Gettysburg (50 page)

The U.S. Sharpshooters were the brainchild of Hiram Berdan, an unconventional and controversial soldier in his own right, who had obtained government approval to form two such regiments in the fall of 1861. They had proven their worth on more than one occasion, so for David Birney they were the obvious choice for this assignment. Lieutenant Colonel Casper Trepp led the 1st in this action, though Colonel Berdan was also present, and in overall command. To avoid being caught in the open fields west of Sherfy’s peach orchard, the scouting force had first marched south along the Emmitsburg Road and then swung west to enter the Pitzer Woods from the south.

Skirmishers from the 10th Alabama were only just making contact with Berdan’s men when the 11th unknowingly offered its flank to the Yankees’ deadly rifles. Hit by a rapid series of well-aimed fusillades, the 11th fled back to the main column to be reformed. Several sharpshooters forgot their stealth training and raced into the open after the 11th, presenting easy targets for the 10th’s skirmishers, who were now fully alerted to the danger. The 10th advanced through the woods from the north, slowly pressing the sharpshooters back until they reached the reserve line held by the 3rd Maine. For some twenty-five minutes, the combat was roughly even. “It was quite a spirited little fight …,” Wilcox would remember, “and brought to the front several staff officers, who inquired if we needed reinforcements.” When the 8th Alabama arrived to assist the 10th by working its way around the Yankee flank, Hiram Berdan ordered a withdrawal.

In later years, Daniel Sickles and others would insist that Berdan’s expedition had uncovered Longstreet’s turning movement, but this was not the case. Longstreet’s march was just getting under way at that point, and its forward elements were a good distance removed from the scene of this scrap. Still, for Sickles, Berdan’s report served as confirmation that the enemy was extending across his front. Soon after digesting the colonel’s tale, Sickles took another significant part-step toward the greatest insubordination of his military career, by ordering David Birney to shift his entire division into a line touching the Emmitsburg Road.

If any unit in the Army of the Potomac could be said to be operating under an unlucky star, it would have to be Colonel Leopold von Gilsa’s First Brigade, in the Eleventh Corps’ First Division (commanded on July 1 by Francis Barlow, and on July 2 by Adelbert Ames). At Chancellorsville on May 2, von Gilsa’s four regiments had held the army’s right flank, meaning that they were the first to be swamped under the human tide when half of Lee’s army crashed over them. Nearly 300 out of the unit’s approximately 1,500 members had been killed, wounded, or captured (the last category representing half the total) inside of ten terrible minutes. On July 1, three of the brigade’s regiments,
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about 900 men in all, had again been manning the army’s rightmost outpost, and once more they had been engulfed by the violent Rebel tide of Gordon’s Brigade. Slightly more than half had survived the fighting and the jumbled retreat to Cemetery Hill.

George Meade needed every hand and every gun, so as quickly as brigades could be reorganized, they were shoved into spaces along Cemetery Hill. Von Gilsa’s men now found themselves aligned along a stone wall bordering a lane that connected with a brickyard at the northeastern base of eastern Cemetery Hill. Yesterday, when their commander had finally disentangled himself from the chaotic retreat, an aide had dolefully informed him that bugles and drums were no longer needed, as the brigade was now small enough to “command … with the voice.”

During the night of July 1 and the early-morning hours of July 2, the absent 41st New York had rejoined the brigade, adding two hundred rifles to the count. That unit plus the 153rd Pennsylvania provided skirmishers for the small-scale actions undertaken throughout the morning and midafternoon. According to one of the few extant accounts by men in von Gilsa’s command, several in the brigade “were wounded and others killed, while going for water to a spring in front of them, by a rebel sharpshooter hidden in a tree, who was finally brought down by a bullet from one of the Fifth-fourth [New York].” An officer of the 153rd Pennsylvania who was on the skirmish line spent much of the early afternoon warily watching “quite a body of men in a depression of the ground between us and the rebel battery on a hill back of them.”

