Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg (7 page)

Chamberlain seemed likely to meet the same fate. He had already been slightly wounded twice. With a third of his four hundred men down and the rest of them nearly out of ammunition, with the enemy apparently forming for yet another assault, the Twentieth Maine seemed finished. As Chamberlain later wrote, at this crisis “my thought was running deep.… Five minutes more of such a defensive, and the last
roll-call would sound for us. Desperate as the chances were, there was nothing for it but to take the offensive. I stepped to the colors. The men turned toward me. One word was enough,—’BAYONET!’ It caught like fire, and swept along the ranks.” With a wild yell, the survivors of this two-hour firefight, led by their multilingual fighting professor, lurched downhill in a bayonet charge against the shocked Alabamians. The Twentieth drove them across the front of the next Union regiments in line, the Eighty-third Pennsylvania and the Forty-fourth New York, and together these three regiments captured more than two hundred of them (Chamberlain claimed almost four hundred).

The hero-worship of Chamberlain has prompted a minor backlash among some historians and park rangers who have grown tired of exaggerated questions and claims by visitors who want to see where Chamberlain performed these exploits. The revisionists claim that the men of the Twentieth spontaneously charged, or that Ellis Spear deserves the credit for the bayonet assault (though no one denies that it was Chamberlain who gave the order to fix bayonets). They quote the report of Colonel William C. Oates, commander of the Fifteenth Alabama (who, like Chamberlain, later became governor of his state), that he was in fact preparing to withdraw when the Twentieth Maine came screaming down the hill, and that the withdrawal was a retreat, not a rout. Oates doth protest too much. But
there is no doubt that the Alabamians were exhausted and dehydrated after seemingly endless uphill fighting following a twenty-five-mile march to the battlefield.

It seems clear, however, that Chamberlain deserved the Congressional Medal of Honor he won for the defense of Little Round Top. He went on to become one of the war's most extraordinary soldiers. He rose to brigade command and, on June 18, 1864, was shot through the pelvis while leading his brigade in an assault at Petersburg. Such wounds were almost always fatal; Ulysses S. Grant promoted the supposedly dying colonel to brigadier general on the field—one of only two such occasions in the war. Chamberlain beat the odds and recovered to lead his brigade in the final campaign to Appomattox. At the battle of Quaker Road on March 29, 1865, he took another bullet, this one just below the heart, where it would have killed him had it not been deflected around his ribs by a leather case of field orders in his breast pocket. Chamberlain suffered two cracked ribs and a bruised arm, but continued to lead his brigade in several more fights during the next eleven days until the surrender at Appomattox. So impressed was Grant with his fighting professor that he selected Chamberlain to take charge of the Army of Northern Virginia's formal surrender at Appomattox.

In 1886, Chamberlain and other veterans of the Twentieth Maine returned to Gettysburg to dedicate
their monument on Little Round Top. As we stand at the same spot, listen to Chamberlain's words on that occasion: “In great deeds, something abides. On great fields something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear, but spirits linger, to consecrate the ground for the vision-place of souls. And reverent men and women from afar, and generations that know us not and that we know not of, heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them…” Little wonder that my students could not hold back the tears when I read these words to them here in 1987.

The Twentieth Maine was not the only Union regiment whose heroics helped to save the day at Gettysburg. We will walk back to the west face of Little Round Top to study the interpretive markers and a dozen monuments there. One of the latter is a bust of Colonel Patrick O’Rorke, who graduated at the top of his West Point Class of 1861, the same class in which George Armstrong Custer, now a brigadier general, had finished last. O’Rorke fell dead with a bullet through his neck while leading his 140th New York in a counterattack that saved that flank of the Union position from collapse. We can also stand on a granite boulder next to a bronze statue of General Warren looking to the southwest where he professed to have seen the glint of sunlight reflected from enemy rifles.

From there we will head down the north slope of Little Round Top and continue on Sedgwick Avenue for a half-mile, where it becomes Hancock Avenue at about the point where it also begins to rise gradually from a swale to the higher ground of Cemetery Ridge. On the right, soon after the road becomes Hancock Avenue, is another impressive bronze statue, of Father William Corby standing with his right arm raised in blessing. Father Corby was chaplain of the famed Irish Brigade of Major General Winfield Scott Hancock's Second Corps. These five regiments, composed mainly of Irish-American Catholics, were much depleted by their losses in battle the previous year but still full of fight.

