Gettysburg (57 page)

Kershaw got his first unpleasant surprise when he observed Hood’s brigades moving “independently against Round Top,” a departure from plan that meant they would not “directly participate in the joint attack.” With Hood off track, he could only hope that Barksdale would do his part, for without the Mississippians’ striking the peach orchard in tandem with his advance, the Yankee cannon would scourge his flank with a terrible power.

Kershaw brought his battle lines forward to their jump-off point and waited. The signal to advance was received, and as Kershaw later recalled with pride, his “men … were promptly aligned, the word [to advance] was given, and the brigade moved off at the word, with great steadiness and precision. … General Longstreet accompanied me in this advance
on foot, as far as the Emmitsburg road … he continued. “When we were about the Emmitsburg road, I heard Barksdale’s drum beat the assembly, and knew
then
that I should have no immediate support on my left, about to be squarely presented to the heavy force of the infantry and artillery at and in rear of the Peach Orchard.”

With plan A shot, Kershaw wasted no time in improvising a plan B. He divided his brigade into two wings: the left (two regiments and the battalion) wheeled north to face the peach orchard salient, while the right wing (the remaining three regiments) pressed toward the stony hill. Communicating this change to his subordinates and carrying it out under a killing shower of canister and spherical case constituted a supreme test of Kershaw’s leadership.

His left wing took horrible losses as it pushed within rifle range of the cannon. “You could constantly see men falling on all sides and the terrible missiles of death were flying thick and fast everywhere,” recollected a member of the 2nd South Carolina, “cutting off large trees and plowing up the ground everywhere.” “Shells were cutting off the arms, legs and heads of our men, cutting them in two and exploding in their bodies, tearing them into mincemeat,” shuddered another in that regiment.

Most of the left wing went to ground, opting to use their rifles to clear the artillery row of its gunners. A problem arose with the other wing as several units crowded together and the ranks became intermingled. To separate them, Kershaw gave the order, intended solely for the right wing, to “move to the right and open at the line.” However, the order to “move by the right flank” was communicated by mistake to the officers of the left wing, who promptly pulled their men away from the cannon and turned their flank and rear to the eager Yankee gunners. “We were, in ten minutes’ or less time, terribly butchered,” declared a soldier in the left wing. “I saw half a dozen at a time knocked up and flung to the ground like trifles.” A Rebel private in the midst of the storm would never forget “the awful deathly surging sounds of those little black [canister] balls as they flew by us, through us, between our legs and over us!” “Hundreds of the bravest and best men of Carolina fell,” Kershaw noted, “victims of this fatal blunder.”

Daniel Sickles’ unauthorized move into a position that required more men than he had at his disposal immediately sucked in the reserve forces of the Fifth Corps and the batteries of the Reserve Artillery. The
manpower drain would not end there—Hancock’s Second Corps soon felt it imperative to support the struggling Third Corps. Andrew Humphreys, while advancing his division to the Emmitsburg Road, pulled his right flank away from its covering connection with the Second, leaving it, in military parlance, “in the air.”

Humphreys appealed to John Gibbon, whose Second Corps division was close at hand, to “close the line by filling up the open space between them.” Gibbon decided to send two of his regiments (the 15th Massachusetts and the 82nd New York) out to the Emmitsburg Road near the Codori farm. Once there, recalled a Massachusetts soldier, “we built a small breastwork of rails behind the fence [lining the road], during which time the enemy were engaged on our left, and there was a rapid picket firing in our front.”

On Little Round Top, Strong Vincent’s brigade had successfully withstood several attacks on its right flank by the 4th Alabama and 4th and 5th Texas Regiments. None of these later attempts had had the desperate, frenzied determination of the first one, exhaustion having exacted its toll on the Rebel assault force. For the moment, the fighting across the southwestern slope was being carried out in Indian fashion, with the men on both sides firing slowly from cover. An Alabama soldier noted that “Minie balls were falling through the leaves like hail in a thunderstorm.”

Approaching the fray from the summit of Big Round Top, William Oates heard the disciplined volleys of the 83rd Pennsylvania and the 20th Maine shredding the 47th Alabama. The sound helped Oates fix the location of the Federal position in his front. Obeying his orders to flank the enemy’s line, he instructed his 15th Alabama to “swing around, and drive the Federals from the ledge of rocks, … gain the enemy’s rear, and drive him from the hill.”

