Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

But the closer the Confederate lines approached, the more difficult it was for Smith to avoid overshooting, until “we could hear the charges of canister passing over us with the noise of partridges in flight.” The Confederate infantry, “marching in line of battle at a brisk gait,” easily pushed back Hiram Berdan’s U.S. Sharpshooters, the 4th Alabama edging ahead and driving them “with the bayonet.” The ground now turned sharply upward toward Devil’s Den, and after pausing near the base of the ridge for a few minutes to re-form the line, the Confederates began swarming over the “rough and rugged” ground toward the crest of Houck’s Ridge and Devil’s Den. “A stake-and-rider fence” stood in the path of the 5th Texas, and one captain called out, “Ten dollars to the first man who gets over that fence.” Two of them climbed over it together, but there was no record afterward “whether they got” the reward “or not,” especially since Ward’s brigade now stood up and opened fire and a “sheet of flame burst from the rocks less than a hundred yards away.” The 1st Texas and 3rd Arkansas were temporarily halted in their tracks, which gave Ward’s regiments a chance to reload and get off another volley. But George Branard, the color-bearer of the 1st Texas, “called upon his color guard to follow him, and, mounting the rocks, dashed toward the Yankee lines.” A shell from one of Smith’s guns blew off the top of Branard’s flagstaff and laid him “unconscious on the ground,” but the rest of the Texans scrambled up the ridge behind him, working up the rough incline “very slowly, only a few feet at a time.”14

  Drawn up along Houck’s Ridge were John Ward’s 99th Pennsylvania, 20th Indiana, and the 86th and 124th New York (nicknamed the “Orange Blossoms,” from upstate Orange County). This line butted against Smith’s battery on Devil’s Den, and a fifth regiment, the 4th Maine, was posted on the other side of the battery, where Devil’s Den fell away amid the boulders and monoliths. They did not have many illusions about holding their position. Ward’s regiments had “but a single line of battle unsupported.” In the ravine behind them which led up to Little Round Top, there was (as far as any of them knew) nothing but “a herd of horned cattle,” while in front of them they could see “four distinct lines of battle” whose “superiority in numbers, seen at a glance, seemed overwhelming.” The colonel of the Orange Blossoms, Augustus Van Horne Ellis, tried to launch a spoiling attack of his own, downhill at the 1st Texas. The major of the regiment, twenty-three-year-old James Cromwell, led the charge, mounted and whirling “his sword twice above his head.” But all Cromwell achieved for his efforts was to get himself shot out of the saddle, and in short order the 124th was brutally hurled back.

  The 1st Texas now began to overrun Smith’s battery, while Smith pled for the milling Union infantrymen to save his guns. The gunners fought off the Texans with anything they could use for a weapon, including their rammers. The 4th Maine and 99th Pennsylvania quickly evicted the attackers (the colonel of the 4th Maine said he would “never forget” the deadly metallic click made by the locking ring of his men’s bayonets as they were fixed for the attack). But there was not much more of this they could take. Smith’s gunners were down to using “canister without sponging” out the gun barrels to extinguish lingering sparks. The color sergeant of the 99th, who survived despite thirteen bullet holes in his clothing and losing every other member of the color guard, remembered being “frightened almost to death,” and he “prayed as I never prayed before or since.”15

  David Birney now began to obey the logic Lee and Longstreet imposed by their method of attack: Birney peeled off the 40th New York (a regiment from de Trobriand’s brigade), and begged the 6th New Jersey from Humphreys’ division out at the Emmitsburg Road, both moving down through the ravine toward Devil’s Den. They never made it. Before Ward could find them a position in which to shore up his line, “a heavy battle line” of Confederate infantry appeared at the other end of the ravine—the 44th and 48th Alabama, along with Henry Benning’s Georgia brigade. “Give them hell,” roared Benning, a former Georgia Supreme Court justice and secession hotspur in 1861, “give them hell”—which it afforded the 17th Georgia “the utmost pleasure” to do. Confederate officers, in the frenzy, threw aside their swords and picked up rifles. Even Longstreet’s artillery chief, James Walton, “got a gun from a fallen Confederate and went into the fight,” his “face powder-stained from biting off the cartridges.” Ward saw the end coming, and dragged his bloodied regiments northward along Houck’s Ridge, the 4th Maine bringing up the rear. But there was not much left after this battering: Smith’s four guns atop Devil’s Den were lost and the 124th New York had “hardly more than a skirmish-line left” on its feet. The howling Confederates, “leaping to and fro from boulder to boulder,” rushed over the abandoned ridge, prodding away “between 140 and 200 prisoners” and sending up the “music of the unmistakable Confederate yell.”16

