Gettysburg
Page 35
Charles Wainwright, the First Corps artillery chief, had twenty-five guns on Cemetery Hill aimed toward Benner’s Hill, supported by ten Eleventh Corps guns as well as a battery on Culp’s Hill. There were thirty-three Yankee guns to counter fire from Seminary Ridge. Colonel Wainwright was unknowingly complimenting Latimer when he wrote in his journal, “their fire was the most accurate I have ever seen on the part of their artillery….” (Charles Wainwright had been observing Confederate artillery fire since the Peninsula campaign.) He witnessed one shot that struck a line of infantry lying down behind a stone wall: “Taking the line lengthways, it literally ploughed up two or three yards of men, killing and wounding a dozen or more.” Lieutenant James Gardner, Battery B, 1st Pennsylvania Light, recorded the effects of the Confederate crossfire: “The shots of the enemy came thick and fast, bursting, crushing, and ploughing, a mighty storm of iron hail, a most determined and terrible effort of the enemy to cripple and destroy the guns upon the hill.“13
When all the Federal batteries were ranged in and firing, however, the pressure on Latimer’s batteries became unbearable. A man in the 1st Maryland Battery put it starkly: “Benner’s Hill was simply a hell infernal.” It is recorded that in one battery, one piece was disabled, two caissons blown up, and twenty-five horses killed. The Rebels scored their share of spectacular hits as well. A direct hit on a caisson in Battery B, 4th U.S., blew the three ammunition chests sky-high. The frantic team “started on a run toward the town” before it was finally halted. “The men ran after them and brought them back; every hair was burnt off the tails and manes of the wheel horses.” The drivers’ injuries were minor. But later that afternoon one of Battery B’s limber chests was exploded, killing two men and two horses.
After two tumultuous hours and more than 1,100 rounds fired, Major Latimer confessed to General Johnson that he could no longer hold his posting on Benner’s Hill. He was told to evacuate all but four guns, which would be used to support the infantry. Not long afterward, directing this remaining battery, the Boy Major was grievously wounded by a shell fragment; he died a month later. Joseph Latimer’s “soldierly qualities,” Dick Ewell would say, “had impressed me as deeply as those of any officer in my command.”
The cannonade that cost Latimer his life and his battalion 10 dead and 40 wounded gained virtually nothing of consequence. As a demonstration it quite failed to distract the Federals, with General Meade continuing to reinforce at will against Longstreet’s offensive. It also quite failed to uncover any obvious “opportunity” for a “real attack” against the Federal right. As for softening up the defenses preliminary to such an attack, it achieved even less. Major Thomas Osborn, chief of artillery for the Eleventh Corps, insisted that “no impression was made on the artillery beyond the loss of a very few men killed and wounded, a few horses killed, and a caisson or two blown up. The batteries were in no way crippled or the men demoralized.” Over on the far left the battle raged on. Here on the right the defeated Confederate batteries ceased their fire. For the infantry behind the batteries the minutes dragged by in silence. If Dick Ewell intended to convert his demonstration “into a real attack,” he was being very slow about it.14
LONGSTREET’S SPRAWLING OFFENSIVE began now to expand northward like a prairie wildfire, fueled by fresh troops from both armies. While the guns dueled on Benner’s Hill and Cemetery Hill, while the struggle on Little Round Top rushed toward a climax, a new battleground opened on the John Rose farm. Mr. Rose’s farmstead fronted on the Emmitsburg Road and covered much of the ground eastward to Plum Run and northward to the Millerstown Road, an east-west track intersecting the Emmitsburg Road at the Peach Orchard. Rose’s house and barn were substantial structures of stone—General Kershaw would remember being startled by the loud clatter of Yankee canister against their stone walls—and his woodlot covered some 40 acres. Between Rose’s Woods and the Millerstown Road lay Mr. Rose’s 20-acre wheatfield, fated this day (like Mr. Sherfy’s peach orchard) to earn capitalization as the Wheatfield.
General Longstreet had gauged the progress of Hood’s offensive, and when he saw it reaching its limits—and saw the enemy fully committing to Hood’s front—he determined to send in McLaws’s division. “I was waiting General Longstreet’s will,” said McLaws. Like Hood, McLaws had deployed on Seminary Ridge on a two-brigade front, Kershaw’s and Barksdale’s brigades in the front line, Semmes’s and Wofford’s brigades in immediate support. To continue the offensive en echelon, Kershaw on the right would go in first, with Semmes following behind him.