Many of von Gilsa’s men were German by birth or heritage. They had endured cruel jeers and epithets after Chancellorsville and knew that
their performance yesterday would only bring more of the same. Whether or not the scorn was justified, their morale was very low this day. Crouching behind the stone wall along Brickyard Lane, under the hot sun and subject to the sudden death visited by enemy snipers, von Gilsa’s soldiers could look ahead to more fighting only with a mixture of wounded pride, anxiety, and dread.

The arrival of Brigadier General Evander M. Law’s brigade, just before noon, was the signal for Longstreet to begin his flank march. Preceding the infantry columns were the guns commanded by Edward P. Alexander. The capable colonel had little problem picking a route that would bypass an open patch of ground being observed by Federal signal officers on Little Round Top. The fighting in the Pitzer Woods was over by the time Alexander halted his march, not far below the point where Pitzer’s Run branched northward from Willoughby Run. After seeing to the parking of his guns, the artillery officer retraced his route until he found the infantry column, McLaws’ Division leading, immobilized just shy of the exposed clearing.

If Longstreet’s troops were to have the desired shock effect once they went into action, it was essential that they not be spotted moving into position. In an omission that would never be explained, neither Longstreet nor McLaws had detailed any officer of Alexander’s caliber to scout the way. A partial explanation for Longstreet was that his failure to persuade Lee to attempt a much wider flanking move had left him visibly agitated and not sufficiently focused on the myriad of small details that a corps commander had to handle on such a march.

To the end of his days, Longstreet would remain convinced that Lee had appended Samuel Johnston to the expedition as its guide, while that young officer himself understood his duties as being solely advisory. Johnston’s scout this morning had been undertaken not to locate a route sufficient for a corps, but to reconnoiter the enemy line, so he was as surprised as anyone when McLaws’ column ground to a halt before the clearing.

Although he would later have some tart observations to make about Longstreet’s management of this enterprise, McLaws would never offer a rationale for his own failure to follow the bypass already used successfully by Alexander. Instead, McLaws flew into a rage (a soldier would afterward recall his “saying things I would not like to teach my grandson … to
repeat”) and decided that nothing less than a reverse march to a different route would suffice. Hood’s Division, following closely behind, was already intermingled with his, so time would be lost separating the two. When Longstreet was at last alerted to the situation, he suggested that the columns might simply about-face, but that maneuver would upset the plan calling for McLaws’ Division to lead the attack, and its commander would not countenance that. Even as Lee was reluctant to intervene with his direct subordinates, so was Longstreet passive in his response to McLaws’ obstinacy. It took even more time, then, to negotiate a path for McLaws’ countermarch. As E. P. Alexander would later comment, “There is no telling the value of the hours which were lost by that division that morning.”

Of all the tactical problems confronting Richard S. Ewell this day, the most vexing was how to deploy his artillery. Plainly stated, he had more guns available than places to put them. Joseph W. Latimer, responsible for the cannon assigned to Edward Johnson’s division, knew that firsthand. After spending much of the morning scouting locations, he had to admit that there was only one viable site, Benner’s Hill, and even that was far from ideal. Although it would afford a clean shot at the enemy guns on Cemetery Hill, only the southern tip of the position would bear on Culp’s Hill; conversely, Yankee gunners from Culp’s Hill to Cemetery Hill could target the Benner’s Hill crest. Added to that was another problem: the space was limited, so Latimer could not employ all of his guns.

The moment his batteries moved into the open area, Latimer knew, they would come under fire; it therefore made no sense to commit them until they were needed. The artillerist was able to preposition six longer-range guns belonging to the Rockbridge Battery on the portion of the hill just north of the Hanover Road, but that was all. For the rest, there was nothing to do but wait in readiness to push out into the open on command. Latimer’s cue would come from the other flank, with the sound of Longstreet’s batteries opening fire serving as the signal for him to order his men forward. Until then, the gunners could only bide their time in the sultry heat.

