Gettysburg (33 page)

Even as the deployment was proceeding, Richard Ewell made the decision to push out Lieutenant Colonel Thomas H. Carter’s artillery battalion. Whatever tactical advantage of surprise Rodes’ movement might have achieved was squandered the instant Carter’s guns began shelling Doubleday’s McPherson Ridge line. With Rodes’ infantry not yet ready to advance, and Heth’s line under no pressure, Ewell’s move succeeded only in spoiling the opportunity.

By this time Ewell had also decided to disregard Lee’s prime directive to avoid a general battle. Perhaps, like Rodes, he thought “that Hill had blundered, and … feared [that blunder] w[oul]d bring on a general engagement before anybody was up.” Certainly he believed that Heth was directly threatened and Rodes too deeply committed to withdraw now. “It was too late to avoid an engagement without abandoning the position already taken up, and I determined to push the attack vigorously,” Ewell later reported.

The first Eleventh Corps regiments began to arrive shortly after noon. They were anything but martial in appearance: the soldiers of the 45th New York, who had been double-quicking for several miles, reached Cemetery Hill “panting and out of breath,” their historian remembered. Following the rough plan hashed out by Howard and Schurz, the men continued marching into town. Behind them came Captain Hubert Dilger’s battery (which paused at Cemetery Hill), followed by portions of Colonel George von Amsberg’s First Brigade (Third Division). These regiments, too, recorded one member, were “much fatigued with a rapid march on a mid-summer day.” Their division commander, Brigadier General Alexander Schimmelfennig (elevated to replace Carl Schurz, the new corps commander), was told by Schurz to use his men to extend the right flank of the First Corps as far as Oak Hill.

The 45th New York moved through Gettysburg via Washington Street, which, on the northern side of town, connected with the Mummasburg Road. As his New Yorkers poked out from the town’s built-up area, von Amsberg spread out a four-company skirmish line as far east as it would reach. The open formation pushed toward Oak Hill, each man moving with cover as it suited him. The widely spaced line had advanced only a short distance, however, when it was subjected to a slow shelling from Confederate cannon (Captain R. C. M. Page’s Morris Artillery) located near the Moses McLean farm, at the eastern base of the hill. Since
skirmish lines were hardly bothered by long-range shelling, the New York soldiers continued their dodging, ducking advance until they were stopped by direct rifle fire from Alabama sharpshooters belonging to O’Neal’s Brigade. Oliver Otis Howard’s plan to anchor a new line on Oak Hill had never had a chance of succeeding.

The decision to maintain the First Corps’ line on McPherson’s Ridge after Ewell’s arrival was Abner Doubleday’s. While he would later offer a variety of military reasons for not withdrawing, his essential motivation was emotional. In his after-action report, he explained that “to fall back without orders from the commanding general might have inflicted lasting disgrace upon the corps, and as General Reynolds, who was high in the confidence of General Meade, had formed his lines to resist the entrance of the enemy into Gettysburg, I naturally supposed that it was the intention to defend the place.”

Although he had been amply warned of Ewell’s approach by Buford’s scouts, Doubleday had assumed that Howard would deal with it, so he was surprised when the threat actually materialized. In a memoir written many years after the war, he noted that the “first indication I had that Ewell had arrived, and was taking part in the battle, came from a battery posted on an eminence called Oak Hill, almost directly in the prolongation of my line, and about a mile north of Colonel Stone’s position.”

This rude awakening prodded Doubleday into an immediate series of countermoves. Cutler’s brigade, which was closest to Carter’s guns and at that point deployed in a line of battle facing west, refused its right flank to face north before slowly backpedaling into the cover provided by the Wills Woods. Doubleday then turned to his reserve division at the seminary, ordering John C. Robinson to send a brigade to the threatened flank. Robinson had one brigade already set in place and another in the process of arriving, so he kept the one that was in motion moving along to the north. This was Brigadier General Henry Baxter’s brigade of Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania regiments. Baxter dispatched the 11th Pennsylvania and the 97th New York to screen ahead while he followed with the other four. As the Federal skirmishers approached the Mummasburg Road, they encountered several Union cavalrymen, who shouted, “‘You stand alone between the Rebel army and your homes. Fight like hell!’”

It was about 1:00
P.M
. when the First Corps staff officer bringing the news of John Reynolds’ death reached Taneytown. George Meade later testified:

The written orders that Meade issued to Hancock (time-dated 1:10
P.M.
) directed him temporarily to turn over command of the Second Corps to Brigadier General John Gibbon and then to proceed to Gettysburg, where, “in case of the truth of General Reynolds’s death, you assume command of the corps there assembled.” Hancock had some qualms about taking over, given that at least one other senior officer (Howard) was already on the scene, but Meade assured him that he had the necessary authority to put him in charge.

