Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Not for the first or last time would Sickles hear a no and pretend he had heard a yes. He took Hunt’s careful attempt to refer the decision to Meade as “the approval of his own judgment,” which, when Hunt explained it all to Meade, would doubtless be endorsed by the army commander as coming from a less offending source than Daniel E. Sickles. So, the orders went out, and “our line was advanced to the new position.” A slightly bewildered and “uncomfortable” Humphreys “sent out working parties” to take down “all the fences” along the road “in my front,” and along the road he pieced out one of his three brigades, under Joseph B. Carr, “in line of battle.” Behind Carr, Humphreys placed the old Excelsior Brigade (commanded these days by William Brewster), drawn up in a close-interval column, “in line of battalions in mass.” Humphreys’ last brigade was “massed in column of regiments,” at intervals of 200 yards. Birney’s division, which Sickles originally wanted to commit in toto to the Emmitsburg Road line, had its three brigades parceled out to cover the road only as far as Sherfy’s peach orchard (which would be held by Charles Graham’s all-Pennsylvania brigade), back to the stony ridge (where Philippe Régis de Trobriand would deploy his brigade), and then down to a massively forbidding rock outcropping known locally as Devil’s Den, where John Henry Hobart Ward’s brigade (which included Berdan’s Sharpshooters) would screen any approach to the Round Tops.

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  If the 3rd Corps had brought with it to Gettysburg its third division (which had instead been sent to bulk up the garrison of Harpers Ferry), Sickles might just barely have been able to defend this ground. As it was, his 10,000 would have to cover a line that stretched more than 2,700 yards—three men for every yard, if you counted every non-combatant, and kept no reserves—and which still did not connect with the 2nd Corps or put a single soldier on the Round Tops. There were so few men available to cover all the necessary yardage that Sickles, as an afterthought, sent off an appeal to the artillery reserve for any extra batteries they could spare (they sent him three six-gun batteries—the old eighteen-gun rule), so that he could stuff them into the gap behind the peach orchard between Graham and de Trobriand.26

  Fully in character for Dan Sickles’ corps, the divisions “advanced in a brilliant line.” The 63rd Pennsylvania (from Birney’s division) and the 1st Massachusetts (from Humphreys’ division) were thrown out as skirmishers for the advance, and the fifteen-piece brass band of the 114th Pennsylvania (“Collis’ Zouaves”) thumped away to mark the time. (The regiment was unreservedly proud of its band: they had played on the field at Fredericksburg, although in a fit of oversight someone had forgotten to notify them when the Army of the Potomac retreated, and left the whole ensemble to be bagged as prisoners by the Confederates.) “The eye beheld,” wrote an officer in Carr’s brigade, “battery and brigade extended from point to point,” full of “moving columns and gay banners.” It was “a grand sight to witness this little corps of two divisions gallantly move on the advance,” and despite taking place on what was, after all, a battlefield, it all “appeared to be a peaceful review,” with a “herd of thirteen or fourteen cows … quietly grazing upon the field.”27

  Over to the right, John Gibbon, “standing on [Cemetery] hill” with the 2nd Corps, turned a puzzled eye on the show unfolding “out to our left and front.” One staffer gaped at Sickles’ “incomprehensible movements,” while “both officers and men” of the 2nd Corps stood up to offer commentary “as [to] the comparative merits of the line” Sickles was acquiring. Hancock saw it, too: “I recollect looking on and admiring the spectacle, but I did not know the object of it.” He “quietly” remarked to his staff, “Gentlemen, that is a splendid advance” and “beautiful to look at.” But he could not imagine that Meade had sanctioned this parade, and he predicted that “those troops will be coming back again very soon.”28

  George Meade was actually one of the last people on Cemetery Hill to learn about Sickles’ maneuver, and this was largely because his impromptu headquarters at the Widow Leister’s ramshackle cottage sat on the reverse slope of a hill and was out of sight of anything to the south. At three o’clock, he received the happy tidings that, at last, John Sedgwick and the 6th Corps were supposed to be closing in, and Meade was finally ready to call for a council of his corps commanders to deliberate on what the now concentrated Army of the Potomac was going to do next. He also dashed off a quick message to Halleck, informing the general in chief that he had put any plans for an attack on hold until the 6th Corps had arrived, but might also “fall back to my supplies at Westminster”—which was to say, to Pipe Creek—“if I find it hazardous to do so.” Gouverneur Warren, who had been informed by an aide of what Sickles was up to, strolled into Meade’s headquarters at the Widow Leister’s cottage and asked casually whether Meade was aware that Sickles had redeployed the entire 3rd Corps out to the Emmitsburg Road. Startled by Warren’s news, Meade erupted in Vesuvian proportions, and demanded that Sickles report to him for an explanation.

