Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg

by James M. McPherson

  Whatever the reason, the Confederate artillery barrage did not accomplish its purpose. Nevertheless, after an hour or so, the Union chief of artillery, Brigadier General Henry J. Hunt, began to withdraw some batteries from action as a ruse to convince the Confederates that they had been knocked out and also to save ammunition for the infantry attack he knew was coming.

  Our next stop is the jump-off point for that attack. To get there from East Cavalry Field, we return to town on the Hanover Road (State Route 116), and continue west from downtown Gettysburg on Middle Street, which becomes the Fairfield Road (still Route 116). At the top of Seminary Ridge, we will turn left at the stoplight onto West Confederate Avenue, which follows the Confederate line south. The numerous cannons on our left, pointing at Cemetery Ridge across the fields, mark the positions of some of those Confederate guns firing fast and furiously that hot afternoon of July 3.

  A little more than a mile after our turn, we will pull into the parking area at the Virginia monument. After viewing this impressive sculpture portraying in bronze several representative Confederate soldiers at the base, with Robert E. Lee far above, mounted on his favorite horse, Traveller, we will walk a hundred yards east to the edge of the woods on the right. From this point the Confederate artillery stretched still another three-quarters of a mile south, all firing at the Union lines. The copse of trees visible across the fields was their central aiming point.

  These fields were crisscrossed in 1863 by Virginia worm fences or post-and-rail fences enclosing small fields of grain, corn, and hay. Farmers in southern Pennsylvania customarily fenced in their crops and left livestock free to graze in open pastures and woods. These fences formed an obstacle to infantry moving across the fields. The Park Service intends to rebuild replica fences where they existed in 1863. But to be entirely realistic, many of the fence rails should then be thrown down, for by the afternoon of July 3, 1863, soldiers of both armies had already done precisely that during the previous two days. And when the Confederate infantry attacked across these fields, details of soldiers ran ahead of the main body to pull down many of the remaining rails.

  That morning Lee and Longstreet had again disagreed about tactical plans for the day. Longstreet had informed Lee shortly after dawn, “General, I have had my scouts out all night, and I find that you still have an excellent chance to move around to the left of Meade's army and maneuver him into attacking us.” But Lee was no more in the mood for such a move than he had been twenty-four hours earlier. “The enemy is there,” he said, pointing toward the Union line, and “I am going to take them where they are.” He ordered Longstreet to prepare Pickett's fresh division and most of the brigades in Hill's two divisions that had fought on July 1—about twelve thousand men altogether—for an assault on the Union center near that copse of trees. They would be supported by other brigades from Major General Richard Anderson's division of Hill's corps.

  The attackers would have to advance across these open fields in front of us, under artillery fire almost every step of the way. When they got across the stout post-and-rail fences lining the Emmitsburg Road (most of which had not been pulled down), they would come under rifle fire from Union infantry sheltered by stone walls, fences, and shallow trenches. “General Lee,” Longstreet later reported himself to have said, “I have been a soldier all my life. I have been with soldiers engaged in fights by couples, by squads, companies, regiments, divisions, and armies, and should know as well as anyone what soldiers can do. It is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position.”

  Irritated by this near-insubordination, Lee replied impatiently that his army had overcome similar odds before—the implication being that Longstreet had not been present at Chancellorsville and therefore did not know what he was talking about—and they could do it again. Longstreet was his senior corps commander, and Lee wanted him to organize the attack despite his reluctance. “My heart was heavy,” Longstreet recalled. “I could see the desperate and hopeless nature of the charge and the cruel slaughter it would cause. That day at Gettysburg was the saddest of my life.”

