Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

  The artillery contest here was prolonged and particularly intense. Porter Alexander, commanding Longstreet’s artillery, had posted his battalion along Seminary Ridge only some 600 yards from the Federal positions, and at that range the effects were deadly. “I don’t think there was ever in our war a hotter, harder, sharper artillery afternoon than this,” Alexander later wrote. He estimated casualties in his six batteries on July 2 to be almost 100 men and more than 75 horses. The ordeal for infantry supporting the batteries was equally severe. When the Rebel guns ceased firing so that Barksdale’s infantry might advance, there was actually a sense of relief among the Yankee infantrymen; at least now they could fire back.

  One of the ideas behind attacking en echelon was to invite the enemy to commit his forces against each advance and so leave an easier path for the next advance in the line. So it happened now. Joseph Kershaw might complain about Barksdale not advancing in concert with him—“I have always believed that had he been shoulder to shoulder with me nothing could have stopped us,” Kershaw later wrote—yet with Caldwell’s Yankee division fully committed to stopping Kershaw, there was no reserve behind the first line of defenders to check Barksdale. And that first line of defenders was not up to its task.

  The Peach Orchard, at the intersection of the Emmitsburg and Millerstown roads, formed the blunt point of Sickles’s salient. The defenders here were the Pennsylvanians of Charles Graham’s brigade, Birney’s division. Graham’s brigade mustered six regiments, but one of them was diverted to supporting artillery along the Millerstown Road, and a second one frittered away its ammunition on skirmishing duty and was sent to the rear. That left four regiments, barely a thousand men, to cover a front of some 500 yards from the Peach Orchard northward to the lane leading to the Abraham Trostle farm. At the center of this line were the six Napoleons of Battery E, 1st Rhode Island Light, with support on the left from a two-gun section of Captain James Thompson’s Pennsylvania battery. Against this array now marched, in compact line of battle, the 1,600 Mississippians of Barksdale’s brigade.

  McLaws’s aide G. B. Lamar watched General Barksdale: “He was in front of his brigade, hat off, and his long white hair reminded me of the ‘white plume of Navarre.’ I saw him as far as the eye could follow, still ahead of his men, leading them on.” A man in the Union Second Corps was also watching: “We see the long gray lines come sweeping down upon Sickles’ front, and mix with the battle smoke; now the same colors emerge from the bushes and orchards upon his right, and envelop his flank in the confusion of the conflict.” 32

  Captain John Bucklyn’s Rhode Island battery was the first target of Barksdale’s assault. Captain Bucklyn’s guns were posted along the Emmitsburg Road on the Sherfy farm, with one section in Mr. Sherfy’s flower garden. “I fire slow and carefully,” Bucklyn entered in his diary. “Men and horses fall around me. The rebel infantry advance to within 40 yards of me and give me a volley…. I limber up and move slowly to the rear…. I have got a case shot through my left shoulder and feel faint. My battery is torn and shattered and my brave boys have gone, never to return. Curse the rebels.” Bucklyn would count his day’s casualties as 30 men and 61 horses.

  The 21st Mississippi, under the redoubtable Benjamin Humphreys, bore down hard against the critical point in Graham’s line, his left, held by the 68th Pennsylvania in the Peach Orchard. The gap between Graham’s brigade and de Trobriand’s had plagued General Birney throughout the fight, and now it was firmly and finally exploited by the Rebels. The 68th’s colonel, Andrew Tippin, faced the 21st Mississippi coming directly at him, the 17th Mississippi moving against his right flank, and he no doubt sighted in the distance Wofford’s Georgia brigade bearing down on the gap on his left, and it all became too much to bear. “We held the position as long as it was possible to hold it,” he would insist, and that was likely the truth—Colonel Tippin lost very close to half his regiment in those few minutes.

  The Yankee batteries sited along the Millerstown Road and their supporting infantry now had to fall back or be swept up by Barksdale’s Mississippians or Wofford’s Georgians or by both. Leaving Wofford’s brigade and his 21st Mississippi to continue eastward along the axis of the Millerstown Road, General Barksdale turned the rest of his brigade northward against Graham’s remaining regiments. They tumbled like dominoes. The 57th Pennsylvania, for example, scattered among the Sherfy outbuildings, was unable to change front soon enough against the advancing Rebels. One of Colonel Peter Sides’s officers pointed out their predicament, and Colonel Sides agreed: “Yes, I think we will go now.” Even then it was too late, and the 57th Pennsylvania lost 115 men this day, half of them prisoners; Colonel Sides was among the wounded.

