A Thousand May Fall

by Brian Matthew Jordan

  It was not until four o’clock in the afternoon that the battle of Gettysburg roared back to life, heralded by the brisk fire of rebel batteries. This was the work of nineteen-year-old Major Joseph White Latimer, a “slight,” clean-shaven former pupil of “Stonewall” Jackson known to some of his superiors as the “Young Napoleon.” Atop a narrow ridge east of the town called Benner’s Hill, Latimer planted his collection of fourteen guns and trained their fire on the knob that anchored the Union line. By silencing as many of the Union cannons as possible, Latimer would license Ewell to turn his “demonstration” into the battle’s next set-piece action.

  Latimer’s guns rained shot and shell over Cemetery Hill for perhaps two hours. “The roar of the guns,” one Louisianan remembered, “was continuous and deafening.” Owing to their position in the shadow of the summit, the men of the 107th Ohio served mostly as spectators during the “heavy” bombardment. “For two hours we had to stand quiet, listening to the noise . . . the air around us literally full of whizzing balls,” one soldier wrote. A lieutenant from the neighboring 17th Connecticut explained that, “we hugged the ground pretty close.” He could not recollect a single casualty produced by the barrage in the entire brigade. Still, “men will get uneasy under a harmless shelling quicker than under a murderous fire of small arms.” A “heavy artillery fire,” Carl Schurz observed, “bewilders the mind of the bravest with a painful sense of helplessness as against a tremendous power.” Indeed, while Latimer’s shells did little physical damage to the Ohioans, their psychological and emotional toll was perhaps far more punishing than any of them cared to admit.3

  Farther up the hill, Latimer’s guns “literally ploughed up two or three yards of men, killing and wounding a dozen or more.” Even so, the “quick and effective” reply of the Union gunners proved too much for the rebels. “We [were] able to shut them up,” the First Corps artillerist Charles Wainwright crowed, “and actually dr[o]ve them from the field.” Sometime around six o’clock, all but one of the Young Napoleon’s batteries limped to the rear—the “dead horses, shattered guns, and ammunition carriages left on the field” telling the woeful tale of their abortive stand.4

  It was a lost opportunity to be sure, but with James Longstreet’s men pitching into the opposite federal flank—battling in turn for Little Round Top, Houck’s Ridge, and the Wheatfield—Ewell was hardly deterred. As dusk approached, Major General Edward “Allegheny” Johnson—the forty-seven-year-old West Pointer and veteran of the Mexican War who earned his moniker in a battle atop western Virginia’s Allegheny Mountain in 1861—nudged his division toward Culp’s Hill. Once Johnson’s troops stepped off, Jubal Early ordered up two brigades—the Old Harry Hays’s Louisiana Tigers and Isaac Avery’s North Carolinians—for an assault on Cemetery Hill.

  On the Confederate right, Hays wheedled his twelve hundred men into three lines of battle. Despite their renown as “drunken, lawless renegades,” these veterans, who had campaigned from the Seven Days to Second Manassas and Sharpsburg, “rated among Lee’s most dependable soldiers.” But while some of the Tigers were impatient to renew the fight, the mere sight of the “tremendous” hill gave others pause. “I felt as if my doom was sealed,” recalled Lieutenant Joseph Warren Jackson of the Eighth Louisiana, “and it was with great reluctance that I started my skirmishers forward.” Others masked their misgivings with swigs of “straight whiskey,” dipping their tin cups into an open barrel.5

  While confined to the makeshift hospital in the German Reformed Church on High Street, an Eleventh Corps private tending to an ugly Blocher’s Knoll wound enjoyed a “grand view” of the battlefield. He watched as the Louisianans “closed up” their ranks, hunched forward, and started toward the base of the hill. “ ‘Old Harry’ shouted forward and on we went,” one lieutenant recalled, “over fences, ditches, [and through] marshy fields.” “We are the Louisiana Tigers!” they shrieked. Others let out the “rebel yell.” Then, as the sun faded from the sky, they slammed their hammers back and prepared to fire.6

  THAT FIRST SHEET of musketry, “so sudden and violent,” startled the 107th Ohio. Early’s division, having formed up behind the “very low ridge” that sprawled between Cemetery Hill and the southern edge of the town, had been “entirely concealed” from the Ohioans throughout the day. “We could not have been much more surprised if the moving column had raised up out of the ground amid the waving timothy grass of the meadow,” alleged Colonel Andrew Harris, who now commanded the brigade. “We had no knowledge that we had any number of the enemy in our front.”7

