Gettysburg

  Isaac Trimble, the new-that-morning commander of Lowrance’s and Lane’s brigades from Pender’s division, would complain afterward that the entire left wing of the assault (his two brigades and Pettigrew’s four) should have set out fifteen minutes ahead of Pickett, to close the gap between the two wings in a timely fashion. Yet neither Trimble nor anyone else seems to have brought up that idea during the morning’s planning. Longstreet passed the start instructions to Pickett in effect through Alexander, and at least initially Pickett’s sole concern was his own division. So each commander in the left wing would take his direction from the actions of the command immediately to his right, with inevitable delays. When it came his turn to advance, General Trimble keyed his movements on those of Fry and Marshall in front of him.

  William Lowrance, commanding Alfred Scales’s decimated brigade (16th, 22nd, 34th, 13th, and 38th North Carolina), was posted on the right in this second line behind Pettigrew. Trimble’s second brigade next to him, under Jim Lane, was also an all–North Carolina command—7th, 37th, 28th, 18th, and 33rd regiments. Trimble and his staff mounted and took position between the two brigades. Jim Lane explained the posting of this second line for the charge—Pettigrew’s division “was much larger than Lowrance’s brigade and my own, which were its only support, and there was consequently no second line in rear of its left.” Thus Pettigrew’s left—Davis’s and Brockenbrough’s ill-led brigades—was quite without support. This was symptomatic of the indifferent planning applied to the left wing of the attack, from Lee’s lack of oversight through A. P. Hill’s negligence to Longstreet’s inattention.

  Of the six brigades in the left wing, only Lane’s 1,700 men could be considered fresh, having seen just minor skirmishing in Wednesday’s fighting. And of the six, only Pettigrew’s former brigade, now under James Marshall, was coming off a victorious (if costly) action on Wednesday. Four had experienced rout or been stopped cold by the Federals. Whether today they proved to be gun-shy or bent on revenge would very much depend on their leadership.

  The 13,000 or so men of Pickett’s Charge needed to cross three-quarters of a mile of open ground to reach their aiming points on Cemetery Ridge. To be sure, there were several shallow swales in that ground that might offer brief shelter, yet for most of the distance, especially when they reached the Emmitsburg Road, they would be completely exposed to a concerted fire by the Yankee defenders. Marching at “common time,” with perhaps a pause or two for realignment on the way, would require some twenty minutes to half an hour to cover the distance.

  On Day Three it had, it seemed, all come down to this.13

  WHILE PICKETT’S CHARGE, as revamped that morning, was simply a direct frontal assault, its execution involved certain complexities. For one thing, the Confederates’ starting line and their target line were not parallel, requiring continuous adjustments by the marchers, under fire, to square up the attacking force. These adjustments were further complicated by the fact that the two wings of the attack did not start off together, either in space or in time. Then there was the Emmitsburg Road, which acted as an artificial but unavoidable and deceptive dividing line in the advance. The road slanted southwest-to-northeast across the valley between Seminary and Cemetery ridges, so that upon reaching it, Pettigrew’s northern wing would come within rifle (and canister) range of the Yankees. Pickett’s southern wing, upon reaching the road, was merely catching up to its own skirmish line. But the largest of the complexities involved the funneling of the mile-and-a-half-wide assembled force into a far narrower striking force that was to storm the targeted area of Cemetery Ridge.

  On most of Pickett’s front the sturdy wood fences along the Emmitsburg Road had been pulled down by the Rebel skirmishers on Thursday or on Friday morning, but on Pettigrew’s front the road lay within the Union skirmish line and so the fences were intact and a barrier to the attackers. The gently rolling, open ground between the two ridges was planted in wheat and corn and clover, and offered no hindrance to the marchers. Their lines would be broken, however, by the Nicholas Codori and William Bliss farmsteads, now unwitting landmarks in the middle of a battlefield.

