Gettysburg (73 page)

Some poignant vignettes would be enshrined in accounts of this large-scale carnage. The Yankee boys on one section of the line would never forget the pet dog that scampered out ahead of the Rebel charge, already limping on three legs. The iron fusillade showed no preference for man or animal, and the dog fell, later to be buried, it was said, “as the only Christian minded being on either side.” In another sector, Federal soldiers watched with wary fascination as a badly wounded Confederate lying in their front painfully reloaded his gun, stuck the muzzle under his chin, and, using the ramrod to push the trigger, blew his brains out.

Edward Johnson finally conceded that the “enemy were too strongly intrenched and in too great numbers to be dislodged by the force at my command. … No further assault was made; all had been done that it was possible to do.” George Steuart, whose brigade had done more than its share in the hopeless cause, was heard to cry repeatedly, “‘My poor boys! My poor boys!’”

The Culp’s Hill fight was terribly one-sided when it came to counting the cost. On the Union side, the Twelfth Corps recorded losses of 1,082, with just 204 of those killed. On the Confederate side, Edward Johnson’s division alone suffered some 2,002 casualties. Added to this were the losses taken by Smith’s (213), O’Neal’s (about 400), and Daniel’s (also approximately 400) Brigades. The 2nd Virginia in the Stonewall Brigade counted itself very lucky in having just 16 wounded (3 mortally), 3 missing, and I killed. The dead man was John Wesley Culp, a native Pennsylvanian whose Gettysburg family had lent its name to the hill. Young Culp had died on the morning of July 2 while skirmishing east of Rock Creek, and contrary to some reports, did not meet his end on the land owned by his father’s first cousin.

On Cemetery Ridge, Alexander Hays organized another attempt to take control of the Bliss farm. This time the attack force consisted of sixty men from the 14th Connecticut who happened to be carrying some of the most technologically advanced weapons on the battlefield: breech-loading Sharps rifles that gave them a firepower out of proportion to their numbers. Rather than moving in compact columns, the Connecticut men went at the barn in a wild rush that made them difficult to target.

These Federals, too, soon learned the bitter lesson of the Bliss farm—namely, that getting there was the least of the problem. Driven from the recaptured wooden house by heavy Rebel cannon fire and musketry, the Federals forted themselves in the stone-and-brick barn and, aided by some Yankee skirmish lines that had eased forward with them, grimly held the place as the sun heated the July air to near 80 degrees.

Tillie Pierce would remember that the “sun was high in the heavens” when she awoke from her exhausted slumber. Almost the moment she opened her eyes, she began thinking of the badly wounded soldier who had beseeched her to visit him this morning. She hurried to where she had seen him lying the previous evening, knowing in her heart what she would find: he had died during the night. Stricken, she made her way back slowly to the main house, where she learned that the Weikerts were evacuating and heading for Two Taverns. After packing up the few belongings she had brought along, Pierce headed for a waiting carriage, but before she could reach it, there was an artillery overshoot from the other side of the Round Tops that shattered her carefully constructed composure. “I was so frightened that I gave a shriek and sprang into the barn,” she later recalled. Friendly hands helped her into the carriage, which was soon jouncing along the Taneytown Road, carrying her farther and farther away from the fighting.

In Gettysburg, the comparative lull following the end of the Rebel assault on Culp’s Hill induced some townsfolk to venture out of their cellars for a deferred breakfast. There would be no such repast at Louis and Georgia McClellan’s house on Baltimore Street, about midway up the slope of Cemetery Hill. Given their location inside the Union-controlled sector on the southern edge of town, the McClellans had thought it safe enough for them to remain at home, where they even made room for other family members, including Georgia’s sister, Mary Virginia (“Jennie”) Wade.

While Mrs. McClellan lay in bed upstairs nursing her newborn son, Jennie busied herself in the kitchen on the house’s southern side, preparing dough for biscuits. Shortly after 8:00
A.M.,
a stray sharpshooter’s bullet penetrated the door on the northern side of the house and passed through a small inner room, retaining enough force to pierce an inside door behind which Jennie was standing. The minie ball hit her in the back and blew out through her breast, piercing her heart on its way.

The young woman fell dead without a scream, never realizing what had happened to her. Gettysburg’s only civilian fatality was a matter of record: Jennie Wade, twenty years old.

Following a line of march that for the most part concealed them, the columns constituting George Pickett’s division began arriving at the southern end of Seminary Ridge between 9:00 and 10:00
A.M.
There was some confusion as the brigades filled in a line running from south to north, with the leftmost brigade, Lewis Armistead’s, jostling for space with troops of Hill’s who had already occupied the area. It was decided that Armistead’s men would form behind Garnett’s and Kemper’s.

Also advancing into place was Heth’s Division, today led by J. Johnston Pettigrew. According to staff aide Louis Young, Pettigrew had at first been under the impression that his assignment was to support Pickett, but that misunderstanding was quickly corrected, and he was instructed that once the advance began, he was to keep “dressed to the right, and moving in line with Major-General Pickett’s division.”

As each Virginia regiment reached its designated area, the men went to ease, some flopping onto the ground to rest while others spread out to find water, shade from the hot sun, or both. One soldier found a well near a battery and took the opportunity to speak with the gunners about the Federal position on Cemetery Ridge. When he returned to the ranks, he remarked, “I would not give 25 cents for my life if the charge is made.” Others had no apprehensions. “It was rumored that this division had been selected because they were Virginians, and that they were expected to be successful where others had failed,” a member of the 9th Virginia proclaimed. An officer wandered near an apple tree under which Generals Longstreet, Lee, and Pickett were gathered. He distinctly recalled hearing Longstreet express doubts about the effort, and Pickett insist that his soldiers could do the job. Some in John Dooley’s company came across a tree laden with small green apples, which they discovered were no good for eating but fine for pelting one another with. “So frivolous men can be even in the hour of death,” Dooley reflected soberly.