  The too-late 40th New York and 6th New Jersey tried to hold the ground down in the ravine alongside the two remaining Parrotts that James Smith had parked there before the fighting began. “The Alabamians’ battle flag drops three different times from the effect of our canister,” Smith wrote. “Thrice their line wavers and seeks shelter in the woods.” But once Benning’s Georgia brigade had secured the top of Devil’s Den, Smith’s remaining gunners were caught in a crossfire from in front and from above, and they, too, joined the pullback “through the woods.” The left flank of Dan Sickles’ ill-starred 3rd Corps line was gone, and the jubilant rebels could at last execute their pivot northward and begin the steady roll-up of the Army of the Potomac, straight toward Cemetery Hill. It was then that they noticed, for the first time, the appearance of Union infantry above them, on the lip of Little Round Top.17

  Little Round Top

  While he waited for troops to show up on Little Round Top, Gouverneur Warren was joined there by a trickle of the curious and the constrained. Daniel Klingel, who fled his log house on the Emmitsburg Road when the 3rd Corps took up positions around it, was waylaid by one of Warren’s staffers, who took him up on Little Round Top to identify the “names of roads, distances” for Warren. A correspondent for the New York Herald mounted the hill to watch as Hood’s division “came out … and silently but swiftly moved down upon us.” As the fighting erupted, the lines were enveloped in a “canopy of smoke” and the declining sun on the western horizon “gleamed … like a fiery furnace.” Thomas Hyde, who had been sent ahead by John Sedgwick to confirm the route of the 6th Corps, rode up to “a little rocky crest” on Little Round Top, and “borrowing a glass from the signal officer,” was “able to distinguish much moving about of troops and artillery.” Descending to the rear of the hill, Hyde was surprised to encounter one of the 6th Corps’ sutlers, staggering drunk, who was nearly blown to perdition by a shell that “shrieked … with more than usually fiendish noise.” The inebriated sutler grinned lopsidedly at Hyde, put “his hand up to his ear,” and croaked, Listen to the mocking-bird.18

  Warren appeared to the Herald reporter to be “cool and undisturbed, watching with his glass the distant woods, and anxiously scanning the forests at our left.” He had good reason, since at least two of McIvor Law’s Alabama regiments had disappeared into the woods at the base of Big Round Top, and if they wheeled and came up the south slope of Little Round Top, there would be nothing to prevent them from going straight over the hill and into the rear of the 3rd Corps. But the only Federal troops who showed up were artillerymen—Lt. Charles Edward Hazlett’s Battery D, 5th U.S. Artillery, which was attached to the 5th Corps, and had been following in the rear of Barnes’ division as they lumbered out of their bivouac around Powers Hill to Sickles’ rescue. At some point, the 5th Corps artillery chief, Augustus Martin, suggested to Hazlett that “there might be a good position for a battery on the summit of the hill if we could reach it, though it seemed somewhat doubtful from the rough and rocky appearance of the westerly slope.” So, accompanied by “an officer” who “rode up and said, ‘Battery D, this way,’ ” Hazlett’s horses, caissons, and six big 10-pounder Parrot
t rifles peeled out of the division column and headed for Little Round Top.19

  How they would get to the crest was even more of a problem for artillery than for infantry. The logging trails up the east face of the hill offered one possibility, but it meant “whips and spurs vigorously applied” to the horses in front, and rounding up “stragglers from the Third Corps” to push and lift from behind. The usual procedure for getting guns up a steep incline like this was to “fox-wedge” them—cutting posts and jamming them into rocks, and looping cables around the guns for “a company of infantry” to haul them forward, pulley-wise. But Hazlett had neither time nor men for by-the-book procedures. The battery’s caissons were parked at the foot of Little Round Top, and one by one the pieces were driven, manhandled, and shoved “by hand and handspike” through the trees and up the slope. Once the first gun got to the top, two more problems presented themselves: first, the crest of Little Round Top was only a rocky spine which would let Hazlett’s guns train in only one direction, westward. Woe betide them if the rebels came up the hill on the left. Second, Hazlett’s Parrott rifles were (like James Smith’s New York battery on Devil’s Den) lovely for long-distance purposes, but they would be nearly useless if Confederate infantry came swarming up the hill at close range, under the barrels of his guns. Warren was glad enough to see Hazlett, but frank enough to tell him that this “was no place for efficient artillery fire—both of us knew that.” Hazlett waved him away. “ ‘Never mind that,’ he replied, ‘the sound of my guns will be encouraging to our troops and disheartening to the others, and my battery’s no use if this hill is lost.’ ”20

