's cavalry on his right, and advanced northward on the east side of the Blue Ridge. On the same day Hooker began to fall back along the Orange and Alexandria Railroad in order to interpose between Lee and the city of Washington. Lee's remaining corps (Hill) now moved by Longstreet's rear, passed into the Shenendoah Valley, and crossed the Potomac at Shepherdstown on June 24th. When Hill had passed, Longstreet moved to the west side of the Shenendoah River and crossed the Potomac by Ewell's route at Williamsport on the 25th. On the 27th Longstreet and Hill were in the vicinity of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.

Apparently with the approval of Lee and Longstreet, the Confederate cavalry leader marched his force by Hooker's rear and continued on his way into Pennsylvania gathering supplies. He was separated from Lee's army by the interposition of the opposing army until nearly the end of the battle of Gettysburg, on which field in a cavalry combat he was defeated by General Gregg. Nevertheless, General Lee retained with his army a sufficient force of cavalry for observation purposes. The absence of Stuart has been overemphasized by historians. One brigade of cavalry, the additional troopers of Emack, White, Gilmor, and Randolph, some 3000 in numbers, and Imboden's brigade, 2000 strong, were left under Lee's control. Stuart crossed the Potomac at Seneca Ford, June 27th, on the 29th was at Westminster, fought with Kilpatrick at Hanover, Pa., on the 30th, veered off in search of Ewell of Lee's army, was at Dover and Carlisle on July 1st, and reached the vicinity of Gettysburg on the 2nd. Confederate troops were in plain sight from the environs of Harrisburg, and only the burning of the bridge over the Susquehanna at Wrightsville prevented Confederate access to Lancaster County. Hooker crossed the Potomac at Edwards Ferry on June 25th and 26th, and by the morning of the 28th when Hooker turned over the command to Meade, the army was in the position heretofore indicated. General Gibbon wrote that "with the confidence born of natural ability and the habit of command" Meade at four o'clock on the morning of June 29th put his army in motion.

Along Pipe Creek on Parr's Ridge he had his engineers locate a position for each army corps. In the rear was the town of Westminster to which place a railroad ran from Baltimore over which supplies could be brought. In front was a wide valley extending to the South Mountain. Both for defense and for offensive movements, in case of Lee's defeat in battle, the position was an admirable one, superior to that of Meade at Gettysburg for the reason that the mountain gaps and range afforded opportunity and protection to Lee on his retreat from Gettysburg were more distant from Pipe Creek, and thus facilitated pursuit.

Lee's infantry had reached Pennsylvania by easy marches, had rested there, and obtained abundance of food from well stocked farms. After his retreat into Virginia, Meade's troops recaptured herds and flocks of many thousand of cattle and sheep, which had been carried off from Pennsylvania. The infantry of the Army of the Potomac on the other hand was making the swiftest and longest marches of the war on the way to Gettysburg. For his first march Meade's orders carried the first and eleventh corps to Emmetsburg [sic], more than twenty miles; the second corps by a winding route from Monocacy Junction through Johnsville, Liberty and Union to Frizzelburg, some thirty miles; the third corps from Woodsborough to Taneytown, about fifteen miles; the fifth followed the second corps as far as Union, three miles short of Frizzelburg; the sixth corps from Hyattstown by way of New Market and Ridgeville, along the western foot of Parr's Ridge, marched to New Windsor, twenty-five miles; the twelfth corps marched from Frederick to Bruceville, beyond Taneytown. Buford's cavalry division crossed the South Mountain to the western side and recrossed it at Monterey Springs, and continued on to Fairfield, Pennsylvania, ten miles southwest of Gettysburg. Fairfield is an interesting village outside of its war associations because its people were to a large extent affiliated with the Catholic Church, an offshoot, perhaps, from the early Catholic stronghold of Maryland. Gregg's cavalry division went to New Windsor, Kilpatrick's to Littlestown, and the Artillery Reserves to Bruceville.

With no time to ascertain the strength of his own army, Meade was also without knowledge of the precise whereabouts of Lee's forces. Meade himself went from Frederick to Middleburg, and the next day, the 30th, to Taneytown. On the 29th, Meade ordered French at Harpers Ferry to send the government property to Washington guarded by 3000 men, and with his remaining force of 7000 to hold Frederick and the Monocacy bridge, guard the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and in the event of Meade's repulse to throw his force into the defense of Washington. On this day Governor Parker, of New Jersey, feared that state would be invaded; Simon Cameron told the President that Lee's crossing of the Susquehanna would be disastrous; President Felton, of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad, informed the Secretary of War that the Confederates were marching on Philadelphia. From the towns and cities of the north treasure and valuable articles were shipped to distant places. In the country regions men were burying treasure, and live stock was driven off to places of safety. The national danger was expressed in national economics by the rise of the price of gold to 144 ½, falling after Gettysburg to 131 ½. Between February, 1862, and May, 1863, subscriptions to the $500,000,000 loan had totalled only $64,000,000, but after Gettysburg for nine months subscriptions to the loan amounted to $49,000,000 a month.

