Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg (10 page)

So, forward they went into a chaos of exploding shells that dropped men at almost every step. On they marched, closing ranks and keeping alignment almost as if they were on the parade ground. It was an awesome spectacle that participants on both sides remembered until the end of their lives—which for many came within the next half hour. We share that awe as we walk across these fields toward the Union line, hearing in our imagination the explosions of shells and the screams of the wounded.

As they approached the Union line, Pickett's division obliqued left so that the concentrated force of the attackers focused on that six-hundred-yard front. Yankee artillery and infantry waited behind their breastworks of fence rails and piled dirt and, for three hundred yards of that front, the protection of a stone
wall. That wall made a ninety-degree turn to the east for sixty yards before resuming its south-north direction. As the attackers crossed the Emmitsburg Road, the spearhead of the assault headed toward that angle in the stone wall. Union artillery switched to canister (bullet-sized balls packed into casings), and Northern riflemen sent sheets of lead into those dense gray lines of infantry. On the right flank of Kemper's brigade, two Vermont regiments swung forward from the Union line and raked the Virginians with a devastating enfilading fire. Six hundred yards to the north, the Eighth Ohio did the same thing to Virginians and Mississippians in Pettigrew's division, aided by several companies of the 108th and 126th New York. The Ohioans deployed through the grounds of what was for decades the Home Sweet Home Motel. The National Park acquired this property in 2002 and razed the motel. The nearest building now to the rear of the Eighth Ohio's position is General Pickett's Buffet and Battle Theater—which would amuse the Ohioans if they could come back.

In the face of these counterattacks, the Confederate flanks melted away like butter on a hot summer day. In the center, too, all was chaos. Longstreet's worst fears were coming true. Trimble went down with a wound that would cost him a leg. Pettigrew received a flesh wound in the hand. Garnett's riderless horse bolted out of the smoke; his master's body was later
buried with his men and never identified. Kemper was crippled by a severe wound. All fifteen regimental commanders in Pickett's division went down; nine of them were killed. Thirteen of Pickett's regiments suffered the ignominy of having their flags captured by the enemy.

Perhaps two hundred men with Armistead had broken through the line at the angle in the stone wall, only to be shot down or captured by Union reserves who counterattacked to close the breach. Armistead received a mortal wound as he placed his hand on an enemy cannon to claim its capture. By four o'clock it was all over. Unwounded but dazed Confederate survivors stumbled back to their starting point. Barely half returned. Of the forty-two regiments that took part in the primary attack, twenty-eight lost their colors to the enemy—by far the highest total for any one action in the war. In addition, of the eight supporting regiments that finally came forward—too late to help—one lost its flag as well.

A stroll around this “high water mark” of the Confederacy is well worth the time it takes to read the interpretive markers and absorb the information on the three dozen regimental monuments and the dozen or more tablets originally placed by the War Department. One Union monument in particular attracts our attention: the Seventy-second Pennsylvania monument with its bronze soldier atop a pedestal
preparing to strike the enemy with his clubbed musket in hand-to-hand combat.

The Seventy-second was part of the Philadelphia brigade—four regiments from that city (69th, 71st, 72nd, and 106th Pennsylvania) which held the Union position that bore the brunt of the Confederate attack. The Seventy-second was originally in reserve about fifty yards to the rear of this monument (at a spot marked by an earlier regimental monument). When the veterans of the Seventy-second proposed in the 1880s to erect a second monument at the advanced position along the stone wall, the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association refused permission. The veterans took the association to court. Several battle participants and witnesses testified for each side in this case. The brigade's commander, Brigadier General Alexander S. Webb, testified that at the crisis of the battle he had ordered the Seventy-second forward from its reserve position. They refused to go, he said. He tried to grab the national flag from the color sergeant to carry it forward, but the sergeant wouldn't let go. (Webb had been in command of the brigade for only a few days, so most of the men may not have known who he was.) Only after the enemy breakthrough had been contained and the assault repulsed, Webb claimed, did the regiment go forward to the place of honor where these craven cowards wanted to
place their monument. Others disputed Webb's testimony, and in the end the judge ruled in favor of the Seventy-second's veterans. They got their second monument, on the front line. And perhaps they deserved it. Statistics of killed and wounded are a rough index of how hard a regiment fought. The Seventy-second had sixty-four killed and 125 wounded at Gettysburg—one-third of the brigade's casualties. It appears that they did quite a bit of fighting after all—or at least they took a lot of punishment.

