Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (32 page)

A fourth brigade of Anderson’s, under Carnot Posey, had been ordered up on Wright’s left to cover his flank, but Posey was nowhere in sight. Threatened with encirclement in the center of the enemy’s position, Wright, very bitter, could only order his Georgians to withdraw.

Posey, for his failure to come up, gave the lame excuse that he was waiting for the fifth brigade, under Mahone, to support him. Fortunately for Posey’s people, his discovery that he was not going to be supported occurred before, like Wright, he was all alone on Cemetery Ridge.

For Billy Mahone, a little man with a large ego who had enjoyed previous big moments and was to know more of them, there was no excuse at all. A V.M.I, graduate, prewar railroad-builder and executive, Mahone simply refused to accept the orders delivered by Anderson’s staff officers. Claiming he had been given contrary orders, Mahone kept his men rooted to their safe ground while their companions in Wright’s brigade were left dead and dying on the slopes of Cemetery Ridge in a somber withdrawal from the crest of the hill.

The three divisions had fought (with Hood attacking at 4:00 p.m., McLaws after 5:00, and Anderson around 6:00) five enemy divisions from three different corps, brigades and regiments from other corps (troops from six corps altogether), and a heavy concentration of artillery. Yet the game had seemed within the hand of any of the three.

Beginning with Warren on the column of Little Round Top and ending with combative Hancock, who sent in reinforcements near the center, there had invariably been an energetic Federal general to rush some of the steadily arriving troops to a threatened point at the very last moment. The Confederates had first Evander Law, a young brigadier acting on his own; then Longstreet, overriding McLaws and mishandling what turned out to be the middle attack; and, finally, the previously competent Dick Anderson exercising no control whatsoever over what should have been the climactic thrust.

So supine was Anderson that Cadmus Marcellus Wilcox related his A.A.G’s account of the division commander when Wilcox’s staff officer rode back across the Emmitsburg road to ask for support to hold the brigade’s advanced position. “He found General Anderson back in the woods which were in the rear of the Emmitsburg road several hundred yards in a ravine, his horse tied and all his staff lying on the ground [indifferent] as tho’ nothing was going on. … [General] Wright never liked him afterwards. I really thought that I should have made some report or complaint against him, but I did not, lest my motives might have been misunderstood. …”

This was Wilcox, who, like Wright, felt that he had sacrificed his men in vain. It is true that no report mentions a staff officer of Anderson’s carrying a single message.

At some point this competent subordinate, left floundering between familiar Longstreet and strange Hill, had, like Ewell in a different test of decision, quit under an unfamiliar responsibility. As an animal does in an insoluble maze, Dick Anderson, the self-effacing gentleman with the Pennsylvania wife, simply sat down and eschewed resolutions.

Nor does this grim parlay complete the record of command failure on that hot Thursday in July. The overlong Confederate line spread on northward and northeast, embracing the bastions of Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill. There Ewell was to exert a pressure that would at least prevent reinforcements from moving southward. At best, he would deliver, in the tradition of Stonewall Jackson’s corps, the assault that had been withheld the day before.

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Ewell’s action, coming at the end of the afternoon and as inconclusive as all the rest, seemed something of an anticlimax after Longstreet’s attack, for which the army had waited all day; yet this unco-ordinated assault came closer than any other Confederate thrust to winning a commanding position in the Union defenses.

Law’s “fight for Little Round Top” was more dramatic, but Hays’s unsung attack in the dark actually carried Cemetery Hill. Had he been supported, the Battle of Gettysburg might have ended there—where it should have ended the night before. It was another story of three divisions working independently, with no general control over the corps.

Essentially, Dick Ewell, though showing more outward composure than the preceding day, lacked the self-command to control the destinies of three separated divisions in a movement in vague conjunction with Longstreet’s distant operations. The paralysis of his will having worn off, he was acutely aware of his earlier failure. After the indirect proddings of General Lee during the morning, Ewell suffered between fear of another failure and an inner goad to commit his troops to action. His unsettled state could not have been helped by the long wait for the sound of Longstreet’s guns, which frayed everyone’s nerves.

