Which is what they now did. Adelbert Ames’ two brigades were strung out in a thin line along the lane at the base of east Cemetery Hill, probably amounting to no more than 1,000 men to face the 4,000 rebel attackers. Andrew Harris, the colonel of the 75th Ohio who inherited Ames’ brigade command, was sure his brigade “did not exceed 500 men,” and even after every possible man was prodded up to the stone wall that ran along the lane, each of them had “all the elbow room he wanted.” Together, they got off at least one volley, but the momentum of the Confederates carried them straight over the wall and Hays’ Louisiana brigade was “not delayed by this impediment more than [a] minute.” The Louisianans “came on us … yelling like demons with fixed bayonets,” and “their officers & colors in advance.” The Prussian captain von Fritsch heard them screaming We are the Louisiana Tigers! A Pennsylvania officer farther down the lane saw Hays’ rebels pour over the dam of the stone wall, “muskets being handled as clubs; rocks torn from the wall in front and thrown, fist and bayonet. A captain in the 107th Ohio, at point-blank range, shot with his revolver a “rebel Color bearer (8th La. Tiger Regt. as it proved by the inscription on the vile rag).” Another rebel color-bearer mounted the wall, “his musket in one hand and a Rebel color in the other,” shouting Surrender, you damned Yankees—only to have a Yankee ram a bayonet into his chest and simultaneously discharge the rifle it was fixed to, “blowing into shreds” the back of the rebel’s shirt.11
Within minutes, Ames’ brigades were dissolving into an uncontrollable spray of fugitives or inconsequential knots of resistance in the lane, as the rebel tide flowed beyond them, and then began mounting the hillside toward the Federal artillery. Otis Howard thought it took not more than “three minutes” before the Louisianans had scaled the grassy slope and “were upon our batteries.” There were four of these batteries perched on the east side of the hill—Michael Weidrich’s Battery I, 1st New York Light Artillery, from the 11th Corps; twelve 3-inch Ordnance Rifles in James Stewart’s Battery B, 4th U.S. Artillery and Gilbert Reynolds’ Battery L, 1st New York Light Artillery, from the 1st Corps—and six more Ordnance Rifles of the combined batteries F and G of the 1st Pennsylvania Light Artillery, under Bruce Ricketts, from the artillery reserve. At any other place, these would have been more than enough to keep any assortment of rebel infantry at a respectful distance. But the speed with which the Confederates moved to the attack, and the sharp incline of the hill, limited how much damage the Union batteries were able to do, and as the rebels came bounding up the hill there was no time to get off more than one or two rounds of canister before the rebels were dancing among the guns in whooping delight.12
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There was no question about limbering up and removing the guns. The gunners and drivers would have to fight for their guns, and do it with “hand-spikes and rammers”—anything, in fact, “calculated to inflict pain or death was now resorted to.” Michael Weidrich’s gunners were Germans, and as one of Harry Hays’ Tigers confidently threw himself onto the muzzle of a Napoleon, he shouted, I take command of this gun! A German gunner with the piece’s lanyard in his hand replied, Du sollst sie haben (it was a line from a German birthday song—you can have it) and blew the rebel into smoking bits. A lieutenant in Ricketts’ battery forgot that he had his officer’s sword on his belt, and “picked up a stone” to knock another rebel down. Otis Howard himself took up his stand among the guns, sending off orders for Carl Schurz to bring up whatever other parts of the 11th Corps he could spare from the other side of Cemetery Hill. This time, Howard could not get the fugitives from Ames’ division to stop and stand, and “the rushing crowd of stragglers” actually prevented Schurz from bringing “the two regiments nearest to me” to Howard’s aid. (The drivers and crews from Stewart’s U.S. Regular battery actually spread out along the Baltimore Pike with fence rails “to try to stop the runaways, but could do nothing.”) When Charles Wainwright disgustedly asked Howard why he didn’t have their officers shot for cowardice, Howard’s faith in his 11th Corps finally broke, and he sadly replied, “I should have to shoot all the way down” to the privates; “they are all alike.” Perhaps he was asking too much of men who had been hit too often and too hard, and with too few of the familiar elbow-to-elbow cues to keep them from running; perhaps he was asking too much of himself.13
