Gettysburg

  GOOD TRAINING, good tactical leadership, and good fortune had in short order gained the field south of the Chambersburg Pike for the Iron Brigade. But even as that assault was delivered, north of the pike the fortunes of war were exactly reversed. Here it was the Mississippians and North Carolinians of Davis’s brigade who quickly gained the upper hand, threatening to overturn the Iron Brigade’s gains even as they were being made.

  Joseph R. Davis’s brigade seemed an unlikely choice to play such a role. It had come up from North Carolina, from D. H. Hill’s command, and not as General Lee’s first choice for a reinforcement. Only two of its four regiments had any combat experience, and its brigadier was exercising his first combat command. Joe Davis, nephew of President Davis, had spent most of the war serving on his uncle’s staff in Richmond; July 1 would mark his first day of on-the-job training. He had but three of his regiments with him, the veteran 11th Mississippi having been detached to guard the division’s trains. Davis and better than two-thirds of his 1,700 men would be going to battle that morning for the first time.21

  Davis’s line advanced on a front a half-mile wide north of the Chambersburg Pike and also north of the unfinished railroad that paralleled the pike. The roadbed’s embankments and excavated cuts served to cover the Confederates’ right flank and also to shield them from the Federals’ view. Consequently, the element of surprise favored the Rebels. In addition, the arrival of Lysander Cutler’s Federal brigade was not as timely as that of the Iron Brigade farther south. Davis’s three regiments—55th North Carolina, 2nd Mississippi, and 42nd Mississippi—crossed the crest of McPherson’s Ridge first and caught the Yankees before they were fully deployed.

  Captain James Hall’s 2nd Maine battery, positioned on the ridgeline just north of the pike, initially attracted the fire of Willie Pegram’s several batteries, just as General Reynolds had intended. In a duel lasting a good half-hour, Hall would more than hold his own. Cutler’s infantry column, some 1,550 men all told, was meanwhile being directed to support the guns—the two trailing regiments, 84th and 95th New York, to the left of the battery; and the three lead regiments, 76th and 147th New York and 56th Pennsylvania, to protect on the right or northern flank. Just then, for the moment at least, the McPherson farm, at the center of the battlefield where the 84th and 95th New York were posted, proved to be an oasis of calm and they had little shooting to do. The northern flank, however, would witness a thunderous and confusing and deadly melee. As General Davis put it with nice understatement, “The engagement soon became very warm.”

  What happened on this far northern flank was a mirror image of what was happening on the far southern flank, but with the positions reversed. The 42nd and 2nd Mississippi piled straight into the three Yankee regiments as they came slanting across a wheatfield attempting to deploy from column into line of battle. Seeing his advantage, Colonel John M. Stone drove his 2nd Mississippi, the one veteran regiment with Joe Davis that morning, straight at the confused Yankees. Stone went down with a wound, but Major John A. Blair took the command and kept the attack moving.

  Captain Leander Woollard of the 42nd Mississippi recorded in his diary, “just as we were charging them we came to the top of a hill in a wheat field & beheld a regiment of the blue bellies immediately in front & not over 100 yards from me & just as they leveled their guns … I gave the command to ‘lay down,’ and a shower of balls passed over our heads….” With Colonel Stone charging ahead on their left, Captain Woollard wrote, the 42nd was urged to match his pace, and “with a shout—such as Southern enthusiasm alone can give … drove the line of enemy that confronted us down the hill.”

  The 55th North Carolina, on the far left of the Confederate battle line, considerably overlapped the 76th New York, the right-hand Federal regiment—just as the 24th Michigan was overlapping the 13th Alabama to the south, and with similar results. The North Carolinians, in their first battle and with their colonel, John K. Connally, eagerly taking the colors to lead them personally, wheeled around the Federals’ flank and toward their rear. As flag bearer, Colonel Connally immediately became a target, and soon he was down with an arm wound severe enough to require amputation. How badly was he hurt, Major Alfred Belo asked him. Badly enough, Connally replied, but help was at hand. “Go on, and don’t let the Mississippians get ahead of you!”

