Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

  DESPITE LEE’S (and Meade’s) best intentions, the battle at Gettysburg was taking on a life of its own. That morning A. P. Hill had sent in a reconnoitering force too strong to back away from a challenge. Then John Reynolds defiantly threw down a challenge. Now Dick Ewell saw a glittering, now-or-never opportunity squarely before him. Determined to seize the opportunity—and to strike before he himself was struck—Ewell ordered Rodes to the attack.

  Rodes designed his assault with a wary eye to his left, where the Yankees were seen to be bringing troops through Gettysburg and toward Oak Hill. He determined to attack on a two-brigade front, sending in O’Neal’s and Iverson’s men simultaneously, then following up with Daniel’s brigade in echelon on the right. George Dole’s brigade was posted well off to the left, to defend against the enemy forces approaching from Gettysburg until such time as Jubal Early’s division arrived from the north to secure Rodes’s exposed flank. Dodson Ramseur’s brigade would act as a reserve, and Thomas Carter’s battalion would furnish the artillery support. Rodes’s tactical plan was a sound one, but in execution his offensive was bungled right at the start. As it happened, setting off at 2:30 P.M., this largest of the divisions in the Army of Northern Virginia launched its decisive attack against the enemy’s flank with barely a thousand men.

  Colonel Edward O’Neal’s talents, it appeared, were more those of the politician he had been than the warrior he aspired to be. Instead of calculating his advance and coordinating it with Iverson’s brigade, he rushed in his Alabama brigade entirely on its own. Furthermore, he attacked with only three of his five regiments. Rodes himself had detached the 5 th Alabama to help secure the division’s exposed left flank. Then O’Neal apparently could not grasp the meaning of an order that the 3rd Alabama should align with the brigade on its right, and he simply left it behind. To complete his malfeasance, he remained safely in the rear rather than personally directing the assault, as was expected of any officer in Robert E. Lee’s army. O’Neal’s colonels became confused, missed their target, and struck the strongest part of the Yankee line head-on.18

  That Yankee line comprised six veteran and very tough Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York regiments led by a brigadier general who was perhaps even tougher than his men. Henry Baxter was a miller and storekeeper from Michigan who had joined the war as a captain in the 7th Michigan. He rose to command of the regiment and along the way was badly wounded first in the Peninsula campaign, then again at Antietam, then a third time at Fredericksburg. He had only gained his star in March, and his command was newly reconstituted, one brigade out of two, in the army’s May reorganization. Still, Baxter was firmly in charge and had his men well primed for battle.

  During the tense midday pause, with the enemy’s intentions not yet clear, General Robinson posted Baxter’s brigade to guard the First Corps’ flank by facing half to the west and half to the north. Baxter assumed a shallow inverted V-formation along the Mummasburg Road slanting diagonally across the formative battlefield. On their approach march Baxter’s Yankees had been screened by woods, and as a consequence O’Neal’s misdirected Alabamians came on them suddenly and unexpectedly. “Our presence proved a surprise,” a man in the 88th Pennsylvania observed dryly. In his report General Rodes rendered a succinct verdict: O’Neal’s three regiments—6th, 12th, 26th Alabama—“moved with alacrity (but not in accordance with my orders as to direction) and in confusion into the action.”

  The action was as fierce as it was confusing. The three Federal regiments that met the main weight of the attack—88th and 90th Pennsylvania and 12th Massachusetts—had some protection from a roadside fence and a stone wall, on which the men rested their rifles for a steady aim. They also had help from the newly arriving Eleventh Corps. The 45 th New York of Schurz’s division, coming up from the right, poured a flanking fire into the Rebels in what would be remembered as a moment of sweet revenge. The 45th had been one of the first regiments routed by Rodes’s men during Stonewall Jackson’s Chancellorsville assault. Another payback was delivered by Hubert Dilger’s Battery I, 1st Ohio Light Artillery, Eleventh Corps. Captain Dilger had conducted a memorable fighting retreat against Jackson at Chancellorsville, which for all its gallantry was still a retreat, and he welcomed this second chance at the enemy. Dilger’s six well-handled Napoleons delivered canister against the Rebel infantrymen and counterbattery fire against their supporting artillery. Captain R.C.M. Page’s Virginia battery was decimated by this fire, losing 4 gunners dead, 26 wounded, and 17 battery horses.

