Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

  Casualties rose rapidly in this slugging match. In less than 30 minutes of fighting the 20th Indiana lost more than half its men. Its colonel was killed and lieutenant colonel wounded. The 86th New York lost its commander wounded. On the Confederate side, the 3rd Arkansas’ Colonel Manning fell wounded, one of 182 casualties in his command that afternoon. According to General Robertson, “as fast as we would break one line of the enemy, another fresh one would present itself….“5

  Pressure on the stalled Texans and Arkansans was relieved somewhat by Evander Law’s two right-hand orphaned regiments, 44th and 48th Alabama, that threatened to turn the Federals’ flank by pushing up Plum Run valley. The Alabamians’ target was Smith’s battery and the 4th Maine and 124th New York defending it. Soon enough General Ward had to call the 99th Pennsylvania from his far right to brace his threatened left. Captain Smith, his stock of case shot exhausted, called out to his gunners, “Give them shell! Give them solid shot! Damn them, give them anything!”

  As the Rebel battle lines crept closer, the 124th New York’s Colonel Van Horne Ellis and his major, James Cromwell, determined that their best hope lay in a counterattack. Ellis and Cromwell mounted and took their places for the charge. To a staff man who urged them to lead on foot, Colonel Ellis said only, “The men must see us today.” At the cry of “Charge!” from Major Cromwell, the New Yorkers rushed down the west face of Houck’s Ridge at the double-quick. The 1st Texas reeled back some 200 yards under the surprise onslaught. “The conflict at this point defied description,” wrote an officer of the 124th. “Roaring cannon, crashing rifles, screeching shots, bursting shells, hissing bullets, cheers, shouts, shrieks and groans….” Suddenly behind the wavering Rebel line there was revealed through the battle smoke an unwavering second line that “poured into us a terrible fire which seemed in an instant to bring down a quarter of our numbers.” Major Cromwell tumbled dead off his horse, shot through the chest. Then Colonel Ellis was down, shot through the head. The 124th New York, leaderless and spent, staggered back to its starting point. Command fell to Captain Charles Weygant, who counted barely a hundred men to defend their original line. 6

  Artist Waud made this quick sketch of the July 2 fighting at Devil’s Den on the Union left. The view is looking west. (Library of Congress)

  This second Confederate line was the Georgia brigade of Henry Benning, advancing in support of Hood’s first line of attack. Benning, a former justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, was an imposing figure and a fighter of renown, known to his men as “Old Rock.” He was not one for battlefield oratory, simply going into action with the announcement, “Give them hell, boys—give them hell!”

  Old Rock had detected the gap between the two wings of the initial Confederate assault on the Devil’s Den area, and after repelling the 124th New York’s counterattack, he quickly moved up to fill it. Alongside him, in answer to an urgent summons from General Robertson, was the last of Hood’s forces—George “Tige” Anderson’s Georgia brigade. Advancing on Benning’s left through Rose’s Woods, Anderson smashed up against Régis de Trobriand’s Yankee line.

  De Trobriand had already given up one regiment to hard-pressed Hobart Ward, but he mustered strength enough to counter this new threat. The Rebels, he wrote his daughter, “converged on me like an avalanche, but we piled all the dead and wounded men in our front.” During the attack, the 17th Maine got into a fierce head-to-head struggle with the 11th Georgia over possession of a stone wall along the northern edge of Rose’s Woods. Finally, wrote one of the Mainers, the enemy “received such a scorching fire at short range that he thought better of the enterprise….” Repelled in his initial assault, Tige Anderson pulled back to regroup for a second attempt. While he was reorganizing his troops, however, Anderson was hit in the right leg and carried out of the battle.7

  Captain Smith’s New York battery was now under relentless pressure. Alabamians were coming at his guns from the left, Georgians from the center, Texans from the right. He turned to the battered 124th New York, crying “For God’s sake, men, don’t let them take my guns away from me!” But the New Yorkers were too busy trying to keep from being taken themselves. Among the battery’s other defenders, losses in the 4th Maine were approaching 50 percent, in the 99th Pennsylvania, 40 percent. One of Smith’s four front-line pieces had earlier been damaged and withdrawn, and now he doubted he would have time to get the other three away safely if he stopped firing. In the end he had to abandon all three of the Parrott rifles, taking with him the friction primers and other firing tools so the guns could not be turned against him. (The 1st Texas claimed capture of the guns, which the next day were put in order and turned against the Yankees.)

