Like so many of the ridges they had crossed that morning, Herr Ridge fell away from the newly forming Confederate battle line into a shallow ravine and a meandering watercourse known as Willow Run, or
Willoughby Run. Once formed up, Archer and Davis would sweep down into the ravine, cross the run, and mount the rise to McPherson’s Ridge to drive off the dismounted Union troopers and their artillery. Farmer Herbst’s woodlot grew down to the banks of the run, so Archer’s men would be briefly advancing blind up the slope of McPherson’s Ridge, and the run and the woods would both conspire to slow Archer’s two Alabama and three
Tennessee regiments as they moved forward. But these were regiments with considerable fighting experience, and in no especial hurry. They “continued to advance, but in a walk,” with the skirmishers up ahead “loading and firing as we went.”
18
Yet this advance did not quite play according to script. Even in the racket
of artillery and skirmishers trading shots with the dismounted cavalry up ahead, James Archer, tramping along with his rebel brigade, sensed that something was wrong. In the distance, one of his captains noticed troops in motion that he did not think were cavalry, and Archer “suggested” in a message to Heth that his 1,200-man brigade “was too light to risk so far in advance of support.” Heth waved away Archer’s uncertainty and ordered him to get his brigade moving and “ascertain the ‘strength and line of battle of the enemy.’ ” But as the rebels moved forward 200 yards, crossed the run, and penetrated the willow thickets on its banks, the firing in the brigade’s front suddenly roared to a new volume. Through the trees, Archer’s skirmishers could be seen lying down, “waiting for the line of battle to come to their relief.” Beyond them bobbed the tall black hats of the
Iron Brigade’s 2nd Wisconsin. Without time to reflect on where these apparitions had come from, Archer’s two left regiments, the 7th and 14th Tennessee, whipped up their rifles and let off a volley that hit the Wisconsin regiment full in the face, forcing them to veer slightly to the Tennesseans’ left. But before Archer and his men could recover themselves, a new avalanche of black-hats rolled down the ravine onto them—the 7th Wisconsin, coming head-on with fixed bayonets (they had had no time to load their weapons). Beside them appeared their fellow Westerners of the 19th Indiana and, slightly behind them, the 24th Michigan. A confused murmur went up along Archer’s line:
Thar comes them old black-hats! It’s the
Army of the Potomac, sure!
and
We are deceived, ’tis the Army of the Potomac
and
There are those damned black-hatted fellows again! ’taint no militia. It’s the Army of the Potomac
.
19
In a few minutes, the Indiana and Michigan regiments were curling around the unguarded right flank of Archer’s brigade, where the surprised men of the 1st Tennessee and 13th Alabama tried to pull back across the run and bend their line “to the right and formed at nearly right angles to the original line.” But the Iron Brigade had the momentum, and all along Archer’s line, fragments and detachments turned and bolted back toward
Herr Ridge. “We went down at them pretty lively,” remembered a soldier in the 19th Indiana. There were other Federal units coming up near the McPherson barn, beyond the woods’ edge, and they, too, were opening fire on Archer’s men. “The engagement, which seemed to be raging along the whole of the brigade line, soon eased,” reported the lieutenant colonel of the 19th Indiana, “and we found the rebel brigade in our front in full retreat.”
20
Chief of these prizes was James Archer. The temperamental Marylander, “very much exhausted with fatigue,” did not believe in losing gracefully. Seeing himself surrounded, he tried to break “his
sword in the ground” rather than surrender it to an opposing brother officer, according to the traditional cursus honorum of military chivalry. But the “beautiful steel-scabbard
sword” wouldn’t break, and while Archer stamped and pushed on it, a private in Company G of the 2nd Wisconsin,
Patrick Maloney, nudged him to surrender. Archer was not about to turn over his uncooperative sword to a mere ranker; not until he spied the captain of Maloney’s company,
Charles C. Dow, did he stiffly proffer the weapon. But Dow generously refused: “Keep your sword, General, and go to the rear; one sword is all I need on this line.” Archer trudged off, but any mollification he felt at being allowed to keep the sword was destroyed when a brigade staffer, Lt.
Dennis Dailey, caught up with the Confederate general and demanded Archer surrender it to him. By the time the disgruntled Archer came in sight of
Abner Doubleday, it was all he could do keep from exploding. Doubleday, who seems to have had some acquaintance with Archer going back to the
Mexican War, greeted him chirpily, “Good morning, Archer, how are you? I am glad to see you.” “Well,” growled Archer, “I am not glad to see you by a damn sight.” And off he went to the provost marshal’s hastily improvised prisoner pen, and from there to a prison camp in
Ohio, where his never-robust health was so undermined that, even though he would be exchanged in August 1864, he would live for only two more months.
