Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (31 page)

The delay, reflecting the absence of a controlling hand, caused further failures in concerted action among the units. Like overlapping repercussions from a single event, each crisis that an isolated group met as best it could created another crisis for another unit, until the men were fighting as at Little Round Top, only for survival.

With no one certain of the objective and no central control over the details, the unco-ordinated movement forward was directed by no more than the instinct of veteran soldiers to reach the commanding crest. From there guns were spreading death and mutilation among their ranks, and where those guns stood was the enemy’s heart.

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As Kershaw’s men moved in their lonely assault “with the steadiness of troops on parade,” a still unexplained blunder shook his units before they were properly started. Crossing the Emmitsburg road, the four South Carolina regiments moved beside the lane that led to and beyond the house and building of Rose’s farm. They were on the southern edge of the peach orchard, passing over fields of corn and rye and heading for a wooded stony hill directly in their front. On the opposite side of the low hill was the large wheatfield, and beyond it and the marshes of Plum Run Valley was their ob-jective—the slopes of Cemetery Ridge north of Little Round Top. Birney’s broken division was scattered in there, mostly in retreat except for one brigade, but three other brigades from other Union corps (II and V) were to come in. Humphrey’s division was on Kershaw’s left, where Barksdale’s brigade was headed.

As Barksdale had not attacked with him, Kershaw divided his regiments. With two going straight on toward the stony hill, he sent two to their left to take the Union batteries in the back of the peach orchard. The 2nd and 8th South Carolina had moved close enough to the Federals to drive off the gunners when some person whose identity is unknown to this day ordered the two regiments to shift their front and move by the right flank—or away from the guns.

The Federal cannoneers, overcoming what must have been a vast surprise, hurried back to their pieces. Not looking a gift horse in the mouth, they opened with grape and canister at close range on the flanks of what Kershaw called “these doomed regiments… . Hundreds of the bravest and best men of South Carolina fell, victims to this fatal blunder.”

With the usefulness of these regiments temporarily destroyed, Kershaw made his move toward the left of Hood’s division with his remaining two regiments. Emerging from the woods of the stony hill, they met a Federal brigade coming at them from the wheatfield. In that exchange of shots, where the veteran troops of both sides fired with cruel accuracy, the second wave of the unco-ordinated Confederate attack began to disintegrate into another soldiers’ battle. From Kershaw’s right, bordering on the scene of Law’s earlier fight for Little Round Top, the break in order spread steadily northward.

In a curious way the confusion was made more general by the frenzied, fragmentary supports thrown in by the Federals. For one mile between the Emmitsburg road and Cemetery Ridge regiments fought regiments and brigades fought brigades in countless fluid fights, shifting eastward and westward without a defensive line or an attacking front.

The Union defensive line, foolishly extended by Sickles to the peach orchard, broke wide open when its projection was hit on three sides. Good soldier Humphreys, commanding the division among the trees, never lost his poise, but his division was swept backward, as Birney’s had been, and Sickles’s III Corps was a wreck. A division of Hancock’s II Corps was thrown in, the division of Svkes’s regulars went in, two other brigades from Sykes’s fine V Corps, and finally any regiments that came to hand.

Paul Semmes brought up his brigade in support of Kershaw. Looking like a grand seigneur with his curly beard, walking in front of his troops with sword in hand, Semmes, brother of the captain of the raider
Alabama
and a solid brigadier since the Seven Days, fell at the moment of contact. He died of his wound a few days later. Leaderless, his brigade bent back. Wofford’s, the next brigade, came on along the edge of the abandoned peach orchard. Again segments of the Confederate line lunged forward and again they were checked. Although unable to advance consistently, the three brigades of McLaws’s division were keeping a lot of Federal troops busy. Some of the deadliest personal fighting of the war created a touch-and-go situation north of Little Round Top resembling the simultaneous fighting around that hill.