  Click here to see a larger image.

  Sitting “on his horse on the summit of the hill,” wearing a white straw hat and “pointing with his sword towards the enemy,” Hazlett seemed to Warren “the impersonation of valor and heroic beauty.” But if he was to hold on to Little Round Top, Warren needed infantry and not just valor and beauty, and finally losing what was left of his patience, Warren took himself and the last of his staffers down the hill to find them himself. He missed, by what must have been minutes, precisely the infantry he had been praying for—Strong Vincent’s brigade, bolting up the paths on the far side of Little Round Top. What Vincent saw when he reached the lower end of the crest was far from comforting: “Devil’s Den was a smoking crater,” and the ravine which separated Devil’s Den from Little Round Top “was a whirling maelstrom.” Ward’s men along the stony ridge, some 500 yards beyond them, “formed again and went to the ridge among the bowlders, disappeared into the woods, stayed a few minutes, and then, like a shattered wreck upon the foaming sea, came drifting to the rear.”

  Of Vincent’s four regiments, the 44th New York led the way, followed by Vincent’s own 83rd Pennsylvania, the 20th Maine, and finally the 16th Michigan. Vincent placed the 16th Michigan on the right, where they would line up below the first of Charles Hazlett’s guns, as they were rolled one by one into position; beside the Michiganders, “in a semi-circle formation” that curled around the south face of Little Round Top, were the 44th New York, then the 83rd Pennsylvania; on the very end of the brigade and facing south toward Big Round Top was the 20th Maine, commanded by a man who, up till a year before, had been a professor of rhetoric at Bowdoin College, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Vincent, who had been in such a hurry that he didn’t bother unstrapping his sword from his saddle, but went into action armed with nothing more threatening than a riding crop, dressed the lines of the 20th Maine and solemnly warned, “I place you here! This is the left of the Union line. You understand. You are to hold this ground at all costs.” You, at this moment, included everyone who could stand up: “Pioneers and provost guard” were “sent … to their companies,” drummer boys “seized the musket,” and “the cooks and servants not liable to such service asked to go in.” Even Vincent’s brigade bugler dismounted, took up a rifle, and found a place on the line.21

  They did not have long to wait. “The brigade had scarcely formed line of battle and pushed forward its skirmishers” when the pop-pop of Confederate skirmishers could be heard from the woods at the base of Big Round Top, and quickly “three columns”—two regiments each of McIvor Law’s Alabamians and the third composed of the 4th and 5th Texas—“approached.” The 47th Alabama pressed to “within fifteen yards” of the 83rd Pennsylvania, before going to ground “behind the rocks” and keeping up “a deadly fire upon our troops.” Over on the left of the line, Chamberlain and the 20th Maine could see the rebels filtering through the woods “in rear of their line engaged,” trying to curl around the end of his last company. Chamberlain “stretched my regiment to left,” the men opening intervals of “3 to 5 paces” between themselves and bending their line back so that the left of the 20th Maine “was nearly at right angles with my right.” The Alabamians came up “in three lines on a double-quick … with bayonets fixed,” with the heaviest weight of the attack hitting the 83rd Pennsylvania and 44th New York in the center. There was one coordinated volley—“most destructive to our line,” wrote a soldier in the 5th Texas—and “for the first time in the history of the war,” the Texans began to “waver.”

