Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

  Hunt completed his inspection of the western front by visiting the two batteries on the far left, including the six 10-pounder Parrott rifles perched on Little Round Top. This had been the dead Charles Hazlett’s battery; today it was commanded by Lieutenant Benjamin Rittenhouse. Hunt could count all told 119 guns facing west toward Seminary Ridge that morning.2

  He saw that the positioning of support would be critical in the coming battle, and his last stop was the artillery reserve. The reserve and the ordnance trains were posted squarely behind the center of the line, within easy reach of any point on the front. Hunt’s skilled deputy, Robert O. Tyler, was in the process of increasing the number of batteries in the reserve to eighteen through repairs and reconditioning. Hunt delivered his report to General Meade at army headquarters at the Leister house. In their discussion, Meade mentioned his continued concern about the center of the line, and asked Hunt to reappraise artillery coverage there. Since Meade took the center as beginning at Cemetery Hill, Hunt rode there first, as it furnished a superior vantage point. It was about 11:00 A.M.

  What he saw when he looked westward took his breath away. “Here a magnificent display greeted my eyes,” he wrote. “Our whole front for two miles was covered by batteries already in line or going into position. They stretched—apparently in one unbroken mass—from opposite the town to the Peach Orchard, which bounded the view to the left, the ridges of which were planted thick with cannon. Never before had such a sight been witnessed on this continent, and rarely, if ever, abroad.”

  But what did it mean, Hunt wondered. It could be, he thought, merely a cover for shifting infantry to Ewell for a continued attack on that front. Or it could be simply for defense, or even to cover a general withdrawal. But Hunt’s best guess—like most every Yankee witnessing the sight—was that it signaled a massive assault on the center of the Federal line.

  Henry Hunt relished the challenge. Here was the moment he had been waiting for ever since his first artillery command at Bull Run in 1861. Hunt had long nurtured a vision of the proper use of artillery in battle, and he could not have ordered in advance a better scene or situation than what confronted him on this 3rd of July 1863. He was posted on the high ground (but not too high), with clear fields of fire. He had 119 guns of high quality massed in battery, with plentiful reserves and sufficient ammunition. He was positioned to catch an infantry attack in a deadly crossfire. His brigade commanders were chosen by him and trained by him, and all of them were conditioned (he hoped) to take their orders during battle from him. As he later put it, “it was evident that all the artillery on our west front, whether of the army corps or the reserve, must concur as a unit, under the chief of artillery, in the defense.”

  If there was going to be an infantry assault, it seemed all but certain that the Confederates would precede it with a bombardment by their massed artillery. Hunt immediately set out to ride his lines once again, this time to spell out to his artillery chiefs and battery commanders exactly what they should do in that event.

  The message Henry Hunt preached that day was the “first importance” of the artillery primarily directing its fire against the enemy’s advancing infantry. Counterbattery fire aimed at the enemy’s guns must be only a secondary target. When the enemy batteries opened, he instructed his gunners not to reply for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then to fire slowly, not wasting ammunition, and only at “those batteries which were most destructive to us.” In this manner, all his guns should have sufficient long-range ammunition—shell and case shot—for use, especially in crossfire, against the Rebel infantry right from the moment it started its advance, then canister to finish off the job at close range. Thus Henry Hunt’s formula for destroying an attack by artillery alone. 3

  HENRY JACKSON HUNT’S counterpart in the Army of Northern Virginia was William Nelson Pendleton, but only in their respective titles was there any similarity. Brigadier General Pendleton was an 1830 West Point graduate who had spent most of the antebellum years in the ministry rather than the military. Pendleton understood the theory and administration of gunnery well enough, but he completely lacked any instinct for the battlefield. He had been appointed chief of artillery due to circumstance and his friendship with both Lee and Jefferson Davis, but in the field he repeatedly disappointed. His juniors called him “Old Mother Pendleton” and worked around him. “By the way Pendleton is Lee’s weakness,” an artilleryman had written after Sharpsburg. “P. is like the elephant, we have him & we don’t know what on earth to do with him, and it costs a devil of a sight to feed him.”

  Over the past year there had been singular feats of brilliance by the Army of Northern Virginia’s artillery arm, yet its overall management was all too often marked by failure. The closest parallel to the situation on this 3rd of July had been Malvern Hill on the Peninsula a year earlier. There the army’s batteries were supposed to be massed to clear the way for an infantry assault, but at the crucial moment Pendleton and his artillery reserve were nowhere to be found. The charge was bloodily repulsed. A bitter D. H. Hill called the artillery’s role at Malvern Hill “almost farcical.” In the army’s reorganization following Chancellorsville, the artillery reserve was divided up amongst the corps. Pendleton was given the inflated title General in Chief of Artillery, but his actual role was deflated to purely advisory. Yet in that role he remained the only supervisory figure in the artillery’s chain of command, and when General Lee determined that a massive artillery bombardment precede Pickett’s Charge, he issued the order through General Pendleton.4

  The bombardment was the critical element of the plan. Lee was certainly aware of the inherent risks of a frontal attack—he could hardly have forgotten the lessons of Malvern Hill—but he intended this unprecedented volume of gunnery to pulverize the defending Federal batteries and overwhelm and demoralize the defending Federal infantry. The orders, said Porter Alexander, were to cripple the enemy, “to tear him limbless, as it were, if possible.” In the wake of the cannonade, batteries would advance with the infantry to furnish close-in supporting fire, just as Alexander had advanced his guns to the Peach Orchard during Thursday’s fighting.

  Brigadier General Henry J. Hunt, artillery chief of the Army of the Potomac, directed the Union batteries at Gettysburg. (Library of Congress)

  The bombardment, in short, was designed to even the odds, or even to shorten them, and then what Lee firmly believed was the best infantry in the world would breach the center of the Union line. He was surely aware of a precedent. At Solferino in Italy in 1859, after a heavy preliminary bombardment, Napoleon Ill’s frontal attack had broken the Austrian center. Lee’s was potentially a workable plan, yet one that would require the perfect interlocking—and the perfect success—of each supporting element for it to work.

  Lee’s artillery chief was William N. Pendleton, at left. E. Porter Alexander led Longstreet’s artillery. (Cook Collection, Valentine Museum)

  It became General Pendleton’s task to design and execute the bombardment. It was an assignment larger than anything he or the Army of Northern Virginia had ever attempted before. It meant assigning or approving the best firing positions, specifying targets, ordering and coordinating the fire of a dozen battalions from three army corps, instructing battalion and battery commanders in firing discipline, detailing batteries to advance with the infantry, positioning replacement batteries and ordnance trains, and, of vital importance, appraising ammunition supply against anticipated demand. According to Pendleton, he gave his “earnest attention” to all these subjects. In point of fact, he fell far short in almost all of them.

  Porter Alexander had begun the campaign in command of a battalion in the First Corps’ artillery reserve, but upon reaching Gettysburg Longstreet bypassed his chief of artillery, James Walton, to put Alexander in tactical command of the corps’ artillery. Longstreet no doubt did so based on merit, for by report Alexander’s handling of his battalion at Chancellorsville had been exceptional. On this Friday morning Longstreet worked closely wi
th Alexander, whose guns in the coming fight would come nearest to achieving Lee’s ideal for the bombardment. “Visiting the lines at a very early hour toward securing readiness for this great attempt, I found much (by Colonel Alexander’s energy) already accomplished…,” General Pendleton wrote, and passed on.

  Because Lee’s initial plan specified an early-morning assault, Alexander had hurried to post his guns before dawn. At first light he discovered to his horror that a dozen of them were almost under the muzzles of enemy batteries. “It scared me awfully,” he recalled, but by dint of fast, quiet work, he pulled them back to safer ground before the Yankees woke up. Through the morning hours he put in the rest of the First Corps’ guns until he had seventy-five pieces massed in battery. His gun line ran some 1,300 yards from the Peach Orchard northward behind the Emmitsburg Road to Spangler’s Woods. To his surprise and immense relief, the Federals made only scattered efforts to challenge this buildup. It was, he wrote, that day’s policy “to save every possible round for the infantry fight,” and he could hardly afford a gun-versus-gun duel beforehand.