It was now dusk, almost dark. Among the milling mobs on the eastern side of Cemetery Hill, Weidrich’s battery was finally overrun by the 9th Louisiana, and Bruce Ricketts, in a last desperate effort, ordered the 3-inch Ordnance Rifles in his battery to fire shells without fuses, so that the rounds would actually detonate in the barrels and spray out shell splinters like canister—that is, if the guns didn’t blow up in the crews’ faces. And then Ricketts, too, was submerged in the rebel flood, and “every piece of artillery which had been firing upon us was silenced.” Far to the rear, Jubal Early had “several rebel batteries … in readiness to gallop on to Cemetery Hill,” while rebels on the crest struggled to turn “some of the guns on the enemy and tried to fire them.”14
And then, in yet another of those miracle moments which had by now become the routine of the Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg, Federal troops appeared out of the darkness and bore down on the jubilant Confederates and their newly acquired prizes. Four hundred yards to the west, on the other side of Cemetery Hill, Winfield Scott Hancock and George Meade had only just finished clearing the last of Ambrose Wright’s prisoners and wounded from the front of the 2nd Corps when the rising racket of infantry fire to the east caught Hancock’s ear. “At last this fire became so heavy and so threatening” that Hancock, who had been peeling off regiments, brigades, and divisions to send someplace else all afternoon, gave no second thought to peeling off some more. His first impulse was to send a regiment apiece toward Culp’s Hill (where he dispatched the 71st Pennsylvania) and the Evergreen Cemetery gatehouse (where the 106th Pennsylvania was sent). But as the roar swelled, he turned to John Gibbon and said, “Send a brigade, send Carroll.”15
Carroll meant Samuel Spring Carroll, a luxuriantly sideburned colonel of the 8th Ohio who had taken over command in March 1863 of what turned out to be the only other all-“Western” brigade in the Army of the Potomac (in this case, “Western” meant the 4th and 8th Ohio, the 14th Indiana, and the 7th West Virginia). Carroll, with his brick-red hair, often reminded people of his manic-aggressive division commander, Alex Hays, and this occasion was no exception. Carroll wheeled his brigade around from where it had been stacked in column of regiments and, with the 14th Indiana in the lead, sprinted “headlong” across the hill, across the Taneytown Road, past “gravestones” in the Evergreen Cemetery “struck by the spiteful Minnie ball,” and emerged onto the Baltimore Pike just as the last of the “maddened gunners” were “striking the rebels with fist, rammer, ammunition and stones.” Carroll had no guide except for the muzzle flashes ahead, and no time to deploy the brigade except to feed each regiment from column into line as they crossed the road. Even that meager order was quickly lost in the melee: “Bayonets and butts of guns at once joined the efforts of the heroic gunners, with flanks of regiments overlapping” and everyone colliding in an “every-man-in-as-you-can sort of way.”16
Harry Hays and his Louisianans had no idea who these Yankees were (at first, he had not even been sure they were Yankees, since Robert Rodes’ division was supposed to have attacked the west side of Cemetery Hill, and this might be the tip of Rodes’ breakthrough), or how many of them there were. Hays had already taken enough casualties to call it a day, and the North Carolinians had lost Isaac Avery to a bullet in the neck in the first few minutes of the attack. Hays decided to pull back, first retreating down the hill to the lane, and then toward his original starting point. A captain in the 14th Indiana was less measured in his description: “They ran pell mell … in thirty minutes the attack was repulsed and the battery saved.”17
No one was angrier at the results of the attack on Cemetery Hill than Jubal Early,
who could not understand why Robert Rodes’ division, on the west side of Cemetery Hill, had never put in an appearance. The difficulty facing Rodes was that by the time he had moved his 5,000-man division out of Middle Street and into line opposite Cemetery Hill, the moon had come up, and his brigade commanders had become dicey about “the idea of charging strong fortifications in the night time.” Rodes yielded to a plea from Stephen Ramseur to reconnoiter the ground in front of them, and Ramseur came back with the depressing report that the western face of Cemetery Hill was defended by “two lines of infantry behind stone walls,” with artillery backing them.” The nerveless Alfred Iverson claimed that “we were advancing to certain destruction.” And so Rodes called it off. In his diary, William Seymour described Harry Hays on Cemetery Hill, waiting “anxiously … to hear Rodes’ guns co-operating with us on the right; but unfortunately, no such assistance came to us.”18
Robert Rodes did not survive the war, and so had nothing he could say in his own defense. But Jubal Early had good reason to gnash his teeth in disappointment. Of all the nearly-so moments that litter the record of July 2nd, Early’s attack on east Cemetery Hill scattered a Federal division, captured at least two batteries of artillery, and, for a moment, stood in possession of enough ground on Cemetery Hill to have compelled an immediate Federal evacuation. Subtract Carroll’s brigade (and Hancock’s intuition in sending it), and add even a token assault by Rodes, and Jubal Early would have been within inches and minutes of pulling down the center pole of the Army of the Potomac. That it did not happen speaks volumes instead about the uncoordinated command style that had become Robert E. Lee’s habit, and for the paralyzing evaporation of initiative that crept over the senior generals of the Army of Northern Virginia the longer and deeper they remained in the unfamiliar environment of Pennsylvania.
Even after the misfire on Cemetery Hill, there was still Allegheny Ed Johnson’s division, and for once in this long day of Confederate misfires, something in Robert E. Lee’s plans actually looked as though it was going to work. Since the morning of July 2nd, Culp’s Hill had been the property of Henry Slocum’s 12th Corps, aided by the fragments of the 1st Corps. The low spur that connected the west face of Culp’s Hill with Cemetery Hill was defended by the fragile survivors of James Wadsworth’s 1st Corps division, which by this point amounted to little more than an ordinary brigade; from there Culp’s Hill actually developed into two peaks, north and south, and Slocum delegated one of his divisions to the higher north peak and the other to the south.
Culp’s Hill had little military significance of its own—unlike Cemetery Hill and Little Round Top, it was blanketed with a thick canopy of trees which made observation difficult and serving artillery nearly impossible unless Slocum wanted to exhaust the entire corps with lumberjack duties. But livestock grazing had kept the area almost entirely clear of underbrush, so the hill could be attacked by troops if they maintained at least minimal order in line. Culp’s Hill also screened the Baltimore Pike as it headed south from Gettysburg and Cemetery Hill, and if Meade was to keep open a supply line, or a line of retreat to Pipe Creek, he would need to hold Culp’s Hill simply to prevent the Confederates from curling around behind his army and snipping the pike. So the 12th Corps would spread itself out not only to occupy the twin peaks, but also planted two brigades beyond the south peak to cover the open ground between the peak and the pike. Across from the point where Slocum’s men touched the pike loomed Powers Hill; there Meade positioned three batteries of artillery to create a last redoubt along the pike if the Confederates ever overran Cemetery Hill.19
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At first, few people in the 12th Corps seem to have had much apprehension that the Confederates would attempt a head-on attack on Culp’s Hill. “The first formation” of John White Geary’s division on the north peak “was in line of battalions in mass with diminished intervals between battalions,” and neither Geary nor Thomas Ruger (who was in temporary command of the division holding the south peak) was troubled enough by the likelihood of rebel movements to give any orders to improve their hillside positions by digging trenches or chopping down enough trees to form rough protective walls. “No orders were given to entrench,” although at one point Geary got so much nagging from one of his brigade commanders that he gave him “permission” to do so.
This particular brigade commander was George Sears Greene, who was a member of the West Point class of 1823 and also the Army of the Potomac’s oldest general officer (at age sixty-two) at Gettysburg. Born in Rhode Island, Greene had endured enough reverses in his career to develop a remarkably thick hide: his first wife and their three children had all died within seven months of one another … he served thirteen years in the U.S. Army with only a single promotion, to first lieutenant … he re-married, fathered six more children and left the Army for private engineering practice … and then in 1861, volunteered for service and mustered-in as colonel of the 60th New York. He was short and stocky, with a sharply pointed Vandyke beard which gave him something of the appearance of a gnome out of a German fairy tale, and his men delighted in calling him “Pap” or “Old Pappy.” He rose to command a division in the 12th Corps at Antietam, only to get bumped back to brigade command for—without any shade of irony—lack of seniority in the volunteer service. He was “a most remarkable man,” said Oliver Otis Howard, “a man whose reputation will grow; a man who was not appreciated during his lifetime.”20
Uncomplaining, Greene had saved his brigade at Chancellorsville by having them clear a 200-foot-wide space in front of their position and digging in with bayonets, tin cups, and canteen-halves. Greene’s instincts warned him that it would be a good idea to do the same here, and Geary relented. “Right and left,” Greene’s five New York regiments “felled the trees, and blocked them up into a close fence.” A line of trees was felled down the slope with “branches sharpened in regular order,” to form a ready-made abatis, and serve as a primitive forerunner of barbed wire fencing. Stacks of cordwood left from logging operations were piled up “against the outer surface of the logs,” and any pioneer details “which had spades and picks” set to work piling up a battening of earth over the felled logs. They were finished by noon, and “a very fair work” it was. But then, at mid-afternoon, came the erupting roar in the distance that signaled Longstreet’s attack, followed by the artillery duel between the “Boy Major” Latimer’s battalion on Benner’s Ridge and the Federal artillery on Cemetery Hill, and as Greene “walked along the lines with care, giving personal direction to the measurements and the angles” of the earthworks, both Slocum and Geary began feeling prickles of anxiety over reports of large-scale rebel troop movements in the woods to the east.21
Prickles, however, are not proof against orders. At 7:30, as Ambrose Wright’s Georgians curled toward the crest of Cemetery Ridge, Meade summoned Slocum and the 12th Corps to the rescue of the staggering 2nd Corps. Much as he required Culp’s Hill, Meade needed to save Cemetery Hill even more. But the summons could not have come at a worse moment for Slocum, who was growing convinced that Culp’s Hill was about to receive its own attack. Slocum sent his adjutant back to Meade, asking to be permitted to keep “General Geary’s division to cover the works of the corps, and not to leave them deserted.” Slocum’s reply must have seemed as pedantic to Meade to Meade’s order seemed risky to Slocum, but in the end Slocum was “permitted to retain one brigade, and I retained Greene’s.” As the rest of the 12th Corps hurried away, Greene’s brigade resigned itself to stretching out to cover, as best it could, the lines vacated along both peaks of Culp’s Hill. Given that Greene had less than 1,400 men and one battery of artillery to count on, there was more stretching than cover. Greene “formed his brigade in a single line, with spaces between the men, the regiments moving to the right as the line lengthened,” and the smallest of the regiments (the 78th New York) forming a loose line of skirmishers in front. They had “scarcely accomplished this extended formation when a sharp crackling f
ire announced” that both Old Pappy and Henry Slocum had been right to worry.22
Allegheny Ed Johnson sheltered the three big Confederate brigades he would throw against Culp’s Hill behind Benner’s Ridge and on the north side of the Hanover Road for most of the afternoon. (“One of our staff” prudently “conducted religious services … the men gladly joining in the solemn exercises.”) Once the blackened remains of Latimer’s artillery battalion had pulled themselves to safety, “aides were seen dashing furiously down the long line of infantry on our right, who spring to their feet as they pass.” Johnson’s would actually be the first element of Dick Ewell’s corps to begin the “distraction,” and “as soon as Johnson was heard engaged,” Early’s division would move to its attack on east Cemetery Hill. Johnson moved his brigades stealthily along the face of Culp’s Hill until they faced almost due west of the two peaks, then shook out into line of battle and waded Rock Creek (“waist-deep in some places”) to begin ascending the slope. One of Greene’s officers could make out Johnson’s advance in the gathering dusk, “and counting battle flags and intervals in the front line, I calculated that there were eight regiments, and of probably about 400 to 500 muskets in each,” with “two smaller lines of infantry” formed up behind them and “two or more regiments” in column on their left flank.
Gettysburg: The Last Invasion Page 47
