Gettysburg
Page 26
In a booming voice General Daniel rallied his scattered troops and collected his other two regiments and renewed the assault at full strength against Stone’s brigade. During this second attack, the railroad cut between the two battle lines once again became a deadly no man’s land. While the cut seemed to offer an inviting shelter from cannon fire and musketry, it was only really useful defensively at either end, where it was shallow enough to serve as a trench. For most of its length through McPherson’s Ridge the sides of the cut were high and steep, forming a trap rather than a refuge. The 149th Pennsylvania, for example, defended the cut to good effect for a time—its lieutenant colonel reported opening a murderous fire at the advancing Rebels at a range of precisely twenty-two paces—but when finally forced back it lost some 30 men captured who could not climb out to the rear fast enough. The Southerners, in their turn, could not hold the line of the railroad either, and fell back to their starting point. During this exchange Colonel Stone was badly wounded and captured, and his successor, Colonel Wister of the 150th Pennsylvania, was shot in the face. The Bucktails girded for the next assault under the command of Colonel Edmund Dana of the 143rd Pennsylvania. 26
By now, as if two extended powder trains had been lit, the afternoon battle was expanding explosively out from its center, erupting across an ever wider front. Even as Paul’s and Stone’s brigades, under their replacement commanders, clung stubbornly to their positions at the hinge connecting the Federal northern and western battle lines, the extremities of those lines came under attack and began to crumble.
Abner Doubleday, whatever his shifting official status, had sole responsibility for the First Corps from first to last on July 1. General Howard, on his one visit to McPherson’s Ridge, merely told Doubleday to hold on as long as he could and then retreat. Not long afterward, watching the massive buildup of A. P. Hill’s forces to the west, Doubleday sent his adjutant E. P. Halstead to Howard to say that unless he had the support of von Steinwehr’s Eleventh Corps division, then in reserve on Cemetery Hill, his corps would be sacrificed. If support was not forthcoming, Doubleday wanted permission to retire to the better defensive position on Seminary Ridge while he “was still able to do so in good order.”
Howard refused him both von Steinwehr and the withdrawal order. When Major Halstead pointed out a column of enemy troops about to overlap the First Corps’ flank, Howard snapped, “Those are nothing but rail fences, sir!” To prove it he had a staff man focus his glasses on the spot, only to be told, “General, those are long lines of the enemy!” Howard looked, said Halstead, “the picture of despair,” but with the stubbornness of the small-minded he still would not approve a pullback to Seminary Ridge. He did say, “you may find Buford and use him,” but since Colonel Gamble’s troopers already guarded Doubleday’s left, it was an empty gesture. The First Corps would have to stand, or fall, on McPherson’s Ridge. 27
Colonel Charles Wainwright, the First Corps’ chief of artillery, had finished posting his guns and was studying the scene to the west with growing concern. He would write in his diary that as he watched, “a long column of rebels came out of the wood a mile or so in our front, and filed off to our left. This was soon joined by another column, which when they faced into line formed a second line for them. They marched along quietly and with confidence, but swiftly. I watched them from the battery, and am confident that when they advanced they outflanked us at least half a mile on our left.”
This July 1 fighting marked the first test of the Potomac army’s new artillery command system—batteries grouped in brigades, one brigade per infantry corps, to be directed only by the corps commander and his artillery chief—and Wainwright found it working somewhat raggedly. Divisional commander Wadsworth, for example, as ardent as he was inexperienced and undisciplined, kept ordering batteries right up to the firing line without furnishing the infantry support vital to their survival. When Wainwright wasn’t quietly repositioning his guns, a colonel working around a brigadier general, he was having to cope with the strange doings of another brigadier, Thomas Rowley. Put in command of the Third Division when Doubleday took over the First Corps, General Rowley rushed around in a highly agitated state, throwing out bewildering orders right and left. Wainwright was convinced the man was drunk. At one point Rowley had men of Chapman Biddle’s brigade posted squarely in front of the battery it was supposed to be supporting. As it was, Wainwright concluded that the prospects for holding McPherson’s Ridge were slight, “even had our Third Division commanders had any idea what to do with their men, which they had not.“28
The columns of Rebel troops Wainwright saw deploying for battle were the last two uncommitted brigades of Harry Heth’s division, commanded by John Brockenbrough and Johnston Pettigrew. It was Pettigrew’s brigade that overlapped the Federal left—four Tar Heel regiments up from the Department of North Carolina, almost 2,600 strong and the largest brigade in the army, most of them facing their first serious combat this day. Awaiting them on the flank was Chapman Biddle’s brigade. Undermanned to begin with, Colonel Biddle had just seen his largest regiment, the 151st Pennsylvania, pulled back to Seminary Ridge to act as the First Corps’ sole reserve. Biddle’s position was an unpromising one, entirely in the open and with no terrain feature on which to anchor a defense. At the point of contact on the far Federal left, then, the 1,120 men of the 47th and 52nd North Carolina confronted the 886 men of the 121st and 142nd Pennsylvania and the 80th New York.
