Gettysburg: The Next Day ---  The Retreat From Pennsylvania --- 
The Confederates Stopped at the Potomac ---  Reaction from Washington --- 
Reaction from the South ---  The Situation on July 15th, 1863

Gettysburg: The Next Day

Meade chose not to attack the next day and Lee set to the task of taking his army home. The Confederate general planned the journey with as much care and consideration as he had planned any campaign, detailing departure times and order of march for each unit. Lee attempted to exchange prisoners with Meade, who declined. At the beginning of the battle of Gettysburg, Lee's army had a strength of 75,000. After three days of fighting, that number had been cut by a third. Many more had been slightly wounded, but could still be used in battle if necessary.

The first order of business for the Confederate army was to ensure the safe removal of their more seriously wounded. At around noon, a steady rain began that would, by late afternoon, turn into a torrential downpour, turning the dirt roads that ran from Gettysburg into small seas of mud. The mud hampered the efforts of the Rebel soldiers as they attempted to put the wagon trains on the road to Chambersburg, away from the Federal army.

At around 4 p.m., the Army of Northern Virginia began their long somber journey home. The train of wounded, protected by cavalry brigades under General John Imboden, Wade Hampton and Fitzugh Lee, was seventeen miles long, with wagons crammed with as many broken soldiers as they could carry. Even so, nearly 7,000 men had to be left behind on the fields where they had fought.

On the evening of July 4th, with darkness covering their movements, the rest of the defeated Confederate troops began to retreat towards Virginia. Hill's Corps went first, with Longstreet and then Ewell following on the Hagerstown-Fairfield Road. Cavalry under Brigadier Generals Beverly Robertson and William Jones were assigned to secure the army's movements. Stuart and two other cavalry brigades, under John R. Chambliss and Albert G. Jenkins, rode to the east of the mountains in order to screen Lee's left flank and mask his movements.

Meanwhile, Meade had spent the day bringing up supplies and ammunition. He did not realistically believe that Lee would launch another assault upon his lines, but did not want to take the chance. At 4:15 p.m., he issued a proclamation, thanking his army for "the heroic courage and gallantry it has displayed." He also reminded them that the army's work was not yet done, and they still had the task of driving the Confederates from northern soil to attend to.

Scouts and signal officers told Meade that there was mounting evidence that Lee and his army was withdrawing. Meade met with his commanders on the evening of July 4th. With the Union army almost as battered in victory as the Confederates were in defeat, Meade's subordinate commanders wished to pursue the retreating enemy with cavalry, with the infantry following behind. Before agreeing to the maneuver, Meade wanted more information on Lee's position, and ordered a reconnaissance-in-force for the next day.

The Retreat from Pennsylvania

By late afternoon on July 5th, the last Confederate troops left Gettysburg, heading towards the Potomac crossings below Hagerstown, Maryland. Lieutenant Colonel Elijah White's Virginia cavalry battalion and General John Gordon's Georgia brigade formed the rear guard.

By that time, reports confirming Lee's withdrawal had reached Meade. He had a report from Judson Kilpatrick: George Custer's cavalry had clashed with Ewell's troops near Fairfield shortly after midnight. Meade dispatched John Sedgwick's VI Corps, which moved slowly towards the area, encountering Ewell's rear guard.

With the rest of the Union army slowly marching towards Middletown, Maryland, Meade recalled Sedgwick and his corps and directed it towards Emmitsburg. The pursuit of Ewell's Corps and the rest of the Confederate army was limited to just an artillery battery and a brigade of infantry and cavalry.

As the two armies marched across Pennsylvania and Maryland, their cavalry clashed in nearly two dozen different actions. Stuart's cavalry, shielding the Confederate troops, battled their Union counterparts, sent by Meade in an attempt to locate the retreating Army of Northern Virginia.

The Union army marched slowly in pursuit of the Confederate army, not really picking up speed until Lee reached Hagerstown and then the Potomac River on July 7th, the same day as Meade himself left Gettysburg. It continued to rain heavily that day, but the Federal troops covered fifteen to twenty miles. All the while, Meade kept his army distanced from Lee's, so as to protect Washington and Baltimore, if need be.

Much like it would for the Confederates, the heavy rain hampered the Union march. On July 10th, as the Federal army revisited the battlefields of South Mountain and Antietam, where they had fought ten months earlier, they found Antietam Creek overflowed. The Union army had to use three crossings in order to overcome the flood waters and continue in their pursuit of Lee's Confederates.

The rains of the past few days had swelled the Potomac River, and a Union cavalry raid had destroyed the bridges that the Army of Northern Virginia would have used to cross. Lee took his army to Williamsport, Maryland where they dug in and awaited the Federals' arrival. The Confederate line of defense stretched between six and eight miles from the river near Downsville to southwest of Hagerstown. It was Lee's hope that the Confederate defences would hold the Union troops back long enough for his engineers to construct a new bridge.

On July 10th, the Union army arrived upon the Confederate positions. The earthworks were a formidable site, and Meade, rather than ordering an assault that, had it succeeded, would have trapped and destroyed the Army of Northern Virginia, hesitated.

Once again, Meade called for a council of war with his generals. He proposed that an assault be made upon the Confederate defences. Of the seven generals present, five of them opposed Meade's idea. Rather than over-ruling his subordinates, Meade delayed making a decision until he could examine Lee's position personally. Accompanied by his new chief of staff, Andrew Humphreys, Meade carefully studied the Confederate line of defence on July 13th and ordered that a reconnaissance-in-force take place the next day. Meade’s idea was that such a move could be turned into a full-scale assault. At 7:00 a.m. the next morning, Meade ordered four divisions to advance, confident that it was enough to force a major engagement.

