by John Waugh
He said to Lee: “I have been a soldier, I may say, from the ranks up to the position I now hold. I have been in pretty much all kinds of skirmishes, from those of two or three soldiers up to those of an army corps, and I think I can safely say there never was a body of fifteen thousand men who could make that attack successfully.”30 But it was decided. The cannonade would begin after the firing of two signal guns by the Washington Artillery, and when the Union line was sufficiently softened, Pickett would charge.
The soldiers continued to wait. In midmorning there had been a struggle for possession of the Bliss barn between the lines, involving about a hundred guns. But that had died away. There had also been fighting all morning on the extreme Confederate left for possession of Culp’s Hill, but that too had ended with the hill remaining in Union hands. At about eleven o’clock the whole field suddenly fell “as silent as a churchyard.”31
It was the eerie kind of stillness that seeped to the marrow of men’s bones, mysterious and oppressive, depressing the spirit like some “dreadful nightmare.” It was a hush that foretold calamity, the terrifying silence which in nature portends the fury of a coming storm. “More trying on one’s backbone and grit,” as one soldier described such stillness, “than any charge on hill or breastworks,” when a man’s whole life “becomes a living panorama before him.” As the silence stretched on through the late morning, through the noontime, and approached one o’clock, impatience to have the charge done with and over became almost unbearable. A line from Macbeth occurred to Walter Harrison: “ ’Twere well it were done quickly,’ ” he thought, “holds quite as good in heroic action as in crime.”32
* * *
As his corps waited in the silence under the beating sun, Union Brigadier General John Gibbon decided to have lunch. In another of those ironic matchups, Pickett would be hurling his division against the soldiers of this old friend and former classmate. Younger even than McClellan, Gibbon had joined the class late, with the September arrivals in 1842, three months behind the rest. He was soon “found,” however, and put back into the class of 1847. He had proved an outstanding officer, and in this war he had matured into a valued, level-headed general. He was still young and ruggedly handsome, of slight build, with brown hair, and a reddish moustache. He seemed made of ice and born for battle. Nobody could remember ever seeing him either nervous or excited.33 “Steel-cold General Gibbon,” a fellow officer described him, “the most American of Americans, with his sharp nose and up-and-down manner of telling the truth, no matter whom it hurts.”34 He had been telling truth that hurt since the beginning of the war, when he decided to stay with the North and three of his brothers went with the South.
But now it was lunchtime at Gettysburg, and Gibbon had procured a chicken “in good running order.” To share it, he invited Generals Winfield Hancock, John Newton, Alfred Pleasonton, and the army’s new commanding general himself, George Meade. They all came and dined, and afterward leaned back, lit their cigars, rested under the shade of a small tree, and talked of yesterday’s battle and of today’s probabilities. So they passed the lunch hour in the silence in the rear of the Union line, a general now and then dispatching an orderly with a message. At about half past twelve, one by one, beginning with Meade, they rode off leaving Gibbon alone with his staff. There they continued to sit with half-shut eyes, nodding off in the heat and the quiet. At five minutes to one, Captain Frank Haskell looked at his watch and yawned.35
On Seminary Ridge, Brigadier General James J. Pettigrew paid a visit to one of his brigade commanders, Colonel Birkett Davenport Fry. Pettigrew was in temporary command of Major General Henry Heth’s division of A. P. Hill’s corps, which was to assault the Union line in partnership with Pickett’s Virginians. Fry, erstwhile of the class of 1846, a second-year victim of mathematics, was commanding James Archer’s brigade.
Pettigrew told Fry of Lee’s plans. After a heavy cannonade they would assault the Union line. The Federals, of course, would return the fire with all the guns they had. “We must shelter the men as best we can,” Pettigrew told Fry, “and make them lie down.” He ordered him to go at once to Pickett and work out an understanding about dressing the lines in the coming assault, since Fry’s brigade backed on Pickett’s division.