  Convinced that his threadbare brigade would not hold, Harris grew weary. “I knew the weakness of my line,” he conceded, “and felt the responsibility in which I was placed.” Just moments before, supposing that the rebels would aim for the eastern face of Cemetery Hill, General Ames ordered the 17th Connecticut (which had anchored the right of Harris’s northward-facing line) to change fronts. While the move helped to steady the regiments von Gilsa had assembled along the Brickyard Lane, it also created plenty of elbow room in the undermanned 107th and 25th Ohio. Without time to plug the gap, Harris “rode along the line,” offering his soldiers “all the encouragement possible.” To hold that forlorn position, they would need it.8

  Low stone fences knitted the brow of East Cemetery Hill, where the 107th Ohio engaged the Louisiana Tigers in battle on July 2, 1863—the second day of the fighting at Gettysburg. Library of Congress

  With “furious determination,” the Tigers “dashed forward.” “They kept coming up the hill,” one of the Ohioans marveled, “right into the flat area in front of our position.” The artillery crowning the hill once more began lobbing shells and spurting deadly canister, but “most” rounds failed to find their targets—and this despite the very best efforts of the gunners to “depress” their tubes. “The artillery fired,” Silas Schuler explained, “but they fired too high.” In a matter of minutes, the “cursing screaming hordes” were within range. A familiar dread seized hold of the Buckeyes as they rammed charges down the barrels of their guns, took aim, and fired. The command to “shoot low”—the perennial plea of Civil War commanders—was not obeyed, however, and a hail of metal went arching over the attackers.9

  Farther to the right, the 17th Connecticut “poured a destructive fire” into the rebels, which briefly “checked” their progress. Yet the gap opened by their redeployment yawned dangerously to the right of the 25th Ohio—and the Tigers, living up to their reputation, quickly found it. “On they came, with their wild, diabolical yells,” one Buckeye shivered in recollection. Clambering over the stone fence in a furious “headlong charge,” the Louisianans crashed through the gap just as water surges through a broken floodgate. “At this point, and soon all along my whole line,” Colonel Harris remembered, “the fighting was obstinate and bloody.” Men became fiends as they clubbed their muskets, stabbed with bayonets, swung their fists, and did anything that might stop the enemy. “Mr. Yank,” one of the Tigers attested, “did not want to leave.”10

  But Harry Hays was not about to give the woefully outnumbered Buckeyes a choice. Though “driven up the hill,” the 107th Ohio continued to resist; they “fell back fighting step by step.” Under the cover of darkness (and despite “some disorder”), Adjutant Young rallied his out-of-breath remnants at the summit, around the guns of Captain Michael Nicholas Wiedrich’s Battery I, 1st New York Light Artillery. Since their baptism of fire in the Shenandoah Valley the previous summer, Captain Wiedrich’s gunners had managed to unlimber their six three-inch ordnance rifles “in the thickest” of every engagement. For the men from Buffalo, this bloody evening would prove no exception.11

  After scaling the hill, the Louisianans yielded nothing of their momentum. They surged forth in a savage charge, “yelling like demons.” Twenty-three-year-old Julius Geipel, a brown-haired, blue-eyed shoemaker from Elyria, defiantly mounted a stone fence and taunted the Tigers with the 107th Ohio’s regimental colors. Standing five feet, eleven inches tall, the so
ldier made a conspicuous target. When a well-aimed rebel slug hit it, Young rushed forward to rescue the flag from the “rebel grasp.” The Confederates, however, aiming for the tempting prize of Wiedrich’s guns, began swarming the battery instead. The New Yorkers, armed with “hand-spikes, rammers, and staves,” waged a savage, hand-to-hand fight, “defend[ing] themselves desperately.” Not unreasonably, one Buckeye soldier supposed this struggle to be the “most sanguinary of the three days” at Gettysburg.12

