Gettysburg
Page 52
GENERAL PICKETT, in agreeing earlier in the day that the grand charge would guide on Birkett Fry’s brigade of Pettigrew’s command—the center brigade of the attacking force—seems not to have given much thought to the effect of that decision on the movements of his own brigades. Or perhaps Pickett simply misjudged the lay of the land he would have to cross to reach Cemetery Ridge. In any event, as his division neared the Emmitsburg Road it became obvious that its sideling movements “dressing left” would not be enough to close up on Pettigrew’s division. There promised to be two separate assaults rather than one concerted one. Since only Pickett was in a command position to see and
correct this, the order to make a left oblique had to come from him—but he waited dangerously long to give it.
The approximately 45-degree turn, setting the division on a north-by-northeast course almost parallel to the Emmitsburg Road, was smartly executed by the well-drilled Virginians, but it proved a very costly move. Now Pickett’s men were marching right past the Federal batteries. The farthest of McGilvery’s guns were within 800 yards of Kemper’s rightmost regiment. The closest were within 400 yards. Furthermore, the northward turn offered the Yankee gunners full enfilade fire. “Load canister!” came the order. Captain Patrick Hart, 15th New York Battery, McGilvery’s brigade, loaded his four Napoleons with double canister when the range closed. “I continued this dreadful fire on this line until there was not a man of them to be seen,” he reported.
As it had been from the beginning of the charge, Kemper’s flanking brigade was the most immediate victim of this fire. Its new course took it across the Emmitsburg Road and onto the Codori farmstead. There was a brief respite crossing a shallow swale, but as the Virginians detoured around Mr. Codori’s big barn they also came under fire from Yankee infantrymen. These three Vermont regiments, from George Stannard’s brigade, had been posted on the Second Corps’ southern flank to serve the same guarding function as the 8th Ohio on the northern flank.
“It was a terribly costly movement for the enemy,” wrote Lieutenant George Benedict of General Stannard’s staff. “The 14th regiment … at once opened fire by battalion, and continued it by file, at about sixty rods distance, with very great effect. The 13th joined its fire with the 14th, and a line of dead rebels at the close showed distinctly where they marched across the front of the Vermonters.”
With the course now set, for good or ill, toward the Copse, Kemper rode back to find Armistead to coordinate support during the coming critical minutes. “General,” Kemper called out over the din, “I am going to storm those works, and I want you to support me.” Armistead acknowledged that he would, and pointed pridefully to his brigade’s formation. “Did you ever see anything better on parade?” he asked. “I never did,” said Kemper, and threw him a salute. Pickett’s men, trailing dead and wounded at every step, doggedly closing the gaps torn in their ranks, strode on toward the Copse and the wall. General Armistead raised his black slouch hat on his sword’s point to better show the way.22
This oblique march by Pickett’s division finally closed the gap between it and Pettigrew’s division. The Confederates now had a united front, roughly on the line of the Emmitsburg Road. But this by itself did not produce a united result. The two wings of the grand charge would have very different tales to tell in these next hectic, hellish minutes.
Pettigrew’s troops would founder at the Emmitsburg Road, which proved to be both literally and figuratively a barricade to their further advance. The fences along this northern section of the road were intact and too strongly built—post-and-rail on the west, post-and-plank on the east—and the enemy’s fire too hot, for the men to stop long enough to pull them down. They had to climb over instead. To make matters worse, they had now come within musketry range. The command “Fire!” swept along Alexander Hays’s Yankee line, triggered by the general himself. “The time it took to climb to the top of the fence seemed to me an age of suspense,” wrote John H. Moore of the 7th Tennessee, of Fry’s brigade. “It was not a leaping over; it was rather an insensible tumbling to the ground….”
The roadbed here was some two feet below the road edges, and the first shelter of any sort these men had encountered since their march began on Seminary Ridge. Ahead of them was the second roadside fence to climb, then some 200 yards of open, rising ground, bisected by yet another rail fence, to the stone fence now wreathed in smoke and ablaze with what appeared to be one continuous sheet of flame. The artillery blasts from the left had subsided somewhat—a shoulder of Cemetery Hill now masked a number of Osborn’s batteries from targets in the road—but in their place came a searing barrage of canister from the immediate front. The source of the canister was George Woodruff’s Battery I, 1st U.S., six Napoleons posted in front of Ziegler’s Grove with a clear field of fire toward the Emmitsburg Road.
