Gettysburg
Page 41
Barlow’s wounding and capture on July 1, by Adelbert Ames. Leopold von Gilsa and Andrew Harris led Ames’s two brigades, both of which had been badly mauled on Wednesday. “You can now command your brigade easily with the voice, my dear Colonel,” von Gilsa’s aide told him; “this is all that is left.” Ames estimated the strength of his division at 1,150 men after yesterday’s battle; and after yesterday’s battle, Ames, like Howard, had little confidence in those men.
It appeared to General Howard that the attack, when it came, would open against his East Cemetery Hill position, and he deployed his infantry some 120 yards out ahead of the guns. Along the base of the hill was a stone wall paralleling Brickyard Lane that ran southward out of Gettysburg, and Ames posted his troops behind this barrier. On the left, toward the town, the wall made a right-angle turn, and manning this angle was Colonel Harris’s brigade—25th, 75th, and 107th Ohio, and 17th Connecticut. Forming the right half of the battle line was Colonel von Gilsa’s brigade—41st, 54th, and 68th New York, and 153rd Pennsylvania. Extending von Gilsa’s line was the 33rd Massachusetts from Orland Smith’s brigade. Not engaged on July 1, the 33rd regiment’s 490 men added an important reinforcement to Ames’s defense.
Jubal Early marched his attacking force out of Gettysburg and deployed it east of town. “Just before dark,” wrote Louisiana Captain William J. Seymour, “the solitary figure of old Gen. Early is seen emerging from one of the streets of the town and, riding slowly across the field in the direction of our position, the little puffs of dust that arise from around his horse’s feet show that the Federal sharpshooters are paying him the compliment of special attention. Presently the old General reaches us and after inquiring whether we are ready, gives the order to charge.”
Early arranged his assault on a two-brigade front—Harry Hays’s Louisiana brigade and Isaac Avery’s North Carolina brigade, with Hays in overall command. In support would be John Gordon’s brigade. General Early left Extra Billy Smith out on the York Pike to guard the division’s rear. Early understood (he later wrote) that this was to be a general attack, with Rodes’s division advancing on his right—and with A. P. Hill advancing on Rodes’s right. In writing thus, Early underscored yet another command failure in Hill’s Third Corps. Dorsey Pender’s division of the Third formed the link between Hill’s and Ewell’s corps. If Pender was scheduled to join the fighting on July 2, his division quite missed the signal. To be sure, Pender himself was wounded late that afternoon by a shell fragment (a wound that would prove mortal), but that did not excuse the lack of coordination between his division and Rodes’s. 7
The best view of the forming Rebel ranks was from Stevens’s 5th Maine battery posted on a knoll at the far right of the Union line. “Look! Look at those men!” called out one of the gunners, pointing across the darkening fields to hundreds of dim figures climbing over fences and taking up a battle line. Lieutenant Edward Whittier, commanding in place of the wounded Greenleaf Stevens, ordered case shot for the six Napoleons and opened fire “by battery.” According to a nearby infantryman, “suddenly, right over my head it seemed, there was a blaze, a crash and a roar as if a volcano had been let loose.” Stevens’s battery, being on the attackers’ flank, would maintain a steady, deadly fire throughout the assault. As the battery’s report put it, “enfiladed their lines, at a distance of 800 yards, with spherical case and shell, and later with solid shot and canister….”
From their starting point outside Gettysburg, Early’s forces had to make a giant wheel to their right to strike Ames’s line on East Cemetery Hill. Harry Hays’s five Louisiana regiments extended out from the pivot of the wheel. Isaac Avery’s three North Carolina regiments, on the outer edge of the wheel, had the longer march. All the Yankee guns that would bear now opened fire. Captain Michael Wiedrich’s Battery I, 1st New York Light, closest to the onrushing Louisianians, went to canister almost immediately. Before long all the batteries were firing canister, then double canister. When they ran out of canister they fired case shot without fuzes, the missiles exploding as they left the muzzles.
