Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (37 page)

But Krzyzanowski’s brigade was able only to push back Doles’ right-flank regiment, the 21st Georgia; the 4th and 44th Georgia, which had been occupied in outflanking Blocher’s Knoll, now turned their unencumbered attention to Krzyzanowski and flung the Polish émigré’s brigade back like broken toys. A shell fragment knocked down
Albert Walber, a lieutenant in the 26th Wisconsin, and the rush of the Confederates was so quick that none of the rebel officers even stopped to take him prisoner. Officers in the 82nd Ohio tried to steady their men with an “order … to call the rolls.” (This little piece of defiance struck Capt.
Alfred Lee “as being sublime, so firm and decided were the answers of the men.”) It was “almost a hand-to-hand struggle” alongside the Carlisle Road, with Schurz everywhere trying to hold back
the collapsing front of Krzyzanowski’s regiments.
Theodore Dodge, in the 119th New York, saw one “brave boy” go down with a leg wound, but insist on “loading and firing” from a sitting position “with as much regularity and coolness as if untouched, now and then shouting to some comrade in front of him to make room for his shot.”
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It did no good. Dodge estimated that they might have held on for as much as half an hour, until Doles’
Georgians began moving forward again. It was “not a charge on the double-quick, but a simple advance, firing as they came on.” Schurz’s horse took a bullet “clean through the fatty ridge of the neck just under the mane,” as did Krzyzanowski’s, but his other officers did much worse. The 26th Wisconsin lost its colonel to a
shell splinter, then the senior major, and soon command of the regiment was in the hands of the Prussian-born captain of Company A; every member of the color guard was down, and by the end of the day only thirty-two of the 26th’s men were left—although “this gallant squad” still had the regimental flags.
Francis Mahler, the colonel of the 75th Pennsylvania, had been an old “revolutionary comrade” of Schurz’s in Baden in the ’48 uprising. Mahler went down with a fatal wound, and “with death on his face” he reached out for Schurz’s hand “to bid me a last farewell.”

First, Barlow’s division, now Krzyzanowski’s brigade. It was, said Krzyzanowski, “a portrait of hell.” All that was left of the
11th Corps north of the town was Schimmelpfennig’s brigade, dangling perilously from its handhold with the
1st Corps up on
Oak Ridge. Even as they watched, a new danger materialized from over the knob of
Oak Hill—
Robert Rodes’ reserve brigade under
Stephen Dodson Ramseur, a thousand strong and untouched, and ready to stride forward in support of Doles’ Georgians. To face them all, Schimmelpfennig had exactly one regiment in reserve, the 157th New York, commanded by a school principal and less than a year old as a unit, but they would have to do.
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Even in a corps full of
abolitionists, the 157th may have had the most impeccable abolitionist credentials of them all, since they had been sent off to war in 1862 with the assistance of no one less than
Gerrit Smith, the wealthy philanthropist who had also funded
John Brown’s raid in 1859, and unlike other parts of the army, the
Emancipation Proclamation met with “the hearty concurrence of the regiment.” But they had only seen their first battle in May, at Chancellorsville, and with only 350 men they had been held in position in a “field east of the Mummasberg road and just opposite the Pennsylvania College,” and then moved up behind Dilger’s battery astride the Carlisle Road. Now, however, their colonel,
Philip Brown, was ordered by Schimmelpfennig “to move over some distance to the right and attack the enemy.” Brown must have known that he was being sent in as an expendable distraction to
give the remnant of Krzyzanowski’s brigade the chance to escape from Doles’ advance, but in they went all the same, starting “forward in double-column on the center.” This indeed got the attention of “the Rebel Commander who immediately changed his front toward the regt. and poured in such a tremendous fire of balls, that many fell to breathe no more.” Colonel Brown tried to get them to charge right into “the line of rebel heads.” But instead, the 157th stopped, exchanging “8 or 10
volleys” while “the boys were falling in all shapes,” until they finally began ducking down into the wheat and “the fighting continued in indian fashion.” After twenty minutes, one of Schurz’s staffers rode up under fire to recall them. The staffer’s horse went down, but the man got to his feet, “waved his hand to Col. Brown” as though he were calling in recess at a grade school, “then unfastened his saddle and with it started for the rear.” Less than fifty of the 157th were able to rise out of the wheat and follow.