  General Birney was desperately scraping up help for Ward’s brigade. From the neighboring brigade, de Trobriand’s, he borrowed the 40th New York, and from Andrew Humphreys’s division on the corps’ right, the 6th New Jersey. The 40th New York, known as the “Mozart Regiment” for its link to New York City’s Mozart Hall political machine, was surely the most oddly composed regiment in the Army of the Potomac. In the heady days of patriotism in 1861 it had accepted four companies of Massachusetts men, and since then it had merged with or been assigned segments of no fewer than five New York regiments. Somehow Colonel Thomas W. Egan had melded these disparate pieces into a whole with high morale. “I immediately ordered my men to charge,” Egan wrote proudly, “when with great alacrity they pushed forward at a double-quick….”

  The 40th New York plunged into Plum Run valley to try and block that path to Ward’s flank. Then commenced a bitter fight with Benning’s Georgians and Law’s Alabamians in rocky, broken ground on the verge of Plum Run that soldiers would remember as the “Slaughter Pen.” Finally, threatened with being outflanked, the 40th fell back and scrambled out of range. Its retreat was covered by the other new arrival, the 6th New Jersey. Colonel Egan wrote that in this fight he sustained “the loss of many of my bravest and most faithful men….” That proved to be more than a third of his numbers.

  The struggle in Devil’s Den and the Slaughter Pen and throughout this boulder-strewn landscape was often highly personal and like nothing either army had experienced before. “Each side wanted the protection of those rocks,” wrote a private in the 3rd Arkansas. “One in particular. It was very large, about four or five feet high. I saw smoke coming from behind that one and made a run for it, swerving to the right, with my gun ready. I cried, ‘Hands up,’ they dropped their guns and came out from behind the rock. There were six of them. One said, ‘Young man, where is your troops?’ I told them I was it, and showed them to the rear….”

  By now Hood’s division had secured the Devil’s Den area and a lodgment on Houck’s Ridge. It had been, a Texan insisted, “one of the wildest, fiercest struggles of the war.” A Yankee with a literary bent was reminded of the warring din of Milton’s fiends in Pandemonium. Hobart Ward’s brigade and Smith’s battery were driven from the field, and new forces from both armies were already joining battle on new fronts. The weight of the fighting was shifting northward to Mr. Rose’s fields and woodlot and to Mr. Sherfy’s orchard and, at the same time, to the stony slopes of Little Round Top.8

  COLONEL STRONG VINCENT, commanding Third Brigade, First Division, Fifth Corps, was Harvard class of 1859 and a lawyer rather than a professional soldier, yet he possessed all the right soldierly instincts. After volunteering his brigade in response to General Sykes’s order to occupy Little Round Top, he spurred on ahead up the east face of the hill to find the best place to post his men. Vincent, unaware that General Warren was at the signal station on the crest, was acting entirely on his own. (Nor would Warren witness the arrival of Vincent’s brigade.) From what Vincent could see and hear, the threat would come from Round Top to the south and from the area of the fighting to the west, at Devil’s Den. Facing south, he discovered a projecting spur and a rough, stony shelf

  Above: Confederate dead of Hood’s division at the base of Round Top, by James Gibson. Below: Alexander Ga
rdner photographed the scene at the Slaughter Pen soon after the battle. (Library of Congress)

  that slanted westerly across the hillside that he thought ought to serve nicely as a defensive line.

  His brigade was meanwhile hurrying up the slope following Vincent’s track. An occasional enemy shell, aimed at the signal station, arced over the crest and exploded in the treetops or against the rocky hillside. Riding alongside Colonel Joshua L. Chamberlain of the 20th Maine were his two brothers. “Boys,” Chamberlain said, “I don’t like this. Another such shot might make it hard for mother.” He sent them off on separate duties. As the troops came up, Colonel Vincent rushed them into position. He put the 20th Maine on the left, then in succession, forming an ascending curve around toward the west face of the hill, the 83rd Pennsylvania, 44th New York, and 16th Michigan—some 1,350 men all told. Vincent made sure Colonel Chamberlain understood that the 20th Maine’s station was now the extreme left flank of the Army of the Potomac: “You understand! Hold this ground at all costs!” “At all costs” meant no retreat, under any circumstances.9

