Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (51 page)

They not only put John Bell Hood out of commission, but flattened “many of [the] gallant officers and men” in the division’s long lines; the unwieldy battle lines themselves “became broken and confused and the men exhausted.” The ground was rocky and formed “defiles” which forced men in the lines to bunch up in groups of “3 or 4” to pass, tripping, stumbling, “breaking up our alignment and rendering its reformation impossible.”
Jerome Robertson understood Hood’s last orders to have been for him to keep his left flank on the Emmitsburg Road and his right tied to Law’s Alabama brigade. But this began to unravel almost at once. Regiments pulled apart from one another: the 1st Texas and 3rd Arkansas (in Robertson’s brigade) stopped and started, then began to stray to their left, while their companion regiments—the 4th and 5th Texas—wobbled rightward and attached themselves to McIvor Law’s Alabama brigade. But then Law’s brigade began to separate: the 4th Alabama obligingly hitched itself to the 4th and 5th Texas and began heading unsteadily around the southern edge of Devil’s Den; the 47th and 15th Alabama also began wandering rightward and eventually slid in behind the mixed-together Texans and Alabamians; the remaining two regiments of Law’s brigade, the 44th and 48th Alabama, stumbled even farther rightward, toward Big Round Top. Behind Robertson’s and Law’s brigades, the backup brigades of George Anderson and Henry Benning were also moving forward, but they were skewing to the left, instead of following in the tracks of Robertson and Law, heading toward the farmstead of John Rose and the nearer stony ridge which pointed toward the Sherfy peach orchard. Some of Benning’s Georgians became so entangled with Robertson’s Texans that “after several ineffectual efforts … to separate the men,” the officers just gave up and the mass went forward “thus commingled.”
¹³

Click
here
to see a larger image.

But the closer the Confederate lines approached, the more difficult it was for Smith to avoid overshooting, until “we could hear the charges of
canister
passing over us with the noise of partridges in flight.” The Confederate infantry, “marching in line of battle at a brisk gait,” easily pushed back Hiram Berdan’s U.S.
Sharpshooters, the 4th Alabama edging ahead and driving them “with the
bayonet.” The ground now turned sharply upward toward Devil’s Den, and after pausing near the base of the ridge for a few minutes to re-form the line, the Confederates began swarming over the “rough and rugged” ground toward the crest of
Houck’s Ridge and Devil’s Den. “A stake-and-rider
fence” stood in the path of the 5th Texas, and one captain called out, “Ten dollars to the first man who gets over that fence.” Two of them climbed over it together, but there was no record afterward “whether they got” the reward “or not,” especially since Ward’s brigade now stood up and opened fire and a “sheet of flame burst from the rocks less than a hundred yards away.” The 1st Texas and 3rd Arkansas were temporarily halted in their tracks, which gave Ward’s regiments a chance to reload and get off another volley. But
George Branard, the color-bearer of the 1st Texas, “called upon his color guard to follow him, and, mounting the rocks, dashed toward the Yankee lines.” A shell from one of Smith’s guns blew off the top of Branard’s flagstaff and laid him “unconscious on the ground,” but the rest of the Texans scrambled up the ridge behind him, working up the rough incline “very slowly, only a few feet at a time.”
¹⁴

Drawn up along Houck’s Ridge were John Ward’s 99th Pennsylvania, 20th Indiana, and the 86th and 124th New York (nicknamed the “Orange Blossoms,” from upstate Orange County). This line butted against Smith’s battery on Devil’s Den, and a fifth regiment, the 4th Maine, was posted on the other side of the battery, where Devil’s Den fell away amid the boulders and monoliths. They did not have many illusions about holding their position. Ward’s regiments had “but a single line of battle unsupported.” In the ravine behind them which led up to
Little Round Top, there was (as far as any of them knew) nothing but “a herd of horned cattle,” while in front of them they could see “four distinct lines of battle” whose “superiority in numbers, seen at a glance, seemed overwhelming.” The colonel of the Orange Blossoms,
Augustus Van Horne Ellis, tried to launch a
spoiling attack of his own, downhill at the 1st Texas. The major of the regiment, twenty-three-year-old
James Cromwell, led the charge, mounted and whirling “his sword twice above his head.” But all Cromwell achieved for his efforts was to get himself shot out of the saddle, and in short order the 124th was brutally hurled back.

