Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (74 page)

G
EORGE
G
ORDON
M
EADE
did not get to sleep much before midnight, but he took the time after his war council broke up to send off a message to be
telegraphed to Halleck, confirming that “I shall remain in my present position to-morrow.” But exactly what he would do in that position was unclear, even to him. “I am not prepared to say, until better advised of the condition of the army, whether my operations will be of an offensive or defensive character.” When he awoke on the morning of the 3rd, Meade dictated an order to
William French at Frederick (where French had removed the Harpers Ferry garrison), warning him that the day might end in “our discomfiture and withdrawal,” and in that case French should “look to Washington, and throw your force there for its protection.” Meade rode toward
Culp’s Hill, then went on “to various parts of the field, reforming the troops and strengthening their positions.” Just before nine o’clock, he dashed off another note to be telegraphed, this time to Margaretta in Philadelphia, assuring her “all well and going on well with this Army” but admitting that “both armies [are] shattered.” The
Army of the Potomac was in “fine spirits & every one determined to do or die,” but the “result remains to be seen.” He distributed orders to round up stragglers, collect discarded weapons and equipment, and have everyone equipped “to move at a moment’s notice.”

But where he might move them to was a mystery. The night before, as the council broke up, Meade warned
John Gibbon that any rebel attack the next day would probably fall on his 2nd Corps division, on
Cemetery Ridge. “If Lee attacks tomorrow, it will be
in your front
.” This puzzled Gibbon, and Meade explained: “Because he has made attacks on both our flanks and failed
and if he concludes to try it again, it will be on our centre.” But by noon of the 3rd, Meade had changed his mind. He predicted to Winfield Hancock that “the next attack would be made on his right,” and he pinpointed the locus of the attack by telling
John Cleveland Robinson “that he anticipated an attack on the cemetery by the enemy’s forces massed in the town.”
¹

Winfield Hancock was up early, too, ordering up shovels, picks, and axes for details to begin creating some crude trenches and “rifle pits.” Hancock had the primary responsibility for defending 1,600 yards of territory along the crest of Cemetery Ridge, running from the western face of
Cemetery Hill down to the edge of the sprawling farm property of
Nicholas Codori. At that moment, he could count on only four brigades of infantry to keep watch. Lined up from right to left, this included the
“Harpers Ferry Cowards” (who had spent July 2nd redeeming themselves) and
Thomas Smyth’s brigade, which had undertaken the burning of the Bliss farm buildings—both brigades comprising what was left of Alex Hays’ division. Hays, “persistently riding along his line,” ordered his men “to hunt up all abandoned small arms, clean and load them, ready for use.” With this added firepower, Hays’ two brigades were posted around the small white cottage and barn owned by the black farmer
Abraham Bryan.

The other two brigades were the
Philadelphia Brigade, commanded by Alexander Webb, and Norman Hall’s mixed brigade of two New York regiments (the 42nd and 59th), two Massachusetts (the 19th and 20th), and one Michigan regiment (the 7th). Their position was broken up by a two-and-a-half-foot-high stone boundary wall which jutted far enough ahead of Abraham Bryan’s property line to create a hundred-yard-deep angle, protruding westward toward the
Emmitsburg Road. One of the Philadelphia regiments—the 71st Pennsylvania—had to be posted half by half along Bryan’s line and then along the angle. The Philadelphians had their hands full clearing brush and saplings along the stone wall at the angle in their line; the wall still had wooden rails crossed over the stone to prevent cattle straying, and that, together with the piled-up undergrowth, would provide some added measure of cover. With some thought for what might happen later on, they also collected the scattering of
rifles and
cartridge boxes left behind by Wright’s
Georgians. “Almost every man had two to five guns,” many of them .69 caliber smoothbore
muskets, which the 69th Pennsylvania reloaded as buckshot “putting 12 to the load.”
²

There were also some fragments of
William Harrow’s brigade (which also belonged to Gibbon) on the line—the 19th Maine, the 15th Massachusetts, the 1st Minnesota—but they had been so badly chewed up the day before that any roll call made them look more like companies than regiments. Hancock could also call on
George Stannard and his brigade of
Vermonters, who had
been moved into position on Hancock’s left after stopping Ambrose Wright the evening before. The Vermonters energetically “built such slight breastworks as we could on the crest of the ridge,” using “old rails and logs.” But they were nine months’ volunteers and their enlistments were about to expire, and Hancock did not expect much from them.
³