The guns sent great clouds of smoke roiling into the still air. In the growing dark a Twelfth Corps soldier returning to his lines saw a lurid glare lighting the sky ahead. “The smoke had settled down so thickly that the flashes of the artillery could only be seen glaring red as blood through it,” he wrote. “The thick clouds settled down over the hills, fields, and woods like a pall, illuminated at times with the crimson fire of the artillery as it flashed and burned against the sky.” He thought the scene, from a distance at least, was “magnificently grand.“8
For the infantrymen of the Eleventh Corps crouched behind the stone wall at the base of East Cemetery Hill, the scene before them—wide lines of men in butternut advancing apace through the dusk and the smoke and the din—was terrifying rather than magnificent. “But on, still on, they came, moving steadily to the assault, soon the infantry opened fire, but they never faltered,” recalled Colonel Harris in describing Hays’s Louisianians. “They moved forward as steadily, amid this hail of shot shell and minnie ball, as though they were on parade….” Hays’s brigade was best known as the Louisiana Tigers, a name synonymous in the Confederate army with hard fighting and high living. Now, whooping the Rebel yell, the Tigers stormed the stone wall with intent to seize the batteries on the hill behind.
The Confederate assault on East Cemetery Hill on the evening of July 2, sketched by Alfred Waud. The view looks westerly past Stevens’s Maine battery toward the cemetery gateway. (Library of Congress)
Just before the shooting started, General Ames had moved the 17th Connecticut from the center of Harris’s line over to the right, to better tie in with von Gilsa’s brigade. This left a gap, which Harris hastily tried to cover by stretching out his nearby regiments, the 25th and 75th Ohio, to fill the space. “This left my line very thin and weak,” he said. Now every man “could get to the stone wall … and have all the elbow room he wanted.” The Tigers pushed straight for this thinned line.
“Our orders were to shoot low,” wrote Ohioan Frederick Nussbaum, “and we mowed the Tigers down as they came up the hill.” Such shooting inflicted grievous losses, but the Louisianians resolutely closed up and continued on toward the wall. The closer they came the more they evaded the artillery fire, for a number of the Yankee guns could not depress their barrels enough to sweep the slope directly in front of them. Lieutenant Joseph Jackson, 8th Louisiana, described how “We ‘fotched up’ at a stone fence behind which mr. yank had posted himself and he did not want to leave. But with bayonets & clubbed guns we drove them back.” It had become so dark now, Lieutenant Jackson added, that no one could tell “whether we were shooting our own men or not.”
The two left-hand Federal regiments, 107th and 25th Ohio, were overwhelmed by this rush and stumbled back up the hill toward Captain Wiedrich’s New York battery. The Tigers, “yelling like demons,” were right on their heels. Angry artillerist Charles Wainwright entered in his diary that the Eleventh Corps’ German infantry “ran away almost to a man.” Yet he had to admit that Wiedrich’s cannoneers, also German, “fought splendidly,” making a hand-to-hand defense of their battery. There was wild, savage fighting among the guns. A Confederate flag bearer leaped on one of the guns to claim its capture and was instantly killed. Another man seized the flag and “with a wild shout” took the first man’s place, and then he was shot down. A third man, already wounded, climbed up on the gun with the flag and “waved it over his head with a cheer.” He soon went down in a hail of bullets. Wiedrich’s cannoneers meanwhile stood their ground, smashing at the Rebels with rammers and handspikes. One of them was seen to tear the rifle right out of a Tiger’s hands and run him through with the bayonet. “This would show,” Wainwright concluded, “that the Germans have got fight in them.” Whatever fault there was, he thought, must be with their officers.
General Schurz, over on the west side of Cemetery Hill, saw and heard the commotion, commandeered two nearby regiments, and
led them at the double-quick through streams of panicked stragglers to the fighting. In Wiedrich’s battery, Schurz wrote, “we found an indescribable scene of melee….” The Ohioans chased back earlier from the stone wall had rallied by the guns and were continuing the fight; indeed, the 107th Ohio captured the flag of the 8th Louisiana. The arrival of what Harry Hays described as “heavy masses” of Federal infantry now persuaded him to recall the Tigers. By Schurz’s description, “Our infantry made a vigorous rush upon the invaders, and after a short but very spirited hand-to-hand scuffle, tumbled them down the embankment.“9
Isaac Avery was leading the North Carolinians in place of Robert Hoke, wounded at Chancellorsville, and Colonel Avery apparently thought it would make a better impression on his new command if he led the advance on horseback, as he had on July 1. On this day, however, he was barely halfway to the target when he was hit in the neck by a bullet and knocked off his horse. Sensing the wound was mortal, Avery scrawled a last thought in a note to his second-in-command: “Major: Tell my father I died with my face to the enemy.”
