Gettysburg

  It was agreed that two guns fired by the Washington Artillery at the Peach Orchard would signal the bombardment. Porter Alexander was ordered by Longstreet to find the best position from which to view the effects of the gunnery. Then, not long after noon, Alexander was handed a message from Longstreet: “Colonel: If the artillery fire does not have the effect to drive off the enemy or greatly demoralize him, so as to make our effort pretty certain, I would prefer that you should not advise Pickett to make the charge. I shall rely a great deal upon your judgment to determine the matter and shall expect you to let Gen. Pickett know when the moment offers.”

  Knowing that he had exhausted all his own arguments against the attack, Longstreet with this note was now hoping that the most accomplished artillerist in the army might convince Lee that if the bombardment was failing, the infantry attack would surely fail as well—that, in effect, it would be Malvern Hill all over again.

  Alexander was taken aback. General Lee had provided the inspiration for this massive attack, and Lieutenant General Longstreet was in charge of its execution—and now in their place a colonel of artillery was to decide whether the attack should or should not be made, based on “my cold judgment to be founded on what I was going to see.” He talked this over with Rans Wright, who advised him to make his position very clear to Longstreet.

  That thought was uppermost in Alexander’s reply: “General: I will only be able to judge of the effect of our fire on the enemy by his return fire…. If, asl infer from your note, there is any alternative to this attack, it should be carefully considered before opening our fire, for it will take all the artillery ammunition we have left to test this one, and if result is unfavorable we will have none left for another effort. And even if this is entirely successful, it can only be so at a very bloody cost.”

  Longstreet’s second note was a restatement of his first one, and still assigned to Alexander the final say: “Colonel: The intention is to advance the infantry if the artillery has the desired effect of driving the enemy’s off, or having other effect such as to warrant us in making the attack. When that moment arrives advise Gen. Pickett and of course advance such artillery as you can use in aiding the attack.”

  “He has put the responsibility back upon you,” Rans Wright said. Alexander asked Wright for his opinion of the planned assault. “Well, Alexander,” said Wright, “it is mostly a question of supports. It is not as hard to get there as it looks. I was there yesterday with my brigade. The real difficulty is to stay there after you get there—for the whole infernal Yankee army is up there in a bunch!”

  Alexander realized that nothing he would be able to see during the bombardment could possibly determine its effectiveness in the definitive way Longstreet required. The smoke of his firing and of the enemy’s return fire would soon obscure his view of Cemetery Ridge. The basic question (he later wrote) “whether or not that attack was to be made, must be decided before the cannonade opened.” Alexander also pondered the matter of supports that Rans Wright had insisted were necessary. He had seen several of Hill’s brigades forming to support Pickett—and had heard a camp rumor that morning “that Gen. Lee had said he intended to march every man he had upon that cemetery hill that day.” Alexander took that as encouraging.

  Next he rode over to see Pickett: “I did not tell him my object, but just felt his pulse, as it were, about the assault. He was in excellent spirits & sanguine of success.” There seemed nothing more to do or say, and Porter Alexander determined to limit his decision-making to just his own field and his own batteries. He sent Longstreet a brief note: “General: When our fire is at its best, I will advise Gen. Pickett to advance.“19

  On Cemetery Ridge, as the firing at Culp’s Hill died away late in the morning, what General Carl Schurz described as a “perfect stillness” enveloped the field; “it settled down into a tranquillity like the peaceful and languid repose of a warm midsummer morning in which one might expect to hear the ringing of the village church-bells….“To Schurz “there was something ominous, something uncanny, in these strange, unexpected hours of profound silence so sharply contrasting with the bloody horrors which had preceded, and which were sure to follow them.”

  Enough of the Confederate guns in their silent ranks could be seen aimed at the 500-yard section of Cemetery Ridge between Ziegler’s Grove and the Copse that the Yankees manning the line there suspected that any attack that followed this midday pause would come right down their throats. They were not the sort to flinch. These were Winfield Scott Hancock’s Second Corps men—the divisions of Alexander Hays and John Gibbon—and they were as good as the best in the Army of the Potomac.

