Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (38 page)

This was
Gabriel Paul’s brigade, another mixed multitude of six regiments from
Maine,
Massachusetts, New York, and
Pennsylvania, numbering between 1,300 and 1,500 men. They had been busy erecting the “crescent-shaped barricade” of “rails” around the seminary building begun by Baxter’s brigade earlier in the day. Paul’s working parties were called in, and the brigade was moved up to Oak Hill, relieving Baxter’s regiments, which were shoved down the line to create a stronger link with Cutler’s brigade, still guarding Sheads’ Woods and the line north of the railroad bed. They drove off some Confederate skirmishers who had crept along their front from the knob of Oak Hill, but they were hardly in position before it was clear that considerable Confederate forces were massing on the knob for another lunge at the Oak Ridge position—Dodson Ramseur’s full, fresh brigade of North Carolinians, bulked up with the one reasonably unscathed regiment of Alfred Iverson’s massacred brigade and pieces of Edward O’Neal’s Alabamians. In contrast to Iverson, Dodson Ramseur spurred up to the front of his brigade, “and, waving his hat, cried out for us to follow him.”
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Ramseur’s was the smallest of the five brigades in Rodes’ division, and
they may have been attacking Baxter’s and Paul’s brigades at a numerical disadvantage. No matter: they had momentum, and Baxter and Paul soon had Confederates moving behind them and cutting off their path back toward the town. “The fire on our right,” wrote a soldier in Baxter’s 88th Pennsylvania, “came so near” that it “became evident to the exhausted soldiers that they had no further business being there.” It was too late for a pullback directly down the
Mummasburg Road, so after a short, fierce firefight (in which a Confederate bullet struck Gabriel Paul in the right temple and blew out both of his eyes), John Robinson began retiring his division southward along the line of the ridge toward the
railroad cut, hoping to turn left at the rail line and use that as a conduit into the town and beyond.

“General Robinson, evidently feeling a little nervous over his own position,” left behind one regiment, the 16th Maine, to “hold the hill at any cost” and allow him to “save as much of the division as possible.” The 16th’s colonel,
Charles Tilden, protested that this meant sacrificing the entire regiment. But Robinson, noticeably irked and rising “in his stirrups and with his hand extended towards Colonel Tilden,” barked out, “Colonel Tilden, take that position and hold it as long as there is a single man left.” Tilden had no choice: “All right, General; we’ll do the best we can.” But as one of Tilden’s officers lamented, “every man knew that the movement meant death or capture.” The 16th spread itself out and “fought like hell as long as we could.” They struggled to fall back fighting, but in short order Ramseur’s brigade closed in around them, and finally “every man commenced to look after himself without further orders.” Only 84 men managed to avoid capture out of the 300 who had marched up from
Marsh Creek that morning. In the last moments, Colonel Tilden plunged his
sword into the ground and tried to break it, and ordered the regiment’s colors torn from the staffs and cut up into patches the men could hide “about the persons of the survivors,” before finally surrendering. The Confederates of the 45th
North Carolina were only able to seize a “very fine flag-staff and tassels” and some scraps of “a fine Yankee flag … lying in different places.”
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Robinson’s retreat startled his fellow division commander, James Wadsworth, who pulled Cutler’s brigade back to the railroad cut (as though it were a large-size trench) in order to cover the flight of Baxter’s and Paul’s brigades down the railroad tracks toward the town. Backing Cutler’s regiments at the railroad were two batteries of artillery, Battery B, 4th U.S. Artillery under
James Stewart, and (on the south side of the pike)
Greenleaf T. Stevens’ Battery E,
5th Maine Artillery. They would not tarry there long, because coming down on the right flank of Ramseur’s attack was
Junius Daniel’s North Carolina brigade, striding in line more or less parallel to the railroad cut and the
Cashtown Pike, and ready for a second try at capturing the pike and the
railroad. Directly in their path on the south side of the Cashtown Pike were the three Pennsylvania regiments of
Roy Stone’s brigade, who had been positioned there around noon and had thrown back Daniel’s first attack. Two of Stone’s regiments—the 149th and 143rd Pennsylvania—were lined up behind the pike, with skirmishers out front along the railroad embankment; the third regiment, the 150th Pennsylvania, was bent back to face westward across the
McPherson farm and link hands with the
Iron Brigade, still in
Herbst’s Woods.

