Gettysburg (79 page)

Almost as soon as the first distant lines of battle tramped into view, the batteries on the flank of Hunt’s grid began targeting them with long-range fire. Once the full extent of Lee’s line had revealed itself, Hunt, like a symphonic composer summoning forth the dramatic effect, looked toward the center of his artillery row for its contribution to the program. These guns, however, placed as they were among the Second Corps, remained mostly silent, thanks in large part to the earlier activity of Winfield Hancock. “They had unfortunately exhausted their long range projectiles during the cannonade, under the orders of their corps commander, and it was too late to replace them,” Hunt would remark with some bitterness.

The Yankee gunners on the flanks would pen numerous testimonials to the havoc their munitions had wreaked in the Rebel ranks during this action. Thomas Osborn, directing the counterfire from Cemetery Hill, noted the difference in effect between solid and exploding shells: “Each solid shot or unexploded shell cut out at least two men,” he recorded. “The exploding shells took out four, six, eight men, sometimes more than that.” Battery commander Patrick Hart, on McGilvery’s line, thought that the “gaps we made [in the Confederate lines] were simply terrible.” The actual impact that the Union cannon had during this stage of the Rebel advance, however, was most likely much less destructive than its architects imagined.

In his after-action report, Joseph R. Davis, whose Mississippi/North Carolina brigade was somewhat shielded on its left by Brockenbrough’s command, would insist that “not a gun was fired at us until we reached a [point] … about three-quarters of a mile from the enemy’s position.” An officer in the 11th Virginia (Kemper’s Brigade) avowed that the men made it as close as the Union skirmish line before the artillery began really to chew at them, while another, in the 38th Virginia (Armistead’s Brigade), recalled that the first six hundred feet of the Rebel advance went uncontested. An officer marching under Armistead conceded that some enfilade shots from Little Round Top did hit his brigade, but he maintained that the shells were “not striking the line often.”

A few regiments, falling victim to the bad luck that always claims its share in military actions, did suffer. Because Kemper’s Brigade was slow to take station off the right of Garnett, the latter became a target for McGilvery’s now unmasked line. “The enemy’s big guns … tore great gaps through our ranks,” wrote a captain in the 18th Virginia. Another officer in Garnett’s files would long remember how the “round-shot bounding along the plain tore through their ranks and ricocheted around them; shells exploded incessantly in blinding, dazzling flashes before them, behind them, overhead and among them.”

Across the field, on the left flank, nothing was going right for Brockenbrough’s Brigade, which had begun this movement in halves as a consequence of inadequate communication and leadership. The two were now one again, thanks to a ravine that an officer remembered being about “half-way between our position and that of the enemy,” which offered enough cover from the Federal long-range fire to allow the two regiments lagging behind to catch up with the others. Once they had cleared this ravine, though, Brockenbrough’s men were on their own, no longer shielded by the line of friendly troops posted along the sunken road that stretched southwest from Gettysburg.

“The enemy’s batteries soon opened upon our lines with canister, and the left seemed to stagger under it,” recollected a soldier in the 22nd Virginia Battalion. Their advance east from behind the sunken road also brought Brockenbrough’s Virginians within sight and range of Federal skirmishers. An Ohio officer along that line was appalled by the effect on the brigade of the cannon firing from Cemetery Hill: “They were at once enveloped in a dense cloud of smoke and dust,” he remembered. “Arms, heads, blankets, guns, and knapsacks were thrown and tossed into the clear air.”

It was all too much for these Confederate soldiers. “I feel no shame in recording that out of this corner the men without waiting for orders turned and fled, for the bravest soldiers cannot endure to be shot at simultaneously from the front and side,” averred a member of the 40th Virginia. “They knew that to remain, or to advance, meant wholesale death or captivity. The Yankees had a fair opportunity to kill us all, and why they did not do it I cannot tell.”

A handful pressed onward, but most shared the opinion of the sergeant in the 55th Virginia who explained, “We could see it was no use.” A small group rallied back at the ravine under Colonel W. S. Christian and Robert Mayo, both of whom would vigorously assert that the portion of the brigade they commanded had “remained out in that field till all of the troops on our right had fallen back.” Another important component of Lee’s plan—the protection so necessary for the left flank of the advancing line—had collapsed.

While the lack of long-range munitions kept the Union artillerymen in the center of the Cemetery Ridge line relatively quiet, the batteries on the flanks did not have that concern. From the Cemetery Hill area, Thomas Osborn adroitly shifted his fire from Brockenbrough’s broken brigade to the next in line, Joseph R. Davis’. By now Osborn’s trained crews had all the ranges worked out. The gaps caused by their shells “could be distinctly seen from the hill as if we had been close to them,” Osborn declared.

From Little Round Top, all six guns belonging to Hazlett’s battery (now commanded by Lieutenant Benjamin F. Rittenhouse) at first bore on the southern Rebel lines, but as those lines veered northward, they moved out of the firing arc for all save the two rightmost tubes. The latter, however, were handled with deadly efficiency: “Many times a single percussion shell would cut out several files, and then explode in their ranks,” remembered Rittenhouse. “Several times almost a company would disappear, as the shell would rip from the right to the left among them.”

Along McGilvery’s line, the infantry targets (initially Pickett’s Division) were clearly visible, especially to the batteries on the northern end. One of Captain James Thompson’s gunners would recall that the enemy battle lines were some three hundred yards distant when the order was given to fire. “Their lines and columns staggered[,] reeled[,] and yelled like demons,” he noted in his diary. “We mowed them down like ripe grain before the cradle.”

