Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (62 page)

These guns would do little more than make up the loss of Humphreys’ last two batteries on the
Emmitsburg Road, which were at that moment making a singularly disorganized exit. Careening toward the 19th Maine, they forced Francis Heath to order “files broken to the rear to let the guns & horses pass.” They also triggered a crack of profane thunder from Hancock, who roared, “If I commanded this regt. I’d be God Damned if I would not charge
bayonets on you”—which, considering that Heath had refused an order from Humphreys to do just that, might have had interesting consequences. But neither Weir nor Thomas, or the 1st Minnesota, were enough to cover the toothless gap of 400 yards that the flight of the 3rd Corps had opened up, much less to protect McGilvery from the still oncoming crush of Barksdale’s yowling, triumphant
Mississippians. Hancock looked to his right, to Alex Hays’ division, and sent off an aide to Hays, at the far north end of the 2nd Corps line. “General Hancock sends his compliments,” the staffer reported, “and wishes
you to send one of your best Brigades over there,” pointing to the Trostle farm, where the Mississippians had just overrun
Malbone Watson’s battery.
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At that moment, Alexander Hays, who was the rare man in this army who loved fighting and brawling more than anything else in life, had been chatting with Col. George Willard. Hays turned a cocked eye on Willard and snorted: “Take your Brigade over there and knock Hell out of the rebs.” Hardly anyone would have regarded George Willard’s brigade as Hays’ “best.” These were the notorious
“Harpers Ferry Cowards”—the 39th, 111th, 125th, and 126th New York. But the supercharged Hays had adopted the New Yorkers as his pet rehabilitation project and by mid-May 1863, he was able to boast that “the Harper’s Ferry boys have turned out trumps, and when we do get a chance look out for blood.” It was nearly eight o’clock, and the sun was “declining behind the hills in the west.” But to Willard, who had been a captain in the Regulars until taking over the 125th as its colonel, it was high noon, and he was about to lead them to the reclamation of their honor.
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Willard took them forward with fixed
bayonets in “close column by division,” waiting until he had reached “the rear of a bushy swale” which ran across the front of the Mississippians. Through the swale ran a meandering little stream, hardly more than a drainage ditch, known as
Plum Run, and there Willard deployed his regiments out into a line, the 125th New York on the left, the 126th in the center, and the 111th on the right. (Willard wanted to leave the 111th behind as a reserve, but Hancock, who rode part of the way with Willard, had no patience with observing the niceties of reserves at a time like this and “in great haste” ordered the 111th to close up on the others.) Barksdale’s Mississippians, who could see little in front of them “because of the
smoke covering the field,” had barely enough time to collect themselves and get off one “deadly volley at less than ten paces” before the “Cowards” were on top of them, shouting deliriously
Remember Harper’s Ferry! Remember Harper’s Ferry!
“A short but terrible contest ensued in the bushes in the swale,” and then the Mississippians’ “fire slackened and they began to give back.” As they did, “large numbers” of them, staring at “the very points of our bayonets,” surrendered and “lay down in ranks.” The 126th New York was “scarcely able to step without treading on them.”
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The last of Willard’s regiments, the 39th New York, had been consolidated into only four companies, and was posted on Willard’s left flank as a guard against unlooked-for flanking movements by any other lurking Confederates. But the 39th had scores of their own to settle. An artillery lieutenant,
Samuel Peeples, who had been knocked loose from Watson’s battery when the 21st Mississippi captured it, appealed to the 39th’s four companies to retake the battery. “If those Confederates are able to serve my guns, those troops you have just been forming … won’t stay there a minute,” Peeples
added as a warning. So, “without drum or bugle, but with a single Hurrah,” the 39th surged forward, with the forlorn lieutenant picking up a rifle to join the charge. In minutes, they were “driving the enemy from the guns” and “the battery was ours.” The whooping New Yorkers promptly began “hauling the guns off the field by hand” toward McGilvery’s gun line.
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Still in the van of his Mississippians,
William Barksdale, in his gold-braided roundabout jacket, was “almost frantic with rage” at the repulse of his brigade, and “was riding in front of his troops” and “trying to make his fleeing men stand.”
They are whipped!
Barksdale pleaded.
We will drive them beyond the Susquehanna!
This only made him a prominent target, and after “numerous shots” were fired at him from both the 125th and 126th New York, Barksdale dropped from his saddle with “a ball hole through the breast.” With Barksdale down, the colonel of the 21st Mississippi,
Benjamin Humphreys, concluded that “we had advanced too far to the front for safety.” To the right, he could see “Kershaw give way and Wofford retiring toward the Peach Orchard,” so it was clearly time for “a hurried retreat.” (With a curious sort of detachment, the Mississippian retrieved a horse from the broken fragments of Bigelow’s battery at the Trostle farm, and an officer’s “satchel” containing “photographs of 2 very fine-looking boys about 12 or 14 yrs. old, I suppose his children.”)

