Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

  AT 3 O’CLOCK that afternoon, General Meade had convened a meeting of his corps commanders at army headquarters in the Leister house. Before there could be much discussion, General Warren reported that something was badly awry on Sickles’s Third Corps’ front—matters there were “not all straight.” With that, Dan Sickles himself rode up to answer the summons to the commanders’ meeting. George Meade was not one to tolerate fools gladly, and already his patience was paper-thin after Sickles’s repeated puzzlements and complaints about the position assigned him. “I never saw General Meade so angry if I may so call it,” remembered engineer William Paine. “He ordered General Sickles to retire his line to the position he had been instructed to take. This was done in a few sharp words.” Meade told Sickles he was not even to dismount; he must return to his command immediately, and Meade said he would follow presently. Before he left to see to the Third Corps’ front, Meade instructed General Sykes to shift his Fifth Corps from its reserve position toward the left with all speed, “and hold it at all hazards.”

  Some months later, when the historian John C. Ropes sat down with General Meade to review with him the Gettysburg campaign, he took careful notes as Meade reported his encounter with Dan Sickles that afternoon of July 2. Even at that late date Meade had barely cooled on the subject. “Afterwards he rode down to the line,” Ropes wrote, “and to his utter surprise after passing the Second Corps, found a gap. He met Sickles and asked him where the devil his troops were. ‘Out here, sir,’ says Sickles, and pointed to positions half or three-quarters of a mile in advance. Meade asked him what the devil they were out there for, to which Sickles replied that he thought they would better protect Round Top than they would here.”

  Meade’s temper was now on the boil as he rode out to inspect the Third Corps’ new line from a vantage point behind the Peach Orchard. He cut short Sickles’s explanation that he had merely acted within the scope of Meade’s earlier instructions. Pointing to the ground where they sat their horses, Meade said, “General Sickles, this is neutral ground, our guns command it, as well as the enemy’s. The very reason you cannot hold it applies to them.” Sickles asked if he should pull his divisions back to their original line. He might try, Meade said, but delivered a warning: “You cannot hold this position, but the enemy will not let you get away without a fight….”

  He was prophetic. As if on cue, Confederate artillery abruptly opened on the Third Corps’ new position. Should he go ahead with the withdrawal, Sickles asked, shouting over the shellfire. “I wish to God you could,” said Meade, “but the enemy won’t let you!“37

  10. A Simile of Hell Broke Loose

  AS GENERAL LEE had carefully explained it to Lafayette McLaws that Thursday morning, McLaws’s division would spearhead the attack up the Emmitsburg Road, striking obliquely into the Federals’ exposed and vulnerable left flank on Cemetery Ridge. In successive support en echelon would come Hood’s division and then Dick Anderson’s Third Corps division, rolling up the Yankee line from south to north. All this would take place on open, easily traversed ground. At the same time, Dick Ewell would launch a diversion (and perhaps something more) against the other Federal flank. This battle plan rested on two givens—that scout Samuel Johnston had spied not a single Yankee soldier from his vantage point on Little Round Top that morning; and that therefore General Meade lacked either the troops or the intellect to anchor his left flank properly.

  On July 2, however, nothing was as it seemed. Captain Johnston had bungled his morning’s reconnoiter, and General Meade would soon prove himself a worthy opponent indeed. On the other hand, Dan Sickles’s adventuring that afternoon turned Meade’s assumptions, as well as Lee’s, upside down.

  By thrusting his Third Corps out ahead of the Cemetery Ridge line as far as the Peach Orchard and the Emmitsburg Road, Sickles not only forced Lee to modify his battle plan at the last moment, but also brought into play a very different military landscape. Lee’s prospective battlefield was extended southward some three-quarters of a mile. Hood deployed his four brigades, newly designated as the outflanking division, along Seminary Ridge facing due east, toward Round Top and Little Round Top. The half-mile or so of terrain between Hood and the two heights contained what military cartographers euphemistically termed “broken ground.”

