Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  George Pickett was having apprehensions of his own as his division approached the Emmitsburg Road. Pickett went forward with the division, taking up a position “one hundred yards behind” so that he could keep a clear eye to his left, where he needed to dress on Pettigrew’s right-flank brigade. But his first concern was with his own division’s right flank, where he noticed that Cadmus Wilcox’s two brigades were missing. Pickett sent three couriers off to find Wilcox. Robert Bright, Pickett’s aide-de-camp, finally located him. He had been waiting for orders before moving, and he greeted Bright “with both hands raised waving and saying to me, ‘I know, I know.’ ” Few of his men were, by now, eager to come to Pickett’s support. “Knowing what we had to encounter,” wrote a lieutenant in the Florida brigade, the order “was not obeyed with the same alacrity as was the case yesterday.” When they did finally jolt forward, they crossed directly into the path of Freeman McGilvery’s batteries, and a lieutenant in the 5th Florida found himself in a bewildering storm of “men falling all around me with brains blown out, arms off, and wounded in every direction.”

  Then Pickett had to cope with a second problem, posed by geography. Neither the Emmitsburg Road nor Seminary Ridge was exactly parallel to the Union position on Cemetery Ridge; instead, both ran at a slight southwestward tilt away from the ridgeline. This meant that any of Pickett’s brigades which lined up along Seminary Ridge would actually be advancing off target, inclining ever so gradually away from Hancock’s position and in the direction of Little Round Top. This odd conformation of the ground was not easy to discern at eye level, but it meant that at some point Pickett’s lead brigades—Kemper’s and Garnett’s—were going to have to shift their line of attack to the left. Pickett sent a courier, Thomas Friend, to instruct Richard Garnett to close to his left, and then passed the order to Kemper, who tried to make the adjustment in mid-stride, shifting to his left either by moving into close column (which made a brigade easier to navigate) or by “obliqueing” to the left. This gave Kemper’s brigade the look of zigzagging a little drunkenly as it made its approach, crowding men into Garnett’s brigade and crushing Kemper’s own regiments into one another. “Can you do nothing with your men,” cursed an irate Lewis Williams, the colonel of the 1st Virginia, in the direction of his neighbor officers in the 11th Virginia, “they are crowding me out of line.” Williams got little sympathy: “If you will go & attend to that damned little squad of yours,” one of the 11th Virginia’s officers shot back, “and let my Regiment alone, we will get along better.”14

  But the most difficult moment occurred when Garnett and Kemper finally reached the Emmitsburg Road. Not only did the rebels have to stop and clamber over the “slab,” or “plank,” fence and pour down into “the sunken bed of the Emmittsburg road,” but there was a parallel fence on the other side of the road to mount as well, and obstacles of that nature made it all too easy for men to halt, and to “prevail on a number of others to halt, and open fire.” William Swallow saw men climb to the top of the fence and then tumble “flat into the bed of the road,” a good many of whom “remained in the road and never crossed the second fence.” Those who did manage to climb back out of the roadbed emerged “somewhat disordered,” which “caused a confusion … not easily repaired by the officers in command.”

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  Although they had been able to see “nothing but smoke and flame … while we were advancing on the heights,” Pickett’s men now were close enough to Cemetery Ridge to have a full view of “a dense blue line rising from behind” the stone wall along the crest, a hundred yards away, and it took every ounce of exhortation from Richard Garnett to get his brigade moving again: Faster men, faster, we’re almost there. There was no time for precision anymore. “They came forward, sticking it up to our front and in no line-of-battle, but a mob,” gradually merging “into one crowding, pushing line, many ranks deep.” All “organization ceased,” and the rebels became “merely a mass of struggling men.” It had taken them, in all, “just nineteen minutes” to make it from Seminary Ridge to their place on the Union side of the Emmitsburg Road.15