  Sickles at first refused. He “sat upon his white horse, received the papers,” and told the courier, “Say to General Meade that it will be impossible for me to report at his Hd Quarters at this time as this battle will be precipitated upon us before I could reach his Hd Quarters.” Meade furiously sent off a second demand, and this time Sickles obeyed, although the reason had less to do with deference to his commander’s wishes and more with the fact that Charles Graham had glimpsed from his new position in the peach orchard large clumps of Confederate infantry in the woods to the west. Sickles “had not gone 60 ft. before a shell passed over our heads, bursting in air far beyond,” wrote one soldier in Sickles’ old Excelsior Brigade, and “in a few minutes the battle had Commenced.” When Sickles arrived, lathered and dusty, Meade stopped him from dismounting, and told him to turn around back to his corps, and he would follow. He ordered George Sykes to get his 5th Corps men, who were sitting comfortably down by Powers Hill on the Baltimore Pike, up and hurrying to Sickles’ aid, and then he was off himself, outracing his hastily mounted staffers toward the peach orchard, where Sickles had ridden out, dismounted, and was trying to glimpse a “column of infantry” which was “then moving rapidly towards … our left.”29

  Amid the shells arching over their heads, Meade surveyed the Emmitsburg Road. He could see Humphreys’ division, drawn up along the road. Where was the rest of the 3rd Corps? Sickles described the long, attenuated deployment of Birney’s division from the Emmitsburg Road down to Devil’s Den. Meade, “turning and pointing to the rear,” angrily told Sickles where his corps ought to have been—“between the left of the Second Corps and Little Round Top”—and that he had “advanced his line beyond supporting distance of the army.” And what was the artillery banging away at? David Birney now leaned-in on Sickles’ behalf, explaining “the position and movements of the enemy; that they were moving in order to turn our left, and we had opened upon them.” The question that blossomed in Meade’s mind was whether Sickles could hold this ground long enough for Meade to get more troops up behind Sickles. “Are you not too much extended, General,” Meade demanded. “Can you hold this front?” Yes, Sickles lied handsomely, but “I shall need support.” He then shifted to what would turn out to be the first in a half-century’s worth of defenses, justifications, excuses, half-truths, and rationalizations. “I have made these dispositions to the best of my judgment.” And he had occupied the high ground. But, Sickles quickly added, he could pull his men back to where they had started, if that was what Meade wanted. “General Sickles,” Meade sliced in, slamming all the weight of his sarcasm on Sickles’ fingers, “this is in some respects higher ground than that to the rear; but there is still higher ground in front of you, and if you keep on advancing you will find constantly higher ground all the way to the mountains.”

  Very well, Sickles stiffly agreed, he would “be happy to modify” his position “according to your views.” Meade considered this, then rejected it. It was too late for that, h
e retorted. Artillery was the overture to infantry, and Confederate infantry would be on Sickles’ doorstep before any orders to fall back could be distributed. “No,” Meade said, “I will send you the Fifth Corps, and you may send for support from the Second Corps.” Then Meade rode off in “a heavy shower of shells.” He was riding a borrowed horse, and the shelling drove the beast “into an uncontrollable frenzy.” From the woodline in the distance, long lines of Confederate infantry were stepping out and dressing their ranks.30