The North Carolinians surged past their fallen leader. Bracing to meet them on the right of the line was the 33rd Massachusetts, whose colonel, Adin Underwood, watched a Rebel regiment—it was the 57th North Carolina—striding toward him through a storm of artillery fire: “The gaps close bravely up and still they advance. Canister cannot check them.” The range narrowed and behind the wall Colonel Underwood ordered the 33rd to engage: “My regiment opened a severe musketry fire on them, which caused gaps in their line and made it stagger back a little. It soon rallied and bravely came within a few feet of our wall….” Stevens’s Maine battery was less than 200 yards from the Rebels’ flank, point-blank range, firing double canister. The enemy’s line, Underwood reported, “which was almost on to us—their colors nearly within reach—was broken and finally driven back, leaving great heaps of dead and wounded just in front of us.”
Farther to the left, the Confederates found a tender spot. Von Gilsa’s four regiments had been roughly handled at Chancellorsville, and then again the day before north of Gettysburg. Now they were being thrust into the cauldron for a third time. For many of them their stay in this new battle line would be comparatively brief. Two adjacent regiments, 54th and 68th New York, were the first to break and retreat up the hill. A portion of the 41st New York, anchored to the 33rd Massachusetts, stayed and fought, but its left-hand companies joined in the retreat. On the other side of the break, the 17th Connecticut and the 153rd Pennsylvania also stood and made a fight of it. A nine-month regiment, the 153rd had seen its first action at Chancellorsville and its second on July 1, and now it was facing yet another charge by the Rebels’ Second Corps. The 153rd’s historian described the action at the wall as pure melee: “clubs, knives, stones, fists—anything calculated to inflict death or pain was resorted to.” Still, a second gap was now torn in the Federal line, and a second battery became a battle scene.10
This was Battery F–G, 1st Pennsylvania Light, Captain R. Bruce Ricketts. After the experiences of July 2, Captain Ricketts (like Colonel Wainwright) would wax opinionated about the Dutchmen of the Eleventh Corps. “As soon as the charge commenced,” Ricketts wrote, “they, although they had a stone-wall in their front, commenced running in the greatest confusion to the rear, hardly a shot was fired, certainly not a volley, and so panic stricken were they that several ran into the canister fire of my guns and were knocked over.” No doubt Ricketts’s view was colored by the fact that his battery suffered twenty casualties that evening—casualties he would always regard as unnecessary.
Jubal A. Early directed the July 2 attack on East Cemetery Hill. (Cook Collection, Valentine Museum)
After Henry Hunt visited Cemetery Hill during the late-afternoon artillery duel, he returned to the artillery reserve and selected Ricketts and his six 3-inch rifles to send to Colonel Wainwright to relieve whichever of his batteries most needed relief. Wainwright posted Ricketts in the center of the East Cemetery Hill gun line and told him, “this is the key to our position,… and must be held and in case you are charged here, you will not limber up under any circumstances, but fight your battery as long as you can.” That, as it happened, was precisely what Ricketts did. In his pocket diary he left a succinct description of his evening’s work: “My battery charged by Gen. Early’s division just at dusk—punished them terribly with our canister—They took my left gun, spiked it, killed six men, wounded 11 and took 3 prisoners. The boys fought them hand to hand with pistols, handspikes and rammers.”
During this struggle a Rebel lieutenant tried to seize the battery’s guidon, only to be shot by its guardian, Private James H. Riggin. Private Riggin in his turn was mortally wounded as he sought to carry off the guidon to safer ground. A Confederate who picked up the fallen banner was soon struggling for it with one of the gunnery sergeants. Then Lieutenant Charles Brockway stepped in. Having no weapon, Brockway smashed the Confederate in the head with a rock, and the sergeant finished off the interloper with his clubbed musket. That, finally, secured the battery’s guidon. All the while this was taking place in the battery’s left section, on the right Captain Ricketts was keeping the rest of his guns firing.11
At the same time that he volunteered support for Pop Greene on Culp’s Hill, said Winfield Hancock, “I heard the crack of musketry on Howard’s front…. Recognizing the importance to the whole army of holding the threatened positions, I directed General Gibbon to send a brigade instantly to Genl. Howard’s assistance….” As with all of Hancock’s decisions that 2nd of July, this one was fortuitous. The brigade sent was Samuel’S. Carroll’s, and Colonel Carroll was a soldier who did not waste time.