“The order rang along the line, ‘Fire, fire,’ and we all discharged our guns and commenced to load and fire at will…,” remembered Yankee Private Edwin Gearhart. “The enemy were not getting close but still they came.” They came close most quickly against the left-hand regiment, the 121st Pennsylvania. Major Alexander Biddle, cousin of the brigade commander, tried to refuse the 121st’s line to face the attackers curling around his flank, but he ran out of both men and time. As the faces of the Rebels in line of battle appeared over the crest of the ridgeline, Biddle wrote, “we fired effectually into them, and, soon after, received a crushing fire from their right, under which our ranks were broken and became massed together as we endeavored to change front….”
Brigade commander Chapman Biddle rode right into this tangle, waving the national colors in a bold attempt to rally his wavering men. Then his horse was killed and his scalp was creased by a bullet and the flag went down and was lost, and, as Major Biddle put it, “it was soon evident the position was no longer ours.” One of the retreating men admitted that the speed made by the 121st Pennsylvania in reaching Seminary Ridge “was remarkable, perhaps the best on record.” In recognizing the bravery of Colonel Biddle, the historian of the 47th North Carolina noted that it was with “openly expressed pleasure our men heard he was not killed.”
The collapse of Biddle’s flank regiment doomed the next regiments in line, the 80th New York and the 142nd Pennsylvania, leaving first one and then the other open to simultaneous attack from front and flank. Both regiments attempted that most difficult of feats, a fighting withdrawal, starting back toward Seminary Ridge at a measured pace, turning frequently to fire at their tormentors. “Someone yelled retreat…,” Private Gearhart of the 142nd Pennsylvania recalled. “Our line kept falling back slowly firing as it went, but, the enemy giving us a heavy volley at pretty close range, we broke.” As he tried to stem the tide, the 142nd’s Colonel Robert Cummins went down with a severe wound, and the party of his men carrying him to the rear was shot to pieces until just one man was left. Wounded himself, unable to carry his burden any farther, he rescued the dying officer’s sword and bade him a tearful Godspeed.29
With the Iron Brigade in McPherson’s Woods already fiercely engaged against Brockenbrough’s Virginians and Pettigrew’s other two North
Carolina regiments, it was essential that Doubleday somehow shore up his swiftly eroding left flank. His only reserve was the 151st Pennsylvania, on Seminary Ridge. He ordered it forward to try and seal off the threat to the Iron Brigade’s flank. The
151st was one of only two nine-month Pennsylvania regiments still in the Army of the Potomac, and was due to go home before the end of July. With the exception of a brief skirmish at Chancellorsville, it had never before been on a battlefield.
When the 151st arrived on the field, its commander, Lieutenant Colonel George F. McFarland, said that he had “cautioned the men against excitement and firing at random….” When in due course they went into action, he “did not order them to fire a regular volley, but each man to fire as he saw an enemy on which to take a steady aim.” That was a good deal to expect of untried troops, but his Pennsylvanians coolly met the challenge and, McFarland reported with satisfaction, “many of the enemy were brought low.”
