Still in the van of his Mississippians, William Barksdale, in his gold-braided roundabout jacket, was “almost frantic with rage” at the repulse of his brigade, and “was riding in front of his troops” and “trying to make his fleeing men stand.” They are whipped! Barksdale pleaded. We will drive them beyond the Susquehanna! This only made him a prominent target, and after “numerous shots” were fired at him from both the 125th and 126th New York, Barksdale dropped from his saddle with “a ball hole through the breast.” With Barksdale down, the colonel of the 21st Mississippi, Benjamin Humphreys, concluded that “we had advanced too far to the front for safety.” To the right, he could see “Kershaw give way and Wofford retiring toward the Peach Orchard,” so it was clearly time for “a hurried retreat.” (With a curious sort of detachment, the Mississippian retrieved a horse from the broken fragments of Bigelow’s battery at the Trostle farm, and an officer’s “satchel” containing “photographs of 2 very fine-looking boys about 12 or 14 yrs. old, I suppose his children.”)
Barksdale was left, half-alive, to be picked up later that evening and brought back to a field hospital on the Taneytown Road by a detail from the 14th Vermont. He died that night, conscious to the end, and alternately asking that his minders “tell my wife I fought like a man and will die like one” and threatening them that “Gen. Lee will clean out this place to-morrow” or that “before we knew it Ewell would be thundering in our rear.” The next morning, a Vermont lieutenant who remembered seeing Barksdale in action “on the floor of Congress,” recognized the cantankerous Mississippian’s body, lying in the sunshine “with open and unblinking eyes” but “without the wig which Speaker [Galusha] Grow once knocked off in the Hall of Representatives.”7
The repulse of Barksdale’s Mississippians did not give Hancock much respite, for as he turned to look backward, he saw a large body of troops with flags coming out of the battle fog. Hancock at first thought that they were supports from the 12th Corps, arriving from Culp’s Hill at just the moment he needed them to seal off the breach between Willard and McGilvery at one end and the 2nd Corps at the other. He was wrong. They were Cadmus Wilcox’s Alabamians, and they “opened fire” and “twice wounded” Hancock’s only remaining aide, William DeWitt Miller, “whom I immediately told to ride away.” This would be Hancock’s defining moment at Gettysburg, for as he twisted around to look for troops to throw into the path of the Alabamians, he saw absolutely no one—except for one regiment, lying down beside Evan Thomas’ battery where they had been posted a short time earlier. “My God! Are these all the men we have here?” Hancock profanely erupted. But there was no time for careful deductions of risk. The Alabamians, supported on their left by David Lang’s three Florida regiments, were looming up clearly now, in what looked like “three long lines.” Hancock “spurred to where” the regiment lay, calling out, “What regiment is this.” First Minnesota, replied the regiment’s colonel, William Colvill.8
Hancock, pointing toward the Alabamians, wasted no time in instructing Colvill, “Charge those lines!” (In a slightly different version, Hancock tells Colvill, “Do you see those colors? Take them!”) With what? Colvill might have replied. (The actual head count of the 1st Minnesota, like so many other numerical reckonings at Gettysburg, is a mystery: the regiment’s payrolls indicated that it had 399 officers and men present on June 30th; but 10 of these were noncombatant musicians, 37 were on detached service, 33 members of Company F were on a skirmish line, and another company had been detailed for provost guard duties.) In all, Colvill could probably lead just over 230 men into action, against two entire Confederate brigades with more than ten times that strength. This was, in other words, yet another forlorn hope, for no other purpose than to buy time for the gallopers Hancock had sent off to Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill to come back with reinforcements to stop the collapse. “I had no alternative but to order that regiment in,” Hancock later explained. “I saw that in some way five minutes must be gained or we were lost.”9
“Every man realized in an instant what that order meant,” but Colvill, without the slightest protest, called the 1st Minnesota to its feet, rifles at right-shoulder-shift, and down into the swale they went, toward the meager margins of Plum Run, where Wilcox and Lang had paused for a moment to reorder their lines. (Fence climbing had “disordered” the Alabama regiments, and by the time the Mississippians, Alabamians, and Floridians had reached Plum Run, they “were in marked confusion, mixed up indiscriminately, officers apart from their men, men without officers.”) Of all the moments of deliberate self-immolation that the Army of the Potomac performed that afternoon—whether it was the 124th New York in Devil’s Den, or Chamberlain and O’Rorke on Little Round Top—nothing quite hit the bell of the sublime as deeply as the charge of the 1st Minnesota. With “no hesitation, no stopping to fire,” Colvill led them in a fast trot, breaking into a full-scale run as he shouted, “Charge!”
