Gettysburg
Page 53
From the bombardment all through the charge, General Hays was an indomitable force, riding back and forth just behind his battle line, shouting encouragement to his men. “Hurrah! Boys, we’re giving them hell!” he assured them. Two horses were shot from under him, and fourteen of his twenty orderlies were hit. One of his men, writing home the next day, insisted that neither “Shell, shot, nor the bullets of the Rebel sharpshooters seemed to intimidate him in the least; in fact, he paid not the least attention to them….“But Hays did more than simply cheer on the troops. When he saw the Rebel flank crumbling, for example, and realized that his own flank was thereby secure, he quickly added weight to the 8th Ohio’s flanking force that was dealing out so destructive a fire. All in all, Alexander Hays’s July 3 performance was inspired.30
AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME that Pettigrew’s division engaged along the Emmitsburg Road, Pickett’s three brigades were completing their oblique turn and swinging back eastward to storm John Gibbon’s battle line. Pickett’s Virginians did not have the barrier of roadside fences to contend with, nor did they encounter the solid wall of fire that Pettigrew did, and so their fight would reach its climax at closer quarters with the enemy.
General Gibbon had found his mount by now, and as he rode along behind the lines he encouraged his men. Where Alexander Hays was all loud exhortations, John Gibbon was all quiet practicality. “Gnl. Gibbon rode down the lines,” Frank Haskell noted, “cool and calm, and in an unimpassioned voice he said to the men: ‘Do not hurry, men, and fire too fast—let them come up close before you fire, and then aim low, and steadily.’” Haskell added, “The coolness of their General was reflected in the faces of his men.”
Alexander Webb, whose Philadelphia Brigade held the center of the Union position, at the Angle, was also encouraging his troops. Webb’s message was simple. If they did as well today as they had yesterday, he said, he would be well satisfied. One of his colonels even invoked the embattled colonists of yore and cautioned his men not to fire until they “could distinguish the whites of their eyes.” A primary concern for Webb was his artillery support, and he spoke of this to Lieutenant Alonzo Cushing, whose Battery A, 4th U.S., was posted behind the Angle. Only two of Cushing’s 3-inch Ordnance rifles were still operable after the bombardment, and Cushing himself was grievously wounded and could barely stand. When Webb said he expected the enemy would come straight at them, Cushing replied, “I had better run my guns right up to the stone fence and bring all my canister alongside of each piece.” “All right,” said Webb, “do so.“31
Webb’s sector of the battle line was awkward to defend. The jog in the stone fence here meant that his front line, running southward from the Angle, was some 80 yards in advance of Hays’s battle line on his right. Furthermore, Webb was short-handed, with eight companies of the 106th Pennsylvania co-opted by Howard for his fragile Eleventh Corps. Initially Webb had posted just the 69th Pennsylvania at the fence, leaving the 71st, 72nd, and the two remaining companies of the 106th Pennsylvania to the rear, on the artillery line. But when Cushing pushed his two remaining guns right up to the fence, Webb ordered the 71st Pennsylvania forward into the Angle to support the guns. There was not room enough there for the whole regiment, however, so two companies of the 71st remained behind.
Thus when Pickett’s troops came storming toward them, Webb’s 940 men were divided roughly in half—the 69th Pennsylvania and eight companies of the 71st at the front behind the stone fence, and at the rear in support the 72nd Pennsylvania and two companies each of the 71st and 106th. Although the men of the 69th had, like Hays’s men, picked up rifles left from yesterday’s fighting for additional firepower, Webb’s battle line by itself could not begin to match the massed fire being delivered against Pettigrew by Hays’s command.
