Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (29 page)

If anyone needed further convincing, they had it when, less than a mile south of the town, Reynolds himself reappeared. Pounding ahead of the blue column, Reynolds and a cluster of aides had ridden into Gettysburg, got quick directions from Union cavalrymen still milling around the
Eagle Hotel, then turned west to the seminary and the ridge it sat upon. “Seeing Buford in the cupola,” Reynolds shouted up, “What’s the matter, John?” “The devil’s to pay,” cracked Buford. And when he came down, Buford tersely explained, “Reynolds, I have run upon some regiments of infantry”—or, in reality, they had run upon him—“they are in the woods,” somewhere on the other side of
McPherson’s Ridge, “and I am unable to dislodge them.”
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That settled matters in Reynolds’ mind, and he delivered to his aides a short volley of orders and messages which put the final seal on the battle. First, to Meade at Taneytown, a verbal notice to be carried by Capt. Stephen Weld: “Ride at once at your utmost speed”—even if it killed his horse—“to General Meade; tell him the enemy are advancing in strong force and that I fear they will get to the heights beyond the town before I can. I will fight them inch by inch and if driven into town, I will barricade the streets and hold them back as long as possible.” He then added for Meade, almost as an afterthought,
While I am aware that it is not your desire to force an engagement at that point, still I feel at liberty to advance and develop the strength of the enemy
. Then, to
Abner Doubleday: “I will hold onto the Chambersburg Road,” while “you must hold on to the
Millersville Road.” Third, to Otis Howard: “he had encountered the enemy apparently in force” and Howard was “to bring your corps forward as rapidly as possible.” And finally, to Dan Sickles and the
3rd Corps, even more concisely: “Tell General Sickles
I think
he had better come up.” This would leave Meade with no choice. Once Reynolds had committed
three of Meade’s seven infantry corps to Gettysburg, Meade could not refuse to support him with the other four.
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But if he was going to trigger a stand-up fight, Reynolds would need to do it quickly, before the Confederates on
Herr Ridge could deploy and advance, and for that he would need to bring up whatever pieces of the 1st Corps he could lay hands upon. The 1st Corps, with James Wadsworth’s division in the lead, had come abreast of the red farmhouse and barn of
Nicholas Codori, whose property generously straddled the
Emmitsburg Road just south of Gettysburg, and as they had done in so many towns on this march, the colonel of the 6th Wisconsin ordered the
regimental colors uncased, and the fifes and drums to strike up a tune to march by. (The regimental drum major chose “The Campbells Are Coming.”) “Here we were met by General Reynolds,” a soldier at the head of the column remembered, and Reynolds pulled Wadsworth off the road for a rapid consultation. Reynolds “looked careworn, and we thought, very sad, but the high purpose of his patriotic soul was stamped upon every lineament.” In the distance, the men could see a long cloud of smoke rolling up from Buford’s artillery and “hanging about … in clouds.”
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Wadsworth had a map that one of his staffers had scrounged from “some friendly farm-house” which he now unfolded, looking for the best route through the town. But Reynolds told him to forget marching through Gettysburg, and cut across farmer Codori’s fields to the left of the road, skirt the southwest edge of town, and come up over
Seminary Ridge, and do it on the double-quick. Like the Confederates two miles distant, a Union division would have an advance guard on the road at the very front for quick deployment, followed by a brigade of infantry and a battery of artillery, and then the main body of the division’s infantry and the rest of its artillery, with wagons and ambulances and a small rear guard. In James Wadsworth’s division that morning, the lead brigade was composed of four New York regiments and a
Pennsylvania one, with the snappiest-looking unit of the five being the 14th Brooklyn, kitted out in French chasseur uniforms with red caps and red trousers and taking an unholy satisfaction in being called “the red-legged devils.” (Officially, they were the 84th New York Volunteer Infantry; but they were originally recruited from Brooklyn, and they had constituted the old 14th
New York State Militia before the war. The regiment had more or less unanimously enlisted as a three-year volunteer regiment in 1861, but insisted on being known by their militia moniker as the 14th Brooklyn.) They were commanded by a frowning fifty-six-year-old New Englander named
Lysander Cutler, who was one of the army’s tougher customers. In his first job, as a schooltecher, he had imposed a fair sense of order on his pupils by beating the starch out of any bullies who tried to intimidate him; he went on to become an agent for a mining company in Wisconsin, facing down a variety
of outlaws and Indians, and in 1861, he was handed a commission as colonel of the 6th Wisconsin. His schoolmaster manner did not endear him to the 6th, but his performance under fire at Second Bull Run wiped away whatever disgruntlement his regiment felt, and in due time he was promoted to brigadier general and given command of a brigade in James Wadsworth’s division.

