The Illustrated Gettysburg Reader: An Eyewitness History of the Civil War's Greatest Battle

by Rod Gragg

  Arms confidently folded and his kepi placed squarely on his head, a determined-looking Southern artilleryman strikes a pose for his photograph. On July 3, such troops unleashed the largest field artillery bombardment of the war.

  Library of Congress

  Until that moment, though I fully recognized the strength of the enemy’s position, I had not doubted that we would carry it, in my confidence that Lee was ordering it. But here was a proposition that I should decide the question. Overwhelming reasons against the assault at once seemed to stare me in the face. Gen. Wright of Anderson’s division was standing with me. I showed him the letter and expressed my views. He advised me to write them to Longstreet, which I did as follows:—“General: I will only be able to judge of the effect of our fire on the enemy by his return fire, as his infantry is little exposed to view and the smoke will obscure the field. If, as I infer from your note, there is any alternative to this attack, it should be carefully considered before opening our fire, for it will take all the artillery ammunition we have left to test this one, and if the result is unfavorable we will have none left for another effort. And even if this is entirely successful, it can only be so at a very bloody cost.”

  To this note, Longstreet soon replied as follows:—“Colonel: The intention is to advance the infantry if the artillery has the desired effect of driving the enemy’s off, or having other effect such as to warrant us in making the attack. When that moment arrives advise Gen. Pickett and of course advance such artillery as you can use in aiding the attack.”

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  “The Whole Yankee Army is There in a Bunch”

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  Evidently the cannonade was to be allowed to begin. Then the responsibility would be upon me to decide whether or not Pickett should charge. If not, we must return to Va. to replenish ammunition, and the campaign would be a failure. I knew that our guns could not drive off the enemy, but I had a vague hope that with Ewell’s and Hill’s cooperation something might happen, though I knew little either of their positions, their opportunities, or their orders. I asked Wright: “What do you think of it? Is it as hard to get there as it looks?” He answered: “The trouble is not in going there. I went there with my brigade yesterday. There is a place where you can get breath and re-form. The trouble is to stay there after you get there, for the whole Yankee army is there in a bunch.”

  I failed to fully appreciate all that this might mean. The question seemed merely one of support, which was peculiarly the province of Gen. Lee. I had seen several of Hill’s brigades forming to support Pickett, and had heard a rumor that Lee had spoken of a united attack by the whole army. I determined to see Pickett and get an idea of his feelings. I did so, and finding him both cheerful and sanguine, I felt that if the artillery fire opened, Pickett must make the charge; but that Longstreet should know my views, so I wrote him as follows:—“General: When our fire is at its best, I will advise Gen. Pickett to advance.”

  It must have been with bitter disappointment that Longstreet saw the failure of his hope to avert a useless slaughter, for he was fully convinced of its hopelessness. Yet even he could have scarcely realized, until the event showed, how entirely unprepared were Hill and Ewell to render aid to his assault and to take prompt advantage of even temporary success. None of their guns had been posted with a view to cooperative fire, nor to follow the charge, and much of their ammunition had been prematurely wasted. And although Pickett’s assault, when made, actually carried the enemy’s guns, nowhere was there the slightest preparation to come to his assistance. The burden of the whole task fell upon the 10 brigades employed. The other 27 brigades and 56 fresh guns were but widely scattered spectators.

  It was just 1 P.M. by my watch when the signal guns were fired and the cannonade opened. . . .6

  “The Whole Rebel Line Was Pouring Out Thunder and Iron”

  A Storm of Fire Hurtles toward Federal Forces on Cemetery Ridge

  On Cemetery Ridge, opposite Alexander’s line of artillery, Federal troops waited behind a stone wall fortified with piled-up fence posts and took advantage of the lull to doze in the summer warmth. “The silence and the heat were oppressive,” a Northern officer would later recall. “The troops stretched upon the ground with the hot July sun pouring upon them.... Some sat with haversacks on the knee, pencil in hand, writing to the dear ones at home.”

