The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  What happened in the First Virginia regiment in this murderous advance was typical. Its colonel was struck down almost immediately. A major took command and also was hit. A captain jumped to the front and was instantly bowled over. Such death-dealing descent down the chains of command ran through every regiment like a flame at the end of a fuse. By the time they neared the stone wall and were returning fire for fire, the regiments of every brigade were but skeletons of themselves, reduced to mere skirmish lines.29

  None of this was in keeping with Confederate Brigadier James Kemper’s general line of work. He had attended VMI, but he was not a professional soldier. He was a politician and a lawyer, a five-term member of the Virginia House of Delegates, the chairman of its Committee on Military Affairs, and but little more than a year ago—its speaker. But he was also a fighter, and had proved it on other fields. His men loved him for his fine bearing, fearlessness, dash, and politician’s eloquence. Officers prized his good sense and high conception of duty.30

  Rising in his stirrups, he shouted, “There are the guns, boys, go for them.” Everything was now in a kaleidoscopic whirl.31 But Kemper could see with crystal clarity—far clearer perhaps than he cared to. He was within yards of the Union troops, so near that he could make out the expressions on their faces—so near that he thought he could identify the individual soldier who shot him.32

  Birkett Fry heard Richard Garnett give a command to his men, which in the din of the musketry he couldn’t make out.

  “I am dressing on you,” Garnett shouted to him.

  Those were perhaps the last words Garnett uttered. As Fry watched, a blast of canister caught him at the waist and wrenched him from his saddle. He probably never saw who shot him or knew what hit him. When the blast pulled him down, his horse, its shoulder ripped open by a shell, bolted and galloped away, leaving his rider free at last of Stonewall Jackson’s curse.33

  A moment later a bullet ripped into Fry’s thigh, and he dropped instantly. Fry knew bullets. He had taken several of them on other fields. Earlier on this day, during the bombardment, he had been hit again in the shoulder by a shell fragment. But this last hit was a bad one. He was prostrate, couldn’t move, couldn’t get up, couldn’t hope to continue.

  Several of his soldiers leaped to his side, but he waved them off. “Go on,” he shouted, “it will not last five minutes longer!” Fry believed if they could just reach the stone wall, the charge would succeed.34

  Two-thirds of Pettigrew’s division was now gone, blown away in the firestorm. It had absorbed the same punishment Pickett’s had, and its collapse reached Fry’s brigade just as its remnants hit the stone wall.

  In Armistead’s Virginia brigade, the colors tumbled to the ground and a sergeant named Robert Tyler Jones, a grandson of ex-President John Tyler, snatched them up and shook their folds in the air. Armistead said to him, “Run ahead, Bob, and cheer them up!” Jones ran past him, waving the colors over his head.

  Armistead’s men—all that was left of them—followed in a wild charge.35

  Private William Monte, of the Portsmouth Rifle Company, took his watch from his pocket when the Confederate line was near enough to return fire and announced, “We have been just nineteen minutes coming.” At that instant Monte had but two minutes left to live.36

  Time, if not life, was also running out for John Gibbon. As he labored to swing one of his regiments out on the Confederate flank—for he saw the same opportunity Vermont’s George Stannard had seen—he felt a stinging blow behind his left shoulder. Blood trickled down his sleeve over his left hand, and within minutes he felt himself beginning to lose consciousness. He ordered the command of his division turned over to Brigadier General William Harrow, and staggered from the field, the tumult of the battle ringing in his ears.37

  Armistead’s cap, which had been sliding down the shank of his saber to the hilt, was again at the tip, hoisted aloft, still guiding the storm.38 At the stone wall, the fire was galling, and Armistead’s position was untenable. He turned to Rawley Martin.

  “Colonel,” he said, “we cannot stay here.”

  “Forward with the colors,” Martin shouted.

