by John Waugh
He scribbled another urgent note to Pickett: “For God’s sake, come quick. The eighteen guns are gone; come quick, or my ammunition won’t let me support you properly.”58
When Pickett received Alexander’s second message, he rode with it to James Longstreet.
“General, shall I advance?” he asked.
Longstreet did not reply.
Pickett asked again. “General, shall I advance?”
Unable to bring himself to speak the word that he was convinced would send Pickett and his men to a needless slaughter, Longstreet simply bowed his head.
It was answer enough for Pickett. “Sir,” he said, “I shall lead my division forward.”
Longstreet watched his friend ride away, his perfumed hair, dark and glossy, falling nearly to his shoulders in their corkscrew ringlets. What wondrous pulchritude and magnetic presence, Longstreet thought. What a tragedy. He rose and mounted his own horse and rode toward Alexander, who waited anxiously for Pickett’s men to begin their advance.59
On both sides, the firing, which had slackened, now stopped. All along the Union line men cautiously rose to their feet in the sudden silence, stretched, and pulled themselves together.60 On Seminary Ridge Pickett shouted to his soldiers, “Up, men, and to your posts! Don’t forget today that you are from old Virginia!”61
“Come on, boys,” one of his soldiers said, “let’s go and drive away those infernal Yankees.”62
The order was passed to pile knapsacks, blankets—anything that would encumber the march—into company heaps. Then the brigades and divisions were quickly aligned. Pickett’s division was on the right, Kemper in front, Garnett to his left, and Armistead immediately behind in support—three brigades, 4,500 men. To Garnett’s left Birkett Fry’s brigade, on which all would dress, stepped into line, and to his left the rest of Pettigrew’s division—four brigades in all, 5,000 men. In support of Pettigrew were two brigades of Dorsey Pender’s division, temporarily under the command of old Isaac Trimble, with 2,500 soldiers. On the extreme right behind Pickett, to cover his flank as needed, were the soldiers of Cadmus Wilcox—another 1,200 muskets.63
It seemed as if Lewis Armistead was created for this moment. He was the latest of a line of Armisteads who had been soldiers since the Revolutionary War. He had been the first man in the trench at Chapultepec, side by. side with the two Confederates—Longstreet and Pickett—who were with him now on this field. Armistead was chafing because his brigade was not in the lead in this charge. Not even West Point had been able to harness his passions; he was “found,” and ejected, it is said, in part for smashing a plate over Jubal Early’s head in the mess hall. Considering the quality of the mess and Early’s cantankerous personality, it may have been justified. Armistead was now in his forties, a widower in whom the passion for battle burned more fiercely than ever.64
“Rise men,” he shouted, his voice, cavernous under ordinary conditions, blaring now like a bugle blast. “Men, remember what you are fighting for. Remember your homes, your firesides, your wives, mothers, sisters and your sweethearts.” It was Armistead’s set speech before every battle; it’s what he always said.
“Sergeant,” he demanded, addressing the color-bearer of his lead regiment, the Fifty-third Virginia, “are you going to put those colors on the enemy’s works over yonder?”
“Yes, General,” the sergeant replied, “if mortal man can do it.”65
Richard Garnett had been ill. He shouldn’t have been there at all. But there he was, ever courteous, kind, warm-hearted, and ready to fight. Before the war, he had been a strong Union man. The only public address he ever made was against secession. But when the war carne he went with his state. He had never gotten over his rebuke and arrest by Stonewall Jackson after the battle of Kernstown in the Valley. Ever since, he had seemed anxious to expose himself, even unnecessarily, to wipe out by some distinctive action what he considered the unmerited slur on his courage and reputation. He had nothing to prove; nobody alive doubted his courage or questioned his reputation. But it seemed he must prove it anyhow.66
He was puffing quietly on his cigar as Pickett rode up.
“Have you any further instructions?” Garnett asked.
“No, Dick,” Pickett answered, “I don’t recollect anything else— unless it be to advise you to make the best kind of time in crossing the valley; it’s a h——l of an ugly looking place over yonder.”67
Garnett privately agreed with Pickett. “This is a desperate thing to attempt,” he confided to Armistead.
