And not only Hall’s brigade. The handfuls of survivors from Harrow’s brigade—the 1st Minnesota, the 15th Massachusetts, Francis Heath’s 19th Maine, the 82nd New York, regiments which had sustained the highest casualty rates of any brigade in the 2nd Corps—“hurried to the right and joined the troops in front of Pickett’s men.” Jammed together “five and six deep,” these undirected men formed a crescent with the 69th Pennsylvania along the south end of the angle, standing and firing in a loose mob “until all appearance of formation was lost.” Even Henry Hunt, who had ridden up to Freeman McGilvery’s batteries when the infantry attack started, now galloped into the writhing tangle of smoke and fire, firing his revolver and shouting crazily, “See ’em! See ’em!” until his horse was shot down and some of Cowan’s cannoneers had to extricate him. (A few yards away, Alexander Webb noticed that Hunt “had ridden up,” and in the strange stress of combat Webb “had to laugh” because Hunt “looked so funny, up there on his horse, popping at them.”)24
For “perhaps five minutes,” the men were simply a motionless mass of shooters. “Every time a man stops to load, others crowd in ahead of him so that he will have to elbow his way through in order to get another chance to fire.” The smoke rolled in so thickly that men had to shoot at their enemies’ feet, “which was about all we could see of them at the time.” This served “to prevent” any further advance by the Confederates, but otherwise “our shots affected them little,” and the masses of humanity in the angle foamed together in a bloody equipoise. Then, over top of the mayhem, the voice of a soldier in the 15th Massachusetts, George Cunningham of Company B, roared: For God’s sake let us charge, they’ll kill us all if we stand here. “The men sprang forward like a thunderbolt.” The color-bearer of the 19th Massachusetts knocked down the color-bearer of the 14th Virginia “with his color staff,” while all around him men “just rushed in like wild beasts … and struggled and fought, grappled in hand-to-hand fight, threw stones, clubbed muskets, kicked and yelled and hurrahed.” With Armistead down and the Federals closing in, the dwindling mass of Virginians “started on the run towards the Emmitsburg Road.” The Federals kept up firing “until they got out of range,” and then it was over.25
A small knot of Union soldiers from the 72nd Pennsylvania gathered around Armistead, some of them imagining that he was actually James Longstreet. The judge advocate of the 2nd Corps, Henry Bingham, had been “on the right and alongside of Webb’s brigade,” and he stopped “several privates” who were carrying Armistead rearward. Bingham himself had just sustained a nasty wound to his scalp, but almost as though he were helping the victim of a road accident, Bingham halted the little group, and introduced himself to Armistead as a member of General Hancock’s staff. Hancock? Armistead gasped. Winfield Scott Hancock? Yes, replied Bingham. Hancock is “an old and valued friend,” Armistead said. Tell him, Armistead continued, “that I have done him and you all an injury which I shall repent the longest day of my life.”26
It would have sharpened his repentence immeasurably if Armistead had known that, only a few minutes before, Hancock had joined the wounded himself. Riding down to rally Hall’s and Stannard’s brigades, Hancock was hit in the right thigh by a bullet that drilled through the pommel of his saddle and drove itself, several splinters of wood, and a bent ten-penny nail four inches up into his groin. These deadly fragments barely missed an artery, and the 2nd Corps’ chief medical officer, Alexander Dougherty, was able to extract the nail and contain the bleeding sufficiently that Hancock could, even “lying down,” continue to “observe the operation of the enemy and give direction accordingly.” But by this point, there was not much left to direct. Hancock dictated a quick message to Meade—“Tell General Meade that the troops under my command have repulsed the enemy’s assault and that we have gained a great victory”—and sent it off with his aide William Mitchell. Meanwhile, the wrecked pieces of Pickett’s three brigades “fled to the rear over dead and wounded, mangled, groaning, dying men, scattered thick, far and wide” and “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.”27
Pettigrew’s Division
Johnston Pettigrew may not have been the best choice to take over command of Harry Heth’s division—he had only seen serious action in this war on the Peninsula, where a bullet damaged his windpipe and should have killed him—but he was a better choice than either of Heth’s other brigade commanders, Joe Davis and John Brockenbrough, in addition to having seniority over both. The same was true of the decision to give command of the two brigades borrowed from Pender’s division to Isaac Trimble (who was also senior on the Confederate Army list to both Heth and Pender).