  Some of Pettigrew’s men, as they crossed the artillery line and glimpsed what lay ahead, cast a jaundiced eye at their prospects. Captain Joseph Graham, commanding the Charlotte Artillery of North Carolina, wrote that as the infantry passed through his battery “I feared then I could see a want of resolution in our men. And I heard many say, ‘that is worse than Malvern Hill,’ and ‘I don’t hardly think that position can be carried,’ etc., etc., enough to make me apprehensive about the result.” (Cadmus Wilcox had earlier warned Dick Garnett that the enemy’s line here was “twice as strong” as at Gaines’s Mill, that other Federal stronghold on the Peninsula.) There was similar alarm among Pickett’s troops. A man in Garnett’s brigade who had viewed the scene from the artillery’s position came back and told his comrades, “This is going to be a heller! Prepare for the worst!” In Wilcox’s and Lang’s reserve brigades, which had attacked Cemetery Ridge the day before, cautions were issued to Kemper’s Virginians as they passed by—“Boys, that’s a hot place. We were there yesterday.”

  To a veteran like Lieutenant John Dooley, 1st Virginia, the old homilies of a picture-book war had long since given way to stark reality. As Dooley put it, “when you rise to your feet as we did today, I tell you the enthusiasm of ardent breasts in many cases ain’t there, and instead of burning to avenge the insults of our country, families and altars and firesides, the thought is most frequently, Oh, if I could just come out of this charge safely how thankful would I be!“14

  For Pickett and his generals, their immediate preoccupation in directing the assault was to close the considerable gap between their men and Pettigrew’s. The decision setting Pickett’s target as the easily visible scrub oaks of the Copse meant that his division would be making what amounted to a left oblique advance—and for Kemper’s brigade on the far right it would have to be a quite sharp oblique. Marching orders at first were simply to dress the lines to the left, but because for almost the first half of the advance Birkett Fry’s guiding brigade lagged behind and was not even visible on the left, this produced only a modest sideling in that direction. The 3,600 men of Garnett’s and Kemper’s lead brigades, without specific orders for a left-oblique, tended instead to bunch up. In Kemper’s brigade, for example, the 11th Virginia began overlapping the 1st Virginia to its left, causing a verbal skirmish between officers. When orders finally were given for a deliberate left oblique, most of Pickett’s formations would abruptly be presenting their flank squarely to the enemy. All of this was accomplished—and accomplished with admirable discipline—under a rising storm of enemy fire. 15

  The first hostile shots no doubt came from Benjamin Rittenhouse’s Battery D, 5th U.S., perched atop Little Round Top. Lieutenant Rittenhouse was, from an artillerist’s perspective, in the best site on the battlefield. As he afterward put it succinctly, “I watched Pickett’s men advance, and opened on them with an oblique fire, and ended with a terrible enfilading fire.” His six 10-pounder Parrott rifles had the range and the elevation not only to hit Kemper’s flank brigade but to reach into Garnett’s and Armistead’s brigades as well. Percussion shells, designed to explode on contact, were particularly deadly when fired from an elevated enfilading position. “Many times a single percussion shell would cut out several files, and then explode in their ranks,” Rittenhouse explained; “several times almost a company would disappear, as the shell would rip from the right to the left among them.”

  There was so little space on Little Round Top’s cramped, rocky western crest that when the Rebel advance reached halfway across the valley, four of Battery D’s pieces could no longer be shifted to follow. The two guns still bearing were under a pair of Irish sergeants, Samuel Peeples and Timothy Grady—“both splendid shots,” Rittenhouse remarked. “Almost every shot pointed by these two men seemed to go where it was intended.” The massed reserve batteries of Freeman McGilvery
would now take up the contest against Pickett’s wing, but Sergeants Peeples and Grady continued their deadly fire throughout the charge.16

  On the opposite flank the first Yankee guns to open were those posted on the opposite high ground, Cemetery Hill—all or parts of eight batteries under the general command of Thomas Osborn. Major Osborn’s own Eleventh Corps batteries had been strongly reinforced from the First Corps and especially from the artillery reserve, and by the time

  Union soldier Charles Reed sketched Confederates forming up for Pickett’s Charge. The arrow at left rear marks the copse of trees, the focus of the attack. At far left is the Bryan house. (Library of Congress)

  Pettigrew’s wing stepped off on its advance, thirty-nine cannon would be trained on it.

  This fire swept obliquely across the entire face of Pettigrew’s four front-line brigades. “They were at once enveloped in a dense cloud of smoke and dust,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Franklin Sawyer of the 8th Ohio. “Arms, heads, blankets, guns and knapsacks were thrown and tossed in to the clear air…. A moan went up from the field, distinctly to be heard amid the storm of battle….”

