Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (55 page)

At that point, de Trobriand’s regiments at the southern end of the stony ridge—the 110th Pennsylvania and the 5th Michigan, plus the two borrowed units, the 8th New Jersey and 115th Pennsylvania—began looking nervously over their shoulders. They, too, had sustained a series of short, brutal rushes by Anderson’s
Georgians, and were “holding on only in fragments.” With the fallback of the 17th Maine, de Trobriand became desperate to pull them out of harm’s way. “Riding onto the line unattended by staff or orderly,” de Trobriand gave (in his thicky accented English) “ze order tree or four times” to “Change quick, or you all be gobbled up; don’t you see you are flanked? Ze whole rebel army is in your rear.” Once de Trobriand’s men began inching to the rear, Tilton’s and Sweitzer’s brigades suffered their own tremor of isolation on the ridge. And their fears for what was happening to their left and behind them were compounded by the appearance of Kershaw’s South Carolinians, “plainly seen as his regiments gained the Rose [farm] building,” all along their front. The Union “skirmishers came in hurriedly,” recalled by the regimental sergeant-majors “with sword drawn.” Right on their heels, the South Carolinians “appeared through the smoke” like a malevolent fury, “moving with shout, shriek, curse and yell … loading the firing with deliberation as they advanced, begrimed and dirty-looking fellows in all sorts of garb, some without hats, some without coats, none apparently in the real dress or uniform of a soldier.”

Tilton’s and Sweitzer’s marooned brigades put up a brief but determined fight along their end of the stony ridge. “A
shot—one—two—three—and then with a perfectly startling rattle and roar, the line blazed forth, followed by an incessant cheer that seemed to thrill one’s very marrow,” and in the 22nd Massachusetts, men were “placing a heap of
cartridges and caps on the ground in front of them” to speed up “loading and firing as rapidly as possible.” One Massachusetts man noticed the odd “tremulous, wavering movement” along the line “when a shell burst” overhead; but the oddest sound of all—a sound which could be heard even over a battle racket that drowned out bugles and drums—was the repeated dinging of
John Rose’s farm bell as errant bullets ricocheted off it. Neither Yankee brigade had enough men to hold the stony ridge, and with Anderson’s Georgians spilling across the
wheat field behind them and the ridge itself “nearly surrounded,” both brigades retrieved their caps and cartridges, hefted their wounded on unrolled blankets, and abandoned the ridge to Kershaw. There were now no Union troops, from Sherfy’s peach orchard down to
Little Round Top, left to stand in the Confederates’ path, and the remaining brigades of the
3rd Corps along the
Emmitsburg Road were ready to be rolled up at leisure.
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Little of this looked leisurely to Kershaw’s South Carolina regiments. Until Kershaw’s brigade reached the Emmitsburg Road, “little damage was done us,” apart from Union skirmishers who “injured us while climbing the two fences that line the pike.” One rebel skirmish company, striding through “a large patch of ripe blackberries,” actually slowed down long enough to scoop up “the ripe fruit” and were “eating berries” until they bumped into the Federal skirmish line. But once the six South Carolina regiments cleared the road and moved on to the
Rose farm, they found themselves hit, as Kershaw had feared, not only from in front by the rifle fire of Tilton’s and Sweitzer’s men, but from their left flank, where Union batteries could bowl solid
shot and
canister their way with obscene ease. “We saw plainly that their artillerists were loading their guns to meet our assault, while their mounted officers were dashing wildly from gun to gun, to be sure that all were ready,” recalled one soldier in the 2nd South Carolina, and when they opened fire, “every Federal
cannon let fly at us” with solid shot and canister. “O the awful deathly surging sounds of those little black balls as they flew by us, through us, between our legs, and over us!” Hearing the canister balls “clatter … against walls and houses” of Rose’s farm, Kershaw boiled with resentment that Barksdale’s
Mississippians had not moved forward with him—they should have been on Kershaw’s left, giving the Yankee batteries all the distraction they required. “I have never been in a
hotter
place,” he claimed years afterward.
