Gettysburg

  ON JULY 3 at about 4:30 A.M., daybreak, General Lee rode up to Longstreet’s headquarters behind the Emmitsburg Road to watch the start of the day’s renewed assault against “those people,” as he often referred to the Federals. From the north came the crash of artillery, which he assumed signaled the start of Dick Ewell’s part in the day’s plan. Ewell was right on time, as ordered. At First Corps headquarters, however, Lee’s orders appeared to have gone astray. He could see no preparations for an attack. Indeed, he found hardly any activity at all. Instead he was greeted by General Longstreet, who proceeded to expound on a quite different plan.

  As Longstreet later explained it, he feared that General Lee “was still in his disposition to attack,” and so he chose a preemptive course. “General,” he said, “I have had my scouts out all night, and I find that you still have an excellent opportunity to move around to the right of Meade’s army, and maneuver him into attacking us.” He said he was just ordering his forces to prepare to move around Round Top and take a posting on the enemy’s flank.

  Lee was surely surprised by everything he saw and heard, and surely angry as well, but Longstreet only has him reacting “with some impatience” and pointing his fist at Cemetery Hill and saying that the enemy is there and he will strike him. Because it was the 15,000 men of his First Corps who were at risk, Longstreet said he felt it his duty “to express my convictions.” He then did exactly that: “General, I have been a soldier all my life. I have been with soldiers engaged in fights by couples, by squads, companies, regiments, divisions, and armies, and should know, as well as any one, what soldiers can do. It is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position.” And then he pointed to Cemetery Hill.

  In writing this some years later, Old Pete perhaps embellished his recollection somewhat, yet certainly these were his sincere convictions. But he had waited too long to express them. Perhaps the evening before, had he overriden his bruised sensibilities and gone to Lee with his firsthand evaluation of the day’s fighting—something that Lee would undoubtedly have been bound to respect—he might have earned at least a look at his flanking plan, and his thought to bring Ewell or part of his corps, Early’s division, say, around to the right. But now Lee was not to be swayed. He could hardly back down from his issued orders at this late hour. He could hardly—in public as it were—admit as general commanding that his battle plan was basically flawed. Longstreet saw that he was wasting his breath: “General Lee, in reply to this, ordered me to prepare Pickett’s Division for the attack…. I said no more, however, but turned away.” The contest of wills was over.

  Pickett was not yet on the scene—which fact no doubt added to Lee’s irritation—and so there was time for discussion of the attack plan. By now the party was enlarged—in addition to Lee and Longstreet, A. P. Hill, Harry Heth, various staff members, and Colonel Fremantle. Lee intended that the divisions of Hood (now under Evander Law) and McLaws, reinforced by Pickett, make the main attack, starting obliquely from the Peach Orchard foothold and rolling up the enemy line along Cemetery Ridge—a repeat of yesterday’s original plan. Longstreet objected, pointing out that if Law and McLaws shifted north from their present positions to launch such an attack, they would be vulnerable to Yankee fire, and perhaps counterattacks, against their flank and rear.

  Lee led the party on a careful reconnoiter from a point northwest of the Peach Orchard—his first look at Longstreet’s July 2 battleground. “As we formed a pretty large party,” wrote Fremantle, “we often drew upon ourselves the attention of the hostile sharpshooters, and were two or three times favored with a shell.” After long study with his binoculars, Lee had to agree with his lieutenant. Law and McLaws must remain in place. The composition of the assault force would have to be changed.29

  The manpower additions to Pickett’s three brigades would of necessity come from A. P. Hill’s Third Corps. The choices for the first line of attack fell on Hill’s two divisions that had fought on the 1st of July but not on the 2nd—Harry Heth’s and Dorsey Pender’s. Heth’s division, posted next to where Pickett deployed as he arrived, contributed all four of its brigades to the attack. Pender’s contributed two. These six brigades were selected not because of their combat readiness—how much or little action they had seen—but because of their position on the field. It was a decision that would have greatly benefited from more thought.