Barksdale was left, half-alive, to be picked up later that evening and brought back to a field hospital on the
Taneytown Road by a detail from the 14th Vermont. He died that night, conscious to the end, and alternately asking that his minders “tell my wife I fought like a man and will die like one” and threatening them that “Gen. Lee will clean out this place to-morrow” or that “before we knew it Ewell would be thundering in our rear.” The next morning, a Vermont lieutenant who remembered seeing Barksdale in action “on the floor of Congress,” recognized the cantankerous Mississippian’s body, lying in the sunshine “with open and unblinking eyes” but “without the wig which Speaker [Galusha] Grow once knocked off in the Hall of Representatives.”
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The repulse of Barksdale’s Mississippians did not give Hancock much respite, for as he turned to look backward, he saw a large body of troops with flags coming out of the battle fog. Hancock at first thought that they were supports from the
12th Corps, arriving from
Culp’s Hill at just the moment he needed them to seal off the breach between Willard and McGilvery at one end and the 2nd Corps at the other. He was wrong. They were Cadmus Wilcox’s Alabamians, and they “opened fire” and “twice wounded” Hancock’s only remaining aide,
William DeWitt Miller, “whom I immediately told to ride away.” This would be Hancock’s defining moment at Gettysburg, for as
he twisted around to look for troops to throw into the path of the Alabamians, he saw absolutely no one—except for one regiment, lying down beside
Evan Thomas’ battery where they had been posted a short time earlier. “My God! Are these all the men we have here?” Hancock profanely erupted. But there was no time for careful deductions of risk. The Alabamians, supported on their left by
David Lang’s three
Florida regiments, were looming up clearly now, in what looked like “three long lines.” Hancock “spurred to where” the regiment lay, calling out, “What regiment is this.”
First Minnesota
, replied the regiment’s colonel,
William Colvill.
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Hancock, pointing toward the Alabamians, wasted no time in instructing Colvill, “Charge those lines!” (In a slightly different version, Hancock tells Colvill, “Do you see those colors? Take them!”)
With what?
Colvill might have replied. (The actual head count of the 1st Minnesota, like so many other numerical reckonings at Gettysburg, is a mystery: the regiment’s payrolls indicated that it had 399 officers and men present on June 30th; but 10 of these were noncombatant musicians, 37 were on detached service, 33 members of Company F were on a skirmish line, and another company had been detailed for provost guard duties.) In all, Colvill could probably lead just over 230 men into action, against two entire Confederate brigades with more than ten times that strength. This was, in other words, yet another forlorn hope, for no other purpose than to buy time for the gallopers Hancock had sent off to
Cemetery Hill and
Culp’s Hill to come back with reinforcements to stop the collapse. “I had no alternative but to order that regiment in,” Hancock later explained. “I saw that in some way five minutes must be gained or we were lost.”
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“Every man realized in an instant what that order meant,” but Colvill, without the slightest protest, called the 1st Minnesota to its feet, rifles at right-shoulder-shift, and down into the swale they went, toward the meager margins of
Plum Run, where Wilcox and Lang had paused for a moment to reorder their lines. (
Fence climbing had “disordered” the Alabama regiments, and by the time the
Mississippians, Alabamians, and Floridians had reached Plum Run, they “were in marked confusion, mixed up indiscriminately, officers apart from their men, men without officers.”) Of all the moments of deliberate self-immolation that the
Army of the Potomac performed that afternoon—whether it was the 124th New York in
Devil’s Den, or Chamberlain and O’Rorke on
Little Round Top—nothing quite hit the bell of the sublime as deeply as the charge of the 1st Minnesota. With “no hesitation, no stopping to fire,” Colvill led them in a fast trot, breaking into a full-scale run as he shouted, “Charge!”

