Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  The strangest of all these impromptu fighters was John Burns, a cantankerous sixty-nine-year-old shoemaker, former town constable, and veteran of the War of 1812, who showed up behind the 150th Pennsylvania at the McPherson farm in “a bell-crowned hat, a swallow-tailed coat with rolling collar and brass buttons and a buff vest,” and an 1812-vintage flintlock musket “on his shoulder.” Burns served with the Union Army as a teamster in 1861, so it was not at all out of character for him to assume that this was an opportunity to impress both the neighborhood and the Army of the Potomac with his martial skill. He had showed up earlier behind Lysander Cutler’s brigade, but Cutler, who wondered what on earth had dropped this apparition on them, shooed him off. Burns wandered over the Cashtown Pike and made straightaway for an officer of the 150th Pennsylvania, demanding to “fight with our regiment.” The officer pointed Burns to the 150th’s colonel, who wickedly suggested that Burns might find things more interesting if he “went into the wood” and tendered his services to the Iron Brigade (and became their problem). Relentlessly, Burns tracked down the lieutenant colonel of the 7th Wisconsin, John Callis, who advised this village Don Quixote to “go to the rear or you’ll get hurt.” Up came all of Burns’ mock-offended bravado: “No, sir, if you won’t let me fight in your regiment I will fight alone … There are three hundred cowards back in that town who ought to come out of their cellars and fight, and I will show you that there is one man in Gettysburg who is not afraid.” Finally, Callis shrugged: if that was what Burns wanted, the lieutenant colonel of the 7th Wisconsin had better things to do than argue with garrulous old shoemakers. A sergeant found a rifle captured from Archer’s brigade to replace Burns’ flintlock, and put Burns on the line, “as cool as any veteran among us.”4

  It is difficult to piece together Robert E. Lee’s activities once he arrived from Cashtown that afternoon, but his injunction to Harry Heth to “wait awhile” makes sense if Lee’s mind was moving toward a massive, coordinated assault which would begin with the arrival of Early’s division on the Heidlersburg Road, and then add Doles’ brigade and the rest of Rodes’ division, and finally Dorsey Pender’s division on the Cashtown Pike. Early, however, was taking his time. He had more miles to cover than Rodes had that morning, and while Lee waited, he inspected Ewell’s deployment, all the way over to where Doles’ skirmishers were popping away at the 11th Corps, “observing that the men were very much wearied … ordered the band of the 4th Georgia to play for the men.”5

  Finally, by 2:30, Early’s column arrived at a small intersection a mile north of Gettysburg, where the neatly tended farms offered “an open undulating” view straight down to where “we could see the battle raging on our right.” A courier from Ewell carried Lee’s directions to “attack at once,” and the sharp-tongued Early rode up “towards the front.” John Gordon’s Georgia brigade was in the lead that afternoon, and Early turned Gordon off to the right to link up with Doles (whom Lee now shifted eastward, to cement the link) and start skirmishing in earnest. Early then posted Harry Hays’ Louisiana brigade astride the Heidlersburg Road, and split Isaac Avery’s North Carolina brigade out to the left beyond Hays (keeping Extra Billy Smith’s Virginians in column on the road as a reserve). Lastly, he directed the sixteen guns in his division artillery battalion into place, and “in quick sharp tones” ordered them to unlimber and open up. The guns, in turn, were the signal for Gordon and Hays to attack “at the double-quick.” Watching from Oak Hill, Campbell Brown remembered it as “one of the most warlike & animated spectacles I ever looked on—Gordon & Hays … sweeping everything before them … towards the Seminary [Pennsylvania College] & the town.”6