Alexander Hays had had enough. For nearly an hour, the detachment of Connecticut troops he had sent out to the Bliss farm had held on to the advanced position, using the stone-and-brick barn as their stronghold. Far from accepting the situation, the Confederates had fed more and more men into the fight, until it began to look as if Hays would soon have a full-scale engagement on his hands. Enough was enough: Winfield Hancock had already given him discretionary authority to burn the buildings if he thought it prudent, and now he decided that the time had come to take that measure.

Two couriers raced forward with the orders, one a sergeant who went on foot, the other a mounted staff officer who drew more attention. That officer, Captain James Parke Postles, headed toward the barn at a gentle lope. He would afterward declare that “it was a constant wonder and surprise to me that none of the bullets, which I heard whistling around and so close to me, had hit me.” Reaching the barn, Postles shouted as loud as he could, “Colonel Smyth orders you to burn the house and barn and retire.” Then he wheeled about, not sparing the spur on his return ride. Once he felt he was out of easy range, he stopped, turned, and shook his hat defiantly at the Rebels who had tried so hard to kill him.

The officer commanding the Connecticut men in the barn wasted no time executing his new orders. A squad scrambled from the barn to the house, pulled out the wounded and the dead, and set fire to anything that would burn. Back at the barn, the hay was set ablaze, and then everyone hustled off toward Cemetery Ridge. A few of the most opportunistic Yankees had enough presence of mind to haul along the Bliss farm chickens as they fled. Behind them, the two buildings burned in the hot July air.

It was approaching 11:00
A.M.
when Edward P. Alexander notified James Longstreet that the First Corps’ artillery was positioned for the bombardment. Of the 86 artillery pieces under First Corps jurisdiction, Alexander had 76 aimed at positions from Little Round Top to Cemetery Hill. In addition, Robert E. Lee and his artillery chief, William Pendleton, had enlisted guns from the other two corps—55 from Hill’s command, and 33 from Ewell’s—for a total of 164 guns in all. All had been assigned targets and given careful instructions that once the cannonade began, they were to fire slowly and deliberately.

While satisfied with his work, Alexander fretted about things over which he had little control. He worried about having enough of the right kind of ammunition, especially after yesterday’s fighting, which had made serious inroads on his store. He wondered how accurate his crews would be at the relatively long ranges they would face today. (“The great majority of the batteries took the field without having ever fired a round in practice [because of powder shortages], and passed through the war without aiming a gun at any target but the enemy,” reflected Alexander.) And most of all, he was unhappy about the Bormann fuse, a feature common to all the munitions his gunners used, which had a very high failure rate. If the shells did not explode over their targets, the effectiveness of a bombardment on the scale anticipated for this day would be greatly diminished.

Alexander was extremely proud of having eased all his guns into their positions without drawing any significant counterbattery fire from the Yankees. The only casualty he would recall in the entire deployment was one of the horses in Captain Henry H. Carlton’s Troup (Georgia) Artillery, which lost a buttock to a Union shell while making a controlled turn. “I never saw so much blood fly,” Alexander declared, “or so much grass painted red before, & the pretty drill Carlton was wishing to show off was very much spoiled.”

Now that they had been included among those scheduled to take part in Lee’s grand assault, the troops of Joseph R. Davis’ brigade were moved into position preparatory to advancing. In the 11th Mississippi, the only regiment in the brigade not engaged on July 1, Lieutenant William Peel and his men (still ignorant about their assignment) “distributed ourselves to the best advantage, behind trees, stumps, &c, some digging holes with spades that were scattered around … making ourselves as safe as possible.”

From where he was resting, Lieutenant John Dooley of the 1st Virginia watched with interest as Generals Lee and Longstreet conferred with his division commander, George Pickett. Lee’s decision to attack the Federal position in its center was but the beginning of a crash-planning phase that required the two key officers to draw heavily on their experience and knowledge. Critical to the success of the operation would be the principle of convergence. If the 15,000 or so troops merely advanced straight ahead, they would reach the enemy lines with little advantage in numbers, always a crucial factor for troops operating on the offensive. This meant that the advance needed to shrink its frontage during the action, so that by the time the men from the three different divisions reached the Yankee line, their formation would be as compact as possible.

There were other problems to be worked out as well. At the point of departure, the left of Pickett’s Division was nearly fifteen hundred feet from the right of Heth’s Division, a gap that would have to be closed through maneuver under fire. Also, the left of Heth’s line was cramped by troops from Hill’s and Ewell’s Corps who were holding a sunken road in its front. Heth’s left brigade would have to sidle around this obstacle with great care.

While later writers would refer knowingly to a small clump of trees amid the Federal line as the universal aiming point, it is unclear precisely how many units were actually navigating by that objective. For George Pickett’s troops, whose forward movement would also have to include several complicated slides to their left, the clearly visible roof of the Codori farm barn served as a far more useful guide. One immediate and practical outcome of the deliberation by Lee, Longstreet, and Pickett was a task given to the 1st Virginia: “Soon we are ordered to ascend the rising slope and pull down a fence in our front,” recalled John Dooley, “and this begins to look like work.”

Along Cemetery Ridge, the Federal soldiers took their ease. Staff officer and Lieutenant Frank Haskell was absorbing the impressions. “The men upon the crest lay snoring in their blankets,” he observed, “even though some of the enemy’s bullets dropped among them, as if bullets were harmless as the drops of dew around them. As the sun arose to-day the clouds became broken, and we had once more glimpses of sky, and fits of sunshine—a rarity, to cheer us.”