Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (76 page)

Near the Leister cottage, “two shells in every second fell around” George Meade’s headquarters. Shells blew off the doorsteps, knocked down the front door, cut off “the legs of a chair in which a staff officer was seated,” and crashed into the loft under the roof. The line of staffers’ horses tied up to the fence palings outside was particularly hard hit. “A dozen of the frightened animals fell by rebel projectiles, and others broke away and fled in the wildest fright towards the rear.” They were joined in an undignified stampede by “hospital attaches, camp followers” and even a few “citizens” who had evaded army picket lines to catch a glimpse of the commanding general. “In a few minutes the
Taneytown Road in our rear was filled” with them, as “shells were screaming and bursting everywhere.”
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Meade took it all with stoic indifference; people may not have liked
Meade’s brimstone manner, but no one could gainsay the man’s marvelous contempt for physical danger. Noticing in passing that his staffers “were gradually, and probably unconsciously, edging around to the lee side of the house,” Meade was withering: “Gentlemen,” he asked, “are you trying to find a safe place?” They reminded him, he said, of the teamster on “the field of Palo Alto” who hid under an ammunition wagon, and when old
Zachary Taylor upbraided him for sheltering under cover that was more dangerous than the enemy’s fire, the man pleaded that he knew it wasn’t safer, “but it kind o’ feels so.” Nevertheless, in short order, both Meade and chief of staff Dan Butterfield were grazed by pieces of flying ordnance, and Meade ordered the cottage abandoned. He took himself first, with only one aide, to
Cemetery Hill, where he had told John Robinson to expect a Confederate attack to come, and went from battery to battery to emphasize “to our officers that this point must be held at all hazards.” He then took off down the
Baltimore Pike toward Powers Hill. There, of course, was where he had parked the artillery he would use if he had to cover a retreat. If this bombardment indeed presaged Robert E. Lee’s final hammer blow, Meade wanted to be in a position to supervise the evacuation of as much of his army as possible.
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The soldiers along the line of
Cemetery Ridge had no similar options. They instinctively dove to earth, “hugging the ground very closely,” ground that “we would like to get into it if we could.” A few men in the 108th New York, “shook up by the explosion of the
shells,” tried to bolt to the rear, only to be hunted down and prodded back into line by vigilant lieutenants. When one of the 3-inch
Ordnance Rifles in
Alonzo Cushing’s battery had a wheel damaged, Cushing saw a sergeant head to the rear, explaining that he meant to retrieve the spare wheel usually carried on the gun’s caisson. Cushing drew his revolver. “Sergeant Whetstone, come back to your post. The first man who leaves his post again, I’ll blow his brains out!” Even George Meade pushed men back. Riding along the Baltimore Pike, Meade was passed by an Ohio battery, and when Meade asked “the capt what he was leaving for,” he was told that the battery was “out of Ammunition.” All you need to do to replenish your ammunition, Meade glowered back, was to send your caissons back “as there was plenty in the Train.” Meade treated him to “some little advice … giving him to understand that he would look into his case another time.”
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Some men tried to brass it out. Alexander Webb of the
Philadelphia Brigade stood “in the most conspicuous and exposed place, leaning on his sword and smoking a cigar, when all around the air was pierced by screeching
shot and shell,” standing “like a statue watching the movement of the enemy.”
John Gibbon also decided to put a little insouciance up for show, walking down the line of his division as if he was unaware of any danger, asking the men how they were holding up, and getting snarky answers: “O, this is bully,” “We are
getting to like it,” “O, we don’t mind this.” Alex Hays, who “always seemed happiest when in the thickest of the fight,” never dismounted, and rode through his division without the Confederate artillery seeming “to intimidate him in the least.” (At the other extreme,
Wheelock Veazey, the colonel of the 16th
Vermont, was puzzled to see men fall into the peculiar narcolepsy caused by artillery bombardment, as “I think a majority, fell asleep.”) Somewhere, a band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and Winfield Hancock decided to one-up both Hays and Gibbon by riding, mounted on a borrowed light bay and accompanied only by three staffers and an orderly,
John Wells, from left to right across the front of the
2nd Corps.