These tense hours Ewell apparently passed in solitary fretting. He had advised his three division commanders—Allegheny Johnson, Jubal Early, and Robert Rodes—that they should begin their demonstration when they heard Long-street’s guns. He left to their discretion whether or not they should change the threat into actual assault.

The three divisions were well situated to deliver a three-pronged attack, if the attacks were made in concert. Rodes would strike from the northwest, where the Federals on Cemetery Hill faced across the valley toward Seminary Ridge; Early would come in from almost due north, where the Federal flank turned at a right angle on East Cemetery Hill; and Johnson would storm the difficult terrain of Culp’s Hill, on the northeast, almost in the rear of the Union flank.

As if sensitive about their exposed flank south of Culp’s Hill, the Federals had been giving Johnson’s division trouble all afternoon, particularly with heavy snapshooting. Some of his troops were engaged in limited actions when at four o’clock the sonorous roll from down the valley told Johnson that Longstreet had opened at last. To Benner’s Hill, east of Gettysburg, Johnson dispatched Andrews’s sixteen-gun Maryland battalion with the support of the Rockbridge battery.

Andrews was out of action because of wounds, and his four batteries were commanded by twenty-year-old Major Joseph Latimer, who looked, according to one of the Rockbridge gunners, “a mere youth.” Latimer was cool in action, very skillful in directing his guns while under the enemy’s fire, and he was much admired in the Second Corps. That afternoon his cannoneers had no chance. Heavy Federal artillery immediately answered him and soon found the range. Within five minutes one of his caissons exploded. Twenty-seven men went down in the Allegheny Roughs. Gunners in other batteries began dropping, and it became evident that the open hill was too hot a place to stay.

Major Latimer advised Johnson of the hopelessness of the duel, and Old Allegheny immediately ordered him to get out.

While the guns were being withdrawn, the “Boy Major” suffered a wound from which he later died.

This depressing business happened around sundown.

At that point Ewell’s compulsion to deliver an attack finally overcame his fear of failure, and he ordered a general attack. In so doing, he made virtually no artillery preparations. Only four batteries were scattered in support of Early and Rodes, and two battalions remained inactive while the gunners grazed the horses. Unaware of this demonstration of their superior officer’s temporary unfitness, Johnson and Early rushed their men into action as if relieved that the tension of the long wait was over.

Johnson, waving his hickory club, sent in three yelling brigades from Stonewall’s old division at the rock formations of Culp’s Hill. The tumbling hillside, cluttered with woods and thickets and low boulders, was almost a duplication of Little Round Top, though not so precipitous. As at Little Round Top, the attackers breached the first defense line, established a foothold around the base of the hill, and, at darkness, settled down to a savage, formless fight that streaked the smoky blackness with flashes of rifle fire. Also, as the Confederate units at the other end of the line had done, Johnson’s brigades were containing Federal troops, posing a threat, and opening other sectors of the defense arc to attack.

In the middle, Jubal Early’s troops made the most of the opening, though with only two brigades. The brigade of Extra Billy Smith was kept back on the York road, where the political general was still waiting for the phantoms of the evening before to materialize into an enemy. Early, normally an aggressive fighter, for some reason decided to go by the book, and held Gordon’s hard-striking brigade in reserve.

By now Jeb Stuart’s troopers had arrived. Exhausted though they were, his men could have relieved Smith from his anxious guard duty instead of merely supporting him—as they did—against nothing. With Smith moved up in reserve, Gordon could have thrown in the weight of his brigade, which had turned the tide in the previous day’s battle.

But Early made no use of Smith and cautiously conserved Gordon to be advanced where he would be most effective after Rodes went in on the right and the battle had developed its form. Jubal Early would probably have sent Gordon in anyway had he seen the position taken by his two active brigades. But the attack was delivered so late in the day that dusk had fallen when the two brigades reached the foot of East Cemetery Hill, and as they fought their way to the top they were lost in the heavy battle smoke. Gordon remained idle while the two brigades actually took the heights and were abandoned there.