Not that the others were in reliable shape. The “Harpers Ferry Brigade” had taken some rough handling from Barksdale’s
Mississippians, and they lost their commander, George Willard, when an errant
shell decapitated him the evening before at the height of his brigade’s newfound glory. They were now commanded by
Eliakim Sherrill of the 111th New York, and Sherrill had managed to irritate Hancock sufficiently for the short-fused Hancock to put him under
arrest. The 20th Massachusetts lost its colonel,
Paul Joseph Revere, to a shell fragment on July 2nd; so had the 72nd Pennsylvania in the
Philadelphia Brigade. The 69th Pennsylvania was down to 258 men; the 59th New York could count only 137 men. All told, Hancock’s four brigades may have had no more than 3,500 infantry in their crooked line. Apart from Stannard’s Vermonters and the provost guard, there was no other reserve between themselves and the rear of
Cemetery Hill or the
Baltimore Pike.
⁴

As temperatures rose into the upper 80s, “many of the men” created “improvised shelters by inverting their muskets, with the bayonets stuck in the ground … to which, by means of the hammers, pieces of shelter tents or blankets were fastened.” Then they “lolled, sweltered, and waited under the tropical sun.”
Samuel Robert, the major of the 72nd Pennsylvania, sat on “one end of a
fence-rail … passively listening to some jesting remarks about some girls in Philadelphia, made by a sergeant, who was sitting upon the other end of the rails.” In the 82nd New York, “the men rested idly in line as they listened to the incessant roll of musketry at
Culp’s Hill.” In the 1st Minnesota, men went “one or two at a time back to the rear, where they were allowed fires and cooking,” to get coffee. Once the skirmishing over the Bliss farm was over and the columns of black smoke from its burning billowed skyward, a peculiar quiet settled over the ridge. Out at the
Emmitsburg Road, details of skirmishers from the 72nd, 69th, and 106th Pennsylvania formed a skirmish line in the roadbed. The booming to the east, from the struggle for Culp’s Hill, petered out around noon, and “a strange hush fell on the battle-field.”
⁵

John Gibbon was feeling the pangs of hunger. Somewhere, his division staffers had “picked up … an old and tough rooster which was prepared for the pot and made into a stew.” He invited Hancock over to share whatever the rooster might yield in the way of sustenance, setting up “an old mess chest for a table.” Then George Meade, accompanied by
John Newton of the
1st Corps and Alf Pleasonton, cantered past, headed toward his headquarters behind the ridge at the Leister cottage. Gibbon may have been overestimating
what one rooster could provide, but he urged Meade and the others to join him. Meade at first refused; he had reports coming in and paperwork to oversee. But Gibbon cajoled him, arguing that the makeshift mess table was “in plain sight, that he would be absent but a few minutes.” So Meade, who had eaten no breakfast and looked “worn and haggard,” relented. “An old cracker box was found which served as a seat for the commander of the
Army of the Potomac,” and for once the “general feeling was hopeful.” Meade stayed only long enough to share “our coffee and stewed rooster,” and then rode back to the cottage. But the others stayed “on the ground chatting over the probable events of the day,” lighting up cigars, “while the opposing armies waited in deep suspense under the oppressive heat of the July sun.”

The men in the ranks were just as hungry as the officers, but without any equivalent access to roosters. What they did have access to was
whiskey. Alcohol was, in fact, being ladled out pretty freely in both armies;
Richard Garnett and Cadmus Wilcox sat down to a lunch in the shadow of
Joseph Sherfy’s house with cold mutton and a bottle of whiskey. Porter Alexander was puzzled to find “two lieutenants, of a Miss. Regt.,” apparently rifling through the pockets of a dead Confederate officer, only to discover that the officer was the regimental surgeon who was drunk and passed out.
Lewis Armistead could be seen “taking out a small flask” before the advance, and a Union prisoner “lying on the ground near General Pickett’s headquarters” could not help noticing that Pickett had been fortifying himself with more than encouraging reflections. “In looking at his cheeks and nose, we divined that their color was not caused by drinking sodawater only.”
⁶