As the Third Corps was being pushed back from the Rose farm and the Wheatfield, Meade ordered Hancock to send a division to their support. That division included the Irish Brigade. Before they marched away from this spot, Father Corby climbed onto the boulder where his statue stands, and blessed the troops. After doing so, he added ominously that “the Catholic church refuses Christian burial to the soldier who turns his back upon the foe or deserts his flag.” He then pronounced the Latin words of absolution for those who would not come back. Men from other regiments standing nearby also bowed their heads and accepted absolution even though they were Protestants; after all, it couldn't hurt.

The Irish brigade went into action three-quarters of a mile southwest of where Father Corby stands; its position is marked by a monument on Ayres Avenue that includes a bronze relief of the brigade mascot, an Irish wolfhound. Father Corby is one of the few Civil War chaplains honored by a monument (erected in 1910 by veterans of the Irish Brigade); he is surely the only one commemorated by
two
monuments, the second at Notre Dame University, where he served as president for many years after the Civil War.

A quarter-mile north of Father Corby's statue, on the left side of Hancock Avenue, stands one of the most impressive and moving monuments on the battlefield. It depicts a soldier running forward atop a high pedestal. The monument commemorates the attack by eight companies (262 men) of the First Minnesota against an entire Alabama brigade of 1,500 men. The First Minnesota had been in service longer than almost any other regiment in the Army of the Potomac. It had fought in nearly all of the battles since First Bull Run in July 1861, suffering some 260 killed and wounded before Gettysburg. There it would nearly double that total.

As the sun was setting on July 2, the First Minnesota was in line supporting an artillery battery (six guns) near the spot where the monument stands. Fragments of retreating Third Corps units streamed toward the rear while out of the haze of gunsmoke appeared a
line of Alabama troops emerging from a thicket three hundred yards away. All other Union infantry in this sector had gone to the Wheatfield earlier. In a few minutes the Alabama brigade would breach this crucial position unless it was stopped. Hancock galloped up and shouted, “My God! Are these all the men we have here?” Reinforcements were on the way but they could not arrive for ten minutes. Hancock needed to buy that much time, even if it cost every man in the regiment. Turning to Colonel William Colvill, Hancock pointed to the Alabamians and yelled, “Advance, Colonel, and take those colors.”

Without hesitation, the 262 men fixed bayonets and began double-timing forward. “Every man realized in an instant what that order meant—death or wounds to us all,” wrote Colvill, who was wounded in the attack, “and every man saw and accepted the necessity for the sacrifice.” With a yell they tore into the Alabamians and bought Hancock his ten minutes and more. The Confederates made it no farther. Seventy Minnesotans didn't make it at all, and another 145 were wounded or missing. This casualty rate of 82 percent of those engaged was the highest of the war for any Union regiment in a single action.

As the fighting died away at dark on the Union left, the volume of artillery and rifle fire a mile or two northeast at Culp's and East Cemetery Hills continued unabated. This part of the battlefield was the
most visited by tourists in the 1870s and 1880s, for it was the first land purchased by the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association, a private group formed in 1864 to preserve and commemorate the battlefield. Today, however, it is the least visited portion of the battlefield, partly because it is only on the “optional” route of the Park Service's self-guided auto tour, and partly because all of the action described in
The Killer Angels
and the film/miniseries
Gettysburg
occurred on other parts of the battlefield. But the Culp's Hill/East Cemetery Hill fighting was intense, and just as important to the battle's outcome as elsewhere. If the Confederates had captured this position or achieved a breakthrough, it would have been as disastrous for the Union cause as the loss of Little Round Top or Cemetery Ridge.

From the First Minnesota monument we proceed north a tenth of a mile, turn right on Pleasonton Avenue, left onto the Taneytown Road (Route 134), and right at Hunt Avenue, following it for a half mile to a T-crossing at the Baltimore Pike (Route 97). We'll turn right there, then after three-tenths of a mile left onto Slocum Avenue, which will wind through the woods for a half-mile to the optional auto-tour stop at Spangler's Spring. The interpretive markers in this area describe the actions that took place on the evening of July 2 and the morning of July 3. The many monuments alongside the road as one proceeds
up the steep grade to the observation tower commemorate the Union regiments that fought here. We will follow that route in a few moments, but first we pause to consider another long-standing Gettysburg myth.

