Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

  Major General George E. Pickett’s all-Virginia division formed a spearhead of Pickett’s Charge. (Library of Congress)

  While Pickett’s division was receiving fulsome attention from the high command during the planning for the attack, rather less can be said for the rest of the attacking force. A. P. Hill, contributing six of the nine brigades to the operation, remained that Friday the same elusive figure he had been on Wednesday and Thursday. Lee surely consulted with Hill on Friday morning about the availability of the troops in his command, yet the selection of Heth’s (Pettigrew’s) division for the main assault suggests that Hill had made no effort to evaluate its condition after Wednesday’s fighting. In like fashion, Hill inexplicably approved of using Alfred Scales’s wrecked brigade from Pender’s (Trimble’s) division.

  Two of Pickett’s brigade commanders, Brigadier Generals James L. Kemper, left, and Lewis A. Armistead. (Library of Congress–Valentine Museum)

  The Third Corps contained four brigades that had seen only skirmishing action or no action at all on the 1st and 2nd of July—and just one of them would fight on the 3rd of July. The touchy Hill was not on good terms with Longstreet to begin with, and having to turn so much of his command over to Old Pete apparently did not sit well with him. After a stiff morning meeting between the two (they parted without shaking hands, it was noticed), Hill told his brigadiers to take their orders from Longstreet. It appears that Longstreet assumed Hill would at the least superintend the Third Corps’ deployment. Hill instead resumed his bystander role. (Hill had supposedly proposed to Lee that the entire Third Corps be part of the assault, but was told that the uncommitted half of his corps must serve as the army’s reserve. Perhaps this contributed to Hill’s sulks.)

  The order to Pettigrew, according to Lieutenant Lewis Young of his staff, was “to place the division under the nearest cover to the left of Pickett’s Division, with which it would advance in line.” The nearest cover, at this point, was Seminary Ridge, and Pettigrew’s four brigades dutifully deployed behind the wooded crest of the ridge. This left Pettigrew’s line some 200 yards behind that of Pickett and some 400 yards to the left. The two divisions were further separated by a modest ridgeline that ran eastward from Spangler’s Woods. Thus to advance “in line” with Pickett would require a certain amount of extra effort on Pettigrew’s part and a certain amount of shifting on Pickett’s.

  What on Wednesday had been Harry Heth’s newly formed division was on Friday a very different organization. Pettigrew commanded in place of the wounded Heth, and Colonel James K. Marshall directed Pettigrew’s brigade. Colonel Birkett Fry now led the brigade of James Archer, captured on July 1. Joe Davis, the president’s nephew, continued in command of his brigade, but in John Brockenbrough’s brigade there was a decidedly odd change. Colonel Brockenbrough had been a tepid leader in the July 1 fighting, and now, without explanation, he split the command of his brigade. He took charge of two regiments, turning the other two over to Colonel Robert M. Mayo.

  Pettigrew’s division lined up with Fry’s brigade (two Alabama and three Tennessee regiments) on the right. Then came Marshall’s brigade of North Carolinians, Davis’s brigade (one North Carolina and now three Mississippi regiments, the veteran 11th Mississippi having returned from guard duty), and on the far left Brockenbrough’s Virginians. It was a division with dubious leadership in two of its brigades (Davis’s and Brockenbrough’s) and, overall, a division gravely wounded by its July 1 ordeal. In that battle Pettigrew’s brigade had suffered almost 40 percent casualties, and Archer’s brigade lost 33 percent. Officer casualties were high all through the division, and some regiments were decimated—the 26th North Carolina, for example, had lost 624 of its 840 men on Wednesday. Even the division’s deployment was questionable, with Brockenbrough’s jointly led and no doubt confused Virginians forming the left flank of the entire attacking force.10

  If Powell Hill made no effort either to temper the selection of Pettigrew’s division or to manage its deployment, he was even more derelict in regard to the selection of the two brigades from Pender’s division. He simply told Pender’s second-in-command, James H. Lane, to turn the division’s “second line” over to Longstreet. That meant Lane’s own comparatively fresh brigade and also the brigade of Alfred Scales, led now after Scales’s wounding by Colonel William Lowrance. During Wednesday’s fighting Scales’s brigade had charged into a hornet’s nest of Yankee artillery and been slaughtered. Its casualty rate was 63 percent, and it lost its commander and no fewer than fifty-five field and company officers. “In this depressed, dilapidated, and almost unorganized condition, I took command of the brigade…,” Colonel Lowrance reported.