  This was the moment Hancock’s men behind the stone wall had been dreading. Alonzo Cushing, who had been “slightly wounded in the thigh,” limped over to Alexander Webb to ask whether he should pull out and make room for Andrew Cowan’s battery. No, Webb replied, “We’ve all got to stay. Not a man can leave the front.” In that case, Cushing begged, could Webb spare him some infantrymen to help roll the last two Ordnance Rifles of his battery down to the stone wall, where they would have a clear line to fire into the rebels instead of having to shoot over the heads of the 69th Pennsylvania. Webb agreed, and a detail from the 71st Pennsylvania wheeled the guns between companies of the 69th and hurriedly loaded them with whatever came to hand—“pieces of broken shell, small stones, bayonets, etc.”—and let fly. The “artillery … opened on us with canister,” wrote the lieutenant colonel of the 53th Virginia, “and twice I saw the color-bearer stagger and the next man seize the staff and go ahead,” until the “third time the colors struck the ground … the adjutant of the regiment, rushed to them and seized them, and, I think, carried them into the enemy’s works.”16

  Then it was the turn of the Union infantry. Garnett’s brigade was creeping menacingly toward the stone boundary wall held by the Philadelphia Brigade, with the 69th Pennsylvania and two companies of the 71st Pennsylvania at the wall, and the 72nd Pennsylvania (plus two companies of the 106th Pennsylvania which had been out on the skirmish line) and the balance of the 71st behind where Cushing’s battery had sat—and where the remains of most of that battery remained. The colonel of the 69th Pennsylvania, Dennis O’Kane, had been warning his men, Bunker Hill–style, to “hold your fire until you see the whites of their eyes.” Alexander Webb, likewise, was walking among the other regiments of the Philadelphia Brigade, “speaking encouragement.” They waited until the shapeless cloud of Garnett’s brigade, “fifteen to thirty deep,” began to move slowly up from the road—perhaps “halfway across”—when a voice shrilled, Stick it to them! Whether it was O’Kane or someone else, the 69th Pennsylvania and the companies of the 71st stood up, almost as a unit, hard brass rifle butts to the shoulder, and let off a volley “with deliberation and simultaneously.” At this range, the effects were hideous, and they were made more so as the men of the 69th picked up the spare rifles they had stockpiled and began firing over and over again into the staggering mass of Confederates for another fifteen or twenty seconds. (“A few weeks” afterward, William Swallow would see the planks in the fence at the road “so completely perforated with bullet holes that you could scarcely place a half inch between them”; one sixteen-foot-by-fourteen-inch “slab” was “perforated with eight hundred and thirty-six musket balls.”)17

  Richard Garnett made it, still mounted, nearly to the wall, “gallantly waving his hat and cheering the men on to renewed efforts,” before he was knocked off his horse, “shot through the brain” and the abdomen. Every colonel in Garnett’s brigade was hit—one of them killed, another mortally wounded, the other three wounded; in the 8th Virginia, the colonel (Eppa Hunton), lieutenant colonel, major, and six of his company captains were either dead or wounded; in the 18th Virginia, seven of the eleven company captains were casualties. Of the 1,400 men Garnett had started out with, perhaps 800 were still on their feet, scattered between the road and the stone wall. To the right, passing to the other side of Nicholas Codori’s “red barn,” James Kemper’s five medium-sized Virginia regiments lunged up from the Emmitsburg Road toward the line south of the trees held by Norman Hall’s brigade. Hall was ready for them, and when Kemper’s men were “within 3 or 4 rods of us … the regiment rose up and delivered two or three volleys” at Hall’s command. But Hall’s front-rank regiments—the 59th New York, 20th Massachusetts, and 7th Michigan—began to waver and leak men to the rear, leaving the 59th New York “to contend” with the rebels “alone.” Andrew Cowan, standing behind his New Yo
rk battery, was disgusted to see Michigan and Massachusetts “officers among them … and cursed them.” Standing up in his stirrups, Kemper called out, “There are the guns, boys, go for them!” A “young officer” of the 14th Virginia leapt over the wall, “followed by a number of men,” and Cowan heard him shout, Take the gun! But as Kemper’s men surged forward to exploit the breach, Cowan was waiting for them, and at just thirty feet, five of his six Ordnance Rifles blew canister directly into the jumbled mass.18