“It is,” Armistead conceded, “but the issue is with the Almighty, and we must leave it in his hands.”
Cadmus Wilcox rode up to Pickett and offered his flask. “Take a drink with me,” he suggested, “in an hour you’ll be in hell or glory.”68
Pickett didn’t need a pull; he was ready for either hell or glory without it. In a strong, clear voice, he commanded, “Forward! Guide Center! March!”69
James Pettigrew, the North Carolinian commanding the division in the center of the Confederate line, turned to Colonel J. K. Marshall, commanding his first brigade, and said, “Now Colonel, for the honor of the good Old North State. Forward.”70
“Follow me!” roared Armistead as he unloosed his collar, threw off his cravat, placed his old black hat on the point of his sword, lifted it high over his head, and strode away at the front of his brigade of Virginians toward Cemetery Ridge.71
The Confederate line, more than half a mile long, moved up the slope, dressing on Birkett Fry in tight and perfect alignment. As they passed between the still smoking, but now silent row of cannon, the powder-grimed cannoneers watched from astride their pieces and cheered.72
James Longstreet stood beside Alexander on the artillery line, peering through his binoculars toward the stone wall across the valley. Alexander spoke. He told Longstreet that a battery of seven guns he had been counting on to support the advance were no longer available. He also told him that his ammunition supply was so low he could not properly support the charge now getting underway.
Longstreet was aghast. He ordered Alexander to stop Pickett’s advance at once, until the supply could be replenished.
“There is no ammunition with which to replenish,” Alexander said simply.
Longstreet sagged in despair. It had become one of the saddest days of his life. He would gladly at that moment have given up his rank, his position, everything, rather than let Pickett continue with this charge.73
But what could he do now to stop it? He lifted his binoculars to his eyes again, helpless to do anything. “I don’t want to make this attack,” he said grimly, pausing to search the Union position, perhaps seeking some sign of hope or reassurance and finding none. “I believe it will fail.” He paused again. “I do not see how it can succeed.” Another pause. “I would not make it even now, but that Gen. Lee has ordered & expects it.”74
Alexander said nothing.
Now the army was passing. Pickett rode gracefully at the head of his division, his cap raked well over his right ear and his perfumed locks corkscrewing nearly to his shoulders. He seemed to Longstreet to look more the holiday soldier than a general about to lead one of the most desperate charges in military history. Longstreet felt another tug as he watched Brigadier James Kemper pass, leading the old brigade Longstreet himself had drilled and commanded at First Manassas.75
Alexander stared at the long line sweeping out of the woods and over the ridge, and it brought a lump to his throat. He thought it as grand a sight as ever a man looked upon: Who could see it without feeling pride in it? As Garnett passed and saluted Longstreet, Alexander galloped out and reined up next to him, and they rode on side by side for a few paces. The two men were old friends. They had crossed the plains together in 1858, along with Armistead. Alexander remembered how their favorite songs had been “Willie Brewed a Peck of Malt” and “Wife, Children & Friends,” and how they had sung them together on the long trek across the frontier. After a moment, Alexander wished Garnett go
od luck, and returned to his guns.76
Pickett’s and Pettigrew’s divisions cleared the woods, and the sun glanced from the shining steel of their bayonets. Across the valley on Cemetery Ridge, the Union army saw the glistening line emerge and caught its collective breath. It was a sight such as they had never seen before and would never see again.
Where Is
My Division?
The officers on horseback appeared first over the brow of the ridge, rising gradually into view, their sabers glinting in the sun. Behind them followed the soldiers on foot, a solid gathering wall of butternut and gray, their bayonets flashing. Dust, “like the dash of spray at the prow of a vessel,” rose gently from under the thousands of marching feet. Regimental flags fluttered and snapped. Along the line the low, muted commands of the officers rose almost inaudibly above the rustle of a great army in motion.1
Across the valley on the other ridge, the spellbound Union soldiers reacted according to the condition of their hopes and fears.