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  For the previous two hours, the Yankees they were about to fall upon had been struggling to make sense of their situation. Carl Schurz brought his two brigades north of the town limits after noon in the expectation of extending Wadsworth’s flank over Oak Hill. Rodes’ Confederates had beaten him to that knob, and though the rebels had been roughly handled by Baxter’s brigade when they tried to move farther, they were still up there on the knob, and Schurz had no prospect of doing anything about it. He shook out Schimmelpfennig’s brigade into a long line, more or less at right angles to Baxter up on his ridge, between the Mummasburg Road and the Carlisle Road, and put the entire 45th New York out as skirmishers. But he kept Krzyzanowski’s four regiments in a closed column (by companies) behind Schimmelpfennig’s, ready to jump whatever way the rebels themselves jumped next. “Either the enemy was before us in small force,” Schurz wrote, “or he had the principal part of his army there, and then we had to establish ourselves in a position which would enable us to maintain ourselves until the arrival of re-inforcements” in the form of the 12th Corps. As Rodes’ attack on the other side of the ridge petered out, Schurz contented himself with pushing “forward only a strong force of skirmishers” to keep track of any movement by Doles’ Georgians up in front. Shortly after one o’clock, Francis Barlow and his two-brigade division came swinging up from the town on Washington Street. Schurz was by right of seniority temporarily in command of his own and Barlow’s divisions, and he expected Barlow to “refuse his right wing”—in other words, to turn his lead brigade under Leopold von Gilsa to the right of the Carlisle Road and extend Schimmelpfennig’s front facing north. Schurz wanted Barlow’s remaining brigade, under Adelbert Ames, kept in “the right rear … in order to use it against a possible flanking movement by the enemy.”7

  Barlow had ideas of his own. He had never had a very high opinion of Schurz in particular or Germans in general. As the only non-German division commander in the 11th Corps—in fact, one of only two general-rank officers who were not Germans—Francis Channing Barlow was a Brahmin of the Brahmins. Son of a Boston Unitarian minister, his family had close ties to the intellectual circles of the Transcendentalists and even participated in the short-lived Brook Farm community. The teenaged Barlow entered Harvard in 1851, breezing through at the top of his class, and went into partnership practicing law in New York City and writing for Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune until the outbreak of the war. His promotion to brigadier general after Antietam carried endorsements from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

  Snobbishness lay too close to the skin for Barlow to conceal—he found army life “very tedious living so many months with men who are so little companions for me as our officers are”—and he quickly developed a reputation as a “Billy Barlow,” the boorish martinet who (as Schurz delicately put it) carried “his virtues to excess.” But not even Otis Howard had better polished abolitionist and anti-McClellan credentials than Francis Barlow, and it was those credentials that led Howard to “seduce” Barlow into taking command of a division in the 11th Corps after Chancellorsville. He soon regretted it. Barlow disliked the beery and impenetrable Germans in his division as much as he disliked Democrats. He had, he admitted, “always been down on the ‘Dutch’ & I do not abate my contempt now.” That spring, he pulled his family’s many wires to “take command” of a more suitably Brahmin project—a “Negro brigade”—but to no avail. The correspondence about the “Negro brigade” was still in his pocket as his division marched out of the town along the Heidlersburg Road.8

  Howard came out to inspect Schurz’s handiwork around two o’clock, as Barlow’s division was still deploying, and it was not until Schurz commandeered “the roof of a house behind my skirmish line” and glanced over in Barlow’s direction that he saw that Barlow had not done at all what Schurz had ordered. Instead of marching his brigades over to the Carlisle Road, stopping there and bending them backward from Schimmelpfennig’s brigade, Barlow had “advanced his whole line” all the way eastward to a small eminence beside the Heidlersburg Road known simply as Blocher’s Knoll, leaving a sizable gap between himself and Schimmelpfennig. On the knoll, Barlow had placed 900 men of Leopold von Gilsa’s brigade, with two sections of Lt. Bayard Wilkeson’s Battery B, 4th U.S. Artillery as st
iffening, and then drew up Ames’ brigade in column behind. “These troops marched in perfect order,” observed an almost admiring Isaac Trimble from Ewell’s command perch on Oak Hill, “but they had not sent out scouts.” Barlow, with typical insouciance, regarded the knoll as “an admirable position,” and may have assumed that Schurz ought to fill the gap with Krzyzanowski’s reserve brigade. Neither Schurz nor Barlow ever got the time to discuss the fine points, because at 2:45, Jubal Early’s carefully sited artillery sent their first brace of shells winging Barlow’s way, and the rebel infantry of Gordon, Hays, and Doles lurched forward into full view.9