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Kershaw’s three left regiments turned north to face the Yankee cannon fire, and as they did they took a terrific pounding. “We were in ten minutes or less time, terribly butchered,” wrote
Franklin Gaillard, the lieutenant colonel of the 2nd South Carolina (and one of three brothers in the regiment). “I saw half a dozen at a time knocked up and flung to the ground like t
rifles,” including “familiar forms and faces with parts of their heads shot away, legs shattered, arms tore off.” Kershaw took his other three regiments forward toward the stony ridge “on foot … looking cool, composed and grand,” while “men fell here and there from the deadly Minnie-balls.” In their confusion, the 7th South Carolina moved to the left of the Rose farmhouse, got too far ahead, and overlapped the line of its neighbor, the 3rd South Carolina, as the 3rd came around the other side of the house; the 15th South Carolina lost touch and drifted far off to the right. But then, to Kershaw’s surprise, “the troops we first engaged seemed to melt away.” These were Tilton’s and Sweitzer’s brigades,
and as they scrambled down the rear of the stony ridge, Kershaw’s men swept victoriously to the crest, where they could look down from its “copse of woods, covered with granite boulders,” into the wheat field.

What they saw at the apex of the ridge froze them, and sent Kershaw running as fast to the rear as he could in search of his supporting brigade, Paul Semmes’
Georgians. Kershaw had seen “a heavy column” of infantry, moving “in two lines of battle across the wheat-field,” aiming to “attack my position” and take back the ridge. It was the
2nd Corps of the
Army of the Potomac, and, as the clocks moved toward six o’clock, it was also the beginning of the best evening of
Winfield Scott Hancock’s life.
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After his brief stint as George Meade’s majordomo on
Cemetery Hill on the evening of July 1st, Winfield Hancock rode back toward Taneytown to report to Meade and to locate his 2nd Corps, which he had left under
John Gibbon’s command. He did not have to go far. Gibbon marched the 2nd Corps pretty vigorously through the evening, and Hancock had only ridden three miles out of Gettysburg before encountering them. One of his brigade commanders, Samuel Carroll, asked him point-blank what he intended to recommend to Meade, and Hancock confidently assured him that “If Lee does not attack before all our forces are up, we can hold the position … against the whole Confederacy.” Hancock reported to Meade at his Taneytown headquarters around nine o’clock, lay down to sleep for a few hours, and then was back in the saddle before two o’clock to rejoin the 2nd Corps. In the process, grumbled Hancock’s chief of staff,
Charles Morgan, Hancock had managed to kill “nearly every horse belonging to the General or his staff” with “hard riding.” At four o’clock, Hancock had the 2nd Corps back on its feet and on the Taneytown Road to Gettysburg, and by seven he was positioning them “by brigade in mass” along the shallow ridgeline that tailed southward from Cemetery Hill.
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The 2nd Corps contained three of the smaller-sized infantry divisions in the Army of the Potomac, with an average of about 3,500 men apiece. This had once been old
Edwin “Bull” Sumner’s corps, and it had fought with enviable energy on the Peninsula, at Antietam, and at Fredericksburg. Two of its brigades, the
Philadelphia Brigade and the Irish Brigade, were among the rare brigades in the Army of the Potomac to earn a brigade nickname. The 2nd Corps had also suffered some stupefying punishment—one-third of the corps had been struck down, dead or wounded, at Antietam, and three of the Irish Brigade’s regiments were so understrength that they had actually been consolidated
into a single six-company battalion. Above all, the
2nd Corps was bitterly unhappy over the dismissal of McClellan and the release of the
Emancipation Proclamation. “It was nothing but the nigar lovers of the North who took [McClellan] from us,” lamented a corporal in the
Philadelphia Brigade. As they took up their positions on the ridge below
Cemetery Hill, it was “given out that McClellan had taken command,” a piece of unlikely news which nevertheless made the men “perfectly wild with joy … Each battalion as it moved past stepped to the encouraging shouts of thousands of voices in one grand chorus for ‘little Mac.’ ” In the Irish Brigade, there was a lingering resentment at the way they had been “driven to mere slaughter” for the sake of “cursed Yankees” and “savage blacks.”
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The 2nd Corps was not made happier when the reinforcements detailed to join the corps on the march to Pennsylvania turned out to be the
“Harpers Ferry Cowards”—Col. George Willard’s disgraced brigade of the 39th, 111th, 125th, and 126th New York, who had been surrendered en masse when Harpers Ferry was captured by Stonewall Jackson during the Antietam Campaign. The surrender was no fault of their own, but the official report branded their conduct “disgraceful” and they had languished in a parole camp, smarting under “the lasting shame of the surrender.” Once exchanged under the official prisoner of war cartel, they were herded dismally into the defenses of Washington, digging ditches and doing maintenance on the capital’s chain of forts. The new uniforms they had been issued and the unseemly number of tenderfoots who fell out of the brutal route marches to Gettysburg only made them better targets for mockery by the rest of the corps.
