John Buford: the cavalryman who held the ground at Gettysburg

On the last day of June 1863 a Union cavalry general rode into a small Pennsylvania town, saw the head of a Confederate column approaching from the west, and decided to stay. The next morning his dismounted troopers stood in the path of a whole Confederate division. John Buford's choice to hold Gettysburg helped decide where the greatest battle of the Civil War would be fought, and it made a plain, quiet regular officer into one of the war's best remembered horsemen.¹

Early life

John Buford Jr. was born on 4 March 1826 in Woodford County, Kentucky, into a prominent family, and was raised in Rock Island, Illinois. He spent a year at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and then entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, from which he graduated in 1848.²

The war that came in 1861 split his family. James I. Robertson Jr. notes that a half-brother became a Union brigadier general while a cousin held the same rank in the Confederate army, and HistoryNet's profile stresses how hard the choice was for a Kentuckian whose wife also had relatives fighting for the South. Buford, who had grown up in the North and spent his whole adult life in the army, stayed with the Union.³

Dragoon on the frontier, 1848 to 1861

Commissioned into the 1st Dragoons, Buford moved within a year to the 2nd Dragoons, the regiment in which he served until the Civil War. Robertson counts thirteen years of frontier service with the dragoons, and Cullum's register of West Point graduates follows him through the long round of frontier posts and expeditions that filled them.⁴

When the war began he was a captain in the 2nd Dragoons, a regular cavalryman of the old army who had learned his trade far from the parade ground.⁵

First years of the Civil War, 1861 to 1862

On 12 November 1861 Buford was promoted to major and made an assistant inspector general, serving in the defenses of Washington. His chance came in the summer of 1862, when John Pope, the new commander of the Army of Virginia, obtained a brigadier general's commission for him, dated 27 July 1862, and gave him a cavalry brigade. Robertson credits him with turning Pope's disorganized horsemen into a first-rate command.⁶

At the Second Battle of Manassas, or Bull Run, in August 1862 he fought well until he was wounded; the American Battlefield Trust says he was hit in the knee by a spent bullet, and Robertson adds that the wound was serious enough for him to be reported killed. Within weeks he was back as chief of cavalry of the Army of the Potomac under George McClellan, and he served through the Maryland campaign, including South Mountain and Antietam, and at Fredericksburg in December.⁷ › Battle of Fredericksburg, 1862

Brandy Station and the road north, 1863

When the cavalry of the Army of the Potomac was reorganized in 1863, Buford took the Reserve Brigade of regulars. On 9 June 1863 he led the right wing of the Union cavalry across the Rappahannock at Beverly's Ford and into the Battle of Brandy Station, which the American Battlefield Trust calls the largest cavalry engagement in American history. HistoryNet puts the forces at some 20,000 cavalrymen, with infantry and horse artillery in support.⁸ › Largest Cavalry Battles in History

By the Gettysburg campaign Buford commanded the 1st Cavalry Division. Through June it fought J.E.B. Stuart's Confederate cavalry at Aldie, Middleburg and, on 21 June, Upperville. As Robert E. Lee's army marched north into Pennsylvania, Buford's troopers shadowed its advance and were sent ahead to scout the country around Gettysburg.⁹

Gettysburg: 30 June 1863

Buford reached Gettysburg on 30 June with two of his brigades, one of them under Colonel William Gamble. A Confederate brigade under James J. Pettigrew, sent from Cashtown toward the town for supplies, saw the Union cavalry and, having no orders to bring on a battle, withdrew.¹⁰

Buford posted his men on the roads leading into the town. He had his eye on the higher, better ground east and south of Gettysburg, the positions that would become the backbone of the Union line in the days that followed. The National Park Service sums up what came next: Buford decided to stay overnight and wait for the Confederates to return, and his choice set the stage for the battle.¹¹ › The Battle of Gettysburg, 1863

Gettysburg: the first morning

At first light on 1 July two brigades of Henry Heth's division, part of A. P. Hill's corps, came down the Chambersburg Pike from Cashtown. Pickets of Gamble's brigade fired on them near Marsh Creek and fell back. The Confederates deployed on Herr Ridge and attacked Buford's main line on McPherson Ridge, just west of the town.¹²

The troopers fought on foot, as infantry, in a thin line, and their great advantage was the breech-loading carbine, which fired faster than the Confederates' muzzle-loading rifle-muskets. Against a much larger force they could not hope to win; their task was to trade ground for time and give the Union infantry the hours it needed to come up.¹³

It worked. After about two hours of fighting the infantry of John Reynolds's I Corps arrived and took over the line. The National Park Service's handbook on Gettysburg draws the lesson plainly: subordinate field commanders, not Lee or George Meade, had chosen the ground for the battle. When the Union corps were driven back through the town that afternoon, they rallied on the high ground behind it and held it for the next two days.¹⁴

After Gettysburg

The battle itself was won by the infantry and artillery of George Meade's army. When Lee retreated after the third day, Buford's division pursued and harassed the Confederates all the way to the Potomac, clashing with them at Williamsport, Boonsboro, Funkstown and Falling Waters between 5 and 14 July.¹⁵

Through the late summer and autumn of 1863 he fought in central Virginia, around Culpeper and across the Rapidan, and in October his cavalry covered Meade's withdrawal toward Bull Run during the Bristoe campaign.¹⁶

Command style

Buford was a scout and a defender rather than a leader of great mounted charges. In the Gettysburg campaign his task was reconnaissance, and he did it by watching the roads and reporting what came down them. When he fought, he often did it on foot, using the firepower of his carbines and guns to hold a ridge; the American Battlefield Trust credits his skillful placement of his men for the time won on 1 July.¹⁷

He was also a modest man. Cullum's register, written by fellow officers soon after his death, calls him a splendid cavalry officer who was "modest, yet brave; unostentatious, but prompt and persevering", and Robertson quotes a fellow officer who found him quiet and unassuming in his manners. His troopers admired him: Robertson cites one who called him a "model commander".¹⁸

Illness and death

During the campaign along the Rappahannock in November 1863 Buford fell ill with typhoid fever. He gave up his command, went on sick leave and was taken to Washington.¹⁹

On 16 December, as he lay dying, he was made a major general. A note in Abraham Lincoln's hand, now held by the West Point library, reads: "It is said Gen. Buford can not live through the day, and it is suggested that he be nominated as a Major General." The American Battlefield Trust quotes a fuller version of the President's message that names his service at Gettysburg as the reason. Cullum's register says the commission was placed in his hands shortly before he died. Buford died that day, 16 December 1863, aged 37, and was buried in the cemetery at West Point.²⁰

Legacy and memory

A bronze statue of Buford now stands on McPherson Ridge, on the spot where he stood on the morning of 1 July and ordered John Calef's horse artillery to open fire. It shows him standing, not on horseback, and around its base lie four gun tubes of Calef's battery, among them the one credited with firing the first Union cannon shot of the battle.²¹

For more than a century Buford was known mainly to Civil War readers. His fame grew with Michael Shaara's novel The Killer Angels and the 1993 film Gettysburg, in which Sam Elliott played him. Robertson, speaking in 1996, called the film often inaccurate but Elliott's Buford wonderfully portrayed, and argued that the cavalryman deserved far more attention than he had received. The novel is fiction, and the lines it and the film give Buford are the writers' words, not his; the record of what he did lies in the reports and in the ground itself.²²

Read the full story of the Battle of Gettysburg, see how Lee and Meade fought it, or meet the commanders of the American Civil War and famous cavalry units in history.