Gettysburg
Page 27
The men of the 54th and 68th New York stood and fought as long as they could, but that was not long and they were overwhelmed and forced back. This in turn left the supporting 153rd Pennsylvania to absorb the full weight of Gordon’s attack. The 153rd, with the 151st the only nine-month Pennsylvania regiments still with the army, was looking forward to going home on July 24. It had been mauled by Jackson at Chancellorsville, losing 85 men there, and now it was to lose another 211 at Gettysburg—a stiff price for a short-term “emergency” regiment to have to pay. Private Reuben Ruch, himself wounded, recalled the 153rd’s dead: “They were piled in every shape, some on their backs, some on their faces, and others turned and twisted in every imaginable shape.“34
Francis Channing Barlow was cast from the same mold as his opponent, John Brown Gordon—a self-taught volunteer whose rise through the ranks was fueled by gritty determination in leading men in battle. Barlow had been given his Eleventh Corps command in May for the purpose of inserting backbone into the division that had paced the rout at Chancellorsville, but today he was sorely disappointed with the result of his efforts. “We ought to have held the place easily,” he wrote home a few days later of Blocher’s Knoll, “for I had my entire force at the very point where the attack was made. But the enemies skirmishers had hardly attacked us before my men began to run. No fight at all was made.” Barlow afterward elaborated on the point: “But these Dutch won’t fight. Their officers say so & they say so themselves & they ruin all with whom they come in contact.” Spurring his horse into the melee to try and form a second line, Barlow took a bullet in the side. He dismounted and attempted to walk off the field—“Everybody was then running to the rear & the enemy were approaching rapidly,” he explained—but he collapsed from shock and loss of blood. Moments later, riding with the advance, Gordon came on Barlow, identified him as an officer probably by his shoulder straps, and in a nice gesture ordered him carried to the rear for medical attention.
One of Gordon’s Rebels was more generous in his judgment of the Germans than was Barlow. “They then began to retreat in fine order, shooting at us as they retreated,” wrote G. W. Nichols of the 61st Georgia. “They were harder to drive than we had ever known them before.” However that may be, however much of a fight it put up initially, von Gilsa’s brigade when it broke was not to be stopped. Von Gilsa did his best, riding in among the fleeing men, shouting at them to rally and delivering mighty oaths in German.
Their collapse left Barlow’s second brigade, under Adelbert Ames, in a critical position. Already assaulted in front by Doles’s brigade, it was now taken in the flank by Gordon’s. Ames sought to stem the flood by counterattacking with his 75th Ohio and 17th Connecticut, but the enemy’s crossfire of artillery and musketry stopped them in their tracks. The 17th Connecticut was further demoralized when its commander was decapitated by a shell from one of Hilary Jones’s guns. Ames joined von Gilsa in disordered retreat. The case was summed up by Colonel Andrew L. Harris of the 75th Ohio: “The pressure soon became so great and the fire of the enemy so hot and deadly that it was evident our brigade and in fact the division could not long hold its ground.” In perhaps twenty minutes of intense combat, Blocher’s Knoll fell to the Confederates, and the entire right of the Eleventh Corps’ line was gone with it.
Among the Union dead from this fight for Blocher’s Knoll was nineteen-year-old Lieutenant Bayard Wilkeson, commanding Battery G, 4th U.S. Artillery. Young Wilkeson was the son of correspondent Samuel Wilkeson, covering the campaign for the New York Times. Three days later Sam Wilkeson began his story for the Times, “Who can write the history of a battle whose eyes are immovably fastened upon a central figure of transcendingly absorbing interest—the dead body of an oldest born son, crushed by a shell in a position where a battery should never have been sent, and abandoned to death in a building where surgeons dared not to stay?“35
Lieutenant Bayard Wilkeson, center, was mortally wounded directing his Union battery in the defense of Blocher’s Knoll, on the Federal right, on July 1. Drawing by Alfred Waud. (Historic New Orleans Collection)
Now the Eleventh’s other division, under General Schimmelfennig, attempted to take up the struggle. Colonel Wladimir Krzyzanowski’s brigade, advancing across the open fields in compact marching formation, was bracketed by a deadly crossfire from Rodes’s and Early’s batteries. An Ohio captain remembered how “their shells plunged through our solid squares, making terrible havoc.” Then, as they deployed, Doles’s infantry took them under fire. Captain Theodore Dodge, 119th New York, watched the two battle lines exchanging volleys hardly 100 yards apart: “Every five or six seconds some poor fellow would throw up his arms with an ‘Ugh!’ and drop…. Another would drop flat on his face, or his back, without a sound; another would break down, and fall together in a heap…. One brave boy near me, I remember, shot in the leg, sat there loading and firing with as much regularity and coolness as if untouched, now and then shouting to some comrade in front of him to make room for his shot….”