  A small stream, Plum Run, winds through this broken ground along the base of the two Round Tops, with their stony heights forming the eastern face of little Plum Run valley. The valley’s western face is framed largely by Houck’s Ridge, a modest spur slanting off Cemetery Ridge. At the southern end of Houck’s Ridge is another of the geological anomalies of the region, a ten-acre tangle of enormous granite boulders and slabs known as Devil’s Den, so called for an eerie cave or den deep among its jumbled rocks. The balance of the ground between the Round Tops and the Emmitsburg Road was in 1863 a checkerboard of fields, woodlots, and orchards, set off by fences, many of them of stone. It was the worst kind of terrain in which to maneuver troops and manage a battle.

  David Birney’s division formed the left half of Sickles’s salient. Birney’s three brigades were angled back from the Peach Orchard in an irregular, misshapen line—Charles Graham’s brigade on the right, at the Orchard, Régis de Trobriand’s in the center, and Hobart Ward’s on the left. Ward’s brigade was stretched thinly across farmer John Rose’s woodlot to reach as far as Devil’s Den. At the literal end of the line—the extreme left of the Army of the Potomac—was Captain James E. Smith’s New York 4th Independent Battery, posted on Houck’s Ridge overlooking Devil’s Den. General Birney’s division had just over 5,000 men that day, considerably too few to properly cover the ground assigned him by Sickles’s reckless action.1

  General Hood hastily arranged his assault plan on a two-brigade front—Evander Law’s and Jerome Robertson’s brigades leading, Henry L. Benning’s and George T. Anderson’s brigades in immediate support. Hood’s was a crack division. John Bell Hood was perhaps the most highly regarded fighting general in the Army of Northern Virginia. His troops had performed outstandingly at Gaines’s Mill on the Peninsula and at Sharpsburg in Maryland, to note just two of their battles, and Hood led them by inspiration and from up front. On this 2nd of July Hood’s mission was essentially what Lee originally intended for McLaws—to smother the enemy’s flank and start to roll it up. Once that process was begun, McLaws and then Dick Anderson would take up the task. Hood determined to strike the newly found Federal left with Robertson’s brigade directly, while Law on the right swung across Round Top and Little Round Top to turn the Federals’ flank.

  The battle opened with a violent artillery barrage. Along Seminary Ridge to the west of the Emmitsburg Road, Porter Alexander had posted a powerful line of guns—four of his own batteries from the First Corps reserve and four of McLaws’s batteries under Henry Cabell, thirty-six pieces all told—and directed them at Sickles’s salient just 400 to 600

  Newspaper artist Edwin Forbes based this painting on his battlefield sketches. Longstreet’s Confederates advance toward Little Round Top, left, and Round Top on the afternoon of July 2. (Library of Congress)

  yards away. At that range, wrote Alexander, “I thought that if ever I could overwhelm & crush them I would do it now.” But this was not the illmanaged Yankee artillery of Chancellorsville; Henry Hunt had done his work well. “They really surprised me,” Alexander admitted, “both with the number of guns they developed, & the way they stuck to them.”

  Evander Law’s Alabama brigade waited out the Federals’ strong return fire with perhaps more patience than Robertson’s Texas brigade, for it had already put in a full day’s work—its 24-mile march that morning from New Guilford—and welcomed the pause. Longstreet too was taking advantage of the moment, carefully studying the task before him. A Texan saw Old Pete behind Alexander’s gun line, “sitting his horse like an iron man with his spyglass to his eye…. Limbs of trees fell and crashed around him, yet he sat as unmoved as a statue.” Longstreet was all business now. Argument was cast a
side, battle was joined, and he was very much in charge. Four o’clock came and the infantry moved out. In Law’s brigade it was “Shoulder arms! Right shoulder; shift arms! Forward; guide center; march!” Hood personally sent the Texas brigade, his old command, into battle with more verve: “Fix bayonets, my brave Texans! Forward and take those heights!”

  There were nine regiments in Hood’s two lead brigades, and before long, due to the broken ground and the fierce Yankee fire—and to unclear directives—they started diverging from their appointed paths. A man in the 4th Texas remembered the charge being made “not at an orderly double-quick, but in a wild, frantic and desperate run, yelling, screaming and shouting; over ditches, up and down hill, bursting through garden fences and shrubbery….”

