Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  Sickles's unwise move may have unwittingly foiled Lee's hopes. Finding the Union left in an unexpected position, Longstreet probably should have notified Lee. Scouts reported that the Round Tops were unoccupied, opening the way for a flanking move around to the Union rear. Longstreet's division commanders urged a change of attack plans to take advantage of this opportunity. But Longstreet had already tried at least twice to change Lee's mind. He did not want to risk another rebuff. Lee had repeatedly ordered him to attack here, and here he meant to attack. At 4:00 p.m. his brigades started forward in echelon from right to left.

  During the next few hours some of the war's bloodiest fighting took place in the peach orchard, in a wheat field to the east of the orchard, at Devil's Den, and on Little Round Top. Longstreet's 15,000 yelling veterans punched through the salient with attacks that shattered Sickles's leg and crushed his undersize corps. But with skillful tactics, Meade and his subordinates rushed reinforcements from three other corps to plug the breaks. Part of Hill's fresh division finally joined Longstreet's

  assault, while at the other end of the line Ewell's men belatedly went forward but achieved only limited gains before Union counterattacks and darkness halted them.

  The most desperate struggle occurred on Longstreet's front, where two Union regiments at separated points of this combat zone, the 20th Maine and the 1st Minnesota, achieved lasting fame by throwing back Confederate attacks that came dangerously close to breakthroughs. Rising above the surrounding countryside, the two Round Tops dominated the south end of Cemetery Ridge. If the rebels had gotten artillery up there, they could have enfiladed the Union left. Sickles's advance had uncovered these hills. A brigade of Alabamians advanced to seize Little Round Top. Minutes earlier nothing but a Union signal station had stood in their way. But Meade's chief of engineers, General Gouverneur K. Warren, discovered this appalling situation as enemy troops were approaching. Galloping down the hill, Warren persuaded the 5th Corps commander to send a brigade double-timing to the crest of Little Round Top just in time to meet the charging rebels.

  Posted at the far left of this brigade was the 20th Maine, commanded by Colonel Joshua L. Chamberlain. A year earlier Chamberlain had been a professor of rhetoric and modern languages at Bowdoin College. Taking a leave of absence ostensibly to study in Europe, he joined the army instead and now found himself responsible for preventing the rebels from rolling up the Union left. The fighting professor and his down-easterners proved equal to the occasion. For nearly two hours they stood off repeated assaults by portions of several Confederate regiments along the rocky, wooded slope filled with smoke, noise, and terror. But their valor seemed in vain. With more than a third of his men down and the remainder out of ammunition—and with the Johnnies forming for another assault—Chamberlain was in a tight spot. But cool and quickwitted—perhaps a legacy of dealing with fractious students—he ordered his men to fix bayonets on their empty rifles and charge. With a yell, these smoke-grimed Yanks lurched downhill against the surprised rebels. Exhausted by their uphill fighting following a twenty-five mile march that day to reach the battlefield, and shocked by the audacity of this bayonet assault, the Alabamians surrendered by scores to the jubilant boys from Maine. Little Round Top remained in northern hands. Although Sickles's corps was driven back yard by yard through the peach orchard, the wheat field, and Devil's Den, the Union left on Little Round Top was secure.

  A mile to the north, however, another Alabama brigade threatened to puncture the Cemetery Ridge line near its center. Their attack hit a gap in the Union line created by the earlier advance of Sickles's corps to the peach orchard. Winfield Scott Hancock's 2nd Corps occupied this sector, but until Hancock could shift reinforcements to stop the assault he had only eight companies of one regiment on hand to meet the oncoming brigade. The regiment was the 1st Minnesota, veterans of all the army's battles since the beginning at Bull Run. Hancock ordered these 262 men to charge the 1,600 Alabamians and slow them down long enough for reinforcements to arrive. The Minnesotans did the job, but only forty-seven of them came back. Hancock plugged the gap, and the Confederate attack all along the southern half of the battlefield flickered out in the twilight.

