Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (81 page)

Pettigrew lost his horse to shell fire in the march over the fields, but he scaled both fences along with “broken squads” and tried to organize an attack aimed at the Bryan barn.
Birkett Fry went down with a bullet “through the thigh” but kept on urging his
Tennesseans onward as though all it would require was one determined push and the
Army of the Potomac would disintegrate before their eyes: “Go on; it will not last five minutes longer!” Fry and Pettigrew had the help of Trimble’s two brigades, who reached the fence, plowed on through, and “passed over … and went forward.” But even then, “only half” of Trimble’s North Carolinians “managed to cross the road.” Together, there may have been as many as three separate rushes past the Bryan barn and at the stone wall behind it, but none of them had any realistic chance. Behind the wall, soldiers in the 126th New York taunted the rebels,
Come on; Come on; come to death!

Men from Joe Davis’s 11th and 42nd Mississippi also made it to the barn, clustered around it, and exchanged fire with the 39th and 111th New York. One of the 42nd’s captains,
Henry Davenport, ran forward to plant the regiment’s flag on the wall, only to be shot down; the colonel of the 42nd,
Hugh Miller, was “mortally wounded through the left lung … some twenty-five yards from their line of stone fences.” On the other side of the barn, a small party from Trimble’s 37th
North Carolina actually got over the wall before they were quickly rounded up and captured; one of their lieutenants, with the incongruous name of
Iowa Michigan Royster, ran forward “in his new uniform … waving his sword” and “singing Dixie,” only to be cut down, struck in the chest and thigh. The 37th’s right-hand neighbors, the 7th North Carolina, never got closer than forty yards to the wall. Fry’s brigade (the same
brigade which had begun the battle on July 1st, under James Archer’s command) probably made the most serious push up to the wall, where they fought with the 12th New Jersey, the 14th Connecticut, and the 1st Delaware, using stones,
bayonets, rifle butts—even, as Birkett Fry noticed, the “spear on the end of my
regimental colors.” But already, a captain in Fry’s brigade could see that “to the left of the First Tennessee our lines had entirely given way.” An aide told Trimble, who had “been wounded and taken from my horse,” that his brigades were starting to fall back. Should he try to “rally them” for another try? No, said Trimble, who was becoming “faint with loss of blood,” there was no point. “No Charley the best these brave fellows can do is to get out of this,” so “let them get out of this, it’s all over.”
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Pettigrew’s division “gave way, not in sullen retreat, but in disordered flight,” and unlike their counterparts in the
Philadelphia Brigade, Alex Hays’ men were up and eager for the pursuit. The 1st Delaware “sprang over the stone wall
en masse
and charged with the bayonet upon the rebel fugitives,” led by their color sergeant “with the national flag,” as did the color sergeant of the 125th New York, while the 111th New York carefully cleared out the Bryan barn of any remaining Confederates. Alex Hays was in raptures. As a captured rebel officer was being prodded past him, the rebel asked contemptuously if this was all the men Hays had been able to summon: “If I had known that this is all you have, I would not have surrendered.” Well, snarled Hays happily,
Go back and try it again
.

A captain in the 126th New York picked up a
North Carolina regimental flag which had, among the battle honors painted on its bars,
HARPERS FERRY
. Hays wanted this flag, and he wanted to flaunt it for the benefit of the “Harpers Ferry Cowards,” who had finally evened up their scores with the Confederacy on this afternoon. “Gen. Hays took this flag in his hand and rode the length of the brigade in his front, trailing the flag on the ground amid the continuous and deafening cheers of the men,” followed by his two surviving staffers, trailing captured rebel banners in the same fashion. At the angle, he encountered Alexander Webb, “with his hat off, very much excited,” picking through the bodies of the 72nd Pennsylvania in their “dark blue
zouave uniforms.” Webb was looking for some encouraging Victorian sentiment from Hays, saying with a sigh, “Hays, they got through my line.” Alex Hays was the wrong man to expect sentimentality from. He shot back wickedly, “I’ll be damned if they got through mine.”
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It seems to have occurred to neither Webb nor Hays nor anyone else at that moment how ironic it was that the
Army of Northern Virginia’s last hope for a victorious breakthrough expired in bleeding flight from the property of
Abraham Bryan, a free black man, a species of humanity which was, by most Confederate understandings, not even supposed to exist. Lee and his men had
given what Porter Alexander later called “the best we had in the shop,” right down to handsome young lieutenants, moving bravely and impossibly to the attack, singing
“Dixie” under waving swords and snapping flags, and they had, in the end, not been able to roll the stone to the top of the mountain after all. There was already a faint sense in the minds of these soldiers on
Cemetery Ridge, standing there as the sun—and the hopes of the Confederacy—together sank toward
South Mountain, that something unutterably vital had just happened, something to be engraved in bronze books and on pedestals of gray granite, something that would make every man who had been there and survived raise a toast, like Harry the King’s happy few, on every anniversary of the battle, something which would make this place a name everyone would recognize without explanation. But the greatest achievement of the great battle would turn out to be its humblest, as well. For
Abraham Bryan would return to his twelve acres, and his whitewashed cottage and barn, and he and his family would live there until he sold the property in 1869.
And no one would make them afraid, for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken it
.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR  