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But bravado was not insurance. Otis Howard remembered “a young artilleryman” who managed to sing and whistle, while keeping his battery’s horses from shying or bolting under the bombardment. “Just as I was remarking him for his heartiness and lovely conduct, a solid
shot struck him on his thigh; he gave one sharp cry and was no more.” Up on
Cemetery Hill, “there was plenty of dead men and horses strewing the ground,” along with “guns and caissons knocked into a cocked hat.”
Theodore Gates saw a solid shot kill a man who “flopped over like a pancake and never moved a muscle—was stone dead.” The bombardment caught a
6th Corps regiment, the 37th Massachusetts, while it was in column, shifting to a new position, and “tore terrible, bleeding gaps” through the close-packed men, killing and wounding thirty-one. One shell burst so near
James Barnes, at the head of his
5th Corps division, that Barnes was wounded in the leg and one of his staffers “had his face filled with powder.”
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Still, anyone who had the presence of mind to notice could see that the number of infantry casualties being inflicted by the bombardment was surprisingly small. (The British had discovered this same thing at the Alma: “Our young soldiers found themselves, as they imagined, in a thick storm of shot and
cannon-balls; but it seems that missiles of war fly crashing so audibly through foliage that they sound more dangerous than they are.”) The 69th Pennsylvania suffered one killed and sixteen wounded; their comrades in the rest of the
Philadelphia Brigade lost another thirty. One of the Vermont regiments reported a loss of “about sixty men while lying there”; the 7th Michigan, in Norman Hall’s brigade, simply noted that “not as much damage was done us as would naturally be expected from such a storm of missiles.”

On the other hand, it was not the infantry which was Walton’s and Alexander’s target. “Their fire was directed at our batteries,” observed an infantryman in the 1st Minnesota; “not a single shell dropped in this regiment.” And the batteries, as Gibbon’s aide
Frank Haskell could see, “had been handled much more severely.” Horses were killed, “in some batteries more than half of all.” In front of Norman Hall’s brigade, five horses and their drivers in
James Rorty’s New York battery went down, caissons burst, and soon the battery was reduced to two guns, then one. To the right, Hall could see three of Cushing’s limbers blown up, while “horses, men and [gun] carriages were piled together” and the battery was reduced to two serviceable guns. Within an hour, four of the five batteries along the
2nd Corps line were completely, or almost completely, out of action. And if the Confederates had shifted their targets to include the batteries on
Cemetery Hill, “there would not have been a live thing on that hill fifteen minutes after they opened fire.”
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The instinct of every gunner was to return fire, and after fifteen minutes, as the Federal batteries cleared for action, “we … worked our guns on the enemy as lively as we could.” On Cemetery Hill, guns were slewed around “by hand to the front” to face westward toward
Seminary Ridge, and as soon as one barrel became too hot to “use it any longer … we run and got another gun and rolled it up in position and fired that until it was impossible to bear our hand on it.” They certainly gave as good as they had gotten. After a few ranging shots “flew harmlessly over our heads,” one of the Confederate gunners in the peach orchard saw “the entire front of Cemetery Ridge … light up in a blaze … The tops of the trees near us were cut off, limbs broken, and the leaves fairly covered us.” A Confederate limber was struck by a shell, and shot “a thick, hot, white ring … straight up into the air,” so that “shapeless fragments of wood and iron were hurled high above the trees and fell on all sides in an irregular shower.”
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In Pickett’s division, the major of the 8th Virginia saw a shell take “off the head of Sergt. Morris of my brother tom’s Co. & plaistered his brains over my hat.” Another shell wounded the colonel of the 53rd Virginia,
William Aylett, and the colonel of the 3rd Virginia was struck by a “handful of earth mixed with blood and brains” which had, a moment before, belonged to “two poor fellows,” and seriously wounded the sergeant major of the neighboring 7th Virginia. That sergeant major, David Johnston, survived fractured ribs, a “badly contused” left lung, and paralysis down his left side, and years later described Pickett’s division as sort of a grotesque shooting gallery in which “at almost every moment muskets, swords, haversacks, human flesh and bones flying and dangling in the air or bouncing above the earth, which now trembled as if shaken by an earthquake.” The incessant discharging, blasting, cracking, and pounding created its own miniature weather system, and a soldier in the 16th Mississippi was amazed to see that “birds, attempting to fly, tumbled and fell to the ground.”
