Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

  Old Pete sat there calmly and outwardly unperturbed, and Fremantle reported that he gave his reply with a laugh. Surely it was a bitter laugh. “The devil you wouldn’t!” Longstreet told him. “I would like to have missed it very much; we’ve attacked and been repulsed. Look there!”

  On second look Fremantle could see in the valley Confederate troops “slowly and sulkily returning towards us in small broken parties….” At this stage of the fighting these were most likely remnants of Brockenbrough’s or Joe Davis’s wrecked brigades, but Longstreet had already identified them as the outriders of a larger defeat. He told Captain Bright to return to Pickett “and tell him what you have heard me say to Colonel Fremantle.” Bright started out, but then Longstreet called him back—he was also to tell Pickett “that Wilcox’s brigade is in that peach orchard, and he can order him to his assistance.”

  There is a clear echo here of Longstreet’s admission that on July 2 it was never his intention to press what he viewed as a misguided offensive, had the enemy initially appeared too strong for his divisions that day. As to July 3, Old Pete had argued from the first that Pickett’s Charge was misguided. Now, while he could not defy Lee’s orders and recall it, he could at least steer additional troops away from a forlorn hope. No doubt he assigned Wilcox’s brigade (and Lang’s, attached to it) to Pickett primarily to assist him in withdrawing when it came to that. Dick Anderson reported that he had Wright’s and Posey’s brigades ready to advance on the left, but that Longstreet “directed me to stop the movement, adding that it was useless, and would only involve unnecessary loss….”

  So the grand charge would play out, and most likely within a matter of minutes. It would not end, Longstreet wrote bitterly, until “the utmost measure of sacrifice demanded by honor was full….“40

  However the case may have looked to Longstreet, just then to Generals Kemper, Garnett, and Armistead at the front opportunity appeared to beckon. Unlike the solid wall of fire greeting Pettigrew’s charge, Pickett’s charge met a Union line that had two large gaps in it.

  One of these gaps was right at the Angle itself. Colonel Richard Smith of the 71st Pennsylvania continued today, as he had yesterday, to be overly solicitous of his men. The evening before, on Culp’s Hill, he had pulled them out of the battle line lest they be “murdered.” Today, when General Webb ordered the 71st forward into the Angle, Smith put Lieutenant Colonel Charles Kochersperger in charge of the eight companies that squeezed into the space between the Angle and Cushing’s guns. Smith remained safely to the rear with the other two companies. Then, saying nothing of his intentions to Webb, he cautioned Kochersperger to withdraw should the enemy come too close, especially too close to the regiment’s flank at the Angle.

  The Confederates promptly came too close. After a volley or two Kochersperger dutifully ordered the 71st Pennsylvania into retreat … and opened a gap of some 50 yards in Webb’s line. Frank Haskell was an appalled witness: “Great Heaven!…There by the group of trees, and the angles of the wall, was breaking from the cover of their works, and without orders or reason, with no hand lifted to check them, was falling back a fear-stricken flock of confusion!“41

  At about the same time, to the south, beyond the Copse, a second gap abruptly opened in the Federal line. This was at the position of the 59th New York, the rightmost regiment in Norman Hall’s brigade. The 59th was in a bad way to begin with. By the time of Gettysburg it had been consolidated into just four companies, and in Thursday’s fight it lost (among others) its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Max Thoman. Now, as Kemper’s Virginians turned and came right toward it, the 59th suddenly and unaccountably bolted. Captain John H. Smith of the 11th Virginia remembered the moment: In the Yankee battle line directly in front of him he “could see first a few and then more and more and more—and presently to my surprise and delight, the whole line break away in flight.”

  Andrew Cowan, whose 1st New York Independent had just gone into battery in rear of the 59th New York, was equally surprised. “Our infantry,” Cowan wrote, “which was a half dozen yards in front of my guns, lying down, all at once became panic stricken and broke in confusion. The enemy rushed forward with wild cheers….” (The prospect of Cowan’s guns blasting away just over their heads may have had something to do with the infantry’s panic.) One of Cowan’s infuriated gunners smashed a coffee pot down over the head of a fleeing New Yorker.

