Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

  Hall could safely shift his troops to the right because by now Pickett’s dwindling attack was focused entirely on the 100 or so yards between the Angle and the Copse. With Hall supervising the movement, it was carried out (as Haskell put it) “in reasonable time, and in order that is serviceable, if not regular….” Haskell rode on to Harrow’s brigade, and soon those troops too were heading for the fighting at the double-quick. Haskell could now see the Rebel front beginning to crumble and men turning toward the rear, and he shouted encouragement to the reinforcing troops: “See the ‘chivalry.’ See the gray-backs run!”

  Lieutenant Haskell’s characterization of the march order of these reinforcements as “serviceable” was perhaps overly generous. According to Colonel Francis Heath of the 19th Maine, Harrow’s brigade, “it was impossible to get them in any order. Everyone wanted to be first there and we went up more like a mob than a disciplined force.” The move took on the shape of a series of arrowheads, men crowding behind gesturing officers and color bearers.

  These Yankees came up to the battle line very much like Garnett’s and Armistead’s Rebels came rushing in toward the wall from the west a few minutes before—all jammed together, many ranks deep, with only the few men at the head of the advance able to get a clear shot. It was, said one of Webb’s staff, more a melee than a line of battle. Men pushed forward to fire, then fell back to reload. Others dodged around, looking for any opening to shoot. Major Edmund Rice of the 19th Massachusetts would remember rifles “exploding all around, flashing their fire almost in one’s face and so close to the head as to make the ears ring.” Directly in front of Rice was an incongruous tableau: one Rebel kneeling and aiming his rifle right at him, a second man lying on his back “coolly ramming home a cartridge,” and a third on his knees nearby waving a white cloth in surrender. Frustrated Yankees at the rear of the melee threw rocks at the enemy.48

  However unmilitary and chaotic it might look, the Yankee line now forming was rock-solid and unbreakable. Just to the north, Alexander Hays crushed out the last struggling efforts of Pettigrew’s and Trimble’s brigades. Isaac Trimble had suffered a severe leg wound but remained on the field, and when his aide Charles Grogan reported that the men of Trimble’s two brigades were starting to fall back and asked if he should try to rally them, Trimble told him no. “Charlie, the best these brave fellows can do is to get out of this.” Later, turning his command over to Jim Lane, Trimble added a footnote: “He also directs me to say,” Grogan told Lane, “that if the troops he had the honor to command today for the first time, couldn’t take that position, all hell can’t take it.”

  It was now plain that Pickett’s men could not take the position either. Webb’s brigade, especially the 69th Pennsylvania, had stymied them, and then the rest of the Second Corps stormed in to seal the bargain. “The rows of dead after the battle I found to be within 15 and 20 feet apart, as near hand to hand fighting as I ever care to see,” wrote Captain Henry Abbott, 20th Massachusetts. “The rebels behaved with as much pluck as any men in the world could; they stood there, against the fence, until they were nearly all shot down.” 49

  GENERAL CARL SCHURZ was watching from Cemetery Hill: “At last, looking again at the field which had been traversed by the splendid host of assailants, we saw, first, little dribblets, then larger numbers, and finally huge swarms of men in utter disorder hurrying back the way they had come, and then, soon after, in hot pursuit, clouds of blue-coated skirmishers from our front rushing in from both sides, firing and capturing prisoners.” Pickett’s Charge was collapsing, but there was one scene in the drama still to play out.

  Pickett’s call to Cadmus Wilcox and David Lang, on the Confederate right, had been no more specific than to come to his support. Longstreet’s authorization merely mentioned “assistance.” By the time Wilcox’s Alabamians and Lang’s Floridians assembled and started forward, there was no knowing even where Pickett might be in that great welter of smoke and gunfire. No one from Pickett came to serve as guide. Therefore Wilcox, with Lang on his left, some 1,600 men all told, simply advanced straight ahead.