The forces to Webb’s left—the Second Corps brigades of Norman Hall and William Harrow, and the First Corps troops of George Stannard’s Vermont brigade and Theodore Gates’s demi-brigade—were, most of them, not fated to be in the direct line of Pickett’s attack. Indeed it happened in the next critical minutes that these defenders played more the role of the hunter than the hunted.32
The Vermonters, in their advanced position on the left, had been the first Federal infantry to engage Pickett’s advance. Now, as the Rebels completed their oblique move and resumed their eastward course, General Stannard saw opportunity and jumped at it. At the moment his three regiments were facing west; a rapid pivot to the right, he realized, would put him facing northward and squarely on the Confederates’ flank just as they were attacking.
This change of front would be somewhat tricky, however, especially for nine-month troops in their first battle and amidst a smoky, deadly bedlam. The 13th Vermont, on Stannard’s far right, had the easier task. It was ordered to “Change front forward on first company!”—that is, to pivot 90 degrees on the rightmost company. Stannard determined to leave the 14th regiment where it was, facing west as a guard for the new position, and in a more complicated maneuver, to march the 16th regiment by the right flank behind the 14th for some 300 yards and then deploy it facing north alongside the 13th.
Just then Winfield Scott Hancock reined up in front of Stannard in a swirl of dust and demanded to know what was going on. As was his custom in a fight, Hancock was all over the field, urging men on, pushing in reinforcements (“Go in there pretty God damned quick!” he yelled to one of his colonels), gauging the action. Like Stannard, he had seen the opportunity to deliver a flanking fire into the attackers, but apparently he disagreed with or misunderstood the Vermonter on how to carry it out. As Stannard remembered it, Hancock “remarked that I was gone to Hell.” George Stannard was not to be intimidated: “My answer was ‘that
Pickett’s Charge from the Confederates’ perspective, looking east, with the opposing battle lines in the middle distance. Ziegler’s Grove is at left center, rear. Painting by Edwin Forbes. (Library of Congress)
to Hell it was then,’ as it was the only thing that could possibly save the day.” The matter seems to have been settled quickly enough, for the maneuver continued without any alterations by Hancock.33
Moments later Lieutenant George Benedict, Stannard’s aide, watched Hancock start to ride away “when he uttered an exclamation and I saw that he was reeling in his saddle.” Staff men eased the general to the ground and (wrote Benedict) they “opened his clothing where he indicated by a movement of his hand that he was hurt, a ragged hole, an inch or more in diameter, from which the blood was pouring profusely, was disclosed in the upper part and on the side of his thigh.” Hancock said urgently, “Don’t let me bleed to death. Get something around it quick!” A tourniquet was applied and a doctor summoned. It was found that a bullet had gone through the pommel of Hancock’s saddle and carried with it into the wound splinters of wood and a saddle nail. It was a severe but not mortal injury. Said General Stannard, “I reported the condition of the fight to him from time to time while he laid there awaiting an ambulance.”
John Gibbon was also ranging right along the battle line as he directed matters. At one point he even rode out ahead of a regiment to redirect its posting. “I was suddenly recalled to the absurd position I had assumed by the whole regiment opening fire!” he later wrote. “I got to the rear as soon as possible.” Soon after, while prodding troops forward, a bullet slashed through his left arm and into his shoulder. He turned command over to the senior officer, William Harrow, and was helped to the rear.34
Observing the flanking move of the Vermonters from the opposite perspective was Henry T. Owen, 18th Virginia, Garnett’s brigade. Looking off to his right, Captain Owen saw “A body of yankees 800 or 1000 yards away coming at a double quick … muskets glittering in the sunlight and battle flags fluttering…. Their line was perpendicular to our own and
they were hastening to strike us before we reached the stone wall. I saw it was to be a race and as Genl. Garnett came along saying several times ‘faster, faster men’ I put my men to the double quick….“35
The strongest battery now defending the Union center was Andrew Cowan’s just arrived 1st New York Independent, with its six 3-inch Ordnance rifles. These small-bore rifles fired a smaller-sized canister round than the Napoleons, but with double or even triple charges they were deadly enough at close range. Five of Cowan’s guns were posted to the left of the Copse and one to the right, and when he saw how exposed he was, Cowan had the prolonge ropes laid out behind the pieces so they could be quickly hauled back to safer ground if it should come to that.