  Harry Heth was himself hors de combat. He had been clipped in the head by a bullet and although he remained on the field he was probably concussed. His place was taken by Johnston Pettigrew, new even to brigade command. Of the division’s four brigades, on Wednesday Archer’s and Joe Davis’s had been routed, Brockenbrough’s stopped cold, and only Pettigrew’s brigade had made any gains—at the cost of a thousand casualties. “They were terribly mistaken about Heth’s division in this planning,” Colonel Charles Venable of Lee’s staff would later observe.

  Dorsey Pender, felled by a shell fragment on Thursday, was replaced by Major General Isaac Trimble. Trimble had earlier been scheduled for an army command, but a wound and illness sidelined him. He had come along on the campaign as a supernumerary. Trimble was a thorny and belligerent character, and brand-new to his command—he was appointed that morning. Of the two brigades he would lead, James Lane’s had only skirmished on July 1, but Alfred Scales’s had been very roughly handled. Even so, the division’s overall condition seemed to make it a better choice for a main role in the attack than Heth’s division. It appears that A. P. Hill had not informed himself about the condition of his command.

  Since six of the nine brigades selected to lead the attack were from the Third Corps, a case could be made that Hill should have commanded them. That does not seem to have crossed General Lee’s mind. As he originally planned it, Friday’s assault was to be made solely by Longstreet’s First Corps, and when the plan had to be changed and Hill’s brigades substituted, Lee assigned them to Longstreet’s command as a matter of course. To have replaced Old Pete would have demonstrated a lack of confidence, and that was very far from Lee’s thinking. However he might doubt Longstreet’s suggestions for fighting the battle, he had no doubts whatsoever about Longstreet’s generalship.

  By the same token, the July 3 assault would come to be universally known as Pickett’s Charge rather than the Pickett-Pettigrew-Trimble Charge or some other coinage. Pickett’s fresh division had been the core unit from the beginning, and later changes in the attack personnel did not change that logic. In this instance, logic (and brevity) triumphed over strict accuracy.

  There was planning as well for a second wave of attackers, to exploit any triumph of the first wave. Two brigades from Dick Anderson’s division—Cadmus Wilcox’s and David Lang’s—advancing on the right, were what might be called confirmed reinforcements. Others had a less formal status, with participation only on a contingency basis—“if opportunity offered,” in the usual phrase. These included Pender’s (Trimble’s) other two brigades, under Abner Perrin and Edward Thomas, and the three other Anderson brigades of Rans Wright, Carnot Posey, and William Mahone. Promised even more vaguely were three of Robert Rodes’s brigades from Ewell’s Second Corps. In case of a wholesale triumph, McLaws’s First Corps division would be called on to take a role as well.

  The charge itself was to be preceded by a tremendous cannonade by batteries from all three corps. This was intended to overwhelm the defending artillery and soften up the defending infantry, clearing the path for the attackers.

  All this represented, for the second day in a row, a major and quite unexpected change in the plan of attack. The night before, giving no real thought to the matter, making not a single inquiry, determined to enforce his will on his reluctant lieutenants, General Lee had ordered for Friday a repeat of Thursday’s attack. In the light of day, however, he discovered that two-thirds of the attacking force had to be changed. More than that, the focus of the attack was thereby changed. Instead of resuming the original plan—Longstreet’s corps l
aunching an oblique assault on the Federals’ flank, with intent to roll up their line on Cemetery Ridge and reach Cemetery Hill—the stark reality now was a straight-ahead frontal assault on the Federals’ center. This meant a general shift to the north. Pickett’s division, instead of forming the left wing of the attack, was now the right wing.

  Taken as a purely military problem, this was hardly the best choice of targets. Porter Alexander later remarked that any military engineer studying the battlefield “will agree that the point selected for Pickett’s attack was very badly chosen—almost as badly chosen as it was possible to be.” Alexander thought Cemetery Hill, a salient subject to attack from three sides, would have been the wiser choice. Yet if General Lee wanted Pickett’s fresh division to spearhead the assault, and his best general, Longstreet, to lead it, and as there was no time to spare, the choice of targets was strictly limited.

  As finally arranged then, nine brigades would spearhead Pickett’s Charge, with two brigades in immediate support and five more as possible reinforcements. And to finally seal the victory, there would be three brigades from the Second Corps and a further division from the First. Although General Longstreet would command, he did so with the greatest reluctance and only out of duty. “Never was I so depressed as on that day,” he later wrote. “I felt that my men were to be sacrificed, and that I should have to order them to make a hopeless charge.“30

  AS SOON AS HE LEARNED that morning that Longstreet’s attack would be a long time coming, General Lee sent a courier galloping to Dick Ewell to hold up Allegheny Johnson’s assault on Culp’s Hill. Ewell’s terse verdict—“too late to recall”—signaled still another failure of Confederate forces to act in concert.

  The sounds of battle Lee had heard from Ewell’s front were actually the Yankees initiating the fighting there. The night before, when he discovered that the Rebels had seized a section of the Twelfth Corps’ breastworks near the base of Culp’s Hill, Alpheus Williams reported that fact to General Slocum. Slocum wasted no words: “Well! drive them out at daylight.” All well and good for him to say, thought Williams, who expressed a more reasoned view of the matter: “An order that I then thought was more easily made than executed.“31

  It was General Williams’s plan to open a sudden artillery bombardment on the Rebel lines at daybreak, and then attack with two brigades of John Geary’s division, lost the previous evening but now found and primed for action. At 4:30 A.M. twenty-six guns, in five batteries, began to pour a converging fire into the captured breastworks now sheltering Maryland Steuart’s brigade. A man in the 3rd Wisconsin, not in the initial attacking party, was awakened by this cannonade, “the shells going into the woods across the swale and screaming in a most frightful manner. These were followed by hundreds of other shots from our batteries, the shells crashing among the trees, splintering them and scattering the limbs over the ground.” Major William Goldsborough of the 1st Maryland battalion, on the receiving end of this barrage, thought “the fire was awful, the whole hillside seemed enveloped in a blaze.” Canister and shell fragments “could be heard to strike the breastworks like hailstones upon the roof tops.”

  Not all this fire fell on the enemy. Archibald McDougall’s brigade lay under the line of fire of one of the batteries, and rounds began to fall short and dangerously close. McDougall sent back an alarm to the battery, but soon there was another short round, killing and wounding men in the 46th Pennsylvania. The aggrieved Pennsylvania colonel, James Selfridge, stormed back to the guns, waved his pistol under the nose of the battery commander, and said he would shoot him if one more round fell short. Adjustments were quickly made.

  The guns ceased firing and Geary’s men girded themselves to charge … and the Confederates beat them to it. During the barrage Steuart’s brigade had used the captured breastworks for shelter and, comparatively undamaged, now burst forth with the Rebel yell. In company on the right came the brigades of Jesse Williams and Robert Dungan, who was replacing the wounded John M. Jones. This assault was basically a repetition of the previous evening’s attacks. There was no change in tac tics or approach, just more men being thrown at the same targets—in daylight.

  Edward Johnson, left, led the July 3 attack against Alpheus Williams on Culp’s Hill. (U.S. Army Military History Institute–Library of Congress)

  Dick Ewell had not inspected Johnson’s front, and had simply accepted Lee’s attack order as a mandate for Johnson to renew his Thursday evening offensive. Their hope was to capture Culp’s Hill so as to dominate Cemetery Hill. In fact, the Federal works Steuart had captured, at the base of Culp’s Hill, were only some 600 yards from the Baltimore Pike and the rear of the Army of the Potomac. This had been pointed out to Johnson the night before, but neither he nor anyone else in authority seems to have given further thought to the opportunity. To be sure, Thomas Ruger’s division blocked the way, and two brigades from the Sixth Corps, as well as a brigade of cavalry, would soon be on the scene. Still, Allegheny Johnson had some 9,000 men under command on the morning of July 3, the way to the Baltimore Pike was considerably less rugged than the way to the crest of Culp’s Hill, and the alternative was to butt heads against solid breastworks. That alternative was selected, however.32

  The 66th Ohio, of Charles Candy’s brigade, was sent during the night up to the summit of the hill to brace Pop Greene’s extreme left. When the 66th’s Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Powell reported his assignment, General Greene was appalled. “My God, young man, the enemy are right out there,” he told Powell. “I am expecting an attack any moment. If you go out there with your Regiment they will simply swallow you.” Powell was inclined to agree, but orders were orders, and Greene gave him a guide to help place his men.

  They were able to form a downhill line at right angles to Greene’s brigade, so that when Dungan’s Virginians made their frontal attack, the 66th Ohio was perfectly positioned to deliver a devastating flanking fire. For the Rebels it was the same desperate scramble up the steep, rocky hillside as the previous night, except now it was daylight and the Yankee fire was thereby even deadlier. Morale was further tested by having to advance over their own dead from yesterday’s fight. “You had better think we give them what they needed this time if they never got it before,” an Ohioan wrote home. “Well I could not say that I killed one myself, but I can say that I shot enough at them….“TheVirginians soon realized the futility of it all and fell back down the hill and contented themselves with skirmishing fire. The Jones-Dungan brigade suffered 453 casualties in its July 2–3 attacks against the Culp’s Hill summit; the 66th Ohio, which inflicted much of that damage that morning, suffered 17.

  Jesse Williams’s Louisianians attacked the center of Greene’s line just as they had Thursday night, and with similar results. Their assault began, according to the 78th New York’s Lieutenant Colonel Herbert von Hammerstein, “with the same energy which the rebels displayed on the evening before.” Then he added, “Our men succeeded in repulsing them totally, with the same coolness and determination….”

  The Federals here kept up an extremely rapid and continuous fire from behind their breastworks by using the same tactic Greene had employed the previous evening—rotating regiments. Three regiments from Candy’s brigade were posted in a hollow some 50 yards behind Greene’s position, and as Greene’s regiments ran low on ammunition, they exchanged places on the firing line. Pop Greene was pleased to report that “the fire was kept up constantly and efficiently over our whole line, and the men were always comparatively fresh and their arms in good order….“Asit happened, the men were more exposed to Rebel fire during the exchange than they were behind the sturdy breastworks.

  There was an oddly parallel situation in the Confederate line. Williams’s Louisianians had gone to ground to do battle, firing from behind the cover of boulders and trees and hillside ravines, and when Edward O’Neal’s Alabama brigade, of Rodes’s division, started forward to relieve them, the newcomers became exposed to a heavy fire. The Yankees aimed right over the
heads of Williams’s men to strike O’Neal’s. As a man in the 12th Alabama wrote, “we were into it hot and heavy. I thought I had been in hot places before—I thought I had heard Minnie balls; but that day capped the climax.” Once in position the Alabamians stubbornly kept up a steady fire of their own, but they could not advance any farther. 33

  It was at the lower part of the hill, where the Yankees did not have the advantage of being behind breastworks, that Allegheny Johnson believed he had the best hope of breaking through and turning in behind Culp’s Hill defenders. The Federals posted here were the balance of Geary’s division—the two right-hand regiments of Greene’s brigade, the Pennsylvania brigade of Thomas L. Kane, and two regiments of Charles Candy’s brigade. General Geary followed Greene’s example and rotated regiments to keep his battle lines fresh and fast-firing. Over the morning his line would be reinforced by a miscellany—men from Henry Lockwood’s brigade, a brigade from the Sixth Corps, even a pair of regiments from the First Corps. The latter were the 147th New York and the 84th New York (or 14th Brooklyn, as its men preferred being called), and their brief engagement gave them the distinction of being the only Union regiments to fight on all three days at Gettysburg.

  The Federals on the lower portion of the hill may have lacked breastworks, but they were well posted with good cover at the edge of a woods overlooking a seven-acre meadow the Rebels would have to cross in their advance. Furthermore, artillery pounded at Steuart’s men from the moment they left the shelter of the captured works. General Johnson’s artillery battalion, by contrast, was under orders on July 3 to “await further orders”—which never came. As a consequence, Federal gunners were left free to pummel Johnson’s infantry at will with a murderous flanking fire. As a man in the 1st Maryland battalion put it, “one could feel the earth tremble, so fearful was the cannonading.”