Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

  George Meade was watching this maelstrom intently, anticipating the needs of his generals, then acting decisively to meet them. At the first report of Sickles’s deformed line, and even before Longstreet attacked, Meade had ordered Sykes’s Fifth Corps to brace the left. When it became clear that Sickles required rescuing, Meade called on Hancock for a division, and Caldwell’s was sent. Then, with Caldwell in retreat, Meade asked Hancock for an additional brigade, and for good measure assigned him Sickles’s corps as well as his own. When Sedgwick reached the field in advance of his Sixth Corps, Meade greeted him and directed him to support the threatened left. Finally, he would reach out to General Slocum on the right at Culp’s Hill for whatever could be spared of the Twelfth Corps, and even to the battered First Corps on Cemetery Hill. Meade was in the saddle most of this long afternoon and evening, taking many of these decisions based on what he saw personally, at one point riding close enough to the fighting that his horse was wounded.

  In striking contrast, the Confederate high command—with the notable exception of James Longstreet—was virtually static throughout the battle. General Lee, after returning from Longstreet’s column where he altered the direction of the opening attack, remained quietly at his field headquarters on Seminary Ridge. Colonel Fremantle, still perched in his oak-tree observation post, remarked on the fact that the commanding general seemed to be a spectator at his own battle. He reported Lee watching the fighting through his field glasses and sometimes consulting with General Hill or with Colonel Armistead Long of his staff. “But generally he sat quite alone on the stump of a tree.”

  To be sure, this was General Lee’s nature and practice. As he told the Prussian observer Justus Scheibert, he made his plans as perfect as possible and brought his troops to the battlefield; “the rest must be done by my generals and their troops, trusting to Providence for the victory.” Nevertheless, what could hardly have escaped Lee’s notice, since it was squarely in front of him, was the faulty disposition of Dick Anderson’s five brigades.42

  Anderson’s division, of A. P. Hill’s Third Corps, was intended to supply the finishing blow in Longstreet’s offensive. As Anderson understood his role, he would put his troops “in action by brigades as soon as those of General Longstreet’s corps had progressed so far in their assault as to be connected to my right flank.” Since Longstreet’s line (Anderson further understood) would be attacking “nearly at right angles with mine,” he expected that by the time Longstreet reached his right, the Yankees would be on the run northward, with Old Pete at their heels. Anderson would simply join in to roll up the enemy’s line—adding momentum, as it were, to a victory march. One of his brigadiers described the assignment as “holding all the ground the enemy yielded.” Therefore, at Hill’s direction, or at least with Hill’s approval, Anderson had his five brigades strung out in a row on a front a mile long, “covering” the enemy’s front to almost opposite Cemetery Hill.

  In writing thus in his report, Dick Anderson was reciting the original plan for the July 2 battle. But Lee had changed the plan even as the guns opened, and rather than attacking an exposed Federal flank and rolling it up northward, Longstreet’s two divisions found themselves for the most part attacking straight ahead, due east, seeking to break the enemy line. They made their attacks in depth—Hood and McLaws each striking powerfully on a two-brigade front, each backed by two brigades. After two hours or so of fighting, this change of course surely became evident to Anderson and his superior, A. P. Hill. Yet neither made any change in Anderson’s dispositions. Nor did General Lee intervene. In due course Anderson advanced on a wide front as originally planned, an attack that was all width and no depth. Anderson then compounded the misstep by putting only three of his five brigades fully into the fight.

  If Dick Anderson did little that afternoon, Powell Hill did less. Hill on July 2 remains a shadowy figure, just as he was on July 1. His health must have improved, for he was seen in Colonel Fremantle’s oak-tree observation post. What little is recorded of his activities places him with General Lee; nothing suggests he played an active role in the fighting; certainly he did nothing to direct or redirect Anderson’s efforts. Since Hill had been with Lee during much of the previous day’s action as well, it may be that he was simply feeling his way in his new corps commander’s role, imitating Lee’s hands-off style of management. Be that as it may, the Powell Hill of Light Division days would have been right up on the line directing his command.43

  At the time, it would not have occurred to General Andrew Humphreys that there was the slightest flaw in the Confederates’ tactics when they charged upon him and his division. As he explained to his wife, “the fire that we went through was hotter in artillery and as destructive as at Fredericksburg. It was for a time positively terrific….“The smashing of Graham’s brigade in the Peach Orchard completed the destruction of the left half of Sickles’s salient, leaving Humphreys, commanding the right half, to face attack from two directions. From his left came Barksdale’s triumphant Mississippians of McLaws’s division. From his front came Cadmus Wilcox’s yelling Alabamians of Anderson’s division.

