Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  In these houses, the Confederates usually had a blunt ultimatum to deliver to any stay-behinds: get out, or get to the cellar. Catharine Sweney’s house on the west side of Baltimore Street had a convenient line of sight from its garret window to Cemetery Hill, and in short order Sweney and her daughter were packed off “to seek refuge” back in the town. Albertus McCreary, who had already gotten into enough trouble for one boy, got into still more when he and his brother used a trapdoor in the roof of their house on Baltimore Street to get “a good view of Cemetery Hill and of the fields near the Emmetsburg Road.” They noticed a neighbor do likewise, until a bullet struck the brickwork of his chimney “just above his head.” The neighbor dropped so quickly back down his trap door “that we both laughed”—until two bullets stripped off shingles within a foot of McCreary’s head, and he and his brother sought the refuge of the cellar without any further laughter.33

  The cellars might be safe, but they also sealed the townspeople into a bubble just as unnerving as the law of the bullets in the street, apart from “the reports given us by the Confederate soldiers.” Those reports, as Albertus McCreary quickly learned, were more in the nature of mockery than information. “They said their men had taken Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and were nearing Washington, and that all was up with us.” The experience of the cellar was a kind of deafness added to blindness. In fact, one of McCreary’s neighbors who shared the McCreary cellar “was a deaf and dumb man, who, though he could not hear the firing, plainly felt the vibrations.” If a shell burst heavily and closely, “he would spell out on his fingers, ‘That was a heavy one.’ ” For the twenty-two people who sought shelter in David Troxel’s house, the blankness of the cellar eased their anxiety, because it shut out everything in the external world. When a shell struck the upper floor of the Troxel house, “no one mentioned the fact though … a number of men heard it enter [the] house while they were in [the] cellar. They were afraid it would excite the women and children to talk about it.” John Schick coped with his exile to the cellar of his store by smoking “21 cigars in one day.”34

  Perhaps the cigars worked some peculiar safeguard, because the most unusual aspect of the Gettysburg battle was how little damage was done to civilians or their property. Only one documented civilian fatality occurred, on the morning of July 3rd, when Mary Virginia Wade incautiously left the cellar of her sister’s house on Baltimore Street, on the north slope of Cemetery Hill, to bake bread in the kitchen. A bullet drilled through two doors, striking her “in the back of her neck” and killing her instantly. In addition to John Burns, six civilians were wounded—Jacob Gilbert, Georgianna Stauffer, Duncan Carson, the dry goods merchant Robert F. McIlhenny, and two students, Amos Whetstone and Frederick Lehman (who would survive being shot below the knee but would walk with a limp for the rest of his life)—none of them seriously.

  Apart from the “seventeen bullet holes” Matilda Pierce was able to count in the upper balcony of her home, and bullets that chipped brickwork and broke windowpanes in other south-side houses, there was little real physical damage done to the town. Part of this may have been simply due to lack of opportunity; the town was contested territory for all three days of the battle, and the Confederate occupiers had relatively little time for systematic destruction of the sort they would visit a year later in nearby Chambersburg. But another is linked to what cannot be said often enough about the technology of Civil War combat—that the weapons of the armies were neither sufficiently accurate nor sufficiently destructive to wreak the kind of obliteration which Krupp guns and aerial bombings would visit on European cities and towns in the twentieth century. The number of Gettysburg buildings which survive to this day with nothing more serious than bullet scrapes and the odd solid shot wedged into a rafter are a reminder not to rush too quickly to descriptions of the Civil War as a modern, or total, war. Even had the armies possessed the malevolence equal to such destructiveness, they did not possess the means.

  And, in the end, they lacked the malevolence, too. During the night, George Hillyer of the 9th Georgia heard someone in McLaws’ division begin singing, and loudly enough to be heard over both exhausted lines:

  Come, ye disconsolate, where e’er ye languish

  Come to the mercy seat, fervently kneel;

  Here bring your wounded hearts,

  Here tell your anguish;

  Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.