  Longstreet's account may have been colored by hindsight. On the other hand, Confederate officers noted his heavy countenance as he organized the artillery for bombardment and the infantry for attack. He would have six brigades in addition to Pickett's three in the primary attack, and at least two more in support. Except for Pickett's division, these troops would not come from his own corps, which had been too badly shot up the previous day to be ready to fight again. Instead, the other six brigades in the primary attack would come from Henry Heth's and Dorsey Pender's divisions of A. P. Hill's corps. They had been badly mangled on July 1, but at least the survivors had had a day of rest. They would not be under their usual commanders, however; both Heth and Pender had been wounded on that first day (Pender would die of his wound two weeks later). Brigadier Generals J. Johnston Pettigrew and Isaac Trimble took their places. Four of the six brigades in these two divisions were also under new commanders this day—all of them colonels—which did not augur well for the steadiness of these units if they ran into heavy resistance.

  Major General George E. Pickett's all-Virginia division would constitute nearly half of the attacking force. They waited with nervous impatience to go in and get it over with. Like Custer, Pickett had graduated last in his West Point class (of 1846). And like Custer, he wore his long hair in ringlets. With his face adorned by a drooping mustache and goatee, Pickett looked like a cross between a Cavalier dandy and a riverboat gambler. He affected the style of Sir Walter Scott. His division had been involved only in skirmishes since the battle of Antietam, more than nine months earlier, and Pickett himself had seen little action since he was wounded in the Seven Days battles a year before. He was eager to win everlasting glory at Gettysburg.

  Less eager, but driven by honor and pride, were Pickett's brigade commanders, all of them older than Pickett, and all of them brigadier generals: Lewis A. Armistead, Richard B. Garnett, and James L. Kemper. Kemper was an eager secessionist who had been appointed for political reasons but had developed military skills; Armistead and Garnett were professionals with something to prove. Every generation of Virginia Armisteads since 1636 had fought in one of England's or America's wars. Lewis's father and four uncles had fought in the War of 1812. It must have been a matter of some family shame, therefore, when young Lewis was expelled from West Point in 1836, reportedly for hitting Jubal Early over the head with a dinner plate. Armistead went into the army anyway in 1839, and worked his way up to captain before resigning to join the Confederacy in 1861. One of his closest friends in the old army was Winfield Scott Hancock, who was waiting for him across the way as commander of the Union Second Corps holding the sector that the Confederates intended to attack.

  Garnett had commanded the famed Stonewall Brigade under Stonewall Jackson in the battle of Kernstown in March 1862. When his men ran out of ammunition he had pulled them back. Jackson had him court-martialed for disobedience of orders and cowardice. Garnett was never tried, and was subsequently given a brigade under Pickett, but he felt the need to erase the stain on his honor. He was too ill to participate in this attack on foot, and was determined to lead his brigade on horseback, even though that would make him the prime target of every Union rifle within range. As Garnett and Armistead gazed across the fields at the blazing cannons on the ridge they were ordered to assault, Garnett commented, “This is a desperate thing to attempt.” “It is,” agreed Armistead. “But the issue is with the Almighty, and we must leave it in his hands.”

  Pickett's division would go forward on the right of the attacking line. We are standing about where the farthest right of Pettigrew's four brigades would start forward, with three more to the left and Trimble's brigades behind them. The whole line would be a mile wide when it emerged from the woods along Seminary Ridge, contracting to a width of only six hundred yards at the point of attack. Sometime between 2:00 and 3:00 P.M. (reports vary), Confederate batte
ries began to run short of ammunition. Longstreet's artillery commander, Colonel E. Porter Alexander, sent word that it was now or never for the infantry to go forward. “General,” Pickett pleaded with Longstreet, “shall I advance?” Longstreet later wrote that “my feelings had so overcome me that I could not speak, for the fear of betraying my want of confidence.” All he could do was nod. That was enough for Pickett. He rushed back to his men and gave them a short speech (which most could not hear), concluding, “Up men, and to your posts! Don't forget today that you are from old Virginia.”