  Humphreys was riven by conflicting missions. General Birney, initially taking over for Sickles, wanted him to anchor a new line tied to Little Round Top, and Humphreys tried to abide the order even as the enemy rendered it hopeless. He had only two brigades at hand, under Joseph Carr and William Brewster. His third brigade, his reserve, had been cannibalized by Sickles to plug gaps in the line, and now he had to cope with this new invasion of Rebels from the west. “Finally having driven back others, the enemy in my front advanced upon me,” Humphreys summed up for his wife, “while those on my left having forced off our troops also gave their attention to me.” He added, “I have lost very heavily.”

  “Now our time for action had come,” Edmund Patterson, 9th Alabama, entered in his journal, “…and as Gen’l Wilcox rode along down the line giving orders to charge, cheer after cheer filled the air almost drowning the sound of shells that were bursting above and around us.” The two batteries in Humphreys’s line were driven back, one of them leaving four of its six guns when the teams were shot down. Andrew Humphreys was old army, stubborn and disciplined and richly profane, and when he finally had to pull back, it was done slowly and with all deliberation. “Twenty times did I bring my men to a halt & face about,” he told his wife, “myself & Harry and others of my staff forcing the men to it.” John Gibbon of the Second Corps sent over two regiments to help cover the retreat, and Gibbon, veteran artillerist that he was, had his gunners lob solid shot over the heads of the retreating men into the ranks of their pursuers.

  Not every Yankee retreated in such a controlled fashion. One of Gibbon’s men remembered how Third Corps fugitives “came like a great billow, rushing with an irresistible force that no troops could check…. They swept over us, they stepped on or between the men and even tumbled over us….“Indue course what remained of Humphreys’s two brigades reached a newly forming line on Cemetery Ridge. General Hancock saw them there, crowded around their tossing regimental flags, still defiant. Their losses came to 1,600 men, 45 percent of those engaged. The 11th Massachusetts lost eight color bearers. In the 11th New Jersey more than half the men were casualties, including the three senior officers, leaving a lieutenant in command; then he too was wounded.44

  The retreat of Humphreys’s division took with it the last infantry support for the gun line Freeman McGilvery had established along the Millerstown Road. Captain John Bigelow, 9th Massachusetts battery, remembered Colonel McGilvery riding up and telling him that Sickles’s men had withdrawn, leaving his battery “alone on the field, without support of any kind; limber up and get out!” Bigelow’s was the last of the four batteries to go. Their particular nemesis here was Benjamin Humphreys’s 21st Mississippi, of Barksdale’s brigade. When these Mississippians broke through the Peach Orchard, they bowled straight into the flank of the gun line, very nearly collecting Judson Clark’s Battery B, New Jersey Light.
One Mississippian crept close enough to yell out, “Halt, you Yankee sons of bitches! We want those guns!” Corporal Samuel Ennis yelled back, “Go to hell! We want to use them yet awhile.” Clark got his guns away finally, losing twenty men and one caisson.45

  Colonel Humphreys’s Mississippians next set their sights on Bigelow’s 9th Massachusetts battery. This was the 9th’s first experience of battle, and now it was asked to carry out one of the more difficult artillery maneuvers—to “retire by prolonge firing.” Captain Bigelow realized that the Rebels would quickly overrun his guns if he stopped firing long enough to limber up. Instead, the prolonge, or towing rope, was hooked between gun trail and limber, allowing the piece to be dragged away without undue delay. “I say my battery retired by prolonge,” Bigelow later explained; “I should perhaps more properly say by the recoil of its guns, for the prolonges were only used to straighten the alignment….” The six Napoleons went back more than 400 yards this way, blasting away at their pursuers with canister, bounding backward in spurts of recoil.