  The fighting was at close range now, and the toll rose rapidly on both sides. Major Andrew J. Grover, commanding the hard-pressed 76th New York, tried to turn his line to meet the flanking assault of the North Carolinians and was killed in the attempt. General Cutler, who was with the New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians, was unstinting in his praise—they “fought as only brave men can fight, and held their ground until ordered to fall back….” That order soon came from division commander Wadsworth. The two northernmost regiments retreated in considerable disorder to Seminary Ridge, where their surviving officers tried to rally them. In perhaps twenty minutes of fighting, much of that time caught in a crossfire, the 76th New York had 169 men killed and wounded, 45 percent of its numbers.22

  General Wadsworth had intended that all three of the regiments on the northern flank should fall back, but his retreat order had no sooner reached the 147th New York’s Lieutenant Colonel Francis C. Miller than Miller was severely wounded by a bullet in the throat and then was carried off by his runaway horse. The regiment fought on, oblivious of Wadsworth’s order. Soon it was facing assault on two fronts—the 42nd Mississippi attacking from the west, the 2nd Mississippi and 55th North Carolina coming now from the north.

  It was at this point in his so far victorious advance that Joe Davis began to lose control of his forces. Two of his regimental commanders had fallen, and in the excitement of the chase lesser officers were taking matters into their own hands. Companies were scattering in pursuit of the Yankees retreating toward Seminary Ridge, others were turning back to attack the beleaguered 147th New York, still others were aiming at Captain Hall’s Maine battery just north of the Chambersburg Pike.

  To infantrymen, there was no more tempting target than an exposed enemy battery. Captain Hall would write of his astonishment when abruptly a line of Rebel infantry “rose up on my front and right, at a distance of not more than fifty yards,” aiming a killing fire at his gunners and his battery horses. Hall managed to swing his center and right sections sharply right and open on his tormentors with double canister. This drove them back to the shelter of the roadbed embankment behind which they had approached unseen. But Hall knew he could not hold his position long in the absence of infantry support. What, he wondered in growing anger, had happened to Cutler’s regiments supposed to be protecting him on the right?

  In fact, beyond the obscuring battle smoke and unknown to Hall, the 147th New York was making the most desperate kind of stand to hold off the Rebels. Major George Harney, now in command, refused the right of his line to meet the attacks from the north. “We had been firing but a short time when I saw the right of our regiment suddenly swing back, then formed to the rail fence on our right and fired very rapidly,” recalled Lieutenant J. V. Pierce. He added that the next thing he saw was the colors of the 56th Pennsylvania and 76th New York “away back to the rear in the edge of the woods.” Now these Yankees were caught in an ever more destructive crossfire. “Balls whistled round our heads like hail,” wrote Private Francis Pease. “The men very soon began to fall very fast and many wounded.”

  At last General Wadsworth realized the plight of the 147th and sent one of his staff to bring it off. When the staff man reached him with Wadsworth’s order, Major Harney wasted no time in obeying. He called out a somewhat unmilitary but highly practical command: “In retreat, double-quick run!” The New Yorkers, every man for himself, headed for the rear. Sergeant William Wybourn picked up the fallen regimental colors and managed to carry them to safety despite being shot through the body. In perhaps a half-hour of fighting, the 147th New York saw better than three-quarters of its men killed, wounded, or captured. “We fight a little and run a
little,” General Cutler told the survivors. “There are no supports.“23

  The 147th’s last stand bought time, just barely, for the 2nd Maine battery to escape isolation and capture, although at the moment Captain Hall was not aware of this sacrifice. Hall had concluded that if the position on McPherson’s Ridge was proving too advanced for infantry, it was definitely too advanced for artillery, and he did not wait for orders to pull out. His word for the subsequent ordeal was “hellish.” All the horses of the two guns of his right section were shot down; one of the guns was left, the other dragged off by hand. Hall withdrew his four remaining guns from the ridgeline by rolling them back down the slope by hand under cover of the smoke from their last shots, then limbering them at the bottom of the ridge. Getting them back through the fence at the pike one at a time was another ordeal, involving hand-to-hand combat between his gunners and Rebel skirmishers. Somehow Captain Hall got away with the loss of the one gun (which would later be retrieved), 28 battery horses killed, and 18 of his gunners wounded. When he encountered General Wadsworth he was still in a fury, and spoke with disgust of the “cowardly operation of the infantry forsaking my right.” 24