All of these men belonged to Powell Hill’s corps, and Hill proposed to Lee putting in everything he had left, which would have added Pender’s remaining two brigades (Thomas’ Georgians and Abner Perrin’s South Carolinians) and perhaps the underused brigades of Mahone and Posey from Richard Heron Anderson’s division. Lee disagreed. He needed some form of reserve for the rest of the army, and besides, Pettigrew’s role was more in the nature of support for Pickett. (Longstreet’s first design had, in fact, been to place Pettigrew in the rear of Pickett.) This was small comfort to the men Pettigrew would be commanding, who spent “about four hours or more” while George Pickett’s division was getting into position looking glumly over the cheerless fields they would shortly have to cross, “every veteran … counting the probable results.”
As soon as he saw Pickett’s division emerge from the woods and pause to deploy into line, Pettigrew had his men up, too, putting the four brigades of his newly acquired division in a first line (with the regiments in columns formed by five-company battalions), and then Trimble’s two brigades in a second. Birkett Fry, who was now in charge of Archer’s depleted brigade, occupied the right-hand slot in the front line, and would serve as the brigade of direction for the charge, trying to keep an eye out for the movements of Pickett’s division, 400 yards farther to the right. Of the twenty-seven regiments Pettigrew would lead, only four (Brockenbrough’s brigade) were Virginians; fifteen were North Carolina regiments, and so it seemed only natural that Pettigrew would ride across their front, exhorting them, “For the honor of the good old North State, forward.” But it was from the throats of the Tennesseans in Fry’s brigade that the shrill yipping of the rebel yell went up, and the whole line went forward.28
The impetus began to slow almost at once. For one thing, Pettigrew was following Pickett by three or four hundred yards, and the temptation to let Pickett attract as much Federal attention as possible was irresistible. There were also the interminable fences to be climbed, making alignments “so imperfect and so drooping” that it looked like Pettigrew was leading a wedge rather than a line. Pettigrew stopped them once they reached the smoldering ruins of the Bliss farm, trying to adjust and dress the lines, but as he did so he found that John Brockenbrough’s always unreliable brigade had disappeared—parts of it may actually have failed to move at all—and Joe Davis was lagging far behind. Then, “halfway over the plain,” the Federal artillery on Cemetery Hill opened up on Pettigrew’s division. Pettigrew’s line was “at once enveloped in a dense cloud of smoke and dust,” from which “arms, heads, blankets, guns, and knapsacks were thrown and tossed in the clear air.”29
The principal advantage Pettigrew had was the lay of the land: the slant of Seminary Ridge and the Emmitsburg Road meant that his division had a far shorter distance to cover than Pickett’s. “From the top of Seminary Ridge,” it took Pettigrew only “about eight minutes” to reach the Emmitsburg Road. But the pounding of the artillery was already cracking the steadiness of Joe Davis’ brigade. Isaac Trimble was alarmed to see “Pettigrew’s troops” stopping and “firing against orders,” and soldiers from the 11th and 26th North Carolina “ ‘Turkeyed’ in fine style.” They were slowed down still further by a Union regiment which materi
alized on the left flank of Pettigrew’s line; this was the 8th Ohio, the only regiment of Samuel Carroll’s brigade which was left behind the evening before when Carroll went off to push Jubal Early’s division down east Cemetery Hill. A large portion of the 8th Ohio had been out on the skirmish line at noon, but rather than recalling them at the beginning of the Confederate attack, their colonel, Franklin Sawyer, instead “by a still further advance and left wheel” (just as George Stannard was doing several hundred yards away) flung the regiment out on a line perpendicular to Pettigrew’s advance. “Facing the left flank of the advancing column of rebels, the men were ordered to fire into their flank at will.”
