Glory Road (46 page)

Clearly it was time for the guns to go. Hall wrote later that he ordered the battery to retire by sections, "feeling that if the position was too advanced for infantry it was equally so for artillery." His right section went back seventy-five yards, unlimbered again, and opened fire to protect the retirement of the other pieces. The Rebels got in close and killed all of the horses of one of the guns in this right section, so that the men finally had to remove the piece by hand. As Hall's last gun was being removed all of its horses went down, and Hall was about to ride back and bring it off personally when Wadsworth came up and told him not to waste time worrying over one gun-the thing to do was to get the rest of the guns into position back nearer the town to cover the retreat. Hall obeyed, but he did detail a sergeant and five men to go out and see if they could not yet save the gun. They tried but none of them came back, and the gun stayed there, a bleak silhouette on the smoldering sky line.
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As Hall's guns retired, Calef s regulars came up again to take their place, accompanied by Battery L, 1st New York Light Artillery. These guns went into line and the Rebel guns stormed at them, killing horses and men and smashing gun limbers. Cutler reassembled bis infantry, and the brigade formed line at right angles to its original position, drawn up in the roadway facing north. A hundred yards in front there was the cutting of an unfinished railway line running parallel to the road, and somewhere beyond it the isolated 147th New York was still hanging on, invisible in the smoke. Two regiments of Southerners took shelter in the cut and swept the road with a steady fire.

South of the highway things had gone better. General Abner Doubleday, stiff and formal and just a shade pompous, still wearing his laurels as an "old Sumter hero," had come up ahead of bis division, and Reynolds told him to take charge south of the road while Wadsworth looked after affairs to the north. Doubleday led the Iron Brigade forward to the crest of the rise overlooking Willoughby Run, where there were a plot of trees and a little farm, and Archer's Confederate brigade was coming up the slope in a long line, skirmishers out in front.

Like so many other generals of that era, Doubleday felt that troops going into action needed a word of encouragement, and he called out to the men that this spot was the key to the whole battlefield and must be held "to the last extremity." The men yelled back: "If we can't hold it, where will you find men who can?" or so Doubleday reported later: he had a weakness for touching up the things soldiers said in action. He got the 2nd and 7th Wisconsin into line, and they ran into Archer's men head-on, while the 24th Michigan and the 19th Indiana worked around toward the south and took the Confederate brigade in the flank. Rifles blazed all along the slope and in the grove, and the Confederates suddenly realized that they were up against the first team. The Iron Brigade could hear the Southerners telling each other: "Here are those damned black-hat fellers again. . . . 'Tain't no militia—that's the Army of the Potomac!"
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Reynolds rode forward with the battle line. He was a handsome man and a first-rate soldier, who had come up originally with the Pennsylvania Reserves and who had once declined command of the army because he did not think he would be given a free hand. The morning Meade replaced Hooker, Reynolds had carefully put on his dress uniform and sash and had gone formally to call on him; and when Meade, who looked like a wagon master that morning, with an old uniform and muddy boots and a general air of unmilitary slouchiness, had tried to express his embarrassment at being promoted over the man who until recently had been his superior, Reynolds had decently stopped him, assuring him that the post had gone to the man who most deserved it. Now Reynolds was studying the battle, trying to make out just how much weight lay back of the Rebel attack, and a Southern sharpshooter in an old stone barn got him in the sights of his rifle and shot him dead.

Reynolds went down, and his aides took his body to the rear and put it in an ambulance, and the Iron Brigade closed in savagely on Archer's men, getting them off balance, pushing them down into the valley, and driving them back in wild rout. A muscular Irish private in the 2nd Wisconsin ran forward and seized General Archer bodily and made a prisoner of him, hundreds of lesser Confederates surrendered, and the rest of the brigade went staggering back to the high ground to the west.

North of the road, too, there was a success. The 6th Wisconsin had been sent over to help Cutler's men, and it suddenly charged forward to the railway cut, the 84th and 95th New York following it. The Wisconsin men were running in an uneven V-shaped line, the colors at the peak of the V, Colonel Dawes riding along, yelling: "Align on the colors! Close up on that color!" The men swept into the railway cut at the end of the Rebel line, getting a deadly enfilade fire down the length of the Rebel regiments packed between the steep banks, the southern rim of the cut flamed with musket fire, and there was a vicious flurry of hand-to-hand fighting. A Wisconsin private grabbed for a Confederate flag, a Confederate shot him down, a comrade leaped forward swinging his musket like a ball bat and brained the man who had shot him, a corporal ran in and got the flag—and then, all along the line, the Federals were shouting: "Throw down your muskets! Throw down your muskets!"

Hundreds of Southerners obeyed. Dawes shouted for the colonel of the nearest Southern regiment, and the dazed colonel came forward and handed over his sword. Six of his subordinate officers came up and did the same, and Dawes had an awkward moment, standing there with his arms full of swords, until his adjutant relieved him of them. Some of the Rebels escaped by running out at the western end of the cut, but hundreds surrendered, and the beleaguered New York regiment north of the cut was rescued. It had lost two thirds of its men in half an hour's fight.
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So for the moment the Federals had won a decided victory, with two Southern brigades beaten back and a good bag of prisoners going to the rear. (General Archer, understandably, was not in good spirits. En route to the rear he met Doubleday, whom he had known before the war, and Doubleday somewhat tactlessly came forward, crying: "Archer! I'm glad to see you!" Archer refused to shake hands, muttering, "Well, I'm not glad to see you by a damn sight." The Irish private who captured him had manhandled him, and his feelings were all out of joint.)
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Doubleday reflected that Howard and the XI Corps would be up shortly, and it seemed to him that the day was off to a fine start.