  “Follow me, boys,” Armistead roared, “give them the cold steel.”39

  What was left of his brigade—less than two hundred men—followed him over the wall, into what James Kemper called that “cul-de-sac of death”—into a “hell of fire,” as another described it, where “nothing could live.”40

  President Tyler’s grandson was already there, fallen with his colors now and bleeding from a shot in the head, but waving his pistol and threatening to shoot the first man who thought of surrender. Colonel Rawley Martin would fall beyond the wall at Armistead’s side, hit in four places, his thigh shattered. Few officers in fact still stood. Colonel Joseph Mayo, Kemper’s second in command, heard the dreaded hissing, “like the hooded cobra’s whisper of death,” followed by a deafening explosion, a sharp pang of pain somewhere in his body, and a momentary blank. When he regained his feet there were splinters of bone and lumps of flesh sticking to his clothing.41

  For a moment, the Union line staggered under the impact of the Confederate charge. In and around the clump of trees there was pandemonium, all the fighting now hand to hand. “Every foot of ground,” a Union officer said, “was occupied by men engaged in mortal combat.” Every man in the copse of trees was either fighting, or lying wounded and dead under the feet of those who were.42

  Armistead leaped to one of the Union guns. “The day is ours men,” he cried, “come turn this artillery upon them.” Erasmus Williams, who had dug his hole in the woods and survived the cannonade, was still surviving. He leaped to Armistead’s side and caught his left forefinger in the gun, ripping the flesh as if sliced by a knife. They turned the guns, but a withering fire from federal reinforcements caught Armistead, and he slumped to the ground. The sword with the hat at its tip, which had led the storm for so long, fell beside him. Within moments he would be a prisoner. Within two days he would be dead.43

  Also dead was the charge. The clump of trees was as far as the assault would go. The Confederacy had reached high tide. Union Colonel Norman J. Hall, commanding one of Gibbon’s brigades, said later: “The decision of the rebel commander was upon that point; the concentration of artillery fire was upon that point; the din of battle developed in a column of attack upon that point; the greatest effort and the greatest carnage was at that point; and the victory was at that point.” Brigadier Alexander Hays, commanding a federal division at the wall, said, “the angel of death alone can produce such a field as was presented.” To Edward Porter Alexander, watching horrified from his line of guns on Seminary Ridge, “it seemed as if … human life was being poured out like water.”44

  Nobody on the field watched with greater horror than George Pickett. As his division marched on into the storm, he had peeled off to take a position that commanded a full view of the field. It was the job of the brigadiers and colonels to lead the charge; it was his job to stay alive and direct it.

  He saw his line collapsing from the right to the left. He saw the remnants of his once proud division, Armistead with his hat on his sword, drive a narrow wedge into the federal line at the clump of trees. He saw his Virginians touch the vital point. He saw them stretch out a hand to grasp the victory. But suddenly there was only defeat. Where was the rest of the army? Where was his support? Where then were Corse and Jenkins? With them, his two brigades left behind in Richmond and Petersburg, he might have kept his grip on this victory. But all he could see now was his line collapsing from end to end.45

  Desperately he turned to a classmate for help. Cadmus Wilcox was his division’s one remaining hope. Pickett sent one staff officer, and immediately afterward a second, with orders for Wilcox to begin his advance. Within moments after the first two messengers left, Pickett called up yet a third, Captain Robert A. Bright.

  “Captain Bright,” he said, “you go.”

  When Bright rode up, Wilcox was standing
with both hands raised, shouting and waving him off. “I know, I know.”

  “But, General,” Bright said, “I must deliver my message.”46

  When Bright had delivered it and returned, Pickett sent him galloping immediately to James Dearing’s artillery battalion with orders to open fire on the column of federal troops now moving against his left flank. Bright returned to tell Pickett that the guns were virtually without ammunition. The meaning was clear. The enemy was closing around his command; nothing could be done to save his division. He could only watch it disintegrate. Even then, however, Pickett had not seen the worst. He had been so intent on watching the trouble on the left that he had not even seen Stannard’s Vermont regiments pivoting into point-blank range of his exposed right.47

  Wilcox, with his orders in triplicate from Pickett, put his twelve hundred men, including his own Alabama regiments and the Florida troops under Colonel David Lang, in motion. His eyes expectantly searched his front, but not a man of the division that he was ordered to support could he see. They simply didn’t exist. But he had his orders, and he kept moving on toward the Union position, straight toward Stannard’s Vermont brigade. If nobody else was going to call this off, neither was he—not yet anyhow. Stannard’s men, preoccupied with taking prisoners, looked up with a start to see Wilcox “wandering across the field” toward them, not veering to the left as Pickett’s division had done, but coming straight on. The Sixteenth Vermont swung about to confront this unexpected new arrival. The Union artillery opened fire.

