Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Like a fall of dominoes, the unhinging of each Union brigade along Oak Ridge or McPherson’s Ridge caused its left-hand neighbor to give way in succession. The next in order was the Iron Brigade in Herbst’s Woods, which received an extra shove backward from the two brigades Harry Heth had not thrown away that morning, under Johnston Pettigrew and John Brockenbrough. Behind them came Dorsey Pender’s entirely new division of Powell Hill’s corps, which, along with Powell Hill, had at last arrived from Cashtown. Linked to the left of the Iron Brigade was the last of the 1st Corps brigades, Chapman Biddle’s four regiments, backed up by the last two of the 1st Corps artillery batteries, parked 600 yards to the rear near the Lutheran seminary. This was not a formidable array: there were 1,300 men in the brigade, but three of Biddle’s regiments had barely been in action before, and one of them (the 151st Pennsylvania) was actually just a nine-months’ regiment which Biddle wisely planted behind the others. What was worse, the officer who should have been in charge of this end of the fighting, the “short, fat and hearty” Thomas Rowley, had clearly been bucking himself up to his task with too much drink, and by now was nearly incoherent. He rode up to James Wadsworth and loudly asked why the cavalry wasn’t charging. As Wadsworth’s staffers gawked in disbelief, Rowley announced with slurred bravado, “By God, I shall order them to charge,” and rode off to give the orders—only to fall off his horse. Eventually, Rowley’s own staff had to lead him miserably away toward the town. (He would be court-martialed and forced to resign before the end of the war.)27

  With Biddle succeeding to command of the brigade, the men had little to do except post skirmishers at Willoughby Run and try to guess what the Confederates would do next. They had the luxury of occupying “a line” in the “broad meadows” between the Willoughby Run and the seminary “a few hundred yards behind us,” and without much more than an errant shell from Oak Hill scattering splinters around them. Across the run was a small farm owned by Emmanuel Harman, a Baltimore merchant, but operated by his sister, Susan Harman Castle. The two-story brick farmhouse was occupied by Confederate skirmishers who used its elevation to take potshots at Biddle’s men and whizz long-range fire at James Cooper’s 1st Pennsylvania battery near the seminary. This annoyed Biddle and Wadsworth sufficiently that they ordered up a company of the 80th New York to clear the rebels out of their little fortress. Beyond that small clash, it was not until after three o’clock, as the rumbling from the far side of the ridgelines quickened in volume, that Biddle’s brigade understood that its hour had come. “A heavy reinforced line of the enemy” could be seen massing in the woods on the other side of Willoughby Run “for a grand charge.” They appeared first on the Cashtown Pike as “a long column of rebels,” but then “filed off to our left … a mile so in our front,” followed by another ominous column which also “faced into line” behind them. Charles Wainwright, the 1st Corps’ artillery chief, sat among the four batteries he had placed on Seminary Ridge and could see that “when they advanced they outflanked us at least half a mile on our left.”28

  This “long column” was Pender’s division, with its four big brigades under James Henry Lane, Edward Thomas, Alfred M. Scales, and Abner Perrin. Of these four, Scales, Lane, and Perrin—an avalanche of 5,000 men—would face off against Biddle’s untempered brigade. Despite their size, many of these Confederate units were actually not much more acclimatized to war than their opposite numbers. A captain in the 16th North Carolina “was struck” by a shell splinter “and his head was cut and scratched in several places,” making him jump up and run for the rear, screaming, “I’m dead, I’m dead.” (The colonel of the 16th dryly told two stretcher-bearers to chase after him and “go and take that dead man off—if you can catch him.”) The 26th North Carolina, in Pettigrew’s brigade, had been under serious fire only once before, at Malvern Hill, and its colonel was a twenty-one-year-old named Henry King Burgwyn.29

  Pettigrew’s plan was to send his men in by “echelon by battalion,” so that they would cross Willoughby Run and hit the Iron Brigade in staggered order, starting on the Federals’ right. This maneuver would drain troops out of the Iron Brigade’s left flank and weaken it to the point that it would collapse easily when Pettigrew’s last unit went over the run against it. “Attention! Every man was up and ready and every officer at his post,” wrote the bandmaster of the 26th North Carolina, and in they went, wading the run and fumbling through the “briars and underbrush” on the far side. Abner Perrin had his men up in line as well, and gave them a little speech and instructions not to fire their rifles but “give them the bayonet.” Perrin, “his horse, his uniform, and his flashing sword,” would be leading from the front.