Leadership in Pettigrew’s division was being decimated. Pettigrew himself, painfully wounded in the left hand by shrapnel, was unhorsed and had to scurry about on foot to direct events. At about the time his brigade reached the Emmitsburg Road, Birkett Fry was shot through the thigh and had to turn over his command. As Fry remembered it, “I was so confident of victory that to some of my men, who ran up to carry me off, I shouted, ‘Go on—it will not last five minutes longer!’” Moments later, James Marshall, today in charge of Pettigrew’s North Carolina brigade, was shot dead off his horse by two bullets to the head. All four of Marshall’s regimental commanders went down. Brockenbrough and his brigade had already been driven from the field, leaving Joe Davis as the only one of Pettigrew’s brigade leaders still standing.
Whether because of the seeming shelter offered by the sunken road, or the excessive command casualties, or simply the terrific volume of the
Charles Reed pictured Pickett’s men coming under fire from the Union batteries. The copse of trees is at right center, the Bryan house at left center. Reed’s battery was posted at the far left. (Library of Congress)
enemy’s fire, a sizable majority of Pettigrew’s men did not, or could not, take the charge beyond the Emmitsburg Road. Lieutenant Moore of the 7th Tennessee thought perhaps two-thirds of the “front line” that reached the road never advanced beyond it. “I know when I reached the top of the second fence there seemed to remain a line of battle in the road,” he recalled. The 7th Tennessee’s colonel, John A. Fite, estimated that only half his regiment reached the road, and only half of those, some fifty men, advanced beyond it. As Fite put it, “what wasn’t shot down of our crowd fell down.“23
Alexander Hays’s tactic of crowding every rifle in his two brigades right into the front line, holding no one back, proved to be murderously effective against Pettigrew’s charge. The 260 yards of wall Hays was defending appeared to be one solid line of rifle barrels. Men were two, three, even four deep behind it. Within reach were scores of extra rifles gleaned from yesterday’s battlefield. A Federal would fire, fall back to load, and his place on the firing line was immediately filled. Some just loaded and passed pieces forward to better shots. Like Pop Greene’s earlier tactic of rotating the Culp’s Hill defenders, the result was one massive, steady, continuous volley of musketry.
Employing the language of home, Yankee farm boys described the enemy as falling before them like ripe grain before the sickle or the scythe—similes of unsparing accuracy. Afterward an industrious observer examined the board fence along the eastern edge of the Emmitsburg Road. One board, he wrote, “was indeed a curiosity. It was sixteen feet long, fourteen inches broad, and was perforated with eight hundred and thirty-six musket balls.”
Sergeant Ben Hirst, 14th Connecticut, wrote his wife, “such a Volley of rifles we gave them you cannot imagine. Soon the first line was Shattered to pieces, and with shouts of Derision we awaited for the next, served them the same way….” Two companies of the 14th Connecticut were armed with Sharps breechloaders, with a rate of fire about three times that of muzzleloaders. In these few critical moments they were fired so fast that water had to be poured
on their barrels to cool them. The 12th New Jersey could also be said to have special armament. Equipped with obsolete .69-caliber smoothbores that fired buck-and-ball, the Jerseymen were determined to make the best of their handicap. A number of them spent the morning altering cartridges, taking out the ball and adding a handful of buckshot. So it happened that those Rebels who dared push on across the Emmitsburg Road and into the Jerseymen’s range were greeted with blasts from these deadly shotguns.24
Isaac Trimble, bringing up his two brigades behind Pettigrew, watched as Fry’s and Marshall’s brigades directly ahead of him reached the Emmitsburg Road, when suddenly “they seemed to sink into the earth under the tempest of fire poured into them.” The same image could have been applied to Joe Davis’s brigade on the far left. After the flight of Brockenbrough’s Virginians, Davis’s Mississippians and North Carolinians absorbed the full weight of the Federals’ oblique fire. At first this came from Osborn’s guns on Cemetery Hill. Then came the canister blasts from Woodruff’s battery at Ziegler’s Grove. At the same time, the 8th Ohio, reinforced by a hundred or so adventuresome skirmishers from the 125th and 126th New York, continued to pour close-range fire squarely into the Rebels’ flank. By now, according to the Ohioans’ Colonel Sawyer, “the mass appeared more like a cloud of moving smoke and dust than a column of troops.”
