Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg

by James M. McPherson

  Attacking up the steep east side of Culp's Hill from the valley of Rock Creek, Johnson's three brigades of seventeen regiments outnumbered Greene's New Yorkers by more than three to one. Greene contracted his lines to defend four hundred yards of trenches along the upper slope, abandoning the other four hundred yards leading down to Spangler's Spring. Traces of these trenches can be seen east of Slocum Avenue as we ascend the hill. The attackers overran the empty trenches. They then turned right to attack the Union line end-on. Holding this flank was the 137th New York, commanded by Colonel David Ireland, whose predicament here was the same as Colonel Chamberlain's at the other end of the Union line. Just as Chamberlain bent back his line to the left, Ireland bent his to the right. And the 137th fought just as courageously against superior numbers as the 20th Maine did—lacking only the bayonet charge. But no novelist has told the story of the 137th, and few visitors stop to view its monument on the right of Slocum Avenue about a hundred yards past the intersection with Geary Avenue. It is worth our while to stop and contemplate this monument before going on to the top of Culp's Hill and climbing the observation tower that rises next to the splendid bronze statue of General Greene, who remembered his successful defense of Culp's Hill until his death thirty-six years later at the age of ninety-eight.

  Looking northwest from the tower, we see open fields in the near foreground. At dusk on July 2, two brigades of Jubal Early's division swept across this swale between Culp's Hill and East Cemetery Hill to attack the remnants of their Eleventh Corps adversaries of the previous day. Descending from the tower, we will follow Slocum Avenue until it turns left; instead of turning where the auto-tour sign beckons us, we will continue straight ahead on Wainwright Avenue. This narrow road marks the position held by two brigades of the Eleventh Corps. Once again these hapless regiments broke, streaming back up the steep hill to our left. On came the Confederates, threatening to capture the Union artillery at the top. We too will hike up this hill to look at the gun emplacements. Timely Union reinforcements coming from the area that is now the national cemetery counterattacked and drove Early's brigades down the hill and back to their starting point. Much of this fighting was hand-to-hand and took place after dark, when soldiers were in almost as much danger from friendly fire as from the enemy.

  Both armies settled down to an uneasy night interrupted by frequent firing from pickets alarmed by shadows and noises. Each side had suffered almost ten thousand casualties in what turned out to be perhaps the second bloodiest day of the war (the one-day battle of Antietam, with a combined total of 23,000 casualties, was the bloodiest). Confederates had made some gains at great cost, but had failed to achieve a breakthrough. Southern attacks had lacked coordination. Lee had followed his customary practice of issuing general orders but letting his corps commanders execute them as they thought best. The usual skills of generalship in the Army of Northern Virginia seem to have gone missing this day, especially on Ewell's front against Culp's and Cemetery Hills. On the Union side, by contrast, officers from Meade down to regimental colonels acted with initiative and coolness. They moved reinforcements to the right spots and counterattacked at the right times.

  Despite the stout Yankee resistance, Lee believed that his indomitable veterans had won the day. One more push, he thought, and the enemy would break. Pickett's division and Stuart's three cavalry brigades had finally arrived and would be available on the morrow. (Across the way, Union Major General John Sedgwick's Sixth Corps had also arrived, more than balancing the Confederate reinforcements.)

  Lee's mood and physical condition at Gettysburg have been the subjects of some controversy. He seemed unusually excited by the supposed successes of these two days. At the same time he may have been weakened by a touch of diarrhea. Or perhaps, as the novelist Michael Shaara suggested in The Killer Angels, a flare-up of Lee's heart condition left him by turns belligerent and indecisive, gnawed by the conviction that he had little time left.

  Historians have tended to discount Shaara's interpretation. But two surgeons at the University of Virginia medical school, who also happen to be Civil War buffs, have offered evidence to support it. In March 1863 Lee suffered what was probably a myocardial infarction. By his own account, Lee did not feel he had fully recovered and reported himself “more and more incapable of exertion.” Piecing together Lee's own references to his health and those of his physician, these two surgeons suggest that Lee had ischemic heart disease—an inadequate supply of blood to the heart—which eventually killed him in 1870 at the age of sixty-three. “This illness,” the doctors concluded in a medical journal article, may have “had a major influence on the battle of Gettysburg.”