“Thank God! There comes the infantry!” one of them said, too glad to be rid of the oppressive cannonade to appreciate this new and ultimate terror marching toward them through the sultry afternoon.2 But most of the men behind the stone wall understood all too well what was coming and what it meant. “We looked one another in the face,” said one, “examined our muskets and said, ‘Now we are in for it sure.’ ”3
A staff officer appeared leading a horse for John Gibbon. General, he told him, the rebels are coming in force. Gibbon mounted and galloped to the top of the hill. The sight was magnificent—spectacular enough, Gibbon thought, to excite the admiration of everyone. The first Confederate line was followed by a second, and yet a third, extending as far as he could see.4
Gibbon rode along his own line, cautioning his soldiers. “Do not hurry men, and fire too fast,” he urged, “let them come up close before you fire, and then aim low and steadily.” He turned to Frank Haskell, and ordered him to ride immediately to General Meade and tell him that the enemy was advancing.5
Behind the Union line Chaplain Winfield Scott walked with an old classmate from the University of Rochester. “Well, Scott,” his friend said, “we have sat beside each other in the classroom many a day; but this is a new experience. This isn’t much like digging out Greek roots.”
Amen, thought Scott. He gazed at the Confederate army advancing toward them. To him the guns and the bayonets gleaming in the sunlight made the marching line look like a moving river of pure silver. A passage of scripture came to mind and he repeated it aloud: “Fair as the moon, bright as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners.”6
The Confederates themselves were impressed by its grandeur. One of them, a veteran of other battles, believed it to be the most imposing sight he ever saw.7 But the spectacle that lay ahead of them was just as imposing and far more frightening. Most of them were seeing it for the first time—the thicket of bristling Union muskets and bayonets, and the blackened mouths of the cannon waiting for them on the ridge behind the stone wall. Death and destruction hung in suspension, ready to drop on them at an instant.8
Suddenly it did, with the thunder-roll of a hundred guns. A storm of shot, shell, and shrapnel rained down, and seemed to take their breaths away, “causing whole regiments to stoop like men running in a violent sleet.” Their only cover was the still-hovering smoke of the preceding cannonade. Shot and shell streamed in from the battery on Little Round Top, a single ball sweeping away half a dozen men at a time. Gaps opened, great jagged rents in the line. “Close up, men!” “Close up!”—an officer’s head is blown off by a round shot and the men step over his body. “Not too fast on the left”—“Major, take command, the Colonel is down.”9
“Always willing when Bob Lee wants me to fight for him,” one Confederate said, “but I tell you that he puts me in some tight places sometimes.… They poured in the grape shot, canister and shells to us like hail, but on we went, now & then a man’s hand or arm or leg would fly like feathers before the wind.”10 Another soldier compared crossing the tempest-swept field to a man pressing against a “a blinding storm.”11 But on they came, closing up, keeping the same steady forward movement even as their lines were being blown away and their numbers decimated. It seemed to an officer in the Sixty-ninth Pennsylvania watching them come “as if no power could hold them in check.”12 The Union brigadier, Alexander Hays, thought they came as if impelled by machinery.13 The crash of shell and solid shot howling and whistling through their ranks seemed to make no impression. There was not a wavering in the line.14
The Union soldiers stared, appalled by the slaughter on the field in front of them. “Men went down like grain before the reaper,” one soldier wrote. The gaps opened and closed, opened and closed. “Moments,” said Chaplain Scott, “seemed ages. The shock to heart and nerve was awful.” Admiration for the courage of this implacable advancing enemy was universal in the Union ranks. They advanced, said a major from the 116th Pennsylvania, “with a degree of ardor, coolness, and bravery worthy of a better cause.”15
The marching line reached the fences that bordered the Emmitsburg road. As the soldiers scaled them, reformed, and began to push forward again, the Union infantry opened fire. Five thousand muskets poured bullets on top of the shot and shell. The Union line appeared suddenly to be “a sheet of fire, backed by a wall of steel.” It seemed inconceivable that any man could march through that merciless storm and still live.16 “The hiss of bullets was incessant,” a Confederate officer wrote. “Men fell at every step; they fell, I thought, like grass before the scythe.”17 A soldier wrote, “You may judge of how severe the fire was between the contending armies when I say that the green grass burned.”18
