Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (65 page)

It now fell to the infantry to keep up the “distraction,” and the fate of Latimer’s battalion on Benner’s Ridge gave everyone in Early’s division a perfect view of what might be in store for them. This may be why it took Ewell’s three divisions an unusually long time to dress their ranks, inspect weapons, and move into position—Latimer’s cannonade probably ended around 5:30, and Ed Johnson does not seem to have finally readied his division for an attack until well after 6:00, as the struggle for the wheat field was reaching its peak, as though they were hoping they would not be required to offer more than a demonstration. Ewell had other ideas, and, as the late afternoon shadows lengthened, “old Gen. Early is seen emerging from one of the streets of the town, and, riding slowly across the field in the direction of our position.” Harry Hays paid particular attention to his
Louisiana brigade, riding “along our line of battle” and exhorting them with the challenge that “Genl Early” had specifically ordered “the Louisianans and … North Carolinians to take the guns on the hill,” and that Gordon’s brigade would then “come up” to relieve them “and hold the works.”
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Up on Cemetery Hill,
Charles Wainwright caught sight “of the head of their column” as Early’s Louisianans and North Carolinians deployed into line and “rushed for the hill.” A sergeant in the
5th Maine Artillery “suddenly … shouted, ‘Look! look at those men,’ and he pointed to … where, in line of battle extending nearly to
Rock Creek at the base of Benner’s Hill, the enemy could be seen climbing the walls and fences and forming for the assault.” In the lull following Latimer’s abandonment of Benner’s Ridge, the Federals had gradually assumed that their fighting for the day was done. “We did not expect any assault,” and “could not have been more surprised if the moving column had raised up out of the ground amid the waving timothy grass of the meadow.” Some of the men in the 73rd Ohio had actually begun “to wrap our blankets around us and think of snatching a little rest.” And as the sunlight shortened, it was also harder for the artillery batteries to pick their targets. Even though both the Maine gunners and the batteries up on the hill opened up with a roar as soon as the Confederates came into view, they were not hitting very much. There was “an awful roar of big guns and … the enemy’s batteries kept up a terrific fire,” wrote a soldier in the 6th
North Carolina, “but most of the
shells … passed over our heads.” What made the situation even more awkward for the Federal defenders of the hill was that
the east side of Cemetery Hill fell off into a steep ravine, with a small lane at the base; the steepness of the hillside offered a sick discouragement to any direct infantry attack, but it also made it impossible for the gunners up on the hill to depress the muzzles of their pieces if the attackers ever got under the lip of the ravine.
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Which is what they now did.
Adelbert Ames’ two brigades were strung out in a thin line along the lane at the base of east Cemetery Hill, probably amounting to no more than 1,000 men to face the 4,000 rebel attackers.
Andrew Harris, the colonel of the 75th Ohio who inherited Ames’ brigade command, was sure his brigade “did not exceed 500 men,” and even after every possible man was prodded up to the stone wall that ran along the lane, each of them had “all the elbow room he wanted.” Together, they got off at least one volley, but the momentum of the Confederates carried them straight over the wall and Hays’
Louisiana brigade was “not delayed by this impediment more than [a] minute.” The Louisianans “came on us … yelling like demons with fixed
bayonets,” and “their officers & colors in advance.” The Prussian captain von Fritsch heard them screaming
We are the Louisiana Tigers!
A Pennsylvania officer farther down the lane saw Hays’ rebels pour over the dam of the stone wall, “muskets being handled as clubs; rocks torn from the wall in front and thrown, fist and bayonet. A captain in the 107th Ohio, at point-blank range, shot with his revolver a “rebel Color bearer (8th La. Tiger Regt. as it proved by the inscription on the vile rag).” Another rebel color-bearer mounted the wall, “his musket in one hand and a Rebel color in the other,” shouting
Surrender, you damned Yankees
—only to have a Yankee ram a bayonet into his chest and simultaneously discharge the rifle it was fixed to, “blowing into shreds” the back of the rebel’s shirt.