  Graham’s brigade went reeling back toward Cemetery Ridge, carrying General Graham along in the tide of fugitives. The general had two horses shot under him, then a shell fragment hit him, and finally a bullet struck him in the upper body. He managed to turn command over to Colonel Tippin of the 68th Pennsylvania, but refused any aid, and the last Tippin saw of him he was limping toward the rear. Before long, however, General Graham was overtaken by the 21st Mississippi and made a prisoner.

  The brigades of Brigadier Generals Joseph Kershaw, left, and William Barksdale spearheaded the July 2 assaults by McLaws’s Confederate division. (U.S. Army Military History Institute–Library of Congress)

  The 141st Pennsylvania, supporting a battery along the Millerstown Road, was the last of Graham’s regiments to retreat, and it paid a terrible price for its stubborn resistance. Of the 209 men the 141st carried into battle, 149 became casualties. The entire color guard was lost, and it was Colonel Henry Madill who brought the colors off. With perhaps twenty of his men Madill was making his labored way across the Trostle farm when he encountered a frantic Dan Sickles. “Colonel!” Sickles cried, “for God’s sake can’t you hold on?” Colonel Madill pointed to the forlorn remnant of his regiment and said, “Where are my men?“33

  General Sickles had tried to shore up his collapsing Third Corps front by shifting troops about to meet each new threat. He cannibalized George Burling’s brigade of Humphreys’s division, for example, sending individual regiments here and there to try and fill gaps after they opened—always too little and too late—until poor Colonel Burling had no troops at all and wandered haplessly into Humphreys’s headquarters. The thoroughly professional Andrew Humphreys was infuriated by what he took to be Sickles’s amateurish actions. “Had my Division been left intact,” he told his wife shortly after the battle, “I should have driven the enemy back, but this ruinous habit (it don’t deserve the name of system) of putting troops in position & then drawing off its reserves & second line to help others, who if similarly disposed would need no such help, is disgusting.”

  As the Mississippians pushed toward Sickles’s corps headquarters near the Trostle barn, general and staff set off for the rear. Just then a solid shot caught Sickles in the right leg and all but tore it off. He was placed on a stretcher and a tourniquet applied, then borne off to an aid station. Game to the end, Sickles puffed jauntily on a cigar as he was carried away. That evening his leg was amputated, and he was rushed to Washington for recuperation. (An officer in the Second Corps, commenting privately on Sickles, expressed the sense of relief common within the Potomac army’s officer corps: “The loss of his leg is a great gain to us, whatever it may be to him.”) The corps command was turned over to the senior general, David Birney, and General Meade called on Winfield Hancock for another brigade for the left. When Meade learned of Sickles’s wounding, however, he put Hancock in charge of the Third Corps as well as the Second. For the first time this long afternoon, the Federal left wing would have one overall commander.34

  Until Hancock could exercise that overall command, the Federals’ left continued the fight largely without central direction. Before he was wounded, Sickles had dashed along his cracked and breaking lines like the little Dutch boy at the dike, seeking to commandeer help from any quarter. As the Fifth Corps brigades r
eached the field, General Sykes was ordered by Meade to keep his formations intact instead of handing them over piecemeal to the Third Corps; this afternoon more than ever George Meade had little reason to trust Dan Sickles. Sykes was prompt to dispatch two brigades, Vincent’s and Weed’s, to hold Little Round Top. As for Tilton’s and Sweitzer’s brigades and Romeyn Ayres’s two brigades of regulars, Sykes seems to have intended them simply to act as a backup line of defense behind Sickles’s salient, employing them on a wait-and-see basis that had no connection with Sickles himself.