  Three of Law’s Alabama regiments advanced straight east toward Round Top, and two of Robertson’s, under orders to conform to Law’s movements, stayed alongside them on their left. W. C. Ward of the 4th Alabama recalled hearing “charges of canister passing over us with the noise of partridges in flight,” and a comrade calling out, “Come on boys; come on! The 5th Texas will get there before the 4th! Come on boys; come on!” Robertson’s other two regiments farther on the left, 1st Texas and 3rd Arkansas, slanted off on their own to attack Ward’s brigade and Smith’s battery north of Devil’s Den. Further entangling the tactical picture, Law’s two right-hand regiments, to avoid being elbowed out of the fight, turned northward up Plum Run valley behind the rest of their brigade and launched an attack of their own at Devil’s Den.

  General Hood was up front, poised to untangle all of this or at least to manage it, when suddenly a shell exploded over his head and a fragment slashed into his left arm. It was a severe wound—he would lose the use of the arm—and he was carried off the field. There was some delay in notifying General Law to take the division command, and when he did, Law proved less decisive than Hood had promised to be. As a consequence, the striking power of this crack division would be divided and diluted over the course of the fighting.2

  The Federal high command was galvanized by the attack. “All was astir now on our crest,” noted Frank Haskell of General Gibbon’s staff. “Generals and their Staffs were galloping hither and thither.” Artillery chief Henry Hunt, exercising his newly designated command role, ordered up Lieutenant Colonel Freeman McGilvery’s five batteries from the artillery reserve to support Sickles, and Hunt himself rode to the far left to see to James Smith’s battery above Devil’s Den. Smith’s position was awkward and exposed and only large enough for four of his six Parrott rifles; one section had to be posted 150 yards to the rear. The guns would likely come under a crossfire from both artillery and infantry, and Hunt remarked to Captain Smith that he would probably lose his battery before the day was done. When he went off in search of infantry support for Smith, General Hunt had to force his way through a herd of the locals’ cattle maddened and stampeded by the shellfire. In so doing, recalled Hunt, “I had my most trying experience of that battlefield.”

  Army commander Meade, before riding off to see Sickles’s folly for himself, had taken two critical, rapid-fire decisions. First, he ordered Sykes’s Fifth Corps, two miles to the rear and his only infantry reserve, to march to the left with all speed and at all hazards to reinforce the now vulnerable Third Corps. Second, he dispatched chief engineer Gouverneur Warren to Little Round Top to check on what force Sickles had assigned to guard that vitally important piece of high ground. Then, after confronting Sickles and taking the measure of the impending crisis there, Meade was informed of something else to worry about—the sustained crash of artillery fire from the north. That suggested the possibility of a second Confederate assault, this one against Cemetery and Culp’s hills. This new enemy barrage, on the other hand, might just be (as Colonel Wainwright observed) “a mere divertissement.” In any event, Meade had already committed his reserves to the left. At least for the time being, the right would have to fend for itself.3

  Gouverneur Warren and his aides spurred up the rocky slopes of Little Round Top to the flag-signal station on the crest, and were stunned to find there no Federal soldiers at all except for the handful of signalmen. Not only had Dan Sickles disobeyed orders about positioning his battle line, he had also disobeyed Meade’s specific instruction to anchor his line on Little Round Top. It was further apparent, from what the signalmen had seen and from Warren’s own observations, that Confederate attackers were less than a mile away and moving toward the heights even as they watched. That discovery, Warren later wrote, “was intensely thrilling to my feelings and almost appalling.” Earlier in the day he had written his wife, “we are now all in line of battle before the enemy in a position where we cannot be beaten but fear being turned.” Now that fear was upon him. To General Warren it was instantly clear that if Rebel infantry and artillery seized Little Round Top, they would utterly dominate the Potomac army’s position on Cemetery Ridge.

  Warren hurriedly dispatched an aide to Meade with a call for troops to meet the crisis. Then, seeking even quicker action, he sent Lieutenant Ranald Mackenzie of his staff to find Sickles and have him order one of his nearby brigades to the crest—in effect, to tell Sickles to do what he should have done in the first place. Dan Sickles, however, was under hot enemy fire and beginning to realize the dimensions of his folly. According to Mackenzie, Sickles “refused to do so, stating that his whole command was necessary to defend his front, or words to that effect.”