With the exception of the infantrymen who had been posted out as skirmishers, and a few bands of sharpshooters still operating from various places of advantage, the Union infantry was biding its time. “All was orderly and still upon our crest,—no noise, and no confusion,” Frank Haskell remarked.

Both wings of the Confederate assault were closing on the Emmitsburg Road. On the right, the plan for Pickett’s three brigades to draw abreast of one another was not working out. Armistead’s Brigade, which had begun the movement some two hundred yards behind Garnett’s, had not closed the gap, and Kemper’s men, who had been forced to perform several time-consuming maneuvers to remain in formation, likewise had yet to catch up. Lieutenant John Dooley, one of Kemper’s boys, had to split his attention between a steady steam of orders and a clear view of the objective: “Onward—steady—dress to the right—give way to the left—steady, not too fast—don’t press upon the center—how gentle the slope! steady—keep well in line—there is the line of guns we must take—right in front—but how far they appear! … Behind the guns are strong lines of [enemy] infantry. You may see them plainly and now they see us perhaps more plainly.”

Although this advance was later to be immortalized as “Pickett’s Charge,” George Pickett at best controlled only his own three brigades and the two from Richard Anderson’s division assigned to his support. The front line of troops on the left wing reported to J. Johnston Pettigrew, while the two supporting brigades answered to Isaac Trimble. As the first files of Pickett’s men began to reach the Emmitsburg Road, their commander, who with his small staff had kept pace with them up to that point, rode south to find a vantage from which he could observe his entire division in action. Where he stopped to watch will likely remain one of Gettysburg’s unsolved mysteries. Some postbattle accounts place him as close to the fighting as the Codori farm, while others suggest that he retired all the way to Spangler’s. What is hardest to explain is how, in an engagement in which eight out of ten mounted men on the line were wounded or killed or had their animals shot out from under them, Pickett and his mounted staff (a total of six) could have emerged untouched. The most plausible explanation, given all the evidence, is that he set up his field post near the Rogers house, along the Emmitsburg Road.

From wherever he was, he dispatched his aides and orderlies to urge the artillery forward, to rally portions of his command that appeared to have broken, and to counter movements by the enemy. Although all three of his brigades were already leaving untidy bundles of dead and wounded behind them, the total loss, as Pickett must have been relieved to learn, was minimal. The chances seemed excellent that his men would be able to achieve the breakthrough sought by Lee. There was one worrisome threat, though, in the form of a small force of Yankee troops, just now in the process of projecting outward from the main line to catch his units in enfilade. Pickett scribbled a warning about it to Kemper and at the same time sent a note to James Longstreet asking for reinforcements.

The collapse of Brockenbrough’s Brigade on the left wing sparked a disastrous chain of events. Fording the small flood of men spilling back toward Seminary Ridge, the brigade of Joseph R. Davis became the left flank of the first wave, subject to both artillery fire from Cemetery Hill and musketry from enemy skirmishers just to the north. Davis decided that getting through speedily was his best option, so he ordered his men to double-quick, which pace not only successfully pulled them away from the skirmishers but also brought them to the Emmitsburg Road well ahead of the rest of the left wing. Lieutenant William Peel, in the 11th Mississippi, positioned on the extreme left of Davis’ Brigade, would be forever haunted by the memory of the “perfect tempest of maddened shells that ploughed our line & made sad havock in our ranks.” Nevertheless, as the lines surged past the sunken road held by his brigade, Brigadier General Edward L. Thomas impulsively ordered his men to advance. The command was heard only by a portion of the 35th Georgia, which briefly attached itself to Davis’ formation.

If there is a fair supply of contradictory evidence regarding George Pickett’s role in this charge, there is a comparable absence of information about the part played by the man commanding the left wing, J. Johnston Pettigrew. A North Carolinian who was something of a scholar and possessed of piercing black eyes, Pettigrew had, in the words of one of his aides, “taken every precaution to insure concert of action in the division.” That aide’s account suggests that Pettigrew and his staff, all mounted, held station a short distance in the rear of his three-brigade front, most likely tending to the right, where he expected to join hands with the left of Pickett’s Division. Because his route was essentially straight ahead, there was little for Pettigrew to do—once he had taken account of the confusion caused by Brockenbrough’s retreat—save urge any within the sound of his voice to press on.

What of Robert E. Lee? The prime mover and architect of the attack had also been an active participant in the preparations, but once matters were well in hand, he had returned to his headquarters to await the opening of the cannonade. His movements after he visited the Alabama battery near the railroad cut are obscure. As he had done on July 2, Lee allowed those entrusted with the responsibility freedom to operate. While the length of the bombardment must have surprised him, the fact that it drained the ready munitions supplies—thus rendering impotent the arm upon which so much of his plan depended—would not be reported to him until after the action.

None of Lee’s key staff, all of whom wrote postwar memoirs, carried any message to the fighting troops. Around the time the first wave was crossing the Emmitsburg Road, the British observer Fremantle, moving from Gettysburg along Seminary Ridge in search of Longstreet, reported “passing General Lee and his Staff.” That Fremantle made no further comment about the group suggests that there was little activity within it at this point. Immediately after seeing Lee, Fremantle witnessed “many wounded men retiring from the front.” He also encountered members of Brockenbrough’s spooked brigade, “flocking through the woods in numbers as great as the crowd in Oxford street in the middle of the day.” It is difficult to believe that Lee would not have noted this phenomenon as well; he must also have observed batteries in place that by rights should have been moving forward.