Along the sector held by the 20th Maine, Joshua Chamberlain was informed by one of his company captains, positioned near the center of the line, that “something queer was going on in his front.” Chamberlain followed the officer back to his spot and climbed onto a boulder to get a better view. His second in command, Major Ellis Spear, came over from the regiment’s left wing to recommend that the line be refused—that is, bent back—the better to protect that flank. From his perch, Chamberlain saw “thick groups in gray [who] were pushing … in a direction to gain our left flank.”

Joshua Chamberlain was of that rare breed of citizen-soldiers whose metier was combat. Faced in the heat of battle with a tactical problem requiring a quick solution, he coolly came up with an unconventional riposte. Ordering his men to maintain a steady fire to their front, he simultaneously directed them to sidestep to their left, so the second rank merged with the first. By this means, the standard double-ranked lines of battle were transformed into a much longer single line, which Chamberlain then bent back at the place where his left flank had formerly ended. This enabled him to extend his refused flank along a larger perimeter than would have obtained if he had merely bent back the double lines, as Ellis Spear had proposed.

It was not a textbook maneuver, but Chamberlain knew he had to do
something.
“If a strong force should gain our rear,” he later explained, “our brigade would be caught as by a mighty shears-blade, and be cut and crushed.”

The 3,300 men of John C. Caldwell’s Second Corps division had been watching the fight on their left with more than detached interest. “Smoke rises in dense clouds from Little Round Top,” remembered one officer. “The rattle of musketry, the crash of … canister through the dense woodland tells the story of the conflict.” Then the bugles and drums were sounding Assembly, summoning the men into ranks that soon enough began marching toward the maelstrom—or so they thought. Another column was seen cutting across the path of Caldwell’s division: Barnes’ Fifth Corps division, coming forward to buttress Little Round Top and the wheat field. With the advent of that unit, Winfield Hancock told Caldwell to return to his starting point, which he did, doubtless to ample grumbling in the ranks.

Hancock found a place along his sector from which he could observe a good deal of the fighting on his left. Then an aide appeared to request that Hancock send a division to help without reporting to Sickles. Calling for assistance was the Fifth Corps, then battling G. T. Anderson’s and Benning’s Brigades near Rose’s wheat field. “‘Caldwell, you get your division ready,’” Hancock ordered.

It was not long before the four brigades were marching south past Hancock, led by Edward E. Cross’ First Brigade. “‘Colonel Cross, this day will bring you a [general’s] star,’” Hancock shouted. Cross looked anything but pleased. “‘No General,’” he replied, “’this is my last
battle.’” The Federal officer usually sported a red bandana when in action, but today the one he wore was black. Behind Cross came the brigades of Colonels Patrick Kelly and John R. Brooke and Brigadier General Samuel K. Zook. A member of Kelly’s Irish Brigade recalled that the men “at once took arms and were marched by the left flank toward the scene of action.”

Like many other aspects of Daniel Sickles’ repositioning of the Third Corps, the line taken along Houck’s Ridge both aided and endangered the Army of the Potomac. It threatened it by forcing Sickles to uncover the more strategically important Little Round Top; it helped it by absorbing the offensive energies of portions of three Confederate brigades, so draining them of power that they would contribute little to what remained of this day’s combat. In accomplishing that, however, Brigadier General J. H. Hobart Ward’s brigade would itself sacrifice some 781 soldiers out of perhaps 2,200 engaged.

Once Benning’s Georgia brigade had added its full weight to the assault on Devil’s Den, the ability of Ward’s men to sustain their position rapidly eroded. Recognizing at last the impossibility of holding against such odds, and believing that the reinforcements Meade was committing to Rose’s wheat field meant that his defense of the ridge had accomplished its purpose, Ward began pulling his units away from that deadly sector.

The regiments nearest the wheat field got the orders first, while those at Devil’s Den received them last, if at all. The worst fate fell upon the 4th Maine, posted below and facing the gorge. Heavily assailed in its front and from Devil’s Den, the regiment finally backed out of the Plum Run valley with losses approaching 50 percent of those engaged.

