Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (60 page)

Freeman McGilvery, who had brought these batteries up from the artillery
reserve, saw the peach orchard collapse, too, and coolly began arranging to pull the guns out of danger. Clark’s New Jersey battery was the first to go, followed by
Patrick Hart’s four 12-pounder Napoleons. The retreating artillery teams careened through the last of
George Burling’s reserve regiments, the 7th New Jersey, “causing … the right four companies” of the regiment “to separate from the line … to avoid being crushed to death by the reckless drivers of the battery.” McGilvery wanted Clark and Hart, followed by the others, to turn around 250 yards to the rear at another farm road that ran down to
Abraham Trostle’s barn and set up again. But the drivers kept going for a full mile and completely out of the fight.
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That left Bigelow and Phillips. Phillips ordered the limbers of his center and left sections reversed in preparation for hitching up, while the other section kept the rebels at bay, hoping to leap-frog backward until they all reached “Trostle’s house and go in battery there.” But “the enemy had by this time got through the Peach orchard” and shot down the horses and drivers of the right section, forcing Phillips to fix
prolonge
ropes to the guns and start them to the rear by hand. Now it was John Bigelow and the 9th Massachusetts battery alone on the wheat field road, and by the time McGilvery ordered Bigelow to “limber up and get out,” there was no time to do the first and not much chance of the second apart from imitating Phillips and dragging off the guns by
prolonge.
Still, Bigelow managed to get all six of his guns back to the
Trostle farm. All that he found there, however, was a desperate Freeman McGilvery, his horse bleeding from four bullet wounds. “Major McGilvery came to me,” Bigelow recalled, “and said that for 4 or 500 yards in my rear there were no troops.” What was left of the 3rd Corps was fighting for its life up along the Emmitsburg Road, the 5th Corps had been mangled division by division, and Caldwell’s division of the 2nd Corps had long since disappeared in the smoky chamber of the wheat field, with only clumps of disorganized survivors drifting back out. “For heavens sake hold that line,” McGilvery begged, “until he could get some other batteries in position” behind them and patch together one last-ditch artillery line.
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Bigelow never seems to have questioned what was clearly a sacrificial, even suicidal, order. He wheeled his guns into a line across the lane from the Trostle house, facing one section slightly to the southwest and the other two sections directly into the path of the oncoming Confederates (which at this moment was the 21st Mississippi). Bigelow had barely gotten his guns loaded before the Mississippians were running for them. He started with solid shot, “for a ricochet” right into their ranks, then switched to double loads of canister, which the Massachusetts gunners emptied into the faces of the charging rebels “not six feet from the muzzles of our guns.” A German-born gunner named Augustus Hesse thought that “we mowed them down like grass, but
they were thick and rushed up.” Men and horses went down, “the horses … plunging and laying about all around.” There was no time to run back to the limbers for reloads; Bigelow had the ammunition taken out of the limbers “and laid beside the pieces,” where a stray spark could easily blow them all to Tophet. This was calculating survival by the minute, and Bigelow decided to use his remaining horses to save at least the two guns in his left section. (The drivers faced a stone wall in their path, and resorted to jumping the horses and limbers over the wall, so that they came down with a “crash of rocks and wheels”—but still upright.)

In the last rush, the Mississippians began filtering out around Bigelow’s flanks, climbing up on the abandoned limber chests, “and shooting down cannoneers that were handling the pieces.” But “glancing anxiously to the rear,” Bigelow could see McGilvery, some 500 yards away, bringing fresh artillery batteries into position. The 9th Massachusetts had given their mite, and Bigelow shouted “orders for the small remnant of the four gun detachments” to leave the guns and run for their lives. Bigelow himself was knocked out of his saddle by two bullets, and could hear “the officers of the 21st Miss. order their men not to fire at me” so that he could be captured. But Bigelow’s orderly,
Charles Reed, lifted his captain onto his own horse and, “taking the reins of both horses in his left hand, with his right supporting me in the saddle,” walked Bigelow to safety.
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Not everyone got off as miraculously as Bigelow.
Malbone Watson had been slated to relieve
Nelson Ames’ New York battery in the peach orchard with Battery I of the 5th U.S., but it was commandeered “by some unknown officer of the Third Corps,” and positioned a short distance east of the Trostle house, without any infantry support. When the 21st Mississippi overran Bigelow’s guns, Watson’s four 3-inch
Ordnance Rifles were directly in their path. Without pausing, the Mississippians bowled ahead, capturing Watson’s four guns “before they fired,” and putting Watson down with a wound to his right leg that ended in amputation and permanent disability.
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The Trostle farm claimed a far more sensational casualty, and that was no one less than wild Dan Sickles himself. Once Sickles moved the
3rd Corps to the
Emmitsburg Road that afternoon, he had little to do afterward except wrest pieces of the
5th Corps and
2nd Corps away to succor the parts of his own hapless position which were splintering under the weight of Longstreet’s attack. It could not have taken him long to realize that he had handed George Meade all his grim commander needed to take his head off, and it must have, in a bleak sort of way, provided him with a better exit than Meade would have designed when a flying piece of Confederate ordnance cracked the bones of his right leg just below the knee.
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It is not certain exactly what Sickles was hit
by
: witnesses’ accounts varied
from a rifle slug to a shell splinter.