We are advised not to drink the water from Spangler's Spring today. But no such advisory existed in 1863, when this unpolluted water was a godsend for thirsty soldiers. The lines of the opposing armies were close together near the spring on the night of July 2-3. As the theme of Blue-Gray reconciliation grew to powerful proportions from the 1880s onward, a story arose that on this dark night both Confederate and Union soldiers went to the spring to fill their canteens. There they encountered each other, called a truce, talked over the battle, and traded jokes before returning to their own lines. This story fit perfectly with the spirit of joint Blue-Gray veterans’ reunions that began at Gettysburg as early as 1887.

For decades, battlefield guides and the Park Service's interpretive marker and literature told the romantic tale of fraternization at Spangler's Spring. But there is no truth to it, and today the guides and marker tell the real story. When a captain in the Forty-sixth Pennsylvania approached the spring with several empty canteens, he discovered enemy soldiers filling theirs. He backed away silently and returned to his own lines, thanking his lucky stars he had escaped
capture. That is the fact, but it is far less interesting than the legend and did not fit the theme of North-South reconciliation, which explains why legend long prevailed over fact.

Confederates controlled the area around Spangler's Spring because five of the six brigades of the Union Twelfth Corps had gone to the left in response to calls for reinforcements against Longstreet's assault. (As it turned out, most of them were not needed.) They left behind only the five New York regiments of Brigadier General George S. Greene's brigade to hold the hill. This move opened a splendid opportunity for the Confederates. Lee's plan for July 2 had called for Ewell's corps to convert its demonstration against Culp's Hill into a real attack if and when Meade weakened his right to reinforce his left. Meade did so, but Ewell was slow to seize the opportunity. The attack against Culp's Hill by Major General Edward Johnson's division and against Cemetery Hill by two brigades of Jubal Early's division did not get started until almost dusk.

Attacking up the steep east side of Culp's Hill from the valley of Rock Creek, Johnson's three brigades of seventeen regiments outnumbered Greene's New Yorkers by more than three to one. Greene contracted his lines to defend four hundred yards of trenches along the upper slope, abandoning the other four hundred yards leading down to Spangler's Spring. Traces of
these trenches can be seen east of Slocum Avenue as we ascend the hill. The attackers overran the empty trenches. They then turned right to attack the Union line end-on. Holding this flank was the 137th New York, commanded by Colonel David Ireland, whose predicament here was the same as Colonel Chamberlain's at the other end of the Union line. Just as Chamberlain bent back his line to the left, Ireland bent his to the right. And the 137th fought just as courageously against superior numbers as the 20th Maine did—lacking only the bayonet charge. But no novelist has told the story of the 137th, and few visitors stop to view its monument on the right of Slocum Avenue about a hundred yards past the intersection with Geary Avenue. It is worth our while to stop and contemplate this monument before going on to the top of Culp's Hill and climbing the observation tower that rises next to the splendid bronze statue of General Greene, who remembered his successful defense of Culp's Hill until his death thirty-six years later at the age of ninety-eight.

Looking northwest from the tower, we see open fields in the near foreground. At dusk on July 2, two brigades of Jubal Early's division swept across this swale between Culp's Hill and East Cemetery Hill to attack the remnants of their Eleventh Corps adversaries of the previous day. Descending from the tower, we will follow Slocum Avenue until it turns left;
instead of turning where the auto-tour sign beckons us, we will continue straight ahead on Wainwright Avenue. This narrow road marks the position held by two brigades of the Eleventh Corps. Once again these hapless regiments broke, streaming back up the steep hill to our left. On came the Confederates, threatening to capture the Union artillery at the top. We too will hike up this hill to look at the gun emplacements. Timely Union reinforcements coming from the area that is now the national cemetery counterattacked and drove Early's brigades down the hill and back to their starting point. Much of this fighting was hand-to-hand and took place after dark, when soldiers were in almost as much danger from friendly fire as from the enemy.