Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  This moment was the beginning of an orgy of self-congratulation among the Pennsylvania Reserves which lasted through the life of every survivor and beyond. “No foe could withstand a charge impelled by hearts thus nerved to the combat,” boasted the first historian of the Reserves in 1865. But part of the ease of their success in stopping what had otherwise looked like a tidal wave must surely be, as one Maine officer objected, that “Wofford’s Georgians and Kershaw’s brigade had spent the force of their charge, were not an organized line, but were captured in squads representing many parts of regiments.” One of Tige Anderson’s captains testified that his “little band” had been “thinned and exhausted by three and a half hours’ constant fighting” and were too “worn out with fatigue” to continue their advance. Farther away, Longstreet’s staff believed that “Wofford’s men had seen that they were not protected or supported on the left, and had begun to retreat,” and that Longstreet’s and Wofford’s “personal appearance on the field” was all that prevented a panic among the Georgians.

  The other factor was, as Wofford ever afterward insisted, Longstreet’s orders. Lafayette McLaws had gone forward to keep track of the brigades of Semmes and Kershaw and “to correct some irregularities,” when he saw Wofford’s brigade—“General W. on his horse in rear of it”—coming back “from the woods, through which it had charged, and I halted it and asked what was the matter.” Wofford explained that “he had driven everything in his front” when “he was ordered back by General Longstreet.” Goode Bryan, a colonel of one of Wofford’s regiments, would “most positively assert that I received the order to fall back from a courier of General Longstreet.” There had been some discussion about “an effort … to get enough men together to charge Little Round Top,” but Longstreet’s orders put an end to it. The recall made Wofford “not only very much excited about it, but exceedingly angry.”44

  Longstreet never offered much in the way of an explanation for these orders. In his official report, he merely indicated that he “thought it prudent not to push farther.” He was more blunt thirteen years later, when he was under attack from Robert E. Lee’s paladins for the outcome of the battle, calling it “madness … to urge my men forward under these circumstances … and I withdrew them in good order.” He was at his most expansive in his posthumous autobiography in 1908, explaining that, as far as he could see and hear, “Meade’s lines were growing” while “the weight against us was too heavy to carry.” What was worse, he had heard nothing of the attack Dick Ewell was supposed to be launching little more than a mile away. And finally, time was running out. It was after eight o’clock and “the sun was down.” So, “I ordered recall of the troops … leaving picket lines near the foot of the Round Tops.”

  But Longstreet actually had a better reason than any of these for breaking off the attack of Wofford’s brigade, and that was, quite simply, that they had done all that they needed to do. The great swing up the Emmitsburg Road was being performed by the last of McLaws’ brigades and by the crushing weight of the division Longstreet had been lent by Powell Hill, and the battle should, before the passage of another hour and a half and the fall of darkness, have been over.45

  No one was more grateful for Longstreet’s order than the Pennsylvania Reserves. They had recaptured Houck’s Ridge with remarkably few casualties—20 men killed in the charge, out of 2,800 in the entire division—and they could afford to feel satisfied. As the fighting died down and the sun sank, one rebel who had been separated from his regiment and never got the word to pull back, came wandering, “unattended,” up into the lines of the 18th Massachusetts, one of William Tilton’s regiments from the 5th Corps. The 18th Massachusetts was composed mostly of volunteers from Wrentham and its surrounding towns. They had lost one out every five men in the regiment that afternoon—stabbing, shooting, breaking rifle butts over heads—and they could not have been in a good humor. But the situation of this solitary rebel, walking headlong at a whole regiment, was so ludicrous that they began falling down in laughter. “Hello, Johnnie,” someone cried. “You aren’t going to capture us all alone, are you?”46

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The supreme moment of the war had come

  Joseph Sherfy’s Peach Orchard

  Among the many questions which might have asked between seven and eight o’clock in the evening of July 2nd: Why was William Wofford’s brigade where it was? Wofford had been designated as the follow-up to Barksdale’s Mississippi brigade, supporting the Mississippians’ assault on Joseph Sherfy’s peach orchard and wheeling around behind them to follow the Emmitsburg Road toward Cemetery Hill. Yet Wofford’s brigade had appeared, rolling majestically past the peach orchard and down the wheat field lane, where only an hour before three of Kershaw’s regiments had been pounded to pieces by Federal artillery.