G
ENERAL
R
OBERT
E. L
EE
stayed at the point of Pickett’s jump-off throughout the charge, sitting first on an oak stump (which an aide had thoughtfully spread with Lee’s all-weather oilcloth coat) and then “on a camp chair under a hastily-rigged tent-fly” (which his staff had even more thoughtfully contrived). Lee was “outwardly calm,” the only nervousness shown being his habit of “twirling his spectacles in his hand.” Once the Union artillery opened up, the curtains of
smoke closed in and there was little to see, but after Pettigrew’s division went in, “a loud cheering arose in the enemy’s lines.” Lee sent a staffer,
Frederick Colston, to “ride forward and see what that cheering means.” Colston met only ghastly streams of wounded men, staggering rearward, and by the time he was close enough to catch any glimpse worth reporting, all he was able to see was “a Union general galloping down his line,” which was probably Alex Hays in triumph. The fields which Pettigrew’s division had crossed were now “dotted with our soldiers, singly and in small groups, coming back from the charge, many of them wounded, and the enemy were firing at them as you would a herd of game.” Colston himself had bullets cut off one bridle rein and bore holes through the brim of his new hat.
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Longstreet divined what had happened before Lee, probably because he was expecting it. Arthur Fremantle arrived at where Longstreet had settled himself, “at the top of a snake fence at the edge of the wood,” and unwisely bubbled with enthusiasm, “I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.” Longstreet rounded angrily on the Guards officer: “The devil you wouldn’t! I would like to have missed it very much; we’ve attacked and been repulsed: look there!” Fremantle cast his eye over the “open space between the two positions,
and saw it covered with Confederates slowly and sulkily returning towards us in small broken parties.” They moved no “faster than a walk … in irregular and small groups, trailing their arms,” limping in “bleeding swarms.” Staffers who had gone forward with Pickett now came dribbling back in disarray—one “on foot, carrying his saddle, having just had his horse killed,” another “in the same predicament.” Then there was Pickett, “his dark dusty begrimed face bowed almost to his saddle and his horse at a walk … motioning men towards the rear with his hand” and howling to the first of Longstreet’s staff he met,
Where, oh! Where is my division?
He found Longstreet and poured out his heart “in terrible agony”:
General, I am ruined; my division is gone—it is destroyed
. Then it was the turn of Pettigrew, “his arm shattered,” to make the same dismal report, and apologize for being “unable to bring his men up again.” Never mind, Longstreet replied, “just let them remain where they are: the enemy’s going to advance and will spare you the trouble.”
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Powell Hill, who was observing the attack with Lee, “burst into tears … when the charging column was repulsed and streamed back from the enemy’s works.” Eventually, he collected himself sufficiently to walk down to Porter Alexander’s batteries, where he seemed to one of Alexander’s artillerymen “as if he were dazed, if not confounded at the scene before him.” Hill moved over to
Carnot Posey’s skirmish line, ordering Posey’s Mississippians “to stop the retreating men and make them form.” But neither Posey nor Hill could make them rally, and beaten rebels continued back into the woods and beyond. Joe Davis came up “with his sword in his hand” and was stopped by one of Posey’s men: “General Davis, where is your brigade?” Davis looked up at him, then “pointed his sword at the skies,” and wordlessly “walked on.”
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Robert E. Lee had spent most of the attack with “the light of battle … in his eyes, and it was plain he longed to be with the charging column.” If Raglan had been right at the Alma, and Napoleon III had been right at Solferino, then Lee had every expectation of being right in sending Pickett and Pettigrew into this great attack. And then, in the manner of some Southern Agave come suddenly to a realization of what he had done, Lee “ordered his horse and rode forward to meet the retreating divisions.” He met Pickett and took him “by the hand,” saying as apologetically as he could, “General, your men have done all that men could do, the fault is entirely my own.” Pickett should place his division “in rear of this hill, and be ready to repel the advance of the enemy should they follow up their advantage.” Pickett angrily interrupted him:
General Lee, I have no division now.
But Lee missed the point of Pickett’s anguish completely. “General Pickett,” he struggled soothingly, “you and your men have covered yourselves with glory.” Glory, Pickett replied, was not going to have the weight in the balances of loss that victory might have had. “Not all the glory in the world, General Lee, can atone for
the widows and orphans this day has made.” Nor was Pickett the only one refusing to be consoled. Cadmus Wilcox stumbled up to Lee, complaining that he “came into Pennsylvania with one of the finest brigades in the
Army of Northern Virginia and now my people are all gone.”
It is all my fault, General
, Lee repeated, and when Johnston Pettigrew found Lee, he received the same assurance,
General Pettigrew, it is all my fault
.
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Yet the battle was not, strictly speaking, over. Early on the morning of July 3rd, J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry, now reinforced by Albert Jenkins’ brigade (which had remained attached to Ewell’s corps throughout the invasion) moved east along the
York Pike, “pursuant to instructions from the commanding general.” Just what those instructions might be never was spelled out; Stuart implied in his official report that he “hoped to effect a surprise upon the enemy’s rear” while Longstreet’s great attack was under way. Stuart’s loyal aide Henry B. McClellan insisted two decades later that Stuart intended “to make a diversion which might aid the Confederate infantry to carry the heights held by the Federal army,” and perhaps even launch an attack on “the enemy’s rear.” How Stuart was to accomplish this with the 4,800 weary troopers he had brought into Gettysburg the afternoon before, plus Jenkins’ 1,100, is still anyone’s guess. Lee, a cavalry officer himself in the 1850s, had never used light cavalry for anything beyond the customary duties of scouting and screening, so it is far from likely that Lee was ready to sanction the use of Stuart’s horsemen for an infantry-cracking juggernaut-task in the spirit of
Joachim Murat or the Prussian uhlans. It is remotely possible that Lee—or Stuart—might have had some notion of looping the cavalry far out to the east and then turning south to cut the
Baltimore Pike somewhere east or south of Gettysburg. But the idea that Stuart meant to commit his small cavalry force to an attack on infantry belies every tactical lesson the Civil War afforded.
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