  General Wilcox had spoken earlier of his misgivings about the operation, recalling yesterday’s trials, and his officers shared his view. Colonel Hilary Herbert of the 8th Alabama would write that when they looked at the prospect ahead, “every private at once saw the madness of the attempt.” As the two brigades passed his batteries, Porter Alexander remembered “feeling a great pity for the useless loss of life they were incurring, for there was nothing left for them to support.“50

  The Yankee gunners spotted the new formation the moment it appeared. Starting with Rittenhouse’s battery on Little Round Top, progressing through Freeman McGilvery’s array, finally engaging batteries just up from the artillery reserve, they delivered a blistering fire that stopped the Confederates in their tracks. Within minutes, fifty-nine guns had opened on Wilcox and Lang, at first with shell and case shot, then with canister. In addition, Colonel Wheelock Veazey of the 16th Vermont deftly maneuvered his regiment to take the Rebels under an oblique fire. “To remain in this position, unsupported by either infantry or artillery, with infantry on both flanks and in front and artillery playing upon us with grape and canister, was certain annihilation” was how Colonel Lang appraised the situation. He ordered his Floridians to seek cover in some wooded ground along Plum Run and prepare to retreat.

  Wilcox’s brigade, directly fronting McGilvery’s guns, was engulfed by the artillery fire. “I could hear their missiles,” wrote the 8th Alabama’s Colonel Herbert, “some of them grape shot, crashing through the bones of my men ‘like hailstones breaking through glass.’” Wilcox raced back to the artillery line to demand supporting fire, only to be told there was no long-range ammunition. With that, Wilcox reached the same conclusion as had Lang: “knowing that my small force could do nothing save to make a useless sacrifice of themselves, I ordered them back.”

  Most of his Alabamians did make it back, although having to run a bloody gauntlet of artillery fire. The retreat of the Floridians was a fiasco. There were fewer than 450 of them in the three small regiments, and their officers lost touch when the men scattered for cover in the woods. Before Lang’s retreat order could reach them all, the 16th Vermont was on them. The Vermonters scooped up prisoners by the score, mostly from the 5th and 2nd Florida, which regiment also lost its flag. One of Lang’s officers wrote home that the Florida brigade “was small before the fight, it is very much smaller now.”

  The price tag on this misguided assault came to some 360 dead, wounded, and captured. It commenced too late to affect the outcome of the main assault, and was carried out with no guidance from the command it was supposed to assist. One of Garnett’s Virginians would later claim that Wilcox and Lang had “diverted the attention of the enemy from the stragglers of Pickett’s division, and enabled a considerable number of them to escape.” That 360 Virginians were thereby saved, to at least balance the account, seems doubtful.51

  In Pickett’s and Pettigrew’s and Trimble’s commands no one issued a general order to retreat, primarily because hardly anyone was left in command. In Pickett’s division Garnett had been killed, Armistead left for dead at the Angle, and the wounded Kemper very nearly captured—Federals were carrying him away when his men rescued him at the last moment. All but two of Pickett’s fifteen regimental commanders were dead or wounded. In Pettigrew’s four brigades, Marshall was dead, Fry wounded, and Davis and Brockenbrough had already retreated. Pettigrew was wounded slightly, Trimble seriously. George Pickett had taken a central location just behind the lines on the Codori farm, but events had spun swiftly out of his control and well beyond his reach. The men in the ranks still at the front and still fighting simply realized the battle had turned against them and it was time, and past time, for them to go. Isaac Trimble put the matter succinctly in his diary: “here the men broke down from exhaustion & the fatal fire & went no further but walked sullenly back to their entrenchments.”

  Captain Joh
n H. Smith, 11th Virginia, Kemper’s brigade, was bandaging his wounded leg when he saw the Yankees approaching and agreed with his comrade that it was “time to get away from here.” The first stage of their retreat was the most dangerous, for they were still well within musketry range. “We ran out of range,” Smith wrote, “shot after shot falling around us until we got over the Emmittsburg road toward our lines…. No organized body of troops did I meet in going back.” Other men gauged the risk of retreating through this raging storm of musketry and artillery fire and decided that surrender was their best option to live. On the northern flank the 8th Ohio collected prisoners in greater numbers than its own. The Vermonters on the southern flank did almost as well.

