Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  First, Barlow’s division, now Krzyzanowski’s brigade. It was, said Krzyzanowski, “a portrait of hell.” All that was left of the 11th Corps north of the town was Schimmelpfennig’s brigade, dangling perilously from its handhold with the 1st Corps up on Oak Ridge. Even as they watched, a new danger materialized from over the knob of Oak Hill—Robert Rodes’ reserve brigade under Stephen Dodson Ramseur, a thousand strong and untouched, and ready to stride forward in support of Doles’ Georgians. To face them all, Schimmelpfennig had exactly one regiment in reserve, the 157th New York, commanded by a school principal and less than a year old as a unit, but they would have to do.15

  Even in a corps full of abolitionists, the 157th may have had the most impeccable abolitionist credentials of them all, since they had been sent off to war in 1862 with the assistance of no one less than Gerrit Smith, the wealthy philanthropist who had also funded John Brown’s raid in 1859, and unlike other parts of the army, the Emancipation Proclamation met with “the hearty concurrence of the regiment.” But they had only seen their first battle in May, at Chancellorsville, and with only 350 men they had been held in position in a “field east of the Mummasberg road and just opposite the Pennsylvania College,” and then moved up behind Dilger’s battery astride the Carlisle Road. Now, however, their colonel, Philip Brown, was ordered by Schimmelpfennig “to move over some distance to the right and attack the enemy.” Brown must have known that he was being sent in as an expendable distraction to give the remnant of Krzyzanowski’s brigade the chance to escape from Doles’ advance, but in they went all the same, starting “forward in double-column on the center.” This indeed got the attention of “the Rebel Commander who immediately changed his front toward the regt. and poured in such a tremendous fire of balls, that many fell to breathe no more.” Colonel Brown tried to get them to charge right into “the line of rebel heads.” But instead, the 157th stopped, exchanging “8 or 10 volleys” while “the boys were falling in all shapes,” until they finally began ducking down into the wheat and “the fighting continued in indian fashion.” After twenty minutes, one of Schurz’s staffers rode up under fire to recall them. The staffer’s horse went down, but the man got to his feet, “waved his hand to Col. Brown” as though he were calling in recess at a grade school, “then unfastened his saddle and with it started for the rear.” Less than fifty of the 157th were able to rise out of the wheat and follow.16

  Schurz’s recall to the 157th was the signal that he had given up hope of holding any part of the 11th Corps’ line north of town. “An order was received” by Adelbert Ames “from General Schurz, or one of his staff” to fall back “through … the outskirts of the town,” and so the two broken divisions turned and flowed backward through the banks of gunpowder smoke. Barlow’s division had the head start, though it gave the appearance to a Confederate onlooker of being “shriveled up as a scroll.” With Barlow down, Ames struggled to pull his brigade back as deliberately as he could, “in line order, shooting at us as they retreated,” so that one private in the 8th Louisiana had the impression that “the Yanks … rather walked off.” This would not be the 11th Corps’ second Chancellorsville if they could help it.

  Ames and Leopold von Gilsa tried to gather enough men together around a cluster of buildings on the west side of the Heidlersburg Road which served as the Adams County almshouse—an all-purpose poorhouse, insane asylum, and hospice—von Gilsa all the while riding “through a regular storm of lead” and swearing his men into standing still with “the German epithets so common to him.” But as they did, Harry Hays’ Louisiana brigade wheeled and slapped them on the flank even as Gordon’s brigade continued to press them from in front. “This line, too, was driven back in the greatest confusion,” wrote Gordon, “and with immense loss in killed, wounded, and prisoners.” Ames’ brigade broke completely, abandoning in the process the severely wounded Francis Barlow. “The smoke lifting from the field” as the firing died away and “revealed to our sight the defeated Federals in disorderly flight, hotly pursued by the gallant Georgians.” Schurz’s division followed, “vanishing as a mist” and leaving “the golden wheat-fields … covered with the dead and wounded in blue.”17

  Left behind in the retreat was Theodore Dodge, the adjutant of the 119th New York, who had been praying with his colonel only a short while before. “A Minie ball had gone through my ankle-joint,” and he was able to do nothing more than sit until “a rebel straggler, unkempt and powder-begrimed,” ambled suspiciously up to Dodge and demanded that he surrender his sword and revolver. Dodge told him to go to hell, not least because Dodge had no intention of waiving the unspoken protocol which allowed only an officer to demand another officer’s surrender. The rebel “raised his gun, as if to club me,” but one of John Gordon’s staff officers rode over and shooed away the “would-be immolator,” took Dodge’s weapons, and called over “a Confederate tatterdemalion” to help Dodge limp off to find a surgeon.

