Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

The Virginia troopers came pelting through the farmstead of John Rummel, sending the Yankee skirmishers scattering for their horses. Gregg countered by directing Custer to send in the 7th Michigan. Custer himself took the lead, crying out, “Come on, you Wolverines!” The two regiments collided along one of farmer Rummel’s fence lines. An astonished Union skirmisher watched the 7th Michigan, “apparently without any attempt to change direction, dash itself upon a high staked and railed fence, squadron after squadron breaking upon the struggling mass in front, like the waves of the sea upon a rocky shore, until all were mixed in one confused and tangled mass.” Troopers of both sides, many dismounted or unhorsed by the collision, struggled at point-blank range with carbines, pistols, and sabers. Custer’s horse was hit and he took another from one of his men. Victor Comte on the skirmish line saw him “plunge his saber into the belly of a rebel who was trying to kill him. You can guess how bravely soldiers fight for such a general.”

  Enough Yankees managed to break down the fence and spur through to send the Virginians into retreat. Now Stuart countered. Elements from all three of his brigades, hastily thrown into the spreading fight, were enough to drive back the Yankee pursuit. Both sides were now back about where they began, and there was a pause. This was the first real fight for Lieutenant John Clark, 7th Michigan, and he had expressed himself curious “what it was to charge upon the enemy.” Now he knew. “I had my curiosity fully gratified & have not harkened for a fight since….“4

  “Soon there appeared emerging from the woods a large force advancing in fine style,” David Gregg wrote. “It was evident that a grand charge was intended.” This proved to be the better part of Wade Hampton’s brigade, and it promised to be Stuart’s greatest effort yet to gain a breakthrough. According to a Union officer, these enemy squadrons advanced as if on review, and “the spectacle called forth a murmur of admiration.” Their gait went from walk to trot to gallop. Hampton’s officers could be heard calling out, “Keep to your sabers, men, keep to your sabers!”

  The Federal horse batteries opened a sharp fire of shell and then canister, tearing gaps in the advance, but the Rebels closed swiftly before very many rounds could be fired. Confronting the attackers head-on was the 1st Michigan—with Custer riding alongside Colonel Charles Town in the lead. Buglers sounded the charge, and again Custer shouted, “Come on, you Wolverines!” From his posting on the flank Pennsylvania trooper William Miller was watching: “As the two columns approached each other the pace of each increased, when suddenly a crash, like the falling of timber, betokened the crisis. So sudden and violent was the collision that many of the horses were turned end over end and crushed their riders beneath them.”

  The tangle evolved into a wild melee of swinging sabers and blazing pistols and carbines, wreathed in smoke and clouds of dust. John McIntosh sent in every man he could find against the right flank of the attackers, leading them himself. At the same time, the 3rd Pennsylvania assailed their left. The Pennsylvanians cut right through the enemy column, driving off its trailing squadrons, then reversed course and repeated the maneuver. Custer’s horse went down, but he soon found a riderless mount and continued the fight. Wade Hampton too plunged into the struggle, and suffered a bad saber wound. Sergeant William Harrison, the 13th Virginia’s color bearer, employed his flagstaff as a lance to spear two Yankees and save the colors.

  Finally the failing Southern troopers, on their failing horses, assailed it must have seemed from every direction, began to break off and turn back. The Yankees were too shattered themselves to mount a serious pursuit. Having played his last card, Stuart broke off the action.

  In this cavalry battle royal the Federals would record a loss of 254 men, 219 of them in Custer’s Michigan brigade. The Confederates’ loss came to 181. The fighting had lasted perhaps forty minutes. Tactically it was a draw, but certainly Stuart, by being halted in all his ambitions for the day, was the loser. The victor, David Gregg, summed it up: “General Stuart had in view the accomplishment of certain purposes…. His was to do, ours to prevent. Could he have reached the rear of our army … disastrous consequences might have resulted.“5

  If there was purpose to Stuart’s attack, there was no purpose whatever to the ill-conceived attack launched shortly afterward by Yankee cavalryman Judson Kilpatrick at the southern end of the battlefield.