  John Caldwell, when he led his Second Corps division into the struggle for the Wheatfield, came closest to heading a unified command. Yet even then it was a matter of personal, time-consuming negotiations. After committing his last brigade, Brooke’s, Caldwell sought the support of Sweitzer’s brigade of the Fifth Corps. He rode up to Sweitzer “in haste” and explained that Brooke “was driving the enemy like hell over yonder in the woods,” pointing beyond the Wheatfield, and that he needed Sweitzer’s help. Sweitzer said he was willing but could act only on the orders of his superior, General Barnes. Caldwell then hurried off to find Barnes. The punctilious Barnes was agreeable to the request, but would not release Sweitzer without the formality of an exchange of orders and not until he had the troops drawn up and imparted a few “patriotic remarks” to them.

  Caldwell was conducting a similar negotiation with General Ayres for the support of Ayres’s two brigades of regulars when it was pointed out to him that it was his troops that were streaming out of Rose’s Woods in hasty retreat. Caldwell could not at first believe the abrupt turn of events. After he had rushed off to find out what was going on, the veteran Ayres pointed out to his staff that there was no doubt about those troops being in flight. “A regiment does not shut up like a jack-knife and hide its colors,” he explained, “without it is retreating.“35

  What triggered this retreat was Wofford’s Georgia brigade. Advancing on Barksdale’s right rear, it drove into the gap between the Peach Orchard and de Trobriand’s old position at Stony Hill. The Georgians were an especially welcome sight to Kershaw’s weary South Carolinians, trying to sort themselves out on the Rose farm. A 2nd South Carolina officer shouted to his men, “That’s help for us!” and rallied them for a renewed advance.

  William Wofford was a self-made, aggressive officer who on attack made himself highly visible. As his brigade passed through Alexander’s gun line the artillerists raised “a thousand cheers,” and a gunner watching Wofford wrote afterward, “Oh he was a grand sight, and my heart is full now while I write of it….” Longstreet was there too, seeing the men into the fight, and as the Georgians strode past him they raised a cheer of their own. Old Pete’s response was tart: “Cheer less, men, and fight more!“36

  Wofford’s brigade seemed to have a particularly chilling effect on the Yankee defenders. A man in the 57th New York, of Zook’s brigade, watched apprehensively as “the Rebels in battalion front came from the opposite woods into the opening. They were marching steadily, with colors flying as though on dress parade, and guns at right-shoulder-shift. They looked harmless, but the lingering boys did not care to make a closer acquaintance and hurried on….” William Tilton’s Fifth Corps brigade, likewise intimidated, turned and marched to the rear. Captain Francis Donaldson, of the 118th Pennsylvania, Tilton’s brigade, noticed that “with dogged silence the men retired slowly and without apparent panic or hurry, for they were perfectly well satisfied of the impossibility of long holding their ground.”

  Wofford’s advance, guiding along the Millerstown Road and picking up Kershaw’s rallied men on the way, outflanked Caldwell’s Second Corps brigades that had retaken the Wheatfield and Rose’s Woods. John Brooke’s brigade, for example, out ahead on the western edge of the woods, was suddenly confronted from three directions by belligerent Georgians—Tige Anderson’s on the left, Paul Semmes’s in front, William Wofford’s on the right. Brooke had called on General Caldwell for help, but there was not time enough for any help to reach him. His retreat, said Brooke, was carried out in good order and “the whole command came off the field slowly,” firing as it retired. His men recalled matters rather differently. The misaligned formations surely added confusion to the orders, and it was soon every man for himself. “We went back, if not as fast and noisy as we went in, still the most of us made fair time,” Stephen Osborn of the 145th New York remembered; “the Johnnies were close behind … and yelling like mad.” General Brooke was wounded and only escaped with the aid of “a burly fellow under each arm.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Charles Morgan, chief of staff for the Second Corps, was shocked to see Caldwell’s division “flying to the rear,” seemingly without a shadow of organization. He discovered remnants of the Third Corps back as far as the Taneytown Road. “All attempts to form them or any of Caldwell’s division within reach of the enemy’s bullets was useless.” Morgan’s report of this incensed General Hancock, for Caldwell’s division had previously been his own command. But after learning the manner in which Caldwell had been trapped, Hancock concluded that “no troops on the field had done better.“37