21
The repulse of Archer’s brigade was success enough for the moment, and lacking any further orders,
Solomon Meredith pulled his black-hats back to the eastern side of
Willoughby Run, and began sorting them out, switching the 2nd and 7th Wisconsin so that the 7th was now the right flank regiment of the brigade, and doing likewise with the 19th Indiana and 24th Michigan, so that the 19th was on the brigade’s left. Company sergeants began calling the roll to get a count of casualties (the 2nd Wisconsin lost 116 men in their hectic charge; the 19th Indiana had only 6 wounded and 1 man unaccounted for), and
Samuel Williams, the colonel of the 19th Indiana, personally went from company to company, congratulating his Hoosiers on their good show.
22
Matters went no more easily for the other part of Harry Heth’s division on the north side of the
Cashtown Pike, where Joe Davis’ brigade was also supposed to sweep off the Union cavalrymen with no difficulty. Davis had three big regiments in hand—the 2nd and 42nd Mississippi and the 55th North Carolina, totaling around 1,700 men—and started them forward at more or less the same time as Archer’s brigade, expecting nothing more in the way of resistance than the ribbon of dismounted Union cavalry on the north extension of
McPherson’s Ridge. What they did not see until much too late were the sprinting files of
Lysander Cutler’s brigade, moving into line through a series of wheat fields, behind the cavalrymen. And in accordance with John Reynolds’ directive to extend a line on the ridge northward from the
Iron Brigade in
Herbst’s Woods, Cutler peeled off two of his five regiments—the
95th New York and the red-legged 14th Brooklyn—to link up with the Iron Brigade’s right and fill in the space between the woods and the Cashtown Pike. Hall’s battery had unlimbered just on the other side of the pike, where the west end of the
railroad cut flattened out; and beyond Hall’s guns, Cutler rushed into place his remaining three regiments—the 147th New York, 56th Pennsylvania, and 76th New York. That gave Cutler fewer than 1,000 men to put in the path of Davis’ brigade. But they scrambled, panting, into place, laid down in line to allow Tom Devin’s retreating troopers to file to the rear, and in five minutes “they encountered the enemy and the fight commenced.”
23
In their hurry, neither Wadsworth nor Cutler had ordered out skirmishers, and there was enough powder smoke from the artillery firing, in the undulating depressions between the ridgelines, to make the identity of Davis’ Confederates appear uncertain. A lieutenant in the 147th New York could see “innumerable heads of rebels bobbing up and down” as they felt their way forward toward
McPherson’s Ridge, but farther to the right the colonel of the 56th Pennsylvania,
William J. Hoffmann, hesitated, turned back to one of his captains and asked, “Is that the enemy?”
Yes it was
, the captain replied, and Hoffmann quickly barked out, “Ready—Right oblique—Aim—Fire.” That became the signal for a general firefight to erupt between Cutler’s 56th Pennsylvania and 76th New York, and Davis’ 42nd Mississippi and 55th North Carolina. Very quickly, the larger Confederate regiments began to sidle to the left and lap around the exposed right flank of the 76th. The colonel of the 55th North Carolina,
John K. Connally, called for fixed
bayonets and a charge, picking up the 55th’s four-foot-by-four-foot regimental flag and starting forward. The North Carolinians lurched forward, only to see Connally go down almost at once with wounds to the arm and hip. The regiment’s senior major,
Alfred Belo, bent over Connally to catch some last words, only to have Connally splutter,
Pay no attention to me. Take the colors and keep ahead of the Mississippians
, as though this was a footrace rather than a live shooting gallery. The 76th New York was beginning to wilt under its losses, starting with its commanding officer,
Andrew Grover, and after thirty minutes of mounting pressure, it collapsed, dragging the 56th Pennsylvania back with it toward a long woodlot of oak trees along
Seminary Ridge.
24
This left the 147th New York and Hall’s battery dangling without a connection to other units, and with the 2nd and 42nd Mississippi in front and the North Carolinians moving somewhere around to their rear. Pummeled from two sides, the 147th flattened themselves in the knee-high wheat. “The fire of the enemy … cut the grain completely covering the men, who would reach over the ridge, take deliberate aim, fire and then slide under their canopy of covering of straw, reload and continue their firing.” Cutler sent an order to withdraw for the lieutenant colonel of the 147th,
Francis C. Miller, but Miller
was “wounded on top of the head just at the time the order was delivered to him.” Command fell to Maj.