There was a prearranged signal for this. McLaws’s artillery chief, Henry Cabell, was to pause in his cannonade, fire three guns in rapid succession, pause again, then resume steady firing. With that, Joseph Kershaw’s South Carolinians stepped forward “with great steadiness and precision….” Longstreet himself rode along with the battle line as far as the Emmitsburg Road. As Kershaw remembered it, “The directions were ‘to dress to the right and wheel to the left.’ This was the language.” This involved an advance eastward through the Rose farm, conforming to Tige Anderson’s brigade renewing its advance on the right, then a wheel left to face north—there to confront a line of Yankee guns in battery along the Millerstown Road. In a letter to his wife, Colonel David Aiken, 7th South Carolina, summed up what happened next: “We fought for half hour or more, and drove the enemy for half a mile perhaps, and during my experience I have never seen so much damage done both parties in so short a space of time.“15
The Federal defenders in Rose’s Woods fringing the Wheatfield included de Trobriand’s thinned brigade and, in support, on a modest outcropping called with descriptive simplicity Stony Hill, two newly arrived Fifth Corps brigades. Artillery support here was furnished by the six Napoleons of Captain George Winslow’s Battery D, 1st New York Light, posted along the northern edge of the Wheatfield. Régis de Trobriand was by birth a French aristocrat and by aptitude a member of the New York literati. In 1861 he had taken up soldiering, becoming colonel of the 55th New York, the Gardes Lafayette. Today was his first battle in brigade command. Having already fought off one assault by Tige Anderson’s Georgians, de Trobriand was depending now on the support of James Barnes’s Fifth Corps division in the persons of William Tilton and Jacob Sweitzer and their brigades.
Henry Hunt had ordered up five batteries from the army’s artillery reserve to brace the Third Corps’ wavering line, positioning them on the Millerstown Road near the Peach Orchard. Kershaw’s advance first took him across the front of these guns—catching their heavy fire as he did so—before (according to the plan) he wheeled left with his three left-hand regiments and stormed them. All was proceeding according to plan, and the Yankee gunners had ceased firing and were preparing to pull back before they were overrun, when the unthinkable happened. Private John Coxe, 2nd South Carolina, would never forget the moment: “But just then—and, ah me! to think of it makes my blood curdle even now, nearly fifty years afterwards—the insane order was given to ‘right flank.’”
Someone—it was never determined who—had misunderstood Kershaw’s orders or his intent and with this false order aborted the attack. The three regiments obediently wheeled right. Before the mistake could be corrected, the Yankee gunners returned to their pieces and mercilessly shelled the suddenly vulnerable column passing close in front of them. “Hundreds of the bravest and best men of Carolina fell, victims of this fatal blunder,” Kershaw lamented.16
While his left wing staggered back and tried to regroup, Kershaw’s three right-hand regiments—3rd, 7th, and 15th South Carolina—drove straight ahead under General Kershaw’s direction. William Tilton’s Fifth Corps brigade was struck first. A man in the 22nd Massachusetts watched the Rebel line as it approached Rose’s Run in front of the Stony Hill position: “Across the run, the indistinct form of masses of men, presenting the usual dirty, greyish, irregular line, were dimly visible and moving up with defiant yells, while here and there the cross-barred Confederate battle flags were plainly to be see
n. Nearer and nearer came the charging masses.” With a roar the battle lines engaged. Private John Smith, 118th Pennsylvania, wrote his wife that “the rebs came down the hill in front of us in droves and we opened fire on them very lively…. They were so thick that you could shut your eyes and fire and could hit them, and they jumped behind every tree and stump for cover….”
