Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

  Lesser concerns caught Hancock’s eye as well, and roused his temper. When he saw a battery charging right through a marching infantry column, he collared the battery commander and told him in no uncertain terms, “if I commanded this regiment I’d be God Damned if I would not charge bayonets on you!” And he set examples. Inspecting the 19th Maine’s position, Hancock seized on Private George Durgin, on the far left of the formation, marched him out ahead a few dozen yards, and demanded in a loud voice, “Will you stay here?” Private Durgin realized he had little choice in the matter. “I’ll stay here, General, till hell freezes over,” he said. With a smile, Hancock ordered the 19th Maine to form on Private Durgin, and rode on.49

  Dan Sickles’s original push forward to the Peach Orchard had opened a half-mile gap between the Third and Second corps, further widened when Caldwell’s division was ordered to the Wheatfield. John Gibbon stretched William Harrow’s brigade in scattered fashion across this expanse in front of Cemetery Ridge. He posted the 15th Massachusetts and 82nd New York on the Nicholas Codori farm along the Emmitsburg Road, where they might cover Frederick Brown’s Battery B, 1st Rhode Island. Farther to the south, Gulian Weir’s Battery C, 5th U.S., was supported by the 19th Maine, and Evan Thomas’s Battery C, 4th U.S., by the 1st Minnesota. It was a stopgap arrangement at best, and now David Lang’s Floridians and Rans Wright’s Georgians proceeded to tear into it piece by piece.

  After pursuing Humphreys’s men, the Floridians turned their attention to Lieutenant Weir’s battery. They came on so fast and against such light opposition that Weir soon ran out of canister, the artillerist’s primary weapon against infantry. He limbered up but then was encouraged by the supporting fire of the 19th Maine and decided to try to stay and fight. But, wrote Weir, “The enemy were too close.” In the end he managed to get only three of his six Napoleons away.

  Winfield Scott Hancock led the Union Second Corps in the defense of Cemetery Ridge on July 2. (Library of Congress)

  Meanwhile, on the Codori farm, the 15th Massachusetts and 82nd

  New York faced the massed charge of Rans Wright’s Georgians. The Yankees here had piled up fence rails as a makeshift breastworks and, wrote one of them, “With a shout we sprang up on our knees and resting our muskets over the rails, we gave them one of the most destructive volleys I ever witnessed…. They hesitated, then reeled, they staggered and wavered slightly….“Butthe Georgians recovered quickly. Overlapping the Federals’ right, they killed the 15th Massachusetts’ Colonel George H. Ward and the 82nd New York’s Lieutenant Colonel James Huston, and both leaderless regiments soon “retired in some disorder….”

  The Georgians surged across the Emmitsburg Road and made straight for Lieutenant Brown’s Rhode Island battery. A Federal infantryman overrun by the charge tried to surrender, but “they spoke not a word to me but passed over and on, every reb’s eye seemed to be fixed on our artillery….” Brown’s gunners employed case shot, cutting their fuzes shorter with each firing, then switching to canister, then double canister. “And as our artillery fire cut down their men,” wrote the battery’s historian, “they would waver for a second, then close up and continue to advance, their battle flags fluttering in the breeze….” Wright’s men would not be denied, and swarmed into the battery. Lieutenant Brown got only three of his six guns off safely. The Georgians pushed on up Cemetery Ridge.50

  General Wright had noticed that Carnot Posey’s brigade on his left was not keeping pace, and he sent one of his aides back to Anderson to inform him of that fact. The aide returned with word that Posey’s orders would be repeated to him, and that meanwhile Wright should press on. What orders Anderson actually sent to Posey is unclear, but certainly they proved ineffectual. For some hours Posey’s Mississippians had been feuding with the Yankees over possession of William Bliss’s farm buildings midway between the lines, and now they simply renewed the feud more forcefully, capturing Mr. Bliss’s large brick barn, then settling down short of the Emmitsburg Road to snipe at the Federals at a distance. In their advance Wright’s Georgians talked some men of the 48th Mississippi, Posey’s right-hand regiment, into joining them (“Get up and fight!”), but that was the extent of the Mississippi brigade’s role in the assault.