Sending his cavalry out to the right, the left and in front in search of Lee, Buford on the 30th from Fairfield by way of Emmetsburg reached Gettysburg. Gregg's division went to Manchester far to the right, to which place Sedgwick's sixth corps of infantry also marched. Reynolds on the left was in command of three corps, the first, third and eleventh. On the morning of July 1st, Buford at Gettysburg encountered the Confederate advance made from Cashtown. Having learned of the approach of Meade's army, Lee was withdrawing from the Susquehanna and the country towards Harrisburg and concentrating his army.

The resistance made by Buford's dismounted troops, the arrival of Reynolds on the field of Gettysburg with the advance of his infantry, his death from a sharpshooter's rifle shot, Meade's conclusion that his advance had stayed Lee's movement towards the Susquehanna, and his decision to concentrate his army at Gettysburg, together with Lee's support of his advance by his forces from Chambersburg and the northward, decided that the battle should be fought at Gettysburg, not where Meade or Lee might have preferred to fight. Both army commanders had a highly developed sense of topography and a quick and keen eye for an advantageous position, and throughout the war both seized upon such a position whenever it was possible. With the fast and long marches in the midsummer heat or rain Meade's army passed northward out of Maryland, and for a while "the partridge whistled down the valley with a confidence renewed." At Taneytown, Meade learned of Reynold's death, and sent Hancock to Gettysburg to take command of the forces there, who on Cemetery Hill quickly brought order out of disorder. To Sedgwick at Manchester Meade sent one orderly after another with messages to hurry to Gettysburg. The march of the sixth corps from Manchester to Gettysburg was the most extraordinary of the war, starting after dark on July 1st, and continuing all night, and until the afternoon of July 2nd, when Gettysburg was reached. Officers fell asleep as they rode their horses, and marching men appeared to sleep as they walked.

The assaults of Lee upon the second and third day of the battle were turned by Meade's tactics, as to which so excellent an authority as the Confederate General, E. P. Alexander, wrote that the war afforded no finer exhibition of tactical skill than that displayed by Meade at Gettysburg. Meade threw the different parts of his army quickly from one threatened part of his line to another, at the precise moment and place where help was needed. The sixth corps was thus so divided and scattered that Sedgwick, its commander, was left almost alone with his staff, and said he might as well go home. The skillful management that won the battle, however, created a disorganization that made immediate pursuit of a defeated foe impossible. In the battle Lee lost 28,000 men, Meade 23,000. Lee lost no corps commander in the battle. Meade lost Reynolds killed and Hancock, Gibbon and Sickles wounded. Meade's temporary chief of staff, Butterfield, disappeared for a time and was said to have been wounded. Seven of Meade's brigadier generals were killed to four of Lee's. Three hundred thirty-nine of Meade's commissioned officers were killed. One brigade had six different leaders during the battle. Reynolds was the ablest corps commander who lost his life in battle during the war. No successor could fill the place of Hancock, "the superb," that princely soldier, in appearance, conduct and character of the highest type of America's manhood, who never committed a fault in battle for which he was responsible. The relations between Meade and Reynolds and Meade and Hancock were especially close. In previous campaigns if Meade was not at Reynold's tent discussing plans and movements, as opportunity offered, Reynolds was at Meade's. Colonel Theodore Lyman wrote how joyfully Meade came from his tent with extended hand in welcome when Hancock returned to the army after months of suffering from his Gettysburg wound. He also described humorously the long talks between Meade and Hancock as they sat in Hancock's ambulance in the 64 campaign, for, said Lyman, "Hancock is a vehement and interesting talker," and when he and Meade foregathered with each other it was a prolonged discussion. Unfortunately the opportunity and the dictograph were not contemporary.¹

Lee's return to Maryland was through the near-by gaps in the South Mountain range, where a small force could check a large one, to his previously chosen position at Hagerstown by a short and direct route. Lee's one flank was on the Potomac, the other rested on a high hill. His line was entrenched. A wide valley was in his front across which a foe must have advanced to assault, as no flank movement was possible. Here Lee received supplies for his artillery. Had Meade attacked Lee in so formidable a position there would have been a reversal of the conditions which cause Lee's defeat at Gettysburg. All of Grant's subsequent assaults on entrenched positions from the early summer of 1864 until the spring of 1865, at Spottsylvania [sic], Cold Harbor and Petersburg failed of success, with enormous losses, as at an earlier period similar assaults on such positions had failed.

