Gettysburg (49 page)

For others in town, there was a new activity to observe: the building of barricades. Henry Jacobs watched Rebel soldiers tear down a stone wall opposite his home to get material for a breastwork that they then spread across the street. “It lay there,” he wrote, “a spectacle of ruin and a promise of destruction, all day.” Near Charlie McCurdy’s house, the Confederate soldiers piled up wagons, boxes, and barrels to create defensive choke points that were soon being put to a use their builders had not anticipated: “It only served as a source of entertainment for small boys who found a new game in climbing over the obstruction,” McCurdy recollected. Daniel Skelly made friends with a Rebel major who said he was from Pittsburgh. “He was a fair minded man and reasonable in his opinions,” Skelly allowed, “there being no rancor or bitterness evident in any of his observations on the progress of the conflict.”

There was a domestic dispute of sorts being waged in Nellie Aughinbaugh’s house. Her father hated the very idea of Rebels’ occupying his town and would do “no more for them [than] he could help.” But
Nellie’s mother felt sympathy for the young Southern boys, particularly after she saw them eating looted fish raw. “While Father would be gone with baskets full of provisions to the [Union] hospitals,” Nellie reminisced, “Mother would tell the men to give her the fish to broil off for them, and would set one of us children to watch for Father’s return. Mother would say those poor fellows were somebodies’ sons. … When we would see Father approaching we would call, ‘Mother here he comes!’ and she would take the fish off the stove quickly and give them to the men.”

“The greatest danger was from the sharpshooters,” Jennie McCreary explained. Attorney William McClean found this out firsthand when he yielded to temptation and ascended from the cellar that was sheltering his family to take a peek from a second-story window of his house. He had just cracked open the shutter when some inner sense warned him to turn away. Almost at that instant, a sniper’s bullet smashed through the thin wood and struck the bed where his sick wife had lain until he helped her down to the cellar. “I learned that the indulgence of curiosity at such a time was perilous,” the attorney intoned.

Whether or not they admitted it, all in Gettysburg were holding their breath. “Comparative quiet along both lines this morning,” noted diarist Jane Smith. “The day wears on; still only skirmishing.”

Of the U.S. units reaching Gettysburg this day, the Fifth Corps perhaps most clearly reflected, in its minor odyssey, the progressive changes in George Meade’s thinking. The corps had halted its march just after midnight, stretched along the Hanover Road west of that town. Like some other soldiers engaged in this campaign, Major General George Sykes’ men had greeted with cheers the false rumor that George B. McClellan would be taking command of the Army of the Potomac a third time.

The two divisions leading the line of advance had broken camp to march early on July 2, turning south off the Hanover Road before reaching Brinkerhoff’s Ridge, then massing near there as part of Meade’s tentative plan to launch an offensive from his right. Shortly after 7:00
A.M.,
a few Fifth Corps skirmishers had even tangled with some of Ewell’s outpost line. Three hours later, once Meade had abandoned his offensive dreams and filled the Cemetery Ridge line with the Second and Third Corps, the Fifth marched into a central reserve position, where it was joined by its late-arriving Third Division.

Little of the larger scheme was apparent to the men and officers marching under the symbol of the Maltese Cross. The four regiments constituting Colonel Strong Vincent’s Third Brigade, in Brigadier General James Barnes’ First Division, had no more insight than their comrades. A busy diarist in the 16th Michigan griped that the brigade had taken up “position several times and spent the whole forenoon maneuvering & marching around.” All the back-and-forth imparted only confusion to the officer commanding the 20th Maine in Vincent’s brigade, Joshua Chamberlain. “We knew the battle was to be fought, and a sharp one,” he reflected, “but what most impressed our minds was the uncertainty of its plan. Indeed there seemed as yet to be none.” When the men at last halted, around midday, they expected they would rest for a time.