“We started for this point on the double-quick,” reported J. L. Dickelman of the 4th Ohio, “which soon became a dead run, many of our men throwing away their knapsacks and blankets in order to keep up with the mad dash.” They rushed through Evergreen Cemetery and past its gatehouse, and when Carroll was told that Rebels were in Ricketts’s battery ahead, he quickly formed up for a charge. Colonel Carroll possessed what was called a clarion voice, and now he was easily heard all across East Cemetery Hill: “Halt! Front face! Charge bayonets! Forward, double-quick! March! Give them hell!”
The Confederate attack had peaked and was starting to ebb when Carroll’s brigade made its dramatic entrance, yet it supplied the final and necessary push. Through Ricketts’s battery it went, the 14th Indiana in the lead, and chased Avery’s and Hays’s men down the hill and across the stone wall and Brickyard Lane and into the fields beyond. By now it was too dark to see anything ahead, and Carroll ordered his men to cease firing. According to Sergeant Dickelman, Carroll’s brigade always remembered July 2, 1863, as a “never-to-be-forgotten day.”
It struck Carroll that his brigade was out ahead of everyone else, and he called for the Eleventh Corps to form a connection with his troops. Word came back that General Ames would like Colonel Carroll and his men to stay where they were, for Ames had no confidence in any of his own men to hold that advanced line. Colonel Carroll had a blunt reply for General Ames: “Damn a man who has no confidence in his troops!” Corps commander Howard held the same view as Ames. When he tried to send a force from the Eleventh Corps to reinforce Carroll’s brigade, Howard could not find a single officer who would carry out the order. Why did he not have them shot, Colonel Wainwright asked. “I should have to shoot all the way down,” Howard replied; “they are all alike.” 12
Alfred Waud drew the July 2 night assault by the Louisiana Tigers on a Union battery on East Cemetery Hill. (Library of Congress)
Harry Hays, in common with most generals whose attacks have failed, laid the blame on a lack of support. On this occasion he was quite right. With matters hanging in the balance on East Cemetery Hill, Hays had sent to Gordon’s brigade to hurry forward to support the toehold he had won. He was told that Gordon had no orders to advance. With that, said Hays, “my only course was to withdraw my command,” and he returned his troops t
o their starting point.
Jubal Early had already concluded that to send Gordon forward “would have been a useless sacrifice,” and for having to make that decision he blamed Robert Rodes. Rodes, for his part, asserted that an attack on the right by his division “would be a useless sacrifice of life.” Rodes went on to suggest—which Dick Ewell confirmed—that the real blame lay farther to the right, with Powell Hill and Dorsey Pender’s division and their failure to attack. As General Early later explained, in reference to this contretemps, “an army in battle array is like a complicated machine,” requiring perfect coordination or “all the parts are powerless or are thrown out of joint.“13
There was nothing wrong with General Rodes’s resolution. In fact, it was he who that afternoon thought the enemy on Cemetery Hill was astir and suggested to Early a joint attack “just at dark.” But Robert Rodes was new to divisional command, and he seems to have greatly underestimated how long it would take to move his five brigades out of Gettysburg’s narrow streets and deploy them west of the town for an assault. By the time they were in position, Early’s assault was over. Even after this misjudgment, Rodes might have gone ahead but for the advice of his two most reliable brigadiers, Dodson Ramseur and George Doles. Ramseur edged forward to reconnoiter Cemetery Hill in the moonlight and saw two ranks of infantry behind stone walls, and artillery “in position to pour upon our lines direct, cross, and enfilade fires.” When Doles concurred with Ramseur in this report, Rodes canceled the attack. To be sure, those two ranks of infantry were Dutchmen of the shaky Eleventh Corps, but General Rodes had no way of knowing that.
In taking his decision, Rodes was no doubt influenced by the lack of any signs of life in Pender’s division to his right. James H. Lane, who succeeded to the divisional command after Pender’s wounding, said his only orders were to cooperate “if a favorable opportunity presented.” When Ewell suggested that such an opportunity was now present, he received no reply. On July 2, it seemed, no one in A. P. Hill’s corps was ordered to do anything. Yet privately Dick Ewell, as reported by his aide Campbell Brown, mainly attributed the evening’s defeat to “Rodes’ failure to cooperate. For this Ewell always thought Rodes fairly censurable…. Ewell & Early both thought Rodes had been too slow.“14