  Forth they went, line after line. Almost as soon as they emerged from the woods near where we are standing, enemy artillery began to find the range. Confederate soldiers quickly learned that few if any Union cannons had been knocked out. Many of the times I have stood at this spot with a group of students, someone has asked me, “What made these men do it? What motivated them to advance into that wall of fire? What caused them to go forward despite the high odds against coming out unharmed?” The same questions could be asked about Union as well as Confederate soldiers on many a battlefield. I decided to write a book to answer the questions, using the letters and diaries of the soldiers themselves to find out what made them tick.

  The answers to the questions are complex, as one might imagine, but they can be boiled down to the two motives expressed by the title of my book For Cause and Comrades. Most of the soldiers who fought at Gettysburg (and elsewhere) were volunteers. They had enlisted because they believed in the Cause (with a capital C) for which they were fighting: the very survival of their respective nations. If the North lost the war, the words “United States” would become an oxymoron. If the South lost, the Confederacy would exist no more. When the bullets started flying, however, the abstraction of Cause might fade into the background of the clear and present danger presented by those bullets. No sane person would walk alone for a thousand yards across open fields plowed by exploding shells, knowing that if he made it that far, grim men with rifles were waiting to shoot at him during the next three hundred yards. But if his comrades were going forward, he couldn't let them down by lagging behind. His fear of their contempt for his cowardice was greater than his fear of those shells and bullets. “You ask me if the thought of death does not alarm me,” wrote one soldier to his sister. “I will say that I do not wish to die.… I myself am as big a coward as eny could be, but give me the bullet before the coward when all my friends and companions are going forward.”

  So, forward they went into a chaos of exploding shells that dropped men at almost every step. On they marched, closing ranks and keeping alignment almost as if they were on the parade ground. It was an awesome spectacle that participants on both sides remembered until the end of their lives—which for many came within the next half hour. We share that awe as we walk across these fields toward the Union line, hearing in our imagination the explosions of shells and the screams of the wounded.

  As they approached the Union line, Pickett's division obliqued left so that the concentrated force of the attackers focused on that six-hundred-yard front. Yankee artillery and infantry waited behind their breastworks of fence rails and piled dirt and, for three hundred yards of that front, the protection of a stone wall. That wall made a ninety-degree turn to the east for sixty yards before resuming its south-north direction. As the attackers crossed the Emmitsburg Road, the spearhead of the assault headed toward that angle in the stone wall. Union artillery switched to canister (bullet-sized balls packed into casings), and Northern riflemen sent sheets of lead into those dense gray lines of infantry. On the right flank of Kemper's brigade, two Vermont regiments swung forward from the Union line and raked the Virginians with a devastating enfilading fire. Six hundred yards to the north, the Eighth Ohio did the same thing to Virginians and Mississippians in Pettigrew's division, aided by several companies of the 108th and 126th New York. The Ohioans deployed through the grounds of what was for decades the Home Sweet Home Motel. The National Park acquired this property in 2002 and razed the motel. The nearest building now to the rear of the Eighth Ohio's position is General Pickett's Buffet and Battle Theater—which would amuse the Ohioans if they could come back.

  In the face of these counterattacks, the Confederate flanks melted away like butter on a hot summer day. In the center, too, all was chaos. Longstreet's worst fears were coming true. Trimble went down with a wound that would cost him a leg. Pettigrew received a flesh wound in the hand. Garnett's riderless horse bolted out of the smoke; his master's body was later buried with his men and never identified. Kemper was crippled by a severe wound. All fifteen regimental commanders in Pickett's division went down; nine of them were killed. Thirteen of Pickett's regiments suffered the ignominy of having their flags captured by the enemy.

  Perhaps two hundred men with Armistead had broken through the line at the angle in the stone wall, only to be shot down or captured by Union reserves who counterattacked to close the breach. Armistead received a mortal wound as he placed his hand on an enemy cannon to claim its capture. By four o'clock it was all over. Unwounded but dazed Confederate survivors stumbled back to their starting point. Barely half returned. Of the forty-two regiments that took part in the primary attack, twenty-eight lost their colors to the enemy—by far the highest total for any one action in the war. In addition, of the eight supporting regiments that finally came forward—too late to help—one lost its flag as well.

