Please note that our logo is used on our website images only and does not appear on our products.
|
The Bivouac by Keith Rocco.
Major General George G. Meade reached the Gettysburg battlefield just before midnight on July 1, 1863. Meade had been selected to command the Army of the Potomac just four days earlier, when Major General Joseph Hooker, the man whom Lee had defeated at Chancellorsville two months earlier, resigned over differences with the War Department. Few generals in the war bore a heavier burden of command than did Meade at Gettysburg. The country looked to him to deliver victory over a Confederate army that had not yet known defeat. If the Army of the Potomac was defeated, the consequences to the future of the Union would be grim. Meades headquarters was at Taneytown, Maryland, about thirteen miles south of Gettysburg. Meade stayed at Taneytown to better coordinate the movements of his army corps toward the battlefield. Only when he was certain the entire army was responding to the unexpected clash at Gettysburg did he transfer his headquarters to the battlefield. Meade rode to the gatehouse of the Evergreen Cemetery where he found six or seven generals, including Oliver Howard, Henry Slocum, and Daniel Sickles. All of them agreed that the terrain south of Gettysburg offered advantages. General Sickles was heard to say; It is a good place to fight from, general! To which Meade responded: I am glad to hear you say so, gentlemen, for it is too late to leave it. The Bivouac captures Meade on the northern end of Cemetery Ridge, near the farm of a free black man named Abraham Brian, gazing west toward Seminary Ridge. In front of Meade, the line of stacked muskets and sleeping soldiers belong to Brigadier General John Robinson's 2nd Division, 1st Army Corps, which had suffered dreadful casualties in the first day of fighting.
VIEW ALL KEITH ROCCO MILITARY ART
VIEW OUR 19TH CENTURY MILITARY PRINTS PAGES
VIEW OUR BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG PAGE
|