The veteran 11th Mississippi on the left struggled on doggedly through this gauntlet of fire. Led by its color bearer—the fifth of the afternoon, his flag now “dangling in graceless confusion from one corner”—a handful of the Mississippians made it across the Emmitsburg Road and rushed the Yankee line. Fourteen men somehow survived and managed to gain the shelter of Abraham Bryan’s barn, near the northern end of the Yankee line. While they awaited reinforcements, they aimed an occasional shot around the corner of the barn.
“Thinking the line rather a long time coming up,” said Lieutenant William Peel, “I looked to the rear. The state of my feelings may be imagined, but not described, upon seeing the line broken, & flying in full disorder….“His little party certainly could not advance, and it could not retreat without becoming “the ‘flying target’ of a thousand muskets.” In due course someone found a scrap of white cloth and waved it around the corner in token of surrender. Lieutenant Peel’s party had come the closest to the Yankee line of any of Johnston Pettigrew’s troops.
The rest of Davis’s brigade was stymied at the Emmitsburg Road. Pummeled simultaneously from front and flank by musketry, its ranks torn by canister, it retained neither the strength nor the spirit for a further advance. A Mississippi soldier named Wiley Heflin wrote the epitaph for Joe Davis’s brigade on July 3: “our line was so cut down and demoralized by the enemy’s batteries before we got in gun shot distance that we could not carry the works.” Lieutenant Louis Young of General Pettigrew’s staff described the brigade at this point as “reduced to a line of skirmishers.” There was nothing for it now but to turn back to Seminary Ridge.25
The brigades of Fry and Marshall, less damaged by the Cemetery Hill guns and the musketry from the flank than those of Brockenbrough and Davis, were able to reach the Emmitsburg Road in better order. They also pushed across the road in greater numbers, but this was merely a matter of degree. The final result, the final checkmate, was just the same.
A substantial number of these Confederates simply lay or crouched in the sunken roadbed, alongside the bloodied heaps of dead and wounded, and tried to return the enemy’s fire. Possibly 300 of Fry’s Tennesseans and Alabamians and perhaps another 600 or so of Marshall’s North Carolinians succeeded in advancing beyond the road and its two fences. But far fewer of them penetrated beyond the rail fence—the third fence—that extended northward from the Angle in the stone wall. The range here at this fence closed to only some 80 yards, and there were two or three Federal riflemen for each Confederate who reached that far. There was also a major last-minute addition to Hays’s battle line—the six Napoleons of Lieutenant Gulian Weir’s Battery C, 5th U.S.
Weir’s battery had been roughly handled by Rans Wright’s Georgians during Thursday’s fighting, losing (but later regaining) three of its guns. That morning it was refitted, and as the bombardment ended Weir was sent forward by one of Hunt’s staff and directed to take the place of Arnold’s wrecked Rhode Island battery near the Angle. “Go right up there,” he was told, “…and you will come in on their flank, and mow them down.” Unlimbering smartly under fire, loading with double canister, Weir literally blew away a line of Rebels who had reached the third fence.