  Calling for double rounds of canister to meet the charge, Captain Cowan was startled to see Henry Hunt at his side. Here was the army’s chief of artillery rushing into the fray like some young subaltern. “The display of Secesh Battle flags was splendid and scary,” Hunt told his wife. Cowan heard him shout, “See ‘em! See ‘em!” as he emptied his pistol at the oncoming Rebels. Then Hunt’s horse was down, pinning him as it fell. Gunners pulled him to safety and found him a mount. “I have escaped as by a miracle,” Hunt confessed to his wife, “when it appeared as if there could be no escape.“42

  There was no one in front of the battery now except a few score charging

  Forbes here pictures the charge from the Union perspective, looking west. The copse of trees and the fighting at the Angle are at left center. Forbes drew on his battlefield sketches for the scene. (Library of Congress)

  Confederates, led by an officer waving his sword and shouting to his men to take the guns. Then Cowan gave the command to fire. Five guns, barrels depressed to give maximum play to the double rounds of canister, went off in one concerted roar. When the smoke cleared the entire Rebel line, and the officer, had simply disappeared. This was the last of Cowan’s canister, and his gunners took up the prolonges and dragged the guns to safer ground in the rear. A man in the 7th Michigan wrote home, “I never saw such slaughter. Never saw men mowed so by canister as they was there.”

  Farther to the south, the two remaining guns of Robert Rogers’s Battery B, 1st New York, added their fire to the repulse. One of these guns was manned by 15th Massachusetts volunteers, whose enthusiasm exceeded their knowledge of gunnery. While continuing to jam battlefield debris down the barrel of their piece, they failed to realize that double and triple rounds of canister were still fired with only one charge. The 10-pounder Parrott rifle finally exploded so violently that it tipped over, crushing one of the substitute gunners. All the while, Hall’s regiments elsewhere on the battle line held stubbornly to their places, additional artillery reinforcements arrived, and in the end the gap in Hall’s line was not exploited.43

  The gap at the Angle left by the departed 71st Pennsylvania was a different matter. It was a larger gap, for one thing, and there were a good many more Confederates poised close by to exploit it, and there were fewer Yankee guns to challenge them. The men of Garnett’s and Armistead’s brigades facing the Angle could focus without distraction solely on the enemy in front of them, for they had cover on both flanks—Kemper’s brigade to the south, Fry’s and Marshall’s brigades, of Pettigrew’s command, to the north. Finally, their leadership was inspired and inspiring. Dick Garnett, mounted and clearly visible to his followers, and Lew Armistead, marching resolutely twenty paces ahead of the line, hat on his upraised sword, were generals that men would follow to the death.

  Perhaps most important, at their intended point of attack they outnumbered the defenders. The only infantry now in line at the Copse was a single regiment, the 258 men of the 69th Pennsylvania, Webb’s Philadelphia Brigade. The only guns in the immediate vicinity were Alonzo Cushing’s two 3-inch Ordnance rifles, at the stone fence to the Pennsylvanians’ right. The closest supporting infantrymen, also Webb’s, were posted 80 yards or so to the rear—the 72nd Pennsylvania, and two companies each of the 71st and 106th Pennsylvania. (The rest of the 71st regiment was farther to the rear, Colonel Smith regarding his fleeting role in the day’s fighting as finished.)

  The Rebels came on, hurrying now, seeing the gap and just the two guns in the Yankee line. “Onward they came, and it would seem as if no power could hold them in check,” said a man in the 69th Penn
sylvania. The 69th was solidly Irish, so much so that next to the national colors was displayed the emerald flag of Ireland rather than the usual regimental flag. Colonel Dennis O’Kane had sternly reminded his men that they were defending the soil of their native state, and should any man flinch in his duty, he expected “that the man next to him would kill him on the spot.” It was also Colonel O’Kane who urged his men not to fire until they could see “the whites of their eyes.”

  His men obliged him. According to Corporal John Buckley, the Rebels were barely 50 yards away when the 69th opened fire. “The slaughter was terrible,” said Buckley, a slaughter immediately multiplied by the spare rifles the Irishmen had gleaned from yesterday’s battlefield. Major Charles Peyton of the 19th Virginia wrote that his command “recoiled under the terrific fire that poured into our ranks….”

