Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  The Bliss farm buildings provided shelter for five companies of Union infantry sent out beyond the skirmish lines by Alex Hays, who had been annoyed when Confederate skirmishers used the buildings earlier in the day to take potshots at him on Cemetery Ridge. Despite the small size of this ad hoc battalion, Posey had been just as annoyed to have the buildings occupied by Yankees taking potshots, and he had even brought up several rifled cannon to knock the place loose of them. Posey, handsome, commanding, and an arch-secessionist and onetime subordinate of Jefferson Davis in the Mexican War, had a certain reputation for timidity, not to mention bouts of depression, so when Posey received his orders to move forward with Wright, and secure the Bliss farm in the process, the Mississippian cautiously pushed his 12th and 16th Mississippi around the Bliss farm and concentrated on squeezing it into surrender. The Yankees put up a brief resistance, and then began legging it for the safety of Cemetery Ridge (where an infuriated Hancock put the senior officer “under arrest for cowardice in the face of the enemy”). But Posey had wasted enough time in forcing them out that only one of his regiments, the 48th Mississippi, ever managed to keep up with Wright.20

  And then there was William Mahone. A graduate of Virginia Military Institue and a highly successful railroad engineer in Virginia before the war, “Little Billy” Mahone commanded the only Virginia brigade in Richard Anderson’s division—one of only two Virginia brigades in Powell Hill’s entire corps. Mahone was an ardent secessionist, filling out a profile which should have guaranteed easy promotion. Except that, like his fellow Virginian John Brockenbrough, he was a singularly odd number. Rail-thin to the point of emaciation and “not weighing over a hundred pounds,” Mahone was an eccentric of the Stonewall Jackson school. Daniel Harvey Hill, in whose division Mahone served during the Peninsula Campaign, would have court-martialed Mahone for withdrawing “his brigade without any orders” in the face of a “furious attack” at the battle of Seven Pines in 1862; as it was, Mahone tried to challenge Hill to a duel, and had to be talked out of it. Mahone had “failed to distinguish himself in any of the major battles from Manassas to Gettysburg,” and was, as one critic put it, “a little too careful in looking after his men” and preferred to keep them “out of the fighting.”

  Richard Anderson had designated Mahone’s brigade as his division reserve, which Mahone interpreted literally as an inert reservoir of manpower. “The brigade took no special or active part in the actions … during the days and nights of July 2 and 3,” Mahone wrote in his official report a week after the battle, and he was not exaggerating. So when Anderson sent a staffer to summon Mahone to the support of Wilcox and Wright, Mahone (with a Bartleby-like insouciance) told him that his orders were to stay put as Anderson’s reserve. But, argued Anderson’s aide, Samuel Shannon, “I am just from General Anderson and he orders you to advance.” No, responded Little Billy, “I have my orders from General Anderson to remain here.” And he did not budge.21

  Without Posey and Mahone, there was nothing for Wright to do but extricate his brigade as fast as he could from what was beginning to look like a noose. In addition to the Vermonters and the 12th Corps men, the reserve regiment of the Philadelphia Brigade “was moved forward from behind the crest and ordered to attack” with “bayonets fixed”; in Norman Hall’s brigade, the 59th New York leapt to attack the 48th Georgia. “With painful hearts we abandoned our captured guns, and prepared to cut our way through the closing lines in our rear.” This was the “dreadful part of the whole matter,” since nothing makes soldiers more vulnerable to being wounded or killed than a pell-mell retreat. One Georgian “unbuckled his cartridge box, canteen and other such things that might impede his race for the rear … Down went my gun, up went my heels.” Others in the 48th Georgia and 2nd Georgia Battalion, “thinking the command would hold their works, delayed in obeying the order,” and ended up being captured. The colonel of the 22nd Georgia went down, the colonel of the 48th Georgia was wounded and captured, the major commanding the 2nd Georgia Battalion was “seriously and dangerously wounded” (and “has since died,” Wright added in his official report). Wright himself, with “several balls passing through his hat,” found the 2nd Georgia Battalion “without a single officer” standing and “took charge of it in person.”22

  Overall, the Georgians did a good deal of “halting and reforming” to keep things from turning into a rout, but fully half of Wright’s brigade were casualties. In the 22nd Georgia, one company began the attack with forty-five men, “and got out with twenty-two, and every man of the twenty-two was hit somewhere with a bullet but one”; in the 48th Georgia, a corporal discovered that only three of the seventy-three men in Company I “escaped without a bullet piercing their bodies.”23

  Neither Wright nor his surviving officers ever forgave Posey. “If the same advance had been made on our left,” lamented a captain in the 3rd Georgia, “a different history might have been written wherein Gettysburg … would have been the Salamis and Marathon of our independence.” Four days after the battle, Wright composed an incendiary letter for the Augusta Constitutionalist which frankly alleged that both Posey and Mahone had disobeyed orders from Anderson to join him on Cemetery Ridge. Anderson was forced to file charges against Wright for “matters connected with publications which appeared in the Augusta Constitutionalist.” The court-martial acquitted him, but Wright had made himself too hot to handle in the Army of Northern Virginia. He served through the Overland Campaign of 1864, but in the end, he was transferred to Georgia to take command of the state militia and feud with Georgia’s individualistic and cocksure governor, Joe Brown.

  None of this, of course, gave Hancock and Meade all that much to celebrate. For them, it had been another close call, staving off another Chancellorsville through unscripted decisions and split-hair timing. If Posey and Mahone had joined Wright, “it is doubtful whether the Union line, disorganized and broken as it was … would have been able to stand the shock.”24 And in fact, there was yet one more shock in store.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  We are the Louisiana Tigers!

  IF JAMES LONGSTREET’S CORPS was to serve as the hammer on July 2nd, Dick Ewell’s corps was intended to provide the anvil, and maybe provide enough of a distraction over on the east side of Cemetery Hill to drain still more Union troops away from the Emmitsburg Road. But any action by Ewell was “to be a feint & converted into a real attack only if an apparently favorable opening appeared.” And if actions are any explanation, Lee showed no expectation that Ewell would provide more than a “feint.” Once Lee left Ewell around two o’clock to play catch-up with Longstreet, he gave Ewell little attention. He “joined Hill” around four o’clock and “remained there nearly all the time, looking through his field-glass—sometimes talking to Hill and sometimes to Colonel Long of his Staff.” What was more, the Britisher Fremantle noticed that “during the whole time the firing continued, he only sent one message, and only received one report.” Fremantle added that he supposed it was Lee’s “system to arrange the plan thoroughly with the three corps commanders, and then leave to them the duty of modifying and carrying it out to the best of their abilities,” and in that respect Fremantle could not have been more correct.1

  The only specific direction Ewell was given was to wait “until I heard General Longstreet’s guns open on the right.” But almost as though he was determined to wipe away any grousing about his inertia the evening before, Ewell “spent the morning in examining all parts of his position & decided to attack along his whole line.” A wounded Union officer, sheltered in the crowded sanctuary of Christ Lutheran Church on Chambersburg Street, saw “Gen. Ewell and several of his staff officers” enter the church “for observation from the cupola of the church.” Ewell’s wooden leg kept him from ascending the ladder to the roof and his staffers had to call down bearings to him. He also tried the cupola of St. Francis Xavier Church on High Street, again sending staffers to shout down reports while he remained in the street below. At the same time, Ewell took
the precaution of deploying his three divisions in a long arc around Cemetery Hill, with Allegheny Ed Johnson’s division shuffling into line opposite Culp’s Hill, Jubal Early’s division on the left of the town and facing the east slope of Cemetery Hill, and Robert Rodes’ division “on the right of the main street of the town … extending out on the Fairfield road.”2

  From first light, Confederate skirmishers in the town, and Union skirmishers adventuring down Cemetery Hill, began thickening the air with “quick and sharp musketry firing, with an occasional sound of artillery.” Oliver Otis Howard, sleeping “inside of a family lot in the cemetery … with a grave mound for a pillow,” was awakened by the shooting at five o’clock. “It began like the pattering of rain on a flat roof … till it attained a continuous roar.” Ranged around the perimeter of the hill were the misshapen remnants of the 11th Corps. The one untouched brigade, Orland Smith’s brigade of Ohioans, New Yorkers, and Massachusetts men, held the vulnerable west face of Cemetery Hill, and linked hands with Alex Hays’ 2nd Corps division; the north face of the hill was held by the bundled splinters of Coster’s brigade and Carl Schurz’s division; and the east face by what had been Francis Barlow’s division (now directed by Adelbert Ames, since Barlow was missing and presumed dead). At most, Howard could not have had more than 5,000 men left from the 9,200 with which he began the day before; in practical terms, he may have had as few as 2,500. What he did have, though, was artillery—the five batteries of his own corps artillery, plus another six belonging to the 1st Corps, carefully positioned to cover every possible line of approach to the hill.3

  That could not prevent rebel skirmishers concealed in trees and houses from constantly peppering Yankee artillerymen and infantry. The buildings on the south end of Gettysburg were “filled with rebel sharp-shooters,” and from time to time parties of Yankee skirmishers had to be sent down the hill to clear away nests of rebel riflemen who had crept too close. In the 55th Ohio, at the north apex of Cemetery Hill, Capt. Frederick Boalt called out for volunteers to clean out a house at the foot of Baltimore Street which had become an annoying little post for rebel riflemen. With “twenty or twenty-five” men,” Boalt “crawled along the Taneytown road … keeping under cover as much as possible” until his storming party was close enough to rush the house, kick in the doors, and capture the rebels inside. At the same time, it amused the colonel of the 82nd Illinois to draw Otis Howard’s attention to a sign posted in the Evergreen Cemetery: DRIVING, RIDING AND SHOOTING ON THESE GROUNDS STRICTLY PROHIBITED. ANY PERSON VIOLATING THIS ORDINANCE WILL BE PUNISHED BY FINE AND IMPRISONMENT. The colonel solemnly warned Howard that “he would get into trouble after the battle for violating this order.” But a wayward Confederate shell wobbled over and “knocked it into a thousand pieces.” Howard remarked that it seemed to him that the ordinance had been pretty effectively rescinded.4

  This was less amusing for the wounded men who by now had begun to crowd the brick gatehouse of the cemetery, since the “arched brick building” made an ideal guide for Confederate fire. And it made the infantry lines in front of the batteries “one of the hottest places” an officer of the 153rd Pennsylvania thought he had been in. Occasionally, the Yankees gave as good as they got: Dick Ewell sent off Albert Jenkins’ diminutive cavalry brigade to “reconnoiter,” only to have Federal shell explode among Jenkins and his staff, “wounding the General and his horse.” One Yankee gunner grew so “annoyed by a sharp-shooter in one of the church steeples” that he “bade his men run around the cannon and turn somersaults” to induce the sniper to peer out “to see what the queer action meant.” He did, and the gunner let loose. “The shell struck only a foot above” the sniper’s head, and “he came down out of the steeple swearing he could not stand such shooting as that.”5

  Once the rumble of Longstreet’s artillery could be heard, Ewell got his corps moving—Allegheny Johnson’s 6,400-man division moved up behind a small ridge on the farm of Daniel Benner and prepared to face Culp’s Hill; Jubal Early put his two least-damaged brigades from the day before (Isaac Avery’s North Carolina brigade and Harry Hays’ wild Louisianans) in line to strike the eastern face of Cemetery Hill; and Rodes’ division filed out of the town to position themselves to hit Cemetery Hill directly on the west. First, Ewell needed to suppress the deadly array of Federal artillery on Cemetery Hill, and for that he turned to Johnson’s division artillery battalion, fourteen guns under a fresh-faced nineteen-year-old Virginia Military Institute graduate named Joseph White Latimer.

  On paper, this battalion was supposed to be under the command of Lt. Col. Richard Snowden Andrews, a highly unmilitary Baltimore architect but a brother-in-law of Robert E. Lee’s military secretary. However, Andrews had an unusual penchant for getting in the way of nasty wounds, and he had taken one of them at Winchester. That left Latimer, who would ordinarily have been little more than an apprentice, as the battalion’s ranking officer. Not that he was undeserving: Latimer won plaudits at Fredericksburg as “one of the coolest and bravest boys I have ever met with,” and Dorsey Pender thought he was “as brave a soldier as I ever saw.” Latimer had “an unusual readiness and precision in the details of instruction” and a “solid, imperturbable earnestness with which he gave all his orders.” Under any other circumstances, the gunners and crews would have “considered it humiliating to be placed under the tuition of such a child.” Instead, Latimer won them over as a sort of novelty—a “Boy Major,” like J.E.B. Stuart’s now dead protégé John Pelham—and soon enough they “spoke of him as ‘our little Latimer.’ ”6

  “Little Latimer” had done some preliminary scouting of the area for good artillery locations, but Benner’s Ridge seemed to be about the only eminence that satisfied him. A thousand yards distant from Culp’s Hill and 1,300 yards west of Cemetery Hill, it was barely close enough to hit either hill accurately; unhappily, it was also fifty feet shy of the elevation of either Culp’s Hill or Cemetery Hill, and as a spiny ridge like so many other spiny ridges east of South Mountain, it had only limited space for deployment and recoil, and none for caissons and horses, not to mention “no covering of any kind to guns and men.” In the absence of any worthwhile alternatives, however, it was Benner’s Ridge or nothing. It took an hour to gather the battalion and guide it up onto the ridge, but once in position their opening fire was remarkably true. Charles Wainwright thought “their fire was the most accurate I have ever seen on the part of their artillery,” and James Stewart was surprised to see three of his battery’s limber chests blown up into thin-looking smoke-stalks. The battery horses started to bolt down the Baltimore Pike; some of the drivers and gun crews actually ran out into the road to bring them back in, and found that “every hair was burnt off the tails and manes of the wheel horses.”7

  Despite its accuracy, the Confederate artillery fire was not particularly effective. In Adelbert Ames’ division, a Connecticut officer admitted that “we hugged the ground pretty close,” but none of “our brigade were either killed or wounded.” And Latimer’s gunners had no sooner opened their first fire on Cemetery Hill when the enormous weight of the Federal artillery there swiveled around and slowly proceeded to pound the Confederate batteries into flames and dust—“guns dismounted and disabled, carriages splintered and crushed, ammunition chests exploded, limbers upset, wounded horses plunging and kicking, dashing out the brains of men tangled in the harness; while cannoneers with pistols were crawling around through the wreck shooting the struggling horses to save the lives of the wounded men.”

  After an hour and a half, Latimer’s battalion had been “hurled backward, as it were, by the very weight and impact of the metal, from the position it had occupied on the crest,” and Latimer himself sent off his sergeant major to ask Ed Johnson for permission to withdraw, “owing to the exhausted state of his men and ammunition and the severe fire of the enemy.” He kept the last four guns in place to cover the pullback, but as he did so, “a shell presently explodes over him and down go horse and rider, the first dead a
nd the other wounded.” The shell had “shattered completely” Latimer’s right arm, and though the arm was amputated, he would die of gangrene a month later, one of twenty-two dead and twenty-nine wounded in the battalion.8

  It now fell to the infantry to keep up the “distraction,” and the fate of Latimer’s battalion on Benner’s Ridge gave everyone in Early’s division a perfect view of what might be in store for them. This may be why it took Ewell’s three divisions an unusually long time to dress their ranks, inspect weapons, and move into position—Latimer’s cannonade probably ended around 5:30, and Ed Johnson does not seem to have finally readied his division for an attack until well after 6:00, as the struggle for the wheat field was reaching its peak, as though they were hoping they would not be required to offer more than a demonstration. Ewell had other ideas, and, as the late afternoon shadows lengthened, “old Gen. Early is seen emerging from one of the streets of the town, and, riding slowly across the field in the direction of our position.” Harry Hays paid particular attention to his Louisiana brigade, riding “along our line of battle” and exhorting them with the challenge that “Genl Early” had specifically ordered “the Louisianans and … North Carolinians to take the guns on the hill,” and that Gordon’s brigade would then “come up” to relieve them “and hold the works.”9

  Up on Cemetery Hill, Charles Wainwright caught sight “of the head of their column” as Early’s Louisianans and North Carolinians deployed into line and “rushed for the hill.” A sergeant in the 5th Maine Artillery “suddenly … shouted, ‘Look! look at those men,’ and he pointed to … where, in line of battle extending nearly to Rock Creek at the base of Benner’s Hill, the enemy could be seen climbing the walls and fences and forming for the assault.” In the lull following Latimer’s abandonment of Benner’s Ridge, the Federals had gradually assumed that their fighting for the day was done. “We did not expect any assault,” and “could not have been more surprised if the moving column had raised up out of the ground amid the waving timothy grass of the meadow.” Some of the men in the 73rd Ohio had actually begun “to wrap our blankets around us and think of snatching a little rest.” And as the sunlight shortened, it was also harder for the artillery batteries to pick their targets. Even though both the Maine gunners and the batteries up on the hill opened up with a roar as soon as the Confederates came into view, they were not hitting very much. There was “an awful roar of big guns and … the enemy’s batteries kept up a terrific fire,” wrote a soldier in the 6th North Carolina, “but most of the shells … passed over our heads.” What made the situation even more awkward for the Federal defenders of the hill was that the east side of Cemetery Hill fell off into a steep ravine, with a small lane at the base; the steepness of the hillside offered a sick discouragement to any direct infantry attack, but it also made it impossible for the gunners up on the hill to depress the muzzles of their pieces if the attackers ever got under the lip of the ravine.10