Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

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Gettysburg: The Last Invasion Page 99

by Allen C. Guelzo


  Union skirmishers in houses at the base of Cemetery Hill, looking north up Baltimore Street, at the intersection with the Emmitsburg Road. (Illustration Credit bm2.30)

  The wreckage of John Bigelow’s 9th Massachusetts Artillery in the Abraham Trostle farmyard, as it appeared on July 6th or 7th, 1863. (Illustration Credit bm2.31)

  Officers and staff of the 69th Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Brigade. (Illustration Credit bm2.32)

  Brigadier General Cadmus Marcellus Wilcox (1824–1890) graduated from West Point in 1846, in the same class as George B. McClellan and “Stonewall” Jackson, and commanded an Alabama brigade in R. H. Anderson’s division. Wilcox’s attack on July 2nd delivered the final knockdown to the 3rd Corps of the Army of the Potomac, but was eventually stopped by the suicidal charge of the 1st Minnesota. (Illustration Credit bm2.33)

  A prewar image of William Barksdale (1821–1863), with his wig. A congressman from Mississippi before the war, he had served in McLaws’ division of Longstreet’s corps for a year before Gettysburg. He was mortally wounded on July 2nd when his brigade was finally halted by George Willard’s “Harpers Ferry Cowards,” and he died in Union hands that night. (Illustration Credit bm2.34)

  Edward Porter Alexander (1835–1910), Longstreet’s liaison with Pickett’s Division. Like so many of the officers clustered around Longstreet, Porter Alexander was a non-Virginian (he was born in Georgia). His postwar memoirs are among the most valuable observations of the commanders of the Army of Northern Virginia. (Illustration Credit bm2.35)

  Meade’s headquarters at the Widow Leister’s cottage, looking north to Cemetery Hill; the Taneytown Road is visible to the right. It was (according to John Trowbridge) a “little square box of a house … scarcely more than a hut, having but two little rooms on the ground-floor, and I know not what narrow, low-roofed chambers above … whitewashed outside and in, except the floor and ceilings and inside doors, which were neatly scoured.” (Illustration Credit bm2.36)

  The angle where Richard Garnett’s and Lewis Armistead’s brigades fought with the Philadelphia Brigade at the apex of Pickett’s Charge; from a stereo view made in 1882, looking south toward the Round Tops. (Illustration Credit bm2.37)

  Albertus McCreary beats a hasty retreat from his rooftop perch. “From this trap-door we saw Pickett’s charge … While we were watching this charge, a neighbor was watching it also, from his trap-door. He was peeping around the chimney, when a bullet struck just above his head and knocked off a piece of brick. He disappeared so quickly that we both laughed. Almost immediately two bullets struck within a foot of my head in the shingles of the roof, and we followed our neighbor’s example and dropped out of sight also.” (Illustration Credit bm2.38)

  David Emmons Johnston, 7th Virginia Infantry, Pickett’s division; he was wounded in the bombardment that preceded Pickett’s Charge, and so lived to write his memoirs of service in the Army of Northern Virginia. “I had raised my head up to get, if possible, a breath of fresh air … when the shell exploded, which for a few moments deprived me of my breath and sensibility; I found myself lying off from the position I was in when struck, gasping for breath. My ribs on left side were broken, some fractured, left lung badly contused, and left limbs and side paralyzed.” (Illustration Credit bm2.39)

  The house of Abraham Bryan, where James Johnston Pettigrew’s division reached its final limit of advance; taken mid-July 1863. (Illustration Credit bm2.40)

  Brigadier General Alexander Stewart Webb (1835—1911), who commanded the Philadelphia Brigade at the angle. “Gettysburg,” he said in 1883, “was, and is now throughout the world known to be the Waterloo of the Rebellion.” (Illustration Credit bm2.41)

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  ALSO BY ALLEN C. GUELZO

  Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction

  Lincoln Speeches (editor)

  Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction

  Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas

  The New England Theology: From Jonathan Edwards to Edwards Amasa Park (editor, with Douglas Sweeney)

  Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America

  Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America

  Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President

  Edwards in Our Time: Jonathan Edwards and the Shaping of American Religion (editor, with Sang Hyun Lee)

  Josiah Gilbert Holland’s Life of Abraham Lincoln (editor)

  For the Union of Evangelical Christendom: The Irony of the Reformed Episcopalians, 1873–1930

  Edwards on the Will: A Century of American Philosophical Debate, 1750–1850

 

 

 


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