The Day After Gettysburg Read online

  Table of Contents

  ★ MAP ★

  ★ INTRODUCTION ★

  ★ CHAPTER 1 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 2 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 3 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 4 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 5 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 6 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 7 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 8 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 9 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 10 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 11 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 12 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 13 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 14 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 15 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 16 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 17 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 18 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 19 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 20 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 21 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 22 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 23 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 24 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 25 ★

  ★ CHAPTER 26 ★

  ★ EPILOGUE ★

  ★ AFTERWARD ★

  The Day After Gettysburg

  Robert Conroy and J. R. Dunn

  New Alternate History from a Master of the Form: Robert Conroy was an unalloyed master of alternate history. Now, J.R. Dunn completes one of his final novels.

  LEE STRIKES BACK!

  After a terrible setback at Gettysburg, General Robert E. Lee does not retreat across the Potomac and his ultimate surrender at Appomattox. Instead, he turns the tables on Union General George Meade with a vicious counterattack that sets the Union Army on its heels.

  While Lee sets across Pennsylvania in a dazzling war of maneuver, a crazed actor closes in on President Abraham Lincoln. Standing in his way is Major Steve Thorne, a thoughtful lawyer-turned-soldier fighting for the Union and his own self-respect, and Cassandra Baird, a young woman whose courage is only surpassed by her determination to teach emancipated slaves to read and write, and so ensure their freedom.

  Opposing them is Colonel Corey Wade, a brave Confederate officer who is just as determined to fight to the death for his honor and that of his state. And, in the end, the fate of a nation may come down to a freed slave named Hadrian, a man with an iron resolve never to return to bondage.

  The time has come to strike a blow for liberty—or go down swinging!

  Baen Books

  by Robert Conroy

  ★

  Himmler’s War

  Rising Sun

  1920: America’s Great War

  Liberty: 1784

  1882: Custer in Chains

  Germanica

  Stormfront

  The Day After Gettysburg (with J.R. Dunn)

  Baen Books

  by J.R. Dunn

  ★

  Days of Cain

  This Side of Judgment

  Full Tide of Night

  THE DAY AFTER GETTYSBURG

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by the Estate of Robert Conroy and J.R. Dunn

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4814-8251-6

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-580-9

  Cover art by Kurt Miller

  Map by Randy Asplund

  First Baen hardcover printing, June 2017

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  A huge thank you to the readers of Robert’s work.

  He has written about many battles over the years,

  but this book represents his last battle.

  Thank you Robert.

  As you look down upon all you have accomplished,

  we remember your knowledge and enthusiasm

  for history and your need to ask “what if . . .”

  We wish you were still here to share the success

  and joy that was your passion, and that lives on

  through the works you have left behind.

  Diane, Maura, Quinn and Brennan

  ★ MAP ★

  ★ INTRODUCTION ★

  After three agonizing and incredibly bloody days of fighting in the scorching heat of July, 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg limped to a close. Both Union and Confederate armies were exhausted and had been mauled almost beyond recognition. Those three days had resulted in the costliest battle in the history of the United States. The Union had been victorious but had paid a brutal price. The Confederacy, with her smaller army and population base, had suffered even more severely. Estimates of the dead and wounded varied, but could have reached fifty thousand, split almost equally between the two armies.

  As Confederate General Robert E. Lee watched his defeated Army of Northern Virginia withdraw from the field, he is said to have proclaimed that the defeat was all his fault and most historians will not dispute that sad fact. Those same historians will say that he overreached. He’d attacked a larger and well-trained Union Army that held the high ground as well as having the advantage of interior lines, and was led by a general, George Gordon Meade, who understood what he had to do to stave off defeat. Historians also fault Lee for thinking that the soldiers in his army could accomplish the impossible. They couldn’t. They were superb soldiers but they were mortal.

  Still, it was a close victory for the North and most Union soldiers were glad to see the Confederates go on their way back across the Potomac and into Virginia. But Abraham Lincoln did not hold that view. He fully understood that the Rebel army had to be destroyed, not defeated, before the terrible war could be concluded. He prodded Meade into following Lee and drawing him into a climactic battle before he could escape across the Potomac. Meade followed, but not aggressively. He knew that his army had suffered grievous casualties and was exhausted and hungry. In short, Meade’s army was a fragile thing to send on a chase.

  In real history, Lee successfully crosses the Potomac and escapes Meade’s slowly closing clutches. Both armies take the next few months to regroup and prepare for the next round of fighting. Lincoln recognizes that Meade is not the aggressive spirit who can demolish Lee’s army. A few months later, Grant takes over. Two bloody years later, Lee surrenders to Grant at Appomattox Court House.

