Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

  Zook’s and Kelly’s brigades continued to push ahead vigorously toward Stony Hill, where they particularly threatened Kershaw’s flank regiment, the 7th South Carolina. “They were handsomely received and entertained by this veteran regiment,” Kershaw remarked, “which long kept them at bay….“It was not long enough, however. Although the 7th refused its right to better meet the attack, it could not prevent the Yankees from pressing toward the gap between Kershaw’s and Tige Anderson’s brigades.

  In Zook’s brigade the heaviest firepower was delivered by the 140th Pennsylvania on the right, which with more than 500 men was larger than the brigade’s other three regiments combined. The 140th’s Colonel Richard Roberts paced behind his battle line, yelling “Steady, men! Fire low! Remember you are Pennsylvanians!” Such massed fire was brutally effective. Fighting to hold on to Stony Hill were the four Thomas brothers of Company K, 3rd South Carolina. By day’s end Private Lewis P. Thomas was killed, Lieutenant William R. Thomas mortally wounded, and Private Thomas’S. Thomas severely wounded. (A fifth Thomas brother had been killed at Second Manassas.) Only Corporal John A. Thomas survived unhurt to tell the tale.

  Rose’s Woods was the theater of action now, and it was a nasty place in which to fight. The ground was uneven and rocky, and in the still, hot air thick streamers of battle smoke hung low among the trees. Men crouched or even lay down to try and see their foes; by its muzzle flashes an enemy line became known. In this short-range fighting the Irish Brigade, equipped mostly with .69-caliber smoothbores firing buck-and-ball cartridges (three buckshot, one ball), had a decided advantage. Kelly’s lines and Zook’s soon became entangled in the smoke and, reported Major Peter Nelson of the 66th New York, “we were in a deplorable state of confusion.” Straightening out the confusion in the heat of battle was made all the harder by the backwardly aligned formations.

  With his advance stalled and under growing pressure, Kershaw rode quickly to the rear to find General Paul Semmes, whose brigade was assigned to follow him in support. Kershaw wanted Semmes’s Georgians to fill the gap between his brigade and Tige Anderson’s, and Semmes promised to do so. His brigade had hardly started forward, however, before Semmes was fatally wounded. Returning to the front, Kershaw realized he was becoming outgunned and would be unable to hold his position much longer. He ordered a measured withdrawal through the woods to better positions on the Rose farmstead. At about the same time, on the Union side of the lines, General Caldwell was committing his last brigade, under Colonel John Brooke, to the fight. It was Caldwell’s thought for Brooke to relieve Cross’s brigade, which had been first to engage and must now be nearly out of ammunition.23

  Brooke pushed his men rapidly through the Wheatfield. When they came under the enemy’s guns, he halted and ordered fire to be returned at will. According to Daniel Bingham, colonel of the 64th New York, “The men were firing as fast as they could load. The din was almost deafening….” After a few minutes of this, Brooke ordered bayonets fixed for a charge. With help from some of Cross’s regiments, Brooke’s Yankees pushed right into Rose’s Woods and swept Tige Anderson’s brigade back through the trees. The Georgians were by now nearly fought out and low on ammunition, and this fresh tidal wave of Yankees was more than they could handle. At one point, when the advance seemed to falter as it came up against Semmes’s fresh brigade, Colonel Brooke seized the flag of the 53rd Pennsylvania and led the charge personally.

  Brooke’s men finally checked up on the western edge of Rose’s Woods. Their dramatic advance, combined with Kershaw’s gradual but steady withdrawal to the Rose farm, marked the first sustained Federal gain in the afternoon’s fighting. Colonel Brooke, with pardonable overstatement, summed up his attack: “Pressing forward, firing as we went, we drove back the first line of the enemy, capturing a great number, and then charging the second line, drove it from its almost impregnable position on a rocky crest.” The Wheatfield and most of Rose’s Woods were now regained, and thanks to the Second Corps, a good portion of the Third Corps’ broken line appeared to be restored … for at least the moment. 24

  AT THE SAME TIME John Caldwell’s counterattack was sweeping the Confederates out of the Wheatfield and through Rose’s Woods, some three-quarters of a mile to the east the bitter struggle for Little Round Top was reaching its own dramatic finale. Both contestants here—the four regiments of Strong Vincent’s Fifth Corps brigade and the six Texas and Alabama regiments from Law’s and Robertson’s brigades of Hood’s division—had fought to the verge of mutual exhaustion. Lacking unified command, the Confederate attacks had been raggedly executed, grinding down the defenders, certainly, but failing so far to dislodge them.