  There had been intimations that morning, gleaned from the last few detachments of Buford’s cavalry on picket north of the town, that there was “a large force at Heidlersburg that is driving … from that direction.” Midway between noon and one o’clock, Buford sent Howard “word that the enemy was massing between the York and Harrisburg roads, to the north of Gettysburg, some 3 or 4 miles from the town,” and half an hour later, Howard sent out another plea to Slocum and the 12th Corps to come up, because Early “is advancing from York.” He could have saved himself the trouble. Slocum stopped at Two Taverns, only to be overtaken there by the tardy delivery of Meade’s Pipe Creek Circular. Caught between Howard’s cry in extremis and Meade’s order, Slocum decided to stop and wait for clarification. The 12th Corps would not begin moving again until 3:35 (by Slocum’s watch). Howard was not going to get any relief from Sickles, either. The staffer who had been sent off to prod Sickles forward to Gettysburg managed to get himself lost, and wouldn’t actually find Sickles until after three o’clock. Howard and the 11th Corps—along with Doubleday and the 1st Corps—were on their own. The only reserves were the two diminutive brigades Howard posted back on Cemetery Hill, who were to hold on to that particularly valuable piece of ground rather than to be sent off to the rescue of anyone else. If these two corps—one already hollowed with battle shock, the other with the depressing onus of Chancellorsville still hanging over its head—failed to stop an attack, or failed at the last gasp to slow it down enough for darkness to fall, then the hill would be gone, a quarter of the Army of the Potomac would be gone, and maybe the whole war, too.10

  Howard may not have been surprised, but Barlow certainly was when the scream of Early’s artillery broke on Yankee ears, followed by the deadly trill of the rebel yell. The blue-blooded ex-lawyer had just arranged von Gilsa’s brigade and Bayard Wilkeson’s battery across Blocher’s Knoll and sent a heavy line of skirmishers down the front of the knoll toward the rambling brick farmhouse of Josiah Benner, when a sudden violent upsurge of popping and banging broke out. The Union skirmishers came hurrying back, followed by rebel skirmishers and by John Gordon’s Georgians in “three lines of battle.” Early’s artillery zeroed in on the four guns of Lieutenant Wilkeson, knocking down Wilkeson and severing a leg, smashing one of his guns, and making the knoll so hot that the lieutenant who took over from Wilkeson hurriedly shifted position around the knoll, and finally dragged the guns backward with prolonge ropes to escape the deluge of vicious shell shards.

  Two months before, von Gilsa’s brigade was the first to shatter and run before Stonewall Jackson’s flank attack. Now, with Gordon’s yipping Georgians rushing up to them “with a resolution and spirit … rarely excelled,” they once again began to disintegrate. One private was almost knocked over by another soldier beside him, falling dead “with his face towards me,” and it unnerved him so much that he almost could not finish ramming a cartridge down his rifle’s muzzle; then the man on his left fell over and “the thought occurred that I might be the next.” Von Gilsa’s “line was broken in the left and our right was attacked in flank,” and after only fifteen minutes there was nothing for it but “to retire or surrender.” Behind them, von Gilsa’s men left “a regular swath of blue coats … piled up in every shape, some on their backs, some on their faces, and others turned and twisted in every imaginable shape.”11

  Barlow was beside himself at the collapse of von Gilsa’s brigade: “We ought to have held the place easily for I had my entire force at the very point where the attack was made … But the enemies skirmishers had hardly attacked us before my men began to run.” Nor was Barlow the only one unable to contain his disgust. “The dutch run and leave us to fight,” complained Oscar D. Ladley, a lieutenant in the 75th Ohio who was drawn up behind the knoll in Ames’ brigade, “My sword was out and if I didn’t welt them with it my name ain’t O.D.L.” Barlow tried to head the fleeing Germans off and “rally them.” But one of Early’s batteries, attracted by “one of the large white flags which I think they used to designate a Corps commander,” got the range perfectly, dropped a shell over them, and “dispersed the party, killing at least one, whom I saw them carry off.” Barlow was hit in the left side. He was not dead, but he was badly hurt, and since Adelbert Ames ranked von Gilsa, Ames now took charge and sent in his own brigade to push the rebels back.