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Within minutes, Ames’ brigades were dissolving into an uncontrollable spray of fugitives or inconsequential knots of resistance in the lane, as the rebel tide flowed beyond them, and then began mounting the hillside toward the Federal artillery. Otis Howard thought it took not more than “three minutes” before the Louisianans had scaled the grassy slope and “were upon our batteries.” There were four of these batteries perched on the east side of the hill—
Michael Weidrich’s Battery I,
1st New York Light Artillery, from the 11th Corps; twelve 3-inch
Ordnance Rifles in
James Stewart’s Battery B, 4th U.S. Artillery and
Gilbert Reynolds’ Battery L, 1st New York Light Artillery, from the 1st Corps—and six more Ordnance Rifles of the combined batteries F and G of the
1st Pennsylvania Light Artillery, under
Bruce Ricketts, from the artillery reserve. At any other place, these would have been more than enough to keep any assortment of rebel infantry at a respectful distance. But the speed with which the Confederates moved to the attack, and the sharp incline of the hill, limited how much damage the Union batteries were able to do, and as the rebels came bounding up the hill there was no time to get off more than one or two rounds of canister before the rebels were dancing among the guns in whooping delight.
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There was no question about limbering up and removing the guns. The gunners and drivers would have to fight for their guns, and do it with “hand-spikes and rammers”—anything, in fact, “calculated to inflict pain or death
was now resorted to.”
Michael Weidrich’s gunners were Germans, and as one of Harry Hays’ Tigers confidently threw himself onto the muzzle of a Napoleon, he shouted,
I take command of this gun!
A German gunner with the piece’s lanyard in his hand replied,
Du sollst sie haben
(it was a line from a German birthday song—
you can have it
) and blew the rebel into smoking bits. A lieutenant in Ricketts’ battery forgot that he had his officer’s
sword on his belt, and “picked up a stone” to knock another rebel down. Otis Howard himself took up his stand among the guns, sending off orders for
Carl Schurz to bring up whatever other parts of the
11th Corps he could spare from the other side of Cemetery Hill. This time, Howard could not get the fugitives from Ames’ division to stop and stand, and “the rushing crowd of stragglers” actually prevented Schurz from bringing “the two regiments nearest to me” to Howard’s aid. (The drivers and crews from Stewart’s U.S. Regular battery actually spread out along the
Baltimore Pike with
fence rails “to try to stop the runaways, but could do nothing.”) When
Charles Wainwright disgustedly asked Howard why he didn’t have their officers shot for cowardice, Howard’s faith in his 11th Corps finally broke, and he sadly replied, “I should have to shoot all the way down” to the privates; “they are all alike.” Perhaps he was asking too much of men who had been hit too often and too hard, and with too few of the familiar elbow-to-elbow cues to keep them from running; perhaps he was asking too much of himself.
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It was now dusk, almost dark. Among the milling mobs on the eastern side of Cemetery Hill, Weidrich’s battery was finally overrun by the 9th Louisiana, and
Bruce Ricketts, in a last desperate effort, ordered the 3-inch
Ordnance Rifles in his battery to fire
shells without fuses, so that the rounds would actually detonate in the barrels and spray out shell splinters like
canister—that is, if the guns didn’t blow up in the crews’ faces. And then Ricketts, too, was submerged in the rebel flood, and “every piece of artillery which had been firing upon us was silenced.” Far to the rear,
Jubal Early had “several rebel batteries … in readiness to gallop on to Cemetery Hill,” while rebels on the crest struggled to turn “some of the guns on the enemy and tried to fire them.”
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And then, in yet another of those miracle moments which had by now become the routine of the
Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg, Federal troops appeared out of the darkness and bore down on the jubilant Confederates and their newly acquired prizes. Four hundred yards to the west, on the other side of Cemetery Hill,
Winfield Scott Hancock and George Meade had only just finished clearing the last of Ambrose Wright’s prisoners and wounded from the front of the 2nd Corps when the rising racket of infantry fire to the east caught Hancock’s ear. “At last this fire became so heavy and so threatening” that Hancock, who had been peeling off regiments, brigades, and divisions to
send someplace else all afternoon, gave no second thought to peeling off some more. His first impulse was to send a regiment apiece toward
Culp’s Hill (where he dispatched the 71st Pennsylvania) and the
Evergreen Cemetery gatehouse (where the 106th Pennsylvania was sent). But as the roar swelled, he turned to
John Gibbon and said, “Send a brigade, send Carroll.”
