Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (43 page)

After that, the Federal skirmish line maintained a greater distance, as their batteries behind them poured metal on the advancing Confederates. Pickett saw with pride that his lines went steadily on under the carnage, closing up well. He also watched professionally for the effects of the artillery on the foot troops who themselves had no one to shoot at.

At the road, the line paused to allow the men to break down the fence, cross the road, and break down the other. The bursting shell and rain of canister tore great gaps in the ranks then, and there was some crowding among the regiments. Parts of the first fence had not gone down, as men fell along those sections. But there was no need for officers to steady the soldiers, though some talked to them. The men began to talk too, and their irrepressible humor began to be heard here and there.

Where the lines of Garnett and Kemper crossed the road, the brigades divided around the house and large barn of N. Codori on the enemy side of the road, known thereafter as “the Codori barn.” Garnett passed on the northern side of the farm buildings and headed straight up the slope toward the projecting angle of stone fence. Armistead followed. Kemper passed the buildings on the southern side and swung sharply northeastward to come up on Garnett’s right.

When the three brigades started up the rough incline, they were only two hundred yards from the stone fence. Low on the Union side, it loomed about breast-high to the attackers. The crest of the ridge, the heart of the enemy’s defense, was no more than fifty yards beyond the wall.

At that final stage of their march out, the officers and men expected to go all the way to the crest, and they advanced as men who did not believe they could be stopped. Commanding General Meade said: “The assault was made with great firmness,” and Major General Hancock, whose II Corps bore the brunt, said: “I’ve never seen a more formidable attack.”

Climbing, the men felt the intense heat burning through the swirls of smoke, and they still had the infantry fire to face. Their discipline was such that the men acted as if controlled by a single mind. No one was firing nervously. They moved up the hill in grim silence. One of the foreign observers said: “They seemed impelled by some irresistible force.”

Armistead’s second line pushed close up behind the first line going up the hill, and the three decimated brigades were so bunched as to seem almost a single unit.

From Pettigrew’s line, Archer’s Tennesseans under Fry and Garnett’s left companies began to press against one another. A captain, in the lackadaisical voice of a gatekeeper at a fair, said: “Don’t crowd, boys.”

Then, directly ahead of them, rifle fire blazed out in a solid spray from tall grass where the last enemy line outside the works had waited for them.

At this stage of the advance, through the dark smoke Pickett could see the left flank of Pettigrew’s brigades melting away. A heavy flank fire from the Union guns on Cemetery Hill was cutting into the ranks of the compressed survivors. A few steps farther on, his own line would encounter the concentrated rifle fire of the infantry behind the stone fence.

It was clear to Pickett that his men would not be stopped. It was also clear that there would not be enough of them left to hold the crest. Pickett and his staff were then on the enemy side of the road, north of the Codori farm buildings. The general turned to Captain Bright.

“Go to General Longstreet,” he said, “and tell him that the position will be taken, but we cannot hold it unless reinforcements be sent.”

Captain Bright whirled his horse around with his single spur and started back over the littered field. He had to check his horse to avoid running down a group of stragglers from Pettigrew’s division. Although he had no authority over those troops, he halted them and commanded them to go back and support the troops moving up the hill. In his excitement, he yelled: “What are you running for?”

One of the soldiers, seeing Bright’s horse pointed toward the rear, said: “Why, good gracious, captain, ain’t you running yourself?”

Too flurried to think of an explanation, Bright rode off feeling baffled by the encounter.

Pickett sent Captain Symington and Captain Baird to try to rally the broken units from Pettigrew’s division. He was growing excited now as he witnessed the slow wreckage of his division, marching on with no support on the right and the left falling away on its flank. While he was desperately dispatching his staff officers, the advancing lines moved within range of the Federal muskets behind the stone fence, and the men were finally relieved of the strain of marching into fire without fighting back.