George Randolph, who as an artilleryman might be presumed to know, thought Sickles had fallen victim to a solid
shot, but another staffer was certain that the wound had come from “a terrific explosion” which “shook the very earth,” and could only have been a shell. Even Sickles was not sure what had struck him. “I never knew I was hit,” he insisted in 1882, and only knew something was wrong when he became “conscious of dampness along the lower part of my right leg,” and after pulling his leg out of his “high-top boots … was surprised to see it dripping with blood.” He guessed that the work had been done by “a piece of shell,” but twenty-seven years later he compromised: it might have been “a bullet or a shell-fragment.” What is certain is that Sickles, who was mounted, “standing under a small tree … close by the” Trostle farmhouse, was in the process of yielding to Randolph’s entreaties to get under better cover when “the shot struck him.” As the dizziness of shock began to set in, Sickles slowly slid off the left side of his horse and hobbled painfully to the side of the Trostle barn, calling, “Quick, quick! Get something and tie it up before I bleed to death.” Most of Sickles’ “staff were absent,” but Randolph and “a couple of orderlies” rushed over with kerchiefs and saddle straps, and a musician on stretcher duty rushed in with a “Turnkey” to cut off the bleeding.
Henry Tremain arrived a few moments later. “Throwing myself from the saddle,” Tremain asked what may have been the most pointless question of the afternoon:
General, are you hurt?
Sickles was struggling to keep from passing out, and only replied, “Tell General Birney he must take command,” and when Birney galloped up in a lather, Sickles repeated his order. Apart from that, Sickles’ principal concern was “fear of being taken prisoner.”
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The musician,
William Bullard of the 70th New York, thought Sickles had sustained “a compound fracture of the leg.” But it looked much worse—“mangled” and “almost severed,” according to Tremain; “so badly shattered that it hung merely by a shred,” according to
Thomas Cook of the
New York Herald
—and to George Randolph “it was a very long time (seemingly) before the
ambulance and surgeon arrived.” Private Bullard, noticing “how white the Gen. was,” poured some medicinal brandy for Sickles, which seemed to revive him a little, and as Sickles was eased onto a stretcher he had the presence of mind to ask Bullard, “Won’t you be kind enough to light a cigar for me?” Bullard fumbled around “in his Inside pocket,” found a cigar case, bit off the end of a “small” cigar, then lit it up and “placed it in the Gen. mouth.” Tremain and the others got Sickles into an ambulance, and they all set off for the 3rd Corps’ field hospital. Sickles was by now fading in and out of consciousness, at one point insisting that 3rd Corps stragglers be allowed to see him and be assured “that I am allright and will be with you in a short time.” The ambulance stopped at a two-story brick house on the Baltimore
Pike instead, and on an improvised surgical table the
3rd Corps chief medical director,
Thomas Simms, chloroformed Sickles and amputated the butchered leg. “How much missed is his clear-sighted direction and his all-pervading energy,” wept the adoring
New York Times
. Those who did
not
adore Sickles had a different interpretation: that Sickles had been only slightly wounded, but ordered the amputation to engender sympathy and “save him from the mess he got in.” Given what had befallen the 3rd Corps so far, this might have been ungenerous, but not surprising; given what was about to happen to Andrew Humphreys and his division, now under the overall command of a man Humphreys frankly despised, it might even have been plausible.
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Richard Heron Anderson had been a classmate of
James Longstreet’s and
Lafayette McLaws’ at West Point, and under almost any circumstances would have been happier serving under Longstreet than mired as he was, commanding a division under the erratic
Ambrose Powell Hill. For that matter, he would have probably preferred not to have been in the
Confederate Army at all. Although Anderson was born and raised in
South Carolina, he had courted and married a
Pennsylvanian—the daughter of the chief justice of Pennsylvania—in 1850 during a posting to the
Carlisle Barracks. Shy and laconic by temperament, he was notably unenthusiastic about both
slavery and secession, and joined the Confederate Army only after being browbeaten by his father into a sense of obligation to follow “the old Palmetto State.” He was jumped to brigadier general in May 1861, then to major general after the Peninsula (where he became a protégé of Longstreet’s). But there, like William Wofford and so many others who lacked the requisite egotism, secessionism, or Virginia-ism, Anderson stalled. He was assigned to division command in Powell Hill’s corps, where he did not hesitate to make his displeasure with Hill known to a sympathetic James Longstreet. Anderson’s division had come up at the tail end of Hill’s corps on the
Cashtown Pike on July 1st, and when Lee authorized Longstreet to substitute Anderson for George Pickett’s division, he could not have made Longstreet or Anderson a more mutually agreeable gift.
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“Shortly after the line had been formed,” Anderson wrote, “I received notice that Lieutenant-General Longstreet would occupy the ground on the right” and that Anderson was to “put the troops of my division into action by brigades as soon as those of General Longstreet’s corps had progressed so far in their assault as to be connected with my right flank.” Those brigades were five in number, and Anderson had positioned them so that Cadmus Wilcox’s brigade of Alabamians would be the first to go in, followed by a diminutive
Florida brigade under the temporary command of
David Lang, yet another brigade of
Georgians under a highly flammable lawyer and politician named
Ambrose Ransom Wright, and Carnot Posey’s Mississippians (the last brigade, of Virginians under William Mahone, would act as Anderson’s reserve). This amounted to over 7,000 men, with the single biggest concentration in the 1,700 soldiers of Wilcox’s five
Alabama regiments.
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