Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (63 page)

But charge they would, and Wright would lead them himself, sickness or not. He wanted to move fast. With so much Federal artillery clustered within easy range on Cemetery Hill, he dared not put his regiments in column for the easy target they would make. But Wright took them forward so quickly that the skirmish line formed by the 2nd Georgia Battalion had no time to “form all its companies on the left of the brigade,” and some of them had to
fall “into line with other regiments of the command.” The Federal artillery leapt into action at once, sending “
shot and
shell … screaming through the air in every direction.” But so long as they stayed in line and kept moving at the “double quick step,” the Union guns could not fix any solid targets, and even though Wright’s
Georgians were constantly having to stop and tear down “numerous post and rail
fences,” they moved swiftly through
William Bliss’s fields of “oats, wheat and young corn” and shouldered past a clump of Federal skirmishers who had barricaded themselves in the Bliss barn, “a rambling structure seventy-five feet long and thirty-five feet wide,” built of stone and brick and “plentifully supplied with doors and windows.” Federal skirmishers along the
Emmitsburg Road were caught so much by surprise that instead of falling back by twos and fours, hand-to-hand fighting broke out along the roadbed; pioneers from the 106th Pennsylvania who had been chopping down some of the fences had no time but to use their axes to defend themselves. One captain in the 3rd Georgia “with his sword stood on top of a pile of rails, thrusting at a burly Federal who tried to jab the captain with his
bayonet.”
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The Federal skirmishers dropped back toward the ridgeline, and then it was up and out of the roadbed for the Georgians, notwithstanding the stout fences that lined both sides of the road. Two of the regiments Hancock had posted earlier in the afternoon to cover Andrew Humphreys’ division, the 15th Massachusetts and 82nd New York, saw the wave coming at them too late and were overrun by “the yelling exultant Georgians.” The 15th Massachusetts scampered away “in some disorder, being pressed so closely that we lost quite a number of prisoners,” and their flight, in turn, allowed Wright’s Georgians to pounce on Battery B, 1st Rhode Island Artillery. The Rhode Island battery was attached to
John Gibbon’s
2nd Corps division, but earlier that afternoon it was moved up by Gibbon toward a large red farmhouse and barn on the east side of the Emmitsburg Road belonging to
Nicholas Codori. (Codori actually lived in the town and used the farm as a rental property.)

The artillerymen were caught napping. Wright closed the gap so quickly that the Rhode Islanders mistook the men running toward them for the 15th Massachusetts being somehow recalled to Gibbon’s original line on the ridge. “But when we commenced to receive their fire and heard that well known ‘rebel yell,’ as they charged for our battery, we were in doubt no longer.” The battery’s commander,
Fred Brown, managed to get off a few rounds of shell with fuses “cut at three, two, and one second, and then
canister at point blank range.” But the Georgians were “advancing so rapidly” that all order disappeared in a welter of calls to
Limber to the rear
and
Get out of that, you will all be killed
and the gunners’ last resort,
Don’t give up the guns
. It did them
no good. “Men and horses were wounded before we could retire behind our line of support,” and in short order the Georgians were swarming over four of Brown’s guns.
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Beyond them lay a low stone wall at the crest of
Cemetery Ridge, anchored on its left by the small woodlot, and for that moment only
John Gibbon’s last two brigades, the
Philadelphia Brigade and
Norman J. Hall’s mixed brigade of New Yorkers,
Michiganders, and New Englanders, stood in the way of a complete and disastrous breakthrough, worse than
Devil’s Den or the wheat field, right in the rear of
Cemetery Hill. Hancock was already in the midst of the Philadelphia Brigade, trying to sort out what action they should take. The hubbub along Cemetery Ridge forced “Gen. Meade … to abandon his own Head Quarters” a hundred yards below at the Leister cottage, and “for a few minutes affairs seem critical in the extreme.” Wright was exultant: “We had now accomplished our task—we had stormed the enemy’s strong position, had drove off his infantry, had captured all his guns in our front, except a few which he succeeded in running off, and had up to this moment suffered but comparatively small loss.” So were Wright’s men. The 3rd and 22nd Georgia pushed through an opening on the flank of the Philadelphia Brigade and reached the crest of the ridge. “Seizing artillery horses, shooting down the riders and cutting the traces from the casons,” they pressed “on over these guns up to the crest of the hill, where thirteen other pieces of artillery are captured—thus cutting entirely in twain the army of Mead,” one of the captains in the 3rd Georgia would remember years later. Gibbon’s line, “heavily engaged along his whole front,” began to bow and break. George Meade straightened up in his stirrups and drew his sword, as if he was ready to go down swinging right there rather than live with the consequences of the catastrophe staring at him.
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And then, for what must have seemed like the umpteenth time that afternoon, the cry went up,
There they come, general!
It was, to Ambrose Wright’s dismay, “a heavy column of Yankee infantry on our right flank.”
Abner Doubleday, still smarting from his demotion back to division command in the
1st Corps, sent over two regiments and a battalion from his one unbattered brigade,
George Stannard’s nine-month Vermonters, with the 14th Vermont leading the way across the
Taneytown Road “in close column by division, at a sharp double quick” and “forming in line of battle.” (Stannard himself was left behind on
Culp’s Hill; Doubleday had been in such a hurry to respond to Hancock that he forgot to inform Stannard that he had gone over his head, and that evening Stannard furiously “rebuked” the Vermonters “for wandering off without his orders.”) Hancock whooped upon seeing them, and pointed in the direction of Brown’s captured Napoleons:
Could they re-take that battery?
“We can,” shouted the Vermonters. “Forward boys!”