  The answer was simple enough: the peach orchard, as an outpost of Dan Sickles’ 3rd Corps, had ceased to exist.

  Deacon Sherfy owned two small-sized parcels of land, the larger of which straddled the Emmitsburg Road and wrapped around the intersection of the lane leading down to Rose’s wheat field. At this corner, Sherfy had built a highly successful operation in “canned and dried fruits,” which made the peach orchard he planted on the southeast corner of the intersection a landmark of sorts on Adams County’s 1858 survey map. The stumpy, thick-branched peach trees were arranged in rows on a seven-and-a-half-acre rectangle, and sat on a slight knob that gave an unobstructed view of the ground to the north (to Cemetery Hill) and to the southeast (to the stony ridge and the Rose farm). The knob was originally supposed to serve as the pivot point for the great wheel Longstreet’s corps would make up the Emmitsburg Road, and provide an extra bonus in the form of a platform for his artillery to cover them, since (as Lee afterward wrote) “our artillery could be used to advantage in assailing the more elevated ground beyond.”1

  Click here to see a larger image.

  Or would have, but for Dan Sickles. There were only six brigades in the 3rd Corps, and two of them (from David Birney’s division) were already broken beyond repair along the slanting line which ran from the stony ridge down to Devil’s Den. Birney’s third brigade, under Sickles’ old New York political crony Charles Graham, had been assigned to the peach orchard, two of its six Pennsylvania regiments on the south edge of the orchard, three more bent back northward at a right angle along the Emmitsburg Road, and the final one out on the skirmish line to the west of the Emmitsburg Road. But the other three brigades, which formed Andrew Humphreys’ division, were stretched out like thin rubber in a line along the Emmitsburg Road, from the peach orchard and past the Sherfy house and barn for more than half a mile, until their line ended, abruptly, just beyond the tiny one-story log house of Peter and Susan Rodgers. There could be no Confederate attack up the road until the peach orchard was in Confederate hands and that Yankee division on the road was destroyed.

  Not that Humphreys’ division posed much more of an obstacle to the Confederates than Birney’s had. Stacked along the Emmitsburg Road were the New York regiments of the Excelsior Brigade, Sickles’ old command and now directed by a Sickles acolyte, Col. William Brewster; to the right of the Excelsiors were the six regiments commanded by Brig. Gen. Joseph Carr, whose principal qualifications for a brigadier’s star lay entirely with his prewar service in the New York state militia and his political cultivation of Dan Sickles. (A captain in his brigade snorted that Carr was “well known for his cowardice,” and men in the ranks chuckled behind Carr’s back that “there won’t be any fighting while he leads the brigade.” A nasty rumor ran through the brigade that he “had taught dancing schools of a low character before the war,” which tempted the clowns to “call off” dance steps—“Eight and left,” “All promenade to the bar”—whenever Carr “rode by them.”)

  Humphreys kept his last brigade, under Col. George Burling, slightly to the rear of the other two as a reserve. But not even that would do much good now. Humphreys had been paring off regiments through the a
fternoon to shore up pressure points at Devil’s Den and the wheat field, and by late afternoon there were only three regiments left in Burling’s reserve. All told, Sickles may have had 5,000 men on the road (and farther forward as skirmishers) in Graham’s, Brewster’s, and Carr’s brigades, but they had to cover a frontage from the peach orchard to the Rodgers house which would have left only a single rank of men to hold the entire position. And that did nothing for the gap which yawned between Sickles and the 2nd Corps (on the right) or between the peach orchard and the stony ridge, which one of Régis de Trobriand’s regiments occupied thinly as a skirmish line.2

