Gettysburg (53 page)

Quickly assigning Colonel James C. Rice of the 44th New York to lead the unit to Little Round Top, Vincent rode ahead to scout the location with an aide. He decided to ascend the hill’s eastern side, breaking out of the trees near its southern crest. Ironically, Gouverneur K. Warren, anxiously holding his place on the hill’s northeastern face, never saw Vincent or his men as they began arriving not a hundred yards away, the first to respond to his call for help.
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wGeorge Meade’s reluctant decision to support Sickles’ advance line also brought an end to the charade of easing the remaining Third Corps units to the Emmitsburg Road. Relieved of that constraint, Andrew Humphreys moved his two brigades forward with style. “Soon the long lines of the Third Corps are seen advancing, and how splendidly they march,” recalled an officer in Hancock’s corps. “It looks like a dress parade, a review. On, on they go, out towards the peach orchard, but not a shot fired.” Winfield Hancock, who had resumed command of the Second Corps shortly after it took position along Cemetery Ridge, was as surprised by this display as anyone: “I recollect looking on and admiring the spectacle,” he later testified, “but I did not know the object of it.” Standing near Hancock, John Gibbon worried about the way Sickles was exposing his left flank. “There was quite a thick wood away off to the left of Sickles’s line,” Gibbon remarked, indicating an area known as Biesecker’s Woods, “and I asked General Hancock if he supposed there was anything in those woods.”

Returning to his headquarters, Meade could hear the full-throated rumble of the enemy artillery pounding Sickles’ position. There was no longer any question in his mind as to what Lee intended to do.

T
he preassault artillery barrage organized by
E. P.
Alexander, coming from some fifty-four cannon, began at about 3:40
P.M.
The young artillery chief had hoped to unleash his firepower in a single dramatic volley, but that kind of coordination was difficult to achieve under combat conditions. A few of his gunners had already exchanged shots after being goaded by the enemy, so as Hood’s Division began coming into line, the general went ahead and ordered the two batteries with him to open on the Federals, hoping to get them to reveal their positions. This drew a concentrated return fire that left Alexander with little option but to let all his guns engage. “I had hoped, with my 54 guns & close range, to make it short, sharp & decisive,” Alexander later wrote. “At close ranges there was less inequality in our guns, & especially in our ammunition, & I thought that if ever I could overwhelm & crush them I would do it now.”

His gunners did him proud. High on their priority target list were Smith’s four guns in the Devil’s Den. “The accuracy of the enemy’s aim was astonishing,” Smith later admitted. Captain Charles A. Phillips’ 5th Massachusetts Battery went into action right after the Rebel metal began flying. “As soon as the battery was in position the guidon took his position on the right,” Phillips recollected, “and the first shot was apparently directed at the flag and killed two horses on the right piece.” Lieutenant John
K.
Bucklyn held an especially exposed position with his Battery
E,
1st Rhode Island Light Artillery, posted along the Emmitsburg Road just north of Sherfy’s peach orchard. “I fired slow and carefully,” Bucklyn remembered. “Men and horses fell around me.” The “shrieking, hissing, [and] seething” were such that to a young gunner in the 9th Massachusetts Light Artillery, “it seemed as though it must be the work of the very devil himself.”

Only a few minutes into his effort, Alexander had to admit that these Federals were good. “They really surprised me,” he acknowledged, “both
with the number of guns they developed, & the way they stuck to them.” Captain O. B. Taylor of Virginia’s Bath Artillery lost Corporal William P. Ray under this return fire. “He was killed while in the act of sighting his guns,” Taylor reported. “He never spoke after receiving the shot, walked a few steps from his piece, and fell dead.” There was even a near miss for the architect of the action: “I had … my right knee skinned by a bullet which passed behind one leg & in front of the other as I was walking between Gilbert’s guns,”
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E. P. Alexander related. He also noted that one of his four gun batteries “had two [cannon] fairly struck by the enemy’s shot & dismounted.”