  From atop Cemetery Hill General Schurz had a longer view: “Through our field-glasses we could distinctly see the gaps torn in their ranks, and the ground dotted with dark spots—their dead and wounded…. But the brave rebels promptly filled the gaps from behind or by closing up on their colors, and unshaken and unhesitatingly they continued their onward march.” This was an accurate enough depiction of the brigades of Fry and Marshall and Joe Davis, but it was a different case with Brockenbrough’s brigade making its disordered march on the Confederate far left flank.17

  General Hays had posted the 8th Ohio along the Emmitsburg Road, out ahead and to the right of his battle line, to serve as a flank guard. Colonel Sawyer, in turn, aggressively pushed his skirmish line out ahead to a fence at the far end of a cornfield in his front. He could see toward his left the main line of Rebels as it braved Osborn’s artillery barrage, and in his left front a smaller force approaching—Brockenbrough’s Virginians, as it proved. Seeing his opportunity and seizing the moment, Sawyer led his little force at the double-quick through the cornfield to the skirmishers’ fence line, deployed in a single rank, and opened a raking fire at the Rebels some 100 yards distant.

  There were barely 160 Ohioans in this firing line, but so sudden and so unexpected was their musketry that Brockenbrough’s confused Virginians, already stunned by the artillery fire, panicked and (said Sawyer) “fled in the wildest confusion.” Perhaps as much as half the brigade did not stop running until it had crossed Seminary Ridge. Colonel Lowrance, commanding one of Trimble’s two trailing brigades, would complain that Brockenbrough’s men “came tearing through our ranks, which caused many of our men to break.” Pettigrew and even Pickett sent staff officers to try and rally the fugitives, but without success. In virtually the blink of an eye the left-flank brigade of the grand charge was driven from the field.

  This coup did not satisfy the resourceful Colonel Sawyer. Sighting the approach of the Rebels’ next-in-line brigade—it was Joe Davis’s Mississippians and North Carolinians—Sawyer put his regiment in a left wheel so that it was facing due south and aligned behind a board fence. Resting their rifles on the fence, the Ohioans opened a close-in, deadly

  accurate fire straight into the enemy’s flank. As Colonel Sawyer later phrased it, “our blood was up, and the men loaded and fired and yelled and howled at the passing column.” Before they were done for the day, wrote the 8th Ohio’s Thomas Galway, “We got three stands of colors and many prisoners.“18

  Thus far the 8th Ohio was the only infantry positioned to open on the attackers. The range for the infantry lines on Cemetery Ridge was still too great, and so for the next few minutes the killing continued to be the work of the artillery. First Osborn’s thirty-nine guns on Cemetery Hill to the north and then McGilvery’s forty-one on lower Cemetery Ridge to the south smothered the Rebel columns in an enfilading crossfire. And with each step of the advance, the range decreased, the enfilading angle increased, and the destruction mounted. It was all exactly as Henry Hunt had planned it, and almost all he had hoped for. All that was missing from his master scheme was cannon fire from the center. There the guns stood silent, their long-range ammunition exhausted, their gunners impatiently waiting for canister range.

  The Yankee artillerists utilized three types of ammunition in this long-range fire. The smoothbore Napoleons fired solid shot with a deliberately low trajectory that, skipping and bounding into the flank of a column of marching men, was as demoralizing as it was destructive; in its random, very visible course one of these 12-pound iron balls might knock down an entire file of men. The rifled pieces fired primarily either percussion shells, exploding on contact, or fuzed case shot, exploding overhead and raining down shrapnel on the marchers. In enfilading fire all that was required was aim; against these long ranks of marching men a decently aimed shot simply could not miss. And unlike the Rebels’ ammunition, exceedingly few Federal shots were misfires due to faulty fuzes.

  Captain Elijah Taft, commanding three of the powerful 20-pounder Parrott rifles on Cemetery Hill, described this artillerists’ dream—and this attackers’ nightmare. “I could sight down the entire length of their line,” he recalled, “which stretched as far south as the eye could see, a perfect enfilading shot for my gunners…. I watched my fire stop and break one column, all the men turning back in mass seeking cover in the woods.” Taft and Major Osborn’s other battery commanders had opened this long-range fire the moment Pettigrew’s brigades emerged from the woods on Seminary Ridge, and they continued it as fast as the guns could be served for twenty minutes or more, until the attackers reached the Emmitsburg Road and came within canister range. Their fire reached deep into the marching columns, but the most immediate effect was relentlessly to peel away the now exposed left flank of the attack. Pettigrew’s attacking wing was crippled before its men could fire a shot.

