Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (73 page)

The one significant difference from the Alma and Solferino was the artillery bombardment Lee wished to hurl as the overture to the attack. The purpose of a preliminary artillery bombardment, at Gettysburg as it had been at Waterloo, was to silence enemy artillery, to “try & cripple” it. Silencing the enemy’s artillery was so important at Waterloo because Napoleon proposed to make his final grand attack there in column, and needed to close down the British artillery so that they would not make havoc of the large blocks of French attackers. His nephew, Napoleon III, proposed doing much the same thing at Solferino in 1859 when he used a concentrated grand battery to soften up the Austrian center, prior to a headlong infantry assault. “No column could withstand a well-directed fire of shrapnel shells for twenty minutes,” was the dictum born of British experience. “It would have to deploy.” The only alternative was to smother the defenders’ artillery.
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But Raglan’s attack at the Alma dispensed with any artillery bombardment, for the simple reason that he intended to advance in line of battle from the start. Just as an advance in line was slower than a swiftly moving column, it also presented a much thinner and more modest target for artillery to disrupt at long range (with shell) or medium range (with solid shot). There is no surviving evidence whether Lee expressed a tactical preference for the shape of Longstreet’s attack, and it would have been unlike him in any event to have reached that far down into what were, after all, Longstreet’s prerogatives as a corps commander. But Lee’s insistence on a bombardment massive enough to tear the Yankee artillery “limbless” does raise the interesting question of whether Lee intended not only to make an attack in
stosstaktic
style, but in column. For why else would such a bombardment be necessary, especially when (as Alexander was already beginning to realize) the ammunition supplies for the artillery were dangerously low after two days of battle? This may not be the image of Pickett’s Charge which finally emerged on the pages of many of the histories of Gettysburg, but it would place Robert E. Lee in some very good nineteenth-century company.

It was only when Henry Slocum and
Alpheus Williams returned to
Culp’s Hill after Meade’s war council that they learned how much advantage the Confederates had taken of the
12th Corps’ absence. “We had heard none of the tumult of Ewell’s attack,” wrote a captain in Slocum’s command; when they began fumbling their way back to their “old position on the right,” many of them found their positions on the south peak of Culp’s Hill occupied by Confederates from Allegheny Johnson’s division. In the darkness, Slocum’s men imagined that these occupiers were somehow Pap Greene’s men. “They mistook each other for friends” and “mingled and talked freely,” until some remark revealed that they were not among friends at all. A Connecticut soldier thought he was conveying welcome information when he shouted to a shadowy figure, “The Rebs have caught Hail Columbia on the left.” The figure erupted, “Hell! These are Yanks!” and “a general mêlêe took place.” There was a spring at the base of the south peak of Culp’s Hill known as
Spangler’s Spring, from the farmer on whose property it sat, and a detail was sent out from the 46th Pennsylvania to fill up canteens. They collided with Confederates “also there filling their canteens,” but the captain in charge of the detail could not convince the colonel of the regiment that these were really Confederates. The 123rd New York was ready to shuffle back into its place between the two peaks of Culp’s Hill when it was greeted with a who-goes-there. “Come on, it’s all right,” called out a lieutenant on the skirmish line, and walked right into the arms of the rebels.