  Precisely what influence is not clear. Did illness cloud Lee's judgment? Perhaps. But what we might call the “Chancellorsville Syndrome” may have been more important than Lee's health in this regard. Lee continued to think that he could win at Gettysburg as he had won two months earlier against greater numerical odds—by attacking. He had hit the Union flank at Chancellorsville and followed it up with a frontal assault, which had worked. He intended to try similar tactics at Gettysburg. He had come to Pennsylvania in quest of a decisive victory; he was determined not to leave without trying to achieve it. He believed that Meade had weakened his center to reinforce the flanks that were attacked on July 2. With Pickett's fresh division as a spearhead, he would send three divisions against the enemy center. He would also have Stuart's cavalry circle around and come in on the Union rear, while Ewell would again assail the Union right to clamp the pincers when Pickett broke through the front. With proper coordination and leadership, his invincible troops could not fail.

  Over on the Union side of the lines, Northern officers pondered the day's events and wondered what would come on the morrow. Meade called a meeting of his corps commanders in the small farmhouse that served as his headquarters. (The house is still there, about three hundred yards east of the equestrian monument to Meade just behind the scene of the next day's fighting at the climax of Pickett's charge.) Meade asked for a vote by his generals on whether to retreat or to stay and fight. They all voted to stay.

  A myth long persisted that Meade wanted to retreat, but was only persuaded to the contrary by this vote. The origins of the myth lay with two Daniels: Dan Sickles and Major General Daniel Butterfield, Meade's chief of staff, whose main claim to fame was his composition, the previous year, of the bugle call “Taps.” Both Daniels were cronies of the deposed army commander Joe Hooker, and their loyalties lay more with Hooker than with his successor. When Meade took over the army on June 28, there was not time to replace the experienced Butterfield with a new chief of staff before the battle was upon him. Butterfield later claimed that on July 2 Meade had instructed him to prepare orders for a retreat. What actually happened was that Meade asked Butterfield to draw a map of all the roads in the Union rear and to prepare contingency plans for a withdrawal in case it became necessary. This was only prudent, and Meade could be justly criticized if he had failed to prepare for every contingency.

  But Meade, like his corps commanders, wanted to stay and fight. Butterfield's motive for stating the contrary was probably a desire to discredit Meade in order to make Hooker look better. As for Sickles, while recovering from loss of his leg he smarted at criticism of his move forward to the Peach Orchard contrary to orders. He continued to believe that this move had saved the army and won the battle—and also that by precipitating the fighting on July 2, it had undercut Meade's intention to retreat.

  Sickles lived long enough to argue this case many times. Elected to Congress in 1892, he introduced the bill that created Gettysburg National Military Park in 1895. He made sure that the park boundaries included the area where his Third Corps had fought, so that visitors would always be able to see why he took them forward to the higher ground at the Peach Orchard and along the Emmitsburg Road. In 1897, after persistent lobbying, the army belatedly awarded Sickles the Congressional Medal of Honor for gallantry at Gettysburg. In his ninety-fourth
year, Sickles attended the huge fiftieth anniversary commemoration of the battle at Gettysburg, still insisting that his move had set the stage for victory. Sickles died the following year, having outlived every other corps commander at Gettysburg.

  Having decided to stay and fight, Meade made his preparations for the morrow. Two divisions of Hancock's tough Second Corps held the Union center just forward of Meade's headquarters. One of those divisions was commanded by General John Gibbon, a native of North Carolina who had remained loyal to the flag under which he had served for twenty years while three of his brothers went with the Confederacy. Looking back years after the battle, Gibbon recalled that Meade told him on that night of July 2 that “if Lee attacks tomorrow, it will be in your front,” because he had tried both flanks and failed. Gibbon gritted his teeth and told Meade that he would be ready if Lee came his way.

  Day Three: July 3, 1863

  JULY 3 DAWNED warm and humid—normal for midsummer in Gettysburg. As the light strengthened, firing broke out and grew louder on the Culp's Hill lines, where it had died away only seven hours earlier. The Union Twelfth Corps brigades that had departed to reinforce the left had returned during the night and were determined to regain their lost trenches in the morning. We return now to the Spangler's Spring area to discuss what happened there on that morning of July 3.