  By the time it reached Mr. Trostle’s farmyard, the 9th had gained enough ground that Bigelow ordered the guns properly limbered up. Then Colonel McGilvery reappeared, with a forbidding order. Freeman McGilvery was another of those Union officers who on this 2nd of July met each fresh crisis with fresh resolve. He was a rugged Mainer who had followed an odd route—sea captain to artillery captain—to reach his present station as Henry Hunt’s lieutenant. McGilvery was stunned to find that behind the crumbling Third Corps line there was a quarter-mile or more of space on Cemetery Ridge containing nothing but stragglers. While he attempted to cobble together some sort of last-ditch artillery line to fill this void, McGilvery ordered the 9th Massachusetts battery to buy him the time. “I gave Captain Bigelow orders,” he wrote, “to hold his position as long as possible at all hazards….” In Bigelow’s phrase, “In other words the sacrifice of the command was asked in order to save the line.”

  Bigelow posted his guns in Trostle’s cramped farmyard, piling ammunition by each piece for quick firing, and loaded double canister for a fight to the death. The men of the 21st Mississippi obliged him. “When the enemy appeared breast high above the swell of ground, they were within 50 yards, and in close ranks,” Bigelow reported. “They attacked furiously, but the battery men double shotted every gun and swept them back. Again and again they rallied….” When the Yankees ran short of canister, they fired shell and case shot with fuzes cut short to explode at the muzzle.

  The Mississippians would be thrown back, rally and re-form, and come on again from three directions through the billowing smoke, “yelling like demons.” Finally they got in among the guns, and it was clubbed muskets against rammer staffs and handspikes. Colonel Humphreys saw “Lt. George Kempton … astraddle of a gun waving his sword and exclaiming ‘Colonel, I claim this gun for Company L.’ Lt. W. P. McNeily was astraddle of another, claiming it for Company E.” Two of the six guns were gotten away. Captain Bigelow, hit twice, escaped with the aid of his gallant bugler, Charles Reed. The 9th Massachusetts battery lost 28 men and 45 horses and four guns, but it won perhaps thirty minutes. That in the end proved to be enough. 46

  Bugler Charles Reed did this sketch of his 9th Massachusetts battery, commanded by Captain John Bigelow, under attack on July 2 by the 21st Mississippi of William Barksdale’s brigade. (Library of Congress)

  Some 300 yards east of the Trostle farm and across Plum Run, Colonel McGilvery used that time to patch together a new artillery line from all the bits and pieces of batteries he could commandeer. The cornerstone of his line was a fresh battery just up from the army’s reserve, the 6th Maine Light. Around the Mainers’ four Napoleons he corralled one gun here or a section there from batteries of his own reserve battalion, from the Second and Fifth corps, from a battery he had no time even to identify. With canister serving as a substitute for infantry support, the line held, but barely.

  Bigelow’s Massachusetts battery made its last stand near the Abraham Trostle barn, winning valuable time but losing four guns and forty-five battery horses. Photograph by Timothy O’Sullivan. (Library of Congress)

  Benjamin Humphreys’s Mississippians still had one charge left, and it was enough to overrun Battery I, 5th United States, as it unlimbered and to seize its four guns. Colonel Humphreys could see no support of his own, however, and he had already lost a third of his men. “I now saw we had advanced too far to the front for safety,” he explained, and reluctantly ordered his regiment back to the Trostle farm. The 21st Mississippi had made a remarkable run that afternoon. It broke up the left of the Yankees’ Peach Orchard line and captured Brigadier General Graham, it broke up the Yankees’ artillery line on the Millerstown Road, and it broke up two Yankee batteries and took eight of their pieces. Humphreys’s only regret was that he had no means to carry off the captured guns. 47

  AS THE FIGHTING in the Wheatfield and Peach Orchard accelerated and became more threatening, and as there was as yet no sign of an infantry assault against his right, General Meade proceeded to borrow from the right to salvage the left. This simple transaction was compromised by the continued obtuseness of Henry Slocum. Early in the day, when a spoiling attack by Slocum’s Twelfth Corps and Sykes’s Fifth was briefly contemplated, General Slocum got it in his head that by seniority he was thereby (and thereafter) “right wing commander.” This proved to be a thought no one at army headquarters shared. In any event, Slocum put Alpheus Williams in command of the Twelfth Corps, and Williams duly handed his division over to Thomas Ruger. General Sykes then took the Fifth Corps off to fight on its own, which left Slocum in command (so he believed) of the army’s right wing, now consisting of … the Twelfth Corps.