  But what if Lee had been unable to cross the Potomac and, gambler that he was, decided to launch an all or nothing attack against the plodding Union army? And what if he had won an enormous and totally unexpected victory for the Confederacy? How would that have changed the course of the war? What impact would it have had on the presidency itself?

  There was no Fourth Day of Gettysburg. It is simply my term for that critical time following the actual three days of fighting at that now immortal Pennsylvania town. And while there might have been a Sixth Indiana Mounted Infantry, I cannot find when and where it actually took the field. Therefore, it and the personnel associated with it are figments of my imagination.

  And finally, a word about sexual assaults: They have occurred in every war and the Civil War was no exception. There did seem to be a degree of restraint and the assaults appeared to be fewer in number and nothing like what occurred in European or Asian wars. This was due perhaps to the fact that people on both sides were basically of the same stock, spoke the same language, wore the same clothing, and wer
e pretty much all Christians and Americans. Although attacks on female slaves and former slaves were more common than attacks on white women, they did occur. Historians rarely talked about them and one can only speculate as to why. Despite the apparent restraint, women were always in jeopardy, especially those in the countryside and atrocities did occur.

  —Robert Conroy

  ★ CHAPTER 1 ★

  Robert E. Lee tried to rub the exhaustion from his eyes but failed. It was difficult for him to focus his vision. He felt like he was about to slip from his horse. That would never do, he chided himself as he patted the large and faithful grey horse, Traveler. He was almost as well known as Lee himself.

  What was confounding his plans was the fact that the waters of the Potomac were rain-swollen and high and moving quickly to the sea. But not quickly enough, he thought bitterly. One pontoon bridge had already been swept away and there were serious doubts as to whether others would hold. His soldiers were entrenching, building defenses in anticipation of an attack by a Union army that greatly outnumbered them. If he could not get his men across the Potomac, this could easily spell the end of the Army of Northern Virginia and the Confederate States of America. If his army was destroyed, there would be nothing between Meade’s Army of the Potomac and Richmond.

  Many weeks earlier, he had said that Meade would make no mistakes, and the Union general hadn’t. Meade had skillfully defended the hills near Gettysburg. And now he was chasing Lee and would soon catch him. Lee almost smiled. He thought he had the measure of the man. Defense was what Meade did best, and now he was on the offensive with an army that had just suffered somewhere around twenty thousand casualties. So too had Lee’s smaller Confederate army, and the loss of all those fine young men deeply saddened him. But while Lincoln could replace his losses, Lee could not. Jefferson Davis would try to get more troops and supplies to him, but it wouldn’t matter worth a damn if Lee couldn’t get his army back across the Potomac and into Virginia.

  Now Lee did smile. He knew exactly what he had to do.

  “Captain Thorne—you wouldn’t happen to have any fresh food or clean water or maybe some good southern tobacco on you, would you? I wouldn’t mind a chance to change my underwear or possibly converse with a good-looking woman, either.”

  Steven Thorne was so tired it took almost all of his strength to smile and respond to his good friend Archie Willis. “Since I have no idea or memory of what any of those things are, I cannot answer you, Captain.”

  “But sir, are you not the acting commander of this regiment? And as such, aren’t you supposed to know everything?”

  “As I am now your commanding officer, if I told you to go to hell, would you comply?”

  Willis laughed, but it quickly became a cough. The roads from the killing fields of Gettysburg were alternatively chokingly dusty and muddy. Today, each step taken by man or horse raised a cloud of dust to clog the air and make breathing difficult. The men were cold, tired, hungry, and emotionally whipped. Everyone said they had won the battle, and that might be true as far as it went. But at what cost?

  “Well then, Steven, do you think we will catch Bobby Lee?”

  “I think it’s entirely possible, but what happens then? Did you ever see a dog chase a carriage? And what does the dog do when the carriage halts and the dog thinks he has caught it? Most of the time the dog has no idea what to do with his prize and I wonder if General Meade knows what to do if and when he catches Lee. I for one do not look forward to any such development.”

  Both men, along with the two hundred soldiers who comprised the rest of their regiment, needed at least a month’s rest. They had won a gigantic battle but would have nightmares for the rest of their lives. At least the air was cleaner. Gone was the stench of thousands of obscenely bloated bodies rotting in the blazing sun, and gone too were the screams of the wounded as they lay in endless rows waiting for someone, anyone, to help them. Or maybe to put them out of their misery with a prayer to God to forgive them for doing so. Unfortunately, God was conspicuously absent from the battlefields around the previously unknown town of Gettysburg.