  To the north the shift of Union troops from Cemetery and Culp's hills to meet Longstreet's assault gave Ewell's corps the opportunity Lee had hoped for to convert its demonstration into an attack. But the opportunity slipped away. Several of Ewell's brigades did finally advance as dusk descended. One of them seized some trenches on Culp's Hill left unoccupied by a Federal unit sent to the other end of the battlefield, but could advance no farther against determined opposition. Two other gray brigades scored a temporary lodgement against the hapless 11th Corps at Cemetery Hill, but a 2nd Corps brigade counterattacked in the gathering darkness and drove them back.

  The Confederate assaults on July 2 were uncoordinated and disjointed. The usual skill of generalship in the Army of Northern Virginia was lacking this day. On the Union side, by contrast, officers from Meade down to regimental colonels acted with initiative and coolness. They moved troops to the right spots and counterattacked at the right times. As a result, when night fell the Union line remained firm except for the loss of Sickles's salient. Each side had suffered 9,000 or more casualties, bringing the two-day totals for both armies to nearly 35,000.

  It was the heaviest single-battle toll in the war thus far, but the fighting was not over. Despite stout resistance by the Yankees, Lee believed that his indomitable veterans had almost achieved victory. One more push, he thought, and "those people" would break. Lee seemed unusually excited by the supposed success of the past two days. At the same time, however, he was weakened by a bout with diarrhea and irritated by Stuart's prolonged absence (Jeb's tired troopers had finally rejoined the army during the day). In any case, Lee's judgment was not at its best. He had come to Pennsylvania in quest of a decisive victory and he was determined not to leave without it. He had attacked both enemy flanks, causing Meade (he believed) to weaken his center. With Pickett's fresh division as a spearhead, therefore, Lee would send three divisions preceded by an artillery barrage against that weakened center on July 3. Stuart would circle around the Union rear and Ewell would assail the right flank to clamp the pincers when Pickett broke through the front. With proper coordination and leadership, his invincible troops could not fail.

  Across the way a midnight council of Union generals resolved to stay and fight it out. With prescience, Meade told the general commanding his center that "if Lee attacks to-morrow, it will be in your front." 45 At first light, however, fighting broke out at the extreme right of the Union line along the base of Culp's Hill. Units of the Federal 12th Corps, which had been shifted to the left the previous day, came back during the night and attacked at dawn to regain their abandoned trenches now occupied by the rebels. In a seven-hour firefight they succeeded, and thus dimmed Lee's chances for turning the Union right simultaneously with the planned piercing of the center.

  While this was going on, Longstreet once more urged Lee to maneuver around Meade's left. Again Lee refused, and ordered Longstreet to attack the Union center with Pickett's division and two of Hill's—fewer than 15,000 men to advance three-quarters of a mile across open fields and assault dug-in infantry supported by ample artillery. "General Lee," Longstreet later reported himself to have said, "there never was a body of fifteen thousand men who could make that attack successfully." Lee impatiently replied that his magnificent army had done it before and could do it again. "My heart was heavy," wrote Longstreet subsequently. "I could see the desperate and hopeless nature of the charge and the hopeless slaughter it would cause. . . . That day at Gettysburg was one of the saddest of my life."46

  In this mood Longstreet ordered a concentration of Confederate artillery—some 150 guns—for the largest southern bombardment of the war, to soften up the enemy at the point of attack. At 1:07 p.m. Longstreet's guns shattered the uneasy silence that had followed the morning's fight on the Union right. For almost two hour
s an artillery duel among nearly 300 guns filled the Pennsylvania countryside with an ear-splitting roar heard as far away as Pittsburgh. Despite this sound and fury, the Union

  45. John Gibbon, "The Council of War on the Second Day," Battles and Leaders, III, 314.

  46. Longstreet, "Lee's Right Wing at Gettysburg," ibid., 343, 345.

  infantry lying behind stone walls and breastworks suffered little, for the rebel aim was high.

  Pickett's all-Virginia division waited with nervous impatience to go in and get it over with. Thirty-eight years old, George Pickett had graduated last in the same West Point class as George McClellan (who graduated second). Pickett did well in the Mexican War, but in the present conflict he had enjoyed few chances to distinguish himself. His division did not fight at Chancellorsville and marked time guarding supply wagons during the first two days at Gettysburg. With his long hair worn in ringlets and his face adorned by a drooping mustache and goatee, Pickett looked like a cross between a Cavalier dandy and a riverboat gambler. He affected the romantic style of Sir Walter Scott's heroes and was eager to win everlasting glory at Gettysburg.