The moment he saw Pickett set the advance in motion, Porter Alexander had made a hurried survey of his batteries to get, as he later put it, “the best which was left most immediately to the front.” He ordered any guns with intact teams and at least fifteen rounds of long-range ammunition remaining to move up on Pickett’s right to support the charge. Close-in artillery support had been an integral part of Lee’s attack plan from the beginning, yet in the end the only artillerist who made any effort to carry it out was Alexander. He pushed forward perhaps a dozen guns, but they were too few and too late to have any real effect on the outcome. Nevertheless, the Yankee gunners on Cemetery Ridge made short work of the attempt. In the case of one Rebel battery, noted the historian of the 5th Massachusetts Light, “in less than ten minutes not a cannoneer was left to work the guns: all were dead or had ‘skedaddled.’”
By this time Pickett’s infantry was fully engaged. “Then there was soon nothing to see but volumes of musketry smoke,” Porter Alexander remembered, “& the crashing roar which went up—it seemed to me the heaviest I had ever heard—told that the matter was now being brought to the final test.“36
The final test began as a swiftly paced running battle—Pickett’s three brigades, following their distorted march route, coming first within range of Stannard’s Vermont brigade, then Harrow’s brigade and Gates’s demi-brigade, then Hall’s brigade, and finally a climactic struggle with Webb’s brigade at the Angle. George Pickett, his troops already fearfully savaged by the Yankee artillery, watched appalled as they were progressively cut to pieces by a raking infantry and artillery fire until all that remained was a forlorn hope.
While Stannard’s Vermonters were maneuvering into their new flanking position, Harrow’s and Gates’s men to the right took their turn against the Rebels marching invitingly across their front. “Command was given not to fire until ordered—and then to fire at their feet,” explained Sergeant James Wright, 1st Minnesota. “This was to correct, as far as possible, the tendency to overshoot.” Kemper’s brigade, on Pickett’s far flank, was once again the first to come within range. “Well,” Minnesotan Edward Walker wrote home, “we mowed them down—twas Fredericksburg reversed—the first line went down in no time and the others broke…. Perhaps we didnt feel good when we saw them scatter?” Walker’s elation was tempered somewhat when a bullet smashed through his canteen, “making the water fly a little.”
Like the Minnesotans, the men in the 80th New York and 151st Pennsylvania, of Theodore Gates’s demi-brigade, were more than ready to gain some revenge for their losses in the earlier fighting. These two First Corps regiments had been badly hurt in the losing struggle for Seminary Ridge on July 1, and so when Colonel Gates ordered them forward to the stone fence to engage, they went, he said, “cheering, and in gallant style, and poured a volley into the enemy at very short range….”
Soon it was the turn of Norman Hall’s brigade. The Confederates’ 45-degree oblique was carrying them closer to the Yankee line with every step, and by the time Hall’s men opened fire they were at a killing range. Captain Henry Abbott of the 20th Massachusetts wrote home that they took careful aim at the Rebel regiment in front of them “& then bowled them over like nine pins, picking out the colors first. In two minutes there were only groups of two or three men running round wildly, like chickens with their heads off. We were cheering like mad…. By jove, it was worth all our defeats.” These Massachusetts men gained their own particular revenge that bloody afternoon, shouting out “Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!“37
Except for skirmish-line exchanges, Pickett’s men had obeyed orders not to stop to fire, and under the tight rein of command they held to that stricture through most of the oblique turn. A man in the 19th Virginia noted the litany—“Steady, boys!…Don’t fire!…Close up!”—intoned repeatedly by the line officers. To this point their torment was coming from artillery fire, which they knew they could do nothing about. But as their slanting march brought them ever closer to Cemetery Ridge and the blasts of infantry fire scorched their ranks, they pleaded for permission to shoot back. Then, with permission or without it, they began to return fire. It was a matter of self-preservation—this was an enemy they could reply to.