And then, at “about one o’clock,” there was a loud bang from what
Charles Bane, the adjutant of the
Philadelphia Brigade, thought sounded like “a single
Whitworth gun … fired from the extreme left of
Seminary Ridge.” Professor
Michael Jacobs checked his watch (or was it a mantel clock?) and saw its hands had moved to 1:07 p.m. A soldier in the 82nd New York happened to be looking down toward the peach orchard, and “saw a puff of white smoke … darting across the meadow,” and shouted,
There she goes!
even before the “sound of the discharge could reach the eager spectators on the Union side.” The shell landed a little to Bane’s left, among the 19th Massachusetts, where it blew apart a lieutenant who “had leaped to his feet at the sound.” Then there was “another stream of thick, white smoke, streaked with flame,” and another round which also flew into the midst of the 19th Massachusetts, “striking among the gun stacks of the Nineteenth.” And then Adjutant Bane heard “at intervals along the entire line solitary shots were fired” like an engine coughing to life, “and in a few moments there burst forth from the whole Confederate line a most terrific fire of artillery.” Michael Jacobs turned to his son, Henry, and could only think of a verse from St. John’s apocalypse:
Seven thunders uttered their voices
.
⁷

Around noon,
James Walton and Porter Alexander reported to Longstreet that “all [was] ready” with the artillery. But all was not ready with Longstreet’s infantry. After marching “about 25 miles on the 2d,” Pickett’s division “
bivouacked about four miles from Gettysburg on the Chambersburg turnpike” for the night, and even when they got moving again “at 3 o’clock A. m. to take our position in line of Battle,” the entire maneuver was not finished until at least “11 o’clock A. M”—if even by then. (Alexander remembered that as late as noon, he was still waiting to hear whether “Pickett was ready.”) In the meanwhile, Longstreet wanted Alexander “to take a position where I could see the field well & take one of Picketts couriers with me, & that I must send Pickett word when to charge.” Once the infantry was finally in place, Longstreet would signal Walton to open fire with “all the guns on the line … simultaneously,” and Walton’s own signal to the artillery would be “two guns [fired] in quick succession by the
Washington Artillery” at the peach orchard. Alexander’s job would be to observe the effect of the artillery bombardment, and once it was clear the batteries of Federal guns on
Cemetery Ridge had been silenced, he would send off Pickett’s galloper with the signal for the infantry to advance.
⁸

Pickett’s three brigades moved down the
Cashtown Pike, filed off to the southwest on the
Knoxlyn Road, and then worked their way across the
Fairfield Road—behind the Lutheran seminary, behind the divisions from Hill’s corps which would go into action with them—until by eight o’clock they moved into position in a hollow “four hundred yards or so from the top, under the crest” of
Seminary Ridge. It was a “shady quiet march,” ending under the grateful cover of
Henry Spangler’s woods, almost due west from Hancock and the
2nd Corps. There, “arms were stacked” and the men fell out “with the understanding that when two signal guns were fired” they would “take arms and lie flat on the ground.” Kemper’s brigade had the lead on the march in, so the three brigades, when they finally deployed for the attack, would create a front rank of Kemper’s and then Garnett’s brigade, with Armistead’s drawn up a hundred yards behind.

Guiding off Pickett would be Harry Heth’s division, “formed in line of battle” and now commanded by Johnston Pettigrew; the four brigades of the division would be lined up with James Archer’s thinned brigade (directed by
Birkett Fry, since Archer’s capture two days before),
James Marshall’s
North Carolina brigade (Marshall having stepped in for Pettigrew as brigade commander), Joe Davis’ North Carolinians, and
John Mercer Brockenbrough’s woebegone
Virginia brigade. Drawn up behind them would be two of Dorsey Pender’s North Carolina brigades, forming a sort of semi-division, marching
(for the time being) under the garrulous Isaac Trimble. Several of these brigades were not in good form:
Birkett Fry’s brigade was down by 250 men from the 1,200 who had marched so confidently down the
Cashtown Pike on July 1st; Joe Davis’ 2nd Mississippi had come out of the
railroad cut with only 118 men; Pettigrew’s own brigade was, likewise, down by almost a thousand from July 1st, and with all the internal administrative disruption this could imply.
⁹

Added up on paper, Pettigrew and Trimble would be, at best, able to provide 6,200 men to support Pickett. Pickett himself would be able to count just over 5,000. Almost as an afterthought, Lee decided to let Longstreet use Cadmus Wilcox’s well-used brigade, along with Lang’s
Florida brigade. But after their battering the day before, they would add only another 1,700 men to the attack. There would be around 13,000 men in the attack—if all of them could be gotten to move.
¹⁰