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Schurz’s recall to the 157th was the signal that he had given up hope of holding any part of the
11th Corps’ line north of town. “An order was received” by
Adelbert Ames “from General Schurz, or one of his staff” to fall back “through … the outskirts of the town,” and so the two broken divisions turned and flowed backward through the banks of gunpowder smoke. Barlow’s division had the head start, though it gave the appearance to a Confederate onlooker of being “shriveled up as a scroll.” With Barlow down, Ames struggled to pull his brigade back as deliberately as he could, “in line order, shooting at us as they retreated,” so that one private in the 8th
Louisiana had the impression that “the Yanks … rather walked off.” This would not be the 11th Corps’ second Chancellorsville if they could help it.

Ames and Leopold von Gilsa tried to gather enough men together around a cluster of buildings on the west side of the
Heidlersburg Road which served as the Adams County almshouse—an all-purpose poorhouse, insane asylum, and hospice—von Gilsa all the while riding “through a regular storm of lead” and swearing his men into standing still with “the German epithets so common to him.” But as they did, Harry Hays’ Louisiana brigade wheeled and slapped them on the flank even as Gordon’s brigade continued to press them from in front. “This line, too, was driven back in the greatest confusion,” wrote Gordon, “and with immense loss in killed, wounded, and prisoners.” Ames’ brigade broke completely, abandoning in the process the severely wounded Francis Barlow. “The smoke lifting from the field” as the firing died away and “revealed to our sight the defeated Federals in disorderly flight, hotly pursued by the gallant Georgians.” Schurz’s division followed, “vanishing as a mist” and leaving “the golden wheat-fields … covered with the dead and wounded in blue.”
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Left behind in the retreat was
Theodore Dodge, the adjutant of the 119th
New York, who had been praying with his colonel only a short while before. “A Minie ball had gone through my ankle-joint,” and he was able to do nothing more than sit until “a rebel straggler, unkempt and powder-begrimed,” ambled suspiciously up to Dodge and demanded that he surrender his sword and revolver. Dodge told him to go to hell, not least because Dodge had no intention of waiving the unspoken protocol which allowed only an officer to demand another officer’s surrender. The rebel “raised his gun, as if to club me,” but one of John Gordon’s staff officers rode over and shooed away the “would-be immolator,” took Dodge’s weapons, and called over “a Confederate tatterdemalion” to help Dodge limp off to find a surgeon.

Capt.
Alfred Lee of the 82nd Ohio met the same unexpected kindness of enemies. Bowled over by a bullet and “benumbed with pain,” Lee found himself alone in a “field … alive with hooting rebels.” But the soldier in “the usual coarse gray homespun” who found Lee propped him up with a canteen and regretted that “you ones were all out here against us this way.” He tried to find a surgeon or an
ambulance, but returning with neither, “he now directed some negroes to go and gather from the debris of battle such articles as might improve our comfort.” John Gordon himself found Francis Barlow and ordered one of
Jubal Early’s staffers to have Barlow carried to the shade of the Benner farmhouse. In the years after the war, Gordon would spin an enormously embellished story of chivalry and reconciliation out of the encounter. But in fact the kind of story Gordon embroidered was happening spontaneously all over the fields where men had been, a few minutes before, trying to kill one another.
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At 3:20, Schurz sent Otis Howard one last plea for reinforcements, even for just a brigade to post temporarily as a screen across the north end of the town that would allow his division and Barlow’s to reach
Cemetery Hill unharassed. Howard was still reluctant to “spare any troops” from Cemetery Hill. He kept looking southeastward for Slocum and the
12th Corps. Surely, Slocum must be near; if they could hold on a little longer, Slocum would come piling in on the Confederates’ flank like Blücher at Waterloo, and the day would be saved. “Hold out, if possible, awhile longer, for I am expecting General Slocum every moment.”
