Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (34 page)

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James Wadsworth seems to have been the first senior officer in the
1st Corps to awake to this peril. “I am not sure that they are not moving around on our right flank,” Wadsworth wrote suspiciously in a note he dashed off to Doubleday just past noon, “though I do not see any indication of it.” As
a precaution, he pulled Cutler’s brigade back from the northern extension of McPherson’s Ridge into
Sheads’ Woods “to take such position as [Cutler] deemed proper,” and begged from Doubleday a brigade from John Robinson’s reserve division at the seminary to plant on Cutler’s flank, barely reaching to the
Mummasburg Road. As the rebel skirmishers gradually pushed the Yankee cavalrymen backward toward the town, Rodes and Ewell finally mounted the knob of
Oak Hill, and there they could see that they “could strike the force of the enemy with which General Hill’s troops were engaged upon the flank.” But they could also see the head of Schurz’s division moving up from the town onto the broad plain below Oak Hill, so if they were to move, it would have to be done quickly. Doles’
Georgians were swung well out to the left, to warn off Schurz’s oncoming Germans and pin them in place on the plain, and O’Neal’s Alabamians and
Junius Daniel’s five
North Carolina regiments deployed on either side of
Alfred Iverson’s leading brigade, poised to roll up the
1st Corps’ unprotected right flank. “It was the only time in the war that we were in position to get such a view of contending forces,” marveled one of O’Neal’s Alabamians, and what Rodes saw convinced him (as he wrote in a hasty note to
Jubal Early) that “I can burst through the enemy in an hour.”
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But it was not quite as comprehensive a view as he thought. In his haste to “push the attack vigorously,” Rodes now proceeded to make one overeager mistake after another. Once Hubert Dilger’s
Ohio battery rolled into position on the plain north of Pennsylvania College, they began splintering Rodes’ artillery battalions, sitting in the open on the slopes of Oak Hill. “They blew up two or three caissons and entirely disabled one or two of the guns.” The battalion commander, Thomas Carter, accosted Rodes and asked, “General, what fool put that battery yonder?” only to realize after an “awkward pause and a queer expression on the faces of all” Rodes’ staffers that Rodes himself had placed it there. Nor did Rodes take the usual precautions: none of the three brigades poised to roll down on the 1st Corps flank bothered to put out skirmishers, and none of the three brigade commanders was sure what the signal for an advance would be. These were three cavaliers to whom it was not wise to give too much of their own lead.
Edward O’Neal was quarrelsome and unhappy under Rodes, still mired at the rank of colonel and convinced that Rodes was planning to replace him; Alfred Iverson was a Richmond political pet whose promotion was deeply resented in his North Carolina brigade as a vote of no confidence in their political loyalties; and Junius Daniel hadn’t been in action with the
Army of Northern Virginia since the
Peninsula Campaign. Moreover, the majority of the North Carolinians in both Daniel’s and Iverson’s brigades had never yet been in a major battle. “Although we had been
in the field nearly sixteen months,” admitted a soldier in one of Daniel’s regiments, “it was our first regular battle.”
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O’Neal and Iverson promptly justified those doubts. Three of O’Neal’s five
Alabama regiments bolted forward prematurely and collided at the
Mummasburg Road with Union infantry that wasn’t supposed to have been there. These were the six regiments of
Henry Baxter’s brigade—two New York, three
Pennsylvania, and one
Massachusetts—that Wadsworth had planted at the last minute on
Lysander Cutler’s unprotected right flank. Henry Baxter was a blunt, rumple-bearded miller from Hillsdale County in south-central Michigan who seemed to rise conveniently in the rifle sights of every Confederate he encountered, sustaining a bad wound to the midsection on the Peninsula, a wound to the leg at Antietam, and another to the shoulder at Fredericksburg. From each, he bounced back, his feistiness undiminished, and he was steadily promoted until reaching brigadier general by March 1863. As a convinced
abolitionist, he was happily parked in
John Cleveland Robinson’s division of the
1st Corps on the road to Gettysburg. All six of the regiments in Baxter’s brigade had seen action before, but the brigade itself had only been cobbled together in late May, and Gettysburg would be their first fight together.