Armistead’s booming voice roared above the tumult, “Steady, men! Steady.”19 A captain urged his command plaintively, “Don’t crowd, boys; don’t crowd.” A colonel passing him said, “Pretty hot, Captain.” “It’s redicklous, Colonel; perfectly redicklous,” and the colonel knew that coming from him that meant it was as bad as it could get.20
Robert W. Morgan of James Kemper’s brigade was drilled in the instep of his right foot by a minie ball. As he stooped to see if he was hurt bad enough to go to the rear, a second ball struck his left foot at the back of his toes, tore through the full length of the foot, and lodged in his heel. That decided it. Picking up his own musket and another of a fallen comrade, he jammed the butt of each under an armpit, and using them for crutches hopped back toward Seminary Ridge.21
James Longstreet sat on a fence watching the fire-sheeted storm. It was all he feared it would be. He saw the withering musket fire erupt from behind the stone wall—the puff of smoke, the blinding, withering blast, and the long sheet of flame and lightning. When the smoke cleared, nearly two-thirds of Pickett’s division no longer existed. But still the remnant moved on, closing up. Longstreet’s practiced eye saw that the charge was failing. Pettigrew’s left flank was beginning to crumble, and the disintegration was sweeping swiftly along the line toward Pickett’s division.22
Arthur Freemantle, the observer from the British Coldstream Guards, rode up flush with excitement.
“General,” he exclaimed, “I wouldn’t have missed this for any thing.”
“The devil you wouldn’t!” Longstreet retorted. “I would like to have missed it very much; we’ve attacked and been repulsed: look there!”
Freemantle had not yet seen the crumbling of the line on the army’s left and the beginning of the retreat: he had thought the charge was succeeding. But Longstreet knew better. They could not hold together ten minutes longer. What was left of Pickett’s division would strike the Union position and be crushed. The attack was doomed.23
Pickett’s men were marching now to the stone wall. Halfway across the valley they had executed a wheeling movement to the left, putting them on a direct line toward the clump of trees. The movement left the division’s right flank utterly exposed to Union view. Wilcox would have covered it, but he had not yet been ordered to a
dvance.
One of the first Union officers to see it was Brigadier General George Jerrison Stannard, commanding the nine-month Vermont brigade. Stannard was said to have been the first man in Vermont to volunteer when the war came.24 In two years of fighting since then, he had never seen an opportunity such as this. Quickly he moved the Thirteenth and Sixteenth regiments of his brigade out on the exposed Confederate flank.
“Change front forward on first company,” he ordered, and the Thirteenth Vermont swung around squarely on Pickett’s flank, rotating like a wheel around First Sergeant James B. Scully of Company A. Scully would be described later as the pivot of the pivotal movement of the pivotal battle of the war. The Sixteenth Vermont drew up on the left, and the two regiments opened fire point-blank, not a dozen rods from the Confederate flank. Every bullet hit something.25
H. T. Owen, of the Ninth Virginia, saw it coming: “Off to the right, there appeared in the open field a line of men at right angles with our own—a long, dark mass, dressed in blue and coming down at a ‘double quick’ upon the unprotected right flank of Pickett’s men, with their muskets upon the ‘right shoulder shift,’ their battle flags dancing and fluttering in the breeze, created by their own rapid motion, and their burnished bayonets glistening above their heads like forest twigs covered with sheets of sparkling ice when shaken by a blast.”26
Under this ruinous fire Pickett’s men reeled and staggered and fell. The right of the line pressed against the center, crowding the companies into confusion. Garnett galloped along the line, shouting, “Faster, men! faster!” as his soldiers neared the stone wall and the clump of trees.27
One soldier, John Dooley, could have been speaking for them all when he said, “But who can stand such a storm of hissing lead and iron? What a relief if earth, which almost seems to hurl these implements of death in our faces, would open now and afford a secure retreat from threatening death.”28