  Cavalry chief Pleasonton, without bothering to visit the field, had issued a vague directive to Kilpatrick to press the enemy on the left “and to strike at the first opportunity.” What was to be gained by this exercise was not explained. The enemy here was not cavalry but the infantrymen of Hood’s division, holding the position they had gained in front of Round Top on July 2. Looking back on what happened that July 3 afternoon, one of Hood’s Texans wrote that any infantry “who will stand their ground and fight can always defeat cavalry without any trouble…. It was simply a picnic to fight cavalry under such conditions.”

  Evander Law, commanding in place of the wounded Hood, had posted his four brigades in the hard-won ground between the Emmitsburg Road and Round Top. At first Law had just the 1st Texas facing to the south when Kilpatrick appeared there at midday, but he soon reinforced the Texans with infantry and artillery. For the moment Kilpatrick had only Elon Farnsworth’s brigade, and he awaited impatiently the arrival of Wesley Merritt’s brigade from Emmitsburg. By the time Merritt took his place in the line, word had reached Kilpatrick of the repulse of Pickett’s Charge, and that made him doubly eager to contribute something to the day’s victory.

  With his usual faint grasp of cavalry tactics, Kilpatrick put in his attacks piecemeal. Merritt went in first, west of the Emmitsburg Road. His 6th Pennsylvania troopers fought dismounted, and Tige Anderson’s Georgians, assisted by Hart’s South Carolina battery, drove them off with almost contemptuous ease.

  Kilpatrick’s orders to Elon Farnsworth left the young brigadier incredulous. Not only was he being told to launch a mounted charge against an obviously substantial force of infantry, backed by artillery, but the broken terrain he would have to cross was marked by stone walls and fences and woodlots. It was ground utterly unsuited to cavalry. Indeed, the day before, Confederate infantry had great difficulty maintaining order crossing it. Farnsworth protested the order, apparently with some heat, but Kilpatrick was adamant. “My God, Hammond,” Farnsworth said to one of his officers, “Kil is going to have a cavalry charge. It is too awful to think of….”

  The first in Farnsworth’s brigade to make its attack was the 1st West Virginia. “They rode down our skirmishers and charged us,” wrote Thomas McCarty, 1st Texas; “they went through us cutting right and left, the firing for a few minutes was front, rear, and towards the flanks. In a few minutes, great numbers of riderless horses were galloping about, & others with riders were trying to surrender….” Another Texan claimed that he killed a Yankee captain and wounded a lieutenant: “They were both trying to rally their men, who were in the greatest confusion.“6

  Then it was the turn of the 1st Vermont. To broaden the attack Farnsworth formed up the regiment in three battalions, one of which he led himself. They succeeded in breaking through the Texans’ skirmish line, but then found themselves fired at from every side. The Vermont troopers dodged and veered and jumped walls and fences, firing and slashing with their sabers, but they could gain no respite from the incessant fire. “All of a sudden the Rebs in our front appeared by the thousands,” so it appeared to one stunned Yankee. “They seemed to come out of the ground like bees and they gave us such a rattling fire we all gave way and retreated….”

  “Cavalry, boys, cavalry!” shouted an Alabamian. “This is no fight, only a frolic! Give it to them!” They did just that. There seemed to be a cavalryman target everywhere they looked. “Our boys really enjoyed that part of the battle,” Turner Vaughan of the 4th Alabama remarked in his diary. At one point, a Rebel battle line neatly about-faced to fire at a band of Vermonters racing past behind them. In due course the troopers who survived managed to circle back to re
ach Union lines. Elon Farnsworth’s little party had dwindled to perhaps ten men as he dashed this way and that until finally he was cornered. Ignoring calls to surrender, he was hit with five bullets and knocked off his horse. He was dead in moments.

  “Why in hell and damnation don’t you move those troops out,” a now frantic Kilpatrick screamed at the last of Farnsworth’s regiments, the 18th Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvanians dutifully went forward and were stopped in their tracks. With that, at last, there were no more troopers for Kill-Cavalry Kilpatrick to hurl into the battle.7

  AS THE TIDE of Pickett’s Charge receded, an ambulance arrived to carry off the wounded Winfield Hancock. When they were out of range of the enemy’s parting shots, Hancock ordered the driver to stop so he could dictate a message to General Meade. “I repulsed a tremendous attack,” he began, and went on to describe his actions in the fight and his arrangements for restoring the lines. As to what should be done next, Hancock was assertive: “I have never seen a more formidable attack, and if the Sixth and Fifth Corps have pressed up, the enemy will be destroyed.”