  Cowan’s guns were not Kemper’s only problem. Cadmus Wilcox had started off late to catch up with Kemper’s flank, had lagged a good twenty minutes behind it thereafter, and totally lost connection with Kemper’s weird zigzagging toward the Emmitsburg Road. That left Kemper’s right flank uncovered as his brigade surged up to the wall, and in one more of those moments of spontaneous epiphany which had saved the Army of the Potomac over and over again in this battle, George Stannard, the commander of the Vermont brigade, saw what looked to him like a perfectly low-risk opportunity to do serious damage to Kemper’s brigade. While two of his three oversize greenhorn regiments were keeping up a lively fire at Kemper’s men, Stannard “ordered Colonel [Francis] Randall [of the 13th Vermont] to change front forward and form again on the flank” of the rebels. They were new men, and they executed the wheel to their right so clumsily that Stannard was afraid that “his order had been misunderstood” and they would blunder half-formed into the crowd of Confederates. “There was danger … that the hesitation and disorder might extend down the line,” until a quick-witted staff officer sorted them out, faced them “promptly into line,” and let fly “ten or fifteen” volleys into Kemper’s right-flank regiment, the 24th Virginia, “at half pistol shot range.”

  The 24th and the 11th Virginia struggled to bend their line backward to present a firing line to the Vermonters, but between Cowan’s battery and Stannard’s flankers, “the effect upon the rebel lines was instantaneous” and “their progress ceased close upon the low breastworks of the 2d Corps.” Which meant, in plainer terms, that “the rebels began to run, scattering individually back across the field.” Those who could run: of Kemper’s five colonels, only Joseph Mayo was unhurt. Lewis Williams of the 1st Virginia “was knocked out of the saddle by a ball in the shoulder near the brick-house, and in falling was killed by his sword,” mourned Mayo. “His little bay mare kept on with the men in the charge. I can see her now as she came limping and sadly crippled down the hill.” Mayo himself barely escaped when “a hissing sound, like the hooded cobra’s whisper of death,” followed by “a deafening explosion,” momentarily blacked him out. “When I got on my feet again there were splinters of bone and lumps of flesh sticking to my clothes.” The 11th Virginia lost seven company captains; the 1st Virginia lost six and the regiment’s major, plus the entire color guard. Insensibly, Kemper and his battered brigade began to drift to the left, and Kemper himself was knocked “from my horse” with a bullet “through the breast, the ball lodging in his back.”19

  But the Union soldiers paid an equally dear price. Alonzo Cushing went down with a bullet in the face. His thumb, on the vent of the last of his Ordnance Rifles, was burned to the bone; his collapse was broken by the arms of his German-born battery sergeant, Frederick Fuger. Dennis O’Kane went down also, with a bullet in the groin, followed by the major and the lieutenant colonel of the 69th Pennsylvania. And now they had to face a fresh wave of Confederates—Armistead and his brigade, coming up, behind and through Garnett’s stalled survivors, with Armistead in front, “thirty or forty paces in advance of his brigade with his hat off, which he carried on the point of his sword raised high above his head,” as if it were a personal guidon. The hat “slipped down to the hilt” as Armistead reached the rear of Garnett’s stalled brigade, but by that time he no longer needed it. They knew where he was going. “Boys, we must use the cold steel, who will follow me?” Armistead turned and shouted.

  Andrew Cowan thought that “a hundred or two hundred of his bravest men” followed him, the 53rd Virginia leading the surge. Their major roared as he followed Armistead, “Look at your General! Follow him,” and a corporal of the 53rd—Robert Tyler Jones, no less, a grandson of a U.S. president, John Tyler—planted the regiment’s colors on the stones. Next came the 56th Virginia, rallying from its initial repulse with the rest of Garnett’s brigade and splitting open the seam which joined the 69th Pennsylvania to the companies of the 71st Pennsylvania on its right. The Philadelphia regiments peeled back to each side, and Armistead and his men bowled through the gap, heading straight for the crest.20

  As the 69th Pennsylvania leaned back to its left, the men collided with the clump of trees which sat a few yards behind the stone wall. It was, observed one officer, the habit “of the men to fall back a pace or two, each time to load,” which “gave the line a retiring direction.” But the trees—whether they were really “dwarfs” or “bushes” or a poor man’s woodlot—acted to brake the retreat of the Philadelphians. “Even a single tree, in the centre of a small square of infantry,” wrote the British tactician George Twemlow, would enable “two hundred infantry to hold firm, and resist successive charges.” The same peculiar charm worked here. The 69th stiffened; the Virginians pushed up against them; and a wild melee broke out. “Men fire into each other’s faces not five feet apart,” wrote Jacob Hoke. “There are bayonet thrusts, sabre strokes, pistol shots, cool deliberative movements on the part of some; hot passionate, desperate efforts on the part of others; recklessness of life, tenacity of purpose, fiery determination, oaths, yells, curses, hurrahs, shoutings.” Frederick Fuger “saw General Armistead leap over the stone wall with a number of his troops,” and Fuger rallied what was left of his cannoneers and drivers “to stand their ground, fighting hand to hand with hand spikes, pistols, sabers, ramrods.” An officer in the 69th Pennsylvania saw both Union and Confederate men crushed so closely together that they could not work their rifles free to use as clubs, but “struck at each other with the barrels of their rifles.”21