  O’Neal’s brigade, without Iverson advancing on its right, found itself quite alone. Captain Robert Park of the 12th Alabama recorded in his diary that the “balls were falling thick and fast around us, and whizzing past and often striking some one near.” Then Park himself was down with a wound. “It was a wonder, a miracle, I was not afterward shot a half dozen times,” he wrote. Although it seemed an eternity to those in the heat of the fighting, O’Neal’s brigade was broken and driven into retreat in less than thirty minutes. The attack, Rodes reported angrily, “was repulsed quickly, and with loss.” 19

  There would be no rest for Baxter’s victorious Yankees. A second Confederate battle line was seen advancing from Oak Hill, starting from west of where O’Neal’s Alabama brigade had started earlier, apparently aiming for the gap between Baxter’s brigade and Cutler’s, of Wadsworth’s division. General Robinson had Baxter “close this interval” by shifting his regiments left so they now faced northwest and were lined up behind a stone fence. Baxter told the men to lie down and ordered the flags down as well, so that from the Confederate perspective there would be nothing to see upon crossing a low ridgeline but a stone fence on the far border of an open grassy meadow.

  It was a perfectly designed ambush, but it required a blunder on the enemy’s part to be fully successful. Brigadier General Alfred Iverson supplied the blunder, and worse. Like O’Neal, Iverson chose to stay behind rather than personally direct his advance. Then he sent his brigade—5th, 12th, 20th, and 23rd North Carolina, some 1,350 men in all—into battle without any advance reconnaissance and without skirmishers in the lead. As the historian of the 23rd North Carolina would phrase it, bitterly, “unwarned, unled as a brigade, went forward Iverson’s deserted band to its doom.“20

  Iverson’s battle line, well closed up, colors all aligned, moving with parade-ground precision, came slanting across farmer John Forney’s field at an oblique angle to the stone fence. Aiming for a woodlot beyond the end of Baxter’s line, it presented as much flank as front to its unseen foe. Abruptly, as the range closed to less than 100 yards, the Yankee line rose up and with a shout delivered the most killing volley anyone on the field that day had ever witnessed. Men went down by dozens, by scores, quite literally in windrows. It was like a farmer harvesting grain with long swings of a scythe. Lieutenant George Bullock, 23rd North Carolina, would say that in all his war service, from the Peninsula to Appomattox, that field that afternoon at Gettysburg was the only one “where the blood ran like a branch. And that too, on the hot, parched ground.”

  There was a swale running across the field in front of the stone fence, and the Tar Heels ducked down into it for whatever cover it provided from the deadly fire. “I believe every man who stood up was either killed or wounded,” a man in the 20th North Carolina recalled. It must have seemed that way. The 12th North Carolina, on the extreme left of the formation and farthest from the stone fence, escaped the worst of the ambush; even so, the 12th lost more than a third of its men. Iverson’s desperate men in the swale could not advance, and dared not expose themselves in the open trying to retreat. On the other side of the field Lysander Cutler’s Yankees, bloodied in the morning’s fight, moved up to strike the front and left of the beleaguered Rebel brigade.

  An anonymous primitive artist titled his painting Attack on Seminary Ridge. The neatly aligned Federal troops storm the Rebels at left rear. (Karolik Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

  Here and there men began to wave h
ats or handkerchiefs in token of surrender. Henry Baxter, taking in the situation, shouted, “Up boys, and give them steel!” His Yankees leaped over the stone fence and dashed toward the swale. General Baxter was right with them. In the face of their bayonets Rebels all across the field threw down their rifles. When there was time for a count, it was found that 322 in Iverson’s brigade had surrendered. Almost twice that many had been killed or wounded. Three battle flags were taken by Baxter’s men. Two-thirds of Iverson’s brigade had become casualties in these few minutes of slaughter. The 23rd North Carolina would count but 34 men in its ranks; it lost 89 percent of those it took into battle that afternoon.

  The next day Confederate artillerist Henry Berkeley examined the field of Iverson’s disaster. “This morning on getting up,” Berkeley entered in his diary, “I saw a sight which was perfectly sickening and heart-rendering in the extreme…. There were, in a few feet of us, by actual count, seventy-nine (79) North Carolinians laying dead in a straight line. I stood on their right and looked down their line. It was perfectly dressed. Three had fallen to the front, the rest had fallen backward; yet the feet of all these dead men were in a perfectly straight line. Great God!”