This battle-line stalemate was shortly broken by what was becoming a pattern for Federal defeat on this Wednesday afternoon. Krzyzanowski’s brigade was chipped away, one regiment after another, by Early’s troops angling in against its flank. It fell back in confusion toward the town. Schimmelfennig launched a last-ditch counterattack, using the 157th New York from his last uncommitted brigade, Colonel George von Amsberg’s. It was a disaster. Doles’s Georgians pounced on the New Yorkers from three directions. “The men were falling rapidly,” wrote the 157th’s Colonel Philip Brown, “and the enemy’s line was taking the form of a giant semicircle…, concentrating the fire of their whole brigade upon my rapidly diminishing numbers.” By the time Colonel Brown could finally extract his regiment from the trap, it had suffered 307 casualties—75 percent of its numbers.
In the midst of this action, General Doles’s horse suddenly bolted—straight for the Federal line. The general’s best efforts to rein him in were unavailing, and at the last moment he threw himself off. Fortunately he landed in a field of tall wheat and escaped the enemy’s notice. Remarkably, both horse and badly shaken general made it back safely to the Confederate lines.
From the start, confronting the well-positioned and well-led Confederate assaults, the Eleventh Corps’ defense was confused and incoherent. Early was able to break through the Federal lines initially without even using the flanking brigades of Hays and Avery. Gordon and Doles, although outnumbered overall, brought greater numbers and superior tactics to bear at each point of contact with the enemy. There would be no redemption for the poor Dutchmen of the Eleventh Corps.36
General Howard sent Schurz a battery and one of the two infantry brigades from von Steinwehr’s reserve force, under Colonel Charles Coster, but the move was too late and only added to the casualty list. Hays’s and Avery’s brigades swarmed around the flank of Coster’s hastily formed battle line just north of the town. As the Rebels bore down on him, recalled the 154th New York’s Private Charles McKay, “It seemed as though they had a battle flag every few rods, which would indicate that their formation was in solid column,” and he added, “Our fire did good execution….” Coster’s brigade did win some valuable time for Schurz’s retiring columns, but soon enough it too was joining the retreat. “We shot them down, bayoneted them & captured more prisoners than we had men,” reported Lieutenant Joseph Jackson of the 8th Louisiana. Coster had led some 800 men to the battlefield; 313 of them left it as prisoners. Two of the four guns of the reinforcing battery were captured as well.
About this time Dick Ewell was hurrying to Early’s front to follow the action there when a shell fragment killed his horse and he was thrown violently to the ground. Staff men helped him up and found him another horse, and he rode on, not injured beyond a shaking up.
The Eleventh Corps’ collapse was complete by 4 o’clock. It had taken the Rebels no more than an hour. The toll would come to some 3,200 men (1,400 of them prisoners), about half the force General Schurz was
able to get to the firing line that afternoon. The losses in Gordon’s and Doles’s brigades did not exceed 750.37
ON SEMINARY RIDGE, meanwhile, Colonel Charles Wainwright was massing his guns for a last-ditch defense of the Federals’ western flank. An order had reached him from General Howard’s headquarters that Cemetery Hill was to be held “at all hazards.” The German aide who delivered the message spoke broken English, however, and Wainwright knew nothing of any cemetery, and he assumed that what was meant was the Lutheran Seminary’s hill. That in any case was where his batteries were, and he grimly prepared to do battle, at all hazards, to the bitter end.
This renewed contest on the First Corps’ front matched Wainwright’s guns, supported by the infantry of the Iron Brigade and Biddle’s and Stone’s brigades, what little was left of them, against two fresh Confederate brigades from Dorsey Pender’s division. A. P. Hill had brought Pender along that morning as a support for Harry Heth, and now that Heth had exhausted his division driving the Yankees off McPherson’s Ridge, it became Pender’s task to drive them off Seminary Ridge. Pender chose Alfred Scales’s North Carolinians and Abner Perrin’s South Carolinians for the job. Perrin’s brigade, overlapping the Federals’ left flank, had the key position in the attack. Abner Perrin had been a company captain at Fredericksburg, a regimental commander at Chancellorsville, and was now leading a brigade for the first time. Alfred Scales, too, was a first-time brigade commander.