To Kershaw’s right, Tige Anderson’s Georgians now made their second charge at de Trobriand’s brigade and at its newly arrived support, Jacob Sweitzer’s Fifth Corps brigade. As they had earlier, de Trobriand’s men met the Georgians’ attack and brought it to a standstill. “I had never seen any men fight with equal obstinacy,” Colonel de Trobriand wrote proudly. Colonel Sweitzer was equally proud of his Second Brigade. “We had an elegant position and unless they had flanked us I think the old Second could have held it against considerable odds ‘till the cows came home,’” he claimed. On the far left of the line the 17th Maine continued clinging stubbornly to its stone wall. The Mainers broke up an outflanking attempt, wrote one of their officers, “leaving us more at peace than at any previous time.” He remembered the sense of relief being overwhelming: “We were simply hilarious.” Then the unthinkable happened again, this time to the Yankees. 17
Brigadier General James Barnes, commanding First Division, Fifth Corps, was on the field now and issuing orders without notice to General Birney and without paying attention to de Trobriand or his circumstances. The sixty-one-year-old Barnes, filling in for Charles Griffin, absent on sick leave, brought no real combat-command experience to the job. Apparently unnerved by Kershaw’s threatening move toward the right of the Federal line holding the Wheatfield, Barnes ordered Tilton’s brigade to change front to the right and fall back beyond the Millerstown Road. Colonel Sweitzer was likewise directed to “fall back in good order.” In taking his decision Barnes neither consulted anyone nor notified de Trobriand.
Colonel de Trobriand had expressed himself much encouraged by the arrival of the two Fifth Corps brigades. Then, he wrote, “I saw these troops rise up and fall back hurriedly at the command of their officers.” He galloped up to the nearest officer and demanded, “Where are you going?” “We do not know,” replied the officer. “Who has given you orders to retire?” de Trobriand persisted. “We do not know,” came the reply. That settled matters, de Trobriand wrote: “Our position was no longer tenable.” He had no choice but to fall back as well. The Wheatfield was abandoned.
Before many minutes, Rebel riflemen were as close as a hundred yards to both flanks of Winslow’s Battery D, 1st New York Light, along the northern border of the Wheatfield, picking off horses and gunners. Captain Winslow’s infantry support had run out of ammunition and withdrawn, and he began the difficult task of pulling back as well. “I withdrew my guns, one at a time, from the left,” he reported matter-of-factly, “keeping up the fire of remaining pieces until the last withdrew.” It was anything but a matter-of-fact accomplishment. One gun, its entire team shot down, was gotten off hooked to the caisson’s limber and hauled by two stray horses collected from James Smith’s routed New York battery. Captain Winslow would count ten men wounded and eight missing.
Joseph Kershaw’s South Carolinians at the right advance against Captain George Winslow’s Third Corps battery. Artist Waud lightly sketched Winslow’s infantry support in the foreground. (Library of Congress)
Longstreet’s attack had now driven a wedge deep into Meade’s flank. Devil’s Den, Rose’s Woods, and the Wheatfield were all in Rebel hands. The whole left half of Sickles’s salient was broken in, and the rest of the Third Corps appeared to be facing the same fate.18
EARLY ON, as the folly of Sickles’s salient became evident, General Meade had ordered Hancock’s Second Corps, at the center of the Cemetery Ridge line, to furnish support as needed for the Third Corps. General Hancock assigned the task to his leftmost division, under John C. Caldwell, but as Caldwell approached the battleground he found Barnes’s Fifth Corps division already on the scene. His orders being contingent, Caldwell returned to his place in the Second Corps line. But within an hour the situation had worsened enough for Meade to repeat the order, although this time he phrased it as support for the Fifth Corps. Apparently General Meade wanted George Sykes giving directions rather than Dan Sickles. Hancock read the order and said briskly, “Caldwell, you get your division ready.”
Heading Caldwell’s column of march was the brigade of Colonel Edward E. Cross. Colonel Cross went about pre-battle preparations in his usual forthright fashion—“Boys, you know what’s before you,” he told his troops. “Give ‘em hell!”—but personally he had a premonition. Typically before going into battle Cross tied a red bandanna around his head; today it was a black bandanna. As they prepared to march, General Hancock rode up to wish the men of his old division well. “Colonel Cross,” said Hancock, “this day will bring you a star.” “No, general,” Cross replied, “this is my last battle.”
