By Daniel J. Ursu, Roundtable Historian
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2024-2025, All Rights Reserved
Editor’s note: This article was the history brief for the October 2024 meeting of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable.
At the Roundtable’s 2024 field trip to Gettysburg, the participants climbed to the top of the Lutheran Seminary cupola to view Chambersburg Pike as it rises off to the west. While standing in the cupola, they imagined the scene witnessed by General John Buford and others as these Union observers gazed at the Confederate troops raising a cloud of dust while they were marching toward the defensive positions of Buford’s troopers. The field trip participants heard about and saw the ground that the Union I Corps crossed to meet the Confederates head on as the cavalry defense yielded to the infantry of the Union’s First Division and especially the elite Union “Iron Brigade,” which was also featured in my April 2024 history brief. The battlefield guide described how the commander of the First Corps, General John Reynolds, led his troops from the front at the edge of Herbst Woods. But Reynolds was too close to the fighting, and he met an instant and untimely death from a Confederate bullet to his neck.
In contrast to this day-one action in the Battle of Gettysburg, the recently appointed Army of the Potomac’s Commander, General George Gordon Meade, had a far different location in mind to comprehensively terminate General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia’s aggressive and bold invasion of the North in the summer of 1863. In anticipation of the coming battle, Meade wanted to keep his army between Lee’s army and the northern capital of Washington, D.C. Additionally, Meade desired to disrupt Lee’s line of supply from Virginia over the Potomac River through Maryland and into Pennsylvania. This would force Lee to provision his army by “living off the land” and prevent resupply of ammunition and ordnance from the South.
To that end, Meade and his staff, including the Commander of Union Artillery, Henry Hunt, scouted for the best defensive terrain available. They quickly decided on Pipe Creek, located about 15 miles southeast of Gettysburg, as the prime location to meet Meade’s criteria for the strong defensive position that would thwart Lee’s army from heading toward the U.S. capital. I stayed a couple of extra days after the field trip to visit the Pipe Creek region and headed due south on the Baltimore Pike for the 25-minute drive from our field trip hotel quarters.
Edward B. Coddington, in his famous book The Gettysburg Campaign, describes the Pipe Creek position this way: “the line Meade selected had many advantages…it stretched some twenty miles from Manchester (Maryland) to Middleburg (Maryland) south of Pipe Creek. The creek flowed from the northeast into the Monocacy River about three miles west of Middleburg. Although it (the creek) would not have been a formidable (water) barrier, the important geological feature of the area with real military significance was Parr Ridge, extending northeast and southwest through Westminster at elevations of 800 to 1,000 feet and widths of four to ten miles. Entrenched on this high ground, the army would have positions almost impossible to storm in frontal attacks or to turn, so that it could effectively cover the approaches to Baltimore and Washington. The line would also be close to the main supply base at Westminster, which was served after a fashion by the Western Maryland Railroad coming from Baltimore. Should the army fall back to the line, the Sixth Corps, the largest in the army, was already in position, and the Second and Third Corps had but a short march to reach it.”
The numbers indicate the corps in the Army of the Potomac.
Parr Ridge would have been a superb artillery platform for Henry Hunt’s batteries, since the slopes looking downward toward the creek in 1863 had clear fields of fire due to many years of agricultural labor by area farmers. The ridge gave advantages similar to the Malvern Hill position during the Seven Days Battles a year earlier. This position had also been laid out by Hunt. Additionally, Union troops, given sufficient time to fortify the upper slopes, would be able to create a nearly impregnable position reminiscent of the Confederate fortifications at Fredericksburg, where Union General Ambrose Burnside regrettably incurred huge casualties with his ill-conceived frontal assaults the previous winter.
After a fallback to the Pipe Creek Line was executed, it would ideally position the Third Corps at the west end of the line near Middleburg, Maryland, with the First, Eleventh, and Twelfth Corps stretching east toward the center of the line at Union Mills. The Fifth and Sixth Corps would form the eastern half of the line, which would then be anchored at Manchester. The Second Corps would be in reserve near Uniontown.
Allen C. Guelzo, in his acclaimed book Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, notes that on June 30 Meade received firm intelligence from Secretary Edwin Stanton in the War Department that Lee was turning south from his advance toward the Susquehanna River. Stanton directed Meade to “assume position for offensive or defensive, as occasion requires, or resting the troops.” To Meade that meant “the collecting of our troops behind Pipe Creek.”
Accordingly, by day’s end on June 30, Meade issued what would widely become known as the “Pipe Creek Circular.” It read in part, “If the enemy assume the offensive, and attack, it is his (my) intention, after holding them in check sufficiently long, to withdraw the trains and other impedimenta; to withdraw the army from its present position, and form line of battle with the left resting in the neighborhood of Middleburg, and the right at Manchester, the general direction being that of Pipe Creek. For this purpose, General Reynolds, in command of the left, will withdraw the force at present at Gettysburg, two corps by the road to Taneytown and Westminster, and after crossing Pipe Creek, deploy toward Middleburg. The corps at Emmitsburg will be withdrawn via Mechanicsville, to Middleburg, or, if a more direct route can be found leaving Taneytown on their left, to withdraw direct to Middleburg. General Slocum will assume command of the two corps at Hanover and Two Taverns, and withdraw them, via Union Mills, deploying one to the right and one to the left, after crossing Pipe Creek, connecting on the left with General Reynolds, and communicating his right to General Sedgwick at Manchester, who will connect with him and form the right. The time for falling back can only be developed by circumstances. Whenever such circumstances arise as would seem to indicate the necessity for falling back and assuming the general line indicated, notice of such movement will be at once communicated to these headquarters and to all adjoining corps commanders.” Of course, as events played out, this did not happen.
Analysis of Meade’s concept for the coming battle with Lee reveals some other lesser known reasons why the battle took place at Gettysburg, such as General Reynolds’ Pennsylvania heritage. Guelzo further states in his book, “This proposed withdrawal, despite Meade’s wishes, was precisely what John Reynolds had no inclination whatsoever to perform.” He wanted to protect his native state. Reynolds told his division commander Abner Doubleday that if the Confederates were given “time by dilatory measure or by taking up defensive positions they would strip (Pennsylvania) of everything” and that the Army of the Potomac needed “to attack the enemy at once, to prevent his plundering the whole State.”
Reynolds’ corps and wing position south of Gettysburg at the end of June put his troops in place to assault the nearest portion of General Lee’s divided army. Further, Colonel Chapman Biddle of the 121st Pennsylvania stated that Reynolds urged “striking them as soon as possible” and that “he was really eager to get at them.” Of course, Reynolds’ death on the first morning of the battle makes it impossible to ever know what was in his mind at the time, and is merely just one of the controversies that arose around the “Pipe Creek Circular.” For instance, Third Corps Commander General Daniel E. Sickles used the circular to help detract attention from critics of his own actions at Gettysburg when he pushed his troops out to the salient near the Peach Orchard.
For those wanting to learn further about the Pipe Creek Line and its related controversies, a good place to start is a series of online articles by Eric J. Wittenberg under the auspices of the Emerging Civil War (Part One and Part Two). To those who go to the Pipe Creek site for a visit, I recommend beginning at Memorial Park in Taneytown, Maryland with its informative Civil War Trails Marker and other plaques, and then to visit the nearby gorgeous 1844 Antrim Inn, which overlooked the movement of Union troops northward en route toward Gettysburg.
Related link:
Top Four Elite Brigades of the American Civil War
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