  By far the oddest behavior, however, was William Mahone’s. Mahone’s Virginia brigade was the northernmost of Anderson’s five brigades on Seminary Ridge, and supposedly he would advance with the rest of the division. When he did not, Anderson sent a staff officer to order him forward. Mahone refused; General Anderson, he said, had personally told him to remain where he was. But, said the staff man, “I am just from General Anderson and he orders you to advance.” No, said stubborn Billy Mahone, he already had his orders from the general and he would stay put. And he did.

  At no time during the fighting that day was Dick Anderson at the front to direct or correct affairs. He did nothing, for example, about Mahone’s intransigence when it was reported to him. An angry Cadmus Wilcox would report that during the battle he sent his adjutant to General Anderson at his headquarters several hundred yards “back in the woods,” where he found the general’s horse tied to a tree “and all his staff lying on the ground (indifferent) as tho’ nothing was going on…. Iam quite certain that Gen’l. A. never saw a foot of the ground on which his three brigades fought on the 2nd July.“51

  EVEN AS RANS WRIGHT’S GEORGIANS strode toward a little copse of scrub oaks behind an angled stone wall on Cemetery Ridge—they would be credited (in retrospect) with reaching the “high-water mark” of General Lee’s July 2 offensive—the tide of the battle was already turning slowly but irrevocably away from the Confederacy. It was near sunset now, and all along the torn, smoking battleground, from the copse of trees southward to Little Round Top, the Union was striking back with fresh troops.

  When General Meade called on the Second Corps for an additional brigade for the embattled left, Hancock had turned to Alexander Hays’s division, then in the quietest sector of the line. Hays, in turn, selected George L. Willard’s brigade, posted in reserve. To Colonel Willard, Hays forthrightly announced, “Take your Brigade over there and knock the hell out of the rebs!”

  Willard’s brigade—39th, 111th, 125th, and 126th New York—had something to prove on this 2nd of July. Back in September 1862, during the Maryland campaign, these New Yorkers had been swept up by Stonewall Jackson when he captured Harper’s Ferry. The 126th New York was particularly humiliated when, barely three weeks in the army, it broke and ran trying to defend the post. “The Regiment,” wrote one of its men, “panted to remove that stigma.” The brigade was paroled after Harper’s Ferry and then served in the Washington defenses; today would mark its first opportunity for redemption. Hancock overtook Willard’s column as it marched to the battlefront and directed him to deploy behind Colonel McGilvery’s patched-together artillery line.

  After smashing through Graham’s brigade at the Peach Orchard, William Barksdale had turned his Mississippians northward against Andrew Humphreys’s division. With Wilcox’s help, Barksdale forced Humphreys into retreat, and then pushed his men on into the widening gap in the Federal line. The Mississippi brigade had now advanced perhaps a mile from its starting point, overcoming everything in its path but losing heavily, and fierce Barksdale continued driving it forward. When his lieutenants urged him to pause and regroup, his answer was emphatic: “No! Crowd them—we have them on the run. Move your regiments!” Suddenly, from behind the ridgeline in their front there was a solid line of men rising “as if from the earth and … moving down upon them.”

  Hancock had pointed out to Colonel Willard this advancing Rebel line threatening McGilvery’s guns behind Plum Run, and Willard issued the command “Forward!” and the brigade started down the slope. Someone called out, “Remember Harper’s Ferry!” and hundreds took up the cry. It so happened that Barksdale’s brigade had been at Harper’s Ferry in 1862, and chased away the rookie 126th New York, so redemption could be sweeter than the New Yorkers realized. “Men
fell at every step,” wrote a captain in the 111th New York. “We officers were kept busy closing the ranks as they were depleted and pushing on, not heeding the storm of metal.” The Mississippi regiments, disordered from their long advance, were not prepared to meet this hard-driving attack, and they fell back in confusion. General Barksdale rushed into the melee to rally his men and went down mortally wounded. He would die during the night, in a Union hospital. His opposite number, George Willard, died instantly when hit in the face by a shell fragment.