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At the same time, up came the 150th New York and the 1st Maryland Home Brigade Regiment, the first wave of five brigades of
12th Corps troops that Henry Slocum had pulled off
Culp’s Hill and sent to the rescue. At their head was Slocum’s senior division commander,
Alpheus Williams, who “had no precise instructions as to the point I was to support” but simply “followed the sound of the heaviest firing.” (Taking bearings by sound was trickier than it seems: it led Williams from pillar to post, around Powers Hill and behind
Freeman McGilvery’s artillery, but he got there anyway.) Meade gushed as politely as he could with relief. “Come on, gentlemen,” he said, doffing his hat to Williams’ skirmish line, and repeating, half to himself, “Yes, but it is all right now, it is all right now.”
¹⁸

Ambrose Wright, squatting precariously on
Cemetery Ridge, was ready to roll down the reverse slope and carry Meade, his headquarters, and the rear of
Cemetery Hill with him. “The brave Georgians gained the crest of the ridge
and drove the enemy down the opposite side,” wrote an admiring onlooker in the 61st Virginia. Expectantly, Wright looked to his left “through the smoke,” to where
Carnot Posey’s brigade was supposed to be coming up, in perfect position to knock back the oncoming Union reinforcements.
¹⁹

But there was no one there. Posey, to Ambrose Wright’s Herculean rage, “had not advanced on our left,” leaving Wright “perfectly isolated from any portion of our army, a mile in its advance,” and “about to be sacrificed to the bad management and cowardly conduct of others.” In the weeks after the battle, Posey would insist that he had actually been ordered by Anderson to send forward only “two of my regiments, and deploy them closely as skirmishers,” and use his other two regiments to eliminate the knot of Federal resistance clustered in the Bliss farm buildings. Whether or not Anderson intended that Posey treat the Bliss buildings as though they were Gettysburg’s equivalent of Hougoumont, Posey proceeded to behave that way.