  Amid the “melee,” Fritz Nussbaum alerted Adjutant Young to “the color-bearer of the Eighth Louisiana Tigers,” who was conspicuously “waving his flag near the Battery.” Seizing the opportunity to avenge Geipel’s wound, Young shoved ahead and emptied his revolver into the rebel’s chest. A tiny knot of men—including George Billow, Philip Wang, Burkhart Gentner, Henry Brinker, and Fernando Suhrer—followed him into the fight. But just as soon as the color bearer fell (and before the Ohioans could seize the flag), Corporal Leon Gusman, a twenty-one-year-old ex-Centenary College student from Baton Rouge, “sprang forward” to rescue the colors. Young tried to “wrest” the flag from his “firm grip,” but he “could not do it.” Clutching the colors with his left hand, Corporal Gusman gripped a “large Navy revolver” with his right. He squeezed the trigger. Though badly wounded—shot through the shoulder—Young managed to fatally “plant his sabre in the color-bearer’s breast.” Then, after wrenching the “vile rag” of secession from his dead adversary’s hands as a choice souvenir, the adjutant collapsed in Brinker’s arms and was borne to the rear.13

  The Battle for East Cemetery Hill at Gettysburg, July 2, 1863

  At this point, the momentum that had carried the Louisianans up and over the hill seemed to falter. “For a time,” one of the Ohioans recalled, “the opposing forces were much mixed up together.” In the murk and smoke, it became “difficult to distinguish friend from foe.” Still, the determined federals managed to maintain their fire. “Our boys stood like heroes,” delighted George Billow. As it turned out, the flashes of their muskets served as a “guide” in the darkness for Colonel Samuel Sprigg Carroll, the impressively whiskered Marylander who delivered three regiments from his Second Corps brigade to the knob. Now realizing that the tide had turned against him, with none of his promised support in sight, Hays ordered his muddled squads “to retire to the stone wall at the foot of the hill”; he had lost more than two hundred men. As the rebels scrambled down the eminence, Captain Wiedrich offered them a parting salute. “I opened on them again with canister,” he reported, and to “good effect.”14

  JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT, the last wreath of battle smoke lifted into the air. The soft glow of a “brilliant” moon now illuminated evidence of a “heavy slaughter.” “Another day has gone by, and with its passage scores and hundreds of our comrades have passed beyond the scenes of mortality,” Jacob Smith confided to his diary. He marveled that men like Jacob Bise, a forty-six-year-old Prussian bookmaker from Tiffin, and Jacob McCormick, a twenty-one-year-old farmer from Tuscarawas County, now awaited their graves. So too did Private Daniel Palmer, whose remains would be identified days later by the pocket testament and a framed ambrotype discovered on his body. Smith could not be sure, however, what the losses of so many comrades ultimately meant. The repulse of the Louisiana Tigers might have secured the anchor of the Union army’s position at Gettysburg, but the outcome of the battle—much less the war—remained anything but certain.

  Indeed, Robert E. Lee believed that his army had come within a whisper of victory on July 2. The general was so encouraged by the reports trickling into his headquarters that he “determined to continue” the fight the next morning with synchronized strikes on the enemy’s flanks. A “fresh” division under the command of Major General George Edward Pickett would brace Longstreet’s attack; meanwhile, Ewell’s capture of Culp’s Hill would net the rebels a splendid artillery platform. “With proper concert of action,” Lee wagered, “we should ultimately succeed.”15

  To Lee’s great dismay, however, Longstreet did not “have Pickett on hand” for the planned dawn attack—and “before notice could be sent to General Ewell,” eager federal artillerists renewed the contest for Culp’s Hill. With his initial plan for coordinated flank attacks foiled, Lee proposed a daring frontal assault on the Union center instead. Seven minutes after one o’clock that afternoon, a signal gunner from New Orleans yanked his lanyard and commenced a massive bombardment of Cemetery Ridge. “The skies,” one eyewitness gaped, “were converted into a pandemonium of howling, hissing, and exploding missiles.” The cannonade emptied rebel ammunition chests, but did remarkably little to disable the federal batteries planted on the horizon. Finally, at three o’clock, Longstreet reluctantly nodded his men forward. Within the space of an hour, more than half of the nearly thirteen thousand rebels who made the assault would be added to the casualty registers. “The severe loss sustained by the army and the reduction of its ammunition,” Lee concluded in a starchy official report that evaded any responsibility for the assault, “rendered another attempt to dislodge the enemy inadvisable.”16