Fry found his old classmate in good spirits. They had a lot in common, these two. They were both Virginians. Fry had flunked out of West Point and the demerit-laden Pickett had nearly done so. Both had gone on to win reputations as fearless fighters. They had charged the castle at Chapultepec together in the Mexican War, and they spoke now of those pleasant memories. Presently they were joined by Brigadier General Richard Garnett, who commanded the brigade abutting Fry’s. It was decided among the three of them that the assaulting force would dress on Fry, who occupied the exact center of the Confederate line.36
About the time Fry was reporting this decision to Pettigrew, one of his soldiers, June Kimble, an orderly sergeant of the Fourteenth Tennessee, walked out alone to the edge of the open field and looked across at the Union position on Cemetery Ridge.
He stared at it a moment and then solemnly addressed a question to himself. “June Kimble,” he demanded aloud, “are you going to do your duty to-day?”
“I’ll do it, so help me God,” he answered himself.
When he returned to his regiment, his lieutenant asked, “How does it look, June?”
“Boys, if we have to go,” June said, “it will be hot for us, and we will have to do our best.”37
As Frank Haskell was looking at his watch at five minutes to one, James Longstreet was passing an order to the Washington Artillery. “Let the batteries open,” the message read. Major B. F. Eshleman received it, and at one o’clock the first signal shot shattered the hot sultry stillness. The fiction primer failed to fire on the second gun, but the delay was short. Seconds later it, too, bellowed out into the quiet afternoon.38
At John Gibbon’s lunch site, the dozing officers lurched awake. The thunder of the two signal shots had hardly stopped echoing across the valley, and Seminary Ridge was belching fire from end to end. Shells began exploding all around Gibbon and his staff as they sprang to their feet, shouting for their horses. When Gibbon’s did not come at once—his groom had been ripped open by one of the first shells—he snatched up his saber and started forward on the run. It was as if Armageddon had arrived. The air was filled with screeching projectiles. Gibbon could see them plainly as they arched toward him and crashed into the Taneytown road. The long rifled shells careened in with a rush and a scream. He could see them above, upsetting and tumbling end over end through the air. Shots were bursting all about him now, throwing fragments everywhere, or plowing furrows in the earth and hurling shattered pieces of rock.39
Haskell found his own horse tethered to a nearby tree placidly munching oats as if nothing was happening. This is ridiculous, he thought. This horse, of the men and beasts in this hellhole, was the coolest of them all. He leaped on its back and galloped away after Gibbon.40
Cadmus Marcellus Wilcox of the class of 1846 had brought his Confederates to Seminary Ridge at about 7:00 that morning. His soldiers were tired and battle-worn, having been in the thick of yesterday’s fighting. But they had been ordered to support the charge on the right of Pickett’s division today, and Wilcox had the reputation of always being ready—fussily ready. They didn’t call him “Old Billy Fixing” for nothing. Like his ex-classmate John Gibbon, Wilcox was a provider. He had procured a piece of cold mutton for lunch and was sharing it with Richard Garnett and Walter Harrison.
The water from the well in the yard where they lunched was so hard that Harrison decided they needed a chaser “to prevent [it] from freezing my whole internal economy, and petrifying my heart of hearts.” As they ate, they took a pull on the Chambersburg whisky, then on the water. Then the signal guns went off, and Harrison and Garnett bolted for their horses, scarcely reaching them before the artillery on both ridges was in full cry.41
“Lie down, men! Lie do
wn,” the order echoed along Seminary Ridge. “Down! Down!” was the command everywhere on Cemetery Hill. These men, Union and Confederate, didn’t need to be told that, and it hardly mattered. There was nowhere to hide. Along the Union line even the colors had to be furled and laid on the ground to keep from being shredded.42
The thunder of the cannonading rolled over the armies “like doom.”43 “The air seethed with old iron,” wrote a soldier from Maine. “Death and destruction were everywhere. Men and horses mangled and bleeding; trees, rocks, and fences ripped and torn. Shells, solid shot, and spherical case shot screamed, hissed, and rattled in every direction. Men hugged the ground and sought safety behind hillocks, boulders, ledges, stone walls, bags of grain—anything that could give or suggest shelter from this storm of death.”44