Meade’s decision to stay behind in Taneytown would later be questioned. A newspaperman sympathetic to his case offered this rationale: “It was impossible for Meade to go to the battlefield at once. Only two of his infantry corps were at that place. The great bulk of his army … [was] many miles from Gettysburg; and it was therefore necessary for the army headquarters to remain near the center, from which point all the parts of the army could be readily communicated with.” Besides, in selecting Hancock to precede him to Gettysburg, Meade had anointed a proxy who, as he later explained, “understood and could carry out my views.”

Hancock and his staff left Taneytown at about 1:30
P.M.
In order to familiarize himself with the Gettysburg area, Hancock rode part of the way in an ambulance so that he could study maps of the region.

German by birth and trained at the Karlsruhe Military Academy in Baden, Hubert Dilger had been pursuing an honorable military career in the Grand Duke of Baden’s horse artillery when an invitation from a distant uncle lured him to America to put into practice the war-making he had previously only rehearsed. Dilger had proven to be an apt and talented soldier. Handsome, well mustached, and fluent in four languages, the born artillerist had soon been made captain of Battery I, 1st Ohio Light Artillery. The unit he commanded in the advance of the Eleventh Corps this day was arguably the best-trained one of its kind, and Dilger, in the words of an observer, “one of the bravest, coolest and most clearheaded of battery commanders developed in the Civil War.”

By the time Dilger’s artillery reached Cemetery Hill, the skirmish action along the Mummasburg Road north of town had cranked up several notches. The four companies from the 45th New York that had been committed to the fight were making little headway against the Alabama soldiers screening Rodes on Oak Hill, who were themselves backed by the four guns of Page’s Virginia Battery posted near the McLean farm. As long as the Rebel pieces could fire with impunity across the open fields between Oak Hill and Rock Creek, it would be both difficult and costly to deploy the Eleventh Corps.

A two-gun section of Dilger’s battery, commanded by Lieutenant Clark Scripture, were the first Union tubes to challenge Page. The Confederates knew their business, however, and quickly began making things uncomfortable for Scripture. As soon as he was apprised of his subordinate trouble, Dilger brought the rest of his battery forward from Cemetery Hill. On his way he passed the 157th New York, one of whose members would never forget the sight of the artillery unit, “its cannoniers bouncing high in their seats as the wheels revolve[d] rapidly over obstructions in the roadway.”

Once in position east of the Mummasburg Road, Hubert Dilger promptly demonstrated what a true professional could accomplish. According to one admiring witness,

There was something almost intoxicating about the view of the battlefield from Oak Hill. It revealed at once the position of the Union First Corps, the cautious deployment under way by the Eleventh, and the presence of A. P. Hill’s divisions along Herr’s Ridge. “It seemed like some grand panorama with the sounds of conflict added,” marveled one Rebel soldier. Rodes himself would later report that “the whole of that portion of the force opposing General Hill’s troops could be seen.” His analysis of the situation was based on these observations, which, tragically for many of his North Carolina troops, had one failing. From his position Rodes could not see well along the eastern base of Oak Ridge, nor could he adequately assess how many Federal troops had traversed the ridge as far as the Mummasburg Road. His guess was, not many.

His attack plan had the benefit of simplicity. He would advance south from Oak Hill on a two-brigade front: O’Neal’s Alabama unit along the eastern slope of the hill, and Iverson’s North Carolinians moving in tandem south from the hill crown. Part of O’Neal’s job was to clear away the Yankee skirmishers on the eastern ridge slope near the Mummasburg Road, while Iverson was to target the more substantial enemy line in the Wills Woods. Iverson, with the more difficult assignment, was back-stopped by Junius Daniel’s North Carolina brigade. Rodes’ methodical preparations were upset, however, by the appearance along the Mummasburg Road of the two regiments screening the Union advance of Baxter’s brigade from Robinson’s division, which persuaded Rodes “that the enemy was rash enough to come out from the woods to attack me.” He at once ordered Iverson and O’Neal to begin the assault.

Rodes’ hopes of a united assault were dashed almost immediately. O’Neal wasn’t going anywhere; his first effort exposed him to long-range musketry from the 45th New York soldiers, closer-range musketry from First Corps units along the Mummasburg Road, and Hubert Dilger’s murderous artillery.
^*
The few of his men who made it as far as the McLean farm were swarmed by the alert New Yorkers, who took many prisoners. So quickly was O’Neal’s first attack squashed, in fact, that it has been questioned whether he really made any effort at all at this time. Only the 3rd Alabama, stationed on O’Neal’s right, joined the advance, as its position in the woods shielded it from much of the disruptive fire.