Again the Army of the Potomac came into Maryland, this time from the north, on the east side of the mountains. On July 7th, General Meade, himself, reached Frederick where the ladies welcomed him with flowers and wreaths and decorated his horse. This incident gave to the sculptor, Charles Grafty, the thought which he developed in the beautiful marble figures of the Meade Memorial at the head of the mall in the City of Washington.

On Lee's route of retreat the mountain roads were ankle deep in water from the deluge that broke on the night of July 3rd. On the low lands of Meade's route southward the artillery stuck fast in the mud. A half of the eleventh corps was barefoot. The Vermont brigade marched all day without rations. On July 7th one corps marched thirty miles. Passing through the mountains by the gaps, Meade's army took a position looking across the wide valley to entrenched heights on which lay Lee's army waiting to welcome the foe to "hospitable graves." Fortunately Meade held his hand, and on the night of July 13th, Lee recrossed the Potomac, a movement which it was impossible for Meade to ascertain.

The north in the days of peril had preserved a better poise than it now maintained in the hour of victory. The recoil from the dismay of July 1st was to the unwarranted hope of July 5th and 13th. The military authorities at Washington, the President, the Secretary of War [,] Halleck, the General-in-Chief, the newspapers and a now jubilant public in the north did not consider that after Napoleon retired in confusion from Waterloo Wellington did not pursue, or that at the crossing of the Sambre, only twenty-five miles from Waterloo, the pursing Prussians captured only 6000 French soldiers, or that on the next day, when [Emmanuel, Marquis de] Grouchy found both Wellington and Blucher between himself and the Sambre, the French general escaped into France without loss. It was demanded that Meade without an auxiliary army should capture Lee's army at Hagerstown when the opposing forces were about equal and in a similar condition as to strength and exhaustion, but with Lee in a far superior and entrenched position. Writers of books who have allowed that demand have failed to suggest how it could be done. From an early day in June there had been ample warning that Lee was about to make another invasion northward. From different points, eastern Virginia, along the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and in Ohio an army of more than 50,000 trained men under trained officers could have been assembled to be thrown across Lee's line of retreat from Pennsylvania, and Lee would thus have found himself between two opposing armies. General Halleck, the General-in-Chief at Washington, was familiar with military history. Perhaps he remembered that after Napoleon's defeat at Leipsic he was intercepted by General Wrede with 45,000 men, and that at Hanau Wrede was defeated. If the military authorities at Washington feared to make the attempt to intercept Lee by promptly bringing together scattered forces some of them uselessly placed, their fear may have been warranted by that warning from the history of warfare. Nevertheless it was the only method holding any promise of Lee's capture and an immediate ending of the war. They made no such attempt, and it may have been an underlying appreciation of their own inadequacy to meet the situation that caused their dissatisfaction over the retirement of Lee into Virginia.

In July, 1864, General Lew Wallace did better than the military authorities at Washington had done in June, 1863. As the Confederate force under General Jubal A. Early approached from the mountains Wallace threw part of the small command of 3000 men which he had been able to assemble, to the west in front of Frederick, and made a good show of resistance. Many of his officers and men were green troops. The artillery and rifle firing along that front was witnessed by many women and children of the town who sat within range of the Confederate fire and could not be induced to retire to a place of safety. Like the southern women of Harrisonburg, Virginia, the women of Frederick had become used to war, its tumult and danger.

Retiring at night southward some five miles to the Monocacy, Wallace undertook to hold the road to Washington and the road to Baltimore. He already had a brigade of the sixth corps of the Army of the Potomac, and the arrival of another brigade of the same corps gave him 6050 men to stay Early's advance of 10,000. There Wallace fought a one-day battle, and when outflanked and outnumbered, retired on the Baltimore road. His sturdy stand for the day delayed Early's march upon Washington, and probably prevented its capture, and the capture or flight of President Lincoln and members of his cabinet. As Early arrived before the Washington forts veteran troops transported from the Army of the Potomac filed into the defenses, made the capital city safe, and prevented the undoing of the results of the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg.