  As sketched by Edwin Forbes, entire teams of Federal artillery horses lie unmoving, victims of the Confederate artillery bombardment. Noted Forbes: “The whole slope was massed with dead horses—sixty-two lying in one battery.”

  Library of Congress

  Based on a map by Hal Jespersen, www.CWmaps.com

  General Meade, who had been riding his lines during the morning, sat in the shade of a tree near his headquarters, sharing a chicken stew made from “an old and tough rooster” with some of his commanders. Meade had reconsidered his prediction about Lee’s attack, concluding that it might again hit the Federal flanks instead of the center. Accordingly, he had shifted troops from the center to the flanks, leaving less than 6,000 troops to defend the center of his line. The chicken stew dinner party ended, and Meade and his commanders dispersed—the commanders back to their commands and Meade to resume riding his lines. Then, just after one o’clock, the distant line of Confederate artillery belched smoke, followed by a heavy roar, and—as Brigadier General John Gibbon would recall—“the air was all murderous iron,” especially at the center of the Federal line.

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  “They Hiss, They Scream, They Growl, They Sputter”

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  Forced to endure it alongside General Gibbon stood his staff aide, thirty-four-year-old Lieutenant Frank Haskell of Vermont. A prewar lawyer and the former adjutant of the 6th Wisconsin Infantry, Haskell would later describe the unprecedented Confederate artillery bombardment in a long letter to his brother.

  We dozed in the heat, and lolled upon the ground, with half open eyes. Our horses were hitched to the trees munching some oats. A great lull rests upon all the field. Time was heavy, and for want of something better to do, I yawned, and looked at my watch. It was five minutes before one o’clock. I returned my watch to its pocket, and thought possibly that I might go to sleep, and stretched myself upon the ground accordingly. My attitude and purpose were those of the General and the rest of the staff.

  What sound was that? There was no mistaking it! The distinct, sharp sound of one of the enemy’s guns, square over to the front, caused us to open our eyes and turn them in that direction, when we saw directly above the crest the smoke of the bursting shell, and heard its noise. In an instant, before a word was spoken, as if that was the signal gun for general work, loud, startling, booming, the report of gun after gun, in rapid succession, smote our ears, and their shells plunged down and exploded all around us. We sprang to our feet. In briefest time the whole rebel line to the west was pouring out its thunder and its iron upon our devoted crest.

  The wildest confusion for a few moments obtained sway among us. The shells came bursting all about. The servants ran terror-stricken for dear life, and disappeared. The horses hitched to the trees, or held by the slack hands of orderlies, neighed out in fright, and broke away and plunged riderless through the fields. The general at the first had snatched his sword, and started on foot for the front. I called for my horse; nobody responded. I found him tied to a tree, near by, eating oats, with an air of the greatest composure, which, under the circumstances, even then struck me as exceedingly ridiculous. He alone, of all beasts or men near, was cool. I am not sure but that I learned a lesson then from a horse. Anxious alone for his oats, while I put on the bridle and adjusted the halter, he delayed me by keeping his head down, so I had time to see one of the horses of our mess wagon struck and torn by a shell. The pair plunge—the driver has lost the rein; horses, driver, and wagon go into a heap by a tree. Two mules close at hand, packed with boxes of ammunition, are knocked all to pieces by a shell.

  General Gibbon’s groom
has just mounted his horse, and is starting to take the general’s horse to him, when the flying iron meets him and tears open his breast; he drops dead, and the horses gallop away. No more than a minute since the first shot was fired, and I am mounted and riding after the General. The mighty din that now rises to heaven and shakes the earth is not all of it the voice of the rebellion; for our guns, the guardian lions of the crest, quick to awake when danger comes, have opened their fiery jaws and begun to roar,—the great hoarse roar of battle. I overtook the general half way up to the line. Before we reach the crest his horse is brought by an orderly. Leaving our horses just behind a sharp declivity of the ridge, on foot we go up among the batteries. How the long streams of fire spout from the guns! how the rifled shells hiss! how the smoke deepens and rolls! But where is the infantry? Has it vanished in smoke? Is this a nightmare or a juggler’s devilish trick? All too real.