  Thoughts of an immediate counterattack—a classic ploy among military theorists—were already on Meade’s mind. He soon recognized, however, that the Sixth and Fifth corps were not “pressed up” to launch an attack, nor could they be before dark. In Meade’s commitment to the defensive on Day Three, he had allowed no provision for an offensive—or a counteroffensive. No substantial force was massed and ready to advance. Sedgwick’s Sixth Corps, largest in the army, unengaged on the first two days, was scattered from one end of the battlefield to the other to patch holes from the earlier Confederate attacks. Sykes’s Fifth Corps, spread along the army’s left, had seen two of its three divisions severely battered on Day Two and was hardly prepared to spearhead an assault. Skirmishers were sent out “to feel the enemy,” but, said Meade, events conspired to make it “so late in the evening as to induce me to abandon the assault which I had contemplated.”

  Beyond this reality was a question of where to aim a counterattack. On the left were McLaws’s and Hood’s (Law’s) divisions of Longstreet’s corps—which a reconnaissance by the Fifth Corps through the Wheatfield presently discovered were ready to fight. On the right were Ewell’s corps and half of Hill’s. The center of the Confederate line, whence the attack had come, was therefore the obvious target. It so happened, because an anguished General Pickett had taken his wrecked division far to the rear, the center just then was largely empty of infantry. This caused Lee and Longstreet considerable concern, but of course the Federals knew nothing of that. All they could detect from Cemetery Ridge was the menacing array of artillery, in an arc left and right as far as the eye could see. Of course the Federals knew nothing of the dearth of long-range ammunition for these guns. What they did know was the damage canister (of which there was a plentiful supply) would do to their charging men.

  To be sure, had George Meade possessed the unerring prescience to know beyond any doubt that Lee would attack his center on July 3; and had he therefore massed the entire Sixth Corps under Sedgwick just behind Cemetery Ridge; and had he sent Sedgwick rushing forward right on the heels of Pickett’s and Pettigrew’s and Trimble’s retreating troops; and had such doughty fighters as James Longstreet and A. P. Hill been too stunned to react—perhaps then Lee’s army might have been split asunder. Yet neither Meade nor his generals would or could have advocated such a gamble. (When Hancock later said, “I think that our lines should have advanced immediately, and I believe we should have won a great victory,” he conveniently forgot his July 2 vote for the army to stand on the defensive.) The fact of the matter was that Meade sensed Lee would welcome a counterattack, and he refused to oblige him. “I knew he was in a strong position, awaiting my attack,” Meade told General William F. Smith on July 5, “which I declined to make, in consequence of the bad example he had set….“8

  Dusk brought a sense of great relief, wrote Colonel Charles Wainwright, First Corps artillery chief. “Not a certainty that the fight was done, or even that Lee might not try it again tonight or tomorrow, but a feeling that he had done his worst and failed.” The task now on both sides of the field was to pick up the pieces from the day’s fighting, to restore the battle lines and count the living and the dead and care for the wounded and bring up rations and ammunition, to generally try to get the two armies functioning and ready for whatever might come next. The most immediate problem was the wounded. That evening and through the night and into the next day the already overburdened field hospitals were swamped with casualties.

  The first necessity was the exercise of what is now called triage—separating those who might be saved from those who could not be saved. The latter would be set off to the side somewhere in little groups rather like leper colonies, to die as peacefully as they might. These were the severely gut-shot or men with what looked to be fatal head wounds.

  “The first sight that met our eyes,” wrote a young Quaker woman who came to Gettysburg to help, “was a collection of semi-conscious but still living forms, all of whom had been shot through the head, and were considered hopeless. They were laid there to die and I hoped that they were indeed too near death to have consciousness. Yet many a groan came from them, and their limbs tossed and twitched.” When the rush was past, a conscientious surgeon might inspect these moribund groups to see if perhaps a mistake had been made and one or another might still be saved, but that was a rare discovery. Mostly the original diagnosis was confirmed.