In the 44 th New York, of the same brigade, the halt allowed for personal business. “We cooked breakfast and rested until noon,” wrote one soldier. “Then the most of us took our pants off and went for the gray-backs for a while.”
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Adding up “the spiteful firing along the picket line, an occasional exchange of artillery shots, [and] the hurrying to and fro of staff officers,” another New Yorker concluded “that a great battle was about to be fought.” If so, a soldier in the 83rd Pennsylvania worried that their brigade commander would rush headlong into trouble. “Vincent had a peculiar penchant for being in the lead,” he later observed. “Whenever or wherever his brigade might be in a position to ‘get ahead’ he was sure to be ahead.”

“The men of our corps employed their time in rest and in making preparations for the work before them,” held an officer in the 44th New York. In the 20th Maine, that work meant carrying a full combat munitions load. According to a line officer, “At this point twenty rounds of cartridges were issued to each man in addition to those already in the boxes, making a total of sixty rounds.”

It was approaching noon when reporter Whitelaw Reid passed near the Leister house. “General Meade had finished his arrangement of the lines,” Reid scribbled. “Reports of the skirmishing were coming in; the facts developed by certain reconnaissances were being presented[;] … aid[e]s and orderlies were galloping off and back; General Warren … was with
the General Commanding, poring over the maps of the field which the engineers had just finished; most of the staff were stretched beneath an apple tree, resting while they could.”

One of the figures commanding Reid’s attention was the “trim, well-tailored person of Major-General [Alfred] Pleasonton,” Meade’s cavalry chief. Only after the battle would Reid realize that at least one of the trips he had seen Pleasonton make in and out of army headquarters had had as its purpose to deal with a major tactical blunder. Whether due to exhaustion or to an imperfect understanding of the army’s situation, late this morning, when John Buford requested permission to withdraw his division for refitting, Pleasonton agreed, then directed the experienced cavalry commander to take his troopers “back to Westminster, our depot, to protect it, and also to recruit.” With this decision, one of the army’s best combat leaders and his veteran command left the Gettysburg area, not to return until the fighting was over.

George Meade approved this action on the unspoken assumption that another mounted force would come up to protect the army’s left flank. Pleasonton would later explain that Buford’s division had been “severely handled” on July 1 (which was untrue) and assert that he had promptly moved up another cavalry unit to replace it (a bald lie). No one took over for Buford’s men after they began pulling out, around midday. Not until Daniel Sickles complained about losing his flank protection did Meade realize that Pleasonton had not followed through. Dispatches demanding corrective action were forwarded to the cavalry chief at 12:50 and 12:55
P.M.;
an hour later, Pleasonton sent instructions to a cavalry unit posted on the far Union right, directing it to move to the far left. The riders would not arrive in time to accomplish anything this day.

Following their long tramp to reach Gettysburg yesterday, and their active probing of Culp’s Hill last night, the soldiers of Edward Johnson’s division in Ewell’s Corps expected to fight early. Instead of advancing into combat, though, save for the few companies dispersed as skirmishers, the men waited. “Greatly did officers and men marvel as morning, noon, and afternoon passed in inaction,” noted Randolph McKim, a Maryland officer in Brigadier General George H. Steuart’s brigade. The commander of the 10th Louisiana, in Nicholls’ Brigade,
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concurred, later
reporting that there was “nothing doing along our line, men getting restless; the hour of noon had passed; we heard the chopping of trees on the hill; it [was] evident the enemy were building a line of entrenchments.” Less exposed to enemy fire than most Southern units on the field, Johnson’s three brigades (a fourth was watching the Hanover Road) spent the hot day wondering if they would ever fight.

Following his brief conference with Robert E. Lee, Albert Jenkins returned to his 1,300-man mounted brigade, encamped just a short distance north of Gettysburg along the Heidlersburg Road. Representing the largest cavalry force then available to Lee, Jenkins’ men had been cast in an important role: they were to replace the Second Corps infantry now providing flank security east of town. “Boots and Saddles” sounded, regiments and battalions were formed, and Jenkins waved his troopers southward. Possibly because time was short, or maybe as was his wont, Jenkins shared little about the mission with his subordinates.