Then the rebels hit the big fences on either side of the road. “The Confederates did not mind the stone wall” in front of them or the “picket fences” behind them, claimed a member of the 14th Tennessee, “but this mortised post and rail fence checked the charge and confused the whole command.” It did not help their confusion that the Emmitsburg Road, at this point, sank into an even deeper embankment than the one encountered by Garnett and Kemper. “The time it took to climb to the top of the fence seemed to the men an age of suspense,” and then they spilled over the immovable fence into the deep roadbed. There, an embarrassingly large number of them stayed, “and no orders, threats or entreaties could induce them to again face the iron storm.”30
The Union soldiers forty yards away at the crest had stored up a good deal of malice for these rebels. Alex Hays sited both of his remaining brigades behind a low stone wall, one of them where it could connect to the two rear companies of the 71st Pennsylvania, and the other—the “Harpers Ferry Cowards”—on the right, around the Bryan barn, with George Woodruff’s battery on their flank as an anchor. They thought the advance of Pettigrew’s division “was a splendid sight to see,” and it was intimidating enough that several hopped up to “start for the rear,” while an officer of the 111th New York buried his face in the ground and tried to hide ridiculously behind an empty box of hardtack. But in the 12th New Jersey, a regiment which had stuck stubbornly with its old .69 caliber “buck-and-ball” smoothbore muskets, the men were busy repackaging their paper cartridges with multiple rounds, like buckshot, while the 1st Delaware and 14th Connecticut “collected all the spare guns … and laid them in rows beside them.” Alex Hays, riding up and down the line behind them, was brief and to the point: “They are coming, boys; we must whip them,” and to the 12th New Jersey, “You men with buck and ball, don’t fire until they get to that fence.” And they did wait, until “the Confederates began to climb the hither fence” and Alex Hays could shout, Show them your colors and give them hell, boys. When they did, “the storm of lead was beyond description.” After that, the rebels “melted away like wax.” Many of those in Pettigrew’s first line went no farther forward than “about five yards,” then “returned to and laid down in the pike.” Isaac Trimble had the impression that Fry’s brigade crossed the road, but this may have been no more than “some fifty or seventy five of the most reckless.”31
Pettigrew lost his horse to shell fire in the march over the fields, but he scaled both fences along with “broken squads” and tried to organize an attack aimed at the Bryan barn. Birkett Fry went down with a bullet “through the thigh” but kept on urging his Tennesseans onward as though all it would require was one determined push and the Army of the Potomac would disintegrate before their eyes: “Go on; it will not last five minutes longer!” Fry and Pettigrew had the help of Trimble’s two brigades, who reached the fence, plowed on through, and “passed over … and went forward.” But even then, “only half” of Trimble’s North Carolinians “managed to cross the road.” Together, there may have been as many as three separate rushes past the Bryan barn and at the stone wall behind it, but none of them had any realistic chance. Behind the wall, soldiers in the 126th New York taunted the rebels, Come on; Come on; come to death!
Men from Joe Davis’s 11th and 42nd Mississippi also made it to the barn, clustered around it, and exchanged fire with the 39th and 111th New York. One of the 42nd’s captains, Henry Davenport, ran forward to plant the regiment’s flag on the wall, only to be shot down; the colonel of the 42nd, Hugh Miller, was “mortally wounded through the left lung … some twenty-five yards from their line of stone fences.” On the other side of the barn, a small party from Trimble’s 37th North Carolina actually got over the wall before they were quickly rounded up and captured; one of their lieutenants, with the incongruous name of Iowa Michigan Royster, ran forward “in his new uniform … waving his sword” and “singing Dixie,” only to be cut down, struck in the chest and thigh. The 37th’s right-hand neighbors, the 7th North Carolina, never got closer than forty yards to the wall. Fry’s brigade (the same brigade which had begun the battle on July 1st, under James Archer’s command) probably made the most serious push up to the wall, where they fought with the 12th New Jersey, the 14th Connecticut, and the 1st Delaware, using stones, bayonets, rifle butts—even, as Birkett Fry noticed, the “spear on the end of my regimental colors.” But already, a captain in Fry’s brigade could see that “to the left of the First Tennessee our lines had entirely given way.” An aide told Trimble, who had “been wounded and taken from my horse,” that his brigades were starting to fall back. Should he try to “rally them” for another try? No, said Trimble, who was becoming “faint with loss of blood,” there was no point. “No Charley the best these brave fellows can do is to get out of this,” so “let them get out of this, it’s all over.”32
Pettigrew’s division “gave way, not in sullen retreat, but in disordered flight,” and unlike their counterparts in the Philadelphia Brigade, Alex Hays’ men were up and eager for the pursuit. The 1st Delaware “sprang over the stone wall en masse and charged with the bayonet upon the rebel fugitives,” led by their color sergeant “with the national flag,” as did the color sergeant of the 125th New York, while the 111th New York carefully cleared out the Bryan barn of any remaining Confederates. Alex Hays was in raptures. As a captured rebel officer was being prodded past him, the rebel asked contemptuously if this was all the men Hays had been able to summon: “If I had known that this is all you have, I would not have surrendered.” Well, snarled Hays happily, Go back and try it again.