  Finally, about 3:00 p.m., Longstreet reluctantly ordered the attack. The Confederate bombardment seemed to have disabled the enemy's artillery; it was now or never. With parade-ground precision, Pickett's three brigades moved out joined by six more from Hill's division on their left and two others in reserve. It was a magnificent mile-wide spectacle, a picture-book view of war that participants on both sides remembered with awe until their dying moment—which for many came within the next hour. Pickett's charge represented the Confederate war effort in microcosm: matchless valor, apparent initial success, and ultimate disaster. As the gray infantry poured across the gently undulating farmland with seemingly irresistible force, northern artillery suddenly erupted in a savage cascade, sending shot and shell among the southern regiments and changing to canister as they kept coming. The Union guns had not been knocked out after all; their canny chief of artillery, General Henry J. Hunt, had ordered them to cease firing to lure on the rebels and conserve ammunition to welcome them. Yankee infantry behind stone walls opened up at 200 yards while Vermont, Ohio, and New York regiments on the left and right swung out to rake both flanks of the attacking force. The southern assault collapsed under this unbearable pressure from front and flanks. Two or three hundred Virginians and Tennesseeans with General Lewis A. Armistead breached the first Union line, where Armistead was mortally wounded with his hand on a Yankee cannon and his followers fell like leaves in an autumn wind. In half an hour it was all over. Of the 14,000 Confederates who had gone forward, scarcely half returned. Pickett's own division lost two-thirds of its men; his three brigadiers and all thirteen colonels were killed or wounded.

  As the dazed survivors stumbled back to their starting point, they met Lee and Longstreet working to form a defensive line against Meade's expected counterattack. "It's all my fault," said Lee as he rode among his men. "It is I who have lost this fight, and you must help me out of it the best way you can. All good men must rally."47 Rally they did—some of them, at least. But Meade did not counterattack. For this he has been criticized down the years. Hancock, despite being wounded in the repulse of Pickett's assault, urged Meade to launch the 20,000 fresh reserves of the 5th and 6th Corps in pursuit of Lee's broken brigades. But a heavy load of responsibility weighed on Meade's shoulders. He had been in command only six days. For three of them his army had been fighting for the nation's life, as he saw the matter, and had narrowly saved it. Meade could not yet know how badly the enemy was hurt, or that their artillery was low on ammunition. He did know that Stuart was loose in his rear, but had not yet learned that a division of blue troopers had stopped the southern cavalry three miles east of Gettysburg—thus foiling the third part of Lee's three-pronged plan for Meade's undoing. Meanwhile two Union cavalry regiments on the left flank south of the Round Tops charged the rebel infantry in anticipation of orders for a counterattack, but were badly shot up by the alert enemy. In late afternoon a few units from the 5th and 6th Corps advanced over the scene of the previous day's carnage in Devil's Den and the wheat field. They flushed out the rear guard of Longstreet's two divisions, which were pulling back to a new line. Meade apparently did have some idea of attacking in this vicinity next day—the Fourth of July—but a heavy rainstorm that began shortly after noon halted the move.

  Meade's lack of aggressiveness was caused by his respect for the enemy. He could scarcely believe that he had beaten the victors of Chan-cellorsville. Meade also explained later that he had not wanted to follow "the bad example [Lee] had set me, in ruining himself attacking a strong position." "We have done well enough," he said to a cavalry officer eager to do more. In a congratulatory telegram, a former corps commander expressed a widely felt astonishment that the long-suffering Army of the Potomac had actually won a big victory: "The glorious success of the Army of the Potomac has electrified all. I did not believe the enemy could be whipped."48

  The news did indeed electrify the North. "VICTORY! WATERLOO

  47. Clifford Dowdey, Death of a Nation: The Story of Lee and His Men at Gettysburg (New York, 1958), 341; Foote, Civil War, II, 567–68.

  48. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 27, pt. 3, p. 539; Foote, Civil War, II, 575; Freeman Cleaves, Meade of Gettysburg (Norman, Okla., 1960), 172.