Before Meade's plan could come to fruition, Lee's army escaped. Over the night of July 13th-14th, the bulk of the Confederate army crossed the newly constructed pontoon bridge into Virginia. Stuart's troops occupied the defensive trenches left vacant by the infantry, in order to cover Lee's movements. Longstreet's Corps crossed first, followed by Hill's troops. Farther upstream, Ewell's Corps took advantage of the lowered water level to ford the Potomac at Williamsport. After they were across, most of the cavalry followed Ewell's path, with the exception of Fitz Lee's brigade. So as to ease the congestion of crossing the river at Williamsport, Lee’s brigade was to follow Hill's Corps across. However, Lee's troopers crossed just after Longstreet's Corps, believing it to be the rear of the Confederate column.

By 11:00 a.m. on July 14th, the only units remaining behind were the William Pender's division (commanded by James Lane) and Henry Heth's division. The two units, seeing cavalrymen ahead of them, mistakenly believed those horsemen to be part of Fitz Lee's unit. The Confederate infantry, instead, came under fire from a patrol from the 6th Michigan Cavalry. In the fighting, General James J. Pettigrew, who had been in action on July 1st as well as Pickett's Charge, was wounded, dying three days later, safely across the Potomac in Bunker Hill, Virginia. Ironically, the same troops that had begun the Battle of Gettysburg (Heth's and Buford's men) were involved in the final action of the Gettysburg Campaign.

The 26th North Carolina was said to be the last Confederate regiment to cross the Potomac, with Captain Thomas J. Cureton being the last Confederate soldier to reach Virginia. After all were safely across, the ropes of the pontoon bridge were cast off and the bridge was swept into the river.

Reaction from Washington

President Abraham Lincoln believed that, with a solid push, Meade's Army of the Potomac could have destroyed Lee's army as they retreated from Gettysburg. Meade, on the other hand, made only a token pursuit, content to have simply defeated the Confederate army and driven them back to Virginia.

In a message to his troops on the day after the battle of Gettysburg, Meade said that he "looks to the army to drive from our soil every vestige of the presence of the invader." When Lincoln read the message, his reply was "Drive the invader from our soil? My God! Is that all?". In the days that followed, Lincoln continually hounded Meade to march against Lee's army in order to destroy it.

News that Lee's army had escaped across the Potomac only made the situation worse. "We had them within our grasp," Lincoln told his secretary John Hay, "We had only to stretch forth our hands and they were ours. And nothing I could say or do could make the army move."

Lincoln's cabinet agreed with the President's assessment of the situation. Meade offered to resign but General Halleck refused to accept it.

In his defense, historians now state that Meade was forced to remain out of reach of Lee's army in order to appease politicians, including Halleck, who wished for him to remain close to Washington and between the capital and Lee's army. As well, Meade, new to command, relied on the opinions of his generals in order to make decisions and they, having seen the result of assaults on strong defence positions (Pickett's Charge and prior to that, Fredericksburg) were wary of repeating past mistakes. Thus, the attack against Lee’s defensive position before the Potomac was delayed until it was too late.

Finally, Meade's own army was simply too exhausted to have made any quicker a pursuit of Lee's army. As badly in need of shoes and supplies now as Lee's army had been before the campaign, the Army of the Potomac was in no shape to have fought another battle in the days following Gettysburg.

Reaction from the South

The men of the Army of Northern Virginia were not demoralized from the defeat at Gettysburg as their Union counterparts had been after defeats at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and the first and second Bull Runs. Instead they termed it a "tactical draw" because, like Antietem in 1862, they had left the field by their own choice, rather than being driven from it.

The actions of July 1st and 2nd were considered victories for the Confederacy and, while Pickett's Charge was seen as a disaster, Confederate veterans did not believe it to be a blemish on the courage of the men who took part.

In addition, the Gettysburg Campaign had been undertaken with the idea that moving the war into the North would allow Virginia farmers time to harvest their crops without fear of destruction by Union raiders. Although a great victory north of Virginia had not been won, at least one goal had been achieved.

Not all of the Confederate troops, however, were as assured of victory as others. Many survivors of Gettysburg, especially in the poorer sections of the south, such as North Carolina, Alabama and Georgia, deserted in droves following the end of the campaign. Most of the deserters were men who had never and would never owned slaves and thus believed they had less riding on the outcome of the war.

Many of the Confederate troops wanted revenge for Pickett's Charge and the defeat at Gettysburg. Many thought themselves to be superior to the Union troops they fought. Others came to believe that the South would lose the war but did not want to give up the struggle.

The Situation on July 15th, 1863

As the Gettysburg Campaign ended, the Army of the Potomac now had a major victory, their first of the war, over Lee’s once-vaunted Army of Northern Virginia. However, much like Ewell on July 1st, they had missed out on a golden opportunity. Lee’s army had been allowed to escape back into the (relative) safety of Virginia.

Meanwhile, the Army of Northern Virginia had been handed a bitter defeat, one that would alter the entire war. Never again would the South be able to launch another invasion of the North. Instead, they would spend the next two years simply fighting to survive. Much like the Union army on July 1st, they could take solace in the fact that they had escaped Meade’s army without being completely destroyed.

During the Gettysburg campaign, mistakes had been made by both sides. Opportunities had been lost and heroes had been found. For both North and South, however, realization had set in: the war would not end soon.