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  Ames was Maine-born and the son of a Yankee clipper captain, and graduated fifth in the early crop of West Point’s class of 1861. He had been an artillery officer at Bull Run and the Peninsula, was tagged to command the new 20th Maine Volunteers in 1862, and had just been promoted to brigadier general six weeks before. But he had no better time of it than Barlow. He spread four companies of the 17th Connecticut on the east side of the road to guard his flank and ordered up his three Ohio regiments—the 25th, 75th, and 107th—to “check the advance of the enemy” over Blocher’s Knoll. Ames took his brigade in “on foot” and “in front,” and they actually cleared the knoll itself and moved down to “the thin woods in front”—until Gordon’s Georgians began pushing them back, then lapping around their flanks. “Trees were felled everywhere by the cannon balls,” wrote Otto von Fritsch, and “without orders” the 75th Ohio’s colonel, Andrew Harris, “began to fall back … in skirmish line.”12

  And no wonder, because by now Ames was bearing the brunt not only of Gordon’s Georgia brigade in front, but the weight of Harry Hays’ Louisianans sweeping away the thin line of the 17th Connecticut’s skirmishers on one side, and the onslaught of George Doles’ brigade of Georgians to the left of the knoll. “The Confederates approached slowly, and in magnificent order … screaming savagely,” Fritsch remembered. Not so among the Federals: “No order was preserved or thought of,” and though some knots of men “began to retreat in fine order, shooting at us as they retreated,” most of them “in their flight … threw away their knapsacks to accelerate their escape.” Part of the 25th Ohio stood its ground long enough for the color-bearer of one of Gordon’s regiments to get into a personal fight with the 25th’s color-bearer, so that “the flag-bearers struck each other with their flag-staffs.” Carl Schurz, watching the entire right flank of the 11th Corps begin to break up, called up his own reserve brigade, Wladimir Krzyzanowski’s, and threw them against the oncoming wave of Doles and Gordon. And he might have stood half a chance if he had been able to fold Krzyzanowski’s regiments behind the Carlisle Road and force Gordon to wheel to the right to attack him. Krzyzanowski’s men had been quietly watching the to-and-fro of Barlow’s division and their mates in Schimmelpfennig’s brigade, resting “in line.” One of his colonels, John Thomas Lockman of the 119th New York, sat with his adjutant “under an apple tree.” As the fury of the fight on Blocher’s Knoll developed, Thomas predicted that “we are going to have some hot work shortly,” and as an “upright, conscientious” Episcopalian, Thomas and his adjutant “knelt down under the tree, and uttered, each in his own heart, a prayer to the God of Hosts.” Presently, “three or four of the cracking rifles ahead sufficed to tell us” that “a great crisis had come,” and the brigade moved forward “in line of double columns.”13

  But Krzyzanowski’s brigade was able only to push back Doles’ right-flank regiment, the 21st Georgia; the 4th and 44th Georgia, which had been occupied in outflanking Blocher’s Knoll, now turned their unencumbered attention
to Krzyzanowski and flung the Polish émigré’s brigade back like broken toys. A shell fragment knocked down Albert Walber, a lieutenant in the 26th Wisconsin, and the rush of the Confederates was so quick that none of the rebel officers even stopped to take him prisoner. Officers in the 82nd Ohio tried to steady their men with an “order … to call the rolls.” (This little piece of defiance struck Capt. Alfred Lee “as being sublime, so firm and decided were the answers of the men.”) It was “almost a hand-to-hand struggle” alongside the Carlisle Road, with Schurz everywhere trying to hold back the collapsing front of Krzyzanowski’s regiments. Theodore Dodge, in the 119th New York, saw one “brave boy” go down with a leg wound, but insist on “loading and firing” from a sitting position “with as much regularity and coolness as if untouched, now and then shouting to some comrade in front of him to make room for his shot.”14

  It did no good. Dodge estimated that they might have held on for as much as half an hour, until Doles’ Georgians began moving forward again. It was “not a charge on the double-quick, but a simple advance, firing as they came on.” Schurz’s horse took a bullet “clean through the fatty ridge of the neck just under the mane,” as did Krzyzanowski’s, but his other officers did much worse. The 26th Wisconsin lost its colonel to a shell splinter, then the senior major, and soon command of the regiment was in the hands of the Prussian-born captain of Company A; every member of the color guard was down, and by the end of the day only thirty-two of the 26th’s men were left—although “this gallant squad” still had the regimental flags. Francis Mahler, the colonel of the 75th Pennsylvania, had been an old “revolutionary comrade” of Schurz’s in Baden in the ’48 uprising. Mahler went down with a fatal wound, and “with death on his face” he reached out for Schurz’s hand “to bid me a last farewell.”