That was the price now paid by Graham and his men. The 2nd New Hampshire watched the Mississippians approach in “a compact mass of humanity” to “within point-blank range,” where they fired a staggering volley. Thirty men out of the 209 in the 141st Pennsylvania went down, and as they pulled back from the perimeter of the orchard, the colonel, Henry J. Madill, “takes up the rent, shot-pierced flag and bears it from the field.” The 3rd Maine collapsed next, caught between Barksdale’s Mississippians on their front and flank. “It literally melted away,” wrote a survivor. “Every man of the color-guard was either killed or wounded” and “in a short time, measured by minutes, a third at least of the one hundred and fifty men” in the regiment were down. The 2nd New Hampshire went last, under “a perfect hail of metal.” The remaining artillery in the peach orchard—James Thompson’s Pennsylvania battery of 3-inch Ordnance Rifles—“were pounced upon, and half of them taken in a trice, whilst the others limbered up and made off.”9
Trying to stem the collapse by his own personal example, Charles Graham rode into the morass of Federal soldiers, had one horse shot dead underneath him, mounted his adjutant’s horse, lost his bearings, and then mistook “a line of men … seen approaching from the flank” for reinforcements. They were actually Mississippians, and when they called on him to stop, Graham wheeled around and defiantly shouted, “I won’t surrender. I’m a Brigadier General, and I won’t surrender.” The Mississippians, unimpressed, shot Graham’s mount from under him a second time, “which in falling rolled upon the General, holding him as in a vise, in which condition he was captured by the enemy.” Nor was Graham the only one. “As our onrushing line sped down the slope from the Peach Orchard … many of the enemy were outstripped and left behind as prisoners.” One of them, curiously, took the moment to shake his captors’ hands and compliment them on “the most splendid charge of the war.”10
Nervously, the New Yorkers in William Brewster’s brigade along the Emmitsburg Road looked to their left and saw Graham’s brigade “melting away through the smoke, and our wounded in hundreds … streaming back over the Emmitsburg Road, and riderless horses went dashing among them in bewilderment and fright.” Andrew Humphreys could also see how easily the disintegration of Graham’s brigade would expose his own division, and he hurriedly rallied the last regiment of George Burling’s reserve brigade and tried to lay down a new line perpendicular to the Emmitsburg Road before the Mississippians swung leftward to grasp the flank of his division. Humphreys might have stood a chance if Barksdale had listened to the advice of two of his colonels who, “covered with dust and blackened from the smoke of battle,” tried to talk the fiery Mississippian into stopping to reorganize. But Barksdale was having none of it: “No! Crowd them—we have them on the run. Move your regiments.”
To add more punch to Barksdale, Longstreet seized this moment to order Porter Alexander, who had been directing the artillery firing on Sherfy’s peach orchard, to take forward a full battalion of artillery—six batteries’ worth, including the four 24-pounder howitzers of George Moody’s Madison Artillery—to the newly captured peach orchard and set up shop. This was the sort of order Alexander lived for, and forward they all went, “some cannoneers mounted, some running by the sides,” all of them “in a general race and scramble to get there first” and begin pummeling Humphreys’ division along the Emmitsburg Road. The only obstacles were the omnipresent fence lines, but one of the battalion officers corralled “several hundred” Yankee prisoners and ordered them “with an oath” to pull down the fences. “The frightened prisoners rushed at them, and, each man grabbing a rail, the fences literally flew into the air.”11
At that moment, it seemed to both Barksdale and Humphreys that the entire Federal left flank was caving in, that the road to Cemetery Hill was yawning open, and that the most complete victory of the war was beckoning to them. For the first time that afternoon, a Confederate brigade was obeying the original directive to wheel left at the Emmitsburg Road and drive northward, as Barksdale’s troops slowly shifted direction. “Brave Mississippians, one more charge and the day is ours,” bawled the exuberant Barksdale, with his sword upraised “at an angle of forty-five degrees,” as though striking the perfect military tableau. “When I saw their line broken & in retreat,” wrote Porter Alexander, “I thought the battle was ours,” and he exultantly waved his artillerymen into position on the north side of the peach orchard with the promise that “we would ‘finish the whole war this afternoon.’ ”12