The 1st Texas now began to overrun Smith’s battery, while Smith pled for the milling Union infantrymen to save his guns. The gunners fought off the Texans with anything they could use for a weapon, including their rammers. The 4th Maine and 99th Pennsylvania quickly evicted the attackers (the colonel of the 4th Maine said he would “never forget” the deadly metallic
click
made by the locking ring of his men’s bayonets as they were fixed for the attack). But there was not much more of this they could take. Smith’s gunners were down to using “
canister without sponging” out the gun barrels to extinguish lingering sparks. The color sergeant of the 99th, who survived despite thirteen bullet holes in his clothing and losing every other member of the color guard, remembered being “frightened almost to death,” and he “prayed as I never prayed before or since.”
¹⁵

David Birney now began to obey the logic Lee and Longstreet imposed by their method of attack: Birney peeled off the 40th New York (a regiment from de Trobriand’s brigade), and begged the 6th New Jersey from Humphreys’ division out at the Emmitsburg Road, both moving down through the ravine toward Devil’s Den. They never made it. Before Ward could find them a position in which to shore up his line, “a heavy battle line” of Confederate infantry appeared at the other end of the ravine—the 44th and 48th
Alabama, along with
Henry Benning’s Georgia brigade. “Give them hell,” roared Benning, a former Georgia Supreme Court justice and secession hotspur in 1861, “give them hell”—which it afforded the 17th Georgia “the utmost pleasure” to do. Confederate officers, in the frenzy, threw aside their swords and picked up rifles. Even Longstreet’s artillery chief,
James Walton, “got a gun from a fallen Confederate and went into the fight,” his “face powder-stained from biting off the cartridges.” Ward saw the end coming, and dragged his bloodied regiments northward along
Houck’s Ridge, the 4th Maine bringing up the rear. But there was not much left after this battering: Smith’s four guns atop Devil’s Den were lost and the 124th New York had “hardly more than a skirmish-line left” on its feet. The howling Confederates, “leaping to and fro from boulder to boulder,” rushed over the abandoned ridge, prodding away “between 140 and 200 prisoners” and sending up the “music of the unmistakable Confederate yell.”
¹⁶

The too-late 40th New York and 6th New Jersey tried to hold the ground down in the ravine alongside the two remaining Parrotts that James Smith had parked there before the fighting began. “The Alabamians’ battle flag drops three different times from the effect of our canister,” Smith wrote. “Thrice their line wavers and seeks shelter in the woods.” But once Benning’s Georgia brigade had secured the top of Devil’s Den, Smith’s remaining gunners were caught in a crossfire from in front and from above, and they, too, joined the pullback “through the woods.” The left flank of Dan Sickles’ ill-starred 3rd Corps line was gone, and the jubilant rebels could at last execute their pivot northward and begin the steady roll-up of the Army of the Potomac, straight toward Cemetery Hill. It was then that they noticed, for the first time, the appearance of Union infantry above them, on the lip of
Little Round Top.
¹⁷

While he waited for troops to show up on Little Round Top, Gouverneur Warren was joined there by a trickle of the curious and the constrained.
Daniel Klingel, who fled his log house on the
Emmitsburg Road when the
3rd Corps took up positions around it, was waylaid by one of Warren’s staffers, who took him up on Little Round Top to identify the “names of roads, distances” for Warren. A correspondent for the
New York Herald
mounted the hill to watch as Hood’s division “came out … and silently but swiftly moved down upon us.” As the fighting erupted, the lines were enveloped in a “canopy of
smoke” and the declining sun on the western horizon “gleamed … like a fiery furnace.”
Thomas Hyde, who had been sent ahead by
John Sedgwick to confirm the route of the
6th Corps, rode up to “a little rocky crest” on Little Round Top, and “borrowing a glass from the signal officer,” was “able to distinguish much moving about of troops and artillery.” Descending to the rear of the hill, Hyde was surprised to encounter one of the 6th Corps’ sutlers, staggering drunk, who was nearly blown to perdition by a shell that “shrieked … with more than usually fiendish noise.” The inebriated sutler grinned lopsidedly at Hyde, put “his hand up to his ear,” and croaked,
Listen to the mocking-bird
.
¹⁸