Caldwell’s division set off with Cross in the lead, followed by the brigades of Patrick Kelly, John R. Brooke, and Samuel K. Zook. As they neared the fighting, one of Sickles’s aides, Major Henry Tremain, came galloping up to the tail of the column and collared Zook. There was an emergency, said Tremain; no time to find higher authority; would General Zook bring his troops right away? Tell me General Sickles’s order, said Zook, “I will obey it.” Said Tremain, “General Sickles’s order, General, is that you file your brigade to the right and move into action here.” Zook promptly did so. Unbeknownst to General Caldwell, his command was reduced by one quarter.19
In its original position on Cemetery Ridge, Caldwell’s division had been arrayed in “columns of regiments by brigades”—that is, in each brigade the regiments were stacked one behind the other facing west, each regiment in its double line (front rank, rear rank) of battle. Caldwell had elected the fastest way to move south toward the battlefield by left-facing each regiment and marching one brigade after another “closed en masse.” In this unusual but expedient formation they reached the Millerstown Road in a mere 20 minutes, where one of Sykes’s staff found Caldwell and concluded a hasty briefing with the warning, “The enemy is breaking in directly on your right—strike him quick!” That injunction, at the moment, was the extent of the Federals’ battle plan.
For Cross’s leading brigade to deploy to the right to meet this threat, and to do so on the instant, produced a drillmaster’s nightmare. Cross ordered “By the right flank—march!” and his four regiments quickly spaced themselves out along the Millerstown Road. Cross then ordered “Left face!” to confront the enemy—and everything became backward. What had been each regiment’s front rank when it was ordered off Cemetery Ridge was now the rear rank, and each rear rank was in front. Right and left companies were reversed. Officers and file-closers were out ahead instead of behind the regiment; the colors were at the rear. “Of course there was instant confusion,” wrote Lieutenant Charles Hale, 5th New Hampshire. A man in the 61st Pennsylvania observed wryly, “To have fronted would have presented our backs to the Rebels, and that was not the side we had been accustomed to present to them.” Kelly’s and Brooke’s following brigades also deployed “faced by the rear rank.”
The most obvious misplacements were hastily put right—officers and file-closers pushed through to the rear, color guards pushed to the front—but for the rank and file drilled to react by rote in battle, there promised to be confusion trying to maneuver under fire. And they immediately came under fire.20
Colonel Cross led his brigade into the Wheatfield so rapidly that twenty Confederate skirmishers were scooped up. Midway across the field they engaged Tige Anderson’s Georgians firing from the fringes of Rose’s Woods. “The Rebs had their slight protection,” wrote Charles Fuller of the 61st New York, “but we were in the open, without a thing better than wheat straw to catch a minnie bullet that weighed an ounce. Of course our men began to tumble.” Cross and his officers dismounted to become lesser targets. Preparing for a charge, Cross went to
the left to check the posting of his old regiment, the 5th New Hampshire, which was scrapping for the stone wall that the 17th Maine had earlier fought over. Before he could signal the attack, Cross was shot through the stomach by a Rebel marksman concealed behind a boulder. As the mortally wounded Cross was carried to the rear—he would live but six hours—Sergeant Charles Phelps patiently searched out his colonel’s killer and shot him dead. (Within the hour, Sergeant Phelps too was down with a fatal wound.)21
Cross’s brigade pressed on, supported now by Patrick Kelly’s fabled Irish Brigade. The Irishmen—63rd, 69th, and 88th New York, 28th Massachusetts, 116th Pennsylvania—whittled down by long and hard service to hardly 530 muskets, went in under their emerald flags on Cross’s right. Farther to the right, Zook’s brigade, put into the fight independently by Dan Sickles, struggled ahead through retreating Fifth Corps troops. “They called out ‘Don’t mind us, step anywhere; step on us,’” recalled one of Zook’s men. “They enjoyed seeing us get between them and the enemy.” Kelly’s and Zook’s brigades pushed into the northern Wheatfield toward Stony Hill, where they engaged Joseph Kershaw’s South Carolinians.
As Josiah Favill of Zook’s brigade remembered it, “the firing became terrific and the slaughter frightful. We were enveloped in smoke and fire, not only in front, but on our left, and even at times on the right…. Our men fired promiscuously, steadily pressing forward, but the fighting was so mixed, rebel and union lines so close together, and in some places intermingled, that a clear idea of what was going on was not readily obtainable.” General Zook had remained mounted during the advance, apparently to inspire his men, and that decision was the death of him. A conspicuous target, he was fatally wounded by a shot through the body. When his aide Lieutenant Favill reached his side, Zook grasped his hand and said, “It’s all up with me, Favill.” He would die the next day. Already two of Caldwell’s four brigade commanders were out of the battle.22