Descendants of Confederates have had their own controversies about the placement of monuments at the high-water mark. That designation long belonged to the monument marking the spot where Armistead fell, about thirty yards on the Union side of the stone wall. But North Carolinians have disputed this placement of the high-water mark. They insist that a few men in the Twenty-sixth North Carolina penetrated twenty yards farther than the Virginian Armistead. Whatever the merits of this claim, the Twenty-sixth North Carolina unquestionably earned other distinctions. With a total of 840 men going into action on July 1, it was the largest regiment in either army. Its twenty-one-year-old “boy colonel,” Henry Burg-wyn, killed on July 1, was the youngest to hold that rank in either army. The regiment fought on both July 1 and 3, sustaining a total of 687 casualties, which
was both the largest number and percentage (82 percent) for any regiment in the battle. (The same percentage in the First Minnesota on July 2 was for only eight of its ten companies.) Company F of the Twenty-sixth included four sets of twins, every one of whom was killed or wounded in the battle—a phenomenon unmatched by any other unit in the entire war.

Park historians accepted the claim that the Twenty-sixth advanced farther than any other regiment, and allowed North Carolina to place their monument at that point. But the place is to the north of the east-west jog of the stone wall, and
outside
the Union defensive line, while the Armistead monument represents a breakthrough of that line. The controversy reflects a long-standing dispute between Virginians and North Carolinians, who resented Virginia's domination of the writing of Confederate history. Much of the dispute has centered on “Pickett's Charge.” North Carolinians maintain that it should be called “the Pickett-Pettigrew Charge” (Pettigrew was from North Carolina) because almost as many North Carolina regiments (fifteen) as Virginia regiments (nineteen) took part. And the Twenty-sixth North Carolina, they continue to insist, got farther than any Virginian. To assuage the bruised North Carolina ego, it is now politically correct to call it the Pickett-Pettigrew assault. But this in turn is misleading, for ten of those fifteen
North Carolina regiments were in Trimble's two brigades, not in Pettigrew's division.

Not to be outdone, Mississippians have entered the fray. Under pressure from Senator Trent Lott of that state, the Park Service in 1998 allowed a monument to the Eleventh Mississippi to be placed about two hundred yards north of, and as close to the Union lines as, that of the Twenty-sixth North Carolina. The Eleventh Mississippi was a notable regiment. Most of its companies were composed of rough-hewn backwoodsmen, famous for their marksmanship. But all of the soldiers in Company A were University of Mississippi students who enlisted as a body in 1861—the University Greys. They later earned literary fame through the medium of William Faulkner's
Absalom, Absalom!
On July 3, 1863, a baker's dozen of the Eleventh did get as far as the place where their monument now stands. But what the tablet on the monument does
not
say is that when the lieutenant commanding this contingent looked back for the rest of the regiment, he was dismayed to see it running to the rear “in full disorder, at the distance of about one hundred & fifty yards from us.” Having no choice, the lieutenant hoisted a white flag and surrendered to the Yankees of the 111 th New York.

These controversies about who got the farthest would be amusing if Confederate heritage groups did
not take the matter so seriously. Pickett's Charge— excuse me, the Pickett-Pettigrew assault—is viewed not only as the Confederacy's high-water mark, but also as one of the most courageous and praiseworthy events in military history. For decades the hearts of surviving veterans swelled with pride when they recounted their deeds in that attack. Southern honor knew no finer hour. I have always been struck by the contrast between this image and that of the Army of the Potomac's frontal assault against Confederate lines at Cold Harbor exactly eleven months later. In that attack, ordered by Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, fifty thousand Union soldiers suffered seven thousand casualties, most of them in less than half an hour. For this mistake, which he admitted, Grant has been branded a “butcher” careless of the lives of his men, and Cold Harbor has become a symbol of mule-headed futility. At Gettysburg, Lee's men also sustained almost seven thousand casualties in the Pickett-Pettigrew assault, most of them also within a half hour. Yet this attack is perceived as an example of great courage and honor. This contrast speaks volumes about the comparative images of Grant and Lee, North and South, Union and Confederacy.