The shouts of Garnett and Kemper released them. The men brought the rifles down from their shoulders, holding them straight out with bayonets glinting ahead, and, breaking into double-time, opened their throats in the spontaneous, indescribable, high-pitched scream called the Rebel Yell.

They were little more than one hundred yards from the stone fence, their thinned ranks still loosely holding regimental order, when Garnett shouted: “Fire!”

Hardly more than half his men were left to slow their steps, aim, and pull triggers. They made their bullets count. There was no wild shooting. Blue-covered heads disappeared from behind the stone fence.

Biting off the cartridge from the powder load, each man jammed a charge down his long rifle barrel with his ramrod and trotted on. As they prepared to fire, the foremost troops were no more than twenty-five yards from the faces behind the stone wall. The blue infantry was growing unsteady. Beyond them, Garnett’s men saw some of the guns that had poured shells among them. They broke into a run, yelling, firing at the gunners.

Dick Garnett, muffled in his dark overcoat, cheered his men on, waving a black hat with a silver cord. His sword was in its scabbard. Suddenly he rocked back in the saddle. The screaming horse bolted, and Garnett fell heavily to the trampled ground. He never moved again.

Just before Garnett went down, one of his soldiers was struck by a shell fragment on the head. Stumbling, blinded by blood, he fell among rocks and injured his knee. Lying there, he wiped the blood from his eyes and saw that he was in a small clump of rocks with a wounded captain who had crawled there for shelter. A moment later two Federal soldiers squeezed into the rocky shelter. They had been in the line that fired from the grass. Caught between the shooting from their own people and the advancing Confederates, they had had enough for the day.

As they joined the Confederates, a riderless black horse, out of control, galloped past them with blood streaming from a shoulder gash. The two enemy soldiers told the Confederates that it was their general’s horse. They had seen Garnett fall. Then they offered to help the two Confederates back to Seminary Ridge. Without considering motives, the wounded men gratefully accepted the offer.

Kemper’s men had opened fire almost simultaneously with Garnett’s. When his brigade hurried on, preparatory to making the final rush, Kemper spun his horse around and called to Armistead.

“Armistead, hurry up!” he shouted. “I am going to charge these heights and carry them, and I want you to support me.”

“I’ll do it,” Armistead called back. His men were already hurrying, closing in on the heels of the advance line. As yet, with the two other brigades in front, they had been given no chance to fire. Just before ordering the men to double-time, Lewis Armistead could not repress his pride in them. “Look at my line,” he yelled to Kemper. “It never looked better on dress parade.”

Then he gave the order for double-time to the colonel of the regiment of direction and adjusted his hat on the sword point. A bullet going through the hat had caused it to slide down to the hilt, and Armistead was determined to keep the black hat waving.

When his brigade ran forward, the advance lines were so rent that his men moved into the gaps and the three brigades began to merge. Their front was spared the direct fire from the heavy guns now, but from the left the firing from Cemetery Hill plunged through and over Pettigrew’s survivors to tear at Garnett’s men. On the right, Kemper’s men, punished for half a mile by the batteries on Little Round Top, had also been ripped in the flank by some Vermont troops who had rushed out from an advanced clump of trees at the side of the battle line. Through it all, Kemper’s men, like Garnett’s and then Armistead’s, shot deliberately. Taking aim, the soldiers brought surprisingly heavy firepower to the point of contact. In front the rifle fire burning out from the stone wall lost its solidity, becoming scattered as Federal soldiers dropped and others fell back toward their second line.

Lewis Armistead, leading his own men on foot, was the only general in view when, with the three intermingled brigades, he ran the last few yards toward the stone fence. While Armistead was bringing his troops up and into the advance line, Kemper had gone down, shot in the groin.

Two of Kemper’s staff officers had been killed, and no others were near by. A Union officer, rushing about with three privates in the confusion, saw the star-in-a-wreath on Kemper’s collar and placed a blanket under him. The Federal told the wounded general that he would move him back to one of their field hospitals. Then a group of Confederates appeared out of the smoke, and the Federal party left. Several of the men lifted General Kemper and started back to their own lines.