  In front of Chamberlain’s 20th Maine, the Alabamians caught their wind, and “pushed up to within a dozen yards of us before the terrible effectiveness of our fire compelled them to break and take shelter.” A soldier in the 44th New York saw a Confederate officer take off “his coat, and swinging it over his head … ran directly in the rear of the line as fast as he could go from one end of it to the other, pushing and urging his men right up to … the very face and teeth of our men on the slope of the hill.” The powder smoke became so thick in the woods that the major of the 20th Maine could at first only see the legs of the Confederates. Theodore Gerrish remembered “how rapidly the cartridges were torn from the boxes and stuffed in the smoking muzzles of the guns; how the steel rammers clashed and clanged in the heated barrels; how the men’s hands and faces grew grim and black with burning powder,” all of it joining in “a terrible medley of … shouts, cheers, groans, prayers, curses, bursting shells, whizzing rifle-bullets, and clanging steel.”22

  The Alabamians came again, breaking into Chamberlain’s lines and making the fight “literally hand-to-hand.” The Alabamians were pushed back again, and the Maine men pounced on ammunition and weapons from any “disabled friend or foe on the field.” At last, the Alabamians gathered themselves “in two lines in echelon by the right” for a fourth try, and “came on as if they meant to sweep everything before them,” shrieking the rebel yell. Chamberlain beat them to the punch. Fixing bayonets, Chamberlain launched a spoiling attack of his own (like that of the 124th New York at Devil’s Den) with the bayonet, “and with one yell of anguish wrung from its tortured heart, the regiment charged.” The surprise of it rocked the Alabamians back on their heels. “In this charge the bayonet only was used on our part,” wrote Chamberlain four days later, “& the rebels seemed so petrified with astonishment that their front line scarcely offered to run or to fire.” The company Chamberlain had detached to cover his left now swung around and added their fire into the fleeing Alabamians, and that “cleared the front” so completely that Chamberlain had to restrain his jubilant men from pursuing the rebels “to Richmond.”23

  Things did not go nearly so well along the rest of Vincent’s brigade line. “Repeated charges were made on the center of the brigade” and at moments the fighting degenerated into “a terrible, close bayonet fight.” It reminded a man in the 4th Texas of “Indian fighting” more “than anything I experienced during the war.” John Stevens, in the 5th Texas, remembered that “the enemy in front … were not over 25 or 30 paces from us,” and the Texans ended up firing off some “10 or 12” volleys, one after another. Waving his riding crop in the air, Strong Vincent was shouting, “Don’t yield an inch now men or all is lost,” when a bullet ripped into his groin. (He was done for this battle and all other battles, and would die five days later in Lewis Bushman’s farmhouse.) But they we
re yielding. The 48th Alabama and the 4th Texas began edging around the right flank of the 16th Michigan, and finally the Michiganders began to crack. The lieutenant colonel, Norval Welch, and the color party of the 16th Michigan drifted backward, and then stumbled down the reverse slope of Little Round Top. The Texans had lost all order climbing up the rock-strewn slope, “occasionally pulling each other up on account of the rocks.” But at that moment the way was open for the Texans to “overlap, and turn” the entire length of Vincent’s line and Little Round Top with it.24

  And then, over the crest of the hill, led by a sword-waving officer in muttonchop whiskers, ran Union soldiers, companies A and G of the 140th New York, piling into the unprepared Texans from the north end of Little Round Top. They were the men Gouverneur Warren had gone looking for.

  A year earlier, Warren had been busy commanding a brigade in the 5th Corps, in the days when George McClellan’s closest friend, Fitz-John Porter, had been the corps commander. And when Warren came madly loping down the north face of Little Round Top on that late July afternoon, it was his old brigade, now under the acting command of Stephen Weed, which he met on the road at the base of Little Round Top, heading to the relief of Dan Sickles. Directly in his path was the rear regiment of the brigade, the 140th New York, commanded by Patrick O’Rorke. “Paddy” O’Rorke was born in County Cavan, Ireland, but in 1836 his parents brought him to Canada with them as a small child, finally emigrating again to Rochester, New York, in the 1840s. When his father died in 1850, O’Rorke was left the principal breadwinner of his family. But he won a city-wide college scholarship competition in 1855, and then a place at West Point in 1857. Less than 2 percent of the ranks of West Point’s cadets were foreign-born. But O’Rorke placed at or near the top in every department but languages, and was commissioned into the Corps of Engineers in 1861. He circulated through a variety of staff duties until being named colonel of the 140th New York in the fall of 1862, and now his old brigade commander was bearing down on him, shouting something that startled O’Rorke.25