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Carroll
meant
Samuel Spring Carroll, a luxuriantly sideburned colonel of the 8th Ohio who had taken over command in March 1863 of what turned out to be the only other all-“Western” brigade in the Army of the Potomac (in this case, “Western” meant the 4th and 8th Ohio, the 14th Indiana, and the 7th West Virginia). Carroll, with his brick-red hair, often reminded people of his manic-aggressive division commander, Alex Hays, and this occasion was no exception. Carroll wheeled his brigade around from where it had been stacked in column of regiments and, with the 14th Indiana in the lead, sprinted “headlong” across the hill, across the
Taneytown Road, past “gravestones” in the Evergreen Cemetery “struck by the spiteful Minnie ball,” and emerged onto the
Baltimore Pike just as the last of the “maddened gunners” were “striking the rebels with fist, rammer, ammunition and stones.” Carroll had no guide except for the muzzle flashes ahead, and no time to deploy the brigade except to feed each regiment from column into line as they crossed the road. Even that meager order was quickly lost in the melee: “
Bayonets and butts of guns at once joined the efforts of the heroic gunners, with flanks of regiments overlapping” and everyone colliding in an “every-man-in-as-you-can sort of way.”
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Harry Hays and his
Louisianans had no idea who these Yankees were (at first, he had not even been sure they were Yankees, since
Robert Rodes’ division was supposed to have attacked the west side of
Cemetery Hill, and this might be the tip of Rodes’ breakthrough), or how many of them there were. Hays had already taken enough casualties to call it a day, and the North Carolinians had lost
Isaac Avery to a bullet in the neck in the first few minutes of the attack. Hays decided to pull back, first retreating down the hill to the lane, and then toward his original starting point. A captain in the 14th Indiana was less measured in his description: “They ran pell mell … in thirty minutes the attack was repulsed and the battery saved.”
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No one was angrier at the results of the attack on Cemetery Hill than
Jubal Early, who could not understand why Robert Rodes’ division, on the west side of Cemetery Hill, had never put in an appearance. The difficulty facing Rodes was that by the time he had moved his 5,000-man division out of Middle Street and into line opposite Cemetery Hill, the moon had come up, and his brigade commanders had become dicey about “the idea of charging strong fortifications in the night time.” Rodes yielded to a plea from Stephen Ramseur to reconnoiter the ground in front of them, and Ramseur
came back with the depressing report that the western face of Cemetery Hill was defended by “two lines of infantry behind stone walls,” with artillery backing them.” The nerveless
Alfred Iverson claimed that “we were advancing to certain destruction.” And so Rodes called it off. In his diary,
William Seymour described Harry Hays on Cemetery Hill, waiting “anxiously … to hear Rodes’ guns co-operating with us on the right; but unfortunately, no such assistance came to us.”
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Robert Rodes did not survive the war, and so had nothing he could say in his own defense. But
Jubal Early had good reason to gnash his teeth in disappointment. Of all the nearly-so moments that litter the record of July 2nd, Early’s attack on east Cemetery Hill scattered a Federal division, captured at least two batteries of artillery, and, for a moment, stood in possession of enough ground on Cemetery Hill to have compelled an immediate Federal evacuation. Subtract Carroll’s brigade (and Hancock’s intuition in sending it), and add even a token assault by Rodes, and Jubal Early would have been within inches and minutes of pulling down the center pole of the
Army of the Potomac. That it did not happen speaks volumes instead about the uncoordinated command style that had become Robert E. Lee’s habit, and for the paralyzing evaporation of initiative that crept over the senior generals of the
Army of Northern Virginia the longer and deeper they remained in the unfamiliar environment of Pennsylvania.