The other two mounted officers who went up the hill with Pickett, Colonel Eppa Hunton and Colonel Lewis Williams, were both down. Colonel Hunton was wounded and Williams dying, his little bay mare standing quietly near by. Two other colonels who were killed, Patton and Allen, had been Williams’s roommates at V.M.I.

Among Hill’s men, Pettigrew was wounded in the hand and Trimble seriously in the leg, which later had to be amputated. Colonel Fry, who had taken in Archer’s brigade, was down wounded, and Colonel Marshall, temporarily commanding Pettigrew’s North Carolinians, had been killed outright. A shell burst had knocked him from his horse; shaken, he ordered his men to place him in the saddle and turn the horse to the front. He was shot dead from the horse near the crest of the hill.

The colonels and lieutenant colonels leading on foot had suffered almost total casualties. Of field officers in Pickett’s division only one man, Colonel Henry C. Cabell, stayed on his feet, and he was slightly wounded. The others were not all dead—more than half recovered from their wounds—but none was in condition to exercise command. Colonel Hunton’s regiment, which became the “Berkeley Regiment,” was commanded by the youngest of the four brothers, whose only experience had been as lieutenant in a company commanded by an older brother.

By the time Lewis Armistead neared the stone fence, regimental order was going. With less than one fourth of the 4,500 men still pressing on, the foremost of the scattered survivors pressed together in no organized battle line. Those in front were merely the fastest. One of the first at the fence was John Bowie Magruder, twenty-four-year-old University of Virginia graduate and academy teacher, the colonel of the 57th Virginia who had given Armistead the nickname “Lo” for “Lothario.” Climbing up on the stones, he pointed to the enemy guns and shouted: “They are ours!” As he uttered the words he fell back, dead when his body struck the earth.

Armistead reached the fence a moment later, his gray head rising above the men as he started to climb. “Give them the cold steel!” he yelled.

Men fired into one another’s faces and then lunged. A Federal soldier was wounded in the shoulder by a gash made from an impromptu lance tied to a color standard. With cannon silent in this section and rifle fire now scattered, the struggling men, using bayonets and clubbed rifles, could hear the grunts and curses, the moans and panting breaths.

Somebody on the ground was praying. Wounded were begging for water.

The Federal line gave way. From the top of the fence, Lewis Armistead jumped down on the enemy side. The heights were won, as Pickett had prophesied, and the remnants of his men gave an exultant yell.

“Follow me!” Armistead shouted and pointed his hat.

Only 150 men climbed over the stone wall with him. They were a group now, without regiment or even company organization, though survivors from a single unit tried to keep together. The compression of the remaining force was shown by the twenty battle flags that fell in a hundred-square-yard space near the crest.

There were no more enemy soldiers at the fence. Clots of reserves were forming to the right and left of the Confederates, and a second line waited massed for them on the crest of the ridge. The men saw none of that. They saw immediately ahead of them the six guns of Cushing’s battery, all except one silenced. Every horse in the battery was down, every officer killed or wounded. The surviving cannoneers were trying to haul their pieces away.

Lewis Armistead reached the first gun and in triumph placed his hand on it. He wanted his men to turn it on the enemy. As he touched the still warm metal, a bullet caught him. He arched back, hung for a moment, and wilted to the ground beside the gun.

Colonel Martin fell beside him, maimed for life, and forty-two Virginians from his regiment literally carpeted the ground around him and Armistead.

Leaderless, the huddled group then saw, emerging through the smoke, the solid blue lines of fresh units closing in on them from three sides.

Farther to the left, the survivors of Pettigrew’s North Carolina and Tennessee brigades, with oddments of Mississippi troops scattered among them, also halted. The projecting angle of stone wall did not cross their front, and they were fifty or more yards from the crest of the ridge. Probably none reached it.