  Strong Vincent’s soldierly sense of urgency was prophetic. Hardly were his men in place and his skirmishers edging out front than Rebels in force were sighted among the trees on the saddle between Round Top and Little Round Top. Surprise was mutual. First to appear were the three regiments of Hood’s (now Law’s) loosely conceived right wing that had taken the shorter route across the shoulder of Round Top. This right wing was loosely commanded as well as loosely conceived. Of the three lead regiments, two (4th and 5 th Texas) were from the brigade of Jerome Robertson, who was himself a half-mile away leading the fight against Birney’s division. The third regiment was the 4th Alabama, of Law’s brigade. Evander Law, who might otherwise have exercised unified command over the right wing, was instead in the rear commanding the division in place of the wounded Hood. In the ensuing struggle, then, these three regiments would be fought separately by their colonels, which task was further complicated when the two Texas colonels fell wounded early on. Meanwhile, to the farthest right, considerably delayed by their climb over the crest of Round Top, would come two more of Law’s regiments, the 15th and 47th Alabama. These were under the charge of Colonel Oates, 15th Alabama, and Oates would make his fight independently of everyone else.

  Private Elisha Coan of the 20th Maine described the battleground: “Our regt was formed in an open level space comparatively free from rocks and bushes, but in our front was a slight descent fringed by ledges of rock…. Beyond this line of ledge and other rocks … the eye could not penetrate on account of the dense foliage of bushes.” In their opening assault, the Texans and Alabamians emerged from this cover to strike at the Federal center, the 44th New York, then slid progressively right, against the 83rd Pennsylvania and the 20th Maine. “It did not seem to me that it was very severe at first,” Colonel Chamberlain recalled. “The fire was hot, but we gave them as good as they sent, and the Rebels did not so much attempt at that period of the fight to force our line, as to cut us up by their fire.” As Private Coan remembered it, “Soon scattering musketry was heard in our front. Then the bullets began to clip twigs and cut the branches over our heads, and leaves began to fall actively at our feet. Every moment the bullets struck lower and lower until they began to take effect in our ranks. Then our line burst into flames, and the crash of musketry became constant.“10

  The 4th Texas made its first attack inspirited by the Rebel yell, but after they were driven back the Texans did not waste breath in further yelling. There was little coordination in this or subsequent advances; at one point the 5th Texas in the center found itself out front all alone while its neighboring regiments fell back under their own orders. After two raggedly conducted assaults were repelled, the attackers proceeded more slowly and carefully, using the cover of rocks and trees, stressing marksmanship. Casualties grew heavy on both sides. “Every tree, rock and stump that gave any protection from the rain of Minié balls that were poured down upon us from the crest above us, was soon appropriated,” wrote Texan Val Giles. “John Griffith and myself preempted a moss-covered old boulder about the size of a 500-pound cotton bale.”

  Colonel Oates’s two regiments now joined the fight, focusing on the Union left manned by the 20th Maine. His opening assault was met, Oates remembered, by “the most destructive fire I ever saw.” His line “wavered like a man trying to walk against a strong wind.” In Colonel Chamberlain’s phrasing, “They pushed up to within a dozen yards of us before the terrible effectiveness of our fire compelled them to break and take shelter.” Using his 15th Alabama primarily, Oates now began to work around to the west, past the Federals’ far flank. To counter this threat, Chamberlain stretched and thinned his line until it was only a single rank deep, and refused his left at a sharp angle. At the same time, the Texans at the other end of the battle line pressed hard against Colonel Vincent’s right-flank regiment, the 16th Michigan. In isolation from the rest of the battlefield, the fight for Little Round Top settled into a bitter, grinding battle of attrition among the rocks and ledges and trees, with both flanks of the Yankee line coming under growing pressure.11

  In the midst of this struggle, General Warren at the signal station on the crest was welcoming Charles Hazlett’s Battery D, 5th United States Artillery. Like Colonel Vincent, Hazlett was a very opportune arrival. As Augustus Martin’s Fifth Corps artillery brigade approached the field, Captain Martin and Lieutenant Hazlett, whose battery was leading, searched for gun positions to support Sickles. Little Round Top appeared to command the area where the Third Corps was fighting, and Martin told Hazlett to post his battery there. Ordering the guns to follow, Hazlett rode up the hill to reconnoiter and there encountered General Warren. The hilltop was rough and space for artillery was limited. “It was no place for efficient artillery fire, both of us knew that,” said Warren. “I told him so.” “Never mind that,” said Hazlett; simply the sound of his guns would encourage the troops fighting below. In any event, he pointed out, “my battery is of no use if this hill is lost.”