  Hillyer wrote years later that he had “heard [Alice] Neils[e]n and [Adelina] Patti and much that the world applauds in the way of high grade music, but … I have never heard music like that.” The voice quavered through hymns and songs, and finally finished its impromptu serenade with “When This Cruel War Is Over.” Across the now silent battlefield, “thousands of soldiers on both sides clapped and cheered.”35

  PART 4

  The Third Day

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The general plan of attack was unchanged

  THE SUN ROSE ON JULY 3RD behind a thin layer of “cumulo-stratus clouds” (according to Professor Michael Jacobs’ relentless meterological record keeping) which eventually burned off or blew away by noon. Temperatures outside the shade of the oak trees were already in the mid-70s by seven o’clock, and the atmosphere was charging with the edgy promise of a thunderstorm in the afternoon. On Cemetery Hill, “monuments and headstones” in the Evergreen Cemetery “lie here and there overturned.” Graves “have been trampled by horses’ feet” and the “neat and well-trained shrubbery” had vanished. One soldier in the 20th Massachusetts, near the little woodlot on Cemetery Ridge which Ambrose Wright’s Georgians had come so close to holding the evening before, looked down the 2nd Corps line as the dawn painted color onto the deadly landscape, and thought that it “appeared like a country fair on a colossal scale.” Turning around and looking to his rear, he could see Powers Hill and Culp’s Hill, and the road running up to the rear of Cemetery Hill, “covered over with ambulances, wagons, reserve artillery.” There were “thousands of horses with saddles on, mules in harness, hitched to fences, trees, wagon wheels” while they munched “the hay and grain that had been fed out to them. But the most striking sight was that of “seventy thousand muskets, with bayonets fixed” and “stacked in a row four miles long,” marking the line he and his fellows would defend “when the battle note should be sounded.”

  Men also began stirring on the skirmish lines between the two armies, “making the most economical use of any little depression, or a fence-rail or two from the fences thrown down during the night,” and beginning the familiar crackle of skirmish firing. Four-man skirmish teams “acted together, firing by volley into any puff of smoke that would be thrust out by the enemy.” It did not take long for the firing to begin taking its toll, and even though skirmish fire was going to do little or nothing to determine the overall outcome of the battle, the men it killed would be just as dead as if they had been heroically leading the last brave charge of the war. Skirmishers who were too successful violated an unspoken rule of fairness, and when several Confederates “were able to reckon their game with every shot,” their Federal opponents shouted “the wildest imprecations” at them “and threats were made that if taken they would get no quarter.”

  But for all the threats, the skirmishers of the 14th Connecticut actually felt “relief and gladness” when a wounded Confederate, “trying, by a series of flops, to drag his body up the slope to the shelter of his own lines,” finally succeeded in getting out of range. Later, a solitary rebel “was seen to rise … and advance toward the Federals with his hand raised.” The Union fire slackened, and the word was passed down the skirmish line, Wait till we see what he wants. The rebel skirmisher “suddenly dropped upon the grass and for an instant was lost to the sight.” But in a moment, the Federal skirmishers cheered “as hearty as if given in a charge.” The Confederate had heard a wounded Yankee “lying helpless on the ground between the lines … begging in his agonizing thirst for a drink” and “had gone forwar
d to give some comfort to his distressed enemy.” Once he had “performed his act of mercy,” he sprinted back to his own skirmish line, and the cry went up from the Confederates, Down, Yanks; we’re going to fire, and the soldiers returned to the business at hand of killing one another.1

  By mid-morning, the skirmish fire had grown especially annoying for Alex Hays, commanding the other 2nd Corps division on Cemetery Ridge. Confederate skirmishers had once more set up in the William Bliss barn, where they could carry on sniping from less than 600 yards away. Hays called up four companies of the 14th Connecticut to clean out the Bliss barn and farmhouse, and when it became obvious that they could not hold the buildings against a serious Confederate counterattack, Hays ordered both burned. Details from the 12th New Jersey, 1st Delaware, and 111th New York trundled out and began setting fire to the barn with “burning wisps of hay or straw.” They did their work well, and by the time they scrambled back to the Federal skirmish line along the Emmitsburg Road, “both buildings were in flames.”2

  Long before this, Robert E. Lee had made up his mind what course to follow. The men in Kershaw’s South Carolina brigade were certain “that Lee would not yield to a drawn battle without, at least, another attempt to break Meade’s front,” and most expected that “Lee would undertake the accomplishment of the work of the day before.” They were right. Climbing up to the open cupola of Pennsylvania College, Lee saw nothing which suggested that he shouldn’t hit the Federals again in the same fashion. The “partial successes” of July 2nd “determined me to continue the assault the next day.” Moreover, Dick Ewell’s foothold on the south peak of Culp’s Hill “was such as to lead to the belief that he would ultimately be able to dislodge the enemy,” and so “the general plan of attack was unchanged.”