Just 600 yards north, Andrew Atkinson Humphreys’ spirits sank in direct proportion as Alexander’s and Barksdale’s rose. “For the moment, I thought the day was lost,” and with it, Humphreys’ own career. Humphreys was a West Pointer, graduating two years after Robert E. Lee, and perhaps the best engineer officer in the prewar army. (He was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in 1857 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1863.) Humphreys had been a devoted member of McClellan’s staff on the Peninsula, and rose meteorically to division command in the fervently McClellanite 5th Corps in September 1862. (His “special aide,” Carswell McClellan, was George McClellan’s nephew.) After Chancellorsville, Humphreys was put in charge of a division in Sickles’ 3rd Corps, where he had not been at all happy with the mincing bootlickers with which Sickles liked to surround himself. David Birney he loathed above all the others, and now the destruction of Birney’s division looked like it was about to drag him down with it.13
Humphreys’ improvised line could not have lasted long. The regimental chaplain of the 120th New York declared that they stood up to the Mississippians for “an hour or more,” but George Burling thought that “all the troops were forced back, in a few moments.” The likeliest guess is that Burling, along with help from Brewster’s Excelsiors, held on to their improvised line until 7:30, or about twenty minutes. All the while, stragglers from Graham’s brigade “passed through our lines” without stopping, gabbling all kinds of demoralizing predictions: It’s all up with us, boys and We are overpowered and My regiment is all gone and We did the best we could, but we could not whip the world. Rounds from Porter Alexander’s newly unlimbered artillery in the peach orchard were slicing into Brewster’s Excelsiors without much hindrance. A captain in the 120th New York was narrowly missed by a solid shot that tore away his haversack; and when he turned to make small talk of it, a second shot “came along and killed him.” Both Humphreys and Brewster “took positions personally in the rear of our lines, Humphreys, being mounted and Brewster on foot,” Humphreys “walking his horse up and down our line” and Brewster acting “as a file closer with our own line officers.” The colonel of the 120th New York tried to find out from Humphreys, “as we were pacing up and down the line behind,” if there was any help on the way, but “neither he nor Brewster” were “opening their mouths during that tedious combat.”14
The Excelsiors might have made a longer fight of it, but new troubles were already descending on them. At seven o’clock, the officer in charge of Joseph Carr’s skirmishers warned Andrew Humphreys that two more Confederate brigades were “deploying from the wood” in front of the Emmitsburg Road, and were coming across the fields in “three heavy lines of battle.”15
The destruction of Charles Graham’s brigade at the peach orchard and around the Sherfy house opened up the vulnerable flank of Humphreys’ division along the Emmitsburg Road. It also opened up the even more vulnerable line of artillery batteries which Sickles hoped would cover the open space to the left of the peach orchard, along the wheat field road. Ever since wheeling into line, these four batteries—Clark’s New Jersey battery, plus the three batteries from the artillery reserve under John Bigelow (9th Massachusetts), Charles Phillips (5th Massachusetts), and Patrick Hart (15th New York Light Artillery), had been having the day to themselves, keeping down the heads of Kershaw’s South Carolinians around the Rose farmhouse. Clark’s New Jersey battery estimated roughly that “in our front were over 120 dead from three South Car
olina regiments.” No wonder: Clark’s battery alone had fired off 1,342 rounds that afternoon. But the pressure had been slowly mounting, and by 6:30 Clark’s gunners were firing three tins of canister at a time to clear the ground on the other side of the wheat field lane. These four batteries were, in fact, “so intent upon our work that we noticed not” until Charles Phillips “happened to see our infantry falling back in the Peach orchard,” and Bigelow “saw that the Confederates (Barksdale’s Brigade) had come through and were forming a line 200 yards distant.”16
Freeman McGilvery, who had brought these batteries up from the artillery reserve, saw the peach orchard collapse, too, and coolly began arranging to pull the guns out of danger. Clark’s New Jersey battery was the first to go, followed by Patrick Hart’s four 12-pounder Napoleons. The retreating artillery teams careened through the last of George Burling’s reserve regiments, the 7th New Jersey, “causing … the right four companies” of the regiment “to separate from the line … to avoid being crushed to death by the reckless drivers of the battery.” McGilvery wanted Clark and Hart, followed by the others, to turn around 250 yards to the rear at another farm road that ran down to Abraham Trostle’s barn and set up again. But the drivers kept going for a full mile and completely out of the fight.17