  One regiment from each brigade, the 39th New York and the 21st Mississippi, staged a separate contest of their own. The Mississippians, captors of eight Yankee guns, were attempting to turn the cannon on their former owners when the New Yorkers rushed them and drove them off after a sharp fight. One of those leading the charge with rifle in hand was Lieutenant Samuel Peeples, a battery officer determined to reclaim his guns. In due course Willard’s men had to pull back in the face of Porter Alexander’s gun line at the Peach Orchard, but Barksdale’s memorable charge was finally brought to a standstill. It cost Barksdale his life, and his brigade half its men. In his report General Hays recognized the redemption of Willard’s New York brigade: “The history of this brigade’s operations is written in blood,” washing away the Harper’s Ferry taint.52

  Alpheus Williams was meanwhile leading Ruger’s Twelfth Corps division up the east slope of Cemetery Ridge toward the sound of the guns. In elevating himself to wing commander, General Slocum had named Williams acting head of the Twelfth Corps, but now Williams acted as a divisional commander in directly putting his men into the battle. He encountered evidence of heavy fighting and a good many stragglers and wounded, he wrote, “but nobody seemed to know where to go in, nor did any of them offer to go in with us.” Then he came upon an old friend, Colonel McGilvery, who was delighted to see him and knew exactly where the infantry ought to go—to support his embattled gun line. Williams ordered in Henry Lockwood’s brigade, which had reached the army only that morning from its posting at Baltimore. These newcomers occupied Mr. Trostle’s woodlot and recaptured Captain Bigelow’s four abandoned guns in the process. Williams deployed the rest of Ruger’s troops to seal off the gap that had opened in front of McLaws’s division. 53

  After putting in Willard’s brigade, General Hancock was riding north on Cemetery Ridge behind Plum Run with a single aide when in the shadows and smoke he saw what he took to be some Third Corps troops in retreat. He hurried forward to rally them and in a moment the air around him was full of bullets, two of which wounded his aide. He ducked away and spurred back to seek something to plug this new break in the dike. All he found, alongside Evan Thomas’s battery of regular artillery, was a single, not very large regiment. “My God!” he exclaimed. “Are these all the men we have here? What regiment is this?” “First Minnesota,” answered Colonel William Colvill. In a fight Winfield Hancock was not one to waste words. Pointing to the flag of the enemy force that had fired on him, he barked, “Advance, Colonel, and take those colors!”

  With that, said Colonel Colvill, “I immediately gave the order ‘Forward double-quick,’ and under a galling fire from the enemy, we advanced….” The veterans of the 1st Minnesota, that state’s one regiment in the Army of the Potomac, had fought at First Bull Run and in every campaign since and they knew a forlorn hope when they became one, yet they fixed bayonets and charged anyway. Their swift, bold move took the Rebels by surprise—these were Cadmus Wilcox’s Alabamians—and sent them scrambling backward. “The first line broke in our front as we reached it, and rushed back through the second line, stopping the whole advance…,” wrote Lieutenant William Lochren; “they kept a respectful distance from our bayonets….” The Alabamians soon recovered and opened a devastating return fire. The Yankees sought what cover they could in the thickets along Plum Run and in the stream bed itself. But the Rebel fire overlapped their line and losses mounted alarmingly. Colonel Colvill was an early casualty, and before long not a single field officer was left standing. Company captain Nathan Messick took the command.

  The 1st Minnesota made its charge with only some 260 men, and Wilcox had a considerable advantage in manpower, but he sensed that his brigade had lost its momentum. He attempted no counterattack. Thomas’s battery and other Federal guns were pounding the Alabamians, no support was forthcoming on either flank or from General Anderson, and they began taking fire from three directions. Seeing that he could neither go forward nor stay where he was, Wilcox ordered his men back. As their fire slackened, the Minnesotans, what few were left, fell back as well. They did not capture the Rebel flag as Hancock ordered, but they had plugged the gap long enough for reinforcements to arrive. The cost to the 1st Minnesota would be reckoned at 68 percent of those engaged, in hardly fifteen minutes of action. “I cannot speak too highly of this regiment and its commander in its attack…,” General Hancock would write.54

  On the Federal left, where the day’s fighting had started, substantial reinforcements (and the promise of more) were at last swinging the balance in the Union’s favor. The Fifth Corps division of Samuel Crawford had reached the battlefield now, and General Crawford could hardly wait to throw it into the breach. His two brigades of Pennsylvania Reserves—General-in-Chief Halleck had retained the third brigade for Washington’s defenses—were naturally expected to lead in the defense of their home state. General Sykes ordered one of Crawford’s brigades to support the other Fifth Corps troops on Little Round Top. That left the brigade of William McCandless to contend with the Rebels who had reclaimed the Wheatfield and were pushing ahead to the marshy ground along Plum Run, hoping to cut off Little Round Top.