  Click here to see a larger image.

  Longstreet would resume the attack with the one remaining division of his corps which was only just reaching the battlefield, that of George E. Pickett, plus “two brigades of Hill’s corps” which had had time to recover from the fighting on July 1st. (On second thought, Lee added four more brigades from Hill’s corps, just to make certainty certain.) The overall effect would be a renewal of the attack of July 2nd, and its goal would be the Union line—what was left of it—on Cemetery Ridge. If Ewell could extend his grip on Culp’s Hill, the Baltimore Pike artery could be severed; if Longstreet could crush the remaining Federals on Cemetery Ridge, the Yankee artillery on the cemetery plateau would be pinched off and forced to surrender. Stuart and the cavalry would screen Ewell’s flank and rear, but otherwise this was to be the infantry’s show, with some preliminary assistance from a “grand battery” of the army’s artillery.3

  Dick Ewell got his orders for the attack on the night of the July 2nd, apprising him that “an attack would be renewed at daylight of the third, by Longstreet. We were to cooperate, as before, by opening with artillery & engaging the attention of the enemy as far as possible. Also to push out success on the left if practicable.” (Again, that maddening phrase, if practicable.) Lee followed with a personal visit to Longstreet early “on the morning of the 3d,” just “after sunrise,” directing Longstreet to “renew the attack against Cemetery Hill. For that purpose he had already ordered up Pickett’s division.” This did not completely surprise Longstreet, who suspected that Lee “was still in his disposition to attack.” But Longstreet assumed that the idea of attacking Cemetery Hill “had been fully tested the day before,” and that Lee would now be in a more agreeable frame of mind to hear about skirting the entire left flank of the Army of the Potomac and slicing the Baltimore Pike below Powers Hill. Longstreet had even had “scouting parties out during the night in search of a way by which we might strike the enemy’s left,” and “found a way that gave some promise of results.”4

  Lee was not interested. Pointing “with his fist” toward Cemetery Hill, Lee replied just as he had the morning before, The enemy is there, I am going to strike him. Pickett’s division would move up to Seminary Ridge, using the thick forestation for cover, and after a softening-up bombardment, they would follow more or less the same track as Cadmus Wilcox and Ambrose Wright had followed the afternoon before, hitting the 2nd Corps of the Army of the Potomac along Cemetery Ridge between the west side of Cemetery Hill and the woodlot—“a clump of trees,” or, as others described it in less flattering terms, a “clump of bushes” or “a clump of dwarfed trees”—visible on the ridge. Longstreet was taken aback at the bluntness of the plan. He argued that the kind of attack Lee had in mind would require 30,000 men. Pickett’s division had only about 10,500; the other units he would borrow from Powell Hill would only bring that to about 13,000, and even then they “would have to march a mile under concentrating battery fire, and a thousand yards under long-range musketry.”

  Lee disagreed. The distance they would have to cover was, at most, 1,400 yards, and he would reinforce Pickett to bring the “strength of the column” up to 15,000. Longstreet was ready to throw his hands in the air. “General,” Longstreet pleaded, “I have been a soldier all my life. I have been engaged in fights by couples, by squads, companies, regiments, divisions and armies, and … it is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position.” It was no use. Lee “was impatient of listening, and tired of talking, and nothing was left but to proceed.” As soon as Pickett’s division was in place, two divisions of Powell Hill’s corps would be “arranged along his left … We were to open with our batteries, and Pickett was to move out as soon as we silenced the Federal batteries. The artillery combat was to begin with the rapid discharge of two field-pieces as our signal.”5