As these First Corps Yankees had demonstrated throughout this day of battle, they were extremely stubborn about giving up ground, whatever the odds against them. Centering their line in the grove around the Lutheran Seminary building, they took cover behind a stone wall and some rough fence-rail breastworks and opened a blistering fire on the advancing Carolinians. Wainwright had massed eighteen guns on a front only 200 yards wide, and they laid down a devastating barrage. One section commander of Battery B, 1st Pennsylvania Light, had an oblique angle on the attackers, Wainwright wrote, and “His round shot, together with the canister poured in from all the other guns, was cutting great gaps in the front line of the enemy.” Colonel William Robinson of the 7th Wisconsin found a stark simile for the slaughter: “When they were within easy range, the order was given, and their ranks went down like grass before the scythe….“In Scales’s brigade the general was wounded by a shell fragment, and in his five regiments every field officer but one was killed or wounded. Scales launched his attack that afternoon with 1,350 men. That evening barely 500 answered roll call.38
With Scales’s brigade stunned into paralysis, the burden of the attack fell on Perrin’s brigade. It too was greeted ferociously. The color bearers of all four regiments were killed almost immediately. A man in Company K, 14th South Carolina, recalled the scene: “At the charge bayonets, the enemy was behind a rock fence and we could hear their officers distinctly encouraging their men to hold their fire until the command to fire was given. They obeyed their command implicitly and rose to their feet, took as deliberate aim as if they were on dress parade, and to show you how accurate their aim was, 34 out of our 39 men fell at the first fire of the enemy.”
As his brigade wavered, Colonel Perrin rode out ahead of the line and redirected the assault more toward the Union flank. He had detected a gap in the Union line—some 50 yards, between Chapman Biddle’s left-hand regiment, the 121st Pennsylvania, and Colonel Gamble’s flank guard of cavalrymen—and drove straight for it. Perrin himself led the charge. “Filled with admiration for such courage as defied the whole fire of the enemy,” wrote J.F.J. Caldwell of the 1st South Carolina, “…the brigade followed, with a shout that was itself half a victory.“39
The fate of the Federals’ McPherson’s Ridge line was now exactly repeated on Seminary Ridge. Lacking the men to extend its battle line southward far enough to match the enemy’s line, Biddle’s brigade unraveled, regiment by regiment, under Perrin’s deadly flanking fire. This in turn imperiled the rest of the First Corps line. The 6th Wisconsin’s Rufus
Dawes, who had just watched the Iron Brigade and Roy Stone’s Bucktails decisively repulse Scales’s assault, was startled to see, to both his right and left, the Union lines collapsing. The Eleventh Corps to the north, Dawes wrote, “appeared in full retreat, and long lines of Confederates, with fluttering banners and shining steel, were sweeping forward in pursuit of them without let or hindrance.” General Doubleday passed the order for the First Corps to fall back to Cemetery Hill.
The orderliness of the retreat seemed to depend on proximity to the enemy. The Iron Brigade and Stone’s Bucktails generally fell back toward Gettysburg under some semblance of control, but this was not easily done in units with the enemy closing right on their heels. Daniel’s North Carolinians renewed their assault, and Lieutenant Colonel William Lewis of the 43rd North Carolina reported, “At the railroad cut, 400 or 500 prisoners surrendered to the brigade….” The 121st Pennsylvania, caught point-blank by the enemy’s flanking fire, went back “without semblance of order,” every man for himself. Nor did the word reach everyone promptly. Colonel Wainwright, still thinking he must hold his gunners to their task on Seminary Ridge “at all hazards,” discovered most of the First Corps infantry already gone by the time he learned of the retreat order.