They were briefly concealed by a thick bank of smoke which “had settled into the ravine” formed by Plum Run, so that the Alabamians had no warning of their approach until the Minnesotans burst on top of them. Hilary Herbert’s 8th Alabama looked up to see “in front of us” what “seemed to be … two compact lines, probably regiments, and here and there were groups of [Union] fugitives endeavoring to rally.” The front rank of the Alabamians took one look at the “leveled bayonets coming with such momentum and evident desperation” and promptly broke, stumbling and tripping over their rear rank. Colvill pulled the Minnesotans up at the line of Plum Run and “we then poured in our first fire.” It was as though “the ferocity of our onset seemed to paralyze them.” Worse than paralyze, it convinced David Lang that “a heavy force had advanced upon General Wilcox’s brigade, and was forcing it back.” Lang at once concluded that they had walked into a massive Federal trap, and Lang “immediately ordered my men back to the [Emmitsburg] road, some 300 yards to the rear.”10
Overall, the clash between the 1st Minnesota and the two Confederate brigades lasted for no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. “We had not fired but a few shots,” wrote a soldier in Company D, “before we were ordered to fall back.” The Minnesotans came limping back out of the smoke with only handfuls of the regiment which had gone in—35 dead, 180 wounded, Colvill twice wounded and lying stunned in the ditch water of Plum Run, and only 47 men able to answer roll call. But their long-shot charge had worked. Barksdale’s brigade had been stopped and thrown back by Willard’s “Cowards”; now Wilcox and Lang had been scattered back to the Emmitsburg Road (and in fact they “continued to fall back, rallying and reforming upon the line from which we started”).11
Or had it really worked? Hancock, like Sykes, Caldwell, and every other Union general that afternoon, managed to shore up Dan Sickles’ misbegotten line along the Emmitsburg Road by robbing divisions and brigades from anyone not under immediate pressure and sending them to suffocate the emergencies breaking out in place after place from Devil’s Den to Plum Run. But there was going to come a moment when some part of the Union defenses was going to find itself so denuded by emergencies elsewhere that it would have nothing left for its own defense and nowhere to borrow more. Hancock had bled his own corps—ten infantry brigades when the day began—down to exactly three, with only about 1,400 men. They would have to face over 4,200 Confederates, because the last brigades of Richard Heron Anderson’s division were stepping out into the lengthening shadows and moving forward, on a line pointed straight at a small woodlot where the last bits of the 2nd Corps readied themselves for what was already looking like the Army of the Potomac’s Götterdämmerung.12
As early as noon on July 2nd, Anderson notified Ambrose Ransom Wright that his Georgia brigade (the 3rd, 22nd, and 48th Georgia, with the four companies that made up the 2nd Georgia Battalion) would be going in to the attack as soon as Wilcox and Lang had started forward, and that he could look for Carnot Posey’s Mississippi brigade to “move forward upon my advance.”