General Early claimed that the length and swiftness of his marches from Virginia to Frederick and Washington had been unequalled in the war, but a comparison of his marches with those of Meade's army to Gettysburg does not bear out such a claim. Starting at Staunton, Virginia, on June 27th, in two days, by the 29th, Early covered thirty miles; the next day he marched twenty miles; the next fifteen miles; the next eleven miles; the sixth day he made eighteen miles; on the seventh day eleven miles; the next two days were required to cover twelve miles; on the tenth day he marched twelve miles, and after the battle of Monocacy he covered eighteen miles in one day on his march to Washington, and fifteen miles on the next day. On no day did he equal the thirty-five mile march of Sedgwick's corps to Gettysburg, and the marches of other corps of Meade's army to that field excelled Early's rate of progress. Nevertheless, his screened march northward culminating in the battle near Frederick, and narrowly missing the capture of the northern capital, in its daring and imaginative quality outdid the military movements of his great predecessor, the Marquis of Montrose, who too in the end lost his cause.

The North had won a victory in the greatest battle ever fought on American soil, the greatest battle ever fought thus far by Americans in an American cause, and at Hagerstown had been spared a catastrophe such as Lee had met at Gettysburg, Burnside at Fredericksburg, and Grant was to meet at Spottsylvania and Cold Harbor. Major [John] Bigelow wrote in the ablest one battle book of Civil War history, his narrative of Chancellorsville, that it was the victory at Gettysburg that sustained the Army of the Potomac in its desperate wrestling in the Wilderness in 1864 and in gaining the point of advantage from which it started on the fateful race to Appomattox.

Of the character of the re-enforcements started towards Meade to which President Lincoln attached undue importance, General "Baldy" Smith, a capable and experienced officer, wrote that these green troops could be marched along a road, but that it was impossible to maneuver them, and that in the face of the enemy they would be useless.

Statistics purporting to show the strength of the opposing armies at Gettysburg, such as Colonel [Thomas L.] Livermore compiled with diligence, vary greatly. General Andrew A. Humphreys, Chief of Staff, Army of the Potomac Corps Commander, later Chief of Engineers, United States Army, scientist, originator of the thought which led to the Eads jetties at the mouth of the Mississippi, had spent a lifetime in calculations, and was a master of logistics. Participating in many battles and campaigns, and an eyewitness to the wastage in men caused by the rapid marches of Meade's army to Gettysburg, he made after the war at Washington an exhaustive study of the strength of the two armies, and he concluded that Lee's force was somewhat superior in numbers to that of Meade. Meade himself had no time to ascertain the strength of his army, but believed that he was as strong as Lee.

The physical discomforts endured by officers of high rank are shown in a family letter from General Sedgwick, commander of the sixth corps, written on July 26, 1863. "I am worn out. I have not had my clothes off since leaving the Rappahannock," six weeks earlier. "Since we left Fredericksburg it has been the same thing, marching almost day and night, for many of our hardest marches have been made at night. We have done an incredible amount of labor." On July 8, 1863, Meade wrote to his wife, "From the time I took command till today, now over ten days, I have not changed my clothes, have not had a regular night's rest, and many nights not a wink of sleep and for several days did not even wash my face and hands, no regular food and all the time in a great state of mental anxiety." Eating from the tailboard of a wagon or with a cracker box for a seat, sharing such food as General Gibbon could offer him a little while before the cannonade of July 3rd began, in pleasing contrast was an interlude to discomforts and hardships when about six miles from Berlin, Maryland, July 15, 1863, he called upon an old friend, Mrs. Lee, one of the Carrol family, and with much cordiality was urged to bring his staff officers to dine with her and her daughter. At the table waited upon by servants in swallow tail coats, with all the appurtenances of a well-served dinner, including champagne, with the agreeable talk of socially experienced ladies in dinner dress, the toil-worn army commander relaxed for an hour as an apparently endless column of troops could be seen through the windows as they marched along the road.

For Waterloo, Wellington was given a dukedom and large sums of money. America's reward to Meade was to advance him from the rank of Major of Engineers in the regular army to that of Brigadier General in the same establishment. General Humphreys, and there is no authority so high as he, wrote that at Gettysburg Meade had a more difficult task than Wellington had at Waterloo, and performed it equally well with no Blucher to help him.

The boulder from the battlefield of Gettysburg, provided by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, bearing a suitable inscription, and now set in place on ground contributed by a resident of Maryland, will tell through time of a course taken by the ship of state as direct and as fateful as that of Columbus to the shores of America. At last the Army of the Potomac had a leader. Between McClellan and Meade it had two incompetent commanders, and several of its corps had come under the direct control of General Pope, even more incompetent, in the disastrous battle of Second Bull Run.

