Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (56 page)

Caldwell moved his division along in column—“in a chunk,” as one lieutenant recalled—stopping at the farm lane that bordered the north side of the wheat field and deploying them into line along the lane, starting with Cross’ brigade. “We stood in line of battle, officers and sergeants in front,” and then “scaled the fence” along the lane and lined up in the wheat field. Guidons went up to correct the brigade’s alignment, and then “the officers and file closers passed through the ranks and got in rear of the men.” Behind them, the Irish Brigade was still in column, waiting its turn to deploy along the wheat field lane, when the Catholic
chaplain of the 88th New York, Father
William Corby, took the halt as the opportunity to put some last-minute fire into the worn-down ranks. Corby was a priest of the
Congregation of the Holy Cross, the “most priestly of priests” and “scholastic, gentle, refined, cultured.” He had only been ordained on Christmas Day in 1860, but, along with seven other Holy Cross priests, he was directed by his superiors to volunteer for war service to demonstrate that Catholics could be as patriotic as their nativist despisers.

Scrambling onto a “large rock,” Corby proposed to offer absolution to every Catholic “on condition that they make a sincere act of contrition” and that none “turns his back upon the foe or deserts his flag.” Caps flew off heads “and the entire brigade”—including the smattering of Protestants in the ranks—“knelt from ‘Parade rest’ … on the right knee with musket erect in the right hand.” (Out of the corner of his eye, Corby could see that even the luxuriantly profane Hancock had “removed his hat” and “bowed in reverential devotion.”)
Dominus noster Jesus Christus vos absolvat
, Corby intoned, and even before he could finish, “the order came to move.” The watch of the adjutant of the 140th Pennsylvania read “just six o’clock.”
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Caldwell did not have an easy time getting the division deployed properly (“some of the officers alleged that the troops were not put into action very handsomely by the division commander,” and the color company of the 148th Pennsylvania found itself “far out of place” on the flank of the regiment”). Caldwell could not find Sykes, and had to rely on one of Sykes’ staffers to learn “where to place” the division so as not to blunder into the path of the
5th Corps. Still more disruptive, refugees from the
3rd Corps were streaming over the wheat field lane and “were almost inextricably mixed up with” Caldwell’s men even as Caldwell was trying to use the road to form a line of battle. Then Dan Sickles put his oar in. From his temporary command post at Abraham Trostle’s farm, Sickles could see Caldwell’s division heading for the wheat field, and impulsively dispatched Henry Tremain to tear loose a brigade and send them to stanch the ebb of Tilton’s and Sweitzer’s men from the stony ridge.
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The first brigade commander Tremain found was Samuel Zook. The forty-two-year-old Zook was a Pennsylvanian, born and raised near Valley Forge and infatuated from his boyhood with stories of the Revolution (Zook took Kosciusko as his middle name, and his sister married into the family of the Revolutionary general Mad
Anthony Wayne). But soldiering was not his profession. He built a youthful interest in the electrical telegraph into the presidency of the Washington & New York Telegraph Company, and moved
to New York City. He finagled a commission in the New York state militia, and with the outbreak of war in 1861, Zook took command of the 57th New York and was promoted to brigadier general just before Fredericksburg.

Zook was not the most approachable of men; he was rumored to be the only general in the Army of the Potomac who could outproduce Hancock in picturesque blasphemy. But Tremain took his staff rank in his hands, and begged Zook to pivot to his right and retake the stony ridge. “With soldierly mien,” Zook told him he would do nothing of the sort; he belonged to Caldwell’s division, and no underling from another corps had the authority to give him orders—unless, of course, this was a direct order from Sickles as a major general. Very well, Tremain replied, if that was what Zook required, “I do give General Sickles’s orders.” That satisfied Zook, and he turned his four regiments and swung around toward the ridge where Kershaw’s South Carolinians had paused in triumph.
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For the second time that day, the nineteen acres of Rose’s wheat field became an arena of confrontation, the slow-moving blocks of infantry moving to within deadly range and blazing away until one or the other began to wilt and fold.
Edward Cross’ brigade was the first into the wheat field, with Cross’ old regiment, the 5th New Hampshire, on the left and in front. The
Georgians of Anderson’s brigade who had just swept de Trobriand’s regiments out of the wheat field stopped and waited for the New Hampshire men, then stunned them with a
volley that felled almost half of the regiment’s 177 men. That included Cross, who was hit in the abdomen by a bullet which tore all the way through him and exited near his spine. But behind them came the 148th and 81st Pennsylvania and the 61st New York, who let off a volley and waded through the “breast-high wheat” to the stone wall at the south end of the field.