George Harney, who unknowingly “kept [the 147th] on the line” until men in the regiment began to notice “the colors of the 56th and 76th N.Y. away back to the rear of the woods.” Finally, one of Wadsworth’s staffers “with his coal-black hair pressing his horse’s mane” rode down to Harney, gesturing to the rear with his sword over the noise of the firing, “and we then broke for the rear ourselves.” Wadsworth himself told Hall to “lose no time in getting your guns” out, and Hall coolly pulled his battery back, section by section, keeping the hungry skirmishers of the 42nd Mississippi at bay with
canister. Even so, one of his precious
Ordnance Rifles was overrun by the rebels. The color sergeant of the 147th,
John Hinchcliff, had been shot dead just as the New Yorkers turned to run, and the regiment’s colors would probably have been captured had not another sergeant “retraced his steps … under a severe fire, rolled from off the flag the dead color sergt. and brought it off.” The 147th, a regiment of “plowboys” from Oswego County, left forty-four dead behind.
25
Fifty of the New Yorkers on the left of the regiment made their escape down the
railroad cut, whose four-foot depth offered some shelter from Confederate fire from the north. It did nothing, though, to keep the 2nd Mississippi from following them into the cut and firing into the backs of the fleeing Yankees. One New Yorker actually clambered up the side of the cut to get out again, and as “I grasped hold of shrubs and sticks to assist me,” the near-misses of Mississippi bullets “threw dirt in my face … passed between my hands and body, around my head, between my legs … and sounded like a lot of angry bees.” As the 2nd Mississippi packed into the cut to pursue the remnants of the New York regiment, the collapse of Cutler’s front attracted the attention of three Union regiments on the south side of the pike. Two of them, the 14th Brooklyn and 95th New York, had been posted by Cutler around the McPherson farm buildings; the third was the 6th Wisconsin, the reserve regiment of the
Iron Brigade. Seeing the other regiments in Cutler’s brigade falling back, Maj.
Edward Pye (of the 95th New York) assumed that he should do likewise and “retired a short distance.”
26
The lieutenant colonel of the 6th Wisconsin,
Rufus Dawes, had other ideas. Dawes (whose great-grandfather William rode with
Paul Revere to warn Lexington and Concord in 1775) entered the 6th Wisconsin as a captain in 1861, and worked his way up to command of the regiment in time for the Chancellorsville battle. Ordered to form in column in the swale between the Lutheran seminary and
Herbst’s Woods, he had a clear view of “the men of Cutler’s brigade … falling back,” pursued by “an apparently strong but scattered line of rebels pushing slowly” over
McPherson’s Ridge. One of
Abner Doubleday’s staffers came pelting over with orders for Dawes to move up the
pike and get into line of battle. “Go like hell!” he directed, with a fine disregard for language. “It looks as though they are driving Cutler.” (There was a nice irony in this:
Lysander Cutler had been the 6th Wisconsin’s first colonel, and now they were going to the rescue of Cutler’s brigade.) Once there, Dawes opened a long-range “fire by file,”
rifles “resting on the fence rails” that lined both sides of the pike. This “took the enemy
enfilade
, and checked his advance immediately and mixed up his line considerably.” But the 2nd Mississippi found, as they pursued Cutler’s beleaguered men, that the
railroad cut offered them as much protection from Union bullets as the 147th New York hoped it would offer them from Confederate ones, and the Mississippians “ran into the railroad cut” and proceeded to “pour … a heavy fire … upon us from their cover in the cut.”
27
Without any further prompting from Doubleday, Dawes ordered his men to dress up and charge the fifty or so yards separating them from the lip of the railroad cut. As he did so, Dawes noticed that Major Pye of the 95th New York had likewise taken it upon himself to line up the 95th New York and 14th Brooklyn on the left of the 6th Wisconsin, and Dawes ran over to Pye to explain, “We must charge.” “Charge it is,” Pye answered, and forward they went, pulling down the
fences or clambering over them, “with the colors at the advance point.” The 2nd Mississippi waited too long. The three Union regiments got over the fences and rushed the cut with “yells enough to almost awaken the dead.” The Mississippians fired off a terrific volley that knocked down Dawes’ horse and bowled over what seemed to one sergeant like “half our men.” But the momentum of the Yankee charge carried the rest up to the cut, where Dawes’ men now pointed their rifles down at the frantically reloading rebels, demanding their surrender, and a savage little hand-to-hand fight broke out over the 2nd Mississippi’s flag. Dawes came up on foot to the edge of the cut and bluffed them: “Where is the colonel of this regiment?” Dawes shouted. “Who are you?” a voice from the milling rebels replied. “I am the commander of this regiment,” Dawes shouted back. “Surrender, or I will fire on you.” The owner of the rebel voice was Maj.
John Blair, who “replied not a word” further, “but promptly handed me his sword, and all his men, who still held them, threw down their
muskets.”
28