Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (64 page)

Neither Wright nor his surviving officers ever forgave Posey. “If the same advance had been made on our left,” lamented a captain in the 3rd Georgia, “a different history might have been written wherein Gettysburg … would have been the Salamis and Marathon of our independence.” Four days after the battle, Wright composed an incendiary letter for the
Augusta Constitutionalist
which frankly alleged that both Posey and Mahone had disobeyed orders from Anderson to join him on Cemetery Ridge. Anderson was forced to file charges against Wright for “matters connected with publications which appeared in the Augusta Constitutionalist.” The court-martial acquitted him, but Wright had made himself too hot to handle in the
Army of Northern Virginia. He served through the Overland Campaign of 1864, but in the end, he was transferred to Georgia to take command of the state militia and feud with Georgia’s individualistic and cocksure governor, Joe Brown.

None of this, of course, gave Hancock and Meade all that much to celebrate. For them, it had been another close call, staving off another Chancellorsville through unscripted decisions and split-hair timing. If Posey and Mahone had joined Wright, “it is doubtful whether the Union line, disorganized and broken as it was … would have been able to stand the shock.”
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And in fact, there was yet one more shock in store.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN  

I
F
J
AMES
L
ONGSTREET’S CORPS
was to serve as the hammer on July 2nd, Dick Ewell’s corps was intended to provide the anvil, and maybe provide enough of a distraction over on the east side of
Cemetery Hill to drain still more Union troops away from the
Emmitsburg Road. But any action by Ewell was “to be a feint & converted into a real attack only if an apparently favorable opening appeared.” And if actions are any explanation, Lee showed no expectation that Ewell would provide more than a “feint.” Once Lee left Ewell around two o’clock to play catch-up with Longstreet, he gave Ewell little attention. He “joined Hill” around four o’clock and “remained there nearly all the time, looking through his field-glass—sometimes talking to Hill and sometimes to Colonel Long of his Staff.” What was more, the Britisher Fremantle noticed that “during the whole time the firing continued, he only sent one message, and only received one report.” Fremantle added that he supposed it was Lee’s “system to arrange the plan thoroughly with the three corps commanders, and then leave to them the duty of modifying and carrying it out to the best of their abilities,” and in that respect Fremantle could not have been more correct.
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The only specific direction Ewell was given was to wait “until I heard General Longstreet’s guns open on the right.” But almost as though he was determined to wipe away any grousing about his inertia the evening before, Ewell “spent the morning in examining all parts of his position & decided to attack along his whole line.” A wounded Union officer, sheltered in the crowded sanctuary of
Christ Lutheran Church on Chambersburg Street, saw “Gen. Ewell and several of his staff officers” enter the church “for observation
from the cupola of the church.” Ewell’s wooden leg kept him from ascending the ladder to the roof and his staffers had to call down bearings to him. He also tried the cupola of
St. Francis Xavier Church on High Street, again sending staffers to shout down reports while he remained in the street below. At the same time, Ewell took the precaution of deploying his three divisions in a long arc around
Cemetery Hill, with Allegheny Ed Johnson’s division shuffling into line opposite
Culp’s Hill,
Jubal Early’s division on the left of the town and facing the east slope of Cemetery Hill, and
Robert Rodes’ division “on the right of the main street of the town … extending out on the
Fairfield road.”
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From first light, Confederate
skirmishers in the town, and Union skirmishers adventuring down Cemetery Hill, began thickening the air with “quick and sharp musketry firing, with an occasional sound of artillery.”
Oliver Otis Howard, sleeping “inside of a family lot in the cemetery … with a grave mound for a pillow,” was awakened by the shooting at five o’clock. “It began like the pattering of rain on a flat roof … till it attained a continuous roar.” Ranged around the perimeter of the hill were the misshapen remnants of the
11th Corps. The one untouched brigade,
Orland Smith’s brigade of
Ohioans, New Yorkers, and
Massachusetts men, held the vulnerable west face of Cemetery Hill, and linked hands with Alex Hays’
2nd Corps division; the north face of the hill was held by the bundled splinters of Coster’s brigade and
Carl Schurz’s division; and the east face by what had been Francis Barlow’s division (now directed by
Adelbert Ames, since Barlow was missing and presumed dead). At most, Howard could not have had more than 5,000 men left from the 9,200 with which he began the day before; in practical terms, he may have had as few as 2,500. What he did have, though, was artillery—the five batteries of his own corps artillery, plus another six belonging to the
1st Corps, carefully positioned to cover every possible line of approach to the hill.
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That could not prevent rebel skirmishers concealed in trees and houses from constantly peppering Yankee artillerymen and infantry. The buildings on the south end of Gettysburg were “filled with rebel sharp-shooters,” and from time to time parties of Yankee skirmishers had to be sent down the hill to clear away nests of rebel riflemen who had crept too close. In the 55th Ohio, at the north apex of Cemetery Hill, Capt.
Frederick Boalt called out for volunteers to clean out a house at the foot of
Baltimore Street which had become an annoying little post for rebel riflemen. With “twenty or twenty-five” men,” Boalt “crawled along the
Taneytown road … keeping under cover as much as possible” until his storming party was close enough to rush the house, kick in the doors, and capture the rebels inside. At the same time, it amused the colonel of the 82nd Illinois to draw Otis Howard’s attention to a sign posted
in the Evergreen Cemetery:
DRIVING, RIDING AND SHOOTING ON THESE GROUNDS STRICTLY PROHIBITED. ANY PERSON VIOLATING THIS ORDINANCE WILL BE PUNISHED BY FINE AND IMPRISONMENT.
The colonel solemnly warned Howard that “he would get into trouble after the battle for violating this order.” But a wayward Confederate
shell wobbled over and “knocked it into a thousand pieces.” Howard remarked that it seemed to him that the ordinance had been pretty effectively rescinded.
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This was less amusing for the wounded men who by now had begun to crowd the brick gatehouse of the cemetery, since the “arched brick building” made an ideal guide for Confederate fire. And it made the infantry lines in front of the batteries “one of the hottest places” an officer of the 153rd Pennsylvania thought he had been in. Occasionally, the Yankees gave as good as they got: Dick Ewell sent off Albert Jenkins’ diminutive cavalry brigade to “reconnoiter,” only to have Federal shell explode among Jenkins and his staff, “wounding the General and his horse.” One Yankee gunner grew so “annoyed by a sharp-shooter in one of the church steeples” that he “bade his men run around the
cannon and turn somersaults” to induce the sniper to peer out “to see what the queer action meant.” He did, and the gunner let loose. “The shell struck only a foot above” the sniper’s head, and “he came down out of the steeple swearing he could not stand such shooting as that.”
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Once the rumble of Longstreet’s artillery could be heard, Ewell got his corps moving—Allegheny Johnson’s 6,400-man division moved up behind a small ridge on the farm of Daniel Benner and prepared to face Culp’s Hill;
Jubal Early put his two least-damaged brigades from the day before (
Isaac Avery’s North Carolina brigade and Harry Hays’ wild Louisianans) in line to strike the eastern face of
Cemetery Hill; and Rodes’ division filed out of the town to position themselves to hit Cemetery Hill directly on the west. First, Ewell needed to suppress the deadly array of Federal artillery on Cemetery Hill, and for that he turned to Johnson’s division artillery battalion, fourteen guns under a fresh-faced nineteen-year-old Virginia Military Institute graduate named
Joseph White Latimer.