  Capt. Alfred Lee of the 82nd Ohio met the same unexpected kindness of enemies. Bowled over by a bullet and “benumbed with pain,” Lee found himself alone in a “field … alive with hooting rebels.” But the soldier in “the usual coarse gray homespun” who found Lee propped him up with a canteen and regretted that “you ones were all out here against us this way.” He tried to find a surgeon or an ambulance, but returning with neither, “he now directed some negroes to go and gather from the debris of battle such articles as might improve our comfort.” John Gordon himself found Francis Barlow and ordered one of Jubal Early’s staffers to have Barlow carried to the shade of the Benner farmhouse. In the years after the war, Gordon would spin an enormously embellished story of chivalry and reconciliation out of the encounter. But in fact the kind of story Gordon embroidered was happening spontaneously all over the fields where men had been, a few minutes before, trying to kill one another.18

  At 3:20, Schurz sent Otis Howard one last plea for reinforcements, even for just a brigade to post temporarily as a screen across the north end of the town that would allow his division and Barlow’s to reach Cemetery Hill unharassed. Howard was still reluctant to “spare any troops” from Cemetery Hill. He kept looking southeastward for Slocum and the 12th Corps. Surely, Slocum must be near; if they could hold on a little longer, Slocum would come piling in on the Confederates’ flank like Blücher at Waterloo, and the day would be saved. “Hold out, if possible, awhile longer, for I am expecting General Slocum every moment.”19

  But the roar and the smoke billows he could see above the roofs and spires of Gettysburg told Howard that the relief the 11th Corps needed was now, and north of the town. He relented. At four o’clock, he sent orders to Schurz and Doubleday to fall back to Cemetery Hill, and then sent one of the last of the 11th Corps’ brigades, under Charles Coster, “beyond the town, to cover the retreat.” Coster, the son of a wealthy New York merchant, may have had, at most, 800 men in his four regiments, but he called in the skirmishers he had posted around Cemetery Hill and off the brigade trotted through the town, toward the 11th Corps’ inferno. Coster met Schurz along the way, “who ordered him to take a position north and east of Gettysburg,” and rode out with him to guide the brigade past fat trickles of wounded men and stragglers from the “confusion and disaster” up ahead, “dripping with blood … limping slowly and painfully to the rear in search of field hospitals.” As Coster’s brigade “uncovered from the town,” rebel shells “came shrieking closer to their heads, and every shot a little closer.” Schurz left one of Coster’s regiments (the 73rd Pennsylvania) in reserve at the railroad station on Carlisle Street, and strung out the other three thinly in front of a brickyard, in the path of Early’s Confederates. With Lewis Heckman’s Ohio battery drawn up on their left on the west side astride the Carlisle Road, this position looked as though it would allow them to cover the two main streets leading in and through the town, Carlisle and Stratton. It was, actually, a terrible position. A small rise north of the brickyard masked any of the approaches to Coster’s line, so t
hat “we were scarcely in position” before the first elements of Early’s division were on top of them.20

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  Jubal Early had used up Gordon’s Georgia brigade in overrunning the almshouse, so he now turned to Harry Hays’ Louisianans and Isaac Avery’s brigade of North Carolinians to keep up the momentum. Once the almshouse was cleared, Hays and Avery rolled down the Heidlersburg Road, until the road branched into Stratton Street and the brickyard. Together, Hays and Avery had eight big regiments to face Coster’s three small ones, and they assaulted Coster’s line without even bothering to shift out of “solid column.” Lined up behind a rail fence beyond the brick kilns, “our men stood their ground, returning the enemy’s fire with interest.” But, effortlessly, Avery’s North Carolinians wrapped around the uncovered right flank of Coster’s brigade, doubling up the 134th New York, and closing like a set of enormous jaws on all three regiments. “The enemy was gradually closing in upon us,” wrote an officer in Coster’s center regiment, the 154th New York, and if they stayed any longer, Hays and Avery would gobble them up en masse as prisoners. Large numbers of Coster’s men bolted back up Stratton Street, only to collide with Hays’ Louisianans, “and a fierce hand to hand conflict ensued,” with both Union and Confederate “mingled in promiscous confusion.” Heckman’s battery got off (by their reckoning) 113 rounds of canister before pulling out at the last moment, leaving one of their guns behind. Handfuls of the 154th New York fought their way clear with bayonets, but most of the rest—some 148 men—were captured. The collapse had happened so quickly that there had been time for no more than 7 of the 154th to be killed. Colonel Coster also survived, although how he escaped was never clear; he resigned from the army in the fall and never filed an official report.21