  The Westerners in their black Hardee hats were not unready for them—Come on, Johnny! Come on! was what Rufus Dawes remembered the men in his 6th Wisconsin crying—and “as the Confederates crossed the run,” the men in the 2nd Wisconsin “tried to make it lively for them.” The 26th North Carolina, as the first of Pettigrew’s echelon, took the Iron Brigade’s fire full in the face. The color sergeant was killed “quite early in the advance”; a private from Company F picked up the flag, was shot once, stumbled, stood back up, and cried, Come on, boys until another bullet knocked him down for good. A captain picked up the colors, only to be “killed a moment or two later,” and then Henry Burgwyn, the “Boy Colonel,” picked up the flag and called out to the regiment to “dress on the colors.” He turned to hand the colors to a private, only to be hit in the left side, puncturing both lungs; the impact of the shot twisted him around and entangled Burgwyn in the flag. His lieutenant colonel took the colors in hand, and shouting, Twenty-Sixth, follow me! managed to lead them unscathed until they had almost cleared Herbst’s Woods, when a bullet hit him “in the back of the neck, just below the brain” and “crashed through the jaw and mouth.”30

  All told, the 26th North Carolina lost 549 out of the 843 men it had lined up that afternoon; its regimental flag went through thirteen sets of hands. But as bloodied as the 26th North Carolina was in Herbst’s Woods, the rest of Pettigrew’s brigade crossed the run and wrapped itself pythonlike around the 19th Indiana and 24th Michigan, and began pushing the entire Iron Brigade backward. Henry Morrow, the colonel of the 24th, told his men to “withhold their fire until the enemy should come within short range of our guns,” but “their advance was not checked, and they came on with rapid strides, yelling like demons.” This produced “the bloodiest and most stubbornly contested point in all the fighting of that day,” wrote a captain in the 24th Michigan; in front of the 19th Indiana, the 11th North Carolina lost its colonel and senior major, and (by at least one calculation) was suffering five or six men shot every sixty seconds as they advanced.

  To avoid being cut off in the woods, the sergeant major of the 19th Indiana, Asa Blanchard, was sent off to find Wadsworth and see if anything could be done to relieve the pressure. But Wadsworth had no reserves; the best he could do was order the nine-months’ men of the 151st Pennsylvania out of their protected pocket between the seminary and the woods and send them in a desperate, headlong charge at Pettigrew’s right-flank regiments. The colonel of the 151st, George McFarland, hadn’t even gotten the regiment properly deployed before “the enemy greeted me with a volley which brought several of my men down,” and in short order the 151st broke and scampered for “the temporary breastwork” near the Lutheran seminary. The unprotected Iron Brigade began backing out of Herbst’s Woods “by echelon of alternate battalions,” turning and stopping six times to beat back the Confederate pressure. At one point, the 24th Michigan’s colonel, Henry Morrow, “took the flag to rally the remnant of his devoted band” until a private from Company E grabbed it from Morrow’s hands, saying, “The Colonel of the Twenty-fourth Michigan shall not carry the colors while I am alive.” The words were hardly out of his mouth before a bullet killed him.31

  The 24th Michigan made its last stand at the barricade of “rails, stumps, etc.” that Paul’s and Baxter’s brigades had thrown up e
arlier that day on the west side of the seminary; their fellow Westerners in the 2nd Wisconsin groped their way back to a brick house next to the seminary building owned by one of the seminary professors. The Western men were joined there by the fragments of Chapman Biddle’s brigade, whose skirmish outpost at the Harman farmstead was easily overrun. Biddle, down to three regiments, wasted no time pulling back to the ridge, although in the process he was “hit in the head” by a stray bullet. “The sound of the blow was distinctly heard” by Theodore Gates, the colonel of the 80th New York, who was “conversing” with Biddle “in rear of the line,” and at first “both gentlemen thought the injury of a serious character.” It turned out to be only a scalp wound, although it was “very painful” and Biddle had to submit to having his “head bandaged.” His men would join the Federal stand on Seminary Ridge, and if they failed there, “the whole thing would turn into a perfect rout.”32

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Go in, South Carolina!

