Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg by James M. McPherson Page A

fifty local blacks back to Virginia. A diarist raised the estimate to 250 from Franklin County. Blacks in Gettysburg had plenty of warning, and cleared out. Some never returned. Abraham Brian did return. He repaired his house and tided his family over until the next season by exhuming the bodies of Union soldiers at a dollar each for reinterment in the soldiers’ cemetery dedicated in November. Brian submitted a claim of more than a thousand dollars to the federal government for damages to his farm. He received forty-five dollars.
    As the walking wounded and unwounded survivors of the Pickett-Pettigrew attack reached their own lines, they found Lee and Longstreet working vigorously to patch together a defense against an expected counterattack. “General Pickett,” said Lee to a slumped figure from whom all thoughts of glory had fled, “place your division in the rear of this hill, and be ready to repel the advance of the enemy should they follow up their advantage.” “General Lee,” replied Pickett despairingly, “I have no division now.” According to later recollections by Confederate soldiers, Lee rode among his men to buck up their spirits. “It's all my fault,” he reportedly said. “It is Iwho have lost this fight, and you must help me out of it the best way you can. All good men must rally.”
    Rally they did, after a fashion. But Meade did not order a counterattack. It was not for lack of urging by at least some of his subordinates, including Hancock. Wounded at the height of the action by a bullet that drove a bent nail from his saddle into his thigh, Hancock—misinterpreting the source of the nail—said, “They must be hard up for ammunition if they throw such a shot as that.”
    The Confederates
were
short of artillery ammunition. And they had lost at least 23,000—perhaps as many as 28,000—killed, wounded, and captured men during these three days. But Meade, who knew that his own army had been hurt—23,000 casualties altogether—could not know just how badly off his adversary was. The Union commander's failure to follow up his victory with a counterthrust during the nearly four hours of remaining daylight on July 3 provoked criticism at the time and through the years. He had kept the 13,000 fresh troops of the Sixth Corps in reserve; most of them had not fired a shot in the battle. Eight thousand of them were on alert a mile south of the area where the heaviest fighting took place, but Meade had not sent word for them to deploy, nor did he do so after the Confederates were repulsed.
    Meade has his defenders, however. They point out that a heavy load of responsibility weighed on hisshoulders. He had been in command for only six days, three of them fighting for his army's survival. Could he jeopardize his victory by risking a counterattack against an enemy that still had sharp teeth and might bite back as hard as it had been bitten? “We have done well enough,” said Meade to a cavalry officer eager to do more. Meade later explained that he did not want to follow “the bad example [Lee] had set me, in ruining himself attacking a strong position.”
    Out on the Union left flank more than two miles south of Meade's headquarters, however, one Union officer anticipated an order for a counterattack. He was Brigadier General Judson Kilpatrick, commander of a Union cavalry division. Learning at about 5:00 P.M. of the repulse of the Pickett-Pettigrew assault, Kilpatrick ordered a combined mounted and dismounted attack by two brigades against the Confederate right flank west of the Round Tops. Unsupported by infantry, this attack was a bloody fiasco. From a point near the monument to Major William Wells of the First Vermont Cavalry on South Confederate Avenue, we can view the scenes of the mounted attack through the fields of the Slyder farm. Before the Park Service cleared out twenty-seven acres of woods west of the Slyder farmhouse that were not there in 1863, and before a hundred-acre woodlot south