  Ewell had also reinforced the Confederate units at Culp's Hill, doubling their numbers overnight. Both sides planned to attack there at first light—the Federals to regain the trenches they had abandoned, the Confederates to renew their effort to capture the hill. The Yankees struck first, at 4:30 A.M., with an artillery barrage against the Confederates in those captured trenches on the southern slope of the hill. Soon after, Confederate infantry renewed their attack on the higher slopes where the fighting had taken place the previous evening.

  Once again the 137th New York found itself in the thick of the action, but this time it had plenty of help. Back and forth for several hours on this line came attacks and counterattacks, in the woods and in a small clearing called Pardee Field. Some fifty monuments and markers crowded into the half-mile from Spangler's Spring up to the observation tower testify to the intensity of fighting for nearly seven hours on this hot morning. Most of the time it was the Confederates who attacked, but each time they were driven back.

  One dramatic Union assault in late morning by the Second Massachusetts and Twenty-seventh Indiana against the Confederate left was also repulsed with heavy loss, a story told by the interpretive marker and the monuments of these two regiments near Spangler's Spring. Both were elite regiments; most of the Second Massachusetts's officers were Harvard alumni. In a few minutes, about 250 men in the two regiments were shot down, ninety-five of them fatally.

  Another poignant event took place on this flank that morning. Twenty-two-year-old Wesley Culp was a private in the Second Virginia Infantry, which took position as skirmishers on the Confederate left across Rock Creek, about four hundred yards east of Spangler's Spring. Culp had grown up in Gettysburg where, like Henry Wentz, he had learned the trade of carriage-maker. Also like Wentz, he had gone to Virginia before the war, when his employer moved the carriage-making business to Shepherdstown. Young Culp had joined the local militia there, which became Company B of the Second Virginia when the war broke out. Now he was back at Gettysburg, fighting near the hill named after his great-grandfather, who had established a farm near the hill now owned by Wesley's cousin Henry Culp. As a boy, Wesley had splashed in the local swimming hole in Rock Creek; now as a soldier he was taking potshots at Yankees along the creek; one of them took a shot at him and the bullet went home. No monument marks the spot where Wesley Culp was killed; no one recorded where he was buried; it may have been in land owned by his cousin.

  Wesley Culp was not the only native of Gettysburg killed on July 3. In the town itself, Confederates had barricaded Baltimore Street three blocks south of the square. From there and from houses nearby, sharpshooters traded shots with Union skirmishers on Cemetery Hill. Most residents of Gettysburg hid in their cellars to get out of the line of fire. One who did not was Mary Virginia Wade, known as Jenny, a comely twenty-year-old lass who was at her sister's house on Baltimore Street that day to help take care of her sister's newborn baby. Jenny Wade was engaged to Corporal Johnston Skelly of the Eighty-seventh Pennsylvania, which she knew was somewhere in Virginia. She too wanted to do her part for the war effort, so, despite warnings, she went to the kitchen that morning to bake biscuits for Union skirmishers. Suddenly a bullet from a Confederate rifle smashed through two doors and lodged in Jenny's back. She died not knowing that a few days earlier her fiance had also died of a wound he received in the battle of Winchester on June 15—a battle in which Wesley Culp had fought as his regiment was moving north toward Pennsylvania. Jenny Wade was the only civilian death in the battle of Gettysburg. The house where she was killed is still there to be visited, immediately south of the Holiday Inn.

  The exchange of sniper fire between Rebels in Gettysburg and Yankees behind stone walls on Cemetery Hill never ceased during daylight hours. But on Culp's Hill the firing died away about 11:00 A.M. The Confederates pulled back to count their killed and wounded, which were at least double those of the two Union divisions defending the hill. If the Army of Northern Virginia was to win the battle of Gettysburg, it would not do so at Culp's Hill. One part of Lee's three-pronged effort on July 3 had failed. The second part was about to begin.

  Early that morning, Jeb Stuart rode east from Gettysburg at the head of six thousand Confederate cavalry. He intended to circle south about three miles east of Gettysburg, and then turn west to come in on the Union rear along Cemetery Ridge. We will follow the route of Stuart's troopers to what is today called East Cavalry Field. Returning from Culp's Hill to Baltimore Street, we turn north to the traffic circle in downtown Gettysburg, then turn right on York Street (U.S. Route 30) and proceed almost three miles to a right turn onto Cavalry Field Road. Another mile brings us to a sharp right along a ridgeline (Confederate Cavalry Avenue) from which we gaze southward over open, rolling farmland with the historic Rummel farm in the near distance. At about 1:00 P.M. the Confederate horsemen advanced south along this ridge, dismounted skirmishers leading the way. So far they had spotted no enemy. The way to the Union rear seemed open.