As they turned eastward and pushed straight on toward the Angle and the Copse, Pickett’s brigades began to lose their carefully maintained order and to bunch together. This was due certainly to the terrible pressures of the enemy’s raking fire, but it was also due in part to the primal instinct to close as quickly as possible with their tormentors. Kemper’s brigade, turning first, was perhaps slightly ahead, with Garnett close by on the left and Armistead equally close by to the left and somewhat to the rear. But the closer they came, the less the distinction there was between units. Observers spoke of the Confederate troops in a “mass” as they closed on the wall.
The sound of this final charge—“a kind of savage roar” was how General Gibbon described it—was audible even above the din of the guns. Some would also remember a scattering of Rebel yells, but by now most Rebels were too tired for that. To others the sound seemed more of an incoherent, animalistic shouting—and, as the two sides came to grips, from Rebels and Yankees alike. The battle smoke swirled and coiled and spread thickly across the slope, and nothing could be seen very clearly. Nothing could be heard very clearly. Within the mass of Rebels, recalled Virginian Randolph Shotwell, there was an impression of being in a sleet storm, which “made one gasp for breath…. I noticed that many of the men bent in a half stoop as they marched up the slope, as if to protect their faces, and dodge the balls.“38
By now General Stannard’s 13th and 16th Vermont regiments were coming into place on the Confederates’ flank. They opened a devastating fire. The range here was only 80 to 100 yards, and there were some 900 Vermonters on this new firing line. As the 16th Vermont’s Colonel Wheelock Veazey put it, “those great masses of men seemed to disappear in a moment.”
Kemper’s brigade was taking the bulk of this fire, and to meet the danger the two leftmost regiments, 24th and 11th Virginia, were directed to refuse their line and face south. General Kemper wanted to add the 1st Virginia, his center regiment, to this new defensive line. That, however, proved beyond the powers of Lieutenant Edward Reeve, the officer immediately in command. As Reeve recalled it, “the few men left were shot down as fast as I placed them in position and turning to the adjutant, I told him it was too late and there was no 1st Regiment left to execute the movement.”
As Kemper’s brigade swiftly melted away under the concentrated musketry and artillery of the Federal left, Garnett’s brigade was increasingly exposed to the killing fire. Henry Owen of the 18th Virginia, Garnett’s command, remembered the confusion and the now tangled demands on his men: “I saw men turn deliberately and coolly commence upon this new enemy while others shot to the front. At one time I saw two men cro
ss their muskets one fired to our right and the other to our front.”
Garnett’s and Armistead’s brigades, and what was left of Kemper’s, pushed straight on toward the center of the Union line. The parade-ground battle lines of the march were completely gone now, in their place crowding, ragged groupings around the flags, prodded ahead by gesturing officers. Men by dozens, by scores, by hundreds were being consumed by the fire. Those still standing would pause to fire back, then resolutely stride on into the storm.39
COLONEL FREMANTLE, the British observer, had spent the early-afternoon hours scrambling about in search of what he called a “commanding position” from which to view the battle. His first thought was the cupola of a church in Gettysburg, but he found getting there, amidst the rival cannonading, to be highly dangerous. He finally determined “to go into the thick of the thing” and join General Longstreet at his vantage point. Riding back through the woods on Seminary Ridge, Fremantle encountered wounded men trailing back from the attack. “The further I got,” he noted in his diary, “the greater became the number of the wounded. At last I came to a perfect stream of them flocking through the woods in numbers as great as the crowd in Oxford-street in the middle of the day.”
Fremantle found Longstreet perched on a snake-rail fence on the edge of the woods at the Confederate center. With him was Captain Robert Bright of Pickett’s staff, who had just delivered Pickett’s call for reinforcements to hold the lodgment he expected to seize in the enemy’s line. From this perspective Fremantle had his first clear look at the panorama of the grand charge, and he was excited. “I wouldn’t have missed this for anything!” he said to Longstreet.