Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  The South Carolinians had an additional distraction: out of the smoke appeared Samuel Zook’s brigade on the north end of the ridge, followed some distance behind by the reappearance of the wayward brigades of Tilton and Sweitzer. Caldwell himself rode up to Sweitzer “in great haste,” jubilantly announcing that his division “was driving the enemy like Hell over yonder in the woods … and asked if I would give him the support of my brigade.” Most of these Yankees could hardly see where they were going: a soldier in the 32nd Massachusetts found “the powder smoke … so thick in front of the rebel ranks as to make them invisible to us,” and sergeants who were supposed to be guiding their advance from the flank had to navigate “by the jets of smoke and flame just where the muzzles of their guns were.”30 Then, with exquisite timing, the 800 men of John Brooke’s brigade, whom Caldwell had kept back as his reserve, also swarmed into the wheat field, through a gap between the 61st New York and the Irish Brigade. They pressed down upon the remaining pieces of Kershaw’s rebels on the ridge (as well as mingled bits of Georgians and the errant 15th South Carolina), although like Tilton’s and Sweitzer’s men, Brooke’s brigade had only the dimmest idea of where they were going, because “a dense pall of smoke, from the heavy fire of musketry, hung so close to the ground … that nothing could be seen 15 yards away.” The 140th Pennsylvania had to grope forward “until we saw a blaze of light in front” that betrayed the firing line. By 6:30, Brooke, the Irish Brigade, and Zook were “rapidly and irresistibly pushing back the enemy, driving them entirely” off the ridge and back to the Rose farm buildings; now the Federal troops could once more see the Emmitsburg Road in the distance.31

  This vision of recovered ground did not last for long—perhaps only twenty minutes, by John Brooke’s reckoning, a half-hour by Kershaw’s—and the price Caldwell’s division paid for it was steep. In retaking the Rose wheat field and the stony ridge, the division lost not only Edward Cross, but Samuel Zook as well. Zook shook out his brigade—the big 140th Pennsylvania in front in two lines and Zook’s old 57th New York, with the 52nd and 66th New York behind—and was leading them from the front line when “a minie ball entered the left side of the stomach, perforating his sword belt, and lodging in the spine.” A soldier in the 76th New York saw “the General lean back in his saddle pale as death and … they knew he was badly hurt as he never gave up for triffles.” Zook slipped slowly forward, caught in the arms of his adjutant, groaning, “It’s all up with me.” It was all up with a deadly percentage of Zook’s brigade, too. The 140th Pennsylvania marked down 263 casualties out of the 515 men with which it went into action; its colonel was dead, and “many of the companies … came out under the command of a sergeant.” Even more disorienting, “men from every regiment in the division were intermingled with ours in one confused mass.”

  It was no better in Brooke’s brigade, and for some, a good deal worse. The diminutive 27th Connecticut started the day with only two companies’ worth of men; in the wheat field they lost their commander, Henry Merwin, and their senior captain, Jedediah Chapman. “Our number by this time was reduced to less than half that started in the fray,” wrote a grimly proud Connecticut private, “but we had the flags with us.” Brooke, who had led his brigade with the colors of the 53rd Pennsylvania in his hands, found himself on the crest of the stony ridge with “my ammunition … nearly gone.”32

  Still, Brooke was convinced that “I could have held the place” with more ammunition, and Caldwell was relieved to see the heads of the next division of the 5th Corps—Romeyn Ayres’ division, with its two brigades of U.S. Regulars—coming up the wheat field lane from the east. But Brooke was far away from the 2nd Corps ordnance supplies, and every man in his brigade could see, a lot closer and in front of them, “the indistinct forms of masses of men, presenting the usual dirty, greyish, irregular line … dimly visible and moving up with defiant yells, while here and there the cross-barred Confederate battle-flags were plainly to be seen.” This was not just Kershaw’s South Carolinians on the rebound. Brooke spied “a heavy column of the enemy … coming upon my left,” while at almost the same moment the lieutenant colonel of the 140th Pennsylvania noticed “rebels, apparently fresh troops, in large numbers and in good order marching to outflank us on the right.” They had come at the summons of Joseph Kershaw, who had “hurried in person … 150 yards in my right rear” to find Paul Semmes and the brigade of Georgians which had been lined up behind Kershaw to follow the South Carolina brigade into the attack. Semmes “promptly responded to my call.” But “when I got to open ground” at the Rose farm buildings, Kershaw’s greatest delight was to see, sometime after seven o’clock, “Wofford coming in in splendid style.”33

  Click here to see a larger image.

  William Tatum Wofford was once described by James Seddon, the Confederate war secretary, as a “representative man”—a northern Georgia lawyer, a newspaper owner, of “high moral bearing … of the strictest sobriety, and, indeed, of irreproachable moral character.” A veteran of the Mexican War who had done a good deal more fighting than most of the Army Regulars, Wofford was also “very ambitious of military fame and one of the most daring of men,” not to mention possessing an uncanny resemblance to Robert E. Lee. He was also a painful example of the way secessionist politics had laid its snares in the Army of Northern Virginia. Wofford had been a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1860, and then to the Georgia state secession convention in January 1861, and in both venues Wofford set his face resolutely against secession. He “took the field as an anti-secession candidate to the secession convention,” and even after the war began, “he was a decided union man from first to last during the whole war.” Wofford saw “with exceptional prescience … the certain fatality” of secession, but once the deed was done, he closed ranks and was elected colonel of the first Georgia regiment to volunteer for the war. Nevertheless, he languished at regimental command of the 18th Georgia until 1863, always playing second fiddle to the more glamorous and favored John Bell Hood, and remained a brigadier till the end of the war.34

  But in the glorious late afternoon of July 2nd, Wofford drew everyone’s attention to himself. “Oh, he was a grand sight,” enthused a Confederate artillery officer as he watched Wofford’s Georgia Brigade—three full regiments and three battalions, over 1,600 men in all—move down the wheat field lane to strike the stony ridge, “and my heart is full now while I write of it.” The onlooking Yankees gaped in reluctant admiration: “They were marching steadily, with colors flying as though on dress parade, and guns at right-shoulder-shift.” Even Longstreet was exhilarated by the spectacle. “General Longstreet went forward some distance with Wofford’s brigade, urging them on by voice and his personal example.” (This horrified the British observer Arthur Fremantle, who was appalled that “Longstreet will expose himself in such a reckless manner … hat in hand, in front of everybody.”) Add to Wofford’s men the 1,300 Georgians in Paul Semmes’ brigade, plus what must have been at least 1,600 of Kershaw’s original 2,100 men, and the Union reoccupation of the stony ridge began at once to look very, very short-lived. “Coming on at a double quick the whole line as it advanced became heavily engaged … but Wofford’s brilliant advance struck the attacking force in their flank,” and “in a few minutes the blue whelps were tooling away.”35

  Kershaw’s left-wing regiments—the 2nd and 8th South Carolina and 3rd South Carolina Battalion—“met Gen’l. Wofford who pointed to his fresh troops and”—with a wave of his hat—“called upon them to go … with him, which they did.” Kershaw, leaving those regiments to Wofford’s direction, turned and rallied the two regiments which had retired to the Rose farm buildings—the 3rd and 7th South Carolina—and led them forward again against the stony ridge, while the wandering 15th South Carolina and Paul Semmes’ Georgia brigade came up behind them and lapped around the southern edge of the ridge.

  To his dismay, St. Clair Mulholland, in the Irish Brigade, also saw Wofford’s brigade “coming in on the right�
� in column “in battalion front.” In the directionless murk, several of the Federal officers were somehow “under the impression” that Wofford’s men “were Union troops.” Caldwell was also deceived: he had gone looking for Romeyn Ayres, and when he found him, one of Ayres’ staffers noticed an unseemly commotion up ahead in Caldwell’s division. “General, you had better look out, the line in front is giving way,” warned Ayres’ aide-de-camp, William Powell. Caldwell, annoyed at an interruption from a staff lieutenant, brushed him off, saying sharply, “That’s not so, sir, those are my troops being relieved.” Powell shut up for the moment, but he “continued to watch the line in front,” and in a few minutes he interrupted again, this time addressing Ayres: “You will have to look out for your command. I don’t care what any one says, those troops in front are running away.” Four hundred yards away, Ayres and Caldwell could now plainly see “our troops … retiring with their colors drooped,” and Ayres burst out, “Those regiments are being driven back … A regiment does not shut up like a jack-knife and hide its colors without it is retreating.” Abashed at the rebuke, Caldwell “put spurs to his horse and rode off.”36

  Crushed between the jaws of Wofford, Kershaw, and Semmes, the Irish Brigade, the dying Zook’s brigade, and then Brooke’s brigade, followed by Tilton’s, all began to collapse, streaming down off the stony ridge and back the way they had come through the wheat field. A lieutenant in the Irish Brigade noticed that Brooke’s brigade had “precipitately retired,” and “feeling deserted by the men on our left,” the Irish Brigade concluded that “nothing was left but to retire.” Sweitzer’s brigade had never actually made it all the way to the ridge, and it now stood in the wheat field as the boiling mass of refugees from Caldwell’s division foamed around it, struggling to provide cover against yet another Confederate onslaught from Anderson’s brigade. Tige Anderson himself had been wounded and his brigade was now being directed by the lieutenant colonel of the 11th Georgia. But the sheer weight of Southern numbers pushing on the south and west perimeter of the wheat field carried their own authority with them, and so for the third time that day, John Rose’s wheat field became a hellhole of combat.37

  This time, however, no one was making any pretence to it being deliberate or orderly. Hancock’s chief of staff, Charles Morgan, was returning from an errand to the 6th Corps when he was engulfed by “Caldwell’s division, or the remnants of it, flying to the rear, with no shadow of an organization.” On the flank of the Irish Brigade, St. Clair Mulholland and the 116th Pennsylvania were ready to “go forward and attack, if necessary a whole brigade of the enemy,” but presently “a staff officer” ran up and “in a very excited manner” shouted that “we were surrounded and to fall back and save as many of our men as possible.” Mulholland had the colors cased up, told his regiment that it was every man for himself, and with a party of “some thirty men,” darted down into the wheat field. Zook’s 140th Pennsylvania dissolved into “shattered fragments” and was “seen to fly” without any notion of “where our line would rally,” while the rest of Zook’s brigade “gave way … in considerable disorder.”

  As they fled, the remnants of the three 2nd Corps brigades barged into Jacob Sweitzer’s brigade, which was “greatly embarrassed by squads of men and parts of regiments, who, hurrying from the front, broke into and through my line.” One 5th Corps officer was a little less scathing: Caldwell’s division was not so much running as it was “moving sullenly to the rear at a walk.” But “very few of our men were firing—a man now and then would stop and take a shot,” and the “great mass” of “retreating soldiers” filled the entire wheat field in “no organized force, a mere mass of men, officers and men, inextricably mixed.” That included dead men—one Irish Brigade officer remembered keenly how “that plain as I came over it close to the colors of our regiment was rapidly becoming encumbered with the bodies of dead & wounded men.”38

  Caught in the open in the wheat field, Sweitzer’s brigade tried to slow down the Confederate pursuit, but it swiftly came down to a close-order melee of rushes and counterrushes, none with the slightest hope of doing more than buying a little time. “It was give-and-take with them,” wrote a 2nd Corps staff officer, “no quarter being shown on either side.” One of Sweitzer’s colonels, a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer named Harrison Jeffords of the 4th Michigan, saw the regiment’s flag fall, to be picked up by a Confederate. Jeffords and two fellow officers, Michael Vreeland and Watson Seage, impulsively rushed forward to retrieve the colors. Jeffords grabbed the staff, Seage slashed the neck of the rebel with his sword, “killing him instantly,” and a lethal brawl broke out in which the flag was “torn to shreds.” But numbers overwhelmed valor, and Jeffords was mortally wounded “by bayonet thrust through the body,” while his two friends were shot down, “side by side.”39

  “Gallantly our men swept the enemy before them,” wrote Lafayette McLaws to his wife five days later, chasing them toward Houck’s Ridge “with great slaughter” and with “the enemy in crowds running to our lines” as prisoners. There was still Romeyn Ayres’ two brigades of Regulars to deal with, and they moved across Houck’s Ridge and the southern edge of Rose’s wheat field “in column of battalions, closed en masse, but marching as steadily as though on parade.” The Regulars “cheered and broke into a run towards the enemy.” But the cheers “were in the nature of shrieks.” They knew what they were running into. “Any of you who have had the nightmare and attempted to scream and could not,” wrote one survivor, “can imagine the reason we could not give forth good lusty hurrahs instead of shrieks.”

  Ayres’ plan had been “to move forward and sweep through and occupy the woods in my front.” But he had no sooner given the orders when Wofford’s relentless column appeared, “coming down on my rear from the right.” After a spectacularly sharp firefight with Wofford’s brigade along Houck’s Ridge, the Regulars, too, joined the general drift “in as good an order as the nature of the ground would admit,” across the wheat field lane and toward Cemetery Hill. As good an order, according to Romeyn Ayres: to an onlooker, it looked more like Ayres’ Regulars had been reduced to “fragments of regiments … running back without arms, and behind them in solid column over the wheat field and through the woods came the masses of the enemy.” To another onlooker, it seemed as though “the late afternoon sun” had become “a red ball of fire … through the sulphurous canopy that overhung the valley.”40 Sulphurous canopy—how often these soldiers came back to that phrase. But it was not theirs alone; it was a snatch from a popular war poem written six decades before, and it reveals something of the hyperliteracy of mid-nineteenth-century Americans that their almost-unconscious frame of reference for describing battle was poetry.

