On the morning of July 1, 1863, Major General John Fulton Reynolds committed his I Corps to the fight west of Gettysburg. Within minutes, a Confederate bullet struck him near the head and neck, killing him almost instantly. The identity of the shooter has never been established with certainty. Reynolds was the man Abraham Lincoln had personally offered command of the Army of the Potomac, and who had turned him down.
His decisions that morning helped determine where the Battle of Gettysburg would be fought, and he died almost as soon as his infantry entered the fight. John Fulton Reynolds was born on September 20, 1820, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. His father was a newspaper editor, a businessman, and a personal friend of James Buchanan, the future president. It was Buchanan who quietly recommended young John to the West Point selection board.
Reynolds entered the United States Military Academy in 1837 at age seventeen and graduated in the summer of 1841, twenty-sixth in a class of fifty. The class of 1841 proved one of the most consequential in the Academy’s history. Nineteen of its members would rise to become generals on one side or the other during the Civil War. Among them were Israel Richardson, who would die at Antietam; Nathaniel Lyon, who would die at Wilson’s Creek; and Richard Garnett, who would die leading a brigade in Pickett’s Charge two days after Reynolds at the same battle.
After graduation, Reynolds served in the artillery. In 1846, at the Battle of Monterey, he commanded a section of Braxton Bragg’s battery and was brevetted captain for gallantry. Six months later, at Buena Vista, his guns held the line against a Mexican army roughly three times their number, and he was brevetted major on the field. General Zachary Taylor personally mentioned him in his post-battle report.
Reynolds returned from Mexico with a reputation among the regular officer corps as a cold, competent, absolutely reliable artilleryman. The kind of officer other officers wanted next to them in a fight. The next fifteen years took him across the American West, with garrison duty in Maine, a long tour on the Pacific coast, and service in the Mormon Expedition of 1857 to 1858 under Albert Sidney Johnston. He did not marry.
He wrote letters home to his four sisters in Lancaster and to a young woman in New York named Kate Hewitt, whom he had met on a steamer voyage in 1860 returning from California. The engagement was kept secret because Reynolds was Presbyterian and Hewitt was Catholic, and Reynolds’ devout Protestant family would not have approved the marriage. When the Civil War came in April 1861, Reynolds was forty years old, a captain of artillery and the commandant of cadets at West Point. The war promoted him fast.
In August 1861 he was made a brigadier general of volunteers. He commanded a brigade through the Peninsula Campaign of 1862, was captured at Gaines’s Mill in June, held in Libby Prison in Richmond for six weeks, and exchanged in August. He returned to command a division at Second Manassas and Fredericksburg. When Joseph Hooker took command of the Army of the Potomac in early 1863, Reynolds assumed command of the entire I Corps, which he led at Chancellorsville in May, where Hooker held the corps in reserve and never fully engaged it.
Reynolds considered that order a personal insult and an operational disaster, a fact that would shape his answer to Lincoln one month later. In the second week of June 1863, Robert E. Lee crossed the Potomac River northward, invading Pennsylvania. Joseph Hooker was rapidly losing the confidence of Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.
On June 2, Lincoln quietly summoned Reynolds to the White House. The meeting was private, and what is known of the conversation comes from Reynolds’ later account to his staff, letters written by his sister, and a diary entry made by John Hay, one of Lincoln’s secretaries. Lincoln asked Reynolds directly whether he would accept command of the Army of the Potomac. Reynolds indicated he would accept only if he were given freedom from political interference in Washington, a condition understood to mean independence from the Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War and the day-to-day interference of Halleck and Stanton.
Lincoln said no. He could not hand over an army of 100,000 men without civilian oversight. Reynolds, on the spot, declined the command. Three weeks later, on June 28, 1863, at three in the morning in a farmhouse near Frederick, Maryland, George Gordon Meade was awakened by a courier and handed formal orders to take command of the Army of the Potomac.
Historians have argued over Reynolds’ refusal for 150 years. Some argue he simply did not want the political burden, preferring a corps because it let him lead from the front. Others argue he understood the impossible position of a Union Army commander and refused rather than be destroyed the way Burnside and Hooker had been. A third interpretation suggests Reynolds set impossible conditions precisely because he wanted to say no without being seen to refuse the president outright.
Modern research synthesizes all three views and notes that Reynolds had watched three commanders chewed up by Washington politics in the space of nine months. He wanted his corps, and he wanted to fight. On June 29, Meade assigned Reynolds to command the entire left wing of the Army of the Potomac, three corps, roughly 30,000 men, with orders to advance north into Pennsylvania and locate Lee. For the last seventy-two hours of his life, Reynolds was the second most important officer in the Army of the Potomac.
On June 30, John Buford’s Union cavalry reached Gettysburg and identified the leading elements of A. P. Hill’s Confederate Corps advancing eastward on the Chambersburg Pike. Buford sent an urgent dispatch to Reynolds.
The Confederates would be at Gettysburg in force by morning, and the cavalry could hold for only a few hours. At six in the morning on July 1, a courier from Buford reached Reynolds with news that Confederate infantry was pressing McPherson’s Ridge. Reynolds immediately ordered the I Corps to the road and rode ahead of the marching column with his staff at a gallop. He rode directly to the Lutheran Theological Seminary, a three-story brick building on a low ridge west of town topped by a wooden cupola.