The First Corps’ battlefront on McPherson’s Ridge was narrowed now to less than a thousand yards, from the Chambersburg Pike south through McPherson’s Woods and into a grassy field beyond. Near the pike the 150th Pennsylvania from Stone’s brigade faced west and helped drive off the initial assaults of two of Brockenbrough’s regiments. The Iron Brigade in the center turned McPherson’s Woods into a citadel against Brockenbrough’s Virginians and Pettigrew’s North Carolinians. Having already broken Biddle’s brigade, Pettigrew could now focus entirely on the Iron Brigade—and on the late-arriving 151st Pennsylvania. “The fighting was terrible,” wrote the 26th North Carolina’s Major John’T. Jones; “—our men advancing, the enemy stubbornly resisting, until the two lines were pouring volleys into each other at a distance not greater than 20 paces.”
“It was a very hot day and I was in a hot place,” Corporal Nathan Cooper of the 151st Pennsylvania wrote to his wife of this struggle. “My gun got so hot I could scarcely hold to it. The bullets was thick as hail…. I was just as cool and composed as I ever was butchering hogs. The men were falling every second but I paid no attention to them. I could not help them.”
The Iron Brigade’s left-hand regiment, the 19th Indiana, was forced to fight at the edge of McPherson’s Woods facing south as well as west. The fire from the south, delivered mostly by the 11th North Carolina, was particularly destructive. According to the 19th’s Lieutenant Colonel William W. Dudley, its effect was literally annihilating: “The line was held as long as there were men left to hold it.” When they saw the 151st Pennsylvania come up from the rear, the Hoosiers thought it was their much-needed relief and pulled back through the woods. Fully half of them had been killed or wounded. 30
Allen Redwood of the 55th Virginia, Brockenbrough’s brigade, depicted his regiment doing battle with the Iron Brigade at the McPherson barn during the afternoon of July 1. (Century Collection)
Grudgingly, step by step, the Iron Brigade was now pressed back toward Seminary Ridge. Its commander, Long Sol Meredith, went down with a head wound and was additionally injured when his riddled horse fell on him. The most savage and relentless of the fighting here involved the 24th Michigan against the 26th North Carolina. “I have taken part in many hotly contested fights,” Lieutenant Louis Young of General Pettigrew’s staff would write, “but this, I think, was the deadliest of them all….” The battle lines here closed to within forty yards, then twenty yards. The slaughter was mutual and assured. The 26th North Carolina’s Company F entered the fight with ninety-one officers and men, and at the close all ninety-one were dead or wounded. The 26th witnessed fourteen of its color bearers shot down, including the regimental commander, Colonel Henry K. Burgwyn, fatally wounded by a bullet through his chest. The 24th Michigan had nine color bearers hit, including its commander, Colonel Henry A. Morrow, wounded in the head and captured. The only man of the Michigan color guard still alive at the end of the day was badly wounded.
In the midst of this maelstrom, a bullet struck Harry Heth in the head. All that saved him, he would later say, was his hat. It was a new felt hat he had picked up in Cashtown, the band of which his aide had stuffed with tightly folded paper to make it fit properly. It was this reinforcement, said General Heth, that deflected the bullet enough that it only cracked his skull instead of killing him.
Finally the repeated anvil blows from front and flank became too great for the heavily outnumbered Yankees, and General Doubleday passed the word to the First Corps to fall back to Seminary Ridge. The struggle for McPherson’s Ridge was over at last. Colonel Brockenbrough, discouraged by his initial rebuffs, had failed to press ahead with his Virginia brigade, leaving Johnston Pettigrew’s North Carolinians to bear the burden of the Confederate assault. Both Pettigrew and his Tar Heels were new to sustained combat; both he and they proved more than equal to the test. But the cost was staggering. The brigade lost more than a thousand men. The 26th North Carolina had gone into battle with 840 men—it was the largest regiment in the Confederate army—and that night would count but 216 men still standing. The battered and bloodied Yankees stood defiantly on Seminary Ridge, but to dislodge them would now require Dorsey Pender’s fresh division.31
AS THE STRUGGLE for McPherson’s Ridge grew in intensity and violence, at the opposite end of the battlefield Dick Ewell’s Rebels were exerting a comparable crushing pressure on the Eleventh Corps. In parallel to what was happening to their western front, the Federals’ northern front was overlapped and crumpled by fresh enemy troops.
