Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (49 page)

Very well, Sickles stiffly agreed, he would “be happy to modify” his position “according to your views.” Meade considered this, then rejected it. It was too late for that, he retorted. Artillery was the overture to infantry, and Confederate infantry would be on Sickles’ doorstep before any orders to fall back could be distributed. “No,” Meade said, “I will send you the Fifth Corps, and you may send for support from the Second Corps.” Then Meade rode off in “a heavy shower of shells.” He was riding a borrowed horse, and the shelling drove the beast “into an uncontrollable frenzy.” From the woodline in the
distance, long lines of Confederate infantry were stepping out and dressing their ranks.
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Robert E. Lee wanted Dick Ewell to get moving as soon as the sound of Longstreet’s engagement began, and it was not a good sign that he felt the need to be on Ewell’s coattails. But as the afternoon began to drag onward past two o’clock with no whisper of combat from Longstreet’s direction, Lee’s anxieties attached themselves to Longstreet instead. “Perceiving the great value of time, General Lee’s impatience became so urgent that he proceeded in person to hasten the movement of Longstreet,” and set off once again, trailing aides, escorts, and observers, to find out what had gone wrong. He arrived to find that skirmishers from Anderson’s division had captured “a Federal sergeant … who was found, on examination, to belong to a division” in the
3rd Corps, which wasn’t even supposed to be in Gettysburg yet. When Longstreet joined Lee “at about three o’clock in the afternoon,” he was as perplexed at the developing situation as Lee was, for now there were clearly large formations of Federal infantry and artillery lining up at the Emmitsburg Road and in the peach orchard. Lee and Longstreet “held a conference on horseback,” and then Longstreet took off “up the line and down again, occasionally dismounting, and going forward to get a better view of the enemy’s position.”
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McLaws’ division was drawn up “in column of companies,” waiting for an order to move forward, seize the Emmitsburg Road, “and when well on the enemy’s flank to face or form to the left” and drive up to Cemetery Hill. But the enemy was now clearly
on
the Emmitsburg Road itself.
John Bell Hood’s scouts came back, breathlessly reporting that while there were obviously Federal troops occupying the peach orchard and the line of the Emmitsburg Road above the orchard, the rest of these Federals were thinly stretched along two stony ridges about a mile directly ahead, and no Federals were posted on the Round Tops, which loomed behind them. Best of all, the scouts had found a major Union wagon park behind the Round Tops, and if Hood was allowed to “march around the base of Round Top to the right,” he could roll up the unanchored Union flank and overrun the wagon park. Hood had already “placed one or two batteries in position and opened fire,” and he was ready to send his division forward in a long curl around the rough outlines of the Round Tops.
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But this would place a terrible burden on soldiers who had been on the march for almost twelve hours without intermission. In Kershaw’s
South Carolina brigade, “the soldiers fell down … as soon as the halt was made … and soon most of them were fast asleep.” And anyway, Lee and Longstreet were working on a different plan. “Gen. Lee was already fretting over the delay which had occurred,” and even if it was no longer possible to launch an attack that wheeled up the Emmitsburg Road, he was certainly not going to call the whole thing off. Taking the situation as it was, Lee proposed to attack the Federals in the road head-on, drive them out of the way, and
then
execute a long curve toward Cemetery Hill. Both an offhand inspection and Hood’s report were evidence that the position could not be very strongly held, and in any case it would be easier to crush these Yankees in the open than if they were backed up against Cemetery Hill; in fact, it was a mercy that they had moved out and revealed themselves in this fashion, because if they had been concealed from view farther to their rear, Longstreet’s original wheel up the
Emmitsburg Road would have offered a disastrously vulnerable flank for them to counterattack.
Had not God delivered the Philistines into his hands?
The attack would go forward, but this time heading straight eastward, rolling over the weak Federal positions and cutting off all the Federal troops posted on Cemetery Hill from behind, while Ewell attacked them from the front. Longstreet’s artillery “should open along the front for ten minutes, then a pause, a signal of three guns from the right battery, in rapid succession, and the attack was to commence without further order.” Hood’s division would jump off first, heading for one of the stony ridges (the property of an elderly farmer named
John Houck; after the battle, it would become known as
Houck’s Ridge) and the Round Tops. McLaws would follow at a decent interval, overwhelming the other, nearer stony ridge and crushing the peach orchard position, “with a view of gaining a line resting upon
Little Round Top on the right and the Peach Orchard on the left.” Richard H. Anderson’s borrowed division would go in last of all.
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This was what, in technical terms, could be called an
echelon
attack, or what Porter Alexander described as the “progressive type, as distinguished from the simultaneous” assault. The genius of the echelon was the way it forced an enemy to use his own instincts against himself. Attacked on one flank, a defending enemy would shore up that flank by pulling units out of unthreatened parts of the line and sending them in as reinforcements; as the next stage in the echelon threatened the next part of the line, the defenders would drain still more troops away from the unthreatened parts; by the time the final part of the echelon was launched, the remaining sector of the defenders’ line would have been bled so dry of troops that it would break and collapse, and the entire position would come unhinged. On the other hand, the echelon had its risks, too, since it required exquisite planning and timing, and a certain amount of cold blood in the veins while the first elements of the echelon were chewed to pieces. In this situation, Lee and Longstreet were hurriedly trying to impose a complicated tactical form on a situation they had not anticipated—and they would just as hurriedly fail to communicate the full shape of this plan down through the ladder of staffers and subordinates.
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None of this sat well with
John Bell Hood, who continued to pester Longstreet with entreaties “to turn Round Top.” Longstreet was sufficiently uncertain about these last-minute overhauls of the attack plan that his only
advice to Hood was the less than hearty endorsement, “We must obey the orders of General Lee.” Longstreet himself dismounted “and held his reins over his arms,” sending off “staff officers and couriers along the line of battle to watch the movements and report to him,” while “General Lee left us.” The artillery whose voice would be the signal to Ewell for his own action to begin three miles away was wheeled into position, and Porter Alexander hoped that “with my 54 guns & close range,” he could also “overwhelm & crush” the Federal artillery he saw rolling up to Sherfy’s peach orchard. Alexander’s own battalion opened fire from “the edge” of the woods “next the Peach Orchard” at about “500 yards distance.” Hood’s division sprang up “as if at a game of ball,” McIvor Law’s
Alabama brigade and
Jerome Robertson (a dark, beetle-browed Kentuckian who had been a hatter, a doctor, a volunteer in the
Texas revolution of 1836, and a Texas state senator) with Hood’s old Texas brigade in front, and Benning’s and “Tige” Anderson’s Georgia brigades drawn up in back of them. “Fix
bayonets, my brave Texans,” Hood shouted as he galloped across the front of Robertson’s brigade, “forward and take those heights.” And they cheered him in response: “Follow the Lone Star Flag to the top of the mountain!” cried the lieutenant colonel of the 1st Texas, and there “arose such a wild indescribable battle yell that no one having heard ever forgot.”
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  CHAPTER FIFTEEN  