  THE 107TH OHIO did not come under fire on July 3, but resting upon arms on a battlefield still crinkled their brows, tightened their throats, and tested their nerves. “Even the light-hearted soldiers, who would ordinarily never lose an opportunity for some outbreak of an hilarious mood,” Carl Schurz made clear, “seemed to feel the oppression.” Before eleven o’clock that morning, several “strange, unexpected hours of profound silence” replaced the distant sounds of battle atop Culp’s Hill. Only the occasional crack of a sharpshooter’s rifle disturbed the relative “tranquility.” Nestled “in the houses and steeples,” the rebel marksmen, still within easy range, “kept up a murderous fire from their safe retreats.” For that reason alone, men “dared not raise [their] heads above the stone fence behind which [they] were sheltered.”17

  The Buckeyes crouched behind that fence throughout the frightful cannonade. “The earth,” one soldier insisted, “seemed to rock from center to circumference.” Hugging the ground, the men listened with “nervous anxiety” as the peals of cannon fire yielded to the distant rattle of musketry. Carl Schurz remembered that during Pickett’s Charge, “some of the men occupied their minds by cleaning their gun-locks,” burnishing their buttons, and “sewing up rents in their clothing.” But such frenetic activity ultimately failed to distract them. From his perch atop Cemetery Hill, Charles Wainwright listened intently for the “sharp, quick reports of our guns” and the “alternate cheers and yells of the contestants.” “The ring of [our] brass twelve-pounders,” the artillerist boasted, “was easily distinguishable.”18

  By five o’clock it was apparent that Lee’s gamble had failed spectacularly. But while some along the Union lines exulted in the verses of “John Brown’s Body,” the Ohioans were not quite ready to rejoice. After still another restless night (“we lay down upon our Arms among the dead bodies”), the men received orders to press down Baltimore Street and into the borough at dawn. “We could not understand what it meant,” Fritz Nussbaum protested. “We were marched through the alleys expecting every step we made to be shot at by the enemy from the houses.” Upon reaching the town square, however, they learned that Lee’s baggage train—now heaped with injured soldiers—was trundling mournfully back into Virginia. His infantry columns would not be far behind.19

  The news was no small relief. Still, as if to confirm the Duke of Wellington’s insistence (the day after Waterloo) that “nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won,” there was hardly time for celebration. Gettysburg’s panorama of death simply overwhelmed the senses. The bodies littering the field had “swollen to twice their original size”; a few even “burst asunder with the pressure of foul gases and vapors.” “The odors were nauseating,” one soldier gasped, “and so deadly that in a short time we all sickened and were lying with our mouths close to the ground, most of us vomiting profusely.” Another soldier shuddered upon recollec
tion of “two dead bodies blackened and bloated in the sun,” wriggling “maggots filling their mouths and eyes.” One could find corpses in almost any pose: curled on the ground, with arms in the air, slumped over a fence. Once again, battle did nothing so well as compile a catalogue of ghastly new ways to die. Charles Wainwright had “no fondness for looking at dead men,” but, doubting that he would ever “get so good a chance again to see what slaughter is,” the artillery chief indulged his morbid curiosity. He was more than repaid for his effort, for as one early battlefield visitor noted, “there was scarcely a rod that did not furnish evidence of the terrible scenes enacted.”20

  There was yet much work to do. While the men bagged prisoners in town (straggling rebels “who were tired of War and concluded not to go back to ‘Dixie’ ”), Jacob Smith and his comrades on ambulance detail combed the battlefield and wound through makeshift hospitals in a search for the missing and maimed. On July 1, the retreat through town had left scores of the regiment’s injured men behind the enemy’s lines and in urgent need of medical care. A thrashing rain made this unpleasant task even more “disagreeable,” requiring the teams to ford swollen creeks, trudge through mud, and navigate “raging” floodwaters. Creaking wagons delivered loads of groaning and gangrenous men—among them a twenty-four-year-old shoemaker named Caspar Bohrer, whose gunshot wound below the right knee would require amputation, and Jacob Hof, a Clevelander who would not make it through the night—to the 156-acre farm of George and Elizabeth Spangler. Located on the Granite Schoolhouse Road, which stabs “between the Taneytown Road and the Baltimore Pike,” their property now hosted the Eleventh Corps hospital.21