Waiting for him at the top, field glass in hand, was John Buford. Reynolds, looking west, saw Confederate infantry deploying in force along Hares Ridge, six brigades under Henry Heth, roughly 7,500 men. Buford’s reply was terse. He had two brigades holding six brigades of Confederate infantry.
If they did not hold the ridge, they lost the high ground south of town. In those next few minutes, Reynolds made one of the most consequential decisions of July 1. He committed the arriving I Corps to the fight west of Gettysburg. Soon after reaching the field, Reynolds dictated a dispatch to Meade at Taneytown, thirteen miles south.
He wrote, “The enemy is advancing in strong force. I will fight him inch by inch, and if driven into the town, I will barricade the streets and hold them back as long as possible. ” When Meade read the dispatch, he said aloud, “Good. That is just like Reynolds.
He will hold on to the bitter end. ” And immediately ordered the rest of the army forward. The decision to fight the general engagement at Gettysburg, rather than falling back to the Pipe Creek line Meade had originally chosen twenty miles south, flowed from Reynolds’ on-the-spot commitment of the I Corps. Around ten in the morning, the head of the I Corps reached the battlefield.
Wadsworth’s division led, with Cutler’s Brigade on the right of the road and the Iron Brigade of Solomon Meredith on the left. The Iron Brigade was five regiments, perhaps the hardest fighting brigade in the army, distinguished by their black hats and a reputation earned at Second Manassas and Antietam for never breaking under fire. Reynolds rode forward with the leading regiments and shouted to the men, “Forward, men. Forward, for God’s sake, and drive those fellows out of the woods.
” He personally guided the 2nd Wisconsin into Herbst Woods, hiding the advance of Archer’s Confederate Brigade behind it. As the first Union infantry deployed, the opening volleys of the battle were fired. On the Union right, two regiments took forty percent casualties in the first ten minutes. In Herbst Woods, the Iron Brigade drove into Archer’s Brigade at the bayonet.
Within twenty minutes, the Confederate line in the woods was in confusion. Fifteen minutes into his battle, Reynolds sat on his horse in the open ground east of Herbst Woods, no more than 150 yards from the tree line. At almost the same moment, down in the ravine of Willoughby Run, a private of the 2nd Wisconsin came face-to-face with General James Archer himself, exhausted and separated from his men. Maloney leveled his bayonet and demanded Archer’s surrender.
It was the first capture of a Confederate general in the entire Army of Northern Virginia. Maloney would be dead within two hours. Somewhere in the fighting along the western edge of Herbst Woods, a Confederate bullet found Reynolds on horseback. The exact identity of the shooter has been debated for a century and a half.
At least seven separate individuals or units have been proposed by later authors. One Confederate soldier later said so many men were firing at the general that it would have been impossible for anyone to know who killed him. The bullet struck Reynolds in the back of the neck just above his coat collar. He fell forward off his horse without a sound.
His orderly later wrote, “The general was dead before we could get him out of the saddle. He never spoke. He never moved. ”
The staff carried Reynolds’ body to the Codori farmhouse on the Emmitsburg road.
They laid him on a bed, covered him with a blanket, and cut a lock of his hair for his sisters. Command of the I Corps passed by seniority to Major General Abner Doubleday. Doubleday held the corps for four more hours against increasing pressure, and when the XI Corps collapsed on the Union right at approximately 3:30 in the afternoon, the I Corps was forced to retreat through the town under fire. By four in the afternoon, the survivors were on Cemetery Hill, south of town, digging in.
They had lost nearly half their strength in one day, 6,055 casualties out of roughly 12,200. The Iron Brigade had lost approximately 1,150 of its 1,830 men. As an effective fighting force, it was finished. There was one more consequence of the shot from Herbst Woods that almost no one on the field that morning knew about.
In a boarding house in New York City, a young Catholic woman named Kate Hewitt was waiting for word of the campaign. She and Reynolds had become secretly engaged, and he had promised to announce it publicly after the campaign ended. On July 3, the newspapers reached New York with the casualty list from Gettysburg. She read Reynolds’ name among the dead.
Within weeks, she entered the convent as a novice under the name Sister Hildegardis. She served as a nurse and teacher for several years, then left the order in 1868. In 1874 she married, and in 1876 she died of consumption at age thirty-nine. Reynolds’ family, going through his personal effects after the funeral, found a small gold locket around his neck containing the portrait of a young woman they did not recognize.
It was Kate Hewitt. Reynolds was buried in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on July 4, 1863. The same day Robert E. Lee began his retreat from Gettysburg and Ulysses S.
Grant accepted the surrender of Vicksburg. During the funeral service, a telegram from Abraham Lincoln was delivered to the family and read aloud. The president wrote, “The name of General Reynolds will be forever cherished in the grateful memories of a free people. ” His grave remains a Pennsylvania State Historic Site.
An equestrian statue of Reynolds was erected at Gettysburg in 1899 near the spot where he fell. The general who refused command of the entire Union Army, who wanted to fight rather than administrate, got the fight he chose. He committed his I Corps to Gettysburg, personally directed the deployment into Herbst Woods, and gave his life within minutes of the opening infantry volleys.
The story of Gettysburg belonged to other men.