  Crawford’s troops could not enter the fight until Romeyn Ayres’s regulars were off the field in front of them. Richard Auchmuty of the division staff watched the scene unfold: “Suddenly a sheet of fire swept the Regulars…. The rebels had flanked them. Up they rose, fell back a little way in good order, then broke and came in a disorderly mob back to our line, followed by the rebels, yelling like mad.” McCandless and his officers steadied the ranks as the regulars came through, then Crawford ordered the troops forward. “We advanced a little and fired a volley,” wrote Captain Auchmuty, “and then Crawford took a flag, and, followed by us all, rode out into the swamp. The brigade, only 1,400 strong, followed, cheering.”

  The flag the general took belonged to the 1st Reserves, whose flag bearer was resentful of this usurpation. As Crawford rode at the head of the brigade, leading it into the swirling battle, the lst’s flag bearer ran right alongside, clutching the general’s pants leg. When he was satisfied the troops were advancing properly, Crawford surrendered the colors to their very determined rightful owner.

  “Suddenly,” wrote Auchmuty, “a cheer came from the hills behind us, now crowded on every rock and tree by the runaways, as spectators, and the troops in position. I then saw that the rebels were running….” They were not in fact running. They were retreating on orders. Captain Auchmuty’s mention of “the troops in position” referred to the massed advance units of the Sixth Corps that were now visible not only to him but, on the other side of the line, to James Longstreet as well.

  It was dusk now and Longstreet had committed every man in his two divisions to the offensive—lacking George Pickett’s division, he had not a single soldier in reserve to secure what had been gained. In contrast, it was apparent that the Federals had substantial forces lined up, just waiting to be committed to the battle. William Wofford and his officers were angry at the pullback order. They had not been attacked in their forward positions on the Millerstown Road and their confidence was strong. The fiery Wofford, it was reported, “shook his pistol” at Longstreet in protest. But Longstreet saw the harsh reality of the situation. “We felt at every step the heavy stroke of fresh troops…,“he later explained. “We received no support at all, and there was no evidence of cooperation on any side. To urge my men forward under these circumstances would have been madness, and I withdrew them in good order t
o the peach orchard….“55

  On the far left of the Confederates’ mile-and-three-quarters-wide offensive, where Rans Wright was storming the center of the Cemetery Ridge line, the tide of battle also peaked. Wright’s Georgians crossed the Emmitsburg Road, overran Brown’s Rhode Island battery, advanced up the ridge, and collided violently with Alexander Webb’s brigade of the Second Corps. “They came up in splendid order passed through one of my batteries and arrived within about 25 yards of me,” General Webb told his wife, “when I opened fire with one regiment behind a fence.” The regiment behind that stone fence was the 69th Pennsylvania, whose historian described what happened next: “still came on the mad Georgians until they reach point-blank range of our rifles. We met their charge with such a destroying fire that they were forced back in confusion.” The moment he saw the enemy line begin to waver, Webb wrote, “I put in another regiment at a double-quick and gave them another volley…. In five minutes they ran….”

  The view on the evening of July 2 from Little Round Top, painted by Edwin Forbes from his battlefield sketch. The guns are those of Lieutenant Charles Hazlett’s Battery D, 5th United States. (Library of Congress)

  Much to his disgust, Rans Wright found himself all alone in the middle of the Yankee line—what seemed the middle of the Yankee army. Lang’s Floridians on his right were under attack themselves, and on his right Lang saw Wilcox fall back, and so in self-defense he fell back across the Emmitsburg Road. Carnot Posey’s Mississippi brigade on the left was nowhere to be seen. Second Corps batteries were blasting canister into Wright’s left flank, Webb’s brigade was blocking his advance in front, and Andrew Humphreys’s rallied command had opened fire on his right. The imaginative Wright entered in his report that “We were now complete masters of the field, having gained the key, as it were, of the enemy’s whole line.” All he lacked was support. Since that was not forthcoming, “with painful hearts we abandoned our captured guns, faced about, and prepared to cut our way through the closing lines in our rear.“56