  Wilcox ordered his men to hold their ground as best they could, and galloped back for artillery support. But like Bright, he could find no guns that had ammunition. Having no hope of artillery support, still seeing none of the troops he had been summoned to help, and knowing his small force could do nothing but make a useless sacrifice of themselves, he ordered them back. The roar of artillery and small arms fire was so deafening that Colonel Lang could not make himself heard. His Floridians were badly scattered in the bushes and among the rocks, hemmed in front and flank by the federal artillery raking them with shell and canister. He knew they faced certain annihilation if they stayed there or attempted to advance farther, so he screamed for a retreat. Even that wasn’t widely heard. Edward Alexander, seeing tragedy piling upon tragedy everywhere he looked, watched Wilcox and Lang hit this wall of fire, so senselessly late, and called it “at once both absurd and tragic.”48

  In the bloody maelstrom that was the clump of trees, the tattered remnants of Pickett’s and Pettigrew’s divisions looked up and saw Union reinforcements moving on them from in front. Looking behind they saw no help coming over the storm-raked field they had just crossed—no support at all from the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia. The entire Confederate line on the left had been swept away. Despite Bob Tyler Jones’s threatening pistol, men with nowhere to go were falling prisoner wholesale.

  Erasmus Williams, so skillful at seeing a need and taking measures, was still alive in the holocaust behind the wall. He now was seeing another urgent, very primitive need. If he had been consulted when Armistead had hesitated at the wall and Martin had shouted, “On with the colors,” he would have proposed an alternative. But he was just an enlisted man. Moments later, before Martin fell riddled with four bullets, he offered his alternative anyhow.

  “Look, Major,” he said, “the Yankees are flanking us, we must get out from here.”

  “No, hold on men, rally, rally, right here!” Martin shouted. When Armistead fell, Williams began backing away, suggesting once again to Martin, “We must get away from here, Major.”

  But it was too late. Martin fell too, with his four bullets and his shattered hip. Williams moved swiftly now, striking out across the bloodied field on his own, back toward Seminary Ridge.49

  George L. Christian, a Confederate cannoneer, watched from Seminary Ridge behind the disappearing line commanded by Isaac Trimble on the Union right. As he watched he became conscious that Lieutenant General A. P. Hill was standing with him, not ten feet from his gun.

  He watched Hill’s face as Trimble’s troops, men of his own corps, faltered, broke, and fell back. It seemed to Christian that Hill looked dazed and confounded by what was happening. It was a face he would not forget as long as he lived. Beyond the stone wall they could clearly see the federal reinforcements moving toward the Confederates in the clump of trees. Several of the artillery officers begged Hill to let them reopen on the Union reinforcements. They believed that with their guns they could turn the battle around. No, Hill said, the ammunition was too dear and too nearly exhausted. It must be saved for whatever was to come of this. A victory on that field was simply not to be.50

  On the field itself Isaac Trimble was of the same mind. At sixty-one, Trimble was one of the oldest officers in the Confederate army, as old as the military academy from which he had graduated in 1822. With his fierce eyes and drooping moustache, he looked to be what he was—an aging but ferocious fighter. “There was fight enough in old man Trimble,” Henry Kyd Douglas said, “to satisfy a herd of tigers.”51 He had fought under Jackson and Ewell in the Valley, and like Ewell had been desperately wounded at Second Manassas. He had returned to duty not ten days before Gettysburg, after nearly a year of convalescence. Only that afternoon, just before the cannonade, he had assumed command of the division of the wounded General Dorsey Pender. Now he was with it on that bloody field, commanding men he did not even know.