The artillery thundering on the southern end of the battlefield was barely audible seven miles to the northeast, near Hunterstown, through which Jeb Stuart’s weary cavalry columns were passing on the final leg of their journey. The leading elements in the mounted procession had reached the outer picket line north of Gettysburg by the time the rear guard, under the immediate control of Brigadier General Wade Hampton, pulled out of the small Pennsylvania village. Hampton was already in a truculent mood, having been the target of an entire carbine magazine pumped at him by a Yankee scout—a remarkably inept Yankee scout, evidently, as he managed only to graze the formidable Rebel officer before escaping with a slight wound inflicted by Hampton’s pistol. At about 4:00
P.M.,
Stuart learned that an outpost left by Hampton in Hunterstown had been driven out by an enemy force of unknown size. Hampton, getting the word to clear the town, was quick to respond.

The Federals in question were four Michigan cavalry regiments under the flamboyant Brigadier General George A. Custer. To buy time for his horse artillery to deploy, Custer launched a bold spoiling attack against Hampton’s heavy columns. “I’ll lead you this time, boys. Come on!” Custer yelled, directing fifty or so troopers in a wild charge. Such bravado nearly cost him his life when the first Rebel volley took down his horse, leaving its rider shaken but uninjured. A 1st Michigan trooper galloped over to his unhorsed leader and hauled him aboard, then raced to safety.

The combat just south of Hunterstown continued to intensify as both sides sent in reinforcements, each convinced that the other was attempting a major flanking move. While it remained modest in overall scale, the fighting was close in and bitter. A 6th Michigan trooper, sent forward dismounted to defend a battery, afterward wrote to his parents that “a few Rebels rode right over us on and up to our guns of the Battery and it was then that [occurred a] hand to hand encounter with the saber until every one that reached the guns was hewn down under the saber or shot to death with Revolvers.”

The combat reached a point of exhaustion beyond which each side waited to see what the other intended to do. Since their common intent was defensive, the weary pause became a permanent end to this furious and violent action that cost the two sides not quite seventy casualties between them. Nothing had been accomplished, nothing gained, in what one Federal trooper would later term “a hard, bold and bloody fight.”

Much closer to Gettysburg, the artillery rumbling on the southern end of the battlefield was the signal Joseph Latimer had been expecting. After confirming his orders with Edward Johnson, Latimer led his batteries to the limited open crest of Benner’s Hill. A foot soldier who watched them go thought it “a splendid sight. Sixteen guns … streaming over the field in bustle and busy speed and enveloped in clouds of dust.” As each tube swung into its place and dropped its stabilizing trail, cannoneers aimed the weapons and fired. Scarcely had the first ragged volley belched off the hill when the first rounds of Federal response began landing across the crest. One of Latimer’s gunners felt “a continuous vibration like a severe storm raging in the elements.”

There was no time for ranging shots, and the distance to their targets was some four thousand feet, but the Confederate gunners knew their business. Grading them from across the way was the First Corps’ demanding artillery chief, Charles Wainwright, who judged the two sides evenly matched as to their number of cannon. However, “in every other respect the rebel guns had the advantage of us,” he believed. Just how much of an advantage became gruesomely evident when an enemy shell burst under one gun of the 1st Pennsylvania Light Artillery, Battery B, killing one crewman and horribly wounding another. Wainwright, who had nothing but admiration for the way the survivors took up the slack, would retain a vivid image of the mortally wounded man, who “lost his right hand, his left arm at the shoulder, and [had] his ribs so broken open that you could see right into him.”

Using Alexander’s guns to soften the enemy positions on the southern portion of the line was a calculated risk, for it did not take long for some of the Yankee overshoots to begin landing amid the infantry concentrated for the attack. Hardest hit was Robertson’s Texas Brigade. “We were standing in an open field, under the shot and shell of those batteries, for
half an hour,” recollected a member of the 4th Texas, “and a good many soldiers were killed all around me.” “It is very trying upon men to remain still and in ranks under a severe cannonading,” testified an officer in that regiment. “To avoid as much danger as possible, we were ordered to lie down until all were in readiness,” recalled a 1st Texas private.