  Earlier, the repulse of Archer’s and Davis’s brigades on the Chambersburg Pike had produced an impasse and an extended pause. Now, however, despite the disasters to O’Neal and Iverson, the fighting on the Mummasburg Road would rush on after only the briefest of pauses. Dick Ewell had the Second Corps fully committed to battle. Daniel’s brigade was already advancing to Iverson’s relief, and Ramseur’s and Doles’s were moving into O’Neal’s vacated spot. And to the east, the outriders of Jubal Early’s division were on the field.

  Iverson’s brigade was wrecked beyond any further use, and Iverson himself was thrust into limbo. There would be rumors of cowardice and drunkenness, and while proof of such charges was lacking, it was evident that his men would no longer tolerate him in command. The mortally wounded Colonel Daniel Christie of the 23rd North Carolina told his surviving men that while he might not live to command them again, he would see to it that “the imbecile Iverson never should.” Nor did he, and three months later Alfred Iverson was transferred out of the Army of Northern Virginia. Edward O’Neal too was permanently tarnished as brigade commander. Lee pocketed O’Neal’s promotion to brigadier general, confining him thereafter to regimental command.21

  As soon as it was evident that Ewell was fully engaged, an impatient Harry Heth rode back to Belmont Ridge to find Generals Lee and Hill. Heth reported the enemy withdrawing troops from his front to defend against Ewell—this would have been John Robinson’s brigades—and once again he asked permission to attack.

  Lee realized now there could be no turning back from a battle of some dimension or another at Gettysburg. Apparently Ewell had been too deeply committed to break off by the time he received Lee’s injunction that “a general engagement was to be avoided.” Although still in the dark about how much of Meade’s army he might have to face that day, Lee was quick to seize the opportunity that chance was offering him. Seldom had he been presented an opening like this to strike the enemy’s front and flank simultaneously. “Wait awhile and I will send you word when to go in,” he told Heth. Heth hurried back to his division on the Chambersburg Pike and, he wrote, “very soon an aide came to me with orders to attack.”

  Four days before, talking to General Isaac Trimble, Lee had speculated about his hopes for engaging the enemy in circumstances eerily similar to what was happening on this 1st of July. At the time, he had predicted the Federal army would come up through Frederick into Pennsylvania strung out and exhausted by hard marching. He would then strike its advance with “an overwhelming force,” crush it, drive one corps back upon another, and “create a panic and virtually destroy the army.” Now, today, it was learned from prisoners that Heth had encountered the First Corps, the advance of the Army of the Potomac. Suddenly Lee found himself in the position to crush this advance, driving one Yankee corps back upon another. Furthermore, Lee had predicted to Trimble (and also to Dick Ewell) that such an encounter might take place at Gettysburg. There were two important differences between prediction and reality, however. This clash of armies on July 1 was by chance rather than by Lee’s choice; and Lee lacked any knowledge of the Federals beyond their advance guard.22

  The 88th Pennsylvania’s Lieutenant George Grant made note of a sudden quiet along the Mummasburg Road following the repulse of O’Neal’s and Iverson’s brigades, but he sensed “it was only the calm preceding the storm.” However brief the lull, Henry Baxter used it to pull his brigade out of the line before the Rebels renewed their attack. It was 3:00 P.M. now, and after almost two hours of fighting his men were down to their last few cartridges. General Robinson moved up Gabriel Paul’s brigade to take Baxter’s place. Paul would be facing long odds—Ramseur’s and Daniel’s and Doles’s fresh brigades bent on regaining the impetus of Robert Rodes’s stalled offensive.

  Paul’s brigade, assuming the same shallow V-formation as had Baxter’s, facing west and north, contended initially with Dodson Ramseur’s North Carolinians. Paul’s brigade was very much a geographic mix—16th Maine, 13th Massachusetts, 107th Pennsylvania, 94th and 104th New York—and Paul was new to its command, but it made a steadfast, stubborn fight. Early on, General Paul was shot in the face and blinded, and before the afternoon’s fighting was done, three more officers pressed into command of the brigade would fall wounded. Stretches of fences and stone walls changed hands after sharp local attacks and counterattacks. Major Abner Small of the 16th Maine captured the moment: “I remember the still trees in the heat, and the bullets whistling over us, and the stone wall bristling with muskets, and the line of our men, sweating and grimy, firing and loading and firing again, and here a man suddenly lying still, and there another rising all bloody and cursing and starting for the surgeon.”