Hoke’s North Carolinians were taken in by Colonel Avery, who fell with a mortal wound, and brought out by Colonel Archibald Godwin. Hays commanded the fierce Louisiana brigade.

Harry Hays was the brigadier who, in the Gettysburg square the day before, had demanded directly of Ewell that he be allowed to continue the pursuit and take the hill. Another of the non-West-Pointers who shone that day, Hays was a forty-three-year-old Tennessean with a law practice in New Orleans. With only the usual Mexican War experience with volunteers, he had come into the Confederate armies as colonel of the 7th Louisiana, and had inherited the sometime unruly brigade of President Taylor’s son.

This brigade comprised an odd collection of plantation scions, New Orleans plug-uglies, an Irish regiment replete with its own flag bearing a harp, a regiment of Acadians who danced the polka around campfires, and sundry rough characters from the bayous. Before they lost their colorful leader, Richard Taylor, the Louisiana Tigers had rivaled the Texans in their imperviousness to discipline, and they boasted a Creole cook who became the colored Casanova of Virginia. Although somewhat subdued in their extravagant assertions by casualties and time, they were still very tough fellows.

Harry Hays had come along after their early gaudy flare had dimmed, and the men had conformed to army standards according to their natures. It was a happy meeting of troops and leader. Always a good man, in the dusk of July 2 Hays just missed becoming militarily immortalized in a niche above any other officer in either army on that field.

Hays’s men moved straight up the hill, taking three successive positions. The first was a fence by a ravine at the bottom of the hill, the second was a stone wall, the third was a fixed line of rifle pits behind an abatis of fallen trees. Hays’s Loui-sianians drove the enemy with more finality and consistency, and with fewer losses to themselves, than any other Confederate troops who attacked that day.

Hays attributed his comparatively light losses during the climb through three lines to “the darkness of the evening, now verging into night, and the deep obscurity afforded by the smoke of the firing. …” Except for that, he said, the massed guns on the crest would have produced “slaughter.”

The men’s partial concealment also caused the Federal infantrymen, firing downhill, to shoot over the heads of the climbing Confederates. Finally, the Federal defenders belonged to Howard’s corps, those victims of Chancellorsville who had caught it again in the fighting the day before. They gave up in droves. Hays reported that he “found many of the enemy who had not fled hiding in the [rifle] pits for protection.”

All at once the Louisiana troops were on top of the hill with not a hostile enemy in sight except for the gunners. The four regiments swooped down on them before a blast was fired, and with a right good will joined the hand-to-hand fighting for the pieces.

Farther to the east, Hoke’s North Carolinians had encountered harder going. They had three stone fences to get. Nearing the top, the brigade came under punishing enfilade fire from the guns and from one immovable line of infantry behind a last stone wall at a right angle to their advance. With a steadiness that the officers admired, the Tarheels changed front under the hail of fire and advanced straight toward the stone wall and the guns. The enemy infantry dissolved, the gunners were dispersed, and the North Carolinians joined with Hays’s Louisianians in silencing the Union artillery.

For one incredible moment, as Hays reported, “every piece of artillery which had been firing upon us was silenced,” and two Confederate brigades possessed the enemy stronghold.

Then, from their right, a blurred body of troops advanced in the darkness. At that time Hoke’s brigade was scattered from the climb and change of front, but Hays’s was fairly compact. Harry Hays had been “cautioned to expect friends” from the position where the indistinguishable mass was moving toward him, and he withheld fire.

The silent line was advancing from the direction where Rodes’s division was expected to come out in their attack from the northwest. With desperate hope influencing his judgment, Hays waited to see if the new troops were friends.

Even when fire spurted from the advancing line, Harry Hays clung to his hope. Then the flashes of a second and a third volley “disclosed the still-advancing line to be one of the enemy.” Not at all shaken, the veteran Louisiana troops poured answering volleys into the blurred mass, and the advance was halted. Then Hays saw vaguely the movement of other troops. He ceased to hope for Rodes. Abandoning the guns, the disappointed troops of both brigades retired down the hill, unpursued. The great chance had come and gone.