  In line south of Ziegler’s Grove were two of Hays’s three brigades, under Thomas A. Smyth and Eliakim Sherrill, who was commanding in place of George Willard, killed on July 2. Hays’s third brigade, Samuel Carroll’s, had gone to the rescue of Otis Howard’s Eleventh Corps the evening before, and now the nervous Howard would not return his rescuers. Of Carroll’s brigade, only the 8th Ohio, which had earlier been on picket duty, was with Hays on July 3.

  Posted from Hays’s left to beyond the Copse were Gibbon’s three brigades, under Alexander’S. Webb, Norman J. Hall, and William Harrow. Webb and Hall had already experienced a sharp taste of combat in repelling Rans Wright’s Georgians the evening before. In Harrow’s brigade, the 1st Minnesota had been thrown alone into the breach by Hancock on July 2 and suffered grievous casualties. To Gibbon’s left was support from the First Corps, especially the large brigade of nine-month Vermonters led by George Stannard. The total number of defenders in this sector between Ziegler’s Grove and south of the Copse—Hays’s and Gibbon’s divisions and their First Corps support—came to fewer than 8,000 men.

  General Lee, in his binocular inspection of the Union line, had detected no fortifications except a stone wall below the crest of Cemetery Ridge. This wall was actually a stone boundary fence, low and not very substantial, crossing the farm of a free black named Abraham Bryan. Hancock’s men were quick to improve on it, however, rebuilding its more derelict parts and piling fence rails atop it. For a man lying down or kneeling it furnished a fair protection, and it also furnished a handy line for the defenders to align on. The fence ran south from Ziegler’s Grove to within 100 yards of the Copse, made a jog west for some 80 yards, and angled back south in front of the Copse for some 280 yards. Before the day was done, that jog would be known as the Angle. The first line of defenders followed this stone fence, and for much of its length there was a second line on ground high enough to fire over the first line. The lines had gaps to provide fields of fire for Captain John Hazard’s five batteries that guarded the sector.20

  John Gibbon’s resourceful mess staff had with some effort scrounged the makings of a midday meal of stew whose principal ingredients were potatoes and what General Gibbon remembered as “an old and tough rooster.” Gibbon persuaded Meade to join them, arguing that the commanding general must keep up his strength in these trying times. Also present at the feast were Generals Hancock, Newton, and Pleasonton. Afterward the generals lit up cigars and tried to relax in the ominous quiet—the quiet, they guessed, before the storm—“chatting over the battle and the probable events of the day.” Presently Meade returned to his headquarters, and the generals and their staffs conversed quietly or dozed in the noontime heat, awaiting General Lee’s next move. 21

  “LET THE BATTERIES OPEN,” General Longstreet’s note read; “order great care and precision in firing.” The first signal gun of Merritt B. Miller’s Third Company, Washington Artillery of New Orleans, shattered the battlefield stillness. A faulty friction primer momentarily delayed the second gun’s firing, but that was soon put to rights and the “batteries open” signal completed. In Gettysburg the meticulous Professor Jacobs noted the time as 1:07 P.M.

  From the Peach Orchard to the Chambersburg Pike, Confederate gunners ran to their pieces and unleashed a barrage such as no one on the field had ever before even imagined; or as Professor Ja
cobs put it, “producing such a continuous succession of crashing sounds as to make us feel as if the very heavens had been rent asunder….” In their letters home Yankee soldiers groped for words to describe it. The effort of Alexander Biddle, 121st Pennsylvania, was typical. Major Biddle wrote his wife the next day, “there is no other expression but terrible to designate the character of their fire….” Sergeant Ben Hirst, 14th Connecticut, told his wife, “Turn your eyes which way you will the whole Heavens were filled with Shot and Shell, Fire and Smoke.“22

  General Gibbon was in the orchard behind the Union center where he had hosted his luncheon gathering, when “the whole air above and around us was filled with bursting and screaming projectiles, and the continuous thunder of the guns….” He called for his horse, but one of the first shells had killed his orderly. Too anxious to get to his command to wait for a mount, Gibbon ran to the crest of the ridge. “At last I reached the brow of the hill, to find myself in the most infernal pandemonium it has ever been my fortune to look upon.” The infantry, he saw, had gone to ground, scrambling for any shelter, many crowding behind the stone fence running along the front. The Union batteries—at least those on the Second Corps front—were now beginning to return fire, adding to the indescribable din and shrouding the ridge in choking smoke.