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Still, sangfroid was the rule on the Confederate side as much as on the Union one. One of the artillerymen heard a voice, “when the artillery fire was at its height,” singing a parody of
Elizabeth Allen’s sentimental “Rock Me to Sleep
”
from the summer of 1860:

Another voice irreverently interrupted: “Yes; and a
gal
child at that.” James Kemper was astonished to see Longstreet nonchalantly riding down the front of Pickett’s division, “slowly and majestically, with an inspiring confidence, composure, self-possession and repressed power.” In the 56th Virginia, however, the men in the regiment were less impressed by Longstreet’s bravado and more concerned about the likelihood that he would attract the unwelcome attention of Federal gunners to their position. “You’ll get your old fool head knocked off,” they shouted unceremoniously. “We’ll fight without you leading us.”
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And yet, like the Confederate artillery, the sound and fury of the Union guns signified comparatively little, once the dust settled. In Joe Davis’
North Carolina brigade, “the fire was heavy and incessant,” but at the end, the final bill was “2 men killed and 21 wounded.” In Pickett’s division, the 8th Virginia’s colonel,
Eppa Hunton, counted 5 dead out the 205 men he had ready for the attack;
Randolph Shotwell, also from the 8th Virginia, estimated that in the entire division Pickett may have lost between 350 and 500 men killed and wounded, certainly not nearly enough to prevent Pickett’s division from making its attack. And there might not have even been that many, if Henry Hunt, Meade’s chief of artillery, had been able to get his way.
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The opening of the Confederate bombardment at one o’clock caught Hunt on
Little Round Top, in the midst of “an inspection of the whole line.” Hunt guessed with cool accuracy what the Confederates were up to. From
Cemetery Ridge, he could see “batteries already in line or going into position” from Sherfy’s peach orchard all the way up to the outskirts of Gettysburg itself. At each point, Hunt had “instructed the chiefs of artillery and battery commanders” to wait for the Confederates to act first, and if they had to open fire at all, to “concentrate … with all possible accuracy on those batteries which were most destructive to us.” By one o’clock, Hunt had worked his way down to
Benjamin Rittenhouse, who had succeeded to command of Hazlett’s battery of 10-pounder Parrotts on Little Round Top. There, Hunt remarked that he had been observing a lot of Confederate artillery activity “opposite our centre and left,” along
Seminary Ridge, and that he was sure they “were getting ready for a charge on our centre.”

That attack, however, would begin “with their artillery,” and Hunt wanted Rittenhouse to understand that he would not tolerate any yielding to the usual artilleryman’s temptation to fire back and turn things into a useless artillery duel. Hunt repeated for Rittenhouse the same orders he had given the others: “not to return their fire, but to reserve my ammunition for the
charge.” If they must return fire, do it “deliberately and slowly as at target practice,” and that would save “at least half our ammunition … to meet the assault when it came.” Once the “furious cannonade” opened up, Hunt estimated that he was seeing “one hundred to one hundred and twenty guns … bearing on our west front,” and he took himself off to what was left of the by-now-depleted artillery reserve, and ordered the reserve chief,
Robert Tyler, to get the four remaining batteries of the reserve limbered up and moving to the front.
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Convinced that the barrage would certainly be followed by an infantry assault, Hunt rode up behind
Freeman McGilvery’s gun line, still parked across the gap made by the collapse of the
3rd Corps the day before, and kept urging them to reply slowly, “so that when the enemy’s ammunition was exhausted, we should have sufficient left to meet the assault.” He worked northward, up the ridgeline, noticing the “infantry … lying down on its reverse slope, near the crest, in open ranks.” He was pleased to find the
2nd Corps batteries obeying his advice to keep their fire “deliberate.” But a quick check of the limbers showed Hunt that “the ammunition was running low,” and since Meade had left the Leister cottage for parts unknown to Hunt, the schoolmasterish artilleryman “rode back along the ridge, ordering the fire to cease.” A half-hour after leaving
Little Round Top, Hunt returned to McGilvery’s batteries with the same orders.