  By Jim Lane’s account, “General Longstreet ordered me to form in rear of the right of Heth’s division, commanded by General Pettigrew.” Surely there was some misunderstanding or misdeployment here, on Pettigrew’s part or Longstreet’s. Lane’s two brigades deployed in a considerably shorter line than Pettigrew’s four, leaving no supporting troops at all behind Davis’s and Brockenbrough’s left-flank brigades—the two most suspect brigades on the battle line. Then Isaac Trimble arrived to take over the command from Lane. Apparently General Trimble was too busy acquainting himself with his new command to question its peculiar deployment. Nor, it seems, did anyone else. Generals Lee and Longstreet, for example, inspected the front twice and were not heard to comment. As Porter Alexander later noted, “The arrangement of all the troops must have been apparent to Gen Lee when he was going about the lines between 11 & 12, & his not interfering with it stamps it with his approval.“11

  The orders to Dick Anderson’s division of the Third Corps were contingent. “I received orders to hold my division in readiness to move up in support, if it should become necessary,” Anderson reported. Presumably that decision would be Longstreet’s. After Thursday’s fighting, Anderson’s five brigades had bivouacked back where they began the day, and those positions dictated their July 3 role. The brigades of Wright, Posey, and Mahone to the left would support Pettigrew and Trimble—“if it should become necessary.” Wilcox’s Alabamians and Lang’s Floridians, assigned to Pickett’s right, were already well forward that morning in support of Alexander’s batteries.

  Wilcox and Lang, having attacked this same Yankee line on Thursday, were not optimistic on Friday. What should they do, Lang wondered, if they were ordered forward once the main attack was repulsed, “as we both felt confident it would be.” Wilcox, who had lost 577 men in yesterday’s bungled assault, said he “would not again lead his men into such a deathtrap.” Should an order to advance be imperative and not discretionary, he said, he would protest it. 12

  On July 3 Johnston Pettigrew, left, led the division of the wounded Henry Heth. Isaac Trimble led two brigades of the wounded Dorsey Pender. (Southern Historical Collection–U.S. Army Military History Institute)

  As the infantry filed into place for the attack, attention became focused on the target. General Lee, having already attacked both enemy flanks, reasoned that the enemy’s center must now be comparatively less well defended. With Longstreet still threatening their left and Ewell still threatening their right, the Federals would be unlikely to risk massing against the threat of an assault on their center. Apparently to sustain this pressure, Lee had allowed Allegheny Johnson to continue his assault on Culp’s Hill that morning. Furthermore, so far as Lee could see, the Federals had not entrenched themselves along the ridge—all that was visible in the way of works was a low stone wall. Yesterday Lee had watched Rans Wright’s Georgians aim their charge toward a little copse of scrub oaks—soon to be christened the Copse—atop Cemetery Ridge, and very nearly reach it. What one brigade almost accomplished on Thursday, he reasoned, nine brigades should be able to accomplish on Friday.

  Some 500 yards north of the Copse was a second, more prominent feature silhouetted on the ridgeline, a woods known locally as Ziegler’s Grove. Pickett and Pettigrew mutually agreed that the attack should guide on the center of the battle line
, and Birkett Fry’s brigade, on the right of Pettigrew’s division, was chosen for the honor. As Fry and Pickett discussed the matter they were joined by Dick Garnett, whose brigade formed Pickett’s left, and “it was agreed,” wrote Fry, “that he would dress on my command…. It was then understood that my command should be considered the centre and that both divisions should align themselves by it.” Marching straight ahead, due east, would take Fry’s brigade right between Ziegler’s Grove and the Copse—which therefore became the obvious and easily visible aiming points for the attack.