This surprise was aggravated by a smarting sense of resentment, especially in units which had spent some time and effort imitating Pap Greene and building up little entrenchments. “It was exasperating to see them benefitting by our labors,” although the men of the 3rd Wisconsin “were somewhat consoled by the capture of a picket of twenty Confederates.” Little firefights broke out as other
12th Corps regiments blundered into Confederate squatters, and presently “orders were at once issued for” Geary to get his division back up to the north peak of Culp’s Hill, while Slocum’s other division, under Williams and
Thomas Ruger, was readied for “an attack at daybreak” to take back control of the south peak.
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By first light, Slocum and Williams had not only repositioned Greene’s brigade and Geary’s division, and gotten three brigades drawn up in the open fields between the
Baltimore Pike and the lower peak, but had planted two of the 12th Corps’ batteries on a small rise beside the Baltimore Pike, “within 600 to 800 yards of the woods” on the lower peak that the men of Steuart and Allegheny Johnson occupied. Together with the last-ditch batteries planted on Powers Hill, Williams could hit the Confederates with twenty-six guns, and he confidently predicted that “from these hills back of us we will shell hell out of them.” The light strengthened in the east, accompanied by “the jostle of soldiers, followed by the clatter of canteens and other utensils … in addition to that of their arms as these clashed together in the efforts of the men to get into ranks.” Pap Greene’s brigade, “now pretty well exhausted with constant fighting,” and their rifles “foul from constant use,” were relieved by Geary’s brigades and other portions of the
1st Corps sent over by James Wadsworth from the saddle joining Culp’s Hill and east
Cemetery Hill. Greene’s grateful New Yorkers fell back “to the foot of the hill, replenished their [cartridge] boxes, cleaned their guns and got their coffee.”
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Finally, the sun rose, dull and indifferent behind the translucent clouds, and the artillery
Alpheus Williams had so carefully assembled broke out in a chorus of crashes, aimed at “Johnson’s troops, who were within the cover of the woods.” Skirmish fire on both sides spurted, and after fifteen minutes of shelling, the six regiments of
Archibald MacDougall’s brigade “pressed forward” to clear the Confederates out of their precarious lodgment on the south peak. For their part, the Confederates had not exactly been inert during the night. Dick Ewell was convinced that
Robert Rodes had mishandled his role in what was supposed to be a joint attack on Cemetery Hill with
Jubal Early, an attack which “had it been otherwise, I have every reason to believe … that the enemy’s lines would have been carried.” If Rodes did not know how to use his division properly, Ewell did, and under cover of darkness he transferred two of Rodes’ brigades around the semicircle of Cemetery Hill and
planted them on the right of Allegheny Johnson’s division. For good measure, Ewell added Jubal Early’s reserve brigade under Extra Billy Smith. “At daylight Friday morning,” Ewell received orders from Lee “to renew my attack.” But “before the time fixed for General Johnson to advance,” Ewell wrote, “the enemy attacked him, to regain the works captured by [Maryland] Steuart the evening before.” Or, as Johnson himself snorted, “the enemy had saved him the trouble of deciding whether to attack.”
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The Confederates slowly worked their way up the rock-pitted slopes of both peaks, the firing becoming “close and deadly, while the echoing of the woods increased the appalling roar.” It was “almost continuous, at times tremendous,” and even in the town the family of
Michael Jacobs, huddled in their cellar on Middle Street, thought “the noise of the musketry fire from that point as it reached the house was actually deafening.”
Louis Léon found himself firing his rifle so often that “my gun became so hot that the ramrod would not come out, so I shot it at the Yankees.” He wondered afterward “if it hit a yankee; if so, I pity him.” Up on the north peak, a soldier in the 28th Pennsylvania had a similar experience: “We were in action 3 hours, during which time I fired 65 rounds of Amunition … more than I have used in any battle. I often had to wait for my rifel to cool, ramming home the ball with a stone.” The rain of bullets was so heavy that trees were “shot off about breast high” and “came tumbling down,” and a soldier in the 78th New York was startled to find “hundreds of small birds” landing “among the men in the firing line, as if for protection, often lighting upon their shoulders.”
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But Pappy Greene and John Geary (“dressed in an old blouse, with few of the outward appearances of a general”) calmly cycled regiments in and out of the earthworks Greene had dug the day before, giving their men time “to secure ammunition, clean pieces, etc.” Altogether, Johnson launched four attacks at Culp’s Hill that morning; each time, they were beaten back, only to “retire a short distance to form again.” At 10:25, a third wave of attackers came up the slope against Geary’s division, charging in “with the usual yell in closed column in mass” in a solid block of companies only “a pace apart.” This accomplished no more than the first two attacks, and a single volley, delivered “within seventy paces,” shook “the entire column,” and it broke to the rear.
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On the left of the 5th Ohio, a sergeant noticed something he had not expected: “An American citizen of African descent had taken position, and with a gun and cartridge box, which he took from one of our dead men, was more than piling hot lead into the Graybacks.” There is no way of knowing whether this solitary black fighter was a civilian teamster who decided to join the Ohioans or a refugee from the town who had come out of hiding to do his bit (or even a member of the Adams County company that had tried, unsuccessfully,
to volunteer itself to the new all-black 54th Massachusetts). He was certainly not a soldier, since none of the new black regiments recruited since the issue of the
Emancipation Proclamation were attached to the
Army of the Potomac. Whoever he was, he is the only African American on record as a combatant fighting at Gettysburg. “His coolness and bravery was noticed and commented upon by all who saw him,” and the Ohio sergeant who described him thought that “if the negro regiments fight like he did, I don’t wonder that the Rebs … hate them so.”
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The odds were mounting against Allegheny Johnson. By eleven o’clock, Slocum was getting reinforcements from a new source.
John Sedgwick’s
6th Corps finally arrived in force during the evening of July 2nd, and though George Meade’s original notion had been to put them into the line along
Cemetery Ridge, the position Dan Sickles was originally supposed to occupy, Sedgwick peeled off two brigades to help Slocum. They arrived in time for the fourth and last attack to come boiling up out of the woods at Geary and Pap Greene, with “two of Johnson’s brigades … formed in column by regiments,” and Maryland Steuart’s brigade “started forward to meet death and defeat” against the south peak. Steuart’s men did not get far; overtaxed by eight hours of fighting, men “threw themselves upon the ground, and despite the pleadings and curses of their officers refused to go forward.” On the north peak, the Confederates actually made it “fairly into our lines.” But Pappy Greene’s regiments drained the attackers of strength, and “in this last charge” some of them actually “rushed forward with white flags to surrender.” Enraged and embarrassed at the surrenders, Allegheny Johnson’s adjutant and chief-of-staff,
Benjamin Leigh, spurred forward “to prevent this surrender, but was shot down when very near our lines.” The
12th Corps was once more “in full possession of its original line,” and “Johnson’s troops withdrew to
Rock Creek, leaving a strong picket line in their front.” If Robert E. Lee had expected Ewell to be the other horn on which the Army of the Potomac would be gored on July 3rd, that horn had now been broken off. And once again, the mysterious genie of coordination had eluded him. “We accomplished nothing,” wrote a captain in the 53rd Virginia.
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As the Confederates faded away into the woods, the one thing which a Union soldier noticed above all others was “the lifeless body of Adjt. Gen. Leigh of Gen. Johnson’s staff, as stark in death he had fallen by the side of a dead horse close up to our works.” Pappy Greene had the body searched for “papers indicating the troops engaged to our front,” and then ordered him given “a soldier’s burial in rear of our line, and near the graves of our own officers and men.” The trees were stripped of leaves and bark, and the trunks “looked like target boards, and many of them had not space upon them where a man could put his hand and not cover a bullet hole.” Even “the ground was covered with flattened bullets, and the rocks were pitted with lead marks.”
All through the woods was a littering of over 1,800
rifles, and 500 corpses, “piled up on each other four and five deep.” But at least the fighting had “practically ceased,” remembered one Union officer, followed by a “period of perfect quiet.” Then, breaking the stillness, there came the distant boom of two artillery pieces.
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  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO