Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Some men tried to brass it out. Alexander Webb of the Philadelphia Brigade stood “in the most conspicuous and exposed place, leaning on his sword and smoking a cigar, when all around the air was pierced by screeching shot and shell,” standing “like a statue watching the movement of the enemy.” John Gibbon also decided to put a little insouciance up for show, walking down the line of his division as if he was unaware of any danger, asking the men how they were holding up, and getting snarky answers: “O, this is bully,” “We are getting to like it,” “O, we don’t mind this.” Alex Hays, who “always seemed happiest when in the thickest of the fight,” never dismounted, and rode through his division without the Confederate artillery seeming “to intimidate him in the least.” (At the other extreme, Wheelock Veazey, the colonel of the 16th Vermont, was puzzled to see men fall into the peculiar narcolepsy caused by artillery bombardment, as “I think a majority, fell asleep.”) Somewhere, a band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and Winfield Hancock decided to one-up both Hays and Gibbon by riding, mounted on a borrowed light bay and accompanied only by three staffers and an orderly, John Wells, from left to right across the front of the 2nd Corps.24

  But bravado was not insurance. Otis Howard remembered “a young artilleryman” who managed to sing and whistle, while keeping his battery’s horses from shying or bolting under the bombardment. “Just as I was remarking him for his heartiness and lovely conduct, a solid shot struck him on his thigh; he gave one sharp cry and was no more.” Up on Cemetery Hill, “there was plenty of dead men and horses strewing the ground,” along with “guns and caissons knocked into a cocked hat.” Theodore Gates saw a solid shot kill a man who “flopped over like a pancake and never moved a muscle—was stone dead.” The bombardment caught a 6th Corps regiment, the 37th Massachusetts, while it was in column, shifting to a new position, and “tore terrible, bleeding gaps” through the close-packed men, killing and wounding thirty-one. One shell burst so near James Barnes, at the head of his 5th Corps division, that Barnes was wounded in the leg and one of his staffers “had his face filled with powder.”25

  Still, anyone who had the presence of mind to notice could see that the number of infantry casualties being inflicted by the bombardment was surprisingly small. (The British had discovered this same thing at the Alma: “Our young soldiers found themselves, as they imagined, in a thick storm of shot and cannon-balls; but it seems that missiles of war fly crashing so audibly through foliage that they sound more dangerous than they are.”) The 69th Pennsylvania suffered one killed and sixteen wounded; their comrades in the rest of the Philadelphia Brigade lost another thirty. One of the Vermont regiments reported a loss of “about sixty men while lying there”; the 7th Michigan, in Norman Hall’s brigade, simply noted that “not as much damage was done us as would naturally be expected from such a storm of missiles.”

  On the other hand, it was not the infantry which was Walton’s and Alexander’s target. “Their fire was directed at our batteries,” observed an infantryman in the 1st Minnesota; “not a single shell dropped in this regiment.” And the batteries, as Gibbon’s aide Frank Haskell could see, “had been handled much more severely.” Horses were killed, “in some batteries more than half of all.” In front of Norman Hall’s brigade, five horses and their drivers in James Rorty’s New York battery went down, caissons burst, and soon the battery was reduced to two guns, then one. To the right, Hall could see three of Cushing’s limbers blown up, while “horses, men and [gun] carriages were piled together” and the battery was reduced to two serviceable guns. Within an hour, four of the five batteries along the 2nd Corps line were completely, or almost completely, out of action. And if the Confederates had shifted their targets to include the batteries on Cemetery Hill, “there would not have been a live thing on that hill fifteen minutes after they opened fire.”26

  The instinct of every gunner was to return fire, and after fifteen minutes, as the Federal batteries cleared for action, “we … worked our guns on the enemy as lively as we could.” On Cemetery Hill, guns were slewed around “by hand to the front” to face westward toward Seminary Ridge, and as soon as one barrel became too hot to “use it any longer … we run and got another gun and rolled it up in position and fired that until it was impossible to bear our hand on it.” They certainly gave as good as they had gotten. After a few ranging shots “flew harmlessly over our heads,” one of the Confederate gunners in the peach orchard saw “the entire front of Cemetery Ridge … light up in a blaze … The tops of the trees near us were cut off, limbs broken, and the leaves fairly covered us.” A Confederate limber was struck by a shell, and shot “a thick, hot, white ring … straight up into the air,” so that “shapeless fragments of wood and iron were hurled high above the trees and fell on all sides in an irregular shower.”27

  In Pickett’s division, the major of the 8th Virginia saw a shell take “off the head of Sergt. Morris of my brother tom’s Co. & plaistered his brains over my hat.” Another shell wounded the colonel of the 53rd Virginia, William Aylett, and the colonel of the 3rd Virginia was struck by a “handful of earth mixed with blood and brains” which had, a moment before, belonged to “two poor fellows,” and seriously wounded the sergeant major of the neighboring 7th Virginia. That sergeant major, David Johnston, survived fractured ribs, a “badly contused” left lung, and paralysis down his left side, and years later described Pickett’s division as sort of a grotesque shooting gallery in which “at almost every moment muskets, swords, haversacks, human flesh and bones flying and dangling in the air or bouncing above the earth, which now trembled as if shaken by an earthquake.” The incessant discharging, blasting, cracking, and pounding created its own miniature weather system, and a soldier in the 16th Mississippi was amazed to see that “birds, attempting to fly, tumbled and fell to the ground.”28

  Still, sangfroid was the rule on the Confederate side as much as on the Union one. One of the artillerymen heard a voice, “when the artillery fire was at its height,” singing a parody of Elizabeth Allen’s sentimental “Rock Me to Sleep” from the summer of 1860:

  Backward, roll backward, O Time in thy flight:

  Make me a child again, just for this fight!

  Another voice irreverently interrupted: “Yes; and a gal child at that.” James Kemper was astonished to see Longstreet nonchalantly riding down the front of Pickett’s division, “slowly and majestically, with an inspiring confidence, composure, self-possession and repressed power.” In the 56th Virginia, however, the men in the regiment were less impressed by Longstreet’s bravado and more concerned about the likelihood that he would attract the unwelcome attention of Federal gunners to their position. “You’ll get your old fool head knocked off,” they shouted unceremoniously. “We’ll fight without you leading us.”29

  And yet, like the Confederate artillery, the sound and fury of the Union guns signified comparatively little, once the dust settled. In Joe Davis’ North Carolina brigade, “the fire was heavy and incessant,” but at the end, the final bill was “2 men killed and 21 wounded.” In Pickett’s division, the 8th Virginia’s colonel, Eppa Hunton, counted 5 dead out the 205 men he had ready for the attack; Randolph Shotwell, also from the 8th Virginia, estimated that in the entire division Pickett may have lost between 350 and 500 men killed and wounded, certainly not nearly enough to prevent Pickett’s division from making its attack. And there might not have even been that many, if Henry Hunt, Meade’s chief of artillery, had been able to get his way.30

  The opening of the Confederate bombardment at one o’clock caught Hunt on Little Round Top, in the midst of “an inspection of the whole line.” Hunt guessed with cool accuracy what the Confederates were up to. From Cemetery Ridge, he could see “batteries already in line or going into position” from Sherfy’s peach orchard all the way up to the outskirts of Gettysburg itself. At each point, Hunt had “instructed the chiefs of artillery and battery commanders” to wait for the Confederates to act first, and if they had to open fire at all, to �
��concentrate … with all possible accuracy on those batteries which were most destructive to us.” By one o’clock, Hunt had worked his way down to Benjamin Rittenhouse, who had succeeded to command of Hazlett’s battery of 10-pounder Parrotts on Little Round Top. There, Hunt remarked that he had been observing a lot of Confederate artillery activity “opposite our centre and left,” along Seminary Ridge, and that he was sure they “were getting ready for a charge on our centre.”

  That attack, however, would begin “with their artillery,” and Hunt wanted Rittenhouse to understand that he would not tolerate any yielding to the usual artilleryman’s temptation to fire back and turn things into a useless artillery duel. Hunt repeated for Rittenhouse the same orders he had given the others: “not to return their fire, but to reserve my ammunition for the charge.” If they must return fire, do it “deliberately and slowly as at target practice,” and that would save “at least half our ammunition … to meet the assault when it came.” Once the “furious cannonade” opened up, Hunt estimated that he was seeing “one hundred to one hundred and twenty guns … bearing on our west front,” and he took himself off to what was left of the by-now-depleted artillery reserve, and ordered the reserve chief, Robert Tyler, to get the four remaining batteries of the reserve limbered up and moving to the front.31

  Convinced that the barrage would certainly be followed by an infantry assault, Hunt rode up behind Freeman McGilvery’s gun line, still parked across the gap made by the collapse of the 3rd Corps the day before, and kept urging them to reply slowly, “so that when the enemy’s ammunition was exhausted, we should have sufficient left to meet the assault.” He worked northward, up the ridgeline, noticing the “infantry … lying down on its reverse slope, near the crest, in open ranks.” He was pleased to find the 2nd Corps batteries obeying his advice to keep their fire “deliberate.” But a quick check of the limbers showed Hunt that “the ammunition was running low,” and since Meade had left the Leister cottage for parts unknown to Hunt, the schoolmasterish artilleryman “rode back along the ridge, ordering the fire to cease.” A half-hour after leaving Little Round Top, Hunt returned to McGilvery’s batteries with the same orders.

  However much satisfaction this gave to Henry Hunt, it gave none whatever to Winfield Hancock. Infantry can, with training and experience, put up with a great many things whirling dangerously around them in battle, but one thing most likely to break the patience, and worse, of the infantryman is to sit or lie, cowering in trenches or rifle pits, under the dropping fire of artillery, and with no effective way of responding. “The inward prayer of every one of us,” wrote a soldier in the 43rd Massachusetts, “would have been, ‘For God’s sake give us something to do!’ The suspense of such moments is terrible, and each moment seems an age.” It was still worse for the nineteenth-century infantryman, whose artillery was often within a pebble’s throw of his own position; no infantryman pretended to understand if his own guns were making little or no attempt to return fire. The odds of an artillery duel actually doing anything to relieve the pressure of the enemy’s bombardment were nugatory, but at least it gave the sense of someone striking back on their behalf.32

  Oddly, it was usually infantry officers who wanted the guns to keep quiet, in hope of offering enemy artillery less incentive for heaving explosives at their heads, and artillery officers who were the most eager to have them speak. Hunt and Hancock now reversed those roles, as Hancock noticed that “the batteries of his own corps did not reply.” This touched off an immediate fury in Hancock, who ordered his corps artillery chief, Capt. John Hazard, to get to work. The confused Hazard replied that he had only just been ordered by General Hunt to slack off firing, but Hancock was hearing nothing of it and “compelled a rapid reply to the enemy.” It galled Hancock even more to notice that, just a few hundred yards to the left, Freeman McGilvery’s gun line had fallen silent. Hancock “came riding up to him in hot haste” and demanded to know “why in hell do you not open fire with those Batteries.” His men were taking a pounding in silence, and “unless our Batteries opened fire his troops would not stand it much longer.”

  Hancock might be able to order his own corps artillery around as he pleased, but McGilvery’s eight batteries belonged to the artillery reserve, and McGilvery had just received orders to stand down from the army’s chief of artillery. He felt no obligation to listen to “some general commanding.” This brought a red-hot stream of “language … profane and blasphemous such as a drunken Ruffian would use” from Hancock. But McGilvery, the “cool, clear-headed old sailor,” was probably not the best choice for profanity practice. He tartly informed Hancock that “he was not under Gen. Hancock’s orders, and … I could not see why the Second Corps could not stand the fire as well as the other troops, or as well as my gunners.” Hancock, he added with an impudent twist, “seemed unnecessarily excited, was unduly emphatic and … his orders would result in a most dangerous and irreplaceable waste of ammunition.”33

  A great deal of Hancock’s impatience, unlike Hunt’s, grew from uncertainty over just what the Confederate bombardment meant. George Meade was still expecting an attack “from the town” on Cemetery Hill, and along the line of the Philadelphia Brigade, Alexander Webb became convinced that the barrage meant that “the Confederate infantry will not advance and attack our position.” Even Henry Hunt at first mistook the Confederate artillery deployment as a ruse “to replace infantry sent to Ewell’s assistance, or perhaps simply to strengthen their line against a counter attack from us.” At one point during the barrage, Hancock dispatched his aide William Mitchell to John Gibbon to ask “what I thought the meaning of this terrific fire” might be. Gibbon himself was not sure. “I replied I thought it was the prelude either to a retreat or an assault.” Neither of them, however, remained long in doubt. Gibbon walked back from the front of his division line at the angle of the stone wall, “the men peering at us curiously from behind the stone wall as we passed along,” and then behind the crest of Cemetery Ridge. Suddenly, “the fire on both sides … considerably slackened,” and a division staffer and an orderly, leading Gibbon’s horse, “met me with the information that the enemy was coming in force.”34

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The shadow of a cloud across a sunny field

  USUALLY A CANNONADE against an infantry line can be but for one purpose only—to disturb and rattle the infantry so that their lines may be the easier penetrated,” wrote Union veteran Robert Beecham. But in the case of the Confederate bombardment that afternoon, Robert E. Lee’s specific purpose for “Longstreet and his batteries” was to “silence those of the enemy.” In particular, James Walton had targeted the batteries he had seen grouped behind Hancock’s four brigades between Cemetery Hill and the “clump of trees” on the ridge. The trees were pointed out “as the proposed point” of Pickett’s attack and the damage Walton’s guns caused among the Union batteries around those trees was considerable: four of Alonzo Cushing’s guns “had been struck by solid shot and dismounted”; Fred Brown’s Rhode Island battery had already lost two pieces the day before, and now lost another and had to be pulled off the line. George Woodruff’s battery had exhausted all its shell and shrapnel, and was wheeled back into an orchard on the western face of Cemetery Hill owned by David Zeigler to present less of a target. It was the task of Porter Alexander to observe the effect, judge the right moment to begin the infantry attack, and send the go-ahead word to Pickett; and from Alexander’s perspective, the artillery had accomplished almost exactly what Longstreet had asked of it.1

  But it still took much longer than Alexander had anticipated. “I had not the ammunition to make it a long business,” Alexander wrote years afterward, and he calculated that the Confederate artillery could hit the Federals pretty hard for about twenty minutes. That would see each of the Confederate guns firing about ten times if managed “carefully,” and would do no serious harm to the remaining supply of ammunition; at worst, if the gunners got too hurried, they might fire off as much as th
irty rounds, “& ammunition burns up very fast in an affair like that.” The minutes ticked by, and Alexander saw that the Confederate batteries weren’t silencing much of anything along the Union line, and that “it seemed madness to launch infantry into that fire … at midday under a July sun.” Pickett began sending couriers, demanding to know when he could advance, and Alexander kept putting them off, until, in exasperation, he wrote an irritated note to Pickett: “If you are coming at all, you must come at once, or I cannot give you proper support; but the enemy’s fire has not slackened at all; at least eighteen guns are still firing from the cemetery itself.” Which was as much as saying, Don’t.2

  And then, to Alexander’s amazement, “the enemy’s fire suddenly began to slacken,” and, what was more, he could see Federal batteries along the ridge limbering up and disappearing. “We Confederates often did such things as that to save our ammunition,” Alexander wrote, “but I had never before seen the federals withdraw their guns simply to save them up for the infantry’s fight.” He waited another five minutes to be sure, thinking that if the Yankees do “not run fresh batteries in there in five minutes, this is our fight.” Then he decided: “For God’s sake, come quick,” he scribbled in a note to Pickett. “The eighteen guns are gone; come quickly, or my ammunition won’t let me support you properly.”3