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William Tatum Wofford was once described by James Seddon, the Confederate war secretary, as a “representative man”—a northern Georgia lawyer, a newspaper owner, of “high moral bearing … of the strictest sobriety, and, indeed, of irreproachable moral character.” A veteran of the
Mexican War who had done a good deal more fighting than most of the Army Regulars, Wofford was also “very ambitious of military fame and one of the most daring of men,” not to mention possessing an uncanny resemblance to Robert E. Lee. He was also a painful example of the way secessionist politics had laid its snares in the
Army of Northern Virginia. Wofford had been a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1860, and then to the Georgia state secession convention in January 1861, and in both venues Wofford set his face resolutely against secession. He “took the field as an anti-secession candidate to the secession convention,” and even after the war began, “he was a decided union man from first to last during the whole war.” Wofford saw “with exceptional prescience … the certain fatality” of secession, but once the deed was
done, he closed ranks and was elected colonel of the first Georgia regiment to volunteer for the war. Nevertheless, he languished at regimental command of the 18th Georgia until 1863, always playing second fiddle to the more glamorous and favored
John Bell Hood, and remained a brigadier till the end of the war.
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But in the glorious late afternoon of July 2nd, Wofford drew everyone’s attention to himself. “Oh, he was a grand sight,” enthused a Confederate artillery officer as he watched Wofford’s Georgia Brigade—three full regiments and three battalions, over 1,600 men in all—move down the wheat field lane to strike the stony ridge, “and my heart is full now while I write of it.” The onlooking Yankees gaped in reluctant admiration: “They were marching steadily, with colors flying as though on dress parade, and guns at right-shoulder-shift.” Even Longstreet was exhilarated by the spectacle. “General Longstreet went forward some distance with Wofford’s brigade, urging them on by voice and his personal example.” (This horrified the British observer Arthur Fremantle, who was appalled that “Longstreet will expose himself in such a reckless manner … hat in hand, in front of everybody.”) Add to Wofford’s men the 1,300 Georgians in Paul Semmes’ brigade, plus what must have been at least 1,600 of Kershaw’s original 2,100 men, and the Union reoccupation of the stony ridge began at once to look very, very short-lived. “Coming on at a double quick the whole line as it advanced became heavily engaged … but Wofford’s brilliant advance struck the attacking force in their flank,” and “in a few minutes the blue whelps were tooling away.”
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Kershaw’s left-wing regiments—the 2nd and 8th South Carolina and
3rd South Carolina Battalion—“met Gen’l. Wofford who pointed to his fresh troops and”—with a wave of his hat—“called upon them to go … with him, which they did.” Kershaw, leaving those regiments to Wofford’s direction, turned and rallied the two regiments which had retired to the Rose farm buildings—the 3rd and 7th South Carolina—and led them forward again against the stony ridge, while the wandering 15th South Carolina and Paul Semmes’ Georgia brigade came up behind them and lapped around the southern edge of the ridge.
To his dismay,
St. Clair Mulholland, in the Irish Brigade, also saw Wofford’s brigade “coming in on the right” in column “in battalion front.” In the directionless murk, several of the Federal officers were somehow “under the impression” that Wofford’s men “were Union troops.” Caldwell was also deceived: he had gone looking for
Romeyn Ayres, and when he found him, one of Ayres’ staffers noticed an unseemly commotion up ahead in Caldwell’s division. “General, you had better look out, the line in front is giving way,” warned Ayres’ aide-de-camp,
William Powell. Caldwell, annoyed at an interruption from a staff lieutenant, brushed him off, saying sharply, “That’s not
so, sir, those are my troops being relieved.” Powell shut up for the moment, but he “continued to watch the line in front,” and in a few minutes he interrupted again, this time addressing Ayres: “You will have to look out for your command. I don’t care what any one says, those troops in front are running away.” Four hundred yards away, Ayres and Caldwell could now plainly see “our troops … retiring with their colors drooped,” and Ayres burst out, “Those regiments are being driven back … A regiment does not shut up like a jack-knife and hide its colors without it is retreating.” Abashed at the rebuke, Caldwell “put spurs to his horse and rode off.”