The Eleventh Mississippi monument stands close to the Brian house and barn. One of the park's markers spells the name as Bryan; the other, a few feet away, as Brian. Perhaps the Park Service agrees with
Andrew Jackson, a notorious misspeller, who said that he could not respect any man who knew only one way to spell a word. In any case, Abraham Brian's twelve-acre farm was right smack in the middle of the fighting on July 3. Shells tore holes in his roof; bullets broke his windows; soldiers trampled his crops. But Brian/Bryan was not there to see it. Like many of the other 474 African-Americans in Adams County— 190 of them living in the town of Gettysburg—he had fled north with his family to put the Susquehanna River between them and the Confederates.

These black people had good reason to flee. Although most of them, including Brian and another black farmer who lived on the battlefield, James Warfield, had always been free, some were former slaves who had escaped from Maryland or Virginia. In the previous Confederate invasion of Union territory, in September 1862, Southern cavalry had made little distinction between free blacks and escaped slaves, driving dozens of them back to Virginia and slavery. They were doing the same thing again in Pennsylvania. In Chambersburg, two local residents wrote in their diaries that when Confederates entered the town in June, “one of the revolting features of this day was the scouring of the fields about the town and searching of houses in portions of the place for Negroes.” “O! How it grated on our hearts to have to sit quietly & look at such brutal deeds—I saw no men among
the contrabands—all women and children. Some of the colored people who were raised here were taken along.”

The Chambersburg newspaper estimated that the Rebels sent at least fifty local blacks back to Virginia. A diarist raised the estimate to 250 from Franklin County. Blacks in Gettysburg had plenty of warning, and cleared out. Some never returned. Abraham Brian did return. He repaired his house and tided his family over until the next season by exhuming the bodies of Union soldiers at a dollar each for reinterment in the soldiers’ cemetery dedicated in November. Brian submitted a claim of more than a thousand dollars to the federal government for damages to his farm. He received forty-five dollars.

As the walking wounded and unwounded survivors of the Pickett-Pettigrew attack reached their own lines, they found Lee and Longstreet working vigorously to patch together a defense against an expected counterattack. “General Pickett,” said Lee to a slumped figure from whom all thoughts of glory had fled, “place your division in the rear of this hill, and be ready to repel the advance of the enemy should they follow up their advantage.” “General Lee,” replied Pickett despairingly, “I have no division now.” According to later recollections by Confederate soldiers, Lee rode among his men to buck up their spirits. “It's all my fault,” he reportedly said. “It is I
who have lost this fight, and you must help me out of it the best way you can. All good men must rally.”

Rally they did, after a fashion. But Meade did not order a counterattack. It was not for lack of urging by at least some of his subordinates, including Hancock. Wounded at the height of the action by a bullet that drove a bent nail from his saddle into his thigh, Hancock—misinterpreting the source of the nail—said, “They must be hard up for ammunition if they throw such a shot as that.”

The Confederates
were
short of artillery ammunition. And they had lost at least 23,000—perhaps as many as 28,000—killed, wounded, and captured men during these three days. But Meade, who knew that his own army had been hurt—23,000 casualties altogether—could not know just how badly off his adversary was. The Union commander's failure to follow up his victory with a counterthrust during the nearly four hours of remaining daylight on July 3 provoked criticism at the time and through the years. He had kept the 13,000 fresh troops of the Sixth Corps in reserve; most of them had not fired a shot in the battle. Eight thousand of them were on alert a mile south of the area where the heaviest fighting took place, but Meade had not sent word for them to deploy, nor did he do so after the Confederates were repulsed.

Meade has his defenders, however. They point out that a heavy load of responsibility weighed on his
shoulders. He had been in command for only six days, three of them fighting for his army's survival. Could he jeopardize his victory by risking a counterattack against an enemy that still had sharp teeth and might bite back as hard as it had been bitten? “We have done well enough,” said Meade to a cavalry officer eager to do more. Meade later explained that he did not want to follow “the bad example [Lee] had set me, in ruining himself attacking a strong position.”