  Over much of the course of the retreat, Pickett’s troops kept reasonably good order, especially at first when under fire; pride would not let them run. On reaching Seminary Ridge, officers tried to rally them and re-form the lines—there was concern about a Yankee counterattack—but a distraught General Pickett told his men to keep going, back to yesterday’s bivouac behind the ridge.

  This seemed to act as a release for all the pent-up emotions of the past hour. At a narrow crossing of Willoughby Run, wrote Henry Owen of the 18th Virginia, “the fugitives, without distinction of rank, officers and privates side by side, pushed, poured and rushed in a continuous stream, throwing away guns, blankets, and haversacks as they hurried on in confusion toward the rear.” Before long there was another attempt to restore order, but again Pickett intervened. “Don’t stop any of my men!” he cried. “Tell them to come to the camp we occupied last night.” As he said this he was “weeping bitterly,” and then he rode on alone toward the rear. That evening cartographer Jed Hotchkiss noted in his diary that he had encountered Pickett’s division “scattered all along the road; no officers and all protesting that they had been completely cut up.“52

  On Cemetery Ridge the infantry reinforcements in their thousands that Meade had called for—from the First, Sixth, and Twelfth corps—were filing into place behind the front, but already the crisis was past. When one of Alexander Hays’s aides announced that help was on the way, the general pointed to the swarms of retreating Rebels and said, “Damn the reinforcements! Look there!” Hays was exuberant. He seized a captured flag and had two of his staff do the same, and the three of them rode slowly past their cheering men dragging the flags of rebellion in the “dust and blood of the battlefield.”

  Edwin Forbes’s sketch of a long column of Confederate prisoners from Pickett’s Charge being escorted to the rear along the Baltimore Pike is labeled by the artist “July 3rd 5 P.M.” (Library of Congress)

  General Meade reached the crest of the ridge too late to witness the final turn of events. Encountering Frank Haskell of Gibbon’s staff, he asked, “How is it going here?”

  “I believe, General, the enemy’s attack is repulsed,” Haskell said.

  With that, Haskell wrote, a look of “gratified surprise” crossed Meade’s face, and he exclaimed, “What! Is the assault entirely repulsed?”

  “It is, Sir,” said Haskell. For a moment Meade seemed about to take off his hat “as if to hurrah,” but checked himself and said simply, “Thank God!” Captain George Meade, the general’s son and aide, did take off his cap and hurrah. Then Meade and a growing entourage of officers rode right along the full length of the line of battle, the troops raising a continuous volley of cheers for their commanding general.53

  Over on Seminary Ridge, Robert E. Lee heard this ovation for his opposite number, and asked a staff man to ride forward to “see what that cheering means.” He was told it was some Union general riding the lines. “I can understand what they have to cheer for,” said Lee, “but I thought it might be our people.”

  Colonel Fremantle now joined the commanding general. “If Longstreet’s conduct was admirable,” the Englishman entered in his diary, “that of General Lee was perfectly sublime. He was engaged in rallying and in encouraging the broken troops, and was riding about a little in front of the wood, quite alone….” Lee turned to Fremantle and said, “This has been a sad day for us, Colonel—a sad day; but we can’t expect always to gain victories.”

  Soon afterward, meeting a bitter Cadmus Wilcox, Lee took him by the hand and told him, “Never mind, General, all this has been my fault—it is I that have lost this fight, and you must help me out of it in the best way you can.“54

  14. A Long Road Back

  A PENNSYLVANIA TROOPER named Charles Gardner, at his posting on the Low Dutch Road east of Cemetery Ridge, would always remember the surprise and shock of the Confederate bombardment that preceded Pickett’s Charge. “The very ground shook and trembled,” he wrote, “and the smoke of the guns rolled out of the valley as tho there were thousands of acres of timber on fire.” It was this barrage that acted as a catalyst on the cavalry battle royal that had been smoldering and crackling since before noon.1

  At about 11:00 A.M. Jeb Stuart had fired off his four-round artillery salvo to inform General Lee that he was behind the Yankee army. This of course also announced his presence to the Yankee army. Stuart’s objective—“pursuant to instructions from the commanding general”—was apparently to push aside any cavalry screen he found and reach the Baltimore Pike and the Federals’ vulnerable rear. He occupied the high ground of Cress Ridge some three miles southeast of Gettysburg, and set out the 34th Virginia battalion as a dismounted skirmish line.

