Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (77 page)

However much satisfaction this gave to Henry Hunt, it gave none whatever to Winfield Hancock. Infantry can, with training and experience, put up with a great many things whirling dangerously around them in battle, but one thing most likely to break the patience, and worse, of the infantryman is to sit or lie, cowering in trenches or rifle pits, under the dropping fire of artillery, and with no effective way of responding. “The inward prayer of every one of us,” wrote a soldier in the 43rd Massachusetts, “would have been, ‘For God’s sake give us something to do!’ The suspense of such moments is terrible, and each moment seems an age.” It was still worse for the nineteenth-century infantryman, whose artillery was often within a pebble’s throw of his own position; no infantryman pretended to understand if his own guns were making little or no attempt to return fire. The odds of an artillery duel actually doing anything to relieve the pressure of the enemy’s bombardment were nugatory, but at least it gave the sense of someone striking back on their behalf.
³²

Oddly, it was usually infantry
officers
who wanted the guns to keep quiet, in hope of offering enemy artillery less incentive for heaving explosives at their heads, and artillery officers who were the most eager to have them speak. Hunt and Hancock now reversed those roles, as Hancock noticed that “the batteries of his own corps did not reply.” This touched off an immediate fury in Hancock, who ordered his corps artillery chief, Capt.
John Hazard, to get
to work. The confused Hazard replied that he had only just been ordered by General Hunt to slack off firing, but Hancock was hearing nothing of it and “compelled a rapid reply to the enemy.” It galled Hancock even more to notice that, just a few hundred yards to the left,
Freeman McGilvery’s gun line had fallen silent. Hancock “came riding up to him in hot haste” and demanded to know “why in hell do you not open fire with those Batteries.” His men were taking a pounding in silence, and “unless our Batteries opened fire his troops would not stand it much longer.”

Hancock might be able to order his own corps artillery around as he pleased, but McGilvery’s eight batteries belonged to the artillery reserve, and McGilvery had just received orders to stand down from the army’s chief of artillery. He felt no obligation to listen to “some general commanding.” This brought a red-hot stream of “language … profane and blasphemous such as a drunken Ruffian would use” from Hancock. But McGilvery, the “cool, clear-headed old sailor,” was probably not the best choice for profanity practice. He tartly informed Hancock that “he was not under Gen. Hancock’s orders, and … I could not see why the Second Corps could not stand the fire as well as the other troops, or as well as my gunners.” Hancock, he added with an impudent twist, “seemed unnecessarily excited, was unduly emphatic and … his orders would result in a most dangerous and irreplaceable waste of ammunition.”
³³

A great deal of Hancock’s impatience, unlike Hunt’s, grew from uncertainty over just what the Confederate bombardment meant. George Meade was still expecting an attack “from the town” on
Cemetery Hill, and along the line of the
Philadelphia Brigade, Alexander Webb became convinced that the barrage meant that “the Confederate infantry will not advance and attack our position.” Even Henry Hunt at first mistook the Confederate artillery deployment as a ruse “to replace infantry sent to Ewell’s assistance, or perhaps simply to strengthen their line against a counter attack from us.” At one point during the barrage, Hancock dispatched his aide
William Mitchell to
John Gibbon to ask “what I thought the meaning of this terrific fire” might be. Gibbon himself was not sure. “I replied I thought it was the prelude either to a retreat or an assault.” Neither of them, however, remained long in doubt. Gibbon walked back from the front of his division line at the angle of the stone wall, “the men peering at us curiously from behind the stone wall as we passed along,” and then behind the crest of
Cemetery Ridge. Suddenly, “the fire on both sides … considerably slackened,” and a division staffer and an orderly, leading Gibbon’s horse, “met me with the information that the enemy was coming in force.”
³⁴

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE  

U
SUALLY A
CANNONADE
against an infantry line can be but for one purpose only—to disturb and rattle the infantry so that their lines may be the easier penetrated,” wrote Union veteran
Robert Beecham. But in the case of the Confederate bombardment that afternoon, Robert E. Lee’s specific purpose for “Longstreet and his batteries” was to “silence those of the enemy.” In particular,
James Walton had targeted the batteries he had seen grouped behind Hancock’s four brigades between Cemetery Hill and the “clump of trees” on the ridge. The trees were pointed out “as the proposed point” of Pickett’s attack and the damage Walton’s guns caused among the Union batteries around those trees was considerable: four of
Alonzo Cushing’s guns “had been struck by solid
shot and dismounted”;
Fred Brown’s Rhode Island battery had already lost two pieces the day before, and now lost another and had to be pulled off the line.
George Woodruff’s battery had exhausted all its shell and shrapnel, and was wheeled back into an orchard on the western face of Cemetery Hill owned by
David Zeigler to present less of a target. It was the task of Porter Alexander to observe the effect, judge the right moment to begin the infantry attack, and send the go-ahead word to Pickett; and from Alexander’s perspective, the artillery had accomplished almost exactly what Longstreet had asked of it.
¹

But it still took much longer than Alexander had anticipated. “I had not the ammunition to make it a long business,” Alexander wrote years afterward, and he calculated that the Confederate artillery could hit the Federals pretty hard for about twenty minutes. That would see each of the Confederate guns firing about ten times if managed “carefully,” and would do no serious harm
to the remaining supply of ammunition; at worst, if the gunners got too hurried, they might fire off as much as thirty rounds, “& ammunition burns up very fast in an affair like that.” The minutes ticked by, and Alexander saw that the Confederate batteries weren’t silencing much of anything along the Union line, and that “it seemed madness to launch infantry into that fire … at midday under a July sun.” Pickett began sending couriers, demanding to know when he could advance, and Alexander kept putting them off, until, in exasperation, he wrote an irritated note to Pickett: “If you are coming at all, you must come at once, or I cannot give you proper support; but the enemy’s fire has not slackened at all; at least eighteen guns are still firing from the cemetery itself.” Which was as much as saying,
Don’t
.
²