  THE EIGHTEEN GUNS of the 1st Corps assembled near the seminary gave the retreating Federals a brief respite. Eleven of the guns—James Cooper’s battery, Greenleaf Stevens’ 5th Maine, and a two-gun section of the 1st New York, had been bunched tightly on the south side of the seminary building, with barely five yards (instead of the regulation fourteen) between their hubs. “This line of artillery opened” fire “as if every lanyard was pulled by the same hand … and Seminary Ridge blazed with a solid sheet of flame.” The artillery stopped Pettigrew’s onrushing brigade short of the “little rough rail intrenchment” around the seminary building and bought the battered Federal survivors one last breathing spell to establish a line “curved slightly back on either side” of the seminary building, with the “rail entrenchment” on the west side forming a slight bulge at the center.

  The pause also gave any novice who wanted to know what a battlefield looked like a good opportunity to judge. From the seminary, George McFarland of the 151st Pennsylvania could see an orchard where “the trees … had been cut off or rather splintered and shivered from the roots up at least ten feet, as the lightning splinters tough young trees,” littering the ground with a carpet of tree limbs. A veteran in the 150th New York remembered “trees cut and marred by bullets and shells, broken branches hanging down; wounded men walking and limping towards the rear, some sitting or lying on the ground; dead men here and there; straggling members of defeated and scattered regiments wandering to the rear.” William Peel, a lieutenant in the 11th Mississippi, belatedly catching up to the rest of Joe Davis’ brigade later that day, saw “implements of war … scattered in every direction,” and “here and there lay horses in every conceivable degree of mutilation.” Occurring in the path of the war tornado were moments of almost Romantic innocence. A soldier in the 53rd North Carolina, dipping his tin cup in “a puddle of muddy water,” was about to drink “and just as I raised it to my lips, I discovered a wounded Yank a few feet from me.” The North Carolinian “gave him the cup,” reflecting afterward that “five minutes before I would have shot him, but instead of an enemy he was only a helpless man.”1

  Not hate, but glory made their chiefs contend,

  And each brave foe was in his soul a friend.

  The helpers, however, were not always motivated by benevolence. John Cabell Early noticed two Confederate stretcher-bearers who were “lagging behind” with more of a mind to dodging the front lines than helping the wounded. The fifteen-year-old Early, who was acting as a volunteer aide on the staff of his uncle, Jubal Early, “insisted that they should go at once to the front with me.” The surly stretcher-bearers told him what he could do with himself, some “lively words were used on both sides,” and finally they told the boy to get off his horse and try consequences with them. He promptly dismounted and tore off his jacket preparatory to a fistfight, but at that moment another officer came by, “gave all three of us a severe scolding,” and all of them went back to their original business.2

  Those moments of help were balanced by visions of an inferno, populated by ghouls. Lieutenant Peel remembered seeing one wounded man who “must have been lying down when he was struck, for a Minnie ball had struck him near the top of his head & appeared to go directly in.” The man’s brains were lying out—“quite a quantity,” as Peel recalled—but he was still alive, “perfectly unconscious” but “breathing freely.” William Cheek of the 26th North Carolina, who had helped carry his dying Boy Colonel, Henry King Burgwyn, to the rear, was helped by “some South Carolina lieutenant”—who then proceeded to filch Burgwyn’s pocket watch. Cheek indignantly “demanded the watch … of my colonel,” and “cocking my rifle and taking aim,” Cheek threatened “that I would kill him as sure as powder would burn.” The pickpocket gingerly replaced the watch. The temperamental John Cabell Early found a dead Federal officer “with his pockets turned out” near the almshouse; anything of value had been removed, but scattered beside the body were papers granting the man a furlough to go home and be married and a letter from his bride-to-be “expressing her happiness at the approaching event.” Sometimes, random cruelty mixed itself with the mercies. In front of the 14th Brooklyn, a corporal from Company C, “who had been wounded in the advance earlier in the day” around the railroad cut, was lying dead some distance in front. “Four of his comrades” decided to retrieve the body, and dashed out with a tent canvas, rolled the body onto the shelter-half, and carried it toward the 14th’s position, with each man holding a corner. They never made it back. A Confederate shell “exploded right among them,” killing three of the rescuers, and tearing off the leg of the fourth. “His scream of agony was heard even above the vast, pulsating roar of the battle.”3