It was a start, but no more. A new infantry line appeared on the western ridge, and more and more Confederate guns came up to blast at the Union line. It was not yet noon, and although there was a brief lull there was trouble in the air. The Confederate battle line kept reaching farther and farther to the north—A. P. Hill's corps was twice the size of Reynolds's—and as Doubleday's own division came up it was hurried into position north of the turnpike to match the extension of Confederate strength. All available Federal guns were in action. Hall's half-wrecked battery was called back from its position on the edge of Gettysburg, and it came galloping up the grade of the unfinished railway. A couple of Rebel guns had an exact line on that cutting and they slammed in solid shot and shell, and because the banks were high Hall's men could neither turn around nor go back but had to keep on for half a mile, taking cruel punishment all the way. They got out of the horrible little ravine at last, turned to the left, and went into battery over near the seminary, where Doubleday had men building a half-moon embankment of fence rails and earth as a strong point.
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From the north Buford's pickets were frantically reporting that a heavy new Rebel column was coming in, and these enemies appeared presently on Oak Hill, a rounded tree-clad knoll at the northern end of Seminary Ridge, taking the Yankee line in flank. Doubleday sent the last of his reserves up to meet this threat—a division led by General John C. Robinson, a salty old regular of whom a soldier said that "in a much-bearded army, he was the hairiest general I ever saw."
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Robinson got his men in behind some stone walls and beat off the first Rebel attack, but there were dust clouds all along the northern horizon marking the impending arrival of still more Confederate troops.

Up from the south came the head of the XI Corps, the Dutchmen who still carried Chancellorsville on their shoulders. The men were tired, and on the long hike up from Falmouth their shoes had given out and some of them were barefooted, and they did the final half mile or so into town on the double under the hot July sun.
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Howard galloped west to the seminary, taking command by virtue of his seniority, and he told Doubleday to stand firm—the Dutchmen would protect his right flank. Two of Howard's divisions he sent straight north through town, planning to seize Oak Hill, but before the men got there a new Confederate battle line was tramping south through the open country east of the hill, and there was nothing for it but to form a hasty line and try to beat them off.

Just south of Gettysburg there was a high hill with a cemetery on top, and Howard put his headquarters there, holding with him General von Steinwehr with some artillery and two thin brigades of infantry. Steinwehr had been a Prussian professional, and he immediately put his men to work digging pits for the guns and banking earth up against the stone walls about the cemetery. A soldier remembered how strange it was to see batteries galloping helter-skelter into the burying ground, knocking over tombstones and setting up their guns, as often as not, on top of graves.
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The right end of the Yankee line north of Gettysburg was in charge of Brigadier General Francis Barlow, the slim, clean-shaven young New York lawyer who had gone into the war as a militia private and now commanded a division, and he tried to anchor it on a little knoll near a stream known as Rock Creek. He planted guns there, a stout regular battery under Lieutenant Bayard Wilkeson, whose father, a correspondent for the New York
Times,
was at that moment coming up toward Gettysburg to see what the news might be. Barlow put the 17th Connecticut in to protect Wilkeson's guns and made note that still another Southern column was materializing on the far side of Rock Creek, away to his right and rear.

The XI Corps line measured perhaps a mile, from Barlow's knoll to its western end. It lay in flat open country, and between its left flank and General Robinson's position below Oak Hill there was a quarter-of-a-mile gap. Up into this gap came Leatherbreeches Dilger and his sue brass smoothbores of Battery I, 1st Ohio, and these guns immediately got into a spirited duel with the Rebel guns on Oak Hill. Dilger believed that the place for smoothbores was as close to the enemy as they could get—they were splendid for close-range work but were not of much account for the longer distances—and when a battery of rifled guns came up beside him he asked its commander, Lieutenant William Wheeler, to lay down a covering fire while he went forward. Wheeler did so, and Dilger's battery trotted straight ahead for several hundred yards, halting once under fire while Dilger had the men collect fence rails and other debris to fill a ditch that blocked the way. Dilger at last got into position at the range he liked, and while he fired Wheeler brought his own guns up to join him, and in a short time the two batteries had dismounted five Rebel cannon.
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It was early afternoon by now, and the Rebel line formed a long semicircle from southwest clear around to northeast. From end to end this semicircle flamed and crashed, and Howard sent couriers off, breakneck, to the nearest Federal troops, Slocum's and Sickles's corps, begging them to come on to Gettysburg as fast as they could. West of Willoughby Run (although the Federals did not know it) was Lee himself. He had not at first planned to bring on a general battle, but he was finding that the setup was practically ideal, with the Yankees badly outnumbered and outflanked, and he ordered an advance all along the line. The wild uproar of battle rose to a crescendo and the great blazing semicircle began to roll forward.

Something had to give, and the break came first on the knoll where Barlow had his guns. Rebel infantry charged in close and laid down a killing fire, and two Confederate batteries hit the knoll with everything they had, and Barlow went down critically wounded. Young Lieutenant Wilkeson was coolly picturesque on his white horse amid his guns, but a sharpshooter killed him, the supporting infantry gave way, and then the guns limbered up hastily and went to the rear. At the other end of the line Confederate infantry drove for the gap between the two corps formations. The left-flank element of the XI Corps, 75th Pennsylvania, changed front to the left to meet this threat, lost 111 men in fifteen minutes' fighting across a snake-rail fence and then had to run for it. All along the line regiments caved in, and the position was lost.
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For the rest of the life of the Army of the Potomac there would be arguments about this, and other troops were to complain that the miserable Dutchmen had let them down again, but the line simply could not be held, and when the men rallied a few hundred yards in the rear the Confederates who had been advancing beyond Rock Creek got in behind the right flank and shook them loose once more. Before long the whole corps was in retreat again, and from the cemetery Steinwehr saw the rout and sent one of his two brigades out through town to form a rear guard.