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Crushed between the jaws of Wofford, Kershaw, and Semmes, the Irish Brigade, the dying Zook’s brigade, and then Brooke’s brigade, followed by Tilton’s, all began to collapse, streaming down off the stony ridge and back the way they had come through the wheat field. A lieutenant in the Irish Brigade noticed that Brooke’s brigade had “precipitately retired,” and “feeling deserted by the men on our left,” the Irish Brigade concluded that “nothing was left but to retire.” Sweitzer’s brigade had never actually made it all the way to the ridge, and it now stood in the wheat field as the boiling mass of refugees from Caldwell’s division foamed around it, struggling to provide cover against yet another Confederate onslaught from Anderson’s brigade. Tige Anderson himself had been wounded and his brigade was now being directed by the lieutenant colonel of the 11th Georgia. But the sheer weight of Southern numbers pushing on the south and west perimeter of the wheat field carried their own authority with them, and so for the third time that day, John Rose’s wheat field became a hellhole of combat.
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This time, however, no one was making any pretence to it being deliberate or orderly. Hancock’s chief of staff,
Charles Morgan, was returning from an errand to the
6th Corps when he was engulfed by “Caldwell’s division, or the remnants of it, flying to the rear, with no shadow of an organization.” On the flank of the Irish Brigade,
St. Clair Mulholland and the 116th Pennsylvania were ready to “go forward and attack, if necessary a whole brigade of the enemy,” but presently “a staff officer” ran up and “in a very excited manner” shouted that “we were surrounded and to fall back and save as many of our men as possible.” Mulholland had the colors cased up, told his regiment that it was every man for himself, and with a party of “some thirty men,” darted down into the wheat field. Zook’s 140th Pennsylvania dissolved into “shattered fragments” and was “seen to fly” without any notion of “where our line would rally,” while the rest of Zook’s brigade “gave way … in considerable disorder.”
As they fled, the remnants of the three
2nd Corps brigades barged into Jacob Sweitzer’s brigade, which was “greatly embarrassed by squads of men and parts of regiments, who, hurrying from the front, broke into and through
my line.” One
5th Corps officer was a little less scathing: Caldwell’s division was not so much running as it was “moving sullenly to the rear at a walk.” But “very few of our men were firing—a man now and then would stop and take a shot,” and the “great mass” of “retreating soldiers” filled the entire wheat field in “no organized force, a mere mass of men, officers and men, inextricably mixed.” That included dead men—one Irish Brigade officer remembered keenly how “that plain as I came over it close to the colors of our regiment was rapidly becoming encumbered with the bodies of dead & wounded men.”
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Caught in the open in the wheat field, Sweitzer’s brigade tried to slow down the Confederate pursuit, but it swiftly came down to a close-order melee of rushes and counterrushes, none with the slightest hope of doing more than buying a little time. “It was give-and-take with them,” wrote a 2nd Corps staff officer, “no quarter being shown on either side.” One of Sweitzer’s colonels, a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer named
Harrison Jeffords of the 4th Michigan, saw the regiment’s flag fall, to be picked up by a Confederate. Jeffords and two fellow officers,
Michael Vreeland and
Watson Seage, impulsively rushed forward to retrieve the colors. Jeffords grabbed the staff, Seage slashed the neck of the rebel with his
sword, “killing him instantly,” and a lethal brawl broke out in which the flag was “torn to shreds.” But numbers overwhelmed valor, and Jeffords was mortally wounded “by
bayonet thrust through the body,” while his two friends were shot down, “side by side.”
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“Gallantly our men swept the enemy before them,” wrote
Lafayette McLaws to his wife five days later, chasing them toward
Houck’s Ridge “with great slaughter” and with “the enemy in crowds running to our lines” as prisoners. There was still
Romeyn Ayres’ two brigades of Regulars to deal with, and they moved across Houck’s Ridge and the southern edge of Rose’s wheat field “in column of battalions, closed en masse, but marching as steadily as though on parade.” The Regulars “cheered and broke into a run towards the enemy.” But the cheers “were in the nature of shrieks.” They knew what they were running into. “Any of you who have had the nightmare and attempted to scream and could not,” wrote one survivor, “can imagine the reason we could not give forth good lusty hurrahs instead of shrieks.”
Ayres’ plan had been “to move forward and sweep through and occupy the woods in my front.” But he had no sooner given the orders when Wofford’s relentless column appeared, “coming down on my rear from the right.” After a spectacularly sharp firefight with Wofford’s brigade along Houck’s Ridge, the Regulars, too, joined the general drift “in as good an order as the nature of the ground would admit,” across the wheat field lane and toward
Cemetery Hill.
As good an order
, according to Romeyn Ayres: to an onlooker, it looked more like Ayres’ Regulars had been reduced to “fragments of regiments … running back without arms, and behind them in solid column
over the wheat field and through the woods came the masses of the enemy.” To another onlooker, it seemed as though “the late afternoon sun” had become “a red ball of fire … through the sulphurous canopy that overhung the valley.”