  Victory could be as disorganizing and bewildering as defeat, and on this day that was true of Joe Davis’s brigade. In its rout of Cutler’s Yankees it had suffered heavy casualties, especially in officers, and the troops were exhausted and scattered and uncertain what they were to do next. They “were jumbled together without regard to regiment or company,” admitted Major John Blair of the 2nd Mississippi. Davis and his staff were not experienced enough to get their troops in hand to meet a counterattack, and an order to retire was issued too late to be effective. Captain Woollard of the 42nd Mississippi would record in his diary that just when “we were feeling that the day at that point at least, was ours, lo—a cloud of blue coats, fresh & eager for the fray, confronted us….”

  That particular cloud of blue coats was the 6th Wisconsin infantry. General Doubleday had held the 6th out of the Iron Brigade’s attack as a reserve in case of need; clearly, with Cutler’s men fleeing toward Seminary Ridge, the need was now. One of Doubleday’s staff reined up before Lieutenant Colonel Rufus Dawes and ordered him to move the 6th to the right and to “go like hell!” It was 750 yards to the Chambersburg Pike, wrote Dawes, and “I moved by a right flank on a run.” As they neared the pike he could see Cutler’s front collapsing, and he ordered the regiment to deploy and align on the roadside fence. Just then his horse was hit and he went sprawling. As he scrambled to his feet, “the men gave a hearty cheer.” Thereafter Colonel Dawes fought his battle on foot, which proved a wise precaution.

  Resting their rifles on the fence rails, the Wisconsin men opened a well-aimed, withering fire. “This fire took the enemy enfilade, and

  checked his advance immediately and mixed up his line considerably,” Dawes wrote. Davis’s surprised troops recoiled and rushed for the shelter of the nearby railroad cut, and from there returned what Dawes termed a “murderous” volley. The two battle lines were now only some 125 yards apart. The Yankees standing in the open appeared to be at a disadvantage, but the railroad cut was to prove of dubious defensive value. As diarist Woollard of the 42nd Mississippi succinctly put it, “the cut was too deep to fire over except at the extreme left and the 2nd Mississippi & 55 N.C. having passed over my company were too thick to either fight or escape.“25

  Dawes of course was not aware of this, nor of the railroad cut itself, and he decided that the only way out of this stalemate was to order a charge. To his relief, he found reinforcements on his left. This was the 95th New York of Cutler’s brigade that had been posted in comparative peace on the McPherson farm. Dawes saw Major Edward Pye of the 95th and shouted, “Let’s go for them, Major!” and Pye waved his sword in acknowledgment. Unbeknownst to Dawes, farther on the left the 84th New York would also join the assault. “Forward double-quick charge!” Dawes cried, and his men climbed over the roadside fences (“a sure test of metal and discipline”) and stormed the cut.

  Men went down by the dozens, and wounded by the scores staggered to the rear, but there was no pause. Dawes kept shouting, “Align on the colors! Close up on the colors!” Then suddenly Yankees were lined up at the cut, firing down into the huddled defenders, yelling for their surrender. The right-hand companies of the 6th got across the mouth of the cut, ready to fire down its length. There was a bitter, desperate struggle for the colors of the 2nd Mississippi. Yankees “kept rushing for my flag and there were over a dozen shot down like sheep in their madly rush for the colors,” the Mississippi color bearer, W. B. Murphy, remembered. Finally “a large man”—Corporal Francis A. Wallar, 6th Wisconsin—“made a rush for me and the flag. As I tore the flag from the staff he took hold of me and the color.”

  Colonel Dawes was there now, calling out, “Where is the colonel of this regiment?” A Confederate major answered coolly, “Here I am. Who are you?” Dawes said, “I am colonel of this regiment and demand the surrender of your regiment.” Rather to Dawes’s surprise, and certainly to his relief, the major calmly handed over his sword. Then other officers came forward and handed him their swords, and Dawes found himself awkwardly clutching a large bundle of weaponry until his adjutant came to his rescue. It was an abrupt and stunning turnaround to the fighting on the northern flank. A good many Confederates escaped out the other end of the cut, and Joe Davis collected these and the other survivors of his brigade on Herr’s Ridge. By Dawes’s count there were 232 prisoners taken in the railroad cut by his regiment, and he credited the 84th and 95th New York with further captures. General Wadsworth, watching the charge, exclaimed to his staff, “My God, the 6th has conquered them!”

