For von Gilsa’s men, the scene was one of acute terror. Dressing ranks behind Gordon’s troops—straddling the Harrisburg Road and extending the Confederate front farther to the right—were five Louisiana regiments led by Brigadier General Harry Thompson Hays, in addition to the three units packed into the Tarheel brigade commanded by Colonel Isaac Avery.
The Battle for Blocher’s Knoll at Gettysburg, July 1, 1863
While significantly outgunned, von Gilsa’s first line resisted the rebels with everything they had. A German-born officer from the 68th New York paced anxiously behind the skirmishers, “encouraging the men to keep cool and aim well.” Though not yet paroled after a brief but unhappy sojourn in Libby Prison, one lieutenant in the 153rd Pennsylvania insisted (over the protest of his more honorable men) on entering the fight. Shortly after moving forward, he fell with a wound to the knee. “The contest,” one of his regimental comrades attested, “was fierce from first to last.”26
“Come on boys,” still another Pennsylvanian implored, “let us give them what they deserve!” The words had scarcely escaped the soldier’s lips when an enemy ball struck his right shoulder, knocking his musket to the ground. Though in great pain, he “worked the gun up against his other shoulder” and managed to squeeze off one more round.
By this time, in an attempt to steel von Gilsa’s feeble line, Adelbert Ames had ordered the 107th Ohio up to the knoll. It was a wretched assignment. Instructed to form up on von Gilsa’s left—“facing northwest”—Colonel Meyer’s troops would be snared in a withering crossfire, resigned to hold the tip of a forlorn salient against all odds. (To the right of the 107th, the 25th Ohio and six companies of the 17th Connecticut would fare little better; the 17th’s Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Fowler was decapitated by a shell, while Captain Wilson French was “severely wounded.”) While Gordon’s men blazed away at the Buckeye soldiers from the north, the four regiments of Brigadier General George Doles’s Georgia brigade “splashed across Blocher’s Run” and pitched into the fight from the west, announcing their arrival with a “soul-stirring rebel yell.” In other words, it was Chancellorsville all over again.27
ALL WAS NOW “considerable confusion.” In a signal of desperation, Ames personally delivered orders to each of his regiments. He found the 107th Ohio determined “to do as well as possible,” but Colonel Meyer unstrung with apprehension and trammeled by emotion. “I noticed that at the whistling of shells and bullets he would crouch down upon his horse,” Ames remembered, “his breast nearly touching the neck of his horse, and at the same time great fear [and] consternation was depicted in his countenance.” “He appeared fearful of the bullets,” one of Ames’s staff officers confirmed. Ames “reproved” Meyer for his “unnecessary dodging at the sound,” but the general had little time to spare—for not long after the Buckeyes pulled up to the knoll, von Gilsa’s reed-thin line finally snapped. Knots of men rushed to the rear, surged beyond the almshouse buildings, and slipped into the confusion of the town. The 153rd Pennsylvania weathered the storm longer than the skirmishers of the 54th and 68th New York (“it proved to be a hot place for us,” one of the Empire State men quipped), though they too gave way before long, their nerves unstrung. “The 1st Brigade,” explained one Connecticut enlisted man, “broke and ran through our ranks like a flock of frightened sheep.” Ignoring his own, not insignificant role in von Gilsa’s defeat, Barlow was “unable to contain his disgust” for the immigrant soldiers under his command. This rendered the tribute paid the brigade by one Georgia private all the more ironic: “They were harder to drive than we had ever known them before,” George Washington Nichols maintained.28