  That left, of course, Powell Hill, and Lee now rode over to Hill’s headquarters near the seminary to brief him. “I was directed,” wrote Hill, “to hold my line with Anderson’s division … and to order Heth’s division”—now commanded by Johnston Pettigrew as a result of Heth’s head wound on July 1st—“and [James H.] Lane’s and [Alfred] Scales’ brigades of Pender’s division, to report to Lieutenant General Longstreet as a support to his corps in the assault on the enemy’s lines.” Hill impulsively offered Lee “my whole Army corps,” but Lee declined, since “what remains of your corps will be my only reserve.” Hill would probably have been more content if he could have actually sent Dorsey Pender to join Pickett, but Pender had been wounded by an errant shell on the evening of July 2nd, and a ragged splinter “about two inches square” had cut into Pender’s left thigh. It did not seem life-threatening at the moment (in fact, once Pender was evacuated to Staunton after the battle his femoral artery burst; the surgeons tried to eliminate the threat by amputating the leg on July 18th, but Pender died). Still, Pender was certainly in no shape to direct an attack, so his division was given a new commander in the shape of the voluble—and conveniently available—Isaac Trimble.6

  And then there were arrangements for the artillery to be made, which Lee left in Longstreet’s hands as the officer responsible for directing the attack. Longstreet, in turn, called in his artillery chief, James Walton, and his favorite, Porter Alexander, and told them “that we would renew the attack early in the morning.” Walton would continue to oversee the corps artillery, but Alexander was “an officer of unusual promptness, sagacity, and intelligence,” and Longstreet would use Alexander in a special staff role, not unlike the one Meade had devised for Hancock on July 1st. Alexander had already guessed that the morning of July 3rd would bring some renewal of the fighting, and he had been requisitioning ammunition and positioning portions of Longstreet’s corps artillery reserve since midnight. In addition to the thirty-four guns of the corps reserve, he would be able to call on the division artillery battalions of Pickett and Lafayette McLaws for another thirty-eight guns, and could expect support for the attack from Powell Hill’s batteries as well, including two deadly Whitworth rifles which had been run through the blockade from England, and which were the proud property of Powell Hill’s artillery reserve. Counting every gun which Alexander and the other
corps artillery chiefs could bring to bear, there may have been as many as 171 muzzles pointed at Cemetery Ridge.7

  But bringing these forces to bear on Cemetery Ridge would take time. Lee’s word to Ewell was to expect an attack “at daylight of the third, by Longstreet,” and Porter Alexander likewise had the impression that Longstreet would have everything ready to begin by eight o’clock, “perhaps earlier.” But action by Longstreet depended on Pickett, and if there was one thing George Pickett could be relied upon for, it was unreliability. Born in 1825, Pickett was charming, talkative, self-confident—and indolent. He was the embodiment of Henry Adams’ estimate of the Virginia ruling class: “He had … the Virginian habit of command and took leadership as his natural habit,” and could be, for a while, “the most popular and prominent young man in his class.” The problem was that “no one knew enough to know how ignorant he was; how childlike … He was simply beyond analysis; so simple that even the simple New England student could not realize him.” Exasperated with their son’s lack of spark, Pickett’s parents wangled an appointment for him to West Point, where he graduated dead last in the class of 1846, and only five behavioral demerits shy of expulsion.

  As a lieutenant in the Mexican War, Pickett distinguished himself leading the charge that breached the defenses of Churubusco, and snatched up the colors of the 8th U.S. Infantry (from the hands of no less than a wounded James Longstreet) and planted them on the ramparts of Chapultepec. Apart from those moments, Pickett’s career was a blank. His wife died in childbirth in 1851, along with the child, and when he was posted to the Washington Territory he married a Yakima woman, fathered a son, triggered an international incident over an island in Puget Sound, and in 1861 abandoned them all to take up a commission as a captain of infantry in the new provisional army of the Confederacy. He proposed to a Virginia girl, LaSalle Corbell, who was eighteen years his junior (he married her in September 1863), and spent more time trying to play the part of “a Virginia slave-baron … proud in bearing, head lifted in arrogance” than in actual combat. Whatever moments he could spare from self-adornment were devoted to the neglect of his duties, and he was so little good as an officer that Longstreet had to assign staffers to Pickett to explain things “very fully; indeed sometimes stay with him to make sure he did not get astray.” Longstreet, however, was also Pickett’s indulgent angel, and was “exceedingly fond” of him. Pickett (according to LaSalle Pickett) had stepped up to supervise the funeral arrangements for Longstreet’s children after their deaths in 1862, and generosity of that order, even if accompanied by a certain dimness of the intellect, is enough to cover a multitude of mediocrity. The only officer on record as praising Pickett as “the best infantry soldier developed on either side” seems to have been George McClellan.8