And then, to Alexander’s amazement, “the enemy’s fire suddenly began to slacken,” and, what was more, he could see Federal batteries along the ridge limbering up and disappearing. “We Confederates often did such things as that to save our ammunition,” Alexander wrote, “but I had never before seen the federals withdraw their guns simply to save them up for the infantry’s fight.” He waited another five minutes to be sure, thinking that if the Yankees do “not run fresh batteries in there in five minutes, this is our fight.” Then he decided: “For God’s sake, come quick,” he scribbled in a note to Pickett. “The eighteen guns are gone; come quickly, or my ammunition won’t let me support you properly.”
³

What Alexander did not realize was that the slacking off of the Federal artillery fire was only partly due to the suppressing fire of the Confederate batteries; it was also Henry Hunt’s device to “save up” his artillery elsewhere along the Union line “for the infantry’s fight.” Nor did Alexander realize that the batteries he had seen being pulled away were to be replaced at once by a pair of batteries from the artillery reserve—
Andrew Cowan’s
1st New York Independent Battery and
Gulian Weir’s Battery C, 5th U.S.—which were already waiting on the reverse slope of
Cemetery Ridge to be waved into position. But Pickett was relieved at last to have something to do, and showed Alexander’s note to Longstreet, whom he presumed would be similarly pleased. He wasn’t. Without meeting Pickett’s gaze, Longstreet merely nodded his head. Unsure how to interpret Longstreet’s glum silence, Pickett fell back on the orders he had been given earlier. “I am going to move forward, sir,” and off he galloped.

Longstreet, still nursing doubts, “mounted and spurred to Alexander’s post” to ask if he was certain. Not entirely, Alexander replied: the bombardment had gone on far longer than he had expected, about forty-five minutes, and that had surely drained the ammunition reserve. Longstreet seized on that caveat: “Stop Pickett immediately and replenish your ammunition.” No,
Alexander, replied, that would take too long and give the Federals a chance to reinforce the line Alexander believed had been shattered by the bombardment. Alexander had the sense that “a word of concurrence from me would have stopped the charge then & there,” and he was probably right. Longstreet said, “very emphatically,” that “I don’t [want] to make this attack. It can’t possibly succeed. I would not make it now but that Gen. Lee has ordered it & expects it.” And then the moment was gone: “Pickett’s division swept out of the wood and showed the full length of its gray ranks and shining
bayonets, as grand a sight as ever a man looked on.”

Out to Pickett’s left, Pettigrew’s division also moved out into the sunshine, stretching beyond Alexander’s sight, “farther than I could see.” Way off to the right,
Lafayette McLaws joined a little knot of his brigade commanders “and saw the advancing Confederates moving to the charge.” It was “magnificent,” McLaws remembered sixteen years later, “it stirred all the highest and deepest emotion of our nature, of admiration for the splendid bearing and courage of our Southern men.” Even for a Union officer like
Philippe Régis de Trobriand, who had seen a good deal of warfare in Europe, “it was a splendid sight.” As the artillery fire petered out, Hancock’s men along
Cemetery Ridge shook themselves, stood up to stretch, hoping that the sudden silence meant that the battle was over. But then they saw “a long line of men coming out of the woods,” and the word fluttered nervously up and down the line,
They are coming
. “The regimental flags and guidons were plainly visible along the whole line,” wrote an officer with the 126th New York’s skirmish line, “the guns and bayonets in the sunlight shone like silver.”
Here they come! Here they come!
the warning raced around the 19th Massachusetts.
Here comes the infantry
.
⁴

Arthur Fremantle and Fitzgerald Ross hoped to make it into the town to view the attack from “some commanding position,” but failed to get there before the Federal bombardment made it impossible. They were forced to turn back, unwillingly accompanied by a local “urchin” who “took a diabolical interest in the bursting of the
shells, and screamed with delight when he saw them take effect.” Fremantle might have saved himself trouble if he had known that the cupolas, steeples, and roofs of the town were already crowded with gaping spectators, from civilians to Union prisoners. Even the methodical mathematician,
Michael Jacobs, called his eighteen-year-old son, Henry, up to the garret of their house on Middle Street to look through his “small but powerful” telescope. “Quick,” Jacobs called to his son, “Come, Come! You can see now what in all your life you will never see again.” Ten miles south, at the Federal signal station on the Indian lookout above Emmitsburg, crowds of people brought “glasses, viz. telescopes, spy, and opera glasses,” each vying with the
others for “a clear view of the field” and “the men in their lines, attending cannon, the cannon themselves, making charges, officers riding along about their lines … In a word the whole scene was spread out to our view.”
⁵

Almost every account of any importance describes the jump-off of Pickett’s Charge as “a long gray line” emerging from “the dark fringe of timber on
Seminary Ridge,” or “the long gray line of infantry … in nearly perfect alignment,” or a “force … in two lines … their formations opened to sift through the momentarily quiet batteries.” But the closer to the actual event, the less certain the testimony becomes. A survivor of the 27th Connecticut remembered in 1866 that Pickett’s attack developed in “two heavy lines of troops,” and
Theodore Gates, whose 80th New York was part of a contingent of
1st Corps survivors posted on Hancock’s left, wrote in his diary on July 3rd that “the enemys Infantry advanced directly upon us in two lines on his right & one on his left.” But
Abner Doubleday spoke of the Confederates coming on in
three
lines, while
John Gibbon counted
four
lines—“a heavy line of skirmishers,” said Gibbon, “then a line of infantry, then another line behind that, and, I believe, a third behind that.”
⁶