This time, Junius Daniel was not going to be surprised. “A converging fire from the rebel batteries west, northwest and north” made the corner formed by Stone’s brigade “most uncomfortable,” and the major of the 150th could see “projectiles … plainly visible in the air” (although he had the satisfaction of noticing that the rebel
shells frequently “struck the ground and ricocheted without exploding”). In spite of the artillery duds, Daniel’s North Carolina regiments rolled relentlessly over the Union skirmishers, and when the 149th Pennsylvania tried to blunt the rebel onslaught by launching a
spoiling attack of their own at Daniel’s brigade, they did little more than give the Confederate onslaught a momentary pause. Roy Stone went down with a wound to the hip which splintered his pelvis, and a Confederate battery boldly rode up and unlimbered to take the 149th in flank with
canister. After a few minutes, the 149th was knocked back to its starting position, considerably worse for the wear. The senior colonel of the brigade,
Langhorne Wister of the 150th Pennsylvania, tried to stiffen the resistance of the other two regiments along the pike by pivoting half of his own regiment into line along the pike with them, and staging yet another little countercharge. It was to no avail. The colonel of the 149th went down with a wound to the thigh, Wister was hit in the jaw by a bullet and spun backward, spurting blood, and the last two senior officers of the 150th were felled by wounds to the chest and the upper arm.
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With so many officers gone, “it seemed to me that every man fought his own hook,” wrote a sergeant in the 150th, and at least one company of the 150th swung back to the left and attached itself to the Iron Brigade, with sergeants and little knots of men “retreating in that direction.” Slowly the weight of Daniel’s advance pressed the three Pennsylvania regiments back at right angles to the pike, and then kept pressing them down the pike in the direction of the town. The Pennsylvanians took “advantage of every favorable spot to make a defensive stand … firing as we went.” But the color detail of the 149th had not received any order to fall back, and both the state and national flags were overrun in a flurry of hand-to-hand fighting. The 149th’s color sergeant,
Henry Brehm, was jumped by a Confederate who grabbed the Stars and Stripes, shouting,
This is mine
. The two locked around each other’s throats and rolled around on the ground, until Brehm got loose and tried to make off with the flag “at the top of his speed”—only to be shot down in the
pike. The color sergeant of the 143rd Pennsylvania,
Benjamin Crippen, made off with both of his regiment’s flags, but when he turned to shake his fist (or make some similar but less virtuous gesture) in contempt at Daniel’s pursuing rebels, Confederate fire cut him down. (The 143rd’s colors, at least, were saved.) Now, a second stream of Union refugees was heading for the town.
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Like a fall of dominoes, the unhinging of each Union brigade along Oak Ridge or
McPherson’s Ridge caused its left-hand neighbor to give way in succession. The next in order was the
Iron Brigade in
Herbst’s Woods, which received an extra shove backward from the two brigades Harry Heth had
not
thrown away that morning, under Johnston Pettigrew and John Brockenbrough. Behind them came Dorsey Pender’s entirely new division of Powell Hill’s corps, which, along with Powell Hill, had at last arrived from Cashtown. Linked to the left of the Iron Brigade was the last of the
1st Corps brigades,
Chapman Biddle’s four regiments, backed up by the last two of the 1st Corps artillery batteries, parked 600 yards to the rear near the Lutheran seminary. This was not a formidable array: there were 1,300 men in the brigade, but three of Biddle’s regiments had barely been in action before, and one of them (the 151st Pennsylvania) was actually just a nine-months’ regiment which Biddle wisely planted behind the others. What was worse, the officer who should have been in charge of this end of the fighting, the “short, fat and hearty”
Thomas Rowley, had clearly been bucking himself up to his task with too much drink, and by now was nearly incoherent. He rode up to James Wadsworth and loudly asked why the cavalry wasn’t charging. As Wadsworth’s staffers gawked in disbelief, Rowley announced with slurred bravado, “By God, I shall order them to charge,” and rode off to give the orders—only to fall off his horse. Eventually, Rowley’s own staff had to lead him miserably away toward the town. (He would be court-martialed and forced to resign before the end of the war.)