  But Rufus Dawes had many to mourn. A few days later he wrote his fiancée, “Our bravest and best are cold in the ground or suffering on beds of anguish…. One young man, Corporal James Kelly of Company ‘B,’ shot through the breast, came staggering up to me before he fell and opening his shirt to show the wound said ‘Colonel, won’t you write to my folks that I died a soldier.’ Every man of our color guard was shot and several volunteer color bearers.” Of the 420 men under Dawes’s command that morning, nearly 200 were casualties.26

  IT WAS NOON NOW, and there was a sudden hush in the hot, smoky fields and woods and on the ridges west of Gettysburg. Harry Heth’s two broken brigades had fallen back to Herr’s Ridge to regroup. They brought off their wounded, but their dead lay scattered in the wheatfields and meadows and woodlots and along the railroad right-of-way. In due course Willie Pegram’s guns began a desultory, defiant fire, and a picket line staked out its claim, but this time General Heth was going to await orders before doing anything further. In his report he would write, with careless irony, “The enemy had now been felt, and found to be in heavy force in and around Gettysburg.“27

  Heth’s morning had been altogether careless. For his march on Gettysburg he gave no credence to Johnston Pettigrew’s warning of his encounter the day before, and went prepared for nothing more menacing than a Yankee militia company or two. His idea of a reconnaissance was to go to battle to force the enemy to reveal his hand. Even when it was quickly evident he was facing not militia but the Army of the Potomac, Heth pushed ahead with an assault in violation of his orders—and a poorly supported assault in the bargain. To complete his catalog of command sins, in his tactics he ignored the well-founded warning of James Archer, his most experienced subordinate.

  To be sure, it happened that General Heth was also the victim of sheer bad luck that morning. First he encountered the best cavalryman in the Yankee service, John Buford, and was thereupon much delayed. Then he was ambushed by perhaps the best fighting unit in the Army of the Potomac. The Iron Brigade was expertly led at every turn, and its men fought so aggressively that they wrenched the initiative away from Archer’s brigade in a matter of minutes. To cap off its triumphs, the Iron Brigade’s 6th Wisconsin led the way to salvaging victory from imminent defeat on Cutler’s front.

  The rai
lroad cut on the July 1 battlefield, west of Gettysburg. Alfred Waud drew this scene of captured Confederates, after the morning’s fighting, “from an officer’s description.” (Library of Congress)

  Yet among the victorious Federals there was little sense that the fighting was over for the day. The Johnnies had been sharply checked, but if the past year was any guide, veterans said, it was likely they would be back before long. The captains and their sergeants sorted out the companies and counted the men and tried to get ready. Canteens were filled and coffee boiled and knapsacks searched for hardtack. The wounded were taken back. A young Gettysburg boy would always remember that day: “On stretchers passing our front door were borne the bloody, mangled forms of tall Westerners, bearing on their black felt hats the red circular patch denoting their membership in the first division of the First Corps, many of them of the ‘Iron Brigade.’…”

  That more fighting was to come was certainly the view of General Doubleday, commanding on the field after Reynolds’s death. Doubleday had been briefed early that morning by Reynolds on the latest intelligence, and was therefore aware that A. P. Hill’s whole corps was somewhere off to the west along the Chambersburg Pike, and that there was thought to be an unknown force off to the north. Determined to carry on Buford’s and Reynolds’s plan to win time with a defense in depth, Doubleday ordered Wadsworth’s two brigades to consolidate on McPherson’s Ridge. The flanks were guarded by Buford’s cavalry, Gamble’s troopers on the left and Devin’s on the right, north of Gettysburg. 28

  Abner Doubleday came to Gettysburg with the reputation of being a cautious, deliberate plodder, but during the morning’s fighting, carrying on for Reynolds, he had his best command hours of the war. First he took the decision to hold back the 6th Wisconsin as a reserve, then the decision to commit the 6th at what proved to be just the right moment. Doubleday’s exalted role was about to end, however. He would have to surrender command of the field and return to the First Corps as soon as his senior, Otis Howard of the Eleventh Corps, came on the scene.