Yet that was little consolation for the men of the 107th Ohio, who were now totally exposed and floundering, lacking any steady leadership. As the troops braced for the rebel onslaught, Colonel Meyer “appeared beside himself” and “not at all cool,” so overwhelmed by “fear” that he delivered neither “intelligible” nor “proper” commands. “Part of the regiment was faced to the left & moved off,” Ames reported, while “part of it remained in its position.” “In portions of the regiment,” he added, “there was the greatest confusion.” Cursing and screaming, “carelessly” swinging his sword “over his head,” the colonel bolted for the rear, abandoning his men in the face of the enemy. If Gettysburg so convincingly resembled Chancellorsville, did the haunting memory of that battle overwhelm the colonel? Did the deployment on Blocher’s Knoll prompt him to relive Edward’s capture, his own wound, and his humiliating capture? Did he fear that this time, he might not be “fortunate” enough to land in Libby? That whatever luck he had enjoyed might finally run out?29
FEARING FOR the Ohioans’ morale, Ames dispatched Captain John Marshall Brown, the quick-witted, twenty-four-year-old Mainer who served as his assistant adjutant general, to post the regiment. As it was, the situation was worse than daunting. “The pressure soon became so great and the fire of the enemy so hot and deadly,” one Ohioan recalled, “that it was evident our brigade and in fact the division could not long hold its ground.” Notwithstanding the despairing odds, Augustus Vignos rallied the men of Company H and was attempting to mount a charge when an enemy shell severed his right arm. General Ames, meanwhile, summoned the 75th Ohio from its reserve position and ordered its 269 men “to fix bayonets, pass to the front between the 107th and 25th Ohio, and if possible check the advance of the enemy.”30
Years later, the 75th Ohio’s colonel yet lamented the “dreadful cost” of that “fearful advance.” For men who had been moored anxiously behind the lines, however, the rush to the front came as an odd sort of relief. “In all the hurry and excitement,” one private in the 75th explained, “there seemed to be order and resolution.” But the illusion of control quickly dissolved as the men “frantically . . . gnawed paper from cartridges” and rammed leaden slugs down the barrels of their Springfield muskets. A “thick and acrid” smoke choked the battlefield, inhibiting visibility and polluting nostrils with the unpleasant “fumes” of gunpowder. “One could scarcely see the comrade beside him,” one soldier protested. “Artillery and small arms rained their fire on the attackers,” another soldier assured, “but the gloom and smoke made it hard to take aim.” Even so, the 75th Ohio managed to momentarily “check” the Georgians in their “immediate front.”31
“Fiercely,” the battle continued for at least thirty minutes. “The enemy made a most obstinate resistance,” John Brown Gordon confirmed in his official report, noting that in places, “less than 50 paces” separated the combatants. “We stood our ground,” Jacob Boroway asserted, “and shot . . . as fast as we could.” The Stark County volunteer got off three rounds before a shell knocked his gun from his hands “and broke it all to pieces.” So close were the contending lines that “flag-bearers struck each other with their flag-staffs.” Even so, the thick veil of smoke lent the intimate battle an eerie character, promoting a terrifying sense of isolation. “It appeared, as near as I [could] tell, that I stood there for some time all alone, no one as I could see near me,” one private in the 17th Connecticut revealed. “Feelings came over me that cannot be described.” The soldiers unable to see, the battle’s auditory elements instead became especially prominent in their memories. The hail of bullets ploughing the knoll was so “terrific” that one private remembered “a continual hiss about my ears.” “The way the bullets did rattle was curious,” still another echoed.32
Before long, the Georgians had swamped “both flanks” of Ames’s brigade. Reveling in their good fortune, the rebels began bagging prisoners. Mahlon Slutz’s captors directed him to “a brick house about a mile north” of Gettysburg; Christian Rieker’s pointed him to the rear. “I expected orders to fall back or assistance to hold on,” the colonel of the 75th Ohio declared, “but neither came.” Instead, the beleaguered soldiers instinctively abandoned that deadly perch to which a brigade should never have been sent, offering whatever resistance they could as they hurried to the rear. At one point, a corporal
in the 17th Connecticut attempted to rally his regiment; a few of the Nutmeggers paused and began to load their weapons, but they could not take aim before the throngs of retreating men swept them up in one inexorable rush toward the almshouse.33