  That as many of Caldwell’s men escaped as they did was due in part to Jacob Sweitzer’s Fifth Corps brigade. Sweitzer had dutifully marched into the Wheatfield with orders to support Caldwell’s advance, and ended up, at considerable cost, covering its retreat. Colonel Sweitzer soon found himself in a nasty crossfire coming from Rose’s Woods and Stony Hill. “Colonel,” said his flag bearer, “I’ll be damned if I don’t think we are faced the wrong way; the rebs are up there in the woods behind us, on the right.” That observation was confirmed by the right-hand regiment, the 4th Michigan, which reported hearing the heavy tread of marching men fifty yards behind them. Sweitzer recorded another aide telling him “that we were surrounded and in a damned bad shape.” Sweitzer refused his flanks, forming a salient, and directed a fighting withdrawal. At one point there was a savage hand-to-hand battle for the 4th Michigan’s flag, a battle won by the 4th’s Colonel Harrison Jeffords only at the cost of his life. Colonel Sweitzer’s horse was killed and he took a bullet through his hat. When there was time for a count, he found he had lost 420 of the thousand men he led into the Wheatfield.

  The collapse of Birney’s Third Corps division, the repulse of Caldwell’s Second Corps division, and the retreat of Barnes’s Fifth Corps reinforcements now left just Romeyn Ayres’s two small brigades of regulars in the Wheatfield. Seemingly energized by Wofford’s bold advance, the Confederates swarmed into the Wheatfield from three directions—Wofford’s brigade, Kershaw’s, Semmes’s, Tige Anderson’s, even some from Old Rock Benning’s brigade. With the exception of Kershaw’s South Carolinians, they were all Georgians, and they scented victory and tore wildly into Ayres’s regulars.38

  Sergeant Frederick Coriette, 14th Infantry, had anticipated an order to charge, but instead it was “about face” and so “we were cut to pieces…. I would not have given one cent for my life, and was half mad.” Rather than a hasty if disorderly retreat with every man for himself, the disciplined regulars were about-faced and marched to the rear “as if on drill.” It made an admirable spectacle, but in their ordered ranks scores were fated to be shot in the back—or, as it was phrased, “they allow themselves to be decimated without flinching.” The 11th Infantry, reported its commander bitterly, lost half its men “without inflicting the slightest damage upon the enemy.”

  The close pursuit was checked by the Fifth Corps’ Battery L, 1st Ohio Light, firing double canister over (and through) the regulars into the ranks of the charging Georgians. A man in the 3rd Infantry survived this friendly fire only because “I saw the artillery men waving their hats to lie low. I got behind a boulder with a number of my men when the battery opened….” How many of his comrades did not find shelter in time is not recorded.39

  The sun was low in the west now, glowing dull red in the drifting smoke, and Longstreet, after two hours of fierce struggle, after committing all his forces, was acro
ss the Emmitsburg Road and in control of Devil’s Den, Houck’s Ridge, Rose’s Woods, and the Wheatfield, and was driving northward beyond Trostle’s lane toward Cemetery Ridge.

  To keep pace, Porter Alexander initiated a charge of his own. In a spectacular rush, he limbered up his six batteries and drove them from their Seminary Ridge positions right onto the Emmitsburg Road ridgeline to furnish the infantry with close-in artillery support. His gunners were “in great spirits, cheering & straining every nerve to get forward in the least possible time….” When fences blocked the guns’ passage, the artillery’s Major James Dearing commandeered a group of Union prisoners, waving his sword and shouting, “God damn you, pull down those fences!” In moments the fences “literally flew into the air.” Colonel Alexander’s pledge, as he directed his gunners and urged them on, was to “finish the whole war this afternoon.“40

  SOLDIER-CORRESPONDENT Captain Samuel Fiske, from his vantage point in the Second Corps’ line on Cemetery Ridge, recorded his impressions as the battle rushed toward him: “The tremendous uproar of hundreds of cannon, the screeches and hisses of shells tearing through the air and bursting over our heads, and burying themselves in the earth at our feet, the sharp crack of musketry and whirring of bullets, the sulphurous canopy of smoke that soon darkened the air and made all things dim around us, the rapid movements of troops flying hither and thither to take up new positions, constituted altogether such a scene of excitement and confusion and grandeur and horror, as nothing but the simile of hell broke loose is at all adequate to describe.“41