  In fact the same was true of the Federals. Henry Hunt’s nearest artillery depot was at Westminster, in Maryland. To be sure, this was much closer than the Rebels’ nearest depot, some 200 miles distant at Staunton in the Shenandoah Valley, yet on this day of battle Hunt, like Pendleton, would have to make his fight with whatever ammunition was in his ordnance trains.

  Colonel Lindsay Walker, chief of artillery for A. P. Hill’s Third Corps, deployed fifty-three of his cannon in front of Seminary Ridge for the bombardment. Well to the north, Walker posted two English-made Whitworth rifles, breechloaders of high accuracy that outranged everything on the field, and aimed them at Cemetery Hill. “To the Third Corps artillery attention was also given,” reported General Pendleton, but it seems that little attention was paid to him in return. Walker’s gunners would act that day with little restraint and expend substantial amounts of ammunition to little purpose.

  Pendleton also reported issuing “specific instructions” to Dick Ewell’s Second Corps’ artillerists, who in the end would furnish just thirty-three guns to the bombardment. It was in his dealings with the Second Corps that Pendleton failed most dismally. “The great criticism I have to make on the artillery operations of the day is upon the inaction of the artillery of Ewell’s corps,” wrote Porter Alexander. The lengthy line manned by Lee’s army—the exterior line condemned by all the military textbooks—did deliver one advantage on July 3: “It enabled us to enfilade any of the enemy’s positions, near the centre of their line, with artillery fire…. No troops, infantry or artillery, can long submit to an enfilade fire.” All that was required, Alexander went on, was decent aim; any shot sighted down the length of a line was bound to hit something. Ewell’s guns were ideally positioned to deliver such a fire, yet only some two dozen shots were delivered by the one Second Corps battalion in that enfilade posting. That, said Alexander bluntly, was Pendleton’s fault: “Gen. Lee’s chief should have known, & given every possible energy to improve the rare & great chance to the very uttermost.” 5

  In Lee’s scheme, at the close of the bombardment the artillerists were to push batteries forward along with the advancing infantry to furnish close-in fire support during the charge. While in theory this seemed a sound tactic, in practice it posed certain difficulties. The problem was the often faulty Confederate ammunition. This might be due to poor powder, but mostly it was defective fuzes. As recently as Chancellorsville, wrote an observer, “An extraordinarily large percentage of Confederate shells failed to burst, and many were even more ineffective by reason of premature explosions.” Porter Alexander remarked on the effect of this phenomenon during the heat of battle: “We were always liable to premature explosions of shell & shrapnel, & our infantry knew it by sad experience, & I have known of their threatening to fire back at our guns if we opened over their heads.”

  This became an important factor on July 3. A number of batteries, posted behind lines of infantry, were restricted to using solid shot in the bombardment, thereby cutting down the effectiveness of their fire. As for advancing in company with the infantry, shoddy ammunition affected that tactic as well. As Alexander put it, the risk of firing over the infantry meant that “each arm must have its own fighting front free, & they do not mix well in a fighting charge.” Nevertheless, Colonel Alexander believed he had worked out a scheme for pushing his guns forward at the proper time.

  General Pendleton had come to him with the offer of nine Third Corps guns, which apparently there was not room enough for in Hill’s gun line. Alexander accepted them gratefully. His thought was to park them under cover behind his line and at the right moment bring them out, fresh and with full ammunition chests, to spring at the enemy. They would actually lead the charge, ahead of Pickett, go into battery just out of infantry range, and open fire to pave the way for the attack. This bold idea was entirely Alexander’s. If Pendleton mentioned anything to the Second and Third corps about advancing their guns, it was only in the vaguest of terms. Ewell’s artillery never moved at all. In the Third Corps Major William Poague understood that should the infantry gain Cemetery Ridge he was to bring his guns there. “Not a word was said about following the infantry as they advanced to the attack,” Poague wrote.