  But Lewis Armistead was not interested in bogging down into a slugging match around the trees. Directly ahead he saw the ruined guns of Cushing’s battery, and behind them Alexander Webb’s last reserve regiment of the Philadelphia Brigade, the “Fire Zouaves” of the 72nd Pennsylvania, and beyond them … nothing. Nothing but the provost guard and the dead horses and overturned wagons in the Taneytown Road, nothing but daylight and victory and the destruction of the Army of the Potomac and the end of the war and independence and peace, and so he lowered his sword and called, The day is ours, men, come turn this artillery on them. And for a moment, the balances shivered and teetered, unsure which future world to bless.22

  Alexander Webb watched his Philadelphia Brigade, his new command, crack open before his eyes. “The Army of the Potomac was never nearer being whipped than it was here,” Webb would later write, and like David Birney, he “almost wished to get killed.” He went down “the whole line during the melée,” using his sword alternately to point out targets and, in one case, to “put it into a man … one of my own men” who tried to flee. A “charge of buckshot” winged him in the right leg, and he could see a rebel officer pointing at him to get someone to take another shot. He and his aide, Frank Haskell, stopped the pullback of the 71st Pennsylvania, and then, “as the damned red flags of the rebellion began to thicken and flaunt along the wall,” Webb turned to his last hope, the 72nd Pennsylvania.

  The “Fire Zouaves” began trading fire from the crest with the Virginians in the angle, and together with the fire from the 69th Pennsylvania they hit Armistead. “He swerved … as though he was struck in the stomach,” dropped his sword and hat, staggered for “two or three … steps,” then collapsed with his left hand on the muzzle of one of Cushing’s silent guns. Two or three of Armistead’s men clustered around their fallen chief, but the others now began to pause, drift backward, drop to the ground, or turn and run back the way they had come. The sight of Armistead’s fall enthused Webb, and he began w
aving his sword over his head, calling on the 72nd to charge: “Yes, boys, the enemy is running, come up, come up.”

  But more than a few men in the 72nd had no idea that Webb was their new brigadier, and when he got no response, he rode up to the color sergeant of the 72nd, William Finecy, ordered him forward, and then tried to seize the colors himself. Webb had almost given up and turned back toward the mass of rebels when Finecy bolted forward, flourishing the floors and crying, “Will you see your color storm the wall alone?” That was enough of a signal. Finecy went down, hit thirteen times, but the line of the 72nd sprang forward, surged around Armistead and the remains of Cushing’s guns, and rolled, pell-mell, all the way down to the stone wall “without any special formation,” more a “melée than a line of battle.”23

  This one regiment alone (even if they were backed up by the two companies of the 106th Pennsylvania who stood at the rear with them) would not have been enough to clean the Virginians out of the angle without the unlooked for assistance of Norman Hall’s brigade. As the pressure from Kemper’s attack eased, Hall’s men could look to their right and easily see Armistead’s Confederates breaking into the angle, and normally this would have been an open invitation to find the first path to the rear. Instead, “a strange, resistless impulse seemed to seize the whole Union line,” and company officers called out, “To our right and front,” pointing toward the trees. One of Hall’s colonels caught sight of Winfield Hancock and appealed directly to Hancock for permission to plunge into the gap where the rebel “colors are coming over the stone wall.” Go in there pretty God-damned quick, Hancock shouted in response, and Hall’s brigade swung backward in a rough wheel, then plunged straight for the clump of trees and into the angle. (Hancock later remarked that “it was not done in the way he wanted, but still it was splendidly done.”) No one could remember whether “the command ‘Charge!’ was given by any general officer”; if anything, “it seemed … to come in a spontaneous yell from the men, and instantly our line precipitated itself on the enemy.”