  Veteran artillerist that he was, Gibbon cast a professional eye on the enemy’s gunnery. Smoothbore solid shot and shells could be plainly seen during their downward arc, he wrote, but the higher-velocity rifled shells “came with a rush and a scream and could only be seen in their rapid flight when they ‘upset’ and went tumbling through the air, creating the uncomfortable impression that, no matter whether you were in front of the gun from which they came or not, you were liable to be hit.” Gibbon noticed, too, that many of the enemy’s shells were not detonating over the lines—or not detonating at all—but were soaring over the ridge and landing in the rear areas. 23

  While some Confederate batteries had ranged in on today’s targets during yesterday’s fighting, most had not, and trying to do so under fire proved uncommonly difficult. The barrage and the return fire quickly blanketed Cemetery Ridge in smoke, which in the hot, still air did not disperse. It therefore became almost impossible for battery captains to gauge the fall of their shot. In any case, an infantry line, fired at head-on, presented a very shallow target. This was also true of a gun line, although a battery’s caissons and limbers and their teams at the rear were vulnerable to overshot rounds. But the Confederate artillerists’ gravest handicap on July 3 was the inferior quality of their fuzes. Colonel Wainwright of the First Corps entered in his diary that the Rebel barrage “was by no means as effective as it should have been, nine-tenths of their shot passing over our men.” While this was surely an exaggeration, it did suggest that on this afternoon even the best-plotted shot was not likely to hit what it was aimed at.

  (Henry Hunt, too, was professionally critical of the Confederate shooting, and at the Appomattox surrender he said so in conversation with Armistead Long, of Lee’s staff. Long had been a gunnery student of Hunt’s in the old army and was bemused by the criticism: “I remembered my lessons at the time, and when the fire became so scattered, wondered what you would think about it!”)

  In consequence, the entire reverse slope of Cemetery Ridge was inundated by an iron hail of shot and shell. As the Second Corps’ historian put it, “The plain behind the ridge was almost immediately swept of all camp followers and the unordered attendants of an army.” Teamsters and ambulance drivers scrambled for safety, and by no means did all of them or their vehicles escape. Field hospitals were hastily evacuated. Matthew Marvin of the 1st Minnesota, wounded on July 2, had thought “that if the rebs had a shell for me that it could not kill me any younger & that they cant do it but once,” but now he began to wonder.

  On the Taneytown Road a marching column of Henry Eustis’s brigade of the Sixth Corps, returning from duty at Culp’s Hill, was caught in the rain of shells. “Solid shot would strike the large rocks and split them as if exploded by gunpowder,” wrote diarist Elisha Hunt Rhodes. “The flying iron and pieces of stone struck men down in every direction.” The artillery reserve, posted behind the center, was squarely in the path of this fire, and General Tyler promptly ordered the ordnance trains to find a safer refuge. The reserve batteries went back too, but couriers were ordered to remain at their original posts to deliver orders for ammunition and replacement batteries when those on the gun line signaled for them. Tyler, like Hunt, intended to be prepared when the infantry came, as he was sure it would. 24

  One of the worst-hit sites was the Leister house, General Meade’s headquarters. Located some 400 yards behind the center of the main line, the little farmhouse was directly in the path of much of the Confederates’ misdirected fire. Shells hit the foundation and the front porch, went through the garret and through the front door, and one narrowly missed the general commanding. “They burst in the yard—burst next to the fence on both sides, garnished as usual with the hitched horses of aides and orderlies,” reported New York Times correspondent Samuel Wilkeson. “The fastened animals reared and plunged with terror. Then one fell, then another—sixteen lay dead and mangled before the fire ceased.”

  General and staff soon evacuated to the back yard, where Meade noticed some of the staff sidling up to the dubious shelter of the back wall of the little house. “Gentlemen,” he said with a sardonic smile, “are you trying to find a safe place?” He said they reminded him of an incident at the Palo Alto fight, back in ‘46. A teamster, he related, caught in the midst of a Mexican bombardment, was seen to tilt up his flimsy cart and crouch behind it. Just then General Zachary Taylor, old “Rough and Ready,” rode by and shouted, “You damned fool, don’t you know you are no safer there than anywhere else?” “I don’t suppose I am, general,” the man replied, “but it kind o’ feels so.”