It seemed to one Confederate that the solid fabric of the hills labored and shook. In Philadelphia over eighty miles away the roar of the thunder was heard and the jar of concussion felt. A federal soldier thought all the fiends of the unknown region had been turned loose. A Union chaplain believed it to be a “tempest of shot and shell such as never before, since the world began.” Nothing, he thought, could have added to the noise. It was “like Heaven’s thunder,” said another. To James Longstreet it was as if the two armies were “mighty wild beasts growling at each other and preparing for a death struggle.”45
Both ridges were soon ablaze with fire and covered with smoke, which eddied out into the valley between. The scene, thought Henry J. Hunt, the chief of the federal artillery, was “indescribably grand.” The sun, so brilliant but a few moments before, was now eclipsed, and out of the gloom came the screaming shot and shell, plowing furrows among the men hugging the earth in the woods behind Seminary Ridge. The hailstorm of howling shot from the more than two hundred guns on the two ridges was worse even than that terrible silence that had preceded it. “No sound of roaring waters, nor wind, nor thunder, nor of these combined,” one officer would write, “ever equaled the tremendous uproar, and no command, no order, no sound of voice, could be heard at all above the ceaseless din.”46
Behind the line of massed cannon on Seminary Ridge the suffering was worst of all. The federal shells fell among the unprotected Confederate soldiers indiscriminately. “Some were stricken down with cigars in their mouths,” a soldier wrote. One was killed clutching a picture of his sister in his hand.47
Within moments after the cannonade began Erasmus Williams, who lay in the makeshift fortification he had dug with his penknife, was covered with dirt kicked up by exploding shells. Almost instantly, the lieutenant who was standing to witness the whole proceeding was swept away by a shot, his blood splattering over Williams. A shell struck the ground nearby and stuck, its fuse still sputtering. Williams reached out and pulled the fuse before the shell exploded.48
A Confederate soldier in Joseph B. Kershaw’s brigade rested his foot in the fork of a bush and a fragment tore into his ankle. He stared at the wound for a moment and said: “Boys, I’ll be ——if that ain’t a thirty-day days’ furlough.”49 Brigadier General Lewis A. Armistead, who was known to be afraid of nothing, paced in the open in front of his line at an easy and unconcerned gait. One of his soldiers rose to his feet, and Armistead ordered him to lie down. When the soldier tried to justify himself by Armistead’s own example, the general said, “Yes, but never mind me; we want men with guns in their hands.”50
Cadmus Wilcox, another general who was up and about, approached Armistead and saluted.
“What do you think will follow this unusually heavy fire of artillery?” Wilcox shouted.
“To charge and carry the enemy’s position in front of us, I suppose,” Armistead answered.
Wilcox was dubious. It appeared to him that since the enemy had nearly twenty-four hours to strengthen their position, it was not a promising prospect. He rode away unconvinced, and as he did so a Union shell struck a small hickory tree nearby and glanced off, severely wounding a soldier and narrowly missing Armistead. A group of soldiers edged nervously away. “Lie still,” Armistead ordered, “there is no safe place here.”51
On Cemetery Ridge, John Gibbon had at last reached the brow of the hill behind the stone fence and found himself “in the most infernal pandemonium.” His infantrymen were hugging the ground. Only the artillerymen were up and at work, busily serving their guns. Shells were bursting all about them, striking now a horse, now a limber box, and now a man. Low over the scene hung a heavy pall of smoke beneath which Gibbon could see only the rapidly moving legs of the men as they hurried back and forth between the guns and the limbers that held their ammunition.
He saw with wonder how perfectly still the horses stood. Even when a shell struck, bowling one of two of them over or throwing another to the ground, those not hit continued to stand fatalistically still. Although Gibbon was as unflappable as any man, he felt a wave of alarm rise within him. He thought only fools could remain unaffected in this situation.
However, he found Brigadier General Alexander Webb sitting placidly beside Lieutenant Alonzo H. Cushing’s roaring battery, as though he had no interest in what was happening. It probably hadn’t crossed Webb’s mind that the intimate friend of his own West Point years, Edward Porter Alexander, was the Confederate hurling all this destruction down on them.52
“What does this mean?” Gibbon asked him. Webb shook his head; nobody knew.