  Stuart had the three brigades—under Wade Hampton, Fitz Lee, and John Chambliss—that had ridden with him on their nine-day odyssey around the Army of the Potomac. By all accounts all three were much diminished in strength and perhaps even in spirit. The 2nd North Carolina, of Chambliss’s brigade, was down to 35 men from 145. The 9th Virginia of the same brigade, according to one of its officers, “was not more than one hundred strong, and the brigade could have hardly exceeded three hundred.” One of Chambliss’s troopers wrote that “No man can stand more, and I never wish to be called on to stand this much again. I had one horse killed under me and rode three others down.” The men were bone-weary and so were their horses, and neither were primed for a battle royal.

  Possibly Chambliss’s command was more cut down than either Hampton’s or Fitz Lee’s, yet of the 4,800 men supposed to be in the three brigades, it is likely that only 3,000 or fewer were engaged on July 3. Attached to Stuart for the day was the brigade of Albert Jenkins, which thus far in the campaign had mostly foraged for Dick Ewell’s corps. Jenkins had been wounded on July 2, and Colonel Milton Ferguson now commanded. Some 430 of his men would see action this day. 2

  The Federals would bring some 3,250 troopers to the contest, their numbers in two brigades being about the same as in Stuart’s attenuated four. Guarding this sector of the battlefield was the cavalry division of David Gregg. Gregg had been warned of Stuart’s approach, and he led John Mcintosh’s brigade to a blocking position astride the Hanover Road that ran southeasterly out of Gettysburg. Already posted at the intersection of the Hanover and Low Dutch roads—which, as it happened, was Stuart’s target—was the brigade of George Armstrong Custer. Custer was then on loan to Gregg from Judson Kilpatrick’s division, but Gregg brought with him cavalry chief Pleasonton’s order for Custer’s return.

  Custer greeted him, Gregg recalled, and “expressed the opinion that I soon would have a big fight on my hands”—the enemy was squarely in front of them in great force. Gregg decided that General Pleasonton, passing the day at army headquarters, was quite out of touch with what was happening in the field, and he had no qualms about ignoring his orders. He told Custer he would welcome the assistance of his brigade. “If you will give me an order to remain,” said Custer, “I will only be too happy to do it.” The matter was quickly arranged, and with Custer’s and McIntosh’s brigades in hand David Gregg prepared to do battle.

  Custer had already set out his own skirmish line and his horse artillery was exchanging shots with the Confederate gunners. Twenty-three-year-old George Custer, West Point ‘61, youn
gest brigadier in the Potomac army, was dressed for battle in a sailor’s blouse with silver stars on its wide collar points, red cravat, black velveteen hussar’s jacket spangled with gold braid, olive corduroy pants, gleaming jackboots, and wide-brimmed felt hat. It was said he looked “like a circus rider gone mad.” Yet for all the gaudy trappings, George Custer always led his Michigan troopers by example and always from out front.3

  Gregg set about raising the stakes by reinforcing Custer’s skirmish line and challenging the Rebels to an artillery duel. His gunners soon had the best of it. “The Federal Artillery seemed very effective,” admitted one of Stuart’s officers, “while ours seemed to be of little service.” Yankee Alanson Randol, commanding a battery of horse artillery, would write dismissively, “As a rule their Horse Art’y was so badly handled in battle that we Art’y officers paid but little attention to it.”

  Stuart’s plan had been to fix the Federals in place with aggressive dismounted skirmishers and then from the concealment of Cress Ridge swing around their left flank. But the Federal skirmishers pushed back so hard they disrupted his plan, so Stuart determined instead to launch a mounted charge to shake the Yankees loose. He selected his old command, the 1st Virginia cavalry, and took General Lee’s 1 o’clock cannonade as the signal to open his own assault.