  They soon encountered plenty of Yankees, however, about five thousand of them in three brigades. One was a Michigan brigade commanded by Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer, who had been jumped several grades to that rank only four days earlier. Having graduated last in his West Point class, Custer had proven in the war's first two years that there was no necessary correlation between class rank and fighting ability. Custer is remembered today mainly for his foolhardy decision at the Little Bighorn in 1876 that led to his death and that of all the men with him. But he should be remembered also for his successful hell-for-leather record as a cavalry commander during the last two years of the Civil War, starting on this hot afternoon at Gettysburg.

  For two hours—the same two hours of the artillery duel and the beginning of the Pickett-Pettigrew assault back at Gettysburg—fast and furious cavalry attacks and counterattacks, mounted and dismounted, surged back and forth across these fields. At one point in the seesawing firefight, with Union horsemen hard pressed and falling back, Custer rode to the head of one of his regiments, the Seventh Michigan, and with a shout of “Come on, you Wolverines,” led them at the gallop in a Hollywood-style charge that blunted the Rebel advance. Counterattacked in turn, the bloodied Wolverines tumbled back in disorder.

  We'll follow Confederate Cavalry Avenue south, to where it bends sharply left and becomes Gregg Avenue. Another half-mile brings us to a roadside marker and the impressive Michigan monument, a hundred yards south of the road. A confused melee in the fields south of this monument resolved itself into a renewed offensive led by the South Carolina brigade of Brigadier General Wade Hampton, a skilled commander and reputedly the South's richest planter. Custer on
ce again led a mounted charge, this time by the First Michigan. As the South Carolinians and Wolverines thundered toward each other, an awed Pennsylvania trooper looking on described what happened next: “As the two columns approached each other, the pace of each increased, when suddenly a crash, like the falling of timber, betokened the crisis. So sudden and violent was the collision that many of the horses were turned end over end and crushed their riders beneath them. The clashing of sabers, the firing of pistols, and demands for surrender, and cries of combatants, filled the air.”

  Custer's horse went down, but he jumped up and mounted a riderless horse and continued to slash away with his saber, scarcely missing a beat. Other Northern units closed in on Hampton's flanks; one New Jersey trooper charged through the confusion and sent Hampton to the rear with severe saber wounds to his head. Their leader down, and beset by angry Yankees yelling like maniacs, the Rebel horsemen retreated to the protection of their artillery on the ridge from which they had started. Not long after Pickett's Virginians reeled back from Seminary Ridge, three miles to the west, Stuart recoiled from what has been known ever since as East Cavalry Field.

  About the time the cavalry action began, the temporary calm back in Gettysburg was shattered by two cannon shots from Seminary Ridge at 1:07 P.M. This was the signal for 150 Confederate guns to soften up the point of attack near a copse of woods on Cemetery Ridge that Lee had selected for the target of his infantry assault. Union guns replied, and for almost two hours the rapid fire of more than 250 cannons shook the countryside. Owing to some freak acoustic condition of the atmosphere, several people in the Pittsburgh area, 150 miles to the west, heard this artillery barrage, while residents of Chambersburg, only twenty-five miles away, heard little or nothing.

  After the first few minutes, the Confederate shells began to go too far before exploding, causing havoc a couple of hundred yards in the rear of the Union lines, but leaving infantry and artillery at the front relatively unscathed. Confederate gunners failed to realize the inaccuracy of their fire because the smoke from all these guns hung in the calm, humid air and obscured their view. Several explanations for this Confederate overshooting have been offered. One theory is that as the gun barrels heated up, the powder exploded with greater force. Another is that the recoil scarred the ground, lowering the carriage trails and elevating the barrels ever so slightly. The most ingenious explanation grows out of an explosion at the Richmond arsenal in March that took it out of production for several weeks. The Army of Northern Virginia had to depend on arsenals farther south for production of many of the shells for the invasion of Pennsylvania. Confederate gunners did not realize that fuses on these shells burned more slowly than those from the Richmond arsenal; thus the shells whose fuses they tried to time for explosion above front-line Union troops, showering them with lethal shrapnel, exploded a split second too late, after the shells had passed over.