  The men of the 11th Corps were not the only ones in trouble that afternoon. Up on Oak Ridge, the men of Henry Baxter’s brigade could look uneasily over their right shoulders and see, down on the plain behind them, the gradual collapse and disintegration of the 11th Corps. “The fields northwest, west and south of Gettysburg were covered over with shattered lines[,] retreating in companies, squads and singly towards the town into which they were pursued,” wrote a gleeful Confederate officer.22

  Both Otis Howard and Abner Doubleday could see this, too, and all that it meant for the now unprotected northern flank of the 1st Corps. Howard sent off couriers with “positive orders” for Doubleday “to fall back to the cemetery as slowly as possible.” (Doubleday claimed never to have received the orders; one of Howard’s staffers believed that the order had, indeed, been conveyed to Doubleday, but the “German” courier spoke in broken English, and made a retreat to the cemetery sound like a retreat to the seminary.) Doubleday still had one brigade of John Cleveland Robinson’s division back at the Lutheran seminary as a last-hope reserve, and he now decided to put it to work, extending and protecting Baxter’s flank.

  This was Gabriel Paul’s brigade, another mixed multitude of six regiments from Maine, Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, numbering between 1,300 and 1,500 men. They had been busy erecting the “crescent-shaped barricade” of “rails” around the seminary building begun by Baxter’s brigade earlier in the day. Paul’s working parties were called in, and the brigade was moved up to Oak Hill, relieving Baxter’s regiments, which were shoved down the line to create a stronger link with Cutler’s brigade, still guarding Sheads’ Woods and the line north of the railroad bed. They drove off some Confederate skirmishers who had crept along their front from the knob of Oak Hill, but they were hardly in position before it was clear that considerable Confederate forces were massing on the knob for another lunge at the Oak Ridge position—Dodson Ramseur’s full, fresh brigade of North Carolinians, bulked up with the one reasonably unscathed regiment of Alfred Iverson’s massacred brigade and pieces of Edward O’Neal’s Alabamians. In contrast to Iverson, Dodson Ramseur spurred up to the front of his brigade, “and, waving his hat, cried out for us to follow him.”23

  Click here to see a larger image.

  Ramseur’s was the smallest of the five brigades in Rodes’ division, and they may have been attacking Baxter’s and Paul’s brigades at a numerical disadvantage. No matter: they had momentum, and Baxter and Paul soon had Confederates moving behind them and cutting off their path back toward the town. “The fire on our right,” wrote a soldier in Baxter’s 88th Pennsylvania, “came so near” that it “became evident to the exhausted soldiers that they had no further business being there.” It was too late for a pullback directly down the Mummasburg Road, so after a short, fierce firefight (in which a Confederate bullet struck Gabriel Paul in the right temple and blew out both of his eyes), John Robinson began retiring his division southward along the line of the ridge toward the railroad cut, hoping to turn left at the rail line and use that as a conduit into the town and beyond.

  “General Robinson, evidently feeling a little nervous over his own position,” left behind one regiment, the 16th Maine, to “hold the hill at any cost” and allow him to “save as much of the division as possible.” The 16th’s colonel, Charles Tilden, protested that this meant sacrificing the entire regiment. But Robinson, noticeably irked and rising “in his stirrups and with his hand extended towards Colonel Tilden,” barked out, “Colonel Tilden, take that position and hold it as long as there is a single man left.” Tilden had no choice: “All right, General; we’ll do the best we can.” But as one of Tilden’s officers lamented, “every man knew that the movement meant death or capture.” The 16th spread itself out and “fought like hell as long as we could.” They struggled to fall back fighting, but in short order Ramseur’s brigade closed in around them, and finally “every man commenced to look after himself without further orders.” Only 84 men managed to avoid capture out of the 300 who had marched up from Marsh Creek that morning. In the last moments, Colonel Tilden plunged his sword into the ground and tried to break it, and ordered the regiment’s colors torn from the staffs and cut up into patches the men could hide “about the persons of the survivors,” before finally surrendering. The Confederates of the 45th North Carolina were only able to seize a “very fine flag-staff and tassels” and some scraps of “a fine Yankee flag … lying in different places.”24

