Gettysburg (60 page)

As the Maine men along the right and center of the line readied themselves, the officer commanding the color guard embarked on a humanitarian mission. There were a number of wounded Maine men in front of the color company who Lieutenant Homer Melcher felt should be secured before the charge. Without first checking with Chamberlain, or even informing anyone else of his intention, he took a squad of men forward to bring in the casualties. Seeing him advance, the color-bearers assumed that the order had been given, and followed. The sight of the regiment’s flags moving down the hill in turn triggered action on both flanks of the 20th Maine’s line.

Ellis Spear saw the standards moving, concluded that he had missed hearing an order, and yelled to his men to move with the flag. “The left took up the shout and moved forward,” he later related. Getting the men started was one thing, Spear discovered, and directing that movement was something else again. Spotting clusters of Rebels directly before them, some of Spear’s men charged eastward, driving the enemy toward the Jacob Weikert farm, where they took a number of prisoners. Other Confederate squads running that way encountered Walter Morrill’s skirmishing company. Several burst through the thin screen in their panic, while others were shot or captured.

Groups of Federals, some of them Spear’s men and some from Morrill’s command, pursued a pack of retreating Rebels southeastward, toward Big Round Top. From his position near the apex of his V-shaped line, Joshua Chamberlain saw the chase and, assuming that the bluecoats were all from Spear’s wing, pronounced the action a “right wheel.” While it may indeed have
seemed
to be a swinging movement by the left, no one on that flank knew anything about such an order. Nevertheless, Chamberlain would enshrine the memory of this imagined maneuver in his report and other subsequent recountings of the fight. For now, however, he waved the right wing forward in a charge that tumbled into the valley between Big and Little Round Top.

Aided in no small way by Oates’ nearly simultaneous decision to retreat, the 20th Maine herded back most of the 15th Alabama, scooping up prisoners in the process. “The rebel front line, amazed at the sudden movement, thinking we had been reinforced … threw down their arms and [cried] out ‘don’t fire! we surrender!,’ [while] the rest fled in wild disorder,” recollected one of Chamberlain’s troops. A portion of the 83rd Pennsylvania meanwhile pitched forward from the right, cutting off those of Oates’ men who were trying to link up with units near Devil’s Den.

Chamberlain managed to halt his Maine soldiers before they got too far up the slope of Big Round Top, and then, with some difficulty, to return them to the position they had so ably defended. As he later put it, “We disposed ourselves to meet any new assault that might come from the courage of exasperation.”

There would be no such action today, at least not on Little Round Top.

“Brave Mississippians, one more charge and the day is ours.” William Barksdale’s declaration and resolve to press on without stopping after overrunning the Federal position in Sherfy’s peach orchard had several repercussions, both positive and negative. It accomplished his avowed purpose of not allowing the enemy time to regroup, but at the same time, it diminished his command and control of his brigade, which broke into two unequal portions as a result. The three leftmost regiments—the 13th, 17th, and 18th Mississippi—angled toward the Emmitsburg Road to flank the Federal formation that was still trying to hold that line. The officer commanding the remaining regiment in Barksdale’s Brigade, Colonel Benjamin G. Humphreys, saw that his 21st Mississippi was on the flank of
a delectable row of Yankee cannon lined up along Wheatfield Road. So while the rest of the brigade pulled away to the northeast, Humphreys directed his 400 men almost due east to do a little battery busting.

“Benner’s Hill was simply a hell inferno,” according to a gunner in one of the four batteries that Joseph Latimer, the boy major, had crammed onto that elevation’s limited crest. For about the first half of their ninety-minute-plus engagement here this day, the two sides had been fairly evenly matched. The Federal guns, however, were more widely dispersed between Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill, so they could add to their total, whereas Latimer already had every tube he could fit in action. Shortly before 5:00
P.M.,
the scales of destruction had begun to turn on the Southern gunners stubbornly holding station on Benner’s Hill.

As the cannoneers worked their weapons, they were completely exposed to the shards of exploding shells, and ever conscious that the munitions they were handling were potentially no less deadly to them than their foes. In Captain William F. Dement’s 1st Maryland Battery, a gunner neglected to close the metal-shielded lid on an ammunition chest and paid for the lapse with his life when a nearby bursting shell threw sparks into the case. One of the first men on the scene after the fiery flash would long remember the sight: “Clothes scorched, smoking and burning, head divested of cap and exposing a bald surface where [there] use[d] to be a full suit of hair, whiskers singed off to the skin, eye-brows and eye-lids denuded of their fringes, and the eyes set with a popped gaze and facial expressions changed to a perfect disguise.”

Things were not much better on the Federal side. The First Corps’ artillery chief, Colonel Charles S. Wainwright, watched with clinical detachment as one of Latimer’s shells arced in among a line of infantry who thought they were safe behind a stone wall. “Taking the line lengthways,” Wainwright observed, “it literally ploughed up two or three yards of men, killing and wounding a dozen or more.” On at least two occasions, the doughty colonel had himself only narrowly escaped being killed—once by a Rebel shell, and the second time by a friendly muzzle blast from one of his own guns, which he had absentmindedly masked.

