Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (42 page)

There was thus an eerie silence over the field when Pickett’s troops began to emerge on a rise of ground about four hundred yards east of General Lee’s command post and directly opposite the Federal center. The hush, as if the gathered forces were spectators at a pageant, ended abruptly as the heavy Federal guns commenced firing at the gray lines of the separated wings. The eighteen guns in the copse of trees reopened, then twenty more, then twice that number, until more than eighty guns were hurling explosives into the two ranks of foot soldiers.

Pickett’s men began to fall as the ranks cleared the ravine. By the time the whole division was in view, gaps were appearing in the lines. On the open high ground the regiments made a wheeling movement to face obliquely toward the point of attack. To a soldier in the 1st Virginia the enemy’s fortified hill looked like a semicircle of guns and blue masses, and his own regiment seemed aimed at the exact center.

The smoke from the cannonade had spread a dark pall over the field, and as the three brigades wheeled to the front, geysers of exploding shells opened holes in their ranks. Under this fire, before starting ahead, the men dressed the line.

As if they were on parade, their left arms shot out and their heads turned right to form a straight alignment. The man one soldier was dressing on would fall before the alignment was completed, and the men kept closing up, eying the guide flags that dipped and rose, while the metal burst over and among them.

Even the waiting infantry of the enemy was awed by the spectacle. “My God, they’re dressing the line!”

Then, under their red battle flags, the men began the forward movement down the slope. They were carrying their rifles, with fixed bayonets, at right-shoulder-arms. There was no cheering among them, not even any talk. The men were getting a good look at where they were going. At their oblique line of march, they had about eight hundred yards to go to the road, and something over two hundred yards from the road up the hill to the enemy’s lines.

No troops on either side had ever attacked over so long a distance without cover. At Fredericksburg, where Burnside’s men had come up a long hill, only the last quarter of a mile was open. There not one man in the repeated waves of assault had reached the Confederate crest.

Here, the fences ahead provided no cover, but only presented obstacles. At the fences along the road the strong Federal skirmish line waited as if no attack were coming at them. The thinner Confederate skirmish line, under orders not to fire until close, moved ahead like figures in a dream.

Through the smoke the watchers around Lee’s command post could see their men going down steadily under cannon fire. Some doubled over and sank to the ground, some rocked back as if pushed, some stumbled and slowly sprawled on the farmed earth. Others staggered, then halted to inspect what had happened to them; some of these hurried to take their places in the line again.

While Private Robert Morgan was examining the damage a Minie ball had done to his right instep, another bullet entered the front of his left foot and plowed through the flesh to the heel. He decided to call it a day and, using his own musket and another belonging to a fallen comrade as crutches, hobbled to the rear. He was part of a small trickle of individuals flowing backward.

A soldier named Byrd was spun around by a shot that tore into his right arm, and asked his captain if he could go back, as he could not hold a rifle. The captain did not want anyone retreating from his company, but Byrd’s corporal said: “Our bird has been winged.” They let him start back. He never made it. A shell caught him from behind.

Colors began to plunge down, to reappear instantly. A color guard walked four paces in front of the line, holding up the ragged flag with the battle names stitched on in white letters by ladies in the soldiers’ families. Colonel Rawley Martin said that the soldiers kept “constantly in view the little emblem which was their beacon light to guide them to glory and to death.”

Many colors were carried successively by six or even eight members of the guard, as one after another went down, and finally were picked up by anyone near. In the 1st Virginia, all five members were killed or wounded, including sixteen-year-old Willie Mitchel, the son of the Irish patriot and Confederate sympathizer. Armistead’s Sergeant Blackburn went down early, but the colors of the 53rd Virginia went on.

By the time the three brigades neared the Emmitsburg road, the first large gaps appeared in the line. They were quickly closed, but still and tortured figures were left where the gaps had been. On Kemper’s right flank the men began to fall as if the line were being gnawed at. A battery on Little Round Top had them in its range and, like a hunter holding a slowly moving object in his sights, followed them with an enfilade fire that almost kept pace with the rhythm of march.

The Confederate gunners had, after the infantry passed below their gun muzzles, opened a scattered fire to try to silence the Union batteries. It was without effect on the deadly work.

The Federal artillerists had stood up under the worst that Alexander could direct against them. Caissons had burst, horses and men been killed or wounded, and scenes of disorder created in what a Union general called the “pandemonium.” But the destructive, demoralizing effect that General Lee had hoped for had not been achieved. The gun crews manned their pieces and directed them at the advancing gray line in—that most cold-blooded of military phrases—“anti-personnel fire.” They were firing bursting shells, some solid shots, and much canister.

Tireless Alexander (he had had two hours’ sleep and no food except his breakfast cracker with unsweetened potato-coffee) turned to arranging guns to follow Pickett. Ammunition was so low that he could load the caisson of only one gun in each battery. By the time the troops were reaching the foot of Cemetery Ridge, he had limbered up between fifteen and twenty guns to move out behind them—less than one artillery battalion to give the support that General Lee had planned for the infantry.

By then, though the smoke was thickening again over the field, the artillerist could see George Pickett and his staff riding close behind the advancing lines. His staff officers were his only brother, twenty-three-year-old Major Charles Pickett, and Captains Stuart Symington, Ed Baird, and Robert Bright. Their party had moved out last, “as closely in rear of the line of battle as it was possible to do,” one of them reported, “and, at the same time, be able to observe the advance” of the whole action.

Starting down the hill, Pickett, looking very jaunty on his black horse, had waved once. He was wearing a small blue cap and buff-colored gauntlets that covered the blue cuffs of his sleeves; above the gauntlets the swirls of cloth-of-gold
galons
glinted briefly against the light-gray cloth. Once he faced forward, none of them looked back.