The Bliss farm buildings provided shelter for five companies of Union infantry sent out beyond the skirmish lines by Alex Hays, who had been annoyed when Confederate skirmishers used the buildings earlier in the day to take potshots at him on Cemetery Ridge. Despite the small size of this ad hoc battalion, Posey had been just as annoyed to have the buildings occupied by Yankees taking potshots, and he had even brought up several rifled
cannon to knock the place loose of them. Posey, handsome, commanding, and an arch-secessionist and onetime subordinate of
Jefferson Davis in the
Mexican War, had a certain reputation for timidity, not to mention bouts of depression, so when Posey received his orders to move forward with Wright, and secure the Bliss farm in the process, the Mississippian cautiously pushed his 12th and 16th Mississippi around the Bliss farm and concentrated on squeezing it into surrender. The Yankees put up a brief resistance, and then began legging it for the safety of Cemetery Ridge (where an infuriated Hancock put the senior officer “under arrest for cowardice in the face of the enemy”). But Posey had wasted enough time in forcing them out that only one of his regiments, the 48th Mississippi, ever managed to keep up with Wright.
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And then there was
William Mahone. A graduate of Virginia Military Institue and a highly successful railroad engineer in Virginia before the war, “Little Billy” Mahone commanded the only Virginia brigade in Richard Anderson’s division—one of only two Virginia brigades in Powell Hill’s entire corps. Mahone was an ardent secessionist, filling out a profile which should have guaranteed easy promotion. Except that, like his fellow Virginian John Brockenbrough, he was a singularly odd number. Rail-thin to the point of emaciation and “not weighing over a hundred pounds,” Mahone was an eccentric of the Stonewall Jackson school.
Daniel Harvey Hill, in whose division Mahone served during the
Peninsula Campaign, would have
court-martialed Mahone for withdrawing “his brigade without any orders” in the face of a “furious attack” at the
battle of Seven Pines in 1862; as it was, Mahone tried to challenge Hill to a duel, and had to be talked out of it. Mahone had “failed to distinguish himself in any of the major battles from Manassas to Gettysburg,” and was, as one critic put it, “a little too careful in looking after his men” and preferred to keep them “out of the fighting.”

Richard Anderson had designated Mahone’s brigade as his division reserve, which Mahone interpreted literally as an inert reservoir of manpower. “The brigade took no special or active part in the actions … during the days and nights of July 2 and 3,” Mahone wrote in his official report a week after the battle, and he was not exaggerating. So when Anderson sent a staffer to summon Mahone to the support of Wilcox and Wright, Mahone (with a Bartleby-like insouciance) told him that his orders were to stay put as Anderson’s reserve. But, argued Anderson’s aide,
Samuel Shannon, “I am just from General Anderson and he orders you to advance.” No, responded Little Billy, “I have my orders from General Anderson to remain here.” And he did not budge.
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Without Posey and Mahone, there was nothing for Wright to do but extricate his brigade as fast as he could from what was beginning to look like a noose. In addition to the
Vermonters and the
12th Corps men, the reserve regiment of the
Philadelphia Brigade “was moved forward from behind the crest and ordered to attack” with “
bayonets fixed”; in Norman Hall’s brigade, the 59th New York leapt to attack the 48th Georgia. “With painful hearts we abandoned our captured guns, and prepared to cut our way through the closing lines in our rear.” This was the “dreadful part of the whole matter,” since nothing makes soldiers more vulnerable to being wounded or killed than a pell-mell retreat. One Georgian “unbuckled his cartridge box, canteen and other such things that might impede his race for the rear … Down went my gun, up went my heels.” Others in the 48th Georgia and
2nd Georgia Battalion, “thinking the command would hold their works, delayed in obeying the order,” and ended up being captured. The colonel of the 22nd Georgia went down, the colonel of the 48th Georgia was wounded and captured, the major commanding the 2nd Georgia Battalion was “seriously and dangerously wounded” (and “has since died,” Wright added in his official report). Wright himself, with “several balls passing through his hat,” found the 2nd Georgia Battalion “without a single officer” standing and “took charge of it in person.”
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Overall, the Georgians did a good deal of “halting and reforming” to keep things from turning into a rout, but fully half of Wright’s brigade were casualties. In the 22nd Georgia, one company began the attack with forty-five men, “and got out with twenty-two, and every man of the twenty-two was hit
somewhere with a bullet but one”; in the 48th
Georgia, a corporal discovered that only three of the seventy-three men in Company I “escaped without a bullet piercing their bodies.”
²³