  The 1st Corps’ respite did not last long. Both Doubleday and Wadsworth gamely rode among the jumbled-up knots of men, bracing them for the next attack, and “mingled groups” from the 149th and 150th Pennsylvania joined the Iron Brigade at the seminary rampart. Doubleday put his own forty-man headquarters escort “around and into the [seminary] building,” and even lent a hand at “sighting the artillery.” The captain of Robert Beecham’s company of the 2nd Wisconsin called together the “handful of men” who had survived the fallback to the seminary, gathered them “around the old regimental flag … riddled and rent,” and took the occasion to pop open his pocket watch and announce, “It is four o’clock.” The “crippled lines of General Pettigrew’s Brigade” had halted and been made to lie down, but this only allowed the brigades of Abner Perrin and Alfred Scales to march over and through them, and angle up the last 200 yards toward the seminary barricade. (Perrin remembered that Pettigrew’s “poor fellows could scarcely raise a cheer for us as we passed,” although one of his sergeants remembered that some of them managed to hoot, Go in, South Carolina! Go in, South Carolina!) With Perrin “dashing through the lines of the brigade” on horseback, his South Carolina brigade “threw itself … with all its fury” against the barricade. Scales was also moving forward, creeping toward the Stevens and Stewart batteries on either side of the Cashtown Pike in hope of a chance to cut them off.4

  “For a mile up and down the open fields before us the splendid lines of the veterans of the army of Northern Virginia swept down upon us,” remembered Rufus Dawes, from the 6th Wisconsin’s perilous seat athwart the railroad. The Union artillery took its time getting the range: “Every shot was fired with care, and Stewart’s men … worked their guns upon the enemy … with the regularity of a machine.” (Stevens later calculated that his battery fired off “about fifty-seven rounds of canister” on that spot.) The Iron Brigade—or what was left of it—also waited until the rebels were close enough that they could hear Scales’ officers shouting to encourage their men. And then, at “about two hundred yards,” the combined weight of the artillery and rifles opened up, and in front of the 7th Wisconsin, “their ranks went down like grass before the scythe.” George McFarland of the 151st Pennsylvania stooped down to catch a glimpse under the rolling bank of powder smoke and thought he saw “their lines brea
king to the rear.” Albert Scales himself went down with a ripping wound to his leg from a shell splinter. But Perrin’s brigade swarmed up to Chapman Biddle’s fast melting line “with a yell & without firing a gun,” the rebels “throwing away their knapsacks and blankets to keep up.” The 1st and 14th South Carolina slipped around the flanks of the rail barricade, while the 12th and 13th South Carolina struck Biddle’s brigade through “a furious storm, of musketry and shells,” forcing Biddle’s thinned-out regiments to fall back behind the seminary.5

  It was (by George McFarland’s reckoning) “20 minutes after 4 o’clock,” and it was now plainly time to go. Doubleday ordered James Wadsworth to pull out the last of his division. Too late for McFarland: as his 151st Pennsylvania fell back around the north end of the seminary a “great [volley] knocked both legs from under me,” and “one of my boys” carried him into one end of the seminary. Too late also for old John Burns. The gouty old constable had limped back toward the seminary along with the Iron Brigade, and there he was wounded three times and left behind for the Confederates to pick up and carry back to his house on Chambersburg Street. (They imagined that they had merely rescued an unarmed old man who had wandered into the line of fire, instead of a civilian belligerent whom they would have been perfectly justified under the conventions of nineteenth-century warfare in shooting out of hand.) Some of the South Carolinians, meanwhile, barged into the seminary from the other end and “captured some ten or more of the panic-stricken enemy who had sought shelter in one of the rooms of the Seminary building.”