They were briefly concealed by a thick bank of
smoke which “had settled into the ravine” formed by Plum Run, so that the Alabamians had no warning of their approach until the Minnesotans burst on top of them. Hilary
Herbert’s 8th Alabama looked up to see “in front of us” what “seemed to be … two compact lines, probably regiments, and here and there were groups of [Union] fugitives endeavoring to rally.” The front rank of the Alabamians took one look at the “leveled
bayonets coming with such momentum and evident desperation” and promptly broke, stumbling and tripping over their rear rank. Colvill pulled the Minnesotans up at the line of
Plum Run and “we then poured in our first fire.” It was as though “the ferocity of our onset seemed to paralyze them.” Worse than paralyze, it convinced
David Lang that “a heavy force had advanced upon General Wilcox’s brigade, and was forcing it back.” Lang at once concluded that they had walked into a massive Federal trap, and Lang “immediately ordered my men back to the [Emmitsburg] road, some 300 yards to the rear.”
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Overall, the clash between the 1st Minnesota and the two Confederate brigades lasted for no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. “We had not fired but a few shots,” wrote a soldier in Company D, “before we were ordered to fall back.” The Minnesotans came limping back out of the smoke with only handfuls of the regiment which had gone in—35 dead, 180 wounded, Colvill twice wounded and lying stunned in the ditch water of Plum Run, and only 47 men able to answer
roll call. But their long-shot charge had worked. Barksdale’s brigade had been stopped and thrown back by Willard’s “Cowards”; now Wilcox and Lang had been scattered back to the
Emmitsburg Road (and in fact they “continued to fall back, rallying and reforming upon the line from which we started”).
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Or had it really worked? Hancock, like Sykes, Caldwell, and every other Union general that afternoon, managed to shore up Dan Sickles’ misbegotten line along the Emmitsburg Road by robbing divisions and brigades from anyone not under immediate pressure and sending them to suffocate the emergencies breaking out in place after place from
Devil’s Den to Plum Run. But there was going to come a moment when some part of the Union defenses was going to find itself so denuded by emergencies elsewhere that it would have nothing left for its own defense and nowhere to borrow more. Hancock had bled his own corps—ten infantry brigades when the day began—down to exactly three, with only about 1,400 men. They would have to face over 4,200 Confederates, because the last brigades of
Richard Heron Anderson’s division were stepping out into the lengthening shadows and moving forward, on a line pointed straight at a small woodlot where the last bits of the
2nd Corps readied themselves for what was already looking like the
Army of the Potomac’s Götterdämmerung.
¹²

As early as noon on July 2nd, Anderson notified
Ambrose Ransom Wright that his Georgia brigade (the 3rd, 22nd, and 48th Georgia, with the four companies that made up the
2nd Georgia Battalion) would be going in
to the attack as soon as Wilcox and Lang had started forward, and that he could look for
Carnot Posey’s
Mississippi brigade to “move forward upon my advance.”

Wright was “a very gifted man, a powerful writer, an effective orator, and a rare lawyer.” He was notorious for possessing a bullwhip temper which made him “self-willed and combative.” Like his division commander, Wright had been less than enthusiastic about secession. His brother-in-law was
Herschel Johnson, the vice presidential running mate of
Stephen Douglas, whose nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate in 1860 impelled the secessionist fire-eaters to split the party, and Wright himself had strayed even further from secession orthodoxy by endorsing the centrist Constitutional Union candidates,
John Bell and
Edward Everett. Proud, intensely self-concerned, and with an innate sense of personal superiority, Wright did not endear himself to the
Virginia elite in the
Army of Northern Virginia. And he had narrowly missed a bushwhacker’s bullet near Hagerstown that “cut off some of his long, black, curly hair.”
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Wright’s temper was improved neither by a “severe indisposition” that made him “very sick” the day before nor by the lay of the land he now had before him. Wright’s brigade, along with Posey’s and then
William Mahone’s reserve brigade, were “placed in line of battle behind a small grove of large oaks … along the line of a stone fence that over-looked the open field between the hostile lines.” The
Emmitsburg Road lay parallel to the treeline and 800 yards away, across gently dipping and rising fields, broken only by a solitary stone barn and “double log and frame” farmhouse owned by an elderly New Englander named
William Bliss (the Bliss family had prudently decamped from the property the day before). The road itself sank unevenly through the dips and rises, creating in some places a substantial embankment, and both sides were lined by heavy “rail and plank
fences.” Beyond the road, the ground swelled gently upward for another hundred yards to form the modest spur of
Cemetery Ridge, and there Wright saw the lines of the
2nd Corps—in this case, the divisions of Alex Hays and
John Gibbon—and the thick concentration of Federal artillery on
Cemetery Hill. And it led Wright to growl to one of his staff that “if we were required to charge it, the sacrifice of life would necessarily be great.”
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