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That left Bigelow and Phillips. Phillips ordered the limbers of his center and left sections reversed in preparation for hitching up, while the other section kept the rebels at bay, hoping to leap-frog backward until they all reached “Trostle’s house and go in battery there.” But “the enemy had by this time got through the Peach orchard” and shot down the horses and drivers of the right section, forcing Phillips to fix prolonge ropes to the guns and start them to the rear by hand. Now it was John Bigelow and the 9th Massachusetts battery alone on the wheat field road, and by the time McGilvery ordered Bigelow to “limber up and get out,” there was no time to do the first and not much chance of the second apart from imitating Phillips and dragging off the guns by prolonge. Still, Bigelow managed to get all six of his guns back to the Trostle farm. All that he found there, however, was a desperate Freeman McGilvery, his horse bleeding from four bullet wounds. “Major McGilvery came to me,” Bigelow recalled, “and said that for 4 or 500 yards in my rear there were no troops.” What was left of the 3rd Corps was fighting for its life up along the Emmitsburg Road, the 5th Corps had been mangled division by division, and Caldwell’s division of the 2nd Corps had long since disappeared in the smoky chamber of the wheat field, with only clumps of disorganized survivors drifting back out. “For heavens sake hold that line,” McGilvery begged, “until he could get some other batteries in position” behind them and patch together one last-ditch artillery line.18
Bigelow never seems to have questioned what was clearly a sacrificial, even suicidal, order. He wheeled his guns into a line across the lane from the Trostle house, facing one section slightly to the southwest and the other two sections directly into the path of the oncoming Confederates (which at this moment was the 21st Mississippi). Bigelow had barely gotten his guns loaded before the Mississippians were running for them. He started with solid shot, “for a ricochet” right into their ranks, then switched to double loads of canister, which the Massachusetts gunners emptied into the faces of the charging rebels “not six feet from the muzzles of our guns.” A German-born gunner named Augustus Hesse thought that “we mowed them down like grass, but they were thick and rushed up.” Men and horses went down, “the horses … plunging and laying about all around.” There was no time to run back to the limbers for reloads; Bigelow had the ammunition taken out of the limbers “and laid beside the pieces,” where a stray spark could easily blow them all to Tophet. This was calculating survival by the minute, and Bigelow decided to use his remaining horses to save at least the two guns in his left section. (The drivers faced a stone wall in their path, and resorted to jumping the horses and limbers over the wall, so that they came down with a “crash of rocks and wheels”—but still upright.)
In the last rush, the Mississippians began filtering out around Bigelow’s flanks, climbing up on the abandoned limber chests, “and shooting down cannoneers that were handling the pieces.” But “glancing anxiously to the rear,” Bigelow could see McGilvery, some 500 yards away, bringing fresh artillery batteries into position. The 9th Massachusetts had given their mite, and Bigelow shouted “orders for the small remnant of the four gun detachments” to leave the guns and run for their lives. Bigelow himself was knocked out of his saddle by two bullets, and could hear “the officers of the 21st Miss. order their men not to fire at me” so that he could be captured. But Bigelow’s orderly, Charles Reed, lifted his captain onto his own horse and, “taking the reins of both horses in his left hand, with his right supporting me in the saddle,” walked Bigelow to safety.19
Not everyone got off as miraculously as Bigelow. Malbone Watson had been slated to relieve Nelson Ames’ New York battery in the peach orchard with Battery I of the 5th U.S., but it was commandeered “by some unknown officer of the Third Corps,” and positioned a short distance east of the Trostle house, without any infantry support. When the 21st Mississippi overran Bigelow’s guns, Watson’s four 3-inch Ordnance Rifles were directly in their path. Without pausing, the Mississippians bowled ahead, capturing Watson’s four guns “before they fired,” and putting Watson down with a wound to his right leg that ended in amputation and permanent disability.20