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But whatever the 2nd Corps had lost in numbers or integrity by 1863, it still had Hancock, and despite Hancock’s reputation for dark tempers and even darker profanity, no other corps commander was so admired for his dash (the Louis Napoleon whiskers, the spic-and-span military outfitting) or for his sheer physical courage. “General Hancock is in his element and at his best in the midst of a fight, which cannot be said of some of the general officers,” wrote a 2nd Corps staff officer,
Josiah Favill. At Chancellorsville two month before, Favill had been astonished to see “General Hancock ride along amidst this rain of
shells utterly indifferent, not even ducking his head when one came close to him, which is a difficult thing to do, for one seems to do it involuntarily.” The corps also had two enormously effective division commanders in
John Gibbon and the sarcastically combative Alex Hays. It was the third (and ironically most senior) of the 2nd Corps’ division heads,
John Curtis Caldwell, who was the big question mark. Caldwell had been a private high school principal before the war, and there were whispers that he had been an “infurnal cowardly soul” at Antietam and Fredericksburg. But Caldwell had powerful political friends. (He had been recommended for his
brigadier general’s star by Maine Republican congressman Israel Washburn.) And so he had taken over Hancock’s original brigade when Hancock went up to division, and then ascended automatically to command of Hancock’s division when Hancock took over the
2nd Corps after Chancellorsville.
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Unlike Dan Sickles,
Winfield Scott Hancock displayed no special anxiety about his position on the left of the
Army of the Potomac. Caldwell’s division, the farthest to the left of the three divisions, “was massed in brigade columns,” but otherwise the men “were allowed to sit or lay down in their ranks, while the officers gathered in groups and discussed the probable outlook for the day.” In the Irish Brigade, “arms were stacked and the colors lay folded on the upturned
bayonets.” There was the usual random skirmish-line firing, but no intimation that very much was in store for Hancock’s men until Sickles staged his grand movement forward around two o’clock. Watching in mingled admiration and disbelief,
John Gibbon muttered something about it being magnificent “but it is not war” to
Charles Morgan—just what the French had said about
the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava. Soon enough, the Confederate onslaught began. Now it was clear “that a general engagement would follow,” and the 2nd Corps “stood to arms.”
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It was just as well that Hancock had his men ready for whatever might be afoot, because once George Meade had gotten Sykes and the
5th Corps moving and satisfied himself that Sedgwick and the
6th Corps were within hailing distance on the
Taneytown Road, Meade crossed back toward
Cemetery Hill and found Hancock and Gibbon, “just to the left” of a small woodlot of trees (which in another twenty-four hours would achieve a sort of immortality of its own). “Something must be done,” Meade barked out; Sykes was not going to be able to shore up Sickles’ paper-thin line in time. At least, “send a couple of regiments out in support of Humphrey[s]” to fill in the gap between Humphreys’ right flank on the
Emmitsburg Road and the 2nd Corps.

At some point, Meade decided to peel one of Hancock’s divisions away, too; he was getting impatient for Tardy George to move up, and if Sykes couldn’t hop to it, one of Hancock’s divisions would have to do. Since Caldwell’s division would have the least distance to cover, Hancock cantered over to Caldwell and ordered him to “get your division ready” and move down to Sickles’ rescue. Then “a column of the Fifth Corps”—Tilton’s and Sweitzer’s brigades—swung into view, and Hancock recalled the order. Not for long, though. Around 5:15, as the Federal positions in the wheat field and on the stony ridge began to fall in, Hancock got Caldwell on his feet again, with orders to report to Sykes. Caldwell “moved rapidly, a portion of the time at the double-quick,” his lead brigade commanded by the irascible and colorful Col.
Edward Cross. “Boys, you know what’s before you,” announced the ever-belligerent Cross, “give ’em hell!” and with a shout his brigade echoed,
“We will, Colonel!” (Cross was not as optimistic as he sounded; it was always his habit to lead his men into a fight wearing a red bandanna to make himself easier to find in the
smoke and confusion of a battle, but today he tied a black scarf around his head, somehow certain that “this is my last battle.”) Cross’ brigade was followed by the Irish Brigade, then Samuel Zook’s brigade of three New York and one Pennsylvania regiments, and last by
John Brooke’s mixed-bag brigade of New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians, the 27th Connecticut, and the 2nd Delaware.
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