  It was a terrific struggle for drivers and teams to haul the guns up the stony hillside. The first section had to be manhandled the last few yards into firing position, with General Warren himself pitching in to help. When the guns opened, the sound heartened both the troops fighting below and Vincent’s men fighting on the south face of the hill. Hazlett’s battery soon drew return enemy fire, and Warren narrowly escaped serious injury when a bullet nicked his throat.

  Strong Vincent’s battle line was not in Warren’s line of sight from the crest, but by now Warren could hear the fighting there and see the battle smoke and had learned enough to realize that reinforcements were needed for that front as well as to support Hazlett’s guns. He determined to find them himself. With his aide Washington Roebling, Warren hastened down the hill to commandeer the first troops he could find.

  By a nice happenstance, the first infantry Warren encountered was from his old Fifth Corps brigade, now under Stephen H. Weed. Weed had ridden on ahead to place the troops, and Colonel Patrick O’Rorke, 140th New York, was at the head of the column. Warren galloped up to him and shouted, “Paddy, give me a regiment!” O’Rorke explained that General Weed was up ahead and they were ordered to follow him, but Warren cut him off: “Never mind that, Paddy! Bring them up on the double-quick—don’t stop for aligning! I’ll take the responsibility!” This was, after all, his old commander speaking, and Paddy O’Rorke promptly marched his 140th New York up the hill, guided by Lieutenant Roebling. In due course, the rest of Weed’s brigade would follow.

  General Warren, believing now he had done all he could at Little Round Top, rode off to report to General Meade. Gouverneur Warren would in time be acclaimed the savior of Little Round Top, and indeed he alone was responsible for recognizing the crisis there, for Vincent’s brigade being sent up the hill, and for commandeering the 140th New York and the rest of Weed’s brigade as reinforcements. Yet at that moment Strong Vincent’s men had their
backs literally against the mountain wall, and the issue of Little Round Top remained very much in the balance.12

  EARLIER, AT 4 O’CLOCK, artillery chief Henry Hunt’s well-trained ear detected, over the roar of the gun duel raging in front of him on the Third Corps’ front, the opening of a second gun duel off to the north. Hunt rushed to the scene like a shepherd to his flock. Atop Cemetery Hill he made a rapid appraisal. From Seminary Ridge to the northwest and from Benner’s Hill to the northeast, the Rebels had Cemetery Hill in an artillery crossfire. Hunt saw that his own well-sited batteries were returning the fire at least shot for shot, and after observing matters for a time, he could detect no sign of an impending infantry assault. Henry Hunt’s confidence in his artillery was absolute. “As soon as I saw that it would lead to nothing serious,” he wrote dismissively, “I returned direct to the Peach Orchard….”

  Dick Ewell had ordered this artillery assault in response to Lee’s directive “to make a simultaneous demonstration upon the enemy’s right, to be converted into a real attack should opportunity offer.” This vague, indefinite instruction reflected both Lee’s and Ewell’s general discouragement with the Second Corps’ position. Artillery placement was a particularly thorny problem. Neither Seminary Ridge nor Benner’s Hill offered real advantages, but they were the best sites available. The three batteries from the corps reserve battalion posted on Seminary Ridge were 1,700 to 2,600 yards from Cemetery Hill, too distant for very accurate shooting. Benner’s Hill at 1,500 yards was within better range, but it was some 40 feet lower than Cemetery Hill and without any natural cover for the guns and their caissons and teams.

  At least Ewell had his best artillerist on Benner’s Hill. Nineteen-year-old Joseph W. Latimer, the “Boy Major,” had learned artillery tactics from Professor Thomas J. Jackson at the Virginia Military Institute. He had risen rapidly and impressed everyone, and today he was leading Allegheny Johnson’s artillery battalion in place of the wounded Snowden Andrews. Major Latimer quickly ranged fourteen pieces across a wheatfield on the crest of Benner’s Hill and opened fire on the Yankees. In immediate support were six long-range 20-pounder Parrott rifles, and from Seminary Ridge a dozen more pieces added their fire.