Wright was “a very gifted man, a
powerful writer, an effective orator, and a rare lawyer.” He was notorious for possessing a bullwhip temper which made him “self-willed and combative.” Like his division commander, Wright had been less than enthusiastic about secession. His brother-in-law was Herschel Johnson, the vice presidential running mate of Stephen Douglas, whose nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate in 1860 impelled the secessionist fire-eaters to split the party, and Wright himself had strayed even further from secession orthodoxy by endorsing the centrist Constitutional Union candidates, John Bell and Edward Everett. Proud, intensely self-concerned, and with an innate sense of personal superiority, Wright did not endear himself to the Virginia elite in the Army of Northern Virginia. And he had narrowly missed a bushwhacker’s bullet near Hagerstown that “cut off some of his long, black, curly hair.”13
Wright’s temper was improved neither by a “severe indisposition” that made him “very sick” the day before nor by the lay of the land he now had before him. Wright’s brigade, along with Posey’s and then William Mahone’s reserve brigade, were “placed in line of battle behind a small grove of large oaks … along the line of a stone fence that over-looked the open field between the hostile lines.” The Emmitsburg Road lay parallel to the treeline and 800 yards away, across gently dipping and rising fields, broken only by a solitary stone barn and “double log and frame” farmhouse owned by an elderly New Englander named William Bliss (the Bliss family had prudently decamped from the property the day before). The road itself sank unevenly through the dips and rises, creating in some places a substantial embankment, and both sides were lined by heavy “rail and plank fences.” Beyond the road, the ground swelled gently upward for another hundred yards to form the modest spur of Cemetery Ridge, and there Wright saw the lines of the 2nd Corps—in this case, the divisions of Alex Hays and John Gibbon—and the thick concentration of Federal artillery on Cemetery Hill. And it led Wright to growl to one of his staff that “if we were required to charge it, the sacrifice of life would necessarily be great.”14
But charge they would, and Wright would lead them himself, sickness or not. He wanted to move fast. With so much Federal artillery clustered within easy range on Cemetery Hill, he dared not put his regiments in column for the easy target they would make. But Wright took them forward so quickly that the skirmish line formed by the 2nd Georgia Battalion had no time to “form all its companies on the left of the brigade,” and some of them had to fall “into line with other regiments of the command.” The Federal artillery leapt into action at once, sending “shot and shell … screaming through the air in every direction.” But so long as they stayed in line and kept moving at the “double quick step,” the Union guns could not fix any solid targets, and even though Wright’s Georgians were constantly having to stop and tear down “numerous post and rail fences,” they moved swiftly through William Bliss’s fields of “oats, wheat and young corn” and shouldered past a clump of Federal skirmishers who had barricaded themselves in the Bliss barn, “a rambling structure seventy-five feet long and thirty-five feet wide,” built of stone and brick and “plentifully supplied with doors and windows.” Federal skirmishers along the Emmitsburg Road were caught so much by surprise that instead of falling back by twos and fours, hand-to-hand fighting broke out along the roadbed; pioneers from the 106th Pennsylvania who had been chopping down some of the fences had no time but to use their axes to defend themselves. One captain in the 3rd Georgia “with his sword stood on top of a pile of rails, thrusting at a burly Federal who tried to jab the captain with his bayonet.”15
The Federal skirmishers dropped back toward the ridgeline, and then it was up and out of the roadbed for the Georgians, notwithstanding the stout fences that lined both sides of the road. Two of the regiments Hancock had posted earlier in the afternoon to cover Andrew Humphreys’ division, the 15th Massachusetts and 82nd New York, saw the wave coming at them too late and were overrun by “the yelling exultant Georgians.” The 15th Massachusetts scampered away “in some disorder, being pressed so closely that we lost quite a number of prisoners,” and their flight, in turn, allowed Wright’s Georgians to pounce on Battery B, 1st Rhode Island Artillery. The Rhode Island battery was attached to John Gibbon’s 2nd Corps division, but earlier that afternoon it was moved up by Gibbon toward a large red farmhouse and barn on the east side of the Emmitsburg Road belonging to Nicholas Codori. (Codori actually lived in the town and used the farm as a rental property.)
The artillerymen were caught napping. Wright closed the gap so quickly that the Rhode Islanders mistook the men running toward them for the 15th Massachusetts being somehow recalled to Gibbon’s original line on the ridge. “But when we commenced to receive their fire and heard that well known ‘rebel yell,’ as they charged for our battery, we were in doubt no longer.” The battery’s commander, Fred Brown, managed to get off a few rounds of shell with fuses “cut at three, two, and one second, and then canister at point blank range.” But the Georgians were “advancing so rapidly” that all order disappeared in a welter of calls to Limber to the rear and Get out of that, you will all be killed and the gunners’ last resort, Don’t give up the guns. It did them no good. “Men and horses were wounded before we could retire behind our line of support,” and in short order the Georgians were swarming over four of Brown’s guns.16
Beyond them lay a low stone wall at the crest of Cemetery Ridge, anchored on its left by the small woodlot, and for that moment only John Gibbon’s last two brigades, the Philadelphia Brigade and Norman J. Hall’s mixed brigade of New Yorkers, Michiganders, and New Englanders, stood in the way of a complete and disastrous breakthrough, worse than Devil’s Den or the wheat field, right in the rear of Cemetery Hill. Hancock was already in the midst of the Philadelphia Brigade, trying to sort out what action they should take. The hubbub along Cemetery Ridge forced “Gen. Meade … to abandon his own Head Quarters” a hundred yards below at the Leister cottage, and “for a few minutes affairs seem critical in the extreme.” Wright was exultant: “We had now accomplished our task—we had stormed the enemy’s strong position, had drove off his infantry, had captured all his guns in our front, except a few which he succeeded in running off, and had up to this moment suffered but comparatively small loss.” So were Wright’s men. The 3rd and 22nd Georgia pushed through an opening on the flank of the Philadelphia Brigade and reached the crest of the ridge. “Seizing artillery horses, shooting down the riders and cutting the traces from the casons,” they pressed “on over these guns up to the crest of the hill, where thirteen other pieces of artillery are captured—thus cutting entirely in twain the army of Mead,” one of the captains in the 3rd Georgia would remember years later. Gibbon’s line, “heavily engaged along his whole front,” began to bow and break. George Meade straightened up in his stirrups and drew his sword, as if he was ready to go down swinging right there rather than live with the consequences of the catastrophe staring at him.17
And then, for what must have seemed like the umpteenth time that afternoon, the cry went up, There they come, general! It was, to Ambrose Wright’s dismay, “a heavy column of Yankee infantry on our right flank.” Abner Doubleday, still smarting from his demotion back to division command in the 1st Corps, sent over two regiments and a battalion from his one unbattered brigade, George Stannard’s nine-month Vermonters, with the 14th Vermont leading the way across the Taneytown Road “in close column by division, at a sharp double quick” and “forming in line of battle.” (Stannard himself was left behind on Culp’s Hill; Doubleday had been in such a hurry to respond to Hancock that he forgot to inform Stannard that he had gone over his head, and that evening Stannard furiously “rebuked” the Vermonters “for wandering off without his orders.”) Hancock whooped upon seeing them, and pointed in the direction of Brown’s captured Napoleons: Could they re-take that battery? “We can,” shouted the Vermonters. “Forward boys!”
Click here to see a larger image.
At the same time, up came the 150th New York and the
1st Maryland Home Brigade Regiment, the first wave of five brigades of 12th Corps troops that Henry Slocum had pulled off Culp’s Hill and sent to the rescue. At their head was Slocum’s senior division commander, Alpheus Williams, who “had no precise instructions as to the point I was to support” but simply “followed the sound of the heaviest firing.” (Taking bearings by sound was trickier than it seems: it led Williams from pillar to post, around Powers Hill and behind Freeman McGilvery’s artillery, but he got there anyway.) Meade gushed as politely as he could with relief. “Come on, gentlemen,” he said, doffing his hat to Williams’ skirmish line, and repeating, half to himself, “Yes, but it is all right now, it is all right now.”18
Ambrose Wright, squatting precariously on Cemetery Ridge, was ready to roll down the reverse slope and carry Meade, his headquarters, and the rear of Cemetery Hill with him. “The brave Georgians gained the crest of the ridge and drove the enemy down the opposite side,” wrote an admiring onlooker in the 61st Virginia. Expectantly, Wright looked to his left “through the smoke,” to where Carnot Posey’s brigade was supposed to be coming up, in perfect position to knock back the oncoming Union reinforcements.19
But there was no one there. Posey, to Ambrose Wright’s Herculean rage, “had not advanced on our left,” leaving Wright “perfectly isolated from any portion of our army, a mile in its advance,” and “about to be sacrificed to the bad management and cowardly conduct of others.” In the weeks after the battle, Posey would insist that he had actually been ordered by Anderson to send forward only “two of my regiments, and deploy them closely as skirmishers,” and use his other two regiments to eliminate the knot of Federal resistance clustered in the Bliss farm buildings. Whether or not Anderson intended that Posey treat the Bliss buildings as though they were Gettysburg’s equivalent of Hougoumont, Posey proceeded to behave that way.
Gettysburg: The Last Invasion Page 45