  ECLIPSED!" shouted a headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The glad tidings reached Washington the day after Pickett's repulse, making this the capital's most glorious Fourth ever. "I never knew such excitement in Washington," wrote one observer. When word arrived three days later of the surrender at Vicksburg, the excitement doubled. Lincoln appeared at a White House balcony to tell a crowd of serenaders that this "gigantic Rebellion" whose purpose was to "overthrow the principle that all men are created equal" had been dealt a crippling blow.49 In New York the diarist George Templeton Strong rejoiced that

  the results of this victory are priceless. . . . The charm of Robert Lee's invincibility is broken. The Army of the Potomac has at last found a general that can handle it, and has stood nobly up to its terrible work in spite of its long disheartening list of hard-fought failures. . . . Copperheads are palsied and dumb for the moment at least. . . . Government is strengthened four-fold at home and abroad.50

  Strong's final sentence was truer than he could know. Confederate Vice-President Stephens was on his way under flag of truce to Union lines at Norfolk as the battle of Gettysburg reached its climax. Jefferson Davis had hoped that Stephens would reach Washington from the south while Lee's victorious army was marching toward it from the north. Reports of Stephens's mission and of Gettysburg's outcome reached the White House at the same time. Lincoln thereupon sent a curt refusal to Stephens's request for a pass through the lines.51 In London the news of Gettysburg and Vicksburg gave the coup de grace to Confederate hopes for recognition. "The disasters of the rebels are unredeemed by even any hope of success," crowed Henry Adams. "It is now conceded that all idea of intervention is at an end."52

  The victory at Gettysburg was purchased at high human cost: 23,000 Union casualties, more than one-quarter of the army's effectives. Yet the cost to the South was greater: 28,000 men killed, wounded, or missing, more than a third of Lee's army. As the survivors began their sad retreat to Virginia in the rain on July 4, thousands of wounded men suffered torture as ambulances and commandeered farm wagons bounced

  49. Cleaves, Meade of Gettysburg, 171; CWL, VI, 319–20.

  50. Strong, Diary, 330.

  51. Beale, ed., Diary of Gideon Welles, I, 358–62.

  52. Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., July 23, 1863, in Ford, ed., Cycle of Adams Letters, II, 59–60.

  along rutted roads. Seven thousand rebel wounded were left behind to be attended by Union surgeons and volunteer nurses who flocked to Gettysburg. Lee was profoundly depressed by the outcome of his campaign to conquer a peace. A month later he offered his resignation to Jefferson Davis. "No one," wrote Lee, "is more aware than myself of
my inability for the duties of my position. I cannot even accomplish what I myself desire. How can I fulfill the expectations of others?"53 Thus said a man whose stunning achievements during the year before Gettysburg had won the admiration of the Western world. Of course Davis refused to accept his resignation. Lee and his men would go on to earn further laurels. But they never again possessed the power and reputation they carried into Pennsylvania those palmy midsummer days of 1863. Though the war was destined to continue for almost two more bloody years, Gettysburg and Vicksburg proved to have been its crucial turning point.

  Perceptive southerners sadly recognized this. The fall of Vicksburg "is a terrible blow, and has produced much despondency," wrote War Department clerk John Jones when he heard the news on July 8. Next day his spirits sank lower, for "the news from Lee's army is appalling. . . . This [is] the darkest day of the war." The fire-eater Edmund Ruffin "never before felt so despondent as to our struggle." And the usually indefatigable Josiah Gorgas, chief of Confederate ordnance, sat down on July 28 and wrote a diary entry whose anguish echoes across the years:

  Events have succeeded one another with disastrous rapidity. One brief month ago we were apparently at the point of success. Lee was in Pennsylvania, threatening Harrisburgh, and even Philadelphia. Vicksburgh seemed to laugh all Grant's efforts to scorn. . . . Port Hudson had beaten off Banks' force. . . . Now the picture is just as sombre as it was bright then. . . . It seems incredible that human power could effect such a change in so brief a space. Yesterday we rode on the pinnacle of success—today absolute ruin seems to be our portion. The Confederacy totters to its destruction.54