  Alfred Waud’s sketch of Union engineer Gouverneur Warren at the Little Round Top signal station. (Library of Congress)

  Lieutenant Mackenzie spurred back to Cemetery Ridge to look for other troops he might commandeer, and came upon Major General Sykes, leading his Fifth Corps to the front on Meade’s orders, and just then on a personal reconnoiter to see where to place his men. George Sykes, stolid, not known for enterprise, in only his fifth day of corps command, promptly rose to the occasion (as had Abner Doubleday on July 1). Without hesitation, without clearing the matter with headquarters, Sykes sent a courier to the commander of his lead division, James Barnes, with orders to answer Warren’s call.

  In a second stroke of good fortune, Sykes’s courier, in his search for Barnes, encountered Colonel Strong Vincent, commanding the Fifth Corps’ lead brigade. “Captain, what are your orders?” Vincent demanded of the courier. He needed to find General Barnes, said the courier. “What are your orders?” Vincent repeated. “Give me your orders.” The captain answered, “General Sykes told me to direct General Barnes to send one of his brigades to occupy that hill yonder,” pointing to Little Round Top.

  “I will take the responsibility of taking my brigade there,” said Vincent. As the corps’ lead brigade, Vincent’s was the logical choice for this task, but in sensing the crisis and bypassing the chain of command, Strong Vincent, too, rose to the occasion. His variegated brigade—20th Maine, 83rd Pennsylvania, 44th New York, 16th Michigan—was soon scrambling up the rocky face of Little Round Top.4

  MINUTE BY MINUTE the Confederate high command was forced to revise its already altered attack plan. While the 1st Texas and 3rd Arkansas of Robertson’s brigade, and the 44th and 48th Alabama of Law’s brigade, smashed at the Federal defenders of Devil’s Den, General Law steered the remaining five regiments of Hood’s lead brigades straight toward the Round Tops.

  As Law’s advance against the heights took shape, it divided into two distinct columns. The two right-hand regiments, 15th and 47th Alabama, under the 15th’s Colonel William C. Oates, labored up the steep, heavily wooded slopes of Round Top, crossed its crest, then headed down its north face to the low saddle connecting Round Top with Little Round Top. Colonel Oates’s instructions were to locate “the left of the Union line, to turn it and do all the damage I could….” Meanwhile, to his left, the 4th Alabama and 4th and 5th Texas followed a shorter curving course across the western shoulder of Round Top before taking aim at Little Round Top. At first the primary obstacles were the rugged terrain, the late-afternoon heat, and extreme
fatigue, especially among Law’s men, already tired from a full day’s worth of marching. “My men had to climb up, catching to the bushes and crawling over the immense boulders,” said Colonel Oates. To this point opposition was limited to a few score Yankee sharpshooter skirmishers, but that was about to change.

  As these Rebels labored across the slopes of Round Top, they could see and hear the fighting already raging off to their left in the area of Devil’s Den. Hobart Ward’s defending brigade there—nearly 2,200 men in six regiments and two companies of sharpshooters—was the largest in the Third Corps. These were veteran troops under a veteran commander. Ward had the 4th Maine and 124th New York posted to support Smith’s battery on the far left, with the rest of the brigade formed to the north along Houck’s Ridge.

  The fighting here was begun by the 3rd Arkansas and 1st Texas, Robertson’s two regiments that had the shortest way to go to reach the Yankees. Shrilling the Rebel yell, they stormed into Rose’s Woods and collided with Ward’s line on Houck’s Ridge. Sickles’s troops had lacked the time, and apparently the inclination, to throw up breastworks, and except for the natural cover of terrain it was a stand-up fight. “For an hour and upward, these two regiments maintained one of the hottest contests, against five or six times their number, that I have witnessed,” wrote General Robertson with pardonable exaggeration. In fact, the initial Yankee fire was delivered by three regiments—86th New York, 20th Indiana, and 99th Pennsylvania, with some flanking fire from one of de Trobriand’s regiments to the north. So great was the din that the 3rd Arkansas’ Colonel Van Manning had to take his men by the shoulders and turn them to meet this flanking fire.