“Here the battle was desperate and sanguinary”—and, true to form, here the Pennsylvanians and Georgians stood with “unyielding tenacity” and shot each other to ribbons.
Charles Augustus Fuller, a lieutenant in the 61st New York, described it simply as “a case of give and take,” with his regiment’s line shrinking “into clumps” as the volleying went on. Still, Fuller saw “no flinching or dodging,” except for a single lieutenant who was bending behind the firing line “so as to bring his head below the line of the heads of the men.” An irritated captain saw this as a fall from masculinity, and whacked the doubled-up lieutenant with his sword, growling, “Stand up like a man.”
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To the left and out of sight of the 61st New York, the 530 men of the Irish Brigade rolled through the wheat field and, angling slightly toward the stony ridge, headed for Kershaw’s South Carolinians. Catching his first glimpse of the lines of the Irish Brigade emerging from the smoke banks below the ridge,
Elbert Bland (the lieutenant colonel of the 7th
South Carolina) instinctively
remarked to the colonel of the 7th, “Is that not a magnificent sight?” It did not feel particularly magnificent to the Irish Brigade: “The ground was exceedingly uneven … which made a regular line of battle impossible,” wrote
John Noyes, an Irish Brigade lieutenant, and the awkward angle at which they were approaching the stony ridge allowed the South Carolinians at the north end of the ridge to fire straight down along the front of the brigade, “decimating the front line, whose gaps were promptly filled by each file-closer stepping to the front as his file leader fell.” As the Irish Brigade scrambled up the ridge, they were hit from in front with a
volley from the 3rd and 7th South Carolina. But the rebels “became too excited and fired too quickly, resulting in the volley passing overhead,” and for a few minutes the Irish Brigade and Kershaw’s men were fighting face-to-face, at revolver and bayonet distance. “The enemy’s infantry came up and stood within thirty steps of each other,” wrote another officer in the 7th South Carolina. “I was so desperate I took two shots with my pistol.”
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The South Carolinians had an additional distraction: out of the
smoke appeared Samuel Zook’s brigade on the north end of the ridge, followed some distance behind by the reappearance of the wayward brigades of Tilton and Sweitzer. Caldwell himself rode up to Sweitzer “in great haste,” jubilantly announcing that his division “was driving the enemy like Hell over yonder in the woods … and asked if I would give him the support of my brigade.” Most of these Yankees could hardly see where they were going: a soldier in the 32nd Massachusetts found “the powder smoke … so thick in front of the rebel ranks as to make them invisible to us,” and sergeants who were supposed to be guiding their advance from the flank had to navigate “by the jets of smoke and flame just where the muzzles of their guns were.”
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Then, with exquisite timing, the 800 men of
John Brooke’s brigade, whom Caldwell had kept back as his reserve, also swarmed into the wheat field, through a gap between the 61st New York and the Irish Brigade. They pressed down upon the remaining pieces of Kershaw’s rebels on the ridge (as well as mingled bits of
Georgians and the errant 15th South Carolina), although like Tilton’s and Sweitzer’s men, Brooke’s brigade had only the dimmest idea of where they were going, because “a dense pall of smoke, from the heavy fire of musketry, hung so close to the ground … that nothing could be seen 15 yards away.” The 140th Pennsylvania had to grope forward “until we saw a blaze of light in front” that betrayed the firing line. By 6:30, Brooke, the Irish Brigade, and Zook were “rapidly and irresistibly pushing back the enemy, driving them entirely” off the ridge and back to the
Rose farm buildings; now the Federal troops could once more see the
Emmitsburg Road in the distance.
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This vision of recovered ground did not last for long—perhaps only twenty minutes, by
John Brooke’s reckoning, a half-hour by Kershaw’s—and the price Caldwell’s division paid for it was steep. In retaking the Rose wheat field and the stony ridge, the division lost not only Edward Cross, but Samuel Zook as well. Zook shook out his brigade—the big 140th Pennsylvania in front in two lines and Zook’s old 57th New York, with the 52nd and 66th New York behind—and was leading them from the front line when “a minie ball entered the left side of the stomach, perforating his sword belt, and lodging in the spine.” A soldier in the 76th New York saw “the General lean back in his saddle pale as death and … they knew he was badly hurt as he never gave up for triffles.” Zook slipped slowly forward, caught in the arms of his adjutant, groaning, “It’s all up with me.” It was all up with a deadly percentage of Zook’s brigade, too. The 140th Pennsylvania marked down 263 casualties out of the 515 men with which it went into action; its colonel was dead, and “many of the companies … came out under the command of a sergeant.” Even more disorienting, “men from every regiment in the division were intermingled with ours in one confused mass.”

It was no better in Brooke’s brigade, and for some, a good deal worse. The diminutive 27th Connecticut started the day with only two companies’ worth of men; in the wheat field they lost their commander,
Henry Merwin, and their senior captain,
Jedediah Chapman. “Our number by this time was reduced to less than half that started in the fray,” wrote a grimly proud Connecticut private, “but we had the flags with us.” Brooke, who had led his brigade with the colors of the 53rd Pennsylvania in his hands, found himself on the crest of the stony ridge with “my ammunition … nearly gone.”
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Still, Brooke was convinced that “I could have held the place” with more ammunition, and Caldwell was relieved to see the heads of the next division of the
5th Corps—
Romeyn Ayres’ division, with its two brigades of U.S. Regulars—coming up the wheat field lane from the east. But Brooke was far away from the
2nd Corps ordnance supplies, and every man in his brigade could see, a lot closer and in front of them, “the indistinct forms of masses of men, presenting the usual dirty, greyish, irregular line … dimly visible and moving up with defiant yells, while here and there the cross-barred Confederate battle-flags were plainly to be seen.” This was not just Kershaw’s South Carolinians on the rebound. Brooke spied “a heavy column of the enemy … coming upon my left,” while at almost the same moment the lieutenant colonel of the 140th Pennsylvania noticed “rebels, apparently fresh troops, in large numbers and in good order marching to outflank us on the right.” They had come at the summons of
Joseph Kershaw, who had “hurried in person … 150 yards in my right rear” to find Paul Semmes and the brigade of
Georgians which had been lined up behind Kershaw to follow the
South Carolina brigade into the attack. Semmes “promptly responded to my call.” But “when I got to open ground” at the
Rose farm buildings, Kershaw’s greatest delight was to see, sometime after seven o’clock, “Wofford coming in in splendid style.”
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