Warren appeared to the
Herald
reporter to be “cool and undisturbed, watching with his glass the distant woods, and anxiously scanning the forests at our left.” He had good reason, since at least two of McIvor Law’s
Alabama regiments had disappeared into the woods at the base of
Big Round Top, and if they wheeled and came up the south slope of Little Round Top, there would be nothing to prevent them from going straight over the hill and into the rear of the 3rd Corps. But the only Federal troops who showed up were artillerymen—Lt.
Charles Edward Hazlett’s Battery D, 5th U.S. Artillery, which was attached to the
5th Corps, and had been following in the rear of Barnes’ division as they lumbered out of their bivouac around Powers Hill to Sickles’ rescue. At some point, the 5th Corps artillery chief,
Augustus Martin, suggested to Hazlett that “there might be a good position for a battery on the summit of the hill if we could reach it, though it seemed somewhat doubtful from the rough and rocky appearance of the westerly slope.” So, accompanied by “an officer” who “rode up and said, ‘Battery D, this way,’ ” Hazlett’s horses, caissons, and six big 10-pounder
Parrott rifles peeled out of the division column and headed for Little Round Top.
¹⁹

How they would get to the crest was even more of a problem for artillery than for infantry. The logging trails up the east face of the hill offered one possibility, but it meant “whips and spurs vigorously applied” to the horses in front, and rounding up “stragglers from the Third Corps” to push and lift from behind. The usual procedure for getting guns up a steep incline like this was to “fox-wedge” them—cutting posts and jamming them into rocks, and looping cables around the guns for “a company of infantry” to haul them forward, pulley-wise. But Hazlett had neither time nor men for by-the-book procedures. The battery’s caissons were parked at the foot of Little
Round Top, and one by one the pieces were driven, manhandled, and shoved “by hand and handspike” through the trees and up the slope. Once the first gun got to the top, two more problems presented themselves: first, the crest of Little Round Top was only a rocky spine which would let Hazlett’s guns train in only one direction, westward. Woe betide them if the rebels came up the hill on the left. Second, Hazlett’s
Parrott rifles were (like James Smith’s New York battery on
Devil’s Den) lovely for long-distance purposes, but they would be nearly useless if Confederate infantry came swarming up the hill at close range, under the barrels of his guns. Warren was glad enough to see Hazlett, but frank enough to tell him that this “was no place for efficient artillery fire—both of us knew that.” Hazlett waved him away. “ ‘Never mind that,’ he replied, ‘the sound of my guns will be encouraging to our troops and disheartening to the others, and my battery’s no use if this hill is lost.’ ”
²⁰

Click
here
to see a larger image.

Sitting “on his horse on the summit of the hill,” wearing a white straw hat and “pointing with his sword towards the enemy,” Hazlett seemed to Warren “the impersonation of valor and heroic beauty.” But if he was to hold on to Little Round Top, Warren needed infantry and not just valor and beauty, and finally losing what was left of his patience, Warren took himself and the last of his staffers down the hill to find them himself. He missed, by what must have been minutes, precisely the infantry he had been praying for—
Strong Vincent’s brigade, bolting up the paths on the far side of Little Round Top. What Vincent saw when he reached the lower end of the crest was far from comforting: “Devil’s Den was a smoking crater,” and the ravine which separated Devil’s Den from Little Round Top “was a whirling maelstrom.” Ward’s men along the stony ridge, some 500 yards beyond them, “formed again and went to the ridge among the bowlders, disappeared into the woods, stayed a few minutes, and then, like a shattered wreck upon the foaming sea, came drifting to the rear.”