  There was another, easily visible reason as well—that was where the Yankee guns were. Porter Alexander counted five batteries there, and promptly took them as his aiming point. From their vantage on Seminary Ridge the Confederates could see additional Yankee guns on Cemetery Hill and on Little Round Top, but a modest rise of ground between the two ridges occupied by the armies prevented them from seeing the defenses posted on the low section of Cemetery Ridge. This, as it happened, comprised a centerpiece of Henry Hunt’s gunnery scheme—Freeman McGilvery’s powerful gun line, forty-one pieces from the artillery reserve, positioned so as to take any infantry assault against the Federal center under a deadly enfilade fire. And because they were not seen, McGilvery’s guns were not designated a target of the Rebel bombardment.13

  AS THE ARMIES GATHERED THEMSELVES, the bloody feud over the Bliss farm heated up again. William Bliss’s large brick barn stood like a citadel squarely between the lines, and sharpshooters from whichever side held it could harass the infantry and artillery of the other side. The fight for the Bliss barn was a sort of battle in miniature, with opportunity for individual derring-do. At one point Captain James Postles, 1st Delaware, volunteered to deliver a crucial order. On horseback he made a breakneck dash for the barn. The enemy’s fire, he recalled, “grew hotter and hotter as I drew near … till it was a constant wonder and surprise to me that none of the bullets, which I heard whistling around and so close to me, had hit me….” He delivered his message and somehow managed to return to Cemetery Ridge unscathed. An admiring Samuel Fiske watched Captain Postles’s return: “On reaching our lines … he reined his horse round, waved his hat in the air and made a graceful bow to the unseen marksmen, who, I really don’t believe were sorry to see him escape unharmed.”

  July 2 had ended with the 12th Mississippi, of Carnot Posey’s brigade, holding the Bliss farm. Alexander Hays’s division fronted the farm on the Union side, and on the morning of July 3 Hays dispatched the 12th New Jersey to drive the Mississippians out. In a column of companies the Jerseymen stormed the barn, rushing in one end while the outnumbered Mississippians escaped out the other. Mr. Bliss’s house and orchard furnished good cover for a counterstroke, however, and soon enough it was the Jerseymen’s turn to scramble back to their lines.

  Called out next was the 14th Connecticut. Instead of charging in a tight, vulnerable formation, the men of the 14th rushed each man for himself, spreading out the enemy’s fire and seizing the barn without great loss. The fight by now had reached the boiling point, drawing in artillery. Porter Alexander was appalled at the waste of hundreds of rounds of precious ammunition by Hill’s Third Corps batteries, firing at an essentially worthless target. “I would not let one of my guns fire a shot,” he wrote in righteous anger.

  Recognizing that there was little prospect of a prompt ending to this scrap, General Hays ordered the Bliss house and barn burned. The volunteer this time was Sergeant Charles A. Hitchcock, 111th New York. Gathering paper and matches, Hitchcock “started on my mission at a double-quick, and kept it up till I reached the buildings….” That, he said modestly, was the only hard part of the mission. After getting everyone out, including the dead and wounded, he fired the house and barn. For his effort, General Hays saw that Sergeant Hitchcock became Lieutenant Hitchcock. The ruins on the Bliss farm would smoke and smolder the rest of the day, as if marking the battlefield for distant travelers.14

  In Gettysburg that morning the renewal of the fighting at Culp’s Hill sent citizens scurrying to their cellars once more. Overshot artillery rounds flew into the town. On July 1 Catherine Foster had narrowly escaped an errant shell that hit her house on South Washington Street. Now, as she and her family were starting down their cellar steps during this new outburst of fighting, two shells in rapid succession plunged into the house and wrecked the kitchen and a bedroom. The three hits on the Foster house would prove to be the town record.

  The southern end of town continued to be highly dangerous, especially for those in buildings that lay in the no man’s land between the skirmish lines. One such was a house on Baltimore Street on the lower slope of Cemetery Hill occupied by Georgia Wade McClellan, whose husband was away in the Union army. Mrs. McClellan was confined to her bedroom with her newborn son, and her mother and her younger sister, Ginnie Wade, were there caring for her and the baby. Twenty-year-old Ginnie was in the kitchen kneading dough for biscuits that morning when a bullet ripped through two doors and into her back and through her heart and killed her instantly. Ginnie Wade would be the only civilian killed during the battle. 15