On paper, this battalion was supposed to be under the command of Lt. Col.
Richard Snowden Andrews, a highly unmilitary Baltimore architect but a brother-in-law of Robert E. Lee’s military secretary. However, Andrews had an unusual penchant for getting in the way of nasty wounds, and he had taken one of them at Winchester. That left Latimer, who would ordinarily have been little more than an apprentice, as the battalion’s ranking officer. Not that he was undeserving: Latimer won plaudits at Fredericksburg as “one of the coolest and bravest boys I have ever met with,” and Dorsey Pender
thought he was “as brave a soldier as I ever saw.” Latimer had “an unusual readiness and precision in the details of instruction” and a “solid, imperturbable earnestness with which he gave all his orders.” Under any other circumstances, the gunners and crews would have “considered it humiliating to be placed under the tuition of such a child.” Instead, Latimer won them over as a sort of novelty—a “Boy Major,” like J.E.B. Stuart’s now dead protégé
John Pelham—and soon enough they “spoke of him as ‘our little Latimer.’ ”
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“Little Latimer” had done some preliminary scouting of the area for good artillery locations, but
Benner’s Ridge seemed to be about the only eminence that satisfied him. A thousand yards distant from
Culp’s Hill and 1,300 yards west of Cemetery Hill, it was barely close enough to hit either hill accurately; unhappily, it was also fifty feet shy of the elevation of either Culp’s Hill or Cemetery Hill, and as a spiny ridge like so many other spiny ridges east of
South Mountain, it had only limited space for deployment and recoil, and none for caissons and horses, not to mention “no covering of any kind to guns and men.” In the absence of any worthwhile alternatives, however, it was Benner’s Ridge or nothing. It took an hour to gather the battalion and guide it up onto the ridge, but once in position their opening fire was remarkably true.
Charles Wainwright thought “their fire was the most accurate I have ever seen on the part of their artillery,” and
James Stewart was surprised to see three of his battery’s limber chests blown up into thin-looking smoke-stalks. The battery horses started to bolt down the
Baltimore Pike; some of the drivers and gun crews actually ran out into the road to bring them back in, and found that “every hair was burnt off the tails and manes of the wheel horses.”
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Despite its accuracy, the Confederate artillery fire was not particularly effective. In
Adelbert Ames’ division, a Connecticut officer admitted that “we hugged the ground pretty close,” but none of “our brigade were either killed or wounded.” And Latimer’s gunners had no sooner opened their first fire on Cemetery Hill when the enormous weight of the Federal artillery there swiveled around and slowly proceeded to pound the Confederate batteries into flames and dust—“guns dismounted and disabled, carriages splintered and crushed, ammunition chests exploded, limbers upset, wounded horses plunging and kicking, dashing out the brains of men tangled in the harness; while cannoneers with pistols were crawling around through the wreck shooting the struggling horses to save the lives of the wounded men.”

After an hour and a half, Latimer’s battalion had been “hurled backward, as it were, by the very weight and impact of the metal, from the position it had occupied on the crest,” and Latimer himself sent off his sergeant major to ask Ed Johnson for permission to withdraw, “owing to the exhausted state of his men and ammunition and the severe fire of the enemy.” He kept the
last four guns in place to cover the pullback, but as he did so, “a shell presently explodes over him and down go horse and rider, the first dead and the other wounded.” The shell had “shattered completely” Latimer’s right arm, and though the arm was amputated, he would die of
gangrene a month later, one of twenty-two dead and twenty-nine wounded in the battalion.
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