David Birney’s division occupied a defensive line unlike anything intended by George Meade. Brigadier General Charles K. Graham’s all-Pennsylvania brigade took position partly along the Emmitsburg Road and partly in a line
facing southwest, forming a forty-five-degree angle that pivoted on the corner of Sherfy’s peach orchard. Brigadier General J. H. Hobart Ward’s brigade took Houck’s Ridge and Devil’s Den, leaving Colonel Philippe Regis de Trobriand to fill in the space between the two with his brigade.

These officers would have had difficulty covering their sectors even with their full complement of troops, and that was a luxury they did not have. Ward’s brigade, for instance, which had counted nearly 2,600 men on June 30, had two regiments dispersed on skirmish lines and a large number of men on the roster books who were not actually on hand (having been lost largely to straggling, illness, and detached duty), leaving Ward with barely 1,800 men to hold his position. The other brigade commanders faced similar problems.

Daniel Sickles now began to ease Andrew Humphreys’ division out to match Birney’s. The able Humphreys, having been kept in the dark throughout the day, had little sense of the overall scheme. He knew only that an advance toward the Emmitsburg Road from his position along Cemetery Ridge had broken his connection with Hancock’s corps to his right. Sickles had one more surprise in store for Humphreys: even as he commenced moving his division, orders came detaching the smallest of his three brigades, Burling’s, to serve as a reserve for Birney, whose command was now too thinly spread out to provide its own.

Once Birney’s infantry were all in place, George Randolph began filling the gaps with his artillery. Several batteries were tightly packed into the salient angle, and three more were lined up to cover the space between the troops in the peach orchard and those near the wheat field. With one critical location remaining for Randolph’s attention, James E. Smith got the call. As he later recollected, “Capt. G. E. Randolph, Chief of Third Corps Artillery, piloted the [4th New York Independent] Battery to ‘Devil’s Den,’ pointing to a steep and rocky ridge running north and south, indicating that my guns were to find location thereon.”

The spot indicated by Randolph lay at the southern end of Houck’s Ridge, which itself formed the western wall of a valleylike area that was bounded on its eastern side by the more formidable Little Round Top and gently pierced by a slight, southward-flowing creek called Plum Run. The southern tip of Houck’s Ridge offered the best field of fire toward the west, but there were formidable obstacles to placing cannon on its crest. A Pennsylvania soldier later wrote that Devil’s Den seemed “as though nature in some wild freak had forgotten herself and piled great rocks in mad confusion together.” A New York veteran observed that
about “its base huge boulders, some of them as large as a small house, rest in an irregular, confused mass, forming nooks and cavernous recesses suggestive of its uncanny name.”

There was no easy way to put Smith’s cannon into this place. A soldier from the 124 th New York, sent along as security, watched as the “guns were unlimbered at the foot of Rocky Ridge and hauled up the steep acclivity into position amid the rocks on its crest.” “Here I could not place more than four guns on the crest,” recorded Smith. “In rear of this ridge, the ground descended sharply to the east, leaving no room for the limbers on the crest, therefore they were posted as near to the guns as the nature of the declivity permitted. The remaining two guns were stationed in rear about seventy-five yards, where they would be used to advantage, covering the Plum Run Gorge passage, which lies to the south of and below the crest.”

One thing Smith knew for sure: if the enemy came at him, he would be hard pressed to get any of his guns safely away from Devil’s Den.

Robert E. Lee exercised his command over the Army of Northern Virginia through his corps commanders. Each was expected to understand both the overall plan and his specific role within it. Once he had conveyed his intentions, Lee assumed the role of observer. He is reported to have said once of his late and able lieutenant “Stonewall” Jackson, “I have but to show him my design, and I know that if it can be done it will be done. No need for me to send [instructions] or watch him.” Applying this same principle to his three Gettysburg lieutenant generals, Lee ceded control of his plans and aspirations to them.