Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (75 page)

And many of them did not like the prospect of moving once they had seen where they would be going. Cadmus Wilcox formed his brigade just forty yards behind the crest of
Seminary Ridge, giving his men a far better vantage point than Pickett’s to see ahead, and what they saw set them to “ominous shakes of the head … as to the wisdom of such a move.” Wilcox rode over to
Richard Garnett and muttered “in the hearing of” several officers “that he considered Cemetery Ridge” impossible to take, that he “had lost between 4[00] and 500 men there the day before in some 15 or 20 minutes, without making the slightest impression.” Porter Alexander found the observer’s perch he needed near Ambrose Wright, and the disgruntled Georgian lost no time in telling Alexander “that the difficulty was not so much in
reaching
Cemetery Hill, or taking it—that his brigade had carried it the afternoon before—but that the trouble was to hold it.” In Pettigrew’s division, a sergeant in the 14th Tennessee,
Junius Kimble, strolled forward to take a look. He saw “an open plain, with a slight incline to the front of Cemetery Ridge … with no obstructions … except three
fences, two worm or rail fences and one slab fence, nearest to the enemy’s front.” He shivered, and asked “aloud the question, ‘June Kimble, are you going to do your duty today?’ ” Kimble summoned up the resolve to say, “I’ll do it, so help me God.” But when he returned to the lines of the 14th Tennessee and was asked how things looked, he could only mumble, “Boys, if we have to go, it will be hot for us.”
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And yet, few of them seem to have seen the task as outright suicide. “Come on, boys,” cried one of the 11th Virginia’s privates, “let’s go and drive away those infernal Yankees.” It was plain to Wilcox’s Alabamians that “many, very many, would go down under the storm of shot and shell … but it never occurred to them that disaster would come” on Cemetery Ridge.
James Crocker, a lieutenant in the 9th Virginia and, oddly enough, a graduate of Pennsylvania College, thought that “all fully saw and appreciated the
cost and the fearful magnitude of the assault, yet all were firmly resolved, if possible, to pluck victory from the very jaws of death itself.” George Pickett, in particular, saw nothing but victory and glory ahead (although privately, he urged
Richard Garnett to get his brigade “across those fields as quick as you can, for in my opinion you are going to catch hell”). At least for the benefit of his division, Pickett appeared “entirely sanguine of success, and was doing nothing but congratulating himself on the opportunity.”
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There were a few last-minute arrangements.
Isaac Trimble rode up and down the lines of his two brigades, “halted at different regiments and made us little speeches, saying he was a stranger to us and had been sent to command us in the absence of our wounded general, and would lead us upon Cemetery Hill.” Lee, Longstreet, and Powell Hill met in front of Pettigrew’s division for a final consultation, and the men in the ranks “voluntarily arose and lifted in reverent adoration their caps to their beloved commander.” In the 14th Virginia, one captain marked out three or four men who were “habitual play-outs” and advised the sergeants who would be forming the rear line of file closers “to take them into that fight or kill them” if they had to, and “he would be responsible.” Staff officers and couriers “began to move about briskly,” wrote
Birkett Fry. “General Pettigrew rode up and informed me that after a heavy
cannonade we would assault the position in our front,” and Fry in turn met with Pickett and then Richard Garnett, who “agreed that he would dress on my command” as “the directing brigade of the line of battle.”
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Finally, it was done. Longstreet sent off a courier with a handwritten order for
James Walton:

Alexander at once recoiled from this message—not just because it suggested that Longstreet still had enough reservations about the attack to contemplate canceling it, but because it seemed as though Longstreet was saddling
him
with the responsibility for making the call. This was not quite the case: Longstreet was in the habit of giving staffers wide latitude for decision making, and even more so than Robert E. Lee. (Longstreet would do this to extremely good effect a year later in the Wilderness, when he allowed his chief of staff,
Moxley Sorrel, to direct the attack that crushed Hancock’s
2nd Corps along the Orange Plank Road.) And given Alexander’s expertise in artillery matters, this was not an imprudent—much less evasive—delegation. Longstreet would later admit that he had been “unwilling to trust myself with the entire responsibility.” But this was less a matter of sloughing the burden onto other shoulders as it was a calculation that Alexander was better fitted “to carefully observe the effect of the fire upon the enemy.”