  As important a matter as the quality of the artillery ammunition was the supply of it. Like Meade, on this day Lee would have to make his fight with what was in the army’s ordnance trains—with no possibility of refilling them except by capture. After three weeks on campaign (during which, among other expenditures, 400 artillery rounds were lost crossing the Shenandoah River), and after two days of exceedingly heavy artillery fighting, it seems obvious that artillery chief Pendleton would have kept a close count on what remained in the trains. If he did so, he did not inform anyone. He especially did not inform General Lee. There was no effort on anyone’s part that morning to balance accounts between how much ammunition would be needed for an effective bombardment and follow-up, and how much was available. If there was any problem here, apparently Lee assumed Pendleton would announce it beforehand. What Pendleton assumed is impossible to say.

  When General Lee wrote his final report on the Gettysburg campaign and made reference to the July 3 ammunition-supply situation, he remarked that the true case “was unknown to me when the assault took place….” From this the inference could easily be drawn (as General McLaws, among others, noted) that had Lee been fully informed by General Pendleton, “the charge would not have been made.”

  Be that as it may, Porter Alexander recalled that on that hot July morning no one on the Confederate side was parsing the two armies’ comparative strengths and weaponry and positions, or “I might not have felt as cheerful & sanguine as I did. But the fact is that like all the rest of the army I believed that it would all come out right, because Gen. Lee had planned it.“6

  PROFESSOR MICHAEL JACOBS of Pennsylvania College, as meticulous as a mathematician was expected to be, continued carefully recording the weather even amidst the greatest battle ever fought in America. The early-morning cloudiness on July 3 was typical of a Pennsylvania summer, but by midday the sky had cleared except for fleecy white cumulus clouds to the west. It was humid and still, and at 2:00 P.M. Professor Jacobs would record the temperature as 87 degrees. As it happened, that would be the highest temperature he recorded in Gettysburg all that month.7

  As the Confederate artillery chiefs finally arranged it, 163 guns, the majority of them rifled pieces, formed a sweeping, irregular arc from the Peach Orchard northward to a point opposite the town, stretching more loosely beyond as far as Oak Hill. Nothing remotely like it had been seen before in this war. With their crews hidden from sight, the guns stood silent in their long ranks like deadly, solitary sentinels. Heat waves radiated off the black iron Parrott and Rodman rifles; the bronze Napoleons gleamed brightly in the sunlight. On Little Round Top an awed Major Thomas Hyde, viewing this array “seemingly directed toward the centre of
our line,” counted 100 guns visible just from his vantage point. When Meade reached the spot on his inspection tour, wrote Hyde, “I dodged back to tell the general that it looked like a cannonade pretty soon.“8

  Meanwhile Confederate infantry was filing into place, taking pains to keep concealed. Pickett’s division, once the largest in the army before D. H. Hill expropriated two of its brigades in North Carolina, could put but 5,830 men on the battle line. This shortfall of manpower was one reason it became necessary to dip into Pender’s Third Corps division for two brigades on July 3. Pickett formed as the left of Longstreet’s corps. A shallow swale on the Henry Spangler farm, just in front of Mr. Spangler’s woods and behind the artillery line, provided cover for James Kemper’s and Richard Garnett’s lead brigades. Kemper deployed to the right, Garnett to the left. Behind them, along the edge of the woods, Lewis Armistead’s brigade formed a second, supporting line. The men were ordered to lie down, and the flags were lowered and out of sight.

  These fifteen Virginia regiments of Pickett’s were trustworthy veterans who had sat out the army’s last two battles, at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Even so, they had more combat experience than their commanding general. Pickett had been wounded at Gaines’s Mill on the Peninsula and today would mark his first fighting command in more than a year.

  George Pickett, of the flowing locks and the effervescent manner, was a protégé of Longstreet’s, and Old Pete very carefully went over the day’s attack plan with him. During his long hiatus Pickett had been promoted to major general and divisional commander, and he was eager to prove his worth. He saw July 3 as his opportunity. He met with Colonel Birkett Fry, commanding the brigade of Pettigrew’s division on Pickett’s immediate left, to coordinate their advance. “He appeared to be in excellent spirits,” Fry remembered, “and, after a cordial greeting and a pleasant reference to our having been together in work of that kind at Chapultepec, expressed great confidence in the ability of our troops to drive the enemy….” 9