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Rodes saw Wadsworth bend Cutler’s brigade back “so as to occupy”
Sheads’ Woods on
Seminary Ridge; what he missed was Baxter’s stealthy tiptoe behind Cutler and out along Cutler’s flank. Anything Rodes sent to attack Cutler would either be flung back by Baxter, or (depending on the axis of attack) be hit from the flank by fire from Baxter—in the event, both happened. Baxter placed two of his regiments—the 11th Pennsylvania and the 97th New York—beside Cutler’s brigade, then faced the remaining four northward along the Mummasburg Road. Some berserk “Union horseman … charged wildly” past the 97th, shouting, “There are no troops behind you! You stand alone, between the Rebel Army and your homes! Fight like hell!”—although there was no report afterward whether this encouraged or depressed the New Yorkers. Someone in the 88th Pennsylvania struck up the
John Brown song, and soon everyone was bawling out “Glory, glory, hallelujah” until Confederate infantry could be seen gathering in front. While Baxter was busy shifting his regiments into position, he heard a racket of complaint from the brigade’s rear, where the provost’s detail was loudly demanding to be put into the line with the rest of their regiments; Baxter grinned at their enthusiasm, and told them, “Well, if that is the case, you are just the men I want there. Go to your regiments!” Baxter was just in time to stop O’Neal’s Alabamians. Baxter’s men quickly put them “under a heavy fire from the front” while Schurz’s skirmishers from the
11th Corps, poking along the
fence line of the McLean farm, peppered them with “a cross fire” from a distance, and in short order
O’Neal’s men “had to fall back to a fence where the Brig. was rallied by Col. O’Neal & Genl Rodes.”
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Then, Iverson’s brigade started forward,
sans
Iverson, who preferred to remain behind and watch—and watch he did, as his brigade swept grandly over the
Mummasburg Road “in magnificent order, with perfect alignment, guns at right shoulder and colors to the front,” in a three-rank column of divisions (six companies in each division), wading into lushly fragrant and utterly unprotected fields of wheat and “a rank crop of timothy.” With exquisite timing, Baxter barked out the order for the 11th Pennsylvania and 97th New York to rise from behind the shelter of a low fieldstone wall, where they had waited with “rifles cocked and fingers on the triggers,” and hurl a deadly and unsuspected
volley into the unprepared North Carolinians. “At the command,” wrote a Pennsylvanian, “a sheet of flame and
smoke burst from the wall … flaring full in the face of the advancing troops.” Men in the
North Carolina lines were toppled over like rag dolls, “falling like leaves in a storm.” As Baxter’s men now began firing at will, the colonel of the 23rd North Carolina,
Daniel Christie, tried to rally his disintegrating command, only to be shot through both lungs. Entire companies broke or dove for the ground, while thickening banks of powder smoke became “so dense you could not perceive an object ten feet from you.” Trying to pile surprise on surprise,
Henry Baxter roared out over the cracking of rifle fire, “Up boys, and give them steel,” and groups of men from the 11th Pennsylvania and 97th New York scampered forward with fixed
bayonets as isolated bunches of numbed North Carolinians “rose singly and in groups” to “show the white flag.” (A captain in the 88th Pennsylvania actually had a fistfight with the color-bearer of the 23rd North Carolina for possession of the flag.) Out of the 1,520 men Iverson had started with at Middletown that morning, 233 were rounded up as prisoners (along with the flag of the 20th North Carolina); another 170 were dead (or nearly dead, with ghastly wounds), 79 of them lying “in a straight line … perfectly dressed.”
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The repulse of O’Neal’s
Alabama brigade and the destruction of Iverson’s North Carolinians left Junius Daniel’s brigade moving ahead on its own, “uncovered.” Two of Daniel’s regiments angled off to face Cutler’s brigade while the remainder bore down blindly on the
railroad cut. They walked into a blazing volley from Union soldiers occupying the railroad cut and “close enough … to cut all three ranks down at one firing.” The 45th North Carolina and the
2nd North Carolina Battalion actually pushed some of their tormentors out of the railroad cut, and “the men in their ardor slid down the almost precipitous bank and attempted to scale the opposite” before it became clear that, without any other support, they (like Joe Davis’
Mississippians a few hours before) were actually in “a most deadly trap.” Junius Daniel, “in
his stentorian tones, audible in command a quarter of a mile or more away,” ordered his brigade back “without regard to company or regimental formation,” and
Robert Rodes’ plan to “burst through the enemy” with his division evaporated.
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It was the regiment, more than anything else, that gave the soldier of these armies his primary identity, and in the regiment “the colonel, as a father, should have a personal acquaintance with every officer and man.” On the battlefield, however, the basic tactical unit was the brigade, and brigadier generals (or senior colonels who happened to be in temporary command of a brigade or awaiting confirmation of promotion) were expected to lead, if not from the front, then certainly alongside their brigades, if only in the interest of coordinating the movement of their regiments. The survivors of Iverson’s brigade, who already thought of him as a sort of secessionist policeman, would never forgive Iverson for violating that rule, and he was accused of everything from drunkenness to cowardice. “I was left alone without any orders,” the colonel of the 12th North Carolina bitterly complained, “our general [being] in the rear, and never coming up.”