Alexander did not read the message that way. He wrote back, “I will only be able to judge of the effect of our fire on the enemy by his return fire … and the
smoke will obscure the whole field. If … there is any alternative to this attack, it should be carefully considered.” But instead of seizing on Alexander’s caution, Longstreet brushed hesitation away. “The intention is to advance the infantry if the artillery has the desired effect … When the moment arrives advise General Pickett, and of course advance such artillery as you can use in aiding the attack.” That settled the question, and Alexander determined in his own mind that once the artillery barrage began, Pickett would go forward at any hazard. “My mind was fully made up that
if the artillery opened Pickett must charge
.” And so he replied to Longstreet, “General: When our artillery fire is doing its best, I shall advise General Pickett to advance.”
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All of the machinery of the great attack was now in motion. Down at Sherfy’s peach orchard,
James Walton turned to
Benjamin Franklin Eschleman, the major commanding the ten-gun
Washington Artillery battalion, and ordered the firing of the two signal guns. The first one, a Napoleon (and not a Whitworth, as the soldier in the 82nd New York thought) from the Washington Artillery’s No. 2 Company, “rang out upon the still summer air”; then there was a clumsy pause. The friction primer inserted in the touchhole
of the other gun was a dud, and there had to be some fumbling around to pull it out and replace it with one that worked. The second gun was “immediately followed by all the battalions along the line.” Over on the other side of the town, a captain in the
14th Virginia Cavalry “heard the big gun—way in the distance—miles to our right.” And then, after only a momentary pause, “we heard the firing grow nearer and nearer,” as batteries chimed in, one after another, rippling from right to left around the crescent of artillery aimed at
Cemetery Hill, “till the whole line was firing.” The hill itself became shrouded in “dense smoke … which was cleared every now and then, for a Small space, by the explosion of a Caisson that circled through the cloud of smoke.”
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When the formidable
Henry Knox first recommended to
George Washington the organization of an artillery arm for the
Continental Army in 1776, his notion involved the supply of just 120 pieces for the entire American service (including fortifications), most of which ended up being shipped to America by the French. The
battle of Buena Vista was won by
Zachary Taylor with the support of only two batteries of artillery, as opposed to the seventeen guns deployed by his Mexican opponent, Santa Anna. Not until the Civil War did American armies begin to make use of large-scale Napoleonic-style artillery forces on the battlefield—the 100 guns used by Napoleon at Wagram, the 94 deployed by the
Russians at Inkerman. Even then, at Malvern Hill, the most famous artillery-dominated battle in the war thus far, only 37 Union guns had faced down 16 Confederate ones. Nevertheless, the impact was beyond anything American soldiers had seen before. “The fire from the enemy’s artillery was truly terrific,” wrote one awed Confederate general. Two and half months later, at Antietam, Stonewall Jackson held off the Federal attack on the
West Woods with 40 guns, and Harvey Hill held back Federal attacks in the center with 50, earning Antietam the nickname “Artillery Hell.”
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But in all of this, there was nothing to match the stupendous concentration of artillery which
James Walton and Porter Alexander had arranged for Longstreet on July 3rd. It would be, in fact, the single loudest sound ever heard on the North American continent. “The noise and din were so furious and overwhelming as well as continuous that one had to scream to his neighbor lying beside him to be heard at all,” wrote one of Wilcox’s Alabamians. “Men could be seen, especially among the artillery, bleeding at both ears from concussion.” Ten miles to the southwest, at
Jack’s Mountain, a signal officer could see “hundreds of shells” bursting, and even as far away as Hagerstown, “we could distinctly hear the cannonading.” In York, “the roar of artillery” was “heard distinctly … at times rapid and heavy.” In Lancaster,
“persons who had arrived there from McCall’s Ferry, Peach Bottom and Safe Harbor” on the Susquehanna “report a continuous cannonade audible at all these points … from the direction of Gettysburg.” One hundred and twenty miles away, farmers in Cecil County,
Maryland, and Chester County, near Philadelphia, “looked up to the sky in puzzlement for the source of thunder on a cloudless day.”
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The sheer noise of the first ripple of fire along the massed line of Confederate batteries, followed by the unremitting blasts of fire from two miles’ worth of artillery, beggared description. Hidden in his family’s cellar on
Baltimore Street, “the vibrations could be felt” by young
Albertus McCreary, “and the atmosphere was so full of
smoke that we could taste the saltpeter.” Behind the Confederate lines, teamsters parked “two or three miles away, declared that the sashes in the windows of buildings where they were shook and chattered as if shaken by a violent wind.” At the far end of the Confederate line, a Texan in Hood’s division thought it was like being “an eagle in the very midst of a tremendous thunderstorm,” and compared it to “Milton’s account of the great battle between the combined forces of good and evil.”

