Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (71 page)

And, in the end, they lacked the malevolence, too. During the night,
George Hillyer of the 9th Georgia heard someone in McLaws’ division begin singing, and loudly enough to be heard over both exhausted lines:

Hillyer wrote years later that he had “heard [Alice] Neils[e]n and [Adelina] Patti and much that the world applauds in the way of high grade music, but … I have never heard music like that.” The voice quavered through hymns and songs, and finally finished its impromptu serenade with “When This Cruel War Is Over.” Across the now silent battlefield, “thousands of soldiers on both sides clapped and cheered.”
³⁵

PART 4
 

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE  

T
HE SUN ROSE ON
J
ULY 3RD
behind a thin layer of “cumulo-stratus clouds” (according to Professor
Michael Jacobs’ relentless meterological record keeping) which eventually burned off or blew away by noon. Temperatures outside the shade of the oak trees were already in the mid-70s by seven o’clock, and the atmosphere was charging with the edgy promise of a thunderstorm in the afternoon. On
Cemetery Hill, “monuments and headstones” in the
Evergreen Cemetery “lie here and there overturned.” Graves “have been trampled by horses’ feet” and the “neat and well-trained shrubbery” had vanished. One soldier in the 20th Massachusetts, near the little woodlot on Cemetery Ridge which Ambrose Wright’s
Georgians had come so close to holding the evening before, looked down the
2nd Corps line as the dawn painted color onto the deadly landscape, and thought that it “appeared like a country fair on a colossal scale.” Turning around and looking to his rear, he could see Powers Hill and
Culp’s Hill, and the road running up to the rear of Cemetery Hill, “covered over with ambulances, wagons, reserve artillery.” There were “thousands of horses with saddles on, mules in harness, hitched to fences, trees, wagon wheels” while they munched “the hay and grain that had been fed out to them. But the most striking sight was that of “seventy thousand muskets, with bayonets fixed” and “stacked in a row four miles long,” marking the line he and his fellows would defend “when the battle note should be sounded.”

Men also began stirring on the skirmish lines between the two armies, “making the most economical use of any little depression, or a fence-rail or two from the fences thrown down during the night,” and beginning the familiar
crackle of skirmish firing. Four-man skirmish teams “acted together, firing by volley into any puff of smoke that would be thrust out by the enemy.” It did not take long for the firing to begin taking its toll, and even though skirmish fire was going to do little or nothing to determine the overall outcome of the battle, the men it killed would be just as dead as if they had been heroically leading the last brave charge of the war. Skirmishers who were too successful violated an unspoken rule of fairness, and when several Confederates “were able to reckon their game with every shot,” their Federal opponents shouted “the wildest imprecations” at them “and threats were made that if taken they would get no quarter.”

But for all the threats, the skirmishers of the 14th Connecticut actually felt “relief and gladness” when a wounded Confederate, “trying, by a series of flops, to drag his body up the slope to the shelter of his own lines,” finally succeeded in getting out of range. Later, a solitary rebel “was seen to rise … and advance toward the Federals with his hand raised.” The Union fire slackened, and the word was passed down the skirmish line,
Wait till we see what he wants
. The rebel skirmisher “suddenly dropped upon the grass and for an instant was lost to the sight.” But in a moment, the Federal skirmishers cheered “as hearty as if given in a charge.” The Confederate had heard a wounded Yankee “lying helpless on the ground between the lines … begging in his agonizing thirst for a drink” and “had gone forward to give some comfort to his distressed enemy.” Once he had “performed his act of mercy,” he sprinted back to his own skirmish line, and the cry went up from the Confederates,
Down, Yanks; we’re going to fire
, and the soldiers returned to the business at hand of killing one another.
¹

By mid-morning, the skirmish fire had grown especially annoying for Alex Hays, commanding the other
2nd Corps division on
Cemetery Ridge. Confederate skirmishers had once more set up in the
William Bliss barn, where they could carry on sniping from less than 600 yards away. Hays called up four companies of the 14th Connecticut to clean out the Bliss barn and farmhouse, and when it became obvious that they could not hold the buildings against a serious Confederate counterattack, Hays ordered both burned. Details from the 12th New Jersey, 1st Delaware, and 111th New York trundled out and began setting fire to the barn with “burning wisps of hay or straw.” They did their work well, and by the time they scrambled back to the Federal skirmish line along the
Emmitsburg Road, “both buildings were in flames.”
²

