At 5:30 on the morning of July 1, 1863, Confederate skirmishers under Brigadier General James Archer came down the Chambersburg Pike, three miles west of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The first shot of the largest battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere was fired by Lieutenant Marcellus Jones of the 8th Illinois Cavalry, who borrowed a carbine from Sergeant Levi Shafer, rested the barrel on a fence rail, and hit a Confederate officer riding down the road. But that single shot was more than a symbol. Behind Jones stretched a dismounted skirmish line of roughly 2,000 Union cavalrymen, commanded by a 37-year-old Kentucky-born general who had made a decision the night before that no cavalry manual had authorized.
His name was John Buford, and he commanded the First Cavalry Division of the Army of the Potomac. By conventional doctrine, a cavalry force encountering Confederate infantry was supposed to screen, fall back, and warn the main army. Buford did the opposite. He dismounted his troopers, planted them on the ridges west of town, and held those ridges against an entire Confederate infantry division while the Union infantry marched to catch up.
His orders did not require it. He did it because he had ridden the ground the previous evening and recognized what almost no one else in the Army of the Potomac had seen: that Gettysburg, a small crossroads town of 2,400 residents, sat on the strategic keystone of southern Pennsylvania. Ten roads converged there. Whichever army held the town held the road network.
And rising south of the streets lay a fishhook of high ground—Cemetery Hill, Culp’s Hill, Cemetery Ridge, Little Round Top, and Big Round Top—that any experienced officer could recognize as a defensive fortress waiting to be occupied. The summer of 1863 had been brutal for the Union. Two years of war had bled the army. Fredericksburg the previous December, Chancellorsville that May: Robert E.
Lee had outmaneuvered every Union general sent against him. In the West, Ulysses S. Grant was tightening the siege of Vicksburg on the Mississippi, but that campaign was weeks from decision. In the East, Lee gambled.
He turned his Army of Northern Virginia north, crossed the Potomac in mid-June, and marched into Pennsylvania with more than 70,000 men, intending to force a decisive battle on northern soil, shake Lincoln’s coalition, and drag European powers toward recognition of the Confederacy. The Army of the Potomac chased him. On June 28, Lincoln relieved Joseph Hooker and gave command to George Gordon Meade, who accepted with the resignation of a man who knew he was being asked to save the country in the middle of the night. Neither commander knew where the other was.
Lee had marched blind because his cavalry chief, J. B. Stuart, had ridden off on a wide raiding arc around the Union army, capturing wagons and tearing up railroads, and had been out of communication with Lee for more than a week. Lee assumed Meade’s army was still south of the Potomac.
It was more than 40 miles ahead of him. Into that blindness rode John Buford, with orders to find the Confederate army and a private conviction that when he found them, he would fight them. Buford had spent his career on the frontier, fighting Sioux and Cheyenne in Utah and Kansas, and he had concluded that in the age of the rifle musket, the old cavalry charge was suicide. He had seen it at Second Manassas in August 1862, where brave horsemen were cut down before they closed, where he lost three horses shot from under him in one afternoon and took a minie ball through the leg.
By 1863, he was considered the most professional cavalry officer in either army. His men, who adored him, said he never wasted a word and never asked them to go anywhere he would not ride first. Late on the afternoon of June 30, Buford’s division, around 2,800 troopers, rode into Gettysburg from the south. That evening, he climbed to the cupola of the Lutheran Seminary on the ridge west of town and looked west, where he could see the smoke of Confederate cook fires on the Cashtown Road and the dust of infantry columns still miles away but closing.
He knew what would come at dawn. That night, in a farmhouse on the Chambersburg Pike, he met with his two brigade commanders, Colonel William Gamble and Colonel Thomas Devin, and laid out a plan that by conventional cavalry doctrine was insane. He would post his troopers on three successive ridges—Herr Ridge, three miles west of town, then McPherson’s Ridge, a mile and a half west, then Seminary Ridge on the edge of town—each higher than the last, and fight a defensive delaying action, firing and falling back, to buy time until the Union I Corps under John Reynolds could arrive. If Reynolds got there while Buford still held the ridges, Gettysburg was Union ground.
If Buford broke first, Lee’s army would seize the high ground before the Army of the Potomac arrived. The line held. From 5:30 until just after ten in the morning, nearly five full hours, Buford’s dismounted cavalry held the ridges west of Gettysburg against Henry Heth’s division of roughly 7,000 Confederate infantry, backed by artillery. The math was hopeless on paper.
The troopers, many armed with seven-shot Spencer repeating carbines, delivered about three times the volume of fire per man that a Confederate infantryman with a muzzle-loading rifle could return. Their horse artillery, a six-gun battery under Lieutenant John Calef, dropped shells into the Confederate columns from a range the Confederates could not effectively answer. Heth initially thought he was facing Pennsylvania militia and expected to sweep them aside in twenty minutes. By seven o’clock he understood he was fighting professional cavalry commanded by a man who had chosen this ground for a reason.