The last intact Federal unit to leave Devil’s Den was the 99th Pennsylvania. Sergeant Harvey Munsell, still hiding his fear from the others, would never forget a final act of sacrifice performed by his decimated color guard. Some powerful emotion bound together three enlisted men in the group, Privates George Broadbent and Charles W. Herbster and Corporal George Setley. After Broadbent was killed, toward the end of the fighting, Herbster and Setley positioned themselves alongside their friend’s body, grimly set on vengeance. Even orders to retreat did not deter them from their self-appointed destiny. “Nothing could move them,” Munsell would remember. “There they were, riveted to the ground, avenging the lives of their comrades, and there we left them.
Setley was frothing at the mouth with excitement and anger, and Herbster taking it as cool as a cucumber.” Munsell knew he would never see the pair again alive.
^*

Once the Federals had relinquished Devil’s Den, it became a favorite target for Union artillery at the northern end of the Plum Run valley. “The shell and shrapnel shot descended, exploding in the earth and hurling the rocks to an amazing height,” recorded the
Savannah Republican’s
reporter, “but in spite of all, our [Confederate] men held their places firmly.”

One unintended effect of the artillery duel on the southeastern side of Gettysburg was a multitude of close calls for the town’s noncombatants. Still clucking over her husband’s insistence on picking garden beans under sniper fire, Sarah Broadhead joined him in the cellar of a neighbor’s house when the firing became so intense that it “seemed as though heaven and earth were being rolled together.” There were some twenty-two townspeople crowded into the space. “Whilst there a shell struck the house,” Broadhead noted, “but mercifully did not burst, but remained embedded in the wall, one half protruding.”

Quite near the George Little house, which was providing sanctuary for ten (mostly women and children), two shells exploded. Asked by one girl present what they should do, Little answered gravely, “Pray.” A third shell, this one exploding even closer, galvanized him into action: he quickly shepherded his flock from the house proper down into the cellar, through the outside door. Hardly had they settled into their new refuge when a fourth shell struck the home, careening into the room they had just left and exploding as it did so.

Henry Jacobs and his professor father, who should have known better, decided they would be safe enough experiencing events in their backyard, sitting on their “old-fashioned sloping cellar door.” For a short while, they enjoyed the spectacle of bright-sounding explosions and whiffs of burned gunpowder. Then a shrapnel shell burst overhead, and the showering of small pieces, Henry reminisced, “made us retreat hastily to the refuge of the cellar.” They were safely sheltered there when Henry
saw a Rebel soldier slip into the spot they had just vacated. To the boy’s lasting horror, the soldier “suddenly groaned, and we heard his body fall over and gently slide downward. He had been killed where he sat.”

Ellis Spear commanded the left wing of the 20th Maine, which was now a long, thin line bent back at an angle to its original south-facing position. Those along the front line had already been engaged, first with the 47th Alabama on their right, then against a fair portion of the 15th Alabama that had come at them head-on. The Rebel commander, William Oates, was veteran enough to seek the enemy’s most vulnerable point. “I advanced my right,” he later recalled, “swinging it around, overlapping and turning their left.” In doing so, Oates struck Spear’s sector. “The fire on both sides was soon hot and men were falling,” remembered the Yankee major.

These Maine men had not had time to fortify their position, so they spread out as each sought his own piece of cover. This allowed Oates’ more compact formation to press in and among Spear’s men, who bent further but did not break. “I ordered a charge, and the enemy in my front fled,” Oates insisted, “but that portion of his line confronting the two companies on my left held their ground, and continued a most galling fire upon my left.”

Joshua Chamberlain, commanding the 20th Maine, had a different perspective on the action: “We opened a brisk fire at close range, which was so sudden and effective they soon fell back among the rocks and low trees in the valley, only to burst forth again with a shout, and rapidly advance, firing as they came,” he related. “They pushed up to within a dozen yards of us before the terrible effectiveness of our fire compelled them to break and take shelter.”

Perhaps fifteen hundred feet north of the spot where Joshua Chamberlain was holding the flank, Gouverneur K. Warren was feeling the same chill of apprehension that had first motivated him to summon help to Little Round Top. “The full force of the enemy was now sweeping the 3d Army Corps from its untenable position and no troops nor any reinforcements could maintain it,” he later wrote. Warren could see that the effort to sustain Sickles’ line was drawing reinforcements from the Fifth and Second Corps, diverting or diluting any assistance that might otherwise have been intended for him.