Just as the head of the column reached the spot where John B. Gordon had staged his July 1 assault, Jenkins signaled his riders to halt, then move off the road. One of his staff imagined that he was waiting for some signal. “We were wondering at the silence prevalent,” the aide recalled. “Only in long intervals the report of a gun [was] heard.” Jenkins remained quietly motionless for some long minutes before gathering about half a dozen of his staff and heading off toward the town. Immediately after crossing Rock Creek, he steered his gaggle to the right to ascend Blocher’s Knoll, from atop which they could see Gettysburg and the high ground beyond.

An officer on Jenkins’ staff rode out from town and joined them, bringing information about the army’s position. The others naturally massed around him as he indicated troop locations on his map. Soon enough the mounted crowd attracted the attention of some sharp-eyed Federal artillery spotters on Cemetery Hill, two miles away, who promptly sent over some shells. It took them only a couple of rounds to get the range; before the Confederate party could react, a fuzed shell exploded almost directly over Jenkins, punching him and his mount to the ground. By the time his staff reached him, the general was unconscious and bleeding from a scalp wound.

Jenkins’ Brigade was not an especially tightly run outfit, and the sudden incapacitation of its commander disrupted the chain of command.
While his staff carried the wounded cavalryman back to the house he had used the night before, his brigade was stalled. No further effort was made to carry out Jenkins’ assignment, nor was any word sent to Robert E. Lee.

The deployment of Anderson’s Division of A. P. Hill’s corps, assigned to extend the Confederate right, added five brigades to those already arrayed along the southern sweep of Seminary Ridge. One of those five comprised the four Georgia units of Brigadier General Ambrose R. Wright’s command, three regiments and a battalion. Wright took up an eastward-facing line just north of Spangler’s Woods. His fourteen hundred men, who had seen no fighting yesterday, were positioned in “a narrow strip of oak woods, with an old grassfield in rear of our line, and fields of oats, young corn and wheat in our front.” The 2nd Georgia Battalion deployed on the skirmish line, so close to the enemy that the Rebels, as one recollected, “could see our Federal brothers.” The only noteworthy action through midday came when a Yankee artillery shell spooked a red fox, which was then chased north along the ridge by soldiers from Wright’s and Thomas’ Brigades until someone from Lane’s Brigade “caught and killed it.”

Wright held a middle position in Anderson’s deployment, with Carnot Posey’s Mississippi brigade on his left and Perry’s Brigade of Florida troops, under Colonel David Lang, on his right. The honor of being Anderson’s rightmost unit went to Brigadier General Cadmus M. Wilcox, whose brigade consisted of five Alabama regiments. Anderson’s instructions to Wilcox suggest that as late as midday, the details of Lee’s attack plan had not yet filtered through to the Third Corps. Wilcox was told to use part of his force to refuse his line—that is, bend it back—to front southeast and south, to guard against any enemy effort to get in behind Hill’s position. Had Anderson known, when he set the formation, that Longstreet’s Corps would be filling in farther south, he would not have bothered to give Wilcox that order.

Wilcox’s Brigade marched off toward the Pitzer Woods, where Wilcox was to pivot his refused right flank. The 10th and 11th Regiments had been selected to cover that section. As the pair advanced, the 10th entered some woods, which slowed its progress, while the 11th, moving more quickly over open fields, pressed ahead, reaching its designated station well before its partner. Just as the men of the 11th attained their position, the woods in which the 10th was supposed to be posted erupted in a burst of gunfire that ripped into their surprised ranks.

The Alabama soldiers had encountered the reconnaissance force dispatched from the Union Third Corps, at the suggestion of Henry Hunt and others, to investigate the Pitzer Woods. Two regiments had drawn the task: the 3rd Maine and one of the most coldly efficient combat units in the Army of the Potomac, the 1st United States Sharpshooters. This
latter was an elite outfit that required prospective candidates to pass a tough marksmanship test. Clad in distinctive dark-green uniforms with leather leggings, and armed mostly with Sharp rifles, its members were men used to operating in small groups with little support, men used to showing initiative and nerve in carrying out their assignments, and, perhaps most important, men used to killing.