  Robert E. Lee wanted Dick Ewell to get moving as soon as the sound of Longstreet’s engagement began, and it was not a good sign that he felt the need to be on Ewell’s coattails. But as the afternoon began to drag onward past two o’clock with no whisper of combat from Longstreet’s direction, Lee’s anxieties attached themselves to Longstreet instead. “Perceiving the great value of time, General Lee’s impatience became so urgent that he proceeded in person to hasten the movement of Longstreet,” and set off once again, trailing aides, escorts, and observers, to find out what had gone wrong. He arrived to find that skirmishers from Anderson’s division had captured “a Federal sergeant … who was found, on examination, to belong to a division” in the 3rd Corps, which wasn’t even supposed to be in Gettysburg yet. When Longstreet joined Lee “at about three o’clock in the afternoon,” he was as perplexed at the developing situation as Lee was, for now there were clearly large formations of Federal infantry and artillery lining up at the Emmitsburg Road and in the peach orchard. Lee and Longstreet “held a conference on horseback,” and then Longstreet took off “up the line and down again, occasionally dismounting, and going forward to get a better view of the enemy’s position.”31

  McLaws’ division was drawn up “in column of companies,” waiting for an order to move forward, seize the Emmitsburg Road, “and when well on the enemy’s flank to face or form to the left” and drive up to Cemetery Hill. But the enemy was now clearly on the Emmitsburg Road itself. John Bell Hood’s scouts came back, breathlessly reporting that while there were obviously Federal troops occupying the peach orchard and the line of the Emmitsburg Road above the orchard, the rest of these Federals were thinly stretched along two stony ridges about a mile directly ahead, and no Federals were posted on the Round Tops, which loomed behind them. Best of all, the scouts had found a major Union wagon park behind the Round Tops, and if Hood was allowed to “march around the base of Round Top to the right,” he could roll up the unanchored Union flank and overrun the wagon park. Hood had already “placed one or two batteries in position and opened fire,” and he was ready to send his division forward in a long curl around the rough outlines of the Round Tops.32

  But this would place a terrible burden on soldiers who had been on the march for almost twelve hours without intermission. In Kershaw’s South Carolina brigade, “the soldiers fell down … as soon as the halt was made … and soon most of them were fast asleep.” And anyway, Lee and Longstreet were working on a different plan. “Gen. Lee was already fretting over the delay which had occurred,” and even if it was no longer possible to launch an attack that wheeled up the Emmitsburg Road, he was certainly not going to call the whole thing off. Taking the situation as it was, Lee proposed to attack the Federals in the road head-on, drive them out of the way, and then execute a long curve toward Cemetery Hill. Both an offhand inspection and Hood’s report were evidence that the position could not be very strongly held, and in any case it would be easier to crush these Yankees in the open than if they were backed up against Cemetery Hill; in fact, it was a mercy that they had moved out and revealed themselves in this fashion, because if they had been concealed from view farther to their rear, Longstreet’s original wheel up the Emmitsburg Road would have offered a disastrously vulnerable flank for them to counterattack. Had not God delivered the Philistines into his hands? The attack would go forward, but this time heading straight eastward, rolling over the weak Federal positions and cutting off all the Federal troops posted on Cemetery Hill from behind, while Ewell attacked them from the front. Longstreet’s artillery “should open along the front for ten minutes, then a pause, a signal of three guns from the right battery, in rapid succession, and the attack was to commence without further order.” Hood’s division would jump off first, heading for one of the stony ridges (the property of an elderly farmer named John Houck; after the battle, it would become known as Houck’s Ridge) and the Round Tops. McLaws would follow at a decent interval, overwhelming the other, nearer stony ridge and crushing the peach orchard position, “with a view of gaining a line resting upon Little Round Top on the right and the Peach Orchard on the left.” Richard H. Anderson’s borrowed division would go in last of all.33

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  This was what, in technical terms, could be called an echelon attack, or what Porter Alexander described as the “progressive type, as distinguished from the simultaneous” assault. The genius of the echelon was the way it forced an enemy to use his own instincts against himself. Attacked on one flank, a defending enemy would shore up that flank by pulling units out of unthreatened parts of the line and sending them in as reinforcements; as the next stage in the echelon threatened the next part of the line, the defenders would drain still more troops away from the unthreatened parts; by the time the final part of the echelon was launched, the remaining sector of the defenders’ line would have been bled so dry of troops that it would break and collapse, and the entire position would come unhinged. On the other hand, the echelon had its risks, too, since it required exquisite planning and timing, and a certain amount of cold blood in the veins while the first elements of the echelon were chewed to pieces. In this situation, Lee and Longstreet were hurriedly trying to impose a complicated tactical form on a situation they had not anticipated—and they would just as hurriedly fail to communicate the full shape of this plan down through the ladder of staffers and subordinates.34