Throughout it all, John B. Hood kept hoping that James Longstreet would formally modify his orders. Spurred one more time by opposition to the plan expressed by his brigadier Evander Law, Hood sent his adjutant general, Major Harry Sellers, to make a final plea. Sellers returned with Longstreet’s last word on the subject: “You will execute the orders you have received.”

It was not what Hood wanted to hear. He had decided nevertheless to obey only the spirit, not the letter, of Lee’s orders. He would secure his right flank from enfilde fire and then meet Lee’s objectives by moving up the Emmitsburg Road. “‘Very well,’” Hood told Sellers. “‘When we get under fire I will have a digression.’”

Hood later wrote, “After this urgent protest against entering the battle of Gettysburg according to instructions—which protest is the first and only one I ever made during my entire military career—I ordered my line to advance and make the assault.”

It was roughly 4:00
P.M.
when the most forward files of the Sixth Corps reached Rock Creek, just two miles from the Union left flank. “Directly the familiar roar of battle began to be heard distinctly,” reminisced a member of the 61st Pennsylvania, “then louder and more continuous.” These sounds, plus the sight of wounded men from yesterday’s fight, provided the necessary stimulus for the soldiers to complete their epic march. “There was much to inspire the men in their dogged resolution to push on,” noted a Wisconsin officer.

Other troops were also approaching Gettysburg—troops that were just as tired from marching this hot day as the Sixth Corps, and just as ready to fight if they were needed. These soldiers, belonging to George E. Pickett’s division of Longstreet’s Corps, had been left behind at Chambersburg to guard the Confederate supply trains; on being relieved by late-arriving cavalry, they had been sent marching east before dawn. As they passed through the town, William Henry Cocke of the 9th Virginia had hoped to find the woman who had jeered the men for appearing to retreat just days earlier. Admittedly “anxious to see the young lady who
spoke to me before to let her know that it was the same party returning,” Cocke was disappointed to discover that “no one was stirring” at that early hour.

“The roads were hard and firm,” recalled a soldier in the 7th Virginia, “and we made good time, but the day was terribly hot and clouds of dust stifling. Water was scarce and we suffered much.” As the column entered the Cashtown Gap around midday, remembered another Virginian, “the vertical rays of the sun seemed like real lances of steel tipped with fire!” Lieutenant John Dooley of the 1st Virginia, in charge of the rear guard, was under orders to keep the troops moving. He heard every kind of excuse, some reasonable, others just a pretext for dropping out. Concluded Dooley, “It is a hard thing to keep these men upon the move.”

As the division approached Gettysburg on the Chambersburg Pike, one Virginia soldier heard “the sullen ‘Boom!’ ‘Boom!’ ‘Boom!’ of artillery in the distance.” Nearer the town, Pickett sent his adjutant and inspector general, Major Walter Harrison, to report their arrival to Robert E. Lee, while he himself went to check in with James Longstreet. Lee’s instructions to Pickett were to let his men rest as they reached Marsh Creek; they would not be needed this day.

T
here was a conscious sense of time’s standing still as John
B.
Hood rode before his division and halted in front of the Texas Brigade. Once his troops had engaged the enemy, Hood’s ability to control events would rapidly diminish. That was the nature of Civil War combat: men communicated by words, gesture, or sound, all of which became increasingly obscured when the action began. Hood knew this and was well aware of the many hundreds of eyes that were fixed on him in that frozen moment.

He spoke some words that did not carry far. Soldiers watching him from a distance could only imagine the exhortation, and those who said they caught it recalled different things. The officer commanding the 1st Texas heard Hood exclaim, “‘Forward, my Texans, and win this battle or die in the effort!’” A private in the ranks of the 4th Texas swore that he said only, “‘Forward—Steady—forward.’” According to another, Hood’s speech ended, “‘Fix bayonets, my brave Texans; forward and take those heights!’” As soon as the Texas Brigade began moving, Law’s Alabama brigade, off its right, took its cue. Law’s adjutant, Captain Leigh
R.
Terrell, spurred his horse to the brigade’s front, where he shouted, “‘Attention! Shoulder— Arms. Right Shoulder Shift—[Arms]. Guide Center. Forward. March!’”