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Farther north on Seminary Ridge, Pettigrew’s line emerged from the cover and started down the slope, the ranks well dressed. Behind them came Pender’s two brigades, with General Trimble riding between the first line and his supports. When he appeared, he was adjusting his seat and his reins with, wrote one observer, “an air and grace as if setting out on a pleasant afternoon.”

The curious calmness characterized almost all of the attacking force. They were trained soldiers and dedicated patriots, but that was not the whole explanation. There was a fatalism about the movement out. The men’s identities had become submerged in that of the regiment, the brigade, the division, the corps, the army. They did not talk or think of their rights or even of the Confederacy. They said “the army”—meaning Lee’s army—and that distilled all their reasons for walking across that field and probably not walking back.

Only where the unit spirit had not been developed or sustained did the individual’s consciousness of self assert itself. That happened in the two brigades fatefully placed on Pettigrew’s left flank—the sporadically led Virginians under their senior colonel, and the green troops among the Mississippians led by President Davis’s well-meaning nephew.

Sometimes in a steeplechase a horse and rider are seen early to fall behind the field. The abused Virginia brigade, commanded by Brockenbrough, was like that. They wavered when the fire struck them, paused irresolutely when it grew heavy, and then, as the rest of the line swept on, the group became isolated, no longer part of the attack. Many openly went back to where it was safe. Others stayed where they were. Some individuals and small units—squads and companies, segments of regiments who remembered the great days when Field was their brigadier—tried to press on.

Their only chance for even an illusory sense of security against the volume of destruction coming at them lay in seeking their fellows. They veered to their right, toward Davis’s brigade, and found his units in similar disorder.

The early volunteers in that brigade, including the Mississippi regiments built on the nucleus of students from the university, went on in a group spirit evolved by time and pride. But with nearly all their field officers lost in the first day’s disaster, they lacked leadership at the unit level and went on blindly.

The green troops, remembering the railroad-cut massacre, simply broke out and got out of there before it could happen again. Inexperienced Joe Davis was helpless to control them. As military units, the two flank brigades disintegrated—to the shocked amazement of Rodes’s idle veterans, who had watched them in confidence that any Confederate would go all the way.

Pettigrew’s attacking line was reduced, with the disorganized survivors of Brockenbrough and Davis, to his own North Carolina brigade under Marshall and Archer’s Tennesseans under Fry. In spite of incredible casualties, remnants of those two brigades came on. Trimble, following with the tough brigades from Pender’s division, said his supporting line walked through blood.

With their left flank composed of nothing more than corpses and fleeing and moaning men, the compressed brigades began their climb up the slope to the enemy. Their right flank had been separated from Pickett’s left when the two sections first started down Seminary Ridge, and the attacking front covered about three quarters of a mile. As Pickett’s brigades drifted northeast, when the lines neared the road the gap between the wings slowly closed.

When the two forces started up the hill there was some jamming between units. It could have been here that the classic Confederate line was spoken: “Cousins, move on, you are drawing the fire our way.”

Although Pickett’s men and Hill’s were directed toward the same objective, there was no accord between them. When the men thought it over later, there was considerable discord. Pickett’s men seemed generally to regard the Pettigrew-Trimble soldiers as supports who had not supported; the Pettigrew-Trimble forces of Hill’s corps seemed to regard Pickett’s division from Longstreet’s corps as another assault group who had done no better than they themselves had done. The crux of the argument, which went on for decades, was command. There was none.

It is true that Pickett had no weak brigades to fade from his flank; expecting Wilcox, he had no flank to begin with. It is also true that his troops came under the cannonade first because they were the first out and closer to the enemy’s guns. Finally, he had no troops who faltered, because the only change President Davis had made in his division was to take away its two largest brigades. All those who marched down the hill beyond Alexander’s guns could say “the army” and mean what Alexander had said: “I had no doubt that we would carry the position, in my confidence that Lee was ordering the attack.”

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No officer reflected the men’s confidence more than George Pickett. There was no fatalism in him. Believing that his hour of destiny had come and expecting to take fortune at its flood, he rode down the slope like a knight in a tournament.

The smoke hanging over the field formed a “glowering darkness,” he said, but so high were his spirits that he made a joke with Captain Bright. Observing a shell fragment strike the staff officer’s spur, forcing the shank around and pointing the rowel to the front, Pickett said: “Captain, you have lost your spurs today instead of gaining them.”

Going down the hill, Pickett on his black horse could view the foggy field over the heads of the men. His confidence was heightened when he saw the battle lines of Hill’s troops emerge from the woods and sweep down the slope to his left. On his open right Wilcox’s brigade lay ready to move into action. Perry’s Florida brigade, under Colonel Lang, was deployed for support. The details of assault had been made no clearer to Pickett than to anyone else, and he seems not to have expected Wilcox and Perry to move out with or immediately after him.

General Lee evidently planned that Wilcox and Perry should form part of an attacking force comprised of eleven brigades, with Hill’s five remaining brigades acting in reserve. Officers close to Lee always maintained that he never planned the attack for only nine brigades, and the positions in which Perry and Wilcox were deployed indicate that their brigades were to be “in support” of Pickett’s wing much as Scales and Lane were in support of Pettigrew.

As Longstreet had not ordered the Alabama and Florida brigades forward with him, Pickett evidently assumed “support” to mean an active reserve on which to call. His actions immediately following suggest that such was his understanding.

When his first line, the troops of Kemper and Garnett, neared the fences that lined the Emmitsburg road, Pickett observed the confident belligerence of the enemy’s heavy skirmish line. They did not fall back until the battle line approached within one hundred yards of them. Then they withdrew up the hillside in good order, still firing.