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But the roar and the smoke billows he could see above the roofs and spires of Gettysburg told Howard that the relief the
11th Corps needed was now, and north of the town. He relented. At four o’clock, he sent orders to Schurz and Doubleday to fall back to Cemetery Hill, and then sent one of the last of the 11th Corps’ brigades, under
Charles Coster, “beyond the town, to cover the retreat.” Coster, the son of a wealthy New York merchant, may have had, at most, 800 men in his four regiments, but he called in the skirmishers he had posted around Cemetery Hill and off the brigade trotted through the town, toward the 11th Corps’ inferno. Coster met Schurz along the way, “who ordered him to take a position north and east of Gettysburg,” and rode out with him to guide the brigade past fat trickles of wounded men and stragglers from the “confusion and disaster” up ahead, “dripping with blood … limping slowly and painfully to the rear in search of field hospitals.” As Coster’s brigade “uncovered from the town,” rebel shells “came shrieking closer to their heads, and every shot a little closer.” Schurz left one of Coster’s regiments (the 73rd Pennsylvania) in reserve at the railroad station on Carlisle Street, and strung out the other three thinly in front of a brickyard, in the path of Early’s Confederates. With Lewis Heckman’s Ohio battery drawn up on their left on the west side astride the Carlisle Road, this position looked as though it would allow them to cover the two main streets leading in and through the town, Carlisle and Stratton. It was, actually, a terrible position. A small rise north of the brickyard masked any of the approaches to Coster’s line, so that “we were scarcely in position” before the first elements of Early’s division were on top of them.
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Jubal Early had used up Gordon’s
Georgia brigade in overrunning the almshouse, so he now turned to Harry Hays’
Louisianans and
Isaac Avery’s brigade of North Carolinians to keep up the momentum. Once the almshouse
was cleared, Hays and Avery rolled down the
Heidlersburg Road, until the road branched into
Stratton Street and the brickyard. Together, Hays and Avery had eight big regiments to face Coster’s three small ones, and they assaulted Coster’s line without even bothering to shift out of “solid column.” Lined up behind a rail fence beyond the brick kilns, “our men stood their ground, returning the enemy’s fire with interest.” But, effortlessly, Avery’s North Carolinians wrapped around the uncovered right flank of Coster’s brigade, doubling up the 134th New York, and closing like a set of enormous jaws on all three regiments. “The enemy was gradually closing in upon us,” wrote an officer in Coster’s center regiment, the 154th New York, and if they stayed any longer, Hays and Avery would gobble them up en masse as prisoners. Large numbers of Coster’s men bolted back up Stratton Street, only to collide with Hays’ Louisianans, “and a fierce hand to hand conflict ensued,” with both Union and Confederate “mingled in promiscous confusion.” Heckman’s battery got off (by their reckoning) 113 rounds of
canister before pulling out at the last moment, leaving one of their guns behind. Handfuls of the 154th New York fought their way clear with
bayonets, but most of the rest—some 148 men—were captured. The collapse had happened so quickly that there had been time for no more than 7 of the 154th to be killed. Colonel Coster also survived, although how he escaped was never clear; he resigned from the army in the fall and never filed an official report.
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The men of the 11th Corps were not the only ones in trouble that afternoon. Up on
Oak Ridge, the men of
Henry Baxter’s brigade could look uneasily over their right shoulders and see, down on the plain behind them, the gradual collapse and disintegration of the 11th Corps. “The fields northwest, west and south of Gettysburg were covered over with shattered lines[,] retreating in companies, squads and singly towards the town into which they were pursued,” wrote a gleeful Confederate officer.
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Both Otis Howard and
Abner Doubleday could see this, too, and all that it meant for the now unprotected northern flank of the
1st Corps. Howard sent off couriers with “positive orders” for Doubleday “to fall back to the cemetery as slowly as possible.” (Doubleday claimed never to have received the orders; one of Howard’s staffers believed that the order had, indeed, been conveyed to Doubleday, but the “German” courier spoke in broken English, and made a retreat to the
cemetery
sound like a retreat to the
seminary.
) Doubleday still had one brigade of
John Cleveland Robinson’s division back at the Lutheran seminary as a last-hope reserve, and he now decided to put it to work, extending and protecting Baxter’s flank.