  Paul’s brigade formed the angular link between the First Corps facing west and the Eleventh Corps facing north, and it clung fiercely to that critical position despite Dodson Ramseur’s best efforts. Only when their flanks were threatened by Rodes’s remaining uncommitted forces, the brigades of Daniel and Doles, would Paul’s Yankees have to face the prospect of retreat or being cut off.23

  THE FIRST THREAT to Paul’s left or western flank would come from Daniel’s North Carolina brigade. Junius Daniel was a West Pointer, a big man with a powerful voice and a pronounced martial bearing who had last commanded his brigade in the Department of North Carolina and who on this day was making his combat-command debut in Lee’s army. The men of his brigade, the largest in Rodes’s division, had very limited battle experience, but they were well drilled and Daniel had them well in hand. Initially he had to divert two of his regiments to the rescue of Iverson’s bungled attack, and they sparred with Baxter’s and then Paul’s Yankees. With only the 32nd and 45th North Carolina and the 2nd North Carolina battalion, Daniel then attempted to break the First Corps line to the south and west along the Chambersburg Pike. Like every other Rebel attacker that day, he was greeted by a sudden and deadly fire.

  The defenders here were from Thomas Rowley’s (formerly Doubleday’s) First Corps division—Roy Stone’s brigade of Pennsylvanians that Stone had christened the “Bucktail Brigade.” Stone had been an officer with the original Bucktails, the 13th Pennsylvania Reserves, skilled hunters who advertised their marksmanship by pinning the tails of bucks to their caps, and he so named and so decorated his new brigade to enhance morale. At the moment that morale was being tested by a crossfire laid on the brigade from north and west by the Rebel artillerists. Colonel Stone devised a ruse. He had the colors of the 149th Pennsylvania shifted some fifty yards to the left front of the brigade. The enemy gunners obligingly shifted their aim to this new target. This proved to be a trial for the 149th’s color guard, but a considerable relief to the rest of the brigade. 24

  As he awaited the advance of the enemy’s infantry, Colonel Langhorne Wister of the 150th Pennsylvania, St
one’s brigade, was startled to see a civilian approach him on the firing line and announce that he wanted to join the fight. He was an incongruous figure, grizzled, well advanced in years, wearing a long linen duster and a high-crowned felt hat and carrying a flintlock musket, a powder horn, and a pocketful of bullets. This proved to be John Burns, age sixty-nine, veteran (noncombat) of the War of 1812, former constable of the borough of Gettysburg, regarded by his fellow citizens as cantankerous and something of a town character. Colonel Wister decided the man was serious but that this was too exposed a place for him. He sent him off to the left, to McPherson’s Woods, where he would have cover and be shaded from the midday sun. John Burns went on to make his fight that afternoon with the Iron Brigade—“I pitched in with them Wisconsin fellers,” he would say—blazing away from behind a tree until he was nicked by three bullets and concluded his fighting career. He was noticed in General Doubleday’s report, would meet Mr. Lincoln, and in the years left to him would be lionized as the “Old Patriot” of Gettysburg.25

  July 1 marked the first major battlefield trial for both Stone’s Pennsylvanians and Daniel’s North Carolinians. Both met the trial with the flinty resolve of veterans. Daniel’s first assault was severely undermanned and was soon thrown back by the Bucktails, assisted by Colonel Wainwright’s guns. Some of the Rebels ducked into the railroad cut north of the pike, and, as Harry Heth’s men had discovered that morning, found it a dubious shelter. Lieutenant James Stewart’s Battery B, 4th U.S., had the angle to fire down the length of the cut, helping to turn it into what one of Daniel’s staff called “that horrible hole.” As Lieutenant Stewart reported it, “meeting with such a storm of lead and iron, they broke and ran over the rising ground entirely out of sight.” The 149th Pennsylvania, in pursuit, chased off the last of the Rebels and took up a position along the north rim of the cut.