  The Confederates’ return fire, by contrast, was diluted by the growing disorder of their charge. Rather than advancing in line, where everyone had a clear shot, now they were bunched up many ranks deep, sharply limiting the number who could return fire. Still they drove on toward the wall through the coiling smoke and the crashing volleys, stumbling over the bodies of their dead and wounded.

  By now, however, James Kemper’s brigade, on Pickett’s flank, was in ruins, torn to pieces first by artillery and then by the successive musketry of three and a half brigades of Yankee infantry. Half its survivors were facing south, trying to stem the deadly flanking fire from Stannard’s Vermonters. The rest had pushed on toward Cemetery Ridge, but after their bloody repulse in front of Cowan’s battery there was hardly any strength left in their efforts. Then General Kemper was down, knocked off his horse by a bullet that ranged through his body and lodged near his spine. “I know that I was then near enough to the enemy’s line,” Kemper recalled, “to observe the features and expressions on the faces of the men in front of me, and I thought I observed and could identify the soldier who shot me.” He lay there unable to move as the battle surged on around him. 44

  The cascade of enemy fire driving in against their right, and the inviting gap in the Federal line near the Angle, caused Garnett and Armistead to slide their brigades leftward, slanting across the 69th Pennsylvania’s front and aiming toward Cushing’s guns. As the battle approached its climax, Garnett and Armistead had between them perhaps 2,500 to 3,000 men remaining under command.

  The moment the Rebels were within canister range, Cushing had begun working his two guns steadily. Private Anthony McDermott of the 69th Pennsylvania watched him. Despite his severe wounds, Cushing stood at the stone fence next to his guns, glass in hand, gauging the fall of his shot. “He would shout back to his men to elevate or depress their pieces so many degrees,” McDermott wrote; “…his last command, that we heard was, ‘that’s excellent, keep that range.’” Then Cushing was felled, killed instantly by a bullet to the head.

  Gunners Frederick Fuger and Christopher Smith loaded their last rounds of canister and ducked behind the stone fence and waited. When the Rebels were 20 yards away, Fuger yelled, “Let ‘em have it!” and they jerked the lanyards. By Smith’s account, two 50-foot-wide swaths were cut in the Rebel ranks. The battery crewmen raced for the rear.45

  General Armistead, somehow spared in this bloody maelstrom, became the literal spearhead of the attack, rushing forward right to the wall and the abandoned guns. Lieutenant Colonel Rawley Martin, 53rd Virginia, came up with him. “Colonel, we can’t stay here,” Armistead said. “Then we’ll go forward!” Martin said. With that Armistead turned to the men who had followed him this far and called out, “Come forward, Virginians! Come on, boys, we must give them the cold steel! Who will follow me?”

  Over the wall they went. There were perhaps a hundred of them crowding resolutely behind Armistead and the 53rd Virginia’s flag bearer—the fourth man to carry the regimental flag in those few minutes. Their rush forward impelled the command of the 69th Pennsylvania to order the three rightmost companies to swing back 90 degrees to counter the charge. Two companies did so, but the captain of the third was killed before he could give the order and nearly all his men were overrun and captured. Others of Armistead’s men seized Cushing’s abandoned guns and swung one of them around to face the Yankees. But there was no ammunition for them to fire, and they were left with nothing more than a symbolic gesture.

  Alfred Waud portrayed the struggle for Cushing’s Federal battery at the Angle, the high-water mark of Pickett’s Charge. Waud’s drawing was published in Harper’s Weekly on August 8. (Library of Congress)

  Indeed, Armistead’s captures, of these men and these guns, would come to symbolize the high-water mark of Pickett’s Charge. Armistead and his little band could advance no farther. To their right, the stubborn Irishmen of the 69th Pennsylvania stood fast, so close in places that the fighting was hand-to-hand—clubbed muskets and fists and stabbing thrusts. To their front, but farther away, was the battle line of the 72nd Pennsylvania, a regiment that in its own way proved to be just as stubborn as the 69th.

  General Webb was mortified by the 71st Pennsylvania’s abrupt retreat from the wall. “When my men fell back,” he wrote his wife, “I almost wished to get killed, I was almost disgraced….” He rushed back to the 72nd Pennsylvania in the second line and called on it to go forward to fill the gap. The 72nd was one of those 1861 independent-minded regiments that had adopted the distinctive if impractical Zouave uniform, and almost two years later some of the men still wore the colorful jackets and white leggings. They were veterans with a good fighting record, and what this young general was yelling at them, with many gestures and much sword-waving, did not make much sense to them.