  Sickles tried to stiffen these paper-thin brigades with artillery borrowed from the Army of the Potomac’s artillery reserve. The 3rd Corps had only five batteries in its artillery brigade, so the army’s chief of artillery, Henry Hunt, gave Sickles a blank check to draw on the nineteen batteries of reserve artillery parked between Powers Hill and Little Round Top. One battery, Nelson Ames’ Battery G, 1st New York Light Artillery, with six 12-pounder Napoleons, was already on its way, and was making for the south side of the peach orchard. It was followed by an entire artillery brigade under a onetime sea captain, Freeman McGilvery, who brought up two batteries each of Napoleons and 3-inch Ordnance Rifles. One of McGilvery’s batteries joined Nelson Ames in the peach orchard; the others were spaced along the wheat field lane, facing south. It would be their job to hold the road down to the stony ridge by themselves.3

  It was these guns along the wheat field lane which kept three of Joseph Kershaw’s regiments of South Carolinians pinned down while the first attack on the stony ridge took place, and which fired a shell whose shrapnel ripped a gash in the leg of Paul Semmes when his Georgia brigade came up to support Kershaw. The batteries took Kershaw’s infantry very much in stride. One of them “opened with shell and case shot, firing slowly, first by gun, next by section, then by half battery, and once or twice by battery.” But as the afternoon stretched on, and Hood’s division, and then Kershaw’s and Semmes’ brigades, slowly crushed Birney’s division, the ammunition in the batteries’ limber chests began running low, starting in the peach orchard with Nelson Ames’ New York battery, whom Ames ordered “to shelter themselves until the enemy advanced to within canister range.” When Kershaw’s regiments tried to creep closer, the New Yorkers returned to their guns (and their canister) and “threw them into great confusion.” After that, their ammunition was completely gone, and they prepared to limber up the guns and head for the rear. “Some staff officer of General Sickles” found a battery belonging to the 5th Corps (Lt. Malbone Watson’s Battery I, 5th U.S.) to put in its place, but before they could move up, the “enemy commenced moving down our front and right in heavy columns, from 600 to 800 yards distant.” It was the Mississippi brigade of William Barksdale, and it was now about to flatten everything in its path.4

  Barksdale’s four Mississippi regiments contained just over 1,600 men, but their most colorful asset was William Barksdale himself. A big, fleshy caricature of a Southern politico, Barksdale had been one of the most violent secessionist fire-eaters in Congress in the 1850s. In 1858, he was involved in a full-scale brawl on the floor of the House of Representatives which featured “Congressman Barksdale’s wig” being “torn from his head.” Barksdale had no trouble obtaining a commission as colonel of the 13th Mississippi, and rose to command an all-Mississippi brigade in late 1862. But he did not have a particularly lengthy combat record; his best moment had been at Fredericksburg, contesting the Rappahannock river crossings. He had been slow getting his brigade deployed to move with Kershaw toward the stony ridge, and by the time he was ready, Longstreet was having second thoughts, and instead he allowed Wofford (who had originally been formed up behind Barksdale) to bring his men up to the line “on Barksdale’s right.”5

  This only made Barksdale more eager to get moving. “I wish you would let me go in, General,” he pleaded with Longstreet, pointing to one of the Federal batteries in the peach orchard, 600 yards away. “I would take that battery in five minutes.” Longstreet refused. “Wait a little,” he said, “we are all going in presently.” Getting nowhere with Longstreet, Barksdale appealed to McLaws “two or three times” for permission to attack, begging almost like a child, “General, let me go; General, let me charge!” Finally, at 6:30, Longstreet gave the go-ahead, and a jubilant Barksdale, “radiant with joy,” brought his four regiments out of the treeline and took them forward. Wigless and hatless, Barksdale rode “fifty yards in front of his brave boys,” and his bald pate and long white hair, streaming behind him, reminded one of McLaws’ staffers of lines from Macaulay’s Ivry.