  In late morning, after the fighting on Culp’s Hill died down, Dick Ewell and his engineer officer, Major Henry Richardson, rode into Gettysburg to reconnoiter. Sharpshooters on Cemetery Hill were keeping the Rebel troops off many of the streets, and Ewell was warned not to go any farther forward. He was reminded that he had already had his horse shot from under him two days earlier. Old Bald Head scoffed. A bystander noted him saying that the Yankee sharpshooters “were fully fifteen hundred yards distant—that they could not possibly shoot with accuracy at that distance & that he would run the risk of being hit.” The two had not advanced twenty paces when Major Richardson was shot through the body and seriously wounded. Ewell announced that he too had been shot. When an anxious aide asked where he was hit, Ewell pointed to his wooden leg and said, “I’ll trouble you to hand me my other leg.” Thus refitted, he bantered with General John Gordon. Suppose it had been Gordon the ball struck, Ewell said; “we would have had the trouble of carrying you off the field, sir. You see how much better fixed for a fight I am than you are. It don’t hurt a bit to be shot in a wooden leg!“16

  Behind Ewell’s Second Corps, Jeb Stuart was preparing, finally, to join the battle at Gettysburg. He and Lee had worked out a contingent part for the cavalry to play in Friday’s offensive. Should Pickett’s assault break into the Cemetery Ridge line, a simultaneous thrust into the Yankee rear by the cavalry ought to create havoc and net many prisoners. That would be at best; at the least Stuart could create a diversion, or perhaps threaten the Yankees’ supply line. Therefore on Friday morning Stuart led four brigades out the York Pike east of Gettysburg. Two and a half miles beyond the town, the column turned off on a country road leading southward toward the Hanover Road. Reaching a long, commanding height called Cress Ridge, Stuart gained a sweeping view westward across the fields toward the Gettysburg battleground. At the moment it was empty of Yankee cavalry, but that was soon to change.

  Stuart’s column had been sighted on the York Pike and a warning sent out to the cavalry command. David Gregg was moved up to a blocking position along the Hanover Road with the brigades of John B. McIntosh and George Armstrong Custer. Stuart ordered his artillery to fire a four-shot salvo. This presumably was the signal to General Lee that the cavalry was in position. It also announced his presence to the Yankees. By all appearances the stage was set for a cavalry battle royal.

  At the other extreme of the battleground, south of Round Top, Judson Kilpatrick, in command of the Union cavalry’s Third Division, was looking to start a battle royal of his own. Kilpatrick had scrapped inconclusively with Wade Hampton’s Rebel troopers the day before at the hamlet of Hunterstown, northeast of Gettysburg, and he was eager for something more decisive. Alfred Pleasonton had been managing the cavalry corps erratically, and when the day began he had only four of his eight brigades in the immediate vicinity of Gettysburg. One of Kilpatrick’s two
brigades, under Custer, had been sent on loan to David Gregg. With the other, under Elon Farnsworth, Kilpatrick sought some way to attack Longstreet’s flank. “Kilpatrick’s orders,” wrote one of his officers, “were to press the enemy, to threaten him at every point, and to strike at the first opportunity….“To replace Custer, Kilpatrick was promised the brigade of Wesley Merritt, then on the way up from Emmitsburg.

  For cavalry to attack the lightly protected rear of an army, as Jeb Stuart was hoping to do that July 3, was one thing, but for cavalry to attack infantry defending a line of its own choosing was something very different—indeed something very reckless. Unfortunately for the men of his command, “reckless” perfectly described Kill-Cavalry Kilpatrick. While he waited for Merritt, Kilpatrick put dismounted troopers to skirmishing with Evander Law’s Texans and pondered how he would launch his assault.17

  Meanwhile, on the Confederate battle line on Seminary Ridge, the last guns were laid and the last infantry moved into position. Pickett’s three fresh brigades furnished 5,830 men. Pettigrew’s and Trimble’s six brigades, after subtracting their losses in Wednesday’s fighting, added some 7,200, bringing the total count of infantry in the first wave of attackers to just over 13,000. The brigades of Lang and Wilcox, firmly defined as support for Pickett’s right, numbered perhaps 1,600 men. Anderson’s remaining three brigades, rather more loosely designated as support for the left “if it should become necessary,” might in due course add another 3,350 troops to the attack. Nine brigades would make the charge, and five others might (or might not) support them, according to circumstances. Thus an attack well started and promising success might involve as many as 17,980 men, with elements of Ewell’s and Longstreet’s forces presumably available to secure and exploit the gains. 18