Gettysburg (72 page)

With that, the question of the first assault wave was settled. Next on the agenda was the matter of close support. Hill’s portion of the July 2 action had been noticeably lacking in that respect, so he may have been the one to suggest it here. Certainly only Hill could have recommended utilizing the two North Carolina brigades of Pender’s Division to back up Heth. Similar help was needed for Pickett, and at this point all eyes must have turned to Longstreet, who remained unwilling, however, to consider using any part of McLaws’ or Hood’s Divisions. It does not require much imagination to picture Hill again stepping forward to add two of Richard Anderson’s brigades to the mix. Due to their present position more than anything else, Wilcox’s Alabama brigade and the Florida troops under Lang were tapped for the task.

With the players chosen, Longstreet and Hill conferred about some preliminary arrangements needed to mesh their two commands into one. One can only imagine Longstreet’s surprise when they returned to Lee and learned that he expected his First Corps commander to direct the combined operation. Speaking with a bluntness that he perhaps hoped would recuse him once and for all, Longstreet declared, “General, I have been a soldier all my life. I have been with soldiers engaged in fights by couples, by squads, companies, regiments, divisions, and armies, and should know, as well as any one, what soldiers can do. It is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position.”

Lee was unmoved. What Longstreet did not know was that Lee had seen how abruptly and thoroughly Hill could be disabled by his affliction. Given the choice between a sickly general still unused to the mantle of corps command and a solid professional unhappy with his assignment, Lee did not hesitate in nominating the latter for this all-important task. “I said no more,” Longstreet recalled.

According to Walter Taylor, “General Longstreet proceeded at once to make the dispositions for attack, and General Lee rode along the portion of the line held by A. P. Hill’s Corps, and finally took position about the Confederate centre.” It was most probably during or at the end of this ride that Lee briefed the army’s artillery chief on what would be expected of him. In his report, William N. Pendleton noted that at the “direction of the commanding general, the artillery along our entire line was to be prepared for opening … a concentrated and destructive fire, consequent upon which a general advance was to be made.”

Unable to sit on his heels, Lee rode out toward Sherfy’s peach orchard, on the way encountering a skirmish line of Mississippi troops under Major George B. Gerald. The officer remembered Lee’s pointing “to the crest of a hill some two hundred yards distant and slightly to the rear and [saying] he was going to place one hundred pieces of artillery there and for me to take a position so as to prevent the artillery from being harassed by federal infantry, which I did.”

Another scrap began around the Bliss farm shortly after 7:30
A.M.
This time there were about 200 Federals involved, largely from the 12th New Jersey, with a sprinkling from the 1st Delaware. The command formed into a compact column that raced down off Cemetery Ridge, punched through the thin Rebel skirmish line east of the buildings, and got among the enemy troops, though not without suffering some casualties in the process. There were just enough Yankees to clear the buildings but not a sufficient number to establish any effective perimeter, so the Confederates quickly rallied off to the west and began to encircle the farmstead once more.

Sergeant Frank Riley of the 12th had positioned himself at a barn loophole from which he was sniping at Rebels in nearby fields, firing as rapidly as possible with rifles handed to him by his comrades in assembly-line fashion. Then someone shouted, “‘Come down! come down quickly! They are trying to capture us!,’” and Riley ran out the back. Looking northward, he saw “what looked like a whole brigade” coming his way. As the raiding party fled back toward Cemetery Ridge, cannon on both sides filled the air around the Yankees with hissing projectiles. A well-aimed Confederate shot set off some limbers among the Federal batteries, throwing a spectacular column of smoke and flame up into the air. A head count showed that the failed effort had cost some twenty-eight more Second Corps men killed or wounded. The Rebels meanwhile reoccupied the farmstead, and the deadly game continued.

Something had convinced Richard Ewell and Edward Johnson that the Federal position on Culp’s Hill could be taken, so even though their first efforts this day had been met with a savage massed firepower and repulsed with no advantages won, additional attacks were ordered. Between 8:00 and 8:30
A.M.,
Edward O’Neal’s brigade of Alabama troops slogged up the slope, clambering over rocks slick with the blood and innards of Walker’s Virginia men, to try to penetrate the wall of flame marking Culp’s Hill’s military crest. “The brigade moved forward in fine style,” O’Neal reported, “under a terrific fire of grape and small-arms, and gained a hill near the enemy’s works, which it held … exposed to a murderous fire.”