Kershaw said that “amid rocks and trees, within a few feet of each other, these brave men, Confederates and Federals, maintained a desperate conflict.” He lost more than 600 killed and wounded, about half of his brigade strength, and in one company of the 2nd South Carolina only four men of the forty who marched out across Emmitsburg road “remained unhurt to bury their fallen comrades.”

In taking their heavy losses, McLaws’s three brigades—those of Kershaw, Semmes, and Wofford—used up so many Federal reinforcements and exerted such a continuing threat to the Little Round Top flank area that the late-starting brigade of Barksdale’s Mississippians had relatively easy going through Sickles’s peach orchard. They got guns of their own across the Emmitsburg road and among the peach trees and began to spray the retreating Federals, driving them all the way up onto Cemetery Ridge.

With the Union left pinned down and no reinforcements coming against them from the center, the Mississippians were driving for the wildly rugged and untillable hillside near George Weikert’s house, between the Little Round Top area and the open stretches of Cemetery Ridge. The only element that could possibly have stopped them was the reserve artillery that had survived all reorganizations of the Federal army. They undertook the job.

One six-gun battery came down to the choppy floor of the valley and unlimbered near the Trostle house, a large two-story affair with a rear gallery on the upper floor—one Dutch house that was not smaller than its barn. Barksdale’s men moved in against the point-blank firing of the cannon and got among the gunners, killing half of them and taking four of the guns. They had been delayed just long enough for other reserve batteries to open on them from the crest The Mississippi brigade went after those too.

They were losing heavily from the grape, canister, and shell exploding in their faces, and when they got among the guns the Federal cannoneers fought with pistols and sabers and whatever came to hand. In what was like a dock brawl among armed men, the Mississippians took the first line of guns.

But the rear line of artillery kept flinging the close-range charges among them, and enemy infantry began to arrive from the Federal right. Like the other successive waves of isolated brigades, Barksdale’s fragmented units fell back, their grasp falling short of the object of assault.

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Before the Union forces could draw breath, still another isolated Confederate attack struck farther north, directed toward the open plateau of Cemetery Ridge. This attack, bv a brigade of Dick Anderson’s division, was made with even less co-ordination than the other two. Anderson, accustomed to Longstreet’s close supervision, was apparently unsettled by Lee’! orders. Placed between his former and new corps commanders, the usually steady soldier employed his troops tentatively, as if waiting for direct order! from either Hill or Longstreet.

Lee’s report said: “General Hill was ordered to threaten the center, to prevent reinforcements being drawn to either wing, and to co-operate with his right division [Anderson’s] in Longstreet’s attack… .”

Ordinarily, this divided assignment would have been routine for Hill. However, three factors operated against him at Gettysburg. In the first place, the surface civilities established between Hill and Longstreet did not include trust on either side, and no communications passed between them on the use of Anderson’s division. HiU reported: “I was ordered to co-operate with him [Longstreet] with such of my brigades from the right as could join with his troops in the attack.” Apparently A. P. Hill then turned over the execution of the order to Anderson.

At the other end of the line, around Cemetery Hill, Ewell asked for co-operation from Pender’s division in an assault he suddenly decided to make on Culp’s Hill. This drew Hill’s attention from the portion of his assignment dealing with the demonstration in the center at a time when a third factor affected him: the shocking loss of his best division commander, Dorsey Pender.

The twenty-nine-year-old North Carolinian with the ingrained sense of duty was struck in the leg by a large stray piece of cannon shot while riding casually along the lines. He died two weeks later after intense suffering. He showed no more fear of death than had the great Stonewall in whose Second Corps he had matured. Completely conscious, he said: “Tell my wife I do not fear to die. I can confidently resign my soul to God, trusting in the atonement of our Lord Jesus Christ. My only regret is to leave her and our children.” Then, summing up his journey on earth, the twenty-nine-year-old father said: “I have always tried to do my duty in every sphere of life in which Providence has placed me.”