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Sulphurous canopy
—how often these soldiers came back to that phrase. But it was not theirs alone; it was a snatch from a popular war poem written six decades before, and it reveals something of the hyperliteracy of mid-nineteenth-century Americans that their almost-unconscious frame of reference for describing battle was poetry.
… but scarce yon level sun
Can pierce the war-cloud rolling dun
,
Where furious Frank and fiery Hun
Shout, mid’ their sulphurous canopy.
THOMAS CAMPBELL
,
“On the Battle of Hohelinden” (July 1803)
If ever there was a moment for Longstreet’s corps to have begun the long-planned for pivot to the left which would finally bring it astride the Emmitsburg Road and make the straight path to
Cemetery Hill plain, this was it. A gigantic wheel executed now would allow Wofford to swing from column into line, backed up by Kershaw and Semmes, and by whatever of
Henry Benning’s and Tige Anderson’s brigades were in sufficiently good shape to join them, all pointed northward at last on the east side of the Emmitsburg Road. But the
Army of the Potomac—and George Sykes’
5th Corps—had one more ace to play, and that was the last of Sykes’ divisions, the newly attached Pennsylvania Reserves, under the muttonchopped doctor and Sumter veteran
Samuel Wylie Crawford.
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Actually, Crawford had only one brigade of Reserves to fight with—the other, under
Joseph Fisher, was held back as the 5th Corps’ last resort—and part of the reason it had taken them so long to come over from Powers Hill was the mounting numbers of
3rd Corps and 5th Corps “wounded walking to the rear and ambulances going the same way.” (Among those wounded was the dying
Stephen Weed, being carried by “a party of officers and men,” followed by another detail with the body of Charles Hazlett.) Crawford had about 1,500 men, and he was now backed up by two 5th Corps batteries, Lt.
Aaron Walcott’s Battery C, 3rd Massachusetts, with six deadly short-range Napoleons, and Capt.
Frank Gibbs’ Battery L, 1st Ohio, with another six Napoleons.
As the Reserves cleared the north base of
Little Round Top near eight o’clock, Crawford formed them up in two big lines, with the 6th and 1st
Reserves in the front and the 13th and 2nd Reserves “massed on the first” (a stray regiment from Fisher’s brigade, the 11th Reserves, “united itself to and fought with” the front line). Gibbs’
Ohio battery had been ordered by Sykes “to cover the valley” between
Houck’s Ridge and
Little Round Top, and to get the most out of his guns, Gibbs split the battery into three sections, two guns low on the north slope of Little Round Top (which the crews had to “place … in position by hand”) and the other two astride the wheat field lane. “We had hardly placed our guns in position when the Fifth Corps was forced back by a terrific charge of Longstreet’s corps.” They had to wait until the “confused masses” of fugitives had cleared past them to see skirmishers lapping up to the foot of Little Round Top, and behind them, “the irregular, yelling line of the enemy.” Then the gunners got to work “with double charges of canister,” fired so rapidly that the bronze Napoleons “became too hot to lay a hand on.”
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Now it was the turn of Crawford’s Reserves. “The enemy in masses were coming … across the low ground towards the hills upon which we stood,” Crawford recalled, while the broken shards of the Regulars “were flying … in every direction.” Crawford ordered the Reserves forward until only fifty yards separated the Reserves from the Confederate skirmish line. “The first line delivered two
volleys,” and then Crawford—like Ellis and the 124th New York, and Chamberlain and the 20th Maine—called for yet another last-hope spoiling charge. “With the peculiar shout of the Reserves,” Crawford led his Pennsylvanians forward “in the name of Pennsylvania,” shaking them out into a single double line of five regiments. Mounted on a “spirited” bay, Crawford reached theatrically for the colors of the 1st Reserves, intending to carry them himself. The corporal of the color guard unceremoniously yanked the flag back, which should have been enough to settle Crawford’s mind. Instead, the floridly bewhiskered general demanded the flag with injured authority: “Don’t you know me? I am your General. Give me your colors.” The corporal reluctantly surrendered the flag, but he grabbed Crawford’s pants leg and stayed with him, as though waiting for the general to issue a receipt. While this little drama was being played out, the surprised Confederates “endeavored for a moment to stand, but soon broke beneath the impetuous charge, and fled in disorder” back over Houck’s Ridge and into the wheat field.
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