  A stroll around this “high water mark” of the Confederacy is well worth the time it takes to read the interpretive markers and absorb the information on the three dozen regimental monuments and the dozen or more tablets originally placed by the War Department. One Union monument in particular attracts our attention: the Seventy-second Pennsylvania monument with its bronze soldier atop a pedestal preparing to strike the enemy with his clubbed musket in hand-to-hand combat.

  The Seventy-second was part of the Philadelphia brigade—four regiments from that city (69th, 71st, 72nd, and 106th Pennsylvania) which held the Union position that bore the brunt of the Confederate attack. The Seventy-second was originally in reserve about fifty yards to the rear of this monument (at a spot marked by an earlier regimental monument). When the veterans of the Seventy-second proposed in the 1880s to erect a second monument at the advanced position along the stone wall, the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association refused permission. The veterans took the association to court. Several battle participants and witnesses testified for each side in this case. The brigade's commander, Brigadier General Alexander S. Webb, testified that at the crisis of the battle he had ordered the Seventy-second forward from its reserve position. They refused to go, he said. He tried to grab the national flag from the color sergeant to carry it forward, but the sergeant wouldn't let go. (Webb had been in command of the brigade for only a few days, so most of the men may not have known who he was.) Only after the enemy breakthrough had been contained and the assault repulsed, Webb claimed, did the regiment go forward to the place of honor where these craven cowards wanted to place their monument. Others disputed Webb's testimony, and in the end the judge ruled in favor of the Seventy-second's veterans. They got their second monument, on the front line. And perhaps they deserved it. Statistics of killed and wounded are a rough index of how hard a regiment fought. The Seventy-second had sixty-four killed and 125 wounded at Gettysburg—one-third of the brigade's casualties. It appears that they did quite a bit of fighting after all—or at least they took a lot of punishment.

  Descendants of Confederates have had their own controversies about the placement of monuments at the high-water mark. That designation long belonged to the monument marking the spot where Armistead fell, about thirty yards on the Union side of the stone wall. But North Carolinians have disputed this placement of the high-water mark. They insist that a few men in the Twenty-sixth North Carolina penetrated twenty yards farther than the Virginian Armistead. Whatever the merits of this claim, the Twenty-sixth North Carolina unquestionably earned other distinctions. With a
total of 840 men going into action on July 1, it was the largest regiment in either army. Its twenty-one-year-old “boy colonel,” Henry Burg-wyn, killed on July 1, was the youngest to hold that rank in either army. The regiment fought on both July 1 and 3, sustaining a total of 687 casualties, which was both the largest number and percentage (82 percent) for any regiment in the battle. (The same percentage in the First Minnesota on July 2 was for only eight of its ten companies.) Company F of the Twenty-sixth included four sets of twins, every one of whom was killed or wounded in the battle—a phenomenon unmatched by any other unit in the entire war.

  Park historians accepted the claim that the Twenty-sixth advanced farther than any other regiment, and allowed North Carolina to place their monument at that point. But the place is to the north of the east-west jog of the stone wall, and outside the Union defensive line, while the Armistead monument represents a breakthrough of that line. The controversy reflects a long-standing dispute between Virginians and North Carolinians, who resented Virginia's domination of the writing of Confederate history. Much of the dispute has centered on “Pickett's Charge.” North Carolinians maintain that it should be called “the Pickett-Pettigrew Charge” (Pettigrew was from North Carolina) because almost as many North Carolina regiments (fifteen) as Virginia regiments (nineteen) took part. And the Twenty-sixth North Carolina, they continue to insist, got farther than any Virginian. To assuage the bruised North Carolina ego, it is now politically correct to call it the Pickett-Pettigrew assault. But this in turn is misleading, for ten of those fifteen North Carolina regiments were in Trimble's two brigades, not in Pettigrew's division.