It was on the crowded campus of the almshouse that the 107th Ohio made its own attempt to stem the Georgian tide. Gripping the regimental colors, his brow knitted with contempt for the enemy, Adjutant Young stood in the middle of the road that reached into the borough. There, he collected the dazed remnants of the regiment. It was impossible to form another battle line (“the enemy,” Jacob Smith noted, was “close behind in hot pursuit”), but for a few, critical moments, the harried knot of Ohioans “held the houses & outskirts of the town.” Years later, John Brown Gordon paid the men an inadvertent tribute, claiming that he “never” remembered “more desperate fighting” than that which swirled “around the almshouse.”34
Of necessity, the Ohioans joined the stampede of Union soldiers jamming the streets of the town. “We were much like a parcel of schoolboys turned loose,” a soldier in the 75th Ohio recalled. By itself, the collapse of the Eleventh Corps line might have overwhelmed the borough’s dense maze of streets and alleys, creating a dangerous bottleneck. But that afternoon a renewed Confederate attack west of town drove the men of the First Corps from the fresh defensive works they had fastened along the spine of Seminary Ridge. At the very moment Howard’s soldiers battled their way into the borough, the First Corps men flooded the town from the west. The “two bodies of men,” Howard reported matter-of-factly, “became entangled in the streets.” Amid the bedlam, the commanding general ordered up Colonel Charles Coster’s tiny brigade of New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians (it had been held in reserve south of town) and nodded them forward on a hopeless mission to “check” the “eager advance of the enemy.” The men formed a line in a congested brickyard on the edge of town.35
The retreat through town was harrowing, but even more so for the ambulance detail, obliged to wind wagons heaped with their wounded and dying comrades through the “confused,” gnarled masses congesting the streets. “We were not long in finding sufficient wounded soldiers to fill our wagons,” Jacob Smith shuddered. Their freight testified to the intensity of the fight atop the knoll. One soldier, for instance, “had been shot through the mouth”; the musket ball entered through one of his cheeks and exited “out the other,” ejecting “four or five teeth” and severing his tongue “pretty near off.” His life appeared to have been saved by the “small Bible” that he carried “in a pocket over his left breast,” in which still another piece of enemy lead had lodged.36
It made little difference to the rebels whether enemy soldiers trundled ambulances or not; either way, they were bagged as prisoners. Rounding one corner, the Confederates scooped up “more than half” of the 107th Ohio’s ambulance squad. “This I think was about the only time in the service that I considered it really necessary to disobey orders,” Jacob Smith recalled. And yet, he mustered the “considerable” strength required to “get along,” his sense of “duty” soon delivering him to the new Union line taking shape atop Cemetery Hill.37
Standing atop that eminence with an aide by his side, Howard watched as ribbons of Union soldiers emerged from the town. Though the rush of so many “broken regiments” presented a doleful panorama, the general was encouraged. The retreat through town had delivered his command to the “good defensive” ground that he had spied that morning: the good defensive ground that would anchor the Army of the Potomac’s position for the next forty-eight hours. If there was any consolation for the destruction visited on his men that afternoon, any reason for him to heave a sigh of relief, then this was it. “Rally, Boys!” he yowled. “Rally, Boys! Let us regain the name we lost at Chancellorsville.”38
Howard’s appreciation for the unfolding situation, however, was mostly beyond the reach of his men; in the ranks, the troops once again felt the familiar sting of “utter defeat.” Only with “considerable effort,” one of the Ohioans recalled, were officers able to rally their regiments and plant them behind the stout stone walls that rambled along the hill. When ordered to stretch a picket line out into the town, “within easy stone’s throw of the rebels who were stationed in the houses,” Fritz Nussbaum “positively refused to obey the order.” In a telling exercise of caution, Howard posted “a strong guard of cavalry and infantry” in the rear to thwart potential deserters.