As always in any attack, the color bearers, the focus of all eyes and the most visible of all targets, suffered staggering losses. The 14th Tennessee and the 5 th Alabama battalion, of Fry’s brigade, each reached the limit of its advance behind its fourth color bearer of the day. Private Boney Smith of the 14th planted his flag at the third fence and stood holding it there defiantly and then he too was shot down. The 26th North Carolina had lost fourteen color bearers on July 1; on July 3 it lost four more, and lost its flag as well.26
Here and there little groups of a few dozen men led by officers of driving force pressed on through the storm toward the wall. A Federal gunner watched as these officers, “with uplifted swords, rushed madly up and down, calling to their men to follow. One after another they fell.” Probably the closest any of these parties came to the wall was 15 or 20 yards. An officer in the 12th New Jersey compared their brave efforts to “spray driven from a wave,” marking the high-water mark of each desperate push against Hays’s line. Surely the largest such effort was that of Lieutenant Colonel John Graves, taking command of the 47th North Carolina after its colonel fell wounded. Graves drove some 150 of his Tar Heels to within 40 yards of the fence, going to ground there and demanding the men hold on until their supports arrived. But there were no supports. Graves and his stranded survivors soon became prisoners.27
The story of these supports was a matter of too little, too late, and too hopeless. When he saw his left collapsing, first Brockenbrough’s brigade and then Davis’s, General Pettigrew sent back to ask Isaac Trimble to shore up the crumbling flank. Trimble’s orders to Jim Lane’s brigade were confusing, however, and only three and a half of Lane’s five North Carolina regiments moved up to the Emmitsburg Road in Davis’s place. The scene they found was chaotic. Dead and wounded literally carpeted the roadway, breaking up Lane’s formations. Canister from Woodruff’s guns came whistling into this mass of men, kicking up clouds of dust to add to the roils of battle smoke. The flanking force built around the 8th Ohio, further reinforced now, pounded mercilessly at Lane’s flank. This fire, said Lane, was “murderous.” Here again there were spurts of advance by these North Carolinians beyond the road, and even beyond the third fence, but without any power behind them they soon withered and shriveled under Hays’s relentless musketry.
The second of Trimble’s brigades, Scales’s North Carolina brigade led today by William Lowrance, was a frail hope to begin with. It had lost almost two-thirds of its men on Wednesday and nearly all its field officers, and to have to advance once again straight into this maelstrom of enemy fire must have seemed a nightmare revisited. As Colonel Lowrance phrased it, without exaggeration, “Then we were ordered forward over a wide, hot, and already crimson plain.”
Like Lane’s men, the tangle of dead, wounded, and stymied men at the Emmitsburg Road formed an obstacle to Lowrance’s command. At this point, wrote Lieutenant Henry C. Moore, 38th North Carolina, echoing several others in the charge that day, “The fire from the enemy’s artillery and infantry was now terrible, and we were reduced to a mere skirmish line.” In that state there was little they could do: “Our men kept up a weak fire through the plank fence.” In his report, Colonel Lowrance, who was himself wounded, wrote plaintively that by now his brigade and Lane’s “were the only line to be seen upon that vast field, and no support in view. The natural inquiry was, What shall we do? and none to answer.” The decision was soon taken out of his hands: “The men answered fo
r themselves, and, without orders, the brigade retreated….“28
While Pettigrew’s and Trimble’s brigades did not finally have strength enough to break through the line at the stone fence, or even to seriously threaten it, their firepower was enough to damage the Yankees severely. Alexander Hays’s tightly massed battle line might deliver great killing power, but it was thereby greatly vulnerable to return fire. In their spur-of-the-moment battle line in the Emmitsburg Road, the Rebels rested their rifles on the roadside fence for accurate counterfire. The 1st Delaware, at about the center of Hays’s line, had two color bearers killed within two minutes. The 111th New York, on the right, suffered four color bearers killed during the assault, matching several Confederate regiments in that grim statistic.
Lieutenant George Woodruff was shot through the body while maneuvering a section of his guns at Ziegler’s Grove, but waved off aid until the guns were posted properly. He would die the next day. Both of Hays’s brigade commanders were also casualties. Colonel Smyth had been wounded during the bombardment, and now, at the peak of the attack, Colonel Eliakim Sherrill was shot in the stomach, a wound that proved mortal. In the fighting on July 3, said one of his men, Colonel Sherrill was being “too brave a man to live.”
Eliakim Sherrill had assumed the command the day before when George Willard was killed, and he helped the brigade expunge the humiliation of its 1862 capture at Harper’s Ferry. As the fighting wound down, however, the excitable Winfield Hancock took offense when Sherrill prudently withdrew his men to safer ground, and relieved him of the command. Alexander Hays later talked Hancock into rescinding the order and Sherrill got his brigade back, but today the colonel apparently went out of his way to regain the honor he believed he had lost. (Some months later, in a conversation with Hays, Hancock asked about that colonel he had put in arrest at Gettysburg. “I guess I ought to apologize to him,” he said. “That’s just like all your damned apologies, Hancock,” said Hays shortly. “They come too late. He’s dead.”)29