  There is no record of exactly what Meade asked of Slocum by way of reinforcements, but by the testimony of acting corps commander Williams it was a discretionary order—“to detach all I could spare, at least one division….” That fits with Meade’s actions that day regarding other front-line units, such as his calling on Hancock for a single Second Corps division to rescue Sickles. Williams dutifully marched Ruger’s division off Culp’s Hill and southward toward the fighting. As he left, he reminded Slocum of the necessity of retaining the Twelfth Corps’ other division, John Geary’s, in the Culp’s Hill lines. But for reasons he did not share with anyone, General Slocum—perhaps practicing what he regarded as a wing commander’s unbridled discretion—rejected the advice and ordered two brigades of Geary’s division to follow Ruger. That left only George Sears Greene’s brigade—some 1,400 men—on Culp’s Hill to face what was known to be Dick Ewell’s army corps.

  A dozen years later, in response to criticism, Slocum claimed that in fact Meade had called on him for the entire Twelfth Corps; he was able to hold back Greene’s brigade, he said, only by appealing to the general commanding. To be sure, by then General Meade was dead and the official record was silent on the matter, and Henry Slocum preferred not to be reminded of his serious misstep. On July 1 he had failed to exercise a commander’s discretion to march to the sound of the guns; on July 2, it may be said, he overexercised that discretion. And as it happened, Slocum’s exercise went for naught—John Geary lost his way and his troops never reached the battleground. 48

  As Alpheus Williams led Ruger’s division toward the sound of the guns, other Union reinforcements were also rushing to the battleground. Meade called on the First Corps on Cemetery Hill for help, and the first to march was George Stannard’s Vermont brigade, newly arrived from the Washington defenses. Hancock sent for his Department of Washington newcomers, George Willard’s brigade, to plug a gap in the line, and led it there himself. The last of the Fifth Corps’ divisions, Samuel Crawford’s Pennsylvania Reserves, was on the field, and Sedgwick’s hard-marching Sixth Corps was arriving. The burning question was whether all this new strength would be in time to prevent Longstreet and Dick Anderson from punching right through the shattered Union defenses.

  The final Confederate forces to be committed to the battle w
ere from Anderson’s division. Advancing quickly on Wilcox’s left was David Lang’s Florida brigade, smallest in the army—three regiments, engaging fewer than 750 men. It caught Andrew Humphreys’s retreating Yankees in the flank and added greatly to their discomfort. Colonel Lang said he did not remember “the dead lying thicker than where the Yankee infantry attempted to make a stand in our front.” Next in Anderson’s line of battle came Ambrose Ransom “Rans” Wright’s Georgia brigade. Thus four brigades—Barksdale’s of McLaws’s division, and those of Wilcox, Lang, and Wright of Anderson’s division—were now driving in an extended line toward the large gap where Caldwell’s division of the Second Corps had been pulled out to go to Sickles’s aid. Confronting them was Winfield Scott Hancock and a very sketchy patchwork of men and guns, held together largely by the dominating force of General Hancock’s personality.

  Nor did Hancock’s responsibility end there. He recognized he was being handed a dirty job when Meade put him in charge of Sickles’s corps in addition to his own. John Gibbon, to whom Hancock turned over the Second Corps, heard Hancock muttering at the change. “I was not surprised,” Gibbon wrote, “that he should utter some expressions of discontent at being compelled at such time to give up command of one corps in a sound condition to take command of another which, it was understood, had gone to pieces.” The Third Corps’ shattered front, plus the portion of the Second Corps’ front from which Caldwell’s division had been withdrawn, added up to perhaps a three-quarter-mile-wide gap that somehow had to be filled. The southern end of this gap—Little Round Top, the Wheatfield, the Trostle farm—would be the preserve of the Fifth and Sixth corps. Some way or another, Hancock would have to fill up the rest of the hole.

  “Hancock the Superb,” General McClellan had called him on the Peninsula. On the 2nd of July he might have been called “Hancock the Magnificent.” He was everywhere and saw everything and missed nothing. On this smoky, thunderously loud, immensely confusing battlefield, reinforcements often had no notion of where they were supposed to go. But Hancock knew. When Willard’s brigade, the Second Corps’ reserve, was sent off to the fighting, Hancock was there to lead it to where it was needed. Later, Captain Henry Abbott of Gibbon’s division watched as Hancock rode by at the head of a body of First Corps reinforcements “in the handsomest manner. He led them forward on horseback, with his hat off. They cheered him & as soon as we saw him we sent up a tremendous cheer.”