By now the Federals defending Culp’s Hill were operating in shifts. A soldier in the 7th Ohio later described the businesslike routine: “We lay behind our solid breastworks, obeying the command to reserve our fire until the first [enemy] line of battle was well up the slope and in easy range, when the command, ‘Front rank—Ready—Aim low—Fire!’ was given and executed, and immediately the rear rank the same, and kept up as long as the [enemy’s] line remained unbroken.” When the men had shot off the sixty or so rounds they carried, a reserve regiment would be drawn up under cover behind them, and at the word of command the reinforcements would rush forward to replace the first batch of troops, who would filter back a short distance one by one. There they would reform, clean their guns, replenish their cartridge boxes, and rest until it was their turn again. “This is the first time that our Regiment ever fought behind breastworks or fortifications, and all agree that it is a pretty good way to fight,” wrote an Ohio officer.

Even as he monitored the Culp’s Hill combat, George Meade kept abreast on events elsewhere on the battlefield. He was sufficiently sure of his conclusions that a little before 8:00
A.M.,
he dictated instructions for John Sedgwick’s Sixth Corps to position itself so as better to reinforce Hancock’s portion of the Federal line. As paraphrased by Meade’s chief of staff, the message to Sedgwick indicated that “from information received … of the movements of the enemy, it is their intention to make an attempt to pierce our center.”

Meade also found time, a little before 9:00
A.M.,
to pen a note to his wife. “We had a great fight yesterday,” he wrote, “the enemy attacking and we completely repulsing them; both Armies shattered. … Army in fine spirits and every one determined to do or die.” Finally, Meade issued a pair of circulars, the first admonishing his corps commanders to keep their men under arms at all times, and the second directing that all stragglers be brought into the ranks and any loose weapons gathered in.

In preparation for Lee’s assault, James Longstreet met with Edward P. Alexander, whom he had again designated to direct the First Corps’ artillery. Alexander recollected his instructions as follows: “First, to give the enemy the most effective cannonade possible. It was not meant simply to make a noise, but to try & cripple him—to tear him limbless, as it were, if possible. … When the artillery had accomplished that, the infantry column of attack was to charge. And then, further, I was to ‘advance such artillery as … can [be used] … in aiding the attack.”

Alexander decided that in this case, more was better. Setting aside just two batteries to protect the extreme right of the First Corps’ line, he deposed every other available gun—some seventy-six in all—along a four-thousand-foot front between Sherfy’s peach orchard and the northeastern end of Spangler’s Woods. It was a daunting and challenging assignment, but there was at least one thing for which Alexander was grateful: the relative inactivity of the massed Federal batteries opposite him. “They had ammunition in abundance—literally to burn—& plenty more at close hand,” Alexander observed. “We lay exposed to their guns, & getting ready at our leisure, & they let us do it.”

Cavalry officer David McMurtrie Gregg began breathing a little easier at around 10:00
A.M.
His aide had found a brigade to screen the strategically important Hanover Road/Low Dutch Road intersection. It came from Judson Kilpatrick’s division, which had been resting in Two Taverns before moving to Big Round Top. Kilpatrick himself had departed with Farnsworth’s brigade before Gregg’s man arrived, just in time to redirect the only remaining unit, consisting of four Michigan cavalry regiments under George A. Custer.

On reaching the crossroads, the Wolverines settled into a watchful mode, with skirmishers deployed and horse artillery set. The battery that accompanied the riders set up with its guns pointed in the direction from which trouble was expected, west along the Hanover Road toward Gettysburg.

Despite the repeated failure of his troops to achieve anything on the bloody slopes of Culp’s Hill, Edward Johnson decided to mount a maximum effort. It was to be a three-brigade attack, with Steuart’s mixed force swinging off the left of the line, Daniel’s North Carolina troops moving up the center, and Walker’s Stonewall Brigade on the right. Neither Steuart nor Daniel felt any enthusiasm for the plan; in fact, an aide present noted that both “strongly disapproved of making the assault.” When Steuart’s order reached the 1st Maryland Battalion, the officer commanding exclaimed that “it was nothing less than murder to send men into that slaughter pen.”

Steuart’s position required his men to form on the exposed side of the enemy’s former earthworks before marching across an open field. “Our loss was frightful,” a survivor would write to his family a few days later. “The men fell on my right and left and in front of me and I thought sure my time had come.” Daniel’s Tarheels, in the middle, fared no better: “It was truly awful how fast, how very fast, did our poor boys fall by our sides,” remembered a North Carolina soldier. “You could see one with his head shot off, others cut in two, then one with his brains oozing out, one with his leg off, others shot through the heart. Then you would hear some poor friend or foe crying for water, or for ‘God’s sake’ to kill him.” On the right of the attacking line, the Stonewall Brigade charged; afterward a veteran officer in the ranks would avow that he had never “seen in all my fighting as bloody, or as hard contested [a] field, in my life.”