  Brigadier General John Gibbon lived in the South as a child, but he was a firm Union man. He had plenty of combat experience, and he would need it: his division’s sector of the Federal line was the target of the Pickett-Pettigrew Charge.

  Library of Congress

  The men of the infantry have seized their arms, and behind their works, behind every rock, in every ditch, wherever there is any shelter, they hug the ground, silent, quiet, unterrified, little harmed. The enemy’s guns, now in action, are in position at their front of the woods along the second ridge that I have before mentioned, and towards their right, behind a small crest in the open field, where we saw the flags this morning. Their line is some two miles long, concave on the side towards us, and their range is from one thousand to eighteen hundred yards. A hundred and twenty-five rebel guns, we estimate, are now active, firing twenty-four pound, twenty, twelve, and ten-pound projectiles, solid shot and shells, spherical, conical, spiral....

  From the Cemetery to Round Top, with over a hundred guns, and to all parts of the enemy’s line, our batteries reply, of twenty and ten-pound Parrotts, ten-pound rifled ordnance, and twelve-pound Napoleons, using projectiles as various in shape and name as those of the enemy. Captain Hazard, commanding the Artillery Brigade of the Second Corps, was vigilant among the batteries of his command, and they were all doing well. All was going on satisfactorily. We had nothing to do, therefore, but to be observers of the grand spectacle of battle. Captain Wessels, Judge Advocate of the division, now joined us, and we sat down behind the crest, close to the left of Cushing’s Battery, to bide our time, to see, to be ready to act when the time should come, which might be at any moment.

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  “The Shells Swoop Down among the Battery Horses”

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  Who can describe such a conflict as is raging around us? To say that it was like a summer storm, with the crash of thunder, the glare of lightning, the shrieking of the wind, and the clatter of hailstones, would be weak. The thunder and lightning of these two hundred and fifty guns, and their shells, whose smoke darkens the sky, are incessant, all-pervading, in the air above our heads, on the ground at our feet, remote, near, deafening, ear-piercing, astounding; and these hailstones are massy iron, charged with exploding fire. And there is little of human interest in a storm; it is an absorbing element of this. You may see flame and smoke, and hurrying men, and human passion at a great conflagration; but they are all earthly, and nothing more. These guns are great infuriate demons, not of the earth, whose mouths blaze with smoky tongues of living fire, and whose murky breath, sulphur-laden, rolls around them and along the ground, the smoke of Hades. These grimy men, rushing, shouting, their souls in frenzy, plying the dusky globes and the igniting spark, are in their league, and but their willing ministers.

  We thought that at the second Bull Run, at the Antietam, and at Fredericksburg on the 11th of December, we had heard heavy cannonading; they were but holiday salutes compared with this. Besides the great ceaseless roar of the guns, which was but the background of the others, a million various minor sounds engaged the ear. The projectiles shriek long and sharp. They hiss, they scream, they growl, they sputter,—all sounds of life and rage; and each has its different note, and all are discordant. Was ever such a chorus of sound before? We note the effect of the enemy’s fire among the batteries and along the crest. We see the solid shot strike axle, or pole, or wheel, and the tough iron and heart of oak snap and fly like straws. The great oaks there by Woodruff’s guns heave down their massy branches with a crash, as if the lightning smote them. The shells swoop down among the battery horses standing there apart.