Major General Oliver Otis Howard entered the Gettysburg campaign believing that both he and his Eleventh Corps had a burden to bear and much to prove. Howard had been mortified when Jackson routed the Eleventh Corps at Chancellorsville. “I wanted to die…,” he insisted. “That night… I sought death everywhere I could find an excuse to go on the field.” Three days later when Hooker called his generals together to debate continuing the campaign or retreating, Howard voted to stay and fight; his corps, he said, was responsible for the crisis, and he sought its redemption. Now, on this afternoon of July 1, Howard appeared still to be seeking that redemption. Once again, as at Chancellorsville, the Eleventh Corps formed the extreme right of the army, and in his stubborn refusal to fall back to better defensive positions, on either front, Howard had the look of a general out to prove that whatever the cost, this time the men under his command would stand their ground and fight. 32
Carl Schurz, moved up to command of the two Eleventh Corps divisions in the field by Howard’s elevation to the overall command, faced a simple but daunting problem. On the ground he was required to defend there were in his four small brigades too few men to deploy in standard line of battle. Furthermore, the ground north of Gettysburg was, militarily speaking, largely featureless—something over a square mile of farm fields, open and flat and without cover. Finally, Schurz faced a particular problem at the extreme right of the line, where Francis Barlow had advanced his division several hundred yards ahead of the neighboring division in order to seize the only elevation on the field, a modest hillock called Blocher’s Knoll.
The logic of the moment behind Barlow’s taking of Blocher’s Knoll was to prevent the Rebel troops then visible to the north—George Doles’s brigade, of Rodes’s division—from occupying it and using it as an artillery platform. Barlow insisted he acted “as directed,” a claim General Howard in his memoirs confirmed. Carl Schurz in his memoirs said that Barlow must have misunderstood his orders. However that may be, Schurz’s own division (now under Alexander Schimmelfennig) was thereby stretched and thinned in places to little more than a one-rank-deep skirmish line in order to connect with Barlow. Schurz sent an aide pelting back to Cemetery Hill to plead with Howard for all or part of von Steinwehr’s division from the reserve, but it was soon evident that the enemy was not going to grant time for reinforcements to arrive.33
Sweeping along the Harrisburg Road toward this cobbled-together line was Jubal Early’s division, deployed in a three-brigade-wide battle front that was almost a mile across—and overlapped the Union line by almost half a mile. Here again, the god of battles was smiling south this day. When Ewell’s order came that morning to turn south toward Gettysburg, Early happened to be positioned to take the Harrisburg Road, which slanted across the prospective b
attlefield at exactly the right angle to turn the Eleventh Corps’ flank. Like Robert Rodes before him, “Old Jube” announced his presence with an artillery barrage, delivered against the enemy flank by Hilary Jones’s battalion. Jones quickly established superiority over Barlow’s guns. Early then pitched John B. Gordon’s brigade of Georgians straight at Blocher’s Knoll.
It was Early’s thought to fix the Federal defenders in place with Gordon’s frontal attack, then swing around their exposed flank with the brigades of Harry Hays and Isaac Avery. At the same time, to Early’s right, Doles’s Georgians would open an assault in tandem with Gordon’s Georgians. John B. Gordon was a self-taught soldier with a talent for inspiring his men and personally dominating a battlefield. This day he rode a splendid black stallion captured from the Yankees at Winchester. Ordering the charge, Gordon on his warhorse was just behind the battle line, “right in among the slanting barrels and bayonets…,” wrote artillerist Robert Stiles, “standing in his stirrups, bareheaded, hat in hand, arms extended, and, in a voice like a trumpet, exhorting his men. It was superb; absolutely thrilling.”
The immediate object of Gordon’s charge was Colonel Leopold von Gilsa’s brigade posted on Blocher’s Knoll, and to von Gilsa’s three undermanned, largely German regiments—barely 900 men all told—it must have seemed a nightmare revisited. Only two months before, two of these regiments had been the initial target of Stonewall Jackson’s Chancellorsville attack, and if this day’s attack was less of a surprise than the earlier one, it was no less unnerving. The Georgians splashed across Rock Creek and came straight up the hill at them, hallooing the Rebel yell.