The Trostle farm claimed a far more sensational casualty, and that was no one less than wild Dan Sickles himself. Once Sickles moved the 3rd Corps to the Emmitsburg Road that afternoon, he had little to do afterward except wrest pieces of the 5th Corps and 2nd Corps away to succor the parts of his own hapless position which were splintering under the weight of Longstreet’s attack. It could not have taken him long to realize that he had handed George Meade all his grim commander needed to take his head off, and it must have, in a bleak sort of way, provided him with a better exit than Meade would have designed when a flying piece of Confederate ordnance cracked the bones of his right leg just below the knee.21
It is not certain exactly what Sickles was hit by: witnesses’ accounts varied from a rifle slug to a shell splinter. George Randolph, who as an artilleryman might be presumed to know, thought Sickles had fallen victim to a solid shot, but another staffer was certain that the wound had come from “a terrific explosion” which “shook the very earth,” and could only have been a shell. Even Sickles was not sure what had struck him. “I never knew I was hit,” he insisted in 1882, and only knew something was wrong when he became “conscious of dampness along the lower part of my right leg,” and after pulling his leg out of his “high-top boots … was surprised to see it dripping with blood.” He guessed that the work had been done by “a piece of shell,” but twenty-seven years later he compromised: it might have been “a bullet or a shell-fragment.” What is certain is that Sickles, who was mounted, “standing under a small tree … close by the” Trostle farmhouse, was in the process of yielding to Randolph’s entreaties to get under better cover when “the shot struck him.” As the dizziness of shock began to set in, Sickles slowly slid off the left side of his horse and hobbled painfully to the side of the Trostle barn, calling, “Quick, quick! Get something and tie it up before I bleed to death.” Most of Sickles’ “staff were absent,” but Randolph and “a couple of orderlies” rushed over with kerchiefs and saddle straps, and a musician on stretcher duty rushed in with a “Turnkey” to cut off the bleeding. Henry Tremain arrived a few moments later. “Throwing myself from the saddle,” Tremain asked what may have been the most pointless question of the afternoon: General, are you hurt? Sickles was struggling to keep from passing out, and only replied, “Tell General Birney he must take command,” and when Birney galloped up in a lather, Sickles repeated his order. Apart from that, Sickles’ principal concern was “fear of being taken prisoner.”22
The musician, William Bullard of the 70th New Yo
rk, thought Sickles had sustained “a compound fracture of the leg.” But it looked much worse—“mangled” and “almost severed,” according to Tremain; “so badly shattered that it hung merely by a shred,” according to Thomas Cook of the New York Herald—and to George Randolph “it was a very long time (seemingly) before the ambulance and surgeon arrived.” Private Bullard, noticing “how white the Gen. was,” poured some medicinal brandy for Sickles, which seemed to revive him a little, and as Sickles was eased onto a stretcher he had the presence of mind to ask Bullard, “Won’t you be kind enough to light a cigar for me?” Bullard fumbled around “in his Inside pocket,” found a cigar case, bit off the end of a “small” cigar, then lit it up and “placed it in the Gen. mouth.” Tremain and the others got Sickles into an ambulance, and they all set off for the 3rd Corps’ field hospital. Sickles was by now fading in and out of consciousness, at one point insisting that 3rd Corps stragglers be allowed to see him and be assured “that I am allright and will be with you in a short time.” The ambulance stopped at a two-story brick house on the Baltimore Pike instead, and on an improvised surgical table the 3rd Corps chief medical director, Thomas Simms, chloroformed Sickles and amputated the butchered leg. “How much missed is his clear-sighted direction and his all-pervading energy,” wept the adoring New York Times. Those who did not adore Sickles had a different interpretation: that Sickles had been only slightly wounded, but ordered the amputation to engender sympathy and “save him from the mess he got in.” Given what had befallen the 3rd Corps so far, this might have been ungenerous, but not surprising; given what was about to happen to Andrew Humphreys and his division, now under the overall command of a man Humphreys frankly despised, it might even have been plausible.23
Gettysburg: The Last Invasion Page 43