Gibbon had lost track of time. He watched the chaos for what “might have been an age.… it might have been an hour or three or five,” and grew weary of seeing men and horses torn to pieces. He noticed that while some shells were bursting among them, most were overshooting the Union line and exploding in the rear. He decided the safest place was closer to the front, so he rose and walked forward with Haskell. They had taken but a few steps when Cushing’s limber boxes blew sky high.
They passed the clump of trees that was the main landmark on the ridge, and walked forward to the stone wall where his men were lying. Motioning to them to make room, he stepped over the wall to a clump of bushes in front of the line to see if he could detect any movement across the valley. There was nothing but smoke from the long line of batteries on the ridge, and the unending roar of the guns. As he stood there wondering what it would all bring and when, a staff aide arrived from Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, Gibbon’s wing commander. Hancock wanted to know what Gibbon thought it all meant. Gibbon returned his compliments and his opinion: it was either the prelude to a retreat or the overture to an assault. Either way he was covered.53
There was no question in Edward Porter Alexander’s mind what it all meant. Right then he had more responsibilities on his young shoulders than he wanted, more than a colonel of artillery ought to have. It had suited him that Longstreet had put him in charge of positioning the First Corps guns on Seminary Ridge the night before. That was his job. And it made sense that Alexander ought to be the one to decide when the cannonade had done its intended job and the assault ought to begin. To that end he had posted himself on the artillery line with one of Pickett’s couriers at his elbow. As soon as the time seemed right he was to send the word to advance. But if he correctly read these messages he was now getting from Longstreet, he was also being asked to decide if the assault ought to go ahead at all.
Alexander knew that Longstreet did not favor the assault, but the message from the general just before the cannonade began seemed out of line. It said that if the artillery fire didn’t drive off the enemy or greatly demoralize him and make success reasonably certain, he preferred that Pickett be advised not to make the charge. Longstreet said he would rely on Alexander’s “good judgment” to make that decision, and Alexander had recoiled. That wasn’t his job, for God’s sake, it was General Lee’s.
Alexander sent a message immediately to Longstreet that if there was to be any alternative to the attack it ought to be carefully considered now, before he opened fire, for “it will take all the artillery ammunition we have left to test this one thoroughly, and, if the r
esult is unfavorable, we will have none left for another effort.”54
Alexander walked over to Brigadier General Ambrose R. Wright and showed him Longstreet’s messages.
“General,” Alexander said, “tell me exactly what you think of this attack?”
“Well, Alexander,” Wright said, “it is mostly a question of supports. It is not as hard to get there as it looks. I was there yesterday with my brigade. The real difficulty is to stay there after you get there—for the whole infernal Yankee army is up there in a bunch.”55
Still troubled, Alexander rode over to Pickett to see what he thought. But Pickett was no help. He saw no objections; he was happy to be going.
So Alexander wrote Longstreet another note, committing himself to nothing beyond his original orders: “When our artillery fire is at its best, I shall order Pickett to charge.”56
Now Alexander must decide when that ought to be. Before the guns opened, he had made up his mind to send Pickett the order fifteen or twenty minutes after the cannonade started. But now, looking at what was happening on Cemetery Ridge, he was uncertain. It looked like an erupting volcano all along the line. The enemy infantry seemed well shielded, and the Union counterfire hadn’t slackened at all. It seemed madness to launch the Confederate infantry into the face of that fire now. He let the fifteen minutes pass, then twenty, then twenty-five, hoping vainly for something to turn up. And still nothing did, and the minutes continued to tick away. At last he wrote Pickett, “If you are coming at all you must come at once, or I cannot give you proper support; but the enemy’s fire has not slackened at all; at least eighteen guns are still firing from the cemetery itself.”57
Five minutes later the enemy fire suddenly began to slacken. The eighteen guns in the cemetery limbered up and left. If the enemy does not run fresh batteries in there in five minutes, Alexander thought, this is our fight. He stared anxiously through his glasses at the deserted position, still swept by Confederate fire and littered with dead men and horses and parts of disabled carriages. In five minutes nothing came.