Long before this, Robert E. Lee had made up his mind what course to follow. The men in Kershaw’s
South Carolina brigade were certain “that Lee would not yield to a drawn battle without, at least, another attempt to break Meade’s front,” and most expected that “Lee would undertake the accomplishment of the work of the day before.” They were right. Climbing up to the open cupola of Pennsylvania College, Lee saw nothing which suggested that he shouldn’t hit the Federals again in the same fashion. The “partial successes” of July 2nd “determined me to continue the assault the next day.” Moreover, Dick Ewell’s foothold on the south peak of Culp’s Hill “was such as to lead to the belief that he would ultimately be able to dislodge the enemy,” and so “the general plan of attack was unchanged.”

Click
here
to see a larger image.

Longstreet would resume the attack with the one remaining division of
his corps which was only just reaching the battlefield, that of George E. Pickett, plus “two brigades of Hill’s corps” which had had time to recover from the fighting on July 1st. (On second thought, Lee added four more brigades from Hill’s corps, just to make certainty certain.) The overall effect would be a renewal of the attack of July 2nd, and its goal would be the Union line—what was left of it—on
Cemetery Ridge. If Ewell could extend his grip on
Culp’s Hill, the
Baltimore Pike artery could be severed; if Longstreet could crush the remaining Federals on Cemetery Ridge, the Yankee artillery on the cemetery plateau would be pinched off and forced to surrender. Stuart and the cavalry would screen Ewell’s flank and rear, but otherwise this was to be the infantry’s show, with some preliminary assistance from a “grand battery” of the army’s artillery.
³

Dick Ewell got his orders for the attack on the night of the July 2nd, apprising him that “an attack would be renewed at daylight of the third, by Longstreet. We were to cooperate, as before, by opening with artillery & engaging the attention of the enemy as far as possible. Also to push out success on the left if practicable.” (Again, that maddening phrase,
if practicable.
) Lee followed with a personal visit to Longstreet early “on the morning of the 3d,” just “after sunrise,” directing Longstreet to “renew the attack against
Cemetery Hill. For that purpose he had already ordered up Pickett’s division.” This did not completely surprise Longstreet, who suspected that Lee “was still in his disposition to attack.” But Longstreet assumed that the idea of attacking Cemetery Hill “had been fully tested the day before,” and that Lee would now be in a more agreeable frame of mind to hear about skirting the entire left flank of the
Army of the Potomac and slicing the Baltimore Pike below Powers Hill. Longstreet had even had “scouting parties out during the night in search of a way by which we might strike the enemy’s left,” and “found a way that gave some promise of results.”
⁴

Lee was not interested. Pointing “with his fist” toward Cemetery Hill, Lee replied just as he had the morning before,
The enemy is there, I am going to strike him
. Pickett’s division would move up to
Seminary Ridge, using the thick forestation for cover, and after a softening-up bombardment, they would follow more or less the same track as Cadmus Wilcox and Ambrose Wright had followed the afternoon before, hitting the
2nd Corps of the Army of the Potomac along Cemetery Ridge between the west side of Cemetery Hill and the woodlot—“a clump of trees,” or, as others described it in less flattering terms, a “clump of bushes” or “a clump of dwarfed trees”—visible on the ridge. Longstreet was taken aback at the bluntness of the plan. He argued that the kind of attack Lee had in mind would require 30,000 men. Pickett’s division had only about 10,500; the other units he would borrow from Powell
Hill would only bring that to about 13,000, and even then they “would have to march a mile under concentrating battery fire, and a thousand yards under long-range
musketry.”

Lee disagreed. The distance they would have to cover was, at most, 1,400 yards, and he would reinforce Pickett to bring the “strength of the column” up to 15,000. Longstreet was ready to throw his hands in the air. “General,” Longstreet pleaded, “I have been a soldier all my life. I have been engaged in fights by couples, by squads, companies, regiments, divisions and armies, and … it is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position.” It was no use. Lee “was impatient of listening, and tired of talking, and nothing was left but to proceed.” As soon as Pickett’s division was in place, two divisions of Powell Hill’s corps would be “arranged along his left … We were to open with our batteries, and Pickett was to move out as soon as we silenced the Federal batteries. The artillery combat was to begin with the rapid discharge of two field-pieces as our signal.”
⁵