These were words Lee understood, and he recognized the magnitude of Pender’s loss to the South’s struggle for independence. To Powell Hill, the loss of Pender meant both emotional distress for a friend and an upheaval in his newly formed corps. Following the wounding of Heth on the day before, Pender’s removal took from the new corps commander the second of the two familiar division commanders on whom he had built his corps. With Hood down, Lee had lost three of his nine division commanders in two days.

Hill temporarily assigned Pender’s division to James Lane, a capable brigadier not considered for division command during the reorganization. Heth’s division was commanded by Johnston Pettigrew, who, despite the “gallantry” that had won praise for this untrained leader, was scarcely ready for division command.

Only a man less sensitive than Powell Hill could have suffered blows to his emotions and to his new command with equanimity. Unsettled by them and given orders whose vagueness was unsuited to his nature, Hill, besides putting Anderson on his own, directed only a weak demonstration The presence of his one division in line, sporadically firing, retained Federal troops in his front. But with aggressive Pender gone and his successor distracted by Ewell, the division never mounted any action so threatening as to cause the Federals to divert reinforcements away from the Little Round Top area and Cemetery Hill.

As for Longstreet’s relations with his friend Anderson, Old Pete’s report referred only to “the brigades of General Anderson’s division, which were co-operatmg upon my left….”

The whole responsibility for this co-operation thus rested on Anderson, and the unassertive South Carolinian said that he was ordered “to put the troops of my division into action
by brigades
as soon as those of General Longstreet’s corps had progressed so far in their assault as to be connected with my right flank.”

“By brigades” is italicized to indicate that Anderson was still operating on Lee’s original order to attack in echelon across the Emmitsburg road When that order, proved on the scene to be impractical, was first abandoned by Evander Law in defiance of Longstreet, the results caused Longstreet, without announcement also to abandon the order. But, though he sent Lafayette McLaws forward in violation of the letter of the order, Longstreet did not so notify Anderson.

Anderson, adhering to the original order of Lee, sent in his troops, as he said, with “the advance of McLaws’s division … immediately followed by the brigades of mine
in the manner directed.”
The italics, not his, stress that he sent in his brigades in echelon on what had become a frontal attack.

Whether or not the illogical order of advance caused further breakdown in concerted action, Anderson’s tough veterans were the third body of attacking Confederates who just failed to achieve a big breakthrough. Profiting by the bloody work being done by Hood’s and McLaws’s men on the Federal left, one of Anderson’s units—again a single brigade—made it all the way to the crest of Cemetery Ridge. For one eventful fall of time Wright’s Georgians held the middle of the Union position.

The way had been prepared by Wilcox’s Alabama brigade and Perry’s small Florida brigade, both attacking, as had the Confederates all day, by themselves. These two brigades, the first of Anderson’s to go in, drove to the foot of Cemetery Ridge on the left of, but not connecting with, McLaws. There, against massing Federal reinforcements, the brigades held on against counterattacks. To their left, northward, Brigadier General Ambrose R. Wright led his Georgians nearly a mile across the broken ground of the valley and stormed up the slope. He was directly opposite Lee’s command post and under the eye of the Old Man.

Lee saw Wright’s Georgians drive a Federal line from a stone wall at the crest of Cemetery Ridge and, all alone, try to hold their position in the enemy’s center. From where “Rans” Wright had pierced the defense to Law’s brigade south of Little Round Top, the Confederate attacking line was thinned by its spread across a two-mile front. Yet, unused brigades of Anderson’s were available to support Wright, and Wright’s men seemed to be solidifying their hold. Using the stone wall themselves, his riflemen silenced the enemy’s cannon by picking off the gunners, and then the excited Georgians ran forward to take the guns.

Even as they rushed forward, Perry’s little brigade on their right fell back under the pressure of counterattacks. Wright could have faced a regiment about in order to protect that flank, but simultaneously on his left another body of Federal reinforcements appeared out of the dusk.