Watching the bright flashes blossom across Cemetery Hill, and at the same time trying to gauge the progress of Longstreet’s action to the south, were several members of Richard Ewell’s command staff, who had
made an observation post out of the cupola atop the Roman Catholic church. As best they could tell, Longstreet’s men were advancing at every point, bringing their victorious wave closer and closer to the Confederate left. Perhaps regretting his earlier refusal to sanction an offensive movement from his flank, Ewell now decided to exercise the authority bestowed on him by Lee: he would eschew making any demonstration with his infantry and instead simply attack.

Ewell quickly worked up a scheme to assault Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill. Since Edward Johnson’s men had the most ground to cover, they would move first, followed by Jubal Early’s troops and then those of Robert Rodes. As couriers carried word of the plan to the various division headquarters, another messenger sought out Brigadier General James H. Lane, of Hill’s Corps, who was next in line on Rodes’ right. Ewell’s note explained what he planned to do and urged Lane to join him in the offensive. Invested with no direct authority over a brigade belonging to another corps, Ewell could only hope for the best.

On Benner’s Hill, the only place along Ewell’s front where combat action was then occurring, things began to go badly for the boy major. A match for their opponents in skill and courage, but eventually outgunned by them in numbers and position, Latimer’s men were clearly getting the worst of the exchange by 5:45
P.M.
No sooner had Edward Johnson received Ewell’s instructions for an assault than a sergeant major of Latimer’s command presented himself to explain on the major’s behalf, as Johnson later reported, “that the exhausted condition of his horses and men, together with the terrible fire of the enemy’s artillery, rendered his position untenable.” Johnson allowed Latimer to withdraw, with the proviso that he leave four guns in action “to cover the advance of my infantry.” By 6:00
P.M.,
all but that valiant quartet had been pulled under cover, some by hand.

Slightly more than a mile west of where Ewell’s division commander was organizing his advance, a Pennsylvania cavalry captain was making a snap decision that would have a subtle but profound impact on Johnson’s chances of success. Union and Confederate forces had been skirmishing all day across a slight north-south swell of land intersecting the Hanover Road, known as Brinkerhoff’s Ridge. Because the road led directly into Ewell’s left flank, the approach needed to be covered, and the veteran Stonewall Brigade (all-Virginians) of Johnson’s Division had gotten the call. Brigadier General James Walker had detailed the 2nd Virginia to picket Brinkerhoff’s Ridge; soon after the sun rose, the Virginia boys had
begun scrapping with Yankees from the Twelfth Corps, whose parent body was posted just to the south.

The Twelfth Corps foot soldiers were replaced around midmorning by men with a similar mission from the Fifth Corps, then arriving from near Hanover. When George Meade shifted the Fifth from near his right to a more centralized reserve position, the Union infantry skirmishers were themselves relieved by cavalrymen, just reaching the scene as part of Brigadier General David McMurtrie Gregg’s division. Ironically, the completion of Jeb Stuart’s long circuit to connect with the Army of Northern Virginia also brought to Gettysburg the two Federal cavalry divisions that had been sent to intercept him—meaning that the addition to Lee’s combat strength was countered by one to Meade’s. The big difference on Brinkerhoff’s Ridge was that there were no Confederate cavalry units on hand to take over the flank security. In itself, this suggests that Robert E. Lee was not informed of the failure of Jenkins’ Brigade to picket his left, so sent no orders for Stuart’s weary but available regiments to lend a hand.

It was not long after the last Fifth Corps rifleman tramped off to the south that the Confederates, realizing that their opponents were now dismounted cavalry, began raising the ante. James Walker, eager to assess the nature of the force confronting him, ordered Colonel John Quincy Adams Nadenbousch to deploy all of his 2nd Virginia “to clear the field, and advance into the wood [beyond], and ascertain, if possible, what force the enemy had at that point.” The determined advance of the Virginia soldiers shoved back four companies of the 10th New York Cavalry that had been spread out north of the Hanover Road, and so threatened four more companies from the 10th posted south of the lane that they, too, retreated. When an understrength counterattack attempted by the two remaining companies of the 10th failed to do anything more than slow the Rebel advance, more cavalry units were committed. The critical moment came north of the road, along a farm wall running perpendicular to the Hanover Road.

Captain William Miller of Company H, 3rd Pennsylvania Cavalry, led his dismounted squadron in tandem with another, under Captain Frank Watson Hess, up a slope toward the stone wall. “It was discovered … that some Confederate infantry were advancing from the opposite direction,” Miller later wrote. “Double-quick was ordered, and a race for the fence ensued. The men seeing the importance of the position, quickened their steps and arrived at the wall about twenty paces in advance of the enemy.” Levering their carbines for all they were worth, and aided by a two-gun battery firing over their heads from the road below, the Pennsylvanians threw up enough fire that the Rebels stopped, then eased back. The Yankee troopers would hold this place until a Confederate flanking force bent them back, after dark—but by then the damage would be done.

Nadenbousch was convinced that he was facing several cavalry and infantry regiments backed by artillery, and reported as much to Walker. When Edward Johnson began gathering his division for its lunge against Culp’s Hill, he asked Walker if the situation along the Hanover Road was secure enough that the Stonewall Brigade could be released from flank duty. Walker was not sanguine about that prospect, as he believed it would be imprudent to leave the road uncovered, and he was wary as well of moving his brigade within the sight and range of the Federals he knew to be present. Accordingly, the Stonewall Brigade—comprising some 1,300 veteran soldiers—remained in place when Johnson’s other three brigades began to move toward Culp’s Hill.