As it turned out, the afternoon’s most infamous deserter turned up on Cemetery Hill. Hours after abandoning his men on Blocher’s Knoll, an aide on General Howard’s staff spotted Colonel Meyer “riding with his sword in his scabbard,” making “no effort” to corral the “rabble of men coming back in disorder.” (Earlier that afternoon, it seems that Howard had his own chance encounter with the troubled colonel. The general recalled that as his troops began spilling out of town, “a colonel passed by murmuring something in German,” lacking, for the moment, “his command of English.”) Yet seized with fear, “having in his whole aspect a very wilted and drooping appearance,” the colonel lent his men no aid as they formed a new, northward-facing line near the base of East Cemetery Hill. When Ames finally caught up with the colonel, he placed him under arrest and commenced a verbal flogging. “Mr. Meyer,” the general sniffed, “so long as I have a Sergeant left to command the Second Brigade, your services will not be required. Your place is in the rear.”39
HUNCHED BEHIND a low stone fence, their left flank anchored on the Baltimore Pike, it would be a restive night as the questions drumming in the Ohio soldiers’ ears competed with the dreadful moans of the wounded and dying. By any arithmetic, the regiment had been thrashed. Of the 458 men who entered the fight that morning, no more than 171 limped back to Cemetery Hill. The short span of their new line allowed the men to visualize their destruction. They shuddered as they glanced to the left and right. As had been the case at Chancellorsville, the battle exacted a considerable toll in captains, lieutenants, and sergeants, obliging the survivors to perform “the most arduous and exhaustive duties.” In addition to Major Vignos, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Mueller had been “dangerously wounded.” Captain William Fischer clung to life, as did Barnet Steiner, struck by a ball discharged from an Enfield musket. Injuries among the rank and file were no less overwhelming. “What will the morrow bring forth is now the question being asked, weighing heavily upon the hearts of our troops tonight as they lay upon their arms,” one enlisted man told his diary. “Will the rebels again be successful, and must all this sacrifice of blood, lives and treasure be made in vain?” he asked. “Will not the prayers and supplications of God’s people be regarded by a righteous God, and are we doomed to still further defeat?” He hoped that the next day would hazard a few answers.40
CHAPTER 6
“ALL THAT MORTAL[S] COULD DO”
July to August 1863
THE SUN ROSE at a quarter past four the next morning, casting the entire battlefield in an eerie glow. “This morning was fresh, balmy, and pleasant,” Jacob Smith recorded in his diary. “All the surrounding world was quiet and at rest.” This made for a marked contrast with the previous evening, a cheerless coda to a day of gloom. Throughout the night, all had been bustle. While federal gunners studded Cemetery Hill with dozens of batteries—turning their perch into an imposing artillery park—infantrymen piled up fence rails and burrowed out rifle pits, determined that they would be prepared for their next encounter with the enemy. “All night long,” one Confederate captain attested, “the Federals were heard chopping away and working like beavers, and when day dawned the ridge was found to be crowned with strongly built fortifications and bristling with a most formidable array of cannon.”1
It is easy to imagine battle as a prolonged, epic affair, but as with every Civil War engagement, long and often unnerving intervals of inactivity punctuated the fighting at Gettysburg. The morning of July 2 would be another such intermission in the action as the federal lines took shape along the sturdy brow o
f Cemetery Ridge, curling from the thickly wooded Culp’s Hill (where Henry Slocum planted his Twelfth Corps) to rock-littered Little Round Top (animated by the wigwag of a lone Union signal station). As the blue-coated soldiers rustled into place that morning, Robert E. Lee’s scouts reconnoitered a Chancellorsville reprise—a massive flank attack to be delivered by Old Pete Longstreet’s men. Lee intended his “Old War Horse” to launch the main attack on the federal left; meanwhile, Major General Richard Stoddart Ewell would pin the federal right in place and, “if an opportunity offered,” ready an assault of his own toward Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill.
Before long, the rebels—a few of whom had turned the borough into a sharpshooter’s nest—made their presence known. From steeples, garrets, and attic windows, the skilled marksmen eagerly “pick[ed] off their prey whenever the chance afforded.” But the main act was yet to come.2
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