At the time of Lee's surrender in 1865, the three army commanders preceding Meade, with all their corps commanders, and all the corps commanders, who with Meade fought the good fight at Gettysburg, had disappeared from the Army of the Potomac. Of the soldiers at the head of corps, Reno, Mansfield, Reynolds, and Sedgwick had been killed. Sumner and Birney had died of disease. Hancock's fame had been used to draw recruits to a new corps of veterans for service outside of the old army. Gibbon had gone to lead a corps in the Army of the James. A few days before Lee's surrender, Warren had been relieved of command of the fifth corps by General Sheridan without any justification in fact or conduct in the hour of victory at Five Forks, where Warren had corrected Sheridan's faulty plans, orders and movements. Others had been assigned to service, some of them to minor service, elsewhere. Six or eight other officers had been relieved of active command. Of this large number of twenty-seven generals, bearing the names once known in every northern home, many of them of high rank when Meade was a subordinate, and except for his disciplined energy and ability, having his opportunity for success in warfare, Meade alone remained holding the command of the Army of the Potomac, which he here took up, all the way to its disbandment. In the words of General Charles Devens, "faithful to the end to his great and high ideal of duty."

¹Perhaps still greater interest would attach to the long conversation between Meade and Lee at Lee's Richmond home, May 5th, 1865, less than a month after Lee's surrender. It is recorded that at Appomattox, except to General Seth Williams, General Lee's bearing toward the group of Northern officers with General Grant had been coldly formal. But in Richmond, through Custis Lee, there had come to Meade word that General Lee would be pleased to see him. A certain significance attaches to Lee's invitation to Meade from the fact that Meade was the only Union General who had decisively defeated Lee in a great battle fought on relatively even terms. Of the prolonged meeting and the conversation between the two soldiers of equal social inheritance and experience we only know that Meade urged Lee to take the oath of allegiance as an example of loyalty to the people of the South; that Lee expressed personal willingness and his intention to submit to the Constitution and laws of the United States, but he said he was now a paroled prisoner of war, and was unwilling to change this present status until he could form some idea of what the policy of the government was going to be towards the people of the South. Meade argued that it was impossible for the government to decide how they were to be treated until satisfied they had returned to their allegiance, and that the only practicable way of showing this was by taking the oath. Lee admitted that the military power of the Confederacy had been destroyed and that practically now there was no Confederate government; that the government of the United States was the only one having power and authority, and that those who designed living under it should evince their determination by going through this necessary form. Lee also talked of the status of the negro, which Meade also thought to be a great and formidable question of the day, but Meade did not gather from Lee's talk any very practicable suggestions. On the same day Meade wrote to his wife (See Life and Letters of General Meade) giving a summary of the conversation and adding, "I had a long and interesting talk, and left him really sad to think of his position, his necessities and the difficulties that surround him."

There are many printed descriptions by contemporaries of Lee's appearance and bearing. Writing of Meade, General Morris Schaff referred to the "cultured tones of his finely modulated voice." The correspondent of a London newspaper, writing from Hagerstown, Maryland, in 1863, commented upon Meade's distinguished and patrician appearance. Another writer said, "Meade was different from our other greater commanders. He was a thoroughbred." General Francis A. Walker wrote of Meade's "knightly aspect." Justin McCarthy, member of Parliament and historian, met Meade and made record of his courtly presence and courtesy. In Philadelphia, members of the Assembly, a social organization with nearly two hundred years of existence, said that Meade's manner in a ballroom was superior to that of the most celebrated of the Assembly leaders.

In the Southern records there are few departures from the revering portrayal of Lee's character. A Southern naval officer described Lee's irritation caused by overzealous women admirers. A few Southerners have alluded to his coldness and his lack of an intimate. One of his family has told of his liking of having his stockinged feet tickled and his saying to his boy, "No tickling; no story." Meade and Lee were members of the Protestant Episcopal Church. When shortly after the war Meade was in command for a while of a military district composed of Southern States with his headquarters in Georgia, he found the Protestant Episcopal Church of the town in a dilapidated condition and the people too impoverished to repair it. From his friends in the North he collected enough money with his personal contribution to carpet the church and do needed restoration work. Meade smoked many black cigars, in the opinion of one of his staff officers, more than was good for him. He swore roundly on occasion at instances of lawlessness and stupidity. Ordering a wagon master out of the infantry line to march towards Appomattox, and after a while finding the man back again, Meade began to swear at him, and then turning to General Humphreys, he exclaimed, "Humphreys, you had better do this. I don't think I can do it justice." Humphreys was also a good churchman. To a general officer Meade said, "It was your duty to do it; you have not done it; go and do it." Lee did not use tobacco, and he did not swear. When after Pickett's blunder at Five Forks a court martial had been ordered for the offending General and Lee saw him riding with his troops on the retreat to Appomattox, Lee only asked, "Is that man with the Army yet?" It was too late to do more.