U
NTIL FIVE DAYS BEFORE
, the 11,000 men who made up the 5th Corps had been George Meade’s own corps, and his promotion to top command had boosted his senior division commander, George Sykes, to his place. Sykes was a West Pointer’s West Pointer—thirty-ninth in a class of fifty-six in 1842, a Regular Army lifer who had seen action in the Seminole War and the
Mexican War, and as doggedly average a soldier as the army could offer. At West Point, they had called him “Tardy George” and “Slow Trot,” and unthinking, methodical, and deliberate adherence to by-the-book plodding was Sykes’ trademark. Until Sedgwick arrived, the 5th Corps formed the army’s reserve, and Meade positioned them around Powers Hill, a small knob that rose about 100 feet above the track of the
Baltimore Pike, a mile north and east of the Round Tops. But under these new circumstances, George Meade’s first priority became getting Sykes and his 5th Corps moving to Sickles’ support, and it would be vital for “Slow Trot” Sykes to abandon his tardiness for once.

The backbone of the 5th Corps was
Romeyn Ayres’ three-brigade division—two of the brigades (under
Hannibal Day and
Sidney Burbank) were composed of ten regiments of the Regular
U.S. Army. A second three-brigade division was commanded by
James Barnes, filled with a medley of
Massachusetts,
Michigan,
Pennsylvania, and New York regiments, along with one from Maine. The last division had only been attached to the 5th Corps on June 28th: they were
Samuel Wylie Crawford’s two brigades’ worth of Pennsylvania Reserves, marching from the defenses of Washington to the rescue of their native state. Crawford had quite an unusual personal history
with this war. His father was a Reformed
Presbyterian minister (which is to say, exclusively psalm-singing Calvinist and militant
abolitionist, too) who doggedly insisted on remaining in his pulpit in Chambersburg during the rebel occupation; Crawford himself had been the post surgeon at Fort Sumter in 1861, so that the war assumed for him the dimensions of a personal feud, “a conspiracy against God and humanity.” Ayres and Barnes were cut more along the model of Sykes.
Romeyn Ayres was a tall, indolent New Yorker who managed to graduate solidly in the middle of the West Point class of 1847, while
James Barnes, a West Point classmate of Robert E. Lee’s, had spent the previous twenty-two years before the war as an undistinguished railroad executive. Solemn, smiling, slightly puzzled, he was only in command of the division because its regular commander,
Charles Griffin, was still recovering from Chancellorsville.
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With little more to do than wait for Sedgwick and the
6th Corps to arrive and take over the role of army reserve, the
5th Corps sprawled out comfortably around Powers Hill, more or less in battalion columns, “to rest and make up for the loss of sleep” that had been experienced on the swift march from Hanover the night before. If they had any prospect of action, it would be as a support for the
12th Corps, to the east. Then, in midafternoon, the sporadic rifle fire that they had heard through the day “increased to a roar” and “
shells, shot wild of their intended destination, passed over the closely crowded reserve and exploded harmlessly far beyond.” The lounging formations were roused by
Fall in
,
attention
,
load at will, load
, “harsh, stern, determined, in quick succession.” Meade wanted to “personally superintend the posting of his old corps on the left of the Third,” but he had to be content with sending “several staff officers to hurry up the column under Major General Sykes.” Nor did he propose waiting for Sykes to gather the entire corps: “Send a brigade to report to Sickles” was Meade’s directive, and the rest of Sykes’ command could follow. This turned out to be wise. Sykes would take the better part of an hour, between four o’clock and five, to pull the 5th Corps together and get his first available brigade moving at the head of his first available division in Sickles’ direction. That division turned out to be James Barnes’ with just over 3,400 men; its lead brigade belonged to Strong Vincent, who had only the day before speculated grandiloquently on how glorious a death in defense of the soil of old Pennsylvania would be. As it turned out, he would never reach Sickles at all.
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