Twice the Confederate advance closed to within a hundred yards of the ridge. Twice the troopers held. Casualties in the First Cavalry Division ran into the hundreds, but Buford was not fighting to win. He was fighting to buy time.
Between ten and ten-thirty, John Reynolds rode ahead of his marching column and reached Seminary Ridge, climbing to the cupola where Buford had stood the night before. Buford, leaning against a window frame, watched the battle unfold across the fields. Reynolds asked, “How goes it, John? ” Buford answered, “The devil’s to pay, John.
” Reynolds committed the I Corps to battle immediately, the Iron Brigade sweeping into position behind the crumbling cavalry line. The troopers, exhausted and low on ammunition, fell back to remount and reposition on the flanks. Within an hour, a Confederate sharpshooter’s bullet caught Reynolds behind the ear, killing him instantly. Command of the field passed to Abner Doubleday, and the infantry battle continued through the afternoon.
By four o’clock, the Union I and XI Corps were broken and driven back through the town, suffering heavy losses. But when the survivors ran, they ran to the high ground south of town, to Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Ridge, the fishhook of ridges Buford had identified the night before. By evening, Lee’s forces had killed or captured nearly 9,000 Union soldiers, and the Confederates held the town itself. On paper it looked like a Confederate victory.
But the Union army now held the ground on which the battle would be won. Winfield Scott Hancock arrived in mid-afternoon, rallied the retreating troops, and confirmed what Buford had seen. When Meade rode up in the middle of the night, Hancock told him the ground was strong. On July 2, Lee attacked the Union flanks.
Longstreet’s corps against Little Round Top and the Peach Orchard, Ewell against Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill. The Union line bent but did not break. On July 3, Lee ordered the assault history remembers as Pickett’s Charge. Twelve thousand Confederate infantry crossed three-quarters of a mile of open ground toward the Union center on Cemetery Ridge and broke against the stone wall.
More than half of Pickett’s men were killed, wounded, or captured. The Army of Northern Virginia had bled out on ground it should never have attacked, ground the Union held because John Buford had bought John Reynolds five hours on July 1. Historians, from James McPherson to Stephen Sears to Allen Guelzo, have argued that without Buford’s stand, Lee would have occupied Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill on the afternoon of July 1, and Meade would have arrived to find the high ground held against him, forcing the Union either to attack uphill or fall back toward Washington. Either scenario likely leads to a Confederate victory at Gettysburg.
After the battle, Buford did what he had always done. He rode on. His division screened Lee’s retreat back to Virginia through the second week of July, fighting small engagements at Boonsboro, Funkstown, and Falling Waters that never made the history books. His after-action report was flat, professional prose.
He praised his officers by name. He did not praise himself. In the newspapers of that summer, the story of Gettysburg was told through the death of Reynolds and the drama of Pickett’s Charge. Buford’s five-hour stand received a paragraph, a line, sometimes nothing at all.
He did not campaign for his reputation. He wrote no memoir. He gave no speeches. By the autumn of 1863, his health was breaking.
Years of continuous field service had worn him down. He had lost weight, his face was gray, and his junior officers noticed the deep hollowness of his eyes. In November, marching through the mud and cold rains of the Rappahannock Valley, he collapsed, but refused to give up command. By early December he was taken by ambulance to a home in Washington, D.
C. The diagnosis was typhoid fever, the disease that killed more Civil War soldiers than combat did. For two weeks he lay in and out of consciousness. When he was told he had finally been promoted to major general of volunteers, a promotion delayed for months by army politics, he asked whether it had come before the physicians had thought he was dying.
Told that it had, he replied, “Then it is honorable and I accept. ”
He died at two in the afternoon on December 16, 1863, five months and fifteen days after McPherson’s Ridge. He was thirty-seven years old. His funeral was held at St.
John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, across Lafayette Square from the White House. President Abraham Lincoln attended. Cabinet officers attended. No monument was raised at Gettysburg during the war.
The first monument to Buford, an equestrian statue on McPherson’s Ridge near the spot where he had ridden his line on the morning of July 1, was finally erected in 1895, thirty-two years after the battle, long after the men who could have told his story firsthand were dead. It faces west, toward the Confederate line of advance, toward the ridge he chose in the twilight of June 30 and held for five hours on the morning of July 1. In his dispatch filed at 10:30 on the morning of July 1, preserved in the official records of the War of the Rebellion, Buford wrote: “The enemy’s forces are advancing on me at this point and driving my pickets and skirmishers very rapidly… General Reynolds is advancing and is within 3 miles of this point with his leading division.
I am positive that the whole of A. P. Hill’s force is advancing. ” No exclamation.
No drama. No claim of credit. That was, in the end, all John Buford had to say.
And it was enough.