Daniel Christie, the badly wounded colonel of the 23rd North Carolina, swore that he would have “the imbecile Iverson” cashiered if it was the last thing he did (which, in fact, it was, since Christie died in Winchester on July 17th). Iverson was “relieved from the Command of his Brigade” by Robert E. Lee ten days later “for misconduct at Gettysburg.”
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But Iverson’s failure was only one facet of a larger problem experienced by the
Army of Northern Virginia on July 1st. The collective bloody nose suffered by Harry Heth’s division that morning could, after all, be blamed on Heth’s inexperience in division command. Not so Robert Rodes, a Virginia Military Institute graduate and the man whom Stonewall Jackson had put at the head of the attack that collapsed the Union Army at Chancellorsville. Yet, he had botched his division’s attack as surely as Heth had. The figure who seems curiously absent from much of this action is Dick Ewell, although there is some evidence that Ewell, who had switched to horseback to oversee operations despite his wooden leg, was put temporarily hors de combat when a Federal shell knocked the corps commander and his horse down. Ewell, who had performed so smoothly as a corps commander at Winchester that he seemed like the resurrection of Jackson, now displayed a propensity for looking over his shoulder, as though he was reverting mentally to his old role as a division commander “without responsiveness and without suggestiveness.”
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The man Ewell was particularly looking for—as though the one-legged Ewell had forgotten he was in command of a corps rather than a division—was Robert E. Lee. That morning, however, Lee was still on the other side
of South Mountain, and still issuing orders to coordinate the concentration of the Army of Northern Virginia between Cashtown and Gettysburg. His plan was to move his headquarters “for the present” to Cashtown, “east of the mountains,” and that morning he set off eastward on the
Cashtown Pike, with
James Longstreet in tow and Longstreet’s lead division under
Lafayette McLaws on the road behind. If all went well, by the end of the day Lee would have most (if not all) of Hill’s corps in Gettysburg, two of Ewell’s divisions at Cashtown (and maybe three, if Allegheny Johnson could move Ewell’s wagon trains down from Scotland fast enough), and Longstreet between Chambersburg and Cashtown; all three corps would again be within easy supporting distance of one another, and ready to strike on Lee’s command at the disjointed march of the
Army of the Potomac on July 2nd or 3rd.

Longstreet found Lee “in his usual cheerful spirits on the morning of the 1st, and called me to ride with him,” which he did until they encountered the head of Johnson’s division at an intersection, “cutting in on our front, with all of Ewell’s reserve and supply trains.” Johnson had indeed moved swiftly, and since Lee wanted Ewell’s corps kept together, he instructed Longstreet to give Johnson right-of-way to move ahead, and hold his own corps at the crossroads until Johnson passed. But Ewell’s trains alone turned out to be “fourteen miles” in length, and “after a little time General Lee proposed that we should ride on.” It was when they emerged through a rain squall on the eastern side of the
Cashtown Gap and passed the division of Richard H. Anderson on the road that Lee, for the first time, began to hear “reports of
cannon” in the distance. “General Lee passes, going toward the front,” noted a Mississippian in his diary, even as “the cannonading … keeps up briskly.” The firing “seemed to be beyond Cashtown, and as it increased” Lee left Longstreet behind and spurred into Cashtown to find Powell Hill and discover what the trouble was.
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Hill heard the thumping, too, and so did Anderson’s division in the line of march. “Some one hears a boom in front,” recalled one Virginian, but the rest shrug it off as “some-one tapping the bass drum.” Then more, and more, and soon “we know that someone is fighting ahead.” When Lee caught up with Hill in front of the Cashtown inn, “Little Powell” could not offer Lee much enlightenment: he had sent Harry Heth forward that morning with only the expectation of sweeping some odds and ends of Yankee cavalry out of the way and a warning not to start any sort of sizable fight by himself. But what they were hearing was plainly artillery, and presently a courier from Heth arrived with the highly unwelcome news that he had collided with the 1st Corps of the Army of the Potomac and would Hill please send up supports. Hill was not about to do anything until he had seen matters for himself, and so off he rode toward Gettysburg, leaving Lee at Cashtown “very much
disturbed and depressed.” When Richard Anderson’s division stopped at midday at Cashtown, Lee poured out his irritation to Anderson, beginning with the missing Stuart. “I cannot think what has become of Stuart; I ought to have heard from him long before now.” Lee had not planned on meeting the Federals for at least another twenty-four hours, yet here they were in Gettysburg, and Lee had no idea whether “it may be the whole Federal army, or … only a detachment.”