  The sheer ferocity of the bombardment literally staggered Pettigrew’s men. Frederick Edgell reported that his New Hampshire battery, posted on Cemetery Hill, fired 248 rounds of shell and case shot at the attackers. If Captain Edgell’s expenditure was typical of Osborn’s batteries, it meant that more than 1,600 rounds of long-range shot and shell were aimed at Pettigrew’s brigades that afternoon. The crash of the guns and the blast of the exploding shells were indescribable. A man in the 7th Tennessee, in Fry’s brigade, remembered it as “a deepening roar that no exaggeration of language can heighten.”

  The collapse of Brockenbrough’s brigade left Joe Davis’s Mississippians and North Carolinians as the flank brigade of Pettigrew’s wing and consequently a primary target of these Yankee gunners. Already in some disorder as his men picked their way through the smoldering Bliss farmstead, Davis reported that “we were met by a heavy fire of grape, canister, and shell, which told sadly upon our ranks.” Hardest hit was the left-hand regiment, the 11th Mississippi, a veteran outfit that had been guarding trains and missed the brigade’s battering on Wednesday. The 11th paid its dues on Friday. The enemy’s fire, said Davis, “commanded our front and left with fatal effect….” The 11th Mississippi would lose 312 of its 592 men in Pickett’s Charge, and easily a third to a half that number fell before the Yankee artillery.19

  On the southern flank, meanwhile, the rise of ground that had largely shielded McGilvery’s reserve artillery position from Confederate eyes during the opening bombardment now served in its turn—for a time at least—to shield Pickett’s advancing infantry from McGilvery’s guns. As Kemper’s and Garnett’s and Armistead’s battle lines crested the rise, however, there was surely a moment of mutual surprise—5,830 Confederate marchers abruptly confronting a massed array of cannon none of them had suspected was there; and McGilvery’s gunners at last sighting the enemy’s infantry, marching not toward them but at an oblique angle past them, ideal for enfilade fire. As Colonel McGilvery explained it, the Rebel battle lines “present
ed an oblique front to the guns under my command, and by training the whole line of guns obliquely to the right, we had a raking fire through all three of these lines.” The reality behind that matter-of-fact recital was terrifying.

  McGilvery’s forty-one guns sent a torrent of fire raining down on the marchers. Like Osborn’s guns, their missiles were primarily solid shot, percussion shells, and case shot. “The execution of the fire must have been terrible” was McGilvery’s judgment. In the 53rd Virginia Captain Benjamin Farinholt watched as a single shell left a file of thirteen men “in a perfect mangled mass of flesh and blood indistinguishable one from the other.” One strike in the midst of the 56th Virginia, Garnett’s brigade, killed or wounded sixteen men. The color guard of the 11th Virginia in Kemper’s brigade was smothered in shell fragments; three times the flag went down, and three times it was rescued. “I tell you, the gaps we made were simply terrible,” wrote Yankee artillerist Edwin Dow. “But they closed up their lines, and closed up and closed them up….” And they kept coming. 20

  Pickett’s officers worked quickly to keep them coming. “Steady, men!” Dick Garnett called out in his commanding voice. “Close up! A little faster; not too fast! Save your strength!” Garnett, on horseback, was easily seen and widely obeyed. James Kemper, also mounted, calmly continued dressing his lines to the left as ordered. He would later admit that in the intensity of the moment he was oblivious of most everything except the needs of his own brigade. Lew Armistead, marching out ahead of his second line, ignoring the fire, continued to raise his sword high as a guide for the troops.

  General Pickett, from his position behind the advance, ranged back and forth to the best observation sites left and right, so he might better direct events. According to his orderly, Thomas Friend, Pickett “went as far as any Major General, commanding a division, ought to have gone, and farther.” As the division approached the Emmitsburg Road, staggering under the withering artillery fire, Pickett sent back to Longstreet for help. Pickett instructed his aide Robert Bright to say “that the position against which he had been sent would be taken, but he could not hold it unless reinforcements were sent to him.“21