  A half dozen horses start, they tumble, their legs stiffen, their vitals and blood smear the ground. And these shot and shells have no respect for men either. We see the poor fellows hobbling back from the crest, or unable to do so, pale and weak, lying on the ground, with the mangled stump of an arm or leg dripping their life-blood away, or with a cheek torn open or a shoulder mashed. And many, alas! hear not the roar as they stretch upon the ground with upturned faces and open eyes, though a shell should burst at their very ears. Their ears and their bodies this instant are only mud. We saw them but a moment since, there among the flame, with brawny arms and muscles of iron, wielding the rammer and pushing home the cannon’s plethoric load.

  A battery of Federal field artillery assembles for drill a year before Gettysburg. As they returned the Confederate artillery fire on July 3, Federal gun crews were described as “grimy men, rushing, shouting, their souls in frenzy….”

  Library of Congress

  Strange freaks these round shot play! We saw a man coming up from the rear with his full knapsack on, and some canteens of water held by the straps in his hands. He was walking slowly, and with apparent unconcern, though the iron hailed around him. A shot struck the knapsack, and it and its contents flew thirty yards in every direction; the knapsack disappearing like an egg thrown spitefully against a rock. The soldier stopped, and turned about in puzzled surprise, put up one hand to his back to assure himself that the knapsack was not there, and then walked slowly on again unharmed, with not even his coat torn. Near us was a man crouching behind a small disintegrated stone, which was about the size of a common water-bucket. He was bent up, with his face to the ground, in the attitude of a pagan worshipper before his idol. It looked so absurd to see him thus, that I went and said to him, “Do not lie there like a toad,—why not go to your regiment and be a man?” He turned up his face with a stupid, terrified look upon me, and then without a word turned his nose again to the ground. An orderly that was with me at the time told me a few moments later, that a shot struck the stone, smashing it in a thousand fragments, but did not touch the man, though his head was not six inches from the stone.

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  “Flying Iron Meets Him and Tears open His Breast”

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  All the projectiles that came near us were not so harmless. Not ten yards away from us a shell burst among some small bushes, where sat three or four orderlies holding horses. Two of the men and one horse were killed. Only a few yards off a shell exploded over an open limber box in Cushing’s battery, and at the same instant, another shell over a neighboring box. In both the boxes the ammunition blew up with an explosion that shook the ground, throwing fire and splinters and shells far into the air and all around, and destroying several men. We watched the shells bursting in the air, as they came hissing in all directions. Their flash was a bright gleam of lightning radiating from a point, giving place in the thousandth part of a second to a small, white, puffy cloud, like a fleece of the lightest, whitest wool. These clouds were very numerous. We could not often see the shell before it burst, but sometimes, as we faced towards the enemy, and looked above our heads, the approach would be heralded by a prolonged hiss, which always seemed to me to be a line of something tangible, terminating in a black globe, distinct to the eye, as the sound had been to the ear. The shell would seem to stop, and hang suspended in the air an instant, and then vanish in fire and smoke and noise.

  We saw the missiles tear and plow the groun
d. All in rear of the crest for a thousand yards, as well as among the batteries, was the field of their blind fury. Ambulances passing down the Taneytown road with wounded men were struck. The hospitals near this road were riddled. The house which was General Meade’s headquarters was shot through several times, and a great many horses of officers and orderlies were lying dead around it. Riderless horses, galloping madly through the fields, were brought up, or down rather, by these invisible horse-tamers, and they would not run any more. Mules with ammunition, pigs wallowing about, cows in the pastures, whatever was animate or inanimate, in all this broad range, were no exception to their blind havoc. The percussion shells would strike and thunder, and scatter the earth, and their whistling fragments, the Whitworth bolts, would pound and ricochet, and bowl far away sputtering, with the sound of a mass of hot iron plunged in water; and the great solid shot would smite the unresisting ground with a sounding “thud,” as the strong boxer crashes his iron fist into the jaws of his unguarded adversary. Such were some of the sights and sounds of this great iron battle of missiles. . . .7

  “The Enemy Was under the Mistaken Impression That He Had Silenced Our Guns”