Wainwright directed his batteries to limber up “and move at a walk towards town.” He would not allow them to trot lest it panic the infantry crowding in with them on the Chambersburg Pike. “As I sat on the hill watching my pieces file past, and cautioning each one not to trot,” he entered in his diary, “there was not a doubt in my mind but that I should go to Richmond. Each minute I expected to hear the order to surrender….” Suddenly Rebel skirmishers took the road under fire, scattering the infantry and giving Wainwright a clear path. “Trot! Gallop!” he shouted, and his gunners dashed with their pieces three abreast toward safety. His battalion loss would be three caissons and one 3-inch rifle, abandoned when its team was shot down. “I was terribly grieved when I heard about it,” Wainwright wrote, but then he added, “The more I think of it, the more I wonder that we got off at all.“40
These retreat orders left Gabriel Paul’s brigade, posted at the hinge between the Federals’ western and northern fronts, increasingly isolated, and John Robinson ordered it back. To buy the necessary time, he told the 16th Maine it must hold its position as rear guard against the enemy pursuit. Colonel Charles Tilden protested that this was like asking a corporal’s guard to stop the whole Rebel army, but General Robinson was adamant: “Hold it at any cost!” The colonel turned to his men and said, “You know what that means,” and back they went to their stone wall by the Mummasburg Road. “We got there just as a flag and a line of battle showed up across the way,” Major Abner Small wrote; “we heard distinctly the commands of a rebel officer directing his men to fire; and a volley crashed…. Our line blazed away in reply, and the rebel flag went down, and the officer pitched headlong in the stubble.”
The attackers were Dodson Ramseur’s North Carolinians, from Robert Rodes’s division, and they were far too numerous to be held back for long. When Colonel Tilden saw nothing but butternut to both left and right as well as in front, he concluded the 16th Maine had done its job and ordered a retreat. When the Yankees reached the infamous railroad cut they found themselves trapped in a crossfire and it became every man for himself. The 16th Maine went into battle on July 1 with 298 men; that night Major Small counted 35 survivors.41
IT WAS AFTER 4 o’clock now, and the focus of the day’s sprawling contest shrank abruptly to the streets of Gettysburg. The men of the Eleventh Corps had to pass through the town to reach the promised safety of Cemetery Hill directly to the south, and as they rushed into the narrow, crowded streets whatever order they might have retained was largely lost. A Union surgeon watching their flight wrote in his journal, “Away went guns and knapsacks, and they fled for dear life, forming a funnel shaped tail, extending to the town…. I did not see an officer attempt to rally or check them in their headlong retreat.” Ca
ptain Frederick Winkler of Krzyzanowski’s brigade was appalled by the scene: “It seemed so awful to march back through those same streets whipped and beaten. It was the most humiliating step I ever took.”
General Early turned his division’s pursuit over to Hays’s Louisianians and Avery’s North Carolinians, and they came rushing into Gettysburg from the north right on the heels of the Eleventh Corps. On Stratton Street there was a bloody hand-to-hand struggle for the flag of the 154th New York, and although 172 of the New Yorkers would be captured this day, their flag was saved. Before long the First Corps began to join the exodus, multiplying the noise and the chaos—and the bloodshed—in the streets. No one at headquarters had thought to designate withdrawal routes for the two corps, compounding the confusion. On High Street there was another battle for Union colors, this time those of the 150th Pennsylvania; and this time the Yankee soldiers could not save their flag. It would in due course be presented to President Jefferson Davis.
Abner Perrin’s South Carolinians entered the town from the west behind the First Corps. Sergeant John Leach, 1st South Carolina, would remember that as they hurried into Gettysburg they saw, visible down the cross streets, solid columns of Federals marching on parallel streets both north and south of them; “why we were not all captured has been a mystery to me,” he wrote. 42
Gettysburg’s citizens were in a turmoil. Since morning a growing flood of wounded men had been brought into public buildings and dozens of private homes. Refugees—including every free black who had not already left—crowded the roads south and east of town. Those who stayed sought whatever shelter they could find, including the vault of the Gettysburg Bank. Now, in late afternoon, the war surged right into the heart of town. Stray shells plunged through roofs, canister and rifle fire rattled off storefronts. The streets were crowded with disheveled, running Union soldiers. “No one can imagine in what extreme fright we were in when our men began to retreat,” Sarah Broadhead entered in her diary. An officer rode up to one family helping the wounded and shouted, “All you good people go down into your cellar or you will be killed!” Soon Rebel soldiers were on the scene too, and there was fighting in the streets. “We watched through the cellar windows,” Liberty Hollinger remembered, “and Oh, what horror filled our breasts as we gazed upon their bayonets and heard the deafening roar of musketry. Yes, we were really in the midst of an awful reality.”