Cutler’s brigade would move up the
Emmitsburg Road to a farm lane that angled off toward the Lutheran seminary, followed by the six guns of Battery B,
2nd Maine Artillery, under Lt.
James Hall. Behind them marched one of the most famous brigades in the entire
Army of the Potomac, the five regiments commanded by the unwieldy six-foot, seven-inch
Solomon Meredith. Three of these regiments were from Wisconsin—one of them, the 6th, was Lysander Cutler’s old regiment—and the other two from
Michigan and Indiana. They were absurdly proud of being an all-Western brigade in an Eastern army, prouder still of sticking to the prewar army’s outfit of tall-crowned black hats, thigh-length frock coats, and gaiters, and proudest of all at being known as the
Iron Brigade, a nickname they had won at the battle of
South Mountain in 1862. Meredith’s Westerners would turn directly into the fields, and move up to the Lutheran seminary on a line parallel with Cutler’s brigade. The “call for ‘pioneers to the front’ ” went up, followed by “a swinging of axes at all the posts on the left side of the road,” and then it was “oblique” through the breaks in the
fences, along the lanes, and across the fields in two large columns.
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This was no light jog. On a straight line, Wadsworth’s two brigades would have to double-quick for a mile and a quarter in the thick humidity just to reach the seminary. From a small widow’s walk on the top of his store at Baltimore and Middle streets,
Henry J. Fahnestock could watch Wadsworth’s brigade columns “passing … along the base of Seminary Hill,” knocking down more fences along the
Fairfield Road, and finally flowing up onto
Seminary Ridge. The Iron Brigade stopped for breath and direction “to the left of the Seminary” while Wadsworth pointed Cutler’s brigade beyond the seminary and the Cashtown Pike. Coming up even with the seminary, these men could see for the first time the battle they had only been hearing at a distance.
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Six hundred yards away, along the line of
McPherson’s Ridge, Buford’s dismounted cavalrymen were already backing out of a parklike woodlot (owned by a local farmer,
John Herbst) to reclaim their horses and shout, “They are coming, give it to them.” To the right of the woodlot was the McPherson farm, and to the right of that, the Cashtown Pike, where
John Calef’s horse artillery was banging away at the Confederates visible to the west on
Herr Ridge. On the other side of the pike, a deep cut for an unfinished
railroad bed ran parallel to the pike, and beyond that, stretching north, was another somewhat parallel road (leading to Mummasburg) and the eminence known locally as
Oak Hill. Reynolds wanted Wadsworth’s division to secure the ridgeline as far northward as they dared, so Wadsworth placed three of Cutler’s regiments north of the pike and deployed them into line; Cutler’s remaining two regiments would cover the McPherson farm on the south side of the pike. Meredith’s Iron Brigade would push forward on the left of Cutler’s two regiments in the farm buildings and clear farmer
Herbst’s woodlot.

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They would not have much time to do it, either, since lines of Confederate skirmishers could easily be seen moving down the face of
Herr Ridge toward the woods and the McPherson farm. The last of the
Iron Brigade’s regiments had barely reached the crest of
Seminary Ridge when a staffer—
whether from Sol Meredith or from James Wadsworth, it was never clear—“came on a gallop” with orders to move out of column into line of battle, send back musicians and other noncombatants, throw out skirmishers, and rush for the woods on McPherson’s Ridge. There wasn’t time to form a proper brigade line, so each regiment, starting with the 2nd Wisconsin, went in as soon as it was ready, loading and fixing
bayonets as best they could on the way. In fact, there wasn’t even time to find out what, exactly, they were going to meet in those woods.
Lucius Fairchild, the colonel of the 2nd Wisconsin, was simply told “that he would find the enemy in his immediate front as soon as he could form.”
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John Reynolds was up on
Seminary Ridge as Wadsworth’s brigades arrived, and took personal care in replacing
John Calef’s overmatched rifled guns with Hall’s 2nd Maine battery. He wanted the battery on the north side of the
Cashtown Pike, where they would cover the westward approaches of the pike and become the center of a continuous line formed by Cutler’s and Meredith’s brigades along McPherson’s Ridge. Hall’s task would be “to damage the [enemy] Artillery to the greatest possible extent, and keep their fire from our infantry until they are deployed.” If these units could be gotten into position on the ridge, then
Abner Doubleday’s division could be used to extend the line on the left of the Iron Brigade. If Reynolds then moved
John Cleveland Robinson’s division up to the ridge, they could extend the line northward; and if Otis Howard and the
11th Corps were following, then both corps could hold the line from the
Fairfield Road on the left all the way up to
Oak Hill on the right. Doubleday, in fact, had ridden ahead of his division and caught up with the tail end of the Iron Brigade “just as it was going into action.” From McPherson’s Ridge, and certainly from Seminary Ridge, Reynolds could stymie quite a good deal of Confederate infantry for a number of hours—long enough, at least, to keep the rebels piled up on the west side of Gettysburg while Meade came up with the rest of the
Army of the Potomac and secured Cemetery Hill.
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But he would need those woods. At about 10:15, Reynolds rode across the swale between the seminary and
Herbst’s Woods, trailed by two aides and his orderly, urging the 2nd Wisconsin and the following regiments of the Iron Brigade to move forward. “Forward, men! Forward for God’s sake, and drive those fellows out of the woods.” As he saw the 2nd plunge into the woods, Confederate skirmishers let off a “hot fire,” and when Reynolds “turned to come out again” from the woods, a bullet from the rebel
skirmishers in the trees drilled into his head behind the right ear. He slumped forward, falling facedown from his saddle, but catching one boot in the stirrup, so that his agitated horse dragged him for several feet. The orderly, Sgt.
Charles Veil, was the first to reach Reynolds on the ground; he turned Reynolds over and tried
to raise his head. Veil could see “no wound or blood,” and hoping against hope that Reynolds had only been knocked unconscious, the two aides,
Robert Mitchell and
Edward Baird, tried to wake him up, asking, “General are you in pain?” Baird got a canteen and tried to pour a drink through his lips. It was useless. John Reynolds was dead, and it was all that Sergeant Veil could do to round up a few winded stragglers from Cutler’s brigade to help him carry Reynolds’ body to safety on an army blanket. Mitchell and Baird galloped off to find
Abner Doubleday and inform him that he was now in command; even more important, someone needed to find
Oliver Otis Howard and the
11th Corps.
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By the usual standards, Harry Heth had every reason to feel confident. In later years, Heth would even deny that the stand-and-run tactics of the Yankee horsemen amounted to “so much as a skirmish” that morning, and the colonel of the 13th
Alabama (which Heth had deployed on the skirmish line to roll the cavalry back) agreed that “our advance was not retarded, and that the cavalry did us no damage.” Still, it was unnerving to have to fight on unfamiliar ground, and as he remained “ignorant what force was at or near Gettysburg,” it seemed to Heth like no time to take chances on what might be concealed behind
McPherson’s Ridge. So he ordered Archer’s and Joe Davis’ brigades to deploy into line of battle along
Herr Ridge, Archer to the right of the
Cashtown Pike, Davis on the left. Behind them, more Confederate artillery under Willie Pegram “were unlimbered in front of a brick building which looked like an old Virginia county courthouse tavern” (this was
Herr Tavern) and opened fire on “a squad of cavalry” that could be seen in the distance. As soon as the lines were dressed and skirmishers sent ahead, both brigades would clear McPherson’s Ridge and open the road into Gettysburg.
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