A captain in the 126th New York picked up a North Carolina regimental flag which had, among the battle honors painted on its bars, HARPERS FERRY. Hays wanted this flag, and he wanted to flaunt it for the benefit of the “Harpers Ferry Cowards,” who had finally evened up their scores with the Confederacy on this afternoon. “Gen. Hays took this flag in his hand and rode the length of the brigade in his front, trailing the flag on the ground amid the continuous and deafening cheers of the men,” followed by his two surviving staffers, trailing captured rebel banners in the same fashion. At the angle, he encountered Alexander Webb, “with his hat off, very much excited,” picking through the bodies of the 72nd Pennsylvania in their “dark blue zouave uniforms.” Webb was looking for some encouraging Victorian sentiment from Hays, saying with a sigh, “Hays, they got through my line.” Alex Hays was the wrong man to expect sentimentality from. He shot back wickedly, “I’ll be damned if they got through mine.”33
It seems to have occurred to neither Webb nor Hays nor anyone else at that moment how ironic it was that the Army of Northern Virginia’s last hope for a victorious breakthrough expired in bleeding flight from the property of Abraham Bryan, a free black man, a species of humanity which was, by most Confederate understandings, not even supposed to exist. Lee and his men had given what Porter Alexander later called “the best we had in the shop,” right down to handsome young lieutenants, moving bravely and impossibly to the attack, singing “Dixie” under waving swords and snapping flags, and they had, in the end, not been able to roll the stone to the top of the mountain after all. There was already a faint sense in the minds of these soldiers on Cemetery Ridge, standing there as the sun—and the hopes of the Confederacy—together sank toward South Mountain, that something unutter
ably vital had just happened, something to be engraved in bronze books and on pedestals of gray granite, something that would make every man who had been there and survived raise a toast, like Harry the King’s happy few, on every anniversary of the battle, something which would make this place a name everyone would recognize without explanation. But the greatest achievement of the great battle would turn out to be its humblest, as well. For Abraham Bryan would return to his twelve acres, and his whitewashed cottage and barn, and he and his family would live there until he sold the property in 1869. And no one would make them afraid, for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
As clear a defeat as our army ever met with
GENERAL ROBERT E. LEE stayed at the point of Pickett’s jump-off throughout the charge, sitting first on an oak stump (which an aide had thoughtfully spread with Lee’s all-weather oilcloth coat) and then “on a camp chair under a hastily-rigged tent-fly” (which his staff had even more thoughtfully contrived). Lee was “outwardly calm,” the only nervousness shown being his habit of “twirling his spectacles in his hand.” Once the Union artillery opened up, the curtains of smoke closed in and there was little to see, but after Pettigrew’s division went in, “a loud cheering arose in the enemy’s lines.” Lee sent a staffer, Frederick Colston, to “ride forward and see what that cheering means.” Colston met only ghastly streams of wounded men, staggering rearward, and by the time he was close enough to catch any glimpse worth reporting, all he was able to see was “a Union general galloping down his line,” which was probably Alex Hays in triumph. The fields which Pettigrew’s division had crossed were now “dotted with our soldiers, singly and in small groups, coming back from the charge, many of them wounded, and the enemy were firing at them as you would a herd of game.” Colston himself had bullets cut off one bridle rein and bore holes through the brim of his new hat.1
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