  The failure of their frontal attacks turned the Rebels toward the Yankee flanks, which began to appear vulnerable. On the Federal far left, William Oates’s determined efforts to turn the 20th Maine had pushed the Mainers’ line almost back on itself. Oates set about collecting his remaining strength for one final effort. On the Federal far right, meanwhile, the 4th Texas, joined now by the 48th Alabama, had discovered a soft spot.

  Colonel Vincent’s right-hand regiment, the 16th Michigan, was the smallest of the brigade’s regiments to begin with, and then its two largest companies were deployed as skirmishers to tie the line to the defenders of Devil’s Den. This detachment and the casualties suffered in the first Rebel assaults left the 16th Michigan manning its hillside perch with hardly 150 men. Now, as the Texans and Alabamians once again scrambled up the rocky slopes toward him, the 16th’s Lieutenant Colonel Norval Welch became rattled and took a misstep. He later claimed that some higher authority—he thought General Sykes or Weed, although neither was then on the scene—called on the regiment to pull back up the hill to a more defensible spot, and one of his lieutenants, by an “entirely unwarrantable assumption of authority,” ordered the colors back. Be that as it may, Welch and his color guard and a goodly number of his men left the battle line for safer ground to the rear. Oliver Norton, brigade bugler, subsequently found Colonel Welch with his regimental colors and “some forty or fifty of his men” well behind the lines.25

  Strong Vincent saw the 16th Michigan’s flag going back and the right of his line crumbling, and he rushed over to try and rally the remaining defenders and almost immediately was shot down with a mortal wound. Seeing the Yankee colors in retreat, the Rebels redoubled their efforts.

  Already that afternoon Little Round Top had witnessed two miraculously timely arrivals, in the persons of Gouverneur Warren and Strong Vincent, and now it witnessed a third—Paddy O’Rorke, leading the 140th New York into the breach. Patrick H. O’Rorke, West Point ‘61, had ranked number one in the Academy’s first Civil War graduating class and been marked highly promising. He took command of the new 140th New York in September 1862, and July 2 would be its (and his) first serious action. Following General Warren’s directive, he led his regiment up the rocky east slope of Little Round Top with all speed and then traced the sounds of the fighting to the south crest. While his men hastily formed line of battle, he inspected the scene before him and recognized the crisis building on the right.

  Union defenders of Little Round Top on July 2: Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, left, 20th Maine, and his brigade commander, Colonel Strong Vincent. (National Archives–U.S. Army Military History Institute)

  Returning to his troops, Paddy O’Rorke swung off his horse and waved his sword and shouted, “Down this way, boys!” and led the way to where what remained of the 16th Michigan was about to fall under the Rebels’ rush. “It was about this time,” wrote Sergeant James Campbell, “that Col. O’Rorke, cheering on his men and acting as he always does, like a brave and good man, fell, pierced through the neck by a Rebel bullet.” His enraged men rushed past their fallen colonel and into the vacated line, meeting a storm of fire and delivering a storm of fire of their own. As for Colonel O’Rorke’s killer, one of the first New Yorkers to reach the battle line wrote, “that was Johnny’s last shot, for a number of Companies A and G fired instant
ly.” It was said that this particular Johnny was hit, by actual count, seventeen times.

  The 140th arrived at the last possible moment to seize and hold the endangered flank. As one of its men summed up, “We soon got our position, when we opened on them. They soon fell back, our boys being too much for them; but they did cut us down dreadfully while we were advancing.” The 140th New York engaged some 450 men that afternoon, and in those brief moments a quarter of them were casualties. On the other side, the 4th Texas and 48th Alabama stumbled back down the stony slope for the final time that afternoon, having lost a quarter of their men and leaving at least the right of the Federal line secure.26

  On the opposite flank the Little Round Top drama rushed toward another climax. Here the 20th Maine, like the 140th New York, was undergoing its first real test of battle. Colonel Oates grimly prepared one last all-or-nothing assault, and Colonel Chamberlain grimly pondered his diminished numbers and depleted ammunition. Oates’s own manpower was considerably diminished. The 47th Alabama on his left was demoralized by the failed attacks and had lost its commander, lying badly wounded between the lines, and (wrote Oates) the leaderless men “broke and in confusion retreated back up the mountain.” Oates would have to make his attack with just his own 15th Alabama.