  Robinson’s retreat startled his fellow division commander, James Wadsworth, who pulled Cutler’s brigade back to the railroad cut (as though it were a large-size trench) in order to cover the flight of Baxter’s and Paul’s brigades down the railroad tracks toward the town. Backing Cutler’s regiments at the railroad were two batteries of artillery, Battery B, 4th U.S. Artillery under James Stewart, and (on the south side of the pike) Greenleaf T. Stevens’ Battery E, 5th Maine Artillery. They would not tarry there long, because coming down on the right flank of Ramseur’s attack was Junius Daniel’s North Carolina brigade, striding in line more or less parallel to the railroad cut and the Cashtown Pike, and ready for a second try at capturing the pike and the railroad. Directly in their path on the south side of the Cashtown Pike were the three Pennsylvania regiments of Roy Stone’s brigade, who had been positioned there around noon and had thrown back Daniel’s first attack. Two of Stone’s regiments—the 149th and 143rd Pennsylvania—were lined up behind the pike, with skirmishers out front along the railroad embankment; the third regiment, the 150th Pennsylvania, was bent back to face westward across the McPherson farm and link hands with the Iron Brigade, still in Herbst’s Woods.

  This time, Junius Daniel was not going to be surprised. “A converging fire from the rebel batteries west, northwest and north” made the corner formed by Stone’s brigade “most uncomfortable,” and the major of the 150th could see “projectiles … plainly visible in the air” (although he had the satisfaction of noticing that the rebel shells frequently “struck the ground and ricocheted without exploding”). In spite of the artillery duds, Daniel’s North Carolina regiments rolled relentlessly over the Union skirmishers, and when the 149th Pennsylvania tried to blunt the rebel onslaught
by launching a spoiling attack of their own at Daniel’s brigade, they did little more than give the Confederate onslaught a momentary pause. Roy Stone went down with a wound to the hip which splintered his pelvis, and a Confederate battery boldly rode up and unlimbered to take the 149th in flank with canister. After a few minutes, the 149th was knocked back to its starting position, considerably worse for the wear. The senior colonel of the brigade, Langhorne Wister of the 150th Pennsylvania, tried to stiffen the resistance of the other two regiments along the pike by pivoting half of his own regiment into line along the pike with them, and staging yet another little countercharge. It was to no avail. The colonel of the 149th went down with a wound to the thigh, Wister was hit in the jaw by a bullet and spun backward, spurting blood, and the last two senior officers of the 150th were felled by wounds to the chest and the upper arm.25

  With so many officers gone, “it seemed to me that every man fought his own hook,” wrote a sergeant in the 150th, and at least one company of the 150th swung back to the left and attached itself to the Iron Brigade, with sergeants and little knots of men “retreating in that direction.” Slowly the weight of Daniel’s advance pressed the three Pennsylvania regiments back at right angles to the pike, and then kept pressing them down the pike in the direction of the town. The Pennsylvanians took “advantage of every favorable spot to make a defensive stand … firing as we went.” But the color detail of the 149th had not received any order to fall back, and both the state and national flags were overrun in a flurry of hand-to-hand fighting. The 149th’s color sergeant, Henry Brehm, was jumped by a Confederate who grabbed the Stars and Stripes, shouting, This is mine. The two locked around each other’s throats and rolled around on the ground, until Brehm got loose and tried to make off with the flag “at the top of his speed”—only to be shot down in the pike. The color sergeant of the 143rd Pennsylvania, Benjamin Crippen, made off with both of his regiment’s flags, but when he turned to shake his fist (or make some similar but less virtuous gesture) in contempt at Daniel’s pursuing rebels, Confederate fire cut him down. (The 143rd’s colors, at least, were saved.) Now, a second stream of Union refugees was heading for the town.26