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With Biddle succeeding to command of the brigade, the men had little to do except post skirmishers at
Willoughby Run and try to guess what the Confederates would do next. They had the luxury of occupying “a line” in the “broad meadows” between the Willoughby Run and the seminary “a few hundred yards behind us,” and without much more than an errant
shell from
Oak Hill scattering splinters around them. Across the run was a small farm owned by
Emmanuel Harman, a Baltimore merchant, but operated by his sister,
Susan Harman Castle. The two-story brick farmhouse was occupied by Confederate skirmishers who used its elevation to take potshots at Biddle’s men and whizz long-range fire at
James Cooper’s 1st Pennsylvania battery near the seminary. This annoyed Biddle and Wadsworth sufficiently that they ordered up a company of the 80th New York to clear the rebels out of their little fortress. Beyond that small clash, it was not until after three o’clock, as
the rumbling from the far side of the ridgelines quickened in volume, that Biddle’s brigade understood that its hour had come. “A heavy reinforced line of the enemy” could be seen massing in the woods on the other side of Willoughby Run “for a grand charge.” They appeared first on the Cashtown Pike as “a long column of rebels,” but then “filed off to our left … a mile so in our front,” followed by another ominous column which also “faced into line” behind them.
Charles Wainwright, the
1st Corps’ artillery chief, sat among the four batteries he had placed on Seminary Ridge and could see that “when they advanced they outflanked us at least half a mile on our left.”
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This “long column” was Pender’s division, with its four big brigades under
James Henry Lane,
Edward Thomas,
Alfred M. Scales, and
Abner Perrin. Of these four, Scales, Lane, and Perrin—an avalanche of 5,000 men—would face off against Biddle’s untempered brigade. Despite their size, many of these Confederate units were actually not much more acclimatized to war than their opposite numbers. A captain in the 16th North Carolina “was struck” by a
shell splinter “and his head was cut and scratched in several places,” making him jump up and run for the rear, screaming, “I’m dead, I’m dead.” (The colonel of the 16th dryly told two stretcher-bearers to chase after him and “go and take that dead man off—if you can catch him.”) The 26th North Carolina, in Pettigrew’s brigade, had been under serious fire only once before, at Malvern Hill, and its colonel was a twenty-one-year-old named
Henry King Burgwyn.
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Pettigrew’s plan was to send his men in by “echelon by battalion,” so that they would cross Willoughby Run and hit the
Iron Brigade in staggered order, starting on the Federals’ right. This maneuver would drain troops out of the Iron Brigade’s left flank and weaken it to the point that it would collapse easily when Pettigrew’s last unit went over the run against it. “Attention! Every man was up and ready and every officer at his post,” wrote the bandmaster of the 26th North Carolina, and in they went, wading the run and fumbling through the “briars and underbrush” on the far side. Abner Perrin had his men up in line as well, and gave them a little speech and instructions not to fire their rifles but “give them the
bayonet.” Perrin, “his horse, his uniform, and his flashing sword,” would be leading from the front.

The Westerners in their black Hardee hats were not unready for them—
Come on, Johnny! Come on!
was what
Rufus Dawes remembered the men in his 6th Wisconsin crying—and “as the Confederates crossed the run,” the men in the 2nd Wisconsin “tried to make it lively for them.” The 26th North Carolina, as the first of Pettigrew’s echelon, took the Iron Brigade’s fire full in the face. The color sergeant was killed “quite early in the advance”; a private from Company F picked up the flag, was shot once, stumbled, stood back up, and cried,
Come on, boys
until another bullet knocked him down for good. A
captain picked up the colors, only to be “killed a moment or two later,” and then Henry Burgwyn, the “Boy Colonel,” picked up the flag and called out to the regiment to “dress on the colors.” He turned to hand the colors to a private, only to be hit in the left side, puncturing both lungs; the impact of the shot twisted him around and entangled Burgwyn in the flag. His lieutenant colonel took the colors in hand, and shouting,
Twenty-Sixth, follow me!
managed to lead them unscathed until they had almost cleared
Herbst’s Woods, when a bullet hit him “in the back of the neck, just below the brain” and “crashed through the jaw and mouth.”
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