  He strode along his line, crying “Forward, men, to the ledge!” but in the smoke and the din of musketry he could not be easily seen or heard. He would have to lead by example: “I passed through the column waving my sword, rushed forward to the ledge, and was promptly followed by my entire command in splendid style.” From one of his fallen men he paused to snatch up a rifle and fire off several shots of his own. The Alabamians managed to gain the ledge and there was a savage, often hand-to-hand struggle as they tried to hold it. As Chamberlain remembered the scene, “The edge of conflict swayed to and fro, with wild whirlpools and eddies. At times I saw around me more of the enemy than of my own men: gaps opening, swallowing, closing again with sharp convulsive energy….“The 20th’s company officers held their wavering line together by gripping their swords in both hands and pressing the blades flat against the men’s backs. There was a desperate scramble for the 15th Alabama’s flag, and it was saved, said Oates, only when Sergeant Pat O’Connor “stove his bayonet through the head of the Yankee, who fell dead.” At the peak of the action Colonel Oates witnessed his brother, Lieutenant John Oates, fall mortally wounded.

  With clubbed muskets and in many cases their last shots—“In the midst of this,” said Chamberlain, “our ammunition utterly failed”—the Mainers finally regained control of the ledge and forced Oates’s exhausted Alabamians back down the slope. As Oates tried to rally his scattered troops, he sent for support to his left, to what was now the next Confederate regiment in line, the 4th Alabama. His aide soon returned to say that there was no sign of anyone on the left, except Yankees. At the same time, it was reported that musketry was coming at the Alabamians from the far right. Colonel Oates could see no alternative now but retreat. At his signal, he told his officers, “we would not try to retreat in order, but every one should run in the direction from whence we came….“But before he could give the signal, the matter was wrenched out of his hands.27

  Joshua Chamberlain also took a decision, one he (like William Oates) believed to be inevitable. His men around him were displaying empty cartridge boxes; his line, he thought, was thinned far beyond the point of holding off another charge. At the foot of the slope in front of him he saw the “hostile line now rallying in the low shrubbery for a new onset.” All Chamberlain could think to do now to meet his orders to hold the position “at all costs” was to launch a charge of his own, to surprise and break up the Rebels before they could form for another attack.

  Just then Lieutenant Holman Melcher, commanding Company F at the center of the line, came to Chamberlain with a plea to let him advance his company to rescue some wounded comrades trapped between the lines. “Yes, sir, in a moment!” said Chamberlain. “I am about to order a charge!” His order “Fix bayonets!” ran swiftly along the line. Lieutenant Melcher returned to his company and immediately led it forward, along with the regimental colors. With a shout the right half of the 20th Maine charged down the slope.

  The order to charge had not reached the left wing before the right started forward, but Captain Ellis Spear, commanding on the left, saw the colors advancing and quickly seized the moment. “The left took up the shout and moved forward,” Spear recalled; “…every man eager not to be left behind, the whole line flung itself down the slope through the fire and smoke upon the enemy.” The effect was stunning, as explained by Private Elisha Coan of the 20th’s color guard: “The rebel front line, amazed at the sudden movement, thinking we had been reinforced … throw down their arms and cry out ‘don’t fire! We surrender,’ the rest fled in wild confusion.”

  To meet the earlier flanking assaults, the left of Chamberlain’s line had been sharply refused until it was facing more east than south. The Confederates here, abruptly confronted by a rushing line of yelling Yankees, took the shortest route to safety, which was south toward Round Top. In its pursuit, then, Captain Spear’s left wing executed a spectacular, entirely spontaneous right wheel that swept all before it. To complete the Confederates’ discomfort, Captain Walter Morrill’s Company B, sent out earlier by Chamberlain as a skirmish-line guard on the far left, saw Rebels fleeing straight across its front and unleashed a murderous fire. By the time Colonel Oates issued his retreat order, the retreat was in full swing. “When the signal was given,” Oates admitted, “we ran like a herd of wild cattle.”