  The two men were riding side by side. The rest of the mounted infantry rode behind them. Several dozen walked, having lost their horses in the battle. Reporters would say they were “marching”, but they were in truth walking, and barely walking at that. Shuffling might be a better word. Their bodies pleaded for rest.

  “Just think, Archie. If it wasn’t for the fact that I had two weeks more time in grade as a captain than you, the regiment would be yours.”

  “And an empty honor it is.”

  They stopped and looked at each other. Units everywhere were doing the same thing. Thorne’s regiment, the Sixth Indiana Mounted Infantry, was near the front of the long, winding Union column, but far enough back so that they could not see the head of the snake. It did not escape them that their unit was mixed up with others. They knew they weren’t supposed to be in this position, but just where the hell was the rest of the division, the corps?

  Suddenly, they heard gunfire. The rumble and crackle were in the distance and were not an immediate threat, but one thing had just become abundantly clear. They had found Robert E. Lee.

  “General Lee, sir, would you mind telling me just why the hell are we standing here staring at this sorry little creek?”

  Lee smiled. General James Longstreet had arrived and perhaps the rift that had come between them could be closed, or at least eased. Hindsight had shown that Longstreet’s plans for the battle at Gettysburg had been correct. A frontal assault, carried out by Pickett or anyone else, had been doomed to bloody failure. The Army of Northern Virginia should have either tried to turn the Union flanks or simply called it a day and withdrawn. From a different position, perhaps, he could have taunted Meade into attacking him on ground favorable to his army. Likely not, he thought. Meade was a defender, not an attacker.

  Lee had assumed too much and the burden of failure was on him. He had to redeem himself and the Army of Northern Virginia or the Confederacy was a lost cause.

  “General Longstreet,” he said genially, “I’ll have you know that this is a most important river. It separates us from our homes and will be our downfall if we do not find a way to resolve the problem of crossing it. While it is certainly not as wide as the Tennessee or as lovely as the Seine is reputed to be, right now it is the most important river in the world to us. If we cannot solve the issue before us, we might be destroyed.”

  “May I assume you have a plan,” said Longstreet.

  Lee turned and acknowledged the presence of his commanders. Along with Longstreet were generals Ewell and Anderson. He longed to see truculent but trustworthy Stonewall Jackson in the group, but that good man had been killed at Chancellorsville and no one of his caliber had been found to replace him. Longstreet tried, and he was good, but he wasn’t Stonewall. The others, Richard Ewell and Richard Anderson, had performed spottily at Gettysburg. Perhaps, he thought, he wasn’t specific enough or demanding enough in the way he gave his orders. He understood that they weren’t used to his methods and it was something he would have to correct. Maybe they just weren’t used to each other at all just yet.

  Jeb Stuart was not present either. His cavalrymen were harrying the Union advance and sending frequent reports. This is what they should have been during the great battle, instead of dancing across the Union rear in a quest for glory. He’d chided Stuart for his failure and demanded that it never happen again. Apparently, it would not happen again. Lee was getting inundated with reports.

  Lee continued. “Gentlemen, as you know, we are between Hagerstown and the river and, barring a miracle, a vastly larger Union army will soon be descending upon us. Therefore, we must make some very painful decisions.”

  Lee looked at their faces. Only Longstreet seemed confident as he continued. “Have you ever seen a small animal trapped by a larger predator? There are only two things the smaller prey can do. First, and I find this truly amazing, an animal will
sometimes curl up and await death, allowing the predator to chew on him while he yet breathes. Second, there are other small animals who will fight and claw for their very existence, and sometimes will win their way free by virtue of their ferocity.”

  Longstreet nodded solemnly and said, “I recall getting bit by an angry rabbit once.”

  “And what did you do, Pete?” asked Ewell, laughing. Even though Longstreet’s first name was James, he was commonly called Pete.

  Longstreet grinned at the memory. “Since I was but a little one, I ran home to Momma. General Lee, do you think we can get General Meade to run home to Momma, or, in this case, Uncle Abraham?”

  Lee nodded. It was time to get serious. “I don’t know, but we can certainly try. Meade expects us to sit here in our trenches and wait for his artillery to pound us to pieces so that his infantry can storm over us. I do not wish to be that prey that simply waits to die. I wish to cast the dice and launch one ferocious attack against an enemy that is as exhausted as we are, disorganized, and strung out in long columns. We may not win the war, but we might just give us time for the river to go down and for us to cross it in safety.”

  “When do you wish this to happen?” asked Ewell.

  Lee looked skyward at the position of the sun. “There is still plenty of daylight and our cavalry has provided us with an effective screen. They must know we are out here, but they do not know in what numbers or precisely where, while we know a good deal about them. In two hours, they will be close enough for us to fall on them. In two hours, we will attack.”