  Meade led the staff to a barn farther in the rear, “but which on reaching,” he observed dryly, “was found as much exposed as the place I had left.” That reality was confirmed when Chief of Staff Butterfield was wounded by a shell fragment.

  Meade kept insisting he had to be where his lieutenants could find him, and his staff only persuaded him to move to Slocum’s less exposed headquarters on Power’s Hill on the promise that Slocum’s signal officer would be able to communicate with Meade’s signalman left at the Leister house. On reaching Power’s Hill, however, Meade discovered that he was not linked with his old headquarters after all; the signalman there evacuated the place soon after he did. Waving off his staff’s objections, Meade returned to the Leister house. Before the artillery fire finally tapered off, he was again on the move, now toward the front lines. Like Henry Hunt, George Meade expected an infantry attack, and he was going personally to meet it. 25

  The Leister house, General Meade’s headquarters, was hit repeatedly in the Confederate artillery bombardment on July 3. (Library of Congress)

  The ranking generals of the Second Corps felt duty bound to show themselves to the troops, to hearten them amidst this maelstrom. Rough-and-ready Alexander Hays rode up and down the lines as the shells flew over and past him, shouting defiance to the enemy and encouragement to his troops. He told the men to round up all abandoned rifles, clean and load them, and have them at hand to greet the Rebels when they charged. “Some of the men were so energetic as to have four loaded muskets,” recalled Hays’s aide David Shields; “it was very common for men to have two.”

  Being without a mount, John Gibbon, with his aide Frank Haskell, toured the full length of his divisional line on foot, bantering with the men. Observing the Rebel guns generally overshooting, Gibbon concluded that he could just as easily boost morale by being seen out ahead of the lines, and coincidentally be much safer that way. They went forward some 75 yards to a little clump of trees—the men, Gibbon wrote, “peering at us curiously from behind the stone wall as we passed along” — and sat down in the shade to observe the scene. Theirs proved to be one of the bette
r vantage points on the battlefield just then. According to Haskell, “On either crest we could see the great flaky streams of fire, and they seemed numberless, of the opposing guns, and their white banks of swift convolving smoke; but the sound of the discharges was drowned in the universal ocean of sound.”

  Winfield Scott Hancock, who on horseback presented a splendid martial image, not surprisingly chose to ride the lines rather than walk them. With an orderly bearing the corps flag behind him, he rode the length of the Second Corps front, to the cheers of his men. A staff man told him that an officer of his rank should not risk his life in such a manner, to which Hancock replied, “There are times when a corps commander’s life does not count.“26

  When he saw the Federal batteries initially not engaging—they were obeying Henry Hunt’s directive to hold their fire for fifteen minutes or so — Hancock’s hair-trigger temper erupted. General John Geary once observed, “Hancock always swore at everybody, above all on the battlefield.” That was certainly the case when he braced his chief of artillery, John Hazard, about the silent Second Corps guns, and was told of Hunt’s orders to save the long-range ammunition to use against the enemy’s infantry when it stepped out on the charge. Hancock’s concern was his own infantry. As one of his disciples put it, “Every soldier knows how trying and often how demoralizing it is to endure artillery fire without reply.” Captain Hazard was told in no uncertain terms who was in charge here, and that he must open his guns without a moment’s delay. Poor Hazard had no choice. After all, his batteries were brigaded with the Second Corps, and he could hardly refuse a direct order from the Second Corps’ commanding general.

  Hunt had not informed Hancock of his plan to delay the return fire, or the reasoning behind it—perhaps there was no time, perhaps he thought its wisdom was self-evident—and that further raised Hancock’s hackles. The next battery he came to was Patrick Hart’s 15th New York Independent, of the artillery reserve. Why was he not firing, Hancock wanted to know, in language that Captain Hart described as “profane and Blasphemous such as a drunken Ruffian would use.” Hart said he was under the chief of artillery’s orders; Hancock said this battle line was under his orders. Hart’s response was “that should he give me a written order that I would open fire under protest.”