  None of this sat well with John Bell Hood, who continued to pester Longstreet with entreaties “to turn Round Top.” Longstreet was sufficiently uncertain about these last-minute overhauls of the attack plan that his only advice to Hood was the less than hearty endorsement, “We must obey the orders of General Lee.” Longstreet himself dismounted “and held his reins over his arms,” sending off “staff officers and couriers along the line of battle to watch the movements and report to him,” while “General Lee left us.” The artillery whose voice would be the signal to Ewell for his own action to begin three miles away was wheeled into position, and Porter Alexander hoped that “with my 54 guns & close range,” he could also “overwhelm & crush” the Federal artillery he saw rolling up to Sherfy’s peach orchard. Alexander’s own battalion opened fire from “the edge” of the woods “next the Peach Orchard” at about “500 yards distance.” Hood’s division sprang up “as if at a game of ball,” McIvor Law’s Alabama brigade and Jerome Robertson (a dark, beetle-browed Kentuckian who had been a hatter, a doctor, a volunteer in the Texas revolution of 1836, and a Texas state senator) with Hood’s old Texas brigade in front, and Benning’s and “Tige” Anderson’s Georgia brigades drawn up in back of them. “Fix bayonets, my brave Texans,” Hood shouted as he galloped across the front of Robertson’s brigade, “forward and take those heights.” And they cheered him in response: “Follow the Lone Star Flag to the top of the mountain!” cried the lieutenant colonel of the 1st Texas, and there “arose such a wild indescribable battle yell that no one having heard ever forgot.”35

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  You are to hold this ground at all costs

  UNTIL FIVE DAYS BEFORE, the 11,000 men who made up the 5th Corps had been George Meade’s own corps, and his promotion to top command had boosted his senior division commander, George Sykes, to his place. Sykes was a West Pointer’s West Pointer—thirty-ninth in a class of fifty-six in 1842, a Regular Army lifer who had seen action in the Seminole War and the Mexican War, and as doggedly average a soldier as the army could offer. At West Point, they had called him “Tardy G
eorge” and “Slow Trot,” and unthinking, methodical, and deliberate adherence to by-the-book plodding was Sykes’ trademark. Until Sedgwick arrived, the 5th Corps formed the army’s reserve, and Meade positioned them around Powers Hill, a small knob that rose about 100 feet above the track of the Baltimore Pike, a mile north and east of the Round Tops. But under these new circumstances, George Meade’s first priority became getting Sykes and his 5th Corps moving to Sickles’ support, and it would be vital for “Slow Trot” Sykes to abandon his tardiness for once.

  The backbone of the 5th Corps was Romeyn Ayres’ three-brigade division—two of the brigades (under Hannibal Day and Sidney Burbank) were composed of ten regiments of the Regular U.S. Army. A second three-brigade division was commanded by James Barnes, filled with a medley of Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York regiments, along with one from Maine. The last division had only been attached to the 5th Corps on June 28th: they were Samuel Wylie Crawford’s two brigades’ worth of Pennsylvania Reserves, marching from the defenses of Washington to the rescue of their native state. Crawford had quite an unusual personal history with this war. His father was a Reformed Presbyterian minister (which is to say, exclusively psalm-singing Calvinist and militant abolitionist, too) who doggedly insisted on remaining in his pulpit in Chambersburg during the rebel occupation; Crawford himself had been the post surgeon at Fort Sumter in 1861, so that the war assumed for him the dimensions of a personal feud, “a conspiracy against God and humanity.” Ayres and Barnes were cut more along the model of Sykes. Romeyn Ayres was a tall, indolent New Yorker who managed to graduate solidly in the middle of the West Point class of 1847, while James Barnes, a West Point classmate of Robert E. Lee’s, had spent the previous twenty-two years before the war as an undistinguished railroad executive. Solemn, smiling, slightly puzzled, he was only in command of the division because its regular commander, Charles Griffin, was still recovering from Chancellorsville.1