Both the detonations of the guns and the crack of exploding shell overhead “joined in one demonic chorus” composed of “the crash of the bursting spherical case, the howl of the [rifle]-shell” and the “wicked hiss of the solid Whitworth.”
Charles Bane in the
Philadelphia Brigade also noticed the bazaar of sounds. He could distinguish “the shrieking of shells or the heavy thud of round
shot … from the rotary whizzing of the Whitworth bolt.”
George Benedict, in Stannard’s Vermont brigade, listened as “spherical case exploded over our heads and rained iron bullets upon us; the Whitworth solid shot, easily distinguished by their clear musical ring, flew singing by … and round shot ploughed up the ground.”
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Or if it was not the noise, it was the incessant concussions and the damage that rippled outward from them. “It seemed an earthquake would not have caused the foundations to tremble as did the fire of those … pieces of artillery,”
marveled one Confederate. A soldier in the 1st Minnesota felt solid
shot “strike the ground in front of us and … go on their way growling in an anger too terrible for conception.” So unnerving was the shaking of the ground that “loose grass, leaves and twigs arose from six to eight inches above the ground.” Soldiers anywhere near trees saw “the iron tempest” sheer off “branches large and small” and “strewed the ground with fragments, and placed us in great danger even from falling limbs.” One Federal artillery officer described it as a “deluge of limbs falling from tree tops.”

Abraham Bryan had planted shade trees around his whitewashed cottage on
Cemetery Hill, and Bryan’s neighbor,
David Zeigler, had planted an orchard on the west side of Cemetery Hill, beside Bryan’s property. But now the Confederate artillery tore “large limbs … from the trunks … and precipitated [them] down upon our heads … Small trees were cut down and large ones shattered almost to pieces.” Or if not tree limbs, then pieces of fence or housing. A solid shot struck Bryan’s barn and whirled a board through the air, hitting a captain in the 111th New York. A Federal artilleryman on
Cemetery Ridge even caught a glimpse of the wheat fields beyond the
Emmitsburg Road moving in waves as the unending blasts of the artillery blew it “like gusts of wind.”
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Given the low muzzle velocities of Civil War artillery, some Union soldiers discovered that “if you rolled on your back and looked up into the heavens,” it was possible to pick out solid shot and shell as they sailed overhead, and in the 12th New Jersey several men kept track of multiple lines of flying projectiles. “We turn on our backs, look up and trace the course of the
shells; we could see a dark line flit across overhead and others cross this towards every point of the compass.” Or else, also flying through the air, men could see their rifle stacks being knocked into carousels. “So thick did the missiles fly that in a few moments nearly all the inverted muskets were knocked down or shot off,” and “pieces of shell were plainly visible as they hissed by.”
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