  And if my standard-bearer fall, as fall full well he may,

  For never saw I promise yet of such a bloody fray,

  Press where ye see my white plume shine, amidst the ranks of war,

  And be your oriflamme to-day, the helmet of Navarre.6

  The Mississippi brigade drove forward at the double-quick and “literally rushed the goal,” yipping the rebel yell “with the savage courage of baited bulls.” They struck the peach orchard squarely on its angle, the 21st Mississippi wrapping around to crush the south side of the orchard, and the remaining three regiments rolling straight for Graham’s brigade. Three of Graham’s regiments moved to the east side of the road to support one of the 3rd Corps artillery batteries beside the Sherfy barn, but they did not stay there long. As the Mississippians advanced “to within 40 yds,” the 68th Pennsylvania, which “formed an angle fronting on the pike,” was first to fold. Hit from two sides, the 68th crumbled “retiring slowly and contesting the ground inch by inch.” Next to go was the 114th Pennsylvania, whose gaudy Zouave uniforms promptly began littering the yard around the Sherfy barn, windmill, and canning house. “Every door, window and sash of the Sherfy house was shivered to atoms” and the barn was “riddled like a sieve from base to roof.” George Gerald, the major of the 18th Mississippi, led a surge up to the barn, kicked in the barn door, “and within less than two minutes we had killed, wounded or captured every man in the barn.”

  The battery the Zouaves had tried to save—Battery E, 1st Rhode Island Light Artillery—had a long association with the regiment, but there was nothing to do for them now. The battery’s commander, Lt. John Bucklyn, lost “nearly one-half of our horses and one third of our men were either killed or wounded,” and Bucklyn was reduced to hauling off his guns by their prolonge ropes. As they pulled back, a domino effect overcame Graham’s last two regiments on the Emmitsburg Road—the 57th Pennsylvania and 105th Pennsylvania—who only “checked the advancing rebels for a few minutes” and then came unstitched and ran like the rest. (At the last moment, an officer in the 57th Pennsylvania remembered that he had posted a fifteen-man detail inside the Sherfy buildings; anxious not to leave them behind, he bolted into the Sherfy house, up the stairs, and “ran from one room to another” to get them out before the Confederates closed in.)7

  In the peach orchard itself, “showers of branches fell from the peach trees” and made pulp of the near-ripe fruit. Three Union regiments—Graham’s 141st Pennsylvania, the 2nd New Hampshire from George Burling’s reserve, and the orphaned 3rd Maine—were holding the south-facing boundary of the orchard, and, since “the foliage of the peach orchard screened” the infantry, occasionally, “an officer would … saunter out … to take in the situation.” But the confidence of these mismatched regiments could not have been very high. It was not that they lacked for numbers: together, they probably had about 1,000 men, whereas Barksdale may have had not more than 1,600, which should have made for a fairly even fight. But numbers are rarely the deciding consideration. The French veteran of the Crimea Ardant du Picq learned from experience that “four brave men who do not know each other will not dare to attack a lion,” but “four less brave, but knowing each other well, sure of their reliability and consequently of mutual aid, will attack resolutely. There is the science of the organization of armies in a nutshell.” And what told fatally against
Graham’s regiment in the peach orchard was that none of them had ever fought side by side before.

  Standing in the line of battle, the Civil War soldier needed to know one thing above all others—that the men on either side of him would not run. “There is a profound and mysterious gratification to the reciprocal agreement to protect another person with your life,” writes Sebastian Junger, the modern journalist, “and combat is virtually the only situation in which that happens regularly.” A soldier sandwiched between two strangers will be constantly checking to the right and the left to make sure he is not left alone, and if he senses weakening and hesitation, the soldier will at once begin to look to his own safety. Men begin to waver, drop back by ones and twos, then turn and walk away or bolt at high speed, and in short order an entire brigade can go to pieces.8