  He had started his troops out across the open field two hundred yards behind Pettigrew’s line, riding on horseback between his two brigades. They had marched steadily on, under a murderous artillery and infantry fire in front, a severe artillery fire on the right, and an enfilade of musketry on the left. Trimble had watched as Pettigrew’s division seemed to sink into the earth and disappear.52 About two-thirds of the way across, panicked troops from in front began tearing back through his ranks, causing some of his own men to bolt as well. But those who were left kept on until the right of the brigade touched the Union breastworks. By then Trimble’s division had been reduced to no more than eight hundred muskets. His was now the only loosely cohesive Confederate command still on the field, and there was no support in view. His soldiers hesitated; there was also nobody now to tell them what to do or where to go. So they decided for themselves, and began retreating across a field that was as deadly in the going as it had been coming.53

  Trimble was hit—yet again—and sat bleeding on his horse. His aide, Charley Grogan, helped him dismount and asked, “General, the men are falling back, shall I rally them?”

  Trimble looked to the right toward Pickett’s division and saw nothing but a few men in squads moving to the rear.

  “No, Charley,” he said quietly, “the best thing these brave fellows can do is to get out of this.”

  Remounting his horse, he rode back, slowly following them from the field.54

  Major General Lafayette McLaws, watching from Seminary Ridge, saw the Confederate line hit the Union breastworks and rebound “like an Indian rubber ball.”55 The handful of soldiers who had survived getting there were now desperately trying to get back. They were dodging and weaving over a field littered with dead and dying men, pounded by shot and shell that tore the earth around them, and by hissing musket balls that filled the air.56

  It was just one more “mighty unnatural storm.” It was “as if all nature’s power and strength were turned into one mighty upheaval; Vessuvius, Etna, and Popocatepetl … emptying their mighty torrents upon the heads of the unfortunate Confederates.”57

  Erasmus Williams had gone scarcely twenty-five yards when he was shot through the left wrist. June Kimble, who had kept his promise to himself and done his duty that day, sprinted from the stone wall, and for about one hundred yards “broke the lightning speed record.” Then he remembered he had a horror of being shot in the back, so he faced about and back-pedaled the rest of the way out of range. General Pettigrew, with the bones of his left hand shattered by canister shot, was one of the la
st to leave.58

  As the torn fragments of regiments, brigades, and divisions stumbled back into the Confederate line, the first thought on Robert E. Lee’s mind—and James Longstreet’s—was to brace for a Union counterattack. Already federal skirmishers were advancing in the train of the retreating Confederates. Longstreet immediately sent staff offieers to begin collecting what was left of his command. Lee went out among the returning soldiers.59

  As Randolph A. Shotwell dragged himself over the brow of Seminary Ridge, one of the first things he saw was Lee on horseback, his bridle rein lying carelessly across his horse’s neck. Shotwell saw in the general’s bearing an ineffable sadness, weariness, and regretfulness “such as I had never known in him before.” Shotwell saluted and started to pass by when to his surprise Lee asked, “Are you wounded?”

  “No, General—only a little fatigued,” Shotwell answered, “but I am afraid there are but few so lucky as myself.”

  “Ah! Yes—I am very sorry—the task was too great for you—but we mustn’t despond—another time we shall succeed. Are you one of Pickett’s men?”

  “Yes, sir,” Shotwell said.

  “Well, you had better go back and rest yourself,” Lee said. “Captain Linthicum will tell you the rendezvous for your brigade.”

  In the rear Shotwell found C. F. Linthicum, Garnett’s adjutant general, standing by Garnett’s wounded horse with his head against the animal’s bloody mane, silently weeping.60

  Lee continued to ride among the returning soldiers, telling them as they passed, “It was all my fault; get together, and let us do the best we can toward saving that which is left us.”61

  “How are you off for ammunition, Major,” he asked William T. Poague, commanding a battery of artillery.

  Poague told him how much he had left—about one-fourth of a full supply. But he had ordered up six howitzers that had been sequestered in a protected part of the woods. They would have full chests.