  … but scarce yon level sun

  Can pierce the war-cloud rolling dun,

  Where furious Frank and fiery Hun

  Shout, mid’ their sulphurous canopy.

  THOMAS CAMPBELL,

  “On the Battle of Hohelinden” (July 1803)

  If ever there was a moment for Longstreet’s corps to have begun the long-planned for pivot to the left which would finally bring it astride the Emmitsburg Road and make the straight path to Cemetery Hill plain, this was it. A gigantic wheel executed now would allow Wofford to swing from column into line, backed up by Kershaw and Semmes, and by whatever of Henry Benning’s and Tige Anderson’s brigades were in sufficiently good shape to join them, all pointed northward at last on the east side of the Emmitsburg Road. But the Army of the Potomac—and George Sykes’ 5th Corps—had one more ace to play, and that was the last of Sykes’ divisions, the newly attached Pennsylvania Reserves, under the muttonchopped doctor and Sumter veteran Samuel Wylie Crawford.41

  Actually, Crawford had only one brigade of Reserves to fight with—the other, under Joseph Fisher, was held back as the 5th Corps’ last resort—and part of the reason it had taken them so long to come over from Powers Hill was the mounting numbers of 3rd Corps and 5th Corps “wounded walking to the rear and ambula
nces going the same way.” (Among those wounded was the dying Stephen Weed, being carried by “a party of officers and men,” followed by another detail with the body of Charles Hazlett.) Crawford had about 1,500 men, and he was now backed up by two 5th Corps batteries, Lt. Aaron Walcott’s Battery C, 3rd Massachusetts, with six deadly short-range Napoleons, and Capt. Frank Gibbs’ Battery L, 1st Ohio, with another six Napoleons.

  As the Reserves cleared the north base of Little Round Top near eight o’clock, Crawford formed them up in two big lines, with the 6th and 1st Reserves in the front and the 13th and 2nd Reserves “massed on the first” (a stray regiment from Fisher’s brigade, the 11th Reserves, “united itself to and fought with” the front line). Gibbs’ Ohio battery had been ordered by Sykes “to cover the valley” between Houck’s Ridge and Little Round Top, and to get the most out of his guns, Gibbs split the battery into three sections, two guns low on the north slope of Little Round Top (which the crews had to “place … in position by hand”) and the other two astride the wheat field lane. “We had hardly placed our guns in position when the Fifth Corps was forced back by a terrific charge of Longstreet’s corps.” They had to wait until the “confused masses” of fugitives had cleared past them to see skirmishers lapping up to the foot of Little Round Top, and behind them, “the irregular, yelling line of the enemy.” Then the gunners got to work “with double charges of canister,” fired so rapidly that the bronze Napoleons “became too hot to lay a hand on.”42

  Now it was the turn of Crawford’s Reserves. “The enemy in masses were coming … across the low ground towards the hills upon which we stood,” Crawford recalled, while the broken shards of the Regulars “were flying … in every direction.” Crawford ordered the Reserves forward until only fifty yards separated the Reserves from the Confederate skirmish line. “The first line delivered two volleys,” and then Crawford—like Ellis and the 124th New York, and Chamberlain and the 20th Maine—called for yet another last-hope spoiling charge. “With the peculiar shout of the Reserves,” Crawford led his Pennsylvanians forward “in the name of Pennsylvania,” shaking them out into a single double line of five regiments. Mounted on a “spirited” bay, Crawford reached theatrically for the colors of the 1st Reserves, intending to carry them himself. The corporal of the color guard unceremoniously yanked the flag back, which should have been enough to settle Crawford’s mind. Instead, the floridly bewhiskered general demanded the flag with injured authority: “Don’t you know me? I am your General. Give me your colors.” The corporal reluctantly surrendered the flag, but he grabbed Crawford’s pants leg and stayed with him, as though waiting for the general to issue a receipt. While this little drama was being played out, the surprised Confederates “endeavored for a moment to stand, but soon broke beneath the impetuous charge, and fled in disorder” back over Houck’s Ridge and into the wheat field.43