  The 72nd had already shifted by the right flank so that it was directly opposite the Angle. With it were the two companies each of the 106th and 71st Pennsylvania. The men were nicely aligned there, some 80 or 90 yards from the enemy, with a clear shot at an easy range for everyone, and they could see no reason to endanger themselves any further by getting closer. What they were required to do, they could do best right where they were. Being new to the command, Webb was probably not recognized by most men in the ranks, but that could hardly be said of the officers; those who heard him in the clamor simply ignored him. Webb even tried to wrest the flag away from the color bearer to lead the advance himself, but the man would not give it up. Finally Webb stalked away and gave his attention to the 69th regiment at the wall. He would write home that a Rebel general he later learned was Armistead “came over my fence and passed me with four of his men.”

  Fired on now from front as well as flank, the Confederates’ toehold beyond the wall quickly collapsed. Three bullets—fired, it was noted, from the 72nd Pennsylvania’s line—severely wounded General Armistead. He fell close by one of Cushing’s guns, and close to the spot where Cushing had fallen earlier. What remained of the general’s little band was shot down or captured or retreated back over the wall. Their sortie had lasted perhaps ten minutes.46

  The battle raged on now right at the wall, from the Angle to the Copse—Pickett’s men who had reached that far unable to go farther but holding there stubbornly; Webb’s men standing their ground on the other side of the wall with equal stubbornness; both sides firing point-blank at each other as fast as they could load. “The opposing lines were standing as if rooted, dealing death into each other,” wrote a Northern regimental historian. “There they stood and would not move.” Joseph McKeever of the 69th Pennsylvania was amazed: “How they fired without killing all our men I do not know. We thought we were all gone.” The 69th’s Colonel O’Kane went down with a mortal wound, and General Webb was nicked in the leg. On the Confederate side, Captain John H. Smith of the 11th Virginia remembered looking back and expecting to see the rest of General Lee’s army marching up to take over the fight. But he “could see nothing but dead and wounded men and horses on the field behind us…. It was a grievous disappointment.”

  Charles Wainwright, the First Corps artillerist, recorded in his diary the next day a convers
ation with General Webb about this critical moment in the battle. “Webb told me,” Wainwright wrote, “that when the enemy reached the wall all his lines began to shake, and for a moment he thought they were gone; but most of the rebs stopped at the wall…. That halt at the wall was the ruin of the enemy, as such halts almost always are; yet so natural is it for men to seek cover that it is almost impossible to get them to pass it under such circumstances.”

  There was an additional factor contributing to the stalemate, had Webb known it—the destruction of the Rebel high command. Kemper was already down, badly wounded. Armistead’s wounds would prove to be mortal. Now Dick Garnett’s thus far miraculous survival came to an end. Still mounted, still at the head of his troops, he rode to within 20 yards of the wall. “Just as the General turned his horse’s head slightly to the left,” wrote Garnett’s courier, “he was struck in the head by a rifle or musket ball and fell dead from his horse….“47

  What would finally tip the balance at the Angle was the arrival of reinforcing Union troops. First on the scene was the second line of Norman Hall’s brigade, immediately to the south. Colonel Arthur Devereux, 19th Massachusetts, explained that he had been “watching the course of events unable to make use of my own men up to the time when I saw that Webb could not sustain the shock with his front line.” Devereux already had Winfield Hancock’s blessing to join the fight “God damned quick,” so he did not hesitate. Along with Hall’s other second-line regiment, the 42nd New York, the 19th Massachusetts hurried at a slanting run toward the Copse and the struggle along the stone fence.

  At the same time, Lieutenant Frank Haskell of General Gibbon’s staff was casting about for help for the embattled Webb. Haskell had been sent back to headquarters to report the attack, and on his return he could find neither Gibbon nor Hancock, both now wounded, so he took it upon himself to act. He rode first to Norman Hall, directing the three regiments of his brigade in the front line. Hall asked him how the battle was going. “Well, but Webb is hotly pressed, and must have support or he will be overpowered,” Haskell replied. “Can you assist him?” Hall said he would. “You cannot be too quick,” Haskell told him.