  The stretcher cases—and the officers—were lined up and treated before the walking wounded. “Poor fellows lying wounded in every conceivable place and little or no attention paid them,” a medical attendant with a North Carolina regiment wrote his father the night of July 3. “The doctors dont examine unless amputation is necessary or it is extraordinarily dangerous. In fact they come in so fast it is necessary.” The walking wounded would wait patiently in their lines for their turn with the surgeons. Many waited through the night and into the next day.

  With every barn and farmhouse and stable already filled with wounded from the first two days of fighting, this new flood of patients generally remained in the open. That evening there was a hard rain. The busy surgeons at their lamp-lit amputation tables had a canvas rigged overhead for shelter, but everyone else, the treated and the untreated alike, was drenched. Frank Haskell looked in at a Second Corps hospital that evening. “The Surgeons with coats off and sleeves rolled up … are about their work,” he wrote; “and their faces and clothes are spattered with blood; and though they look weary and tired, their work goes systematically and steadily on—how much and how long they have worked, the piles of legs, arms, feet, hands, fingers … partially tell.“9

  The stricken Lewis Armistead was picked up by the Federals and borne to the rear. Captain Henry Bingham of Hancock’s staff happened on the stretcher party and noticed Armistead’s marks of rank and learned his identity. Bingham said he was on General Hancock’s staff and could he do anything. Armistead asked if that was Winfield Scott Hancock. He and Hancock had been close friends in the old 6th Infantry in California before the war, and as Bingham remembered it, Armistead asked him to say to Hancock that he had done him “an injury which I shall regret”—he might have said “repent,” Bingham thought—“the longest day I live.” This would later be distorted into Armistead expressing regret “that he had been engaged in an unholy cause.” It is far more likely that he merely regretted having to fight against his old friend and comrade. Whatever Armistead said, the longest day he lived was his last one; he died in a Union hospital on the morning of July 5.

  Somehow Dick Garnett’s body was never identified, and he was buried as an unknown with his men on the field. Birkett Fry, wounded leading one of Pettigrew’s brigades, was left on the field for the Federals to capture. General Trimble’s leg wound was serious enough to require amputation, and he had to be left behind for the Federals to care for. The same fate befell James Kemper. Of the leaders of Pickett’s Charg
e, then, Garnett, Armistead, and Marshall were dead; Pettigrew and Lowrance wounded; and Trimble, Kemper, and Fry wounded and captured.10

  The Federal provost marshals were flooded with prisoners. When General Meade rode up to Cemetery Ridge just after the repulse, he encountered a crowd of prisoners, who, seeing his general’s stars, called out asking where they should go. With a laugh he pointed and told them, “Go along that way, you will be well taken care of.” The 8th Ohio, being on the flank of the attack, was especially well placed for captures, and at the end of its day’s work it marched back to the Union lines in a formation of 50 men in front with the color bearer and two captured flags, then some 200 prisoners, then the regiment’s other 50 men. In all, an estimated 3,350 Rebels, wounded and unwounded, were taken captive from Pickett’s Charge.

  Another notable capture statistic was flags—twenty-eight of them. When Alexander Webb sent his aide to Alexander Hays to ask for the return of flags captured originally by the Philadelphia Brigade, Hays wondered, “How in hell did I get them if he captured them?” But he told one of his staff to pick out a half dozen Rebel flags and send them over to Webb with his compliments: “We have so many here we don’t know what to do with them and Webb needs them.“11

  By the best estimate, better than half of the 13,000 Confederates who made Pickett’s Charge were casualties—6,600. And just over half that number, 3,350 (wounded and unwounded), became prisoners of the Yankees. The count of the dead came to some 1,190. Thus 35 percent of the men who made the charge were immediately removed from the Confederate rolls through death or capture.

  One of Mathew Brady’s cameramen took this portrait of three Confederate prisoners, posed on Seminary Ridge. (Library of Congress)

  The loss percentages in Fry’s and Marshall’s brigades of Pettigrew’s division, on Pickett’s immediate left, were about the same as those in Garnett’s, Kemper’s, and Armistead’s brigades. This belies the postwar complaint by some of Pickett’s veterans that Pettigrew’s troops failed to support the Virginians and thereby the day was lost. In fact, Pettigrew and Trimble entirely occupied the attention of Hays’s division in front of them. It was Gibbon’s men and their First Corps supports—and the Yankee artillery—that stopped Pickett.12