  The woods that covered the saddle between Little Round Top and Round Top now became a wild tumult of smoke and gunfire and running men—and fallen men. Corporal William Livermore of the Yankee color guard described the not often seen spectacle of fleeing Confederate soldiers: “Some threw down their arms and ran, but many rose up, begging to be spared. We did not stop but told them to go to the rear, and we went after the whipped and frightened rebels, taking them by scores….”

  Colonel Chamberlain, right in the midst of this melee, suddenly came face to face with a defiant Rebel lieutenant who leveled his pistol at him and pulled the trigger. Somehow the shot went wide and Chamberlain knocked the pistol away with his sword and forced the man’s surrender.28

  Finally, well up the slopes of Round Top, the Confederates turned and made a stand and held back their pursuers. Chamberlain ordered recall. As his triumphant companies rejoined their colors they gave three cheers. The 20th Maine—and especially its colonel—had passed the test of battle with those colors flying. Chamberlain and Oates each lost about one-third of their numbers in this head-to-head struggle on the Potomac army’s far-left flank. Chamberlain would claim the capture of 368 Rebels from various regiments, but by Confederate count the total of prisoners lost from the six regiments engaged at Little Round Top came to 218; there was surely miscounting on both sides.

  As gallant and dramatic as were the exploits of the 20th Maine and its commander on July 2, they by themselves did not save Little Round Top for the Union. Colonel Oates, whose own conduct and that of his 15th Alabama was easily as gallant as that of the Mainers, spoke truthfully when he later admitted, “Had I succeeded in capturing Little Round Top isolated as I was I could not have held it ten minutes.” Indeed it was Strong Vincent’s entire brigade that won Little Round Top, a triumph then ensured by the arrival of Charles Hazlett’s battery and Stephen Weed’s Fifth Corps brigade, spearheaded by the 140th New York. 29

  The Union’s Little Round Top victory was drenched in blood. Vincent’s brigade and the 140th New York together suffered 485 casualties, or just over 27 percent of those engaged. Command casualties included Colonel Strong Vincent mortally wounded and Colonel Patrick O’Rorke of the 140th New York killed. Even as the victory was sealed there came two additional command casualties. Brigadier General Stephen H. Weed had hardly arrived on the hill with his brigade when a Confederate bullet felled him with a mortal wound. Wee
d was only recently transferred from the artillery to an infantry command, and in extremis he called for his friend, artillerist Charles Hazlett. As he bent close to hear Weed, Hazlett was shot in the head and fell across his friend’s body. Speechless and insensible, Hazlett died within the hour. Stephen Weed was borne to the rear where his aide sought to comfort him. “General, I hope that you are not so very badly hurt,” he said. Weed replied, “I’m as dead a man as Julius Caesar.” And so he was.30

  GENERAL CALDWELL, having watched in satisfaction as his Second Corps division retook the Wheatfield and swept the Rebels out of Rose’s Woods, rode to the rear and made the rounds seeking reinforcements to secure his gains. He was explaining his need to General Romeyn Ayres, whose Fifth Corps division had just reached the field, when a concerned Lieutenant William Powell of Ayres’s staff interrupted. “General,” he said to Ayres, “you had better look out, the line in front is giving way.” In what Powell would remember as a rather sharp manner, Caldwell turned to him and said, “That’s not so, sir; those are my troops being relieved.” Lieutenant Powell would not be put off. A few moments later he interrupted again: “General Ayres, you will have to look out for your command. I don’t care what anyone says, those troops in front are running away.” At that Caldwell looked again, and then without a word spurred away to see to this latest turn of the battle.31

  Like previous turns that bloody afternoon, it was an injection of fresh troops that changed the course of the fighting. From McLaws’s division Longstreet had committed the last of his forces, the brigades of William Barksdale and William Wofford. The fiery Barksdale had been champing at the bit. He was posted opposite the Peach Orchard and enduring enemy artillery fire, and when Longstreet came past he rushed up to him and said, “I wish you would let me go in, General; I would take that battery in five minutes!” “Wait a little,” said Old Pete, “we are all going in presently.”