Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (44 page)

With all leaders down, the men of both commands were on their own, and they reacted as individuals. Some fought on to the death—one Confederate fell twenty yards beyond Armistead’s gun. Some surrendered. Some turned defiantly to withdraw.

There was no one to look after Lewis Armistead. He was taken to the Union rear by soldiers, through the corps of his old friend Winfield Scott Hancock, and died that night without fully regaining consciousness. Garnett’s body was left on the field; his brigade was brought out by Major Peyton, a one-armed staff officer.

The 150 men who followed Armistead into the angle were not the only survivors of Pickett’s division on the hill. Many who had reached the stone fence used it as a breastwork and fired over it. Many more in the confusion of the last hundred yards had not neared the fence until Armistead was down and his little knot of men was being engulfed. In the disorder, they stumbled over the dead and wounded. When the latecomers saw their unorganized remnants isolated at the enemy’s stronghold, they knew that the charge was over for them.

In the 19th Virginia, twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Wood of Company A (originally the Monticello Guard of Charlottesville) was one who reached the fence late after stopping to inspect a blow on the leg, which turned out to be a bruise from a spent ball. Reaching the stone-and-dirt wall, he “looked to the right and to the left and felt we were disgraced. Where were those who started the charge? With one exception I witnessed no cowardice, and yet we had not a skirmish line. Less than two hundred yards to the right the enemy was forming a line of battle on our side of the fence … rapidly being extended into the field to our rear. I watched them as they began to move in our direction. To remain was life in prison. To retreat was probably death in crossing the field, but possible safety within our lines, and without a moment’s hesitation I turned my back to the fence … and … warm, tired and thirsty I limped down the hill. …”

The men had never questioned the work laid out for them. With their confidence in Lee, each man believed that, as in all their other battles, plans had been perfected to make their attack feasible. In their dazed state on the hillside, the men did not question the reasons for the failure of their assault, did not ask where the plan had gone wrong. They knew nothing about flanks melting away and no supports coming. They knew only that nothing more could be accomplished. They looked to the saving of their own lives and the lives of their wounded comrades.

Something over a thousand men who were unwounded or wounded so slightly as not to be incapacitated for long, or to be listed as battle casualties, made their way back down the hill as individuals. Five hundred or more wounded crawled or were taken back to their own lines. Several days later the division mustered 1,500, not all present for duty.

A. P. Hill’s men with Pettigrew and Trimble fared about the same.

15

At the bottom of the hill George Pickett was slow to recognize the magnitude of the disaster. Expecting to carry the position, Pickett, from the moment his men started up the hill, had been alerted for the supports and intent on remedying the deteriorating situation on his left. It was his impression that the whole left column of the assault had collapsed.

Agitated at the time, he grew bitter later. His official report was so damning of Hill’s troops that Lee refused to accept it on the grounds of avoiding inter-army conflicts. He asked Pickett to submit another, which was never done. Pickett’s staff officers also blamed the troops on their left, and Longstreet in his official report mentioned “the wavering columns of Pettigrew and Trimble.”

The four of Hill’s brigades which started up the hill relatively intact as units did not collapse so completely as Pickett and his staff believed. But neither did the valor of those clusters of individuals who would not stop represent the unit achievement that their officers would have liked to claim. These troops had been shaken by the casualties sustained the first day, and on the third the leadership at brigade and division level was too new, the leaders too unacquainted with the personnel, and the over-all control too loose to ensure effective operations in the face of the murderous losses suffered during that unprotected journey of one mile. Also, none but the stoutest could remain unaffected by the dissolution of their flank brigade, followed by disintegration of the one next to it.

Pickett’s staff was right in claiming that Federal units would not have marched out so boldly against the left flank if an even partially intact brigade had remained to face about and present a firing line. But by the time the men in Pettigrew’s two right brigades found their flank completely gone, their own order had been lost. So the advancing men huddled together to press straight on as had Pickett’s men. They knew nothing else to do.

However, Pickett and his staff could with equal justice have claimed that the Federal forces on their right, especially the Vermont regiments that slashed at them before they made contact, would not have come on unimpeded if Pickett’s division had possessed a flank brigade to face about and protect the advancing line from harassment. But the brigade that should have been on their flank, Wilcox’s, was directly under Longstreet’s orders, and the men in Longstreet’s corps entered no complaint against their corps commander.

When Captain Bright reached Longstreet with Pickett’s call for his supports, he found the bulky lieutenant general seated on a snake fence whose direction ran toward the field. He was peering through the smoke with his glasses. Bright delivered the verbal message. Before Longstreet answered, they were joined by Colonel Fremantle of Her Majesty’s Coldstream Guards.

The Britisher drew in his horse beside them and said breathlessly: “General Longstreet, General Lee sent me here, and said you would place me in a position to see this magnificent charge. I would not have missed it for the world.”

Longstreet laughed. “The devil you wouldn’t!” he said, in bluff heartiness. “I would like to have missed it very much. We’ve attacked and been repulsed. Look there.”

While the foreign observer was staring at the field, Longstreet turned to Bright. Surprisingly, he said: “Captain Bright, ride to General Pickett and tell him what you have heard me say to Colonel Fremantle.”

Shaken by this message of defeat—for the troops had been advancingly handsomely when he left them—Pickett’s staff officer turned his horse for the ride back across the smoky field.

“Captain Bright!” Longstreet called after him. The captain turned in the saddle. Longstreet, pointing ahead, said: “Tell General Pickett that Wilcox’s brigade is in that peach orchard, and he can order him to his assistance.”

(Longstreet made no mention of Wilcox’s long idleness in his official report.)

Bright, his horse leaping over motionless bodies and avoiding sightlessly stumbling men, returned unscathed across the field of fire and gave Longstreet’s report to Pickett. In extreme excitement, Pickett ordered Captain Symington, then Captain Baird, and finally Captain Bright to ride to Wilcox and hurry him forward. Bright believed that Pickett sent all three staff officers because he feared that one or two might not make it.

According to Wilcox, all three made it to him. When Captain Bright galloped up, old-army Cadmus Wilcox had been himself infected by the urgency. He waved both hands at Bright and said: “I know, I know.”

“But, general,” Bright said, “I must deliver my message.”

By the time Wilcox ordered his Alabamians out, there were no longer any lines to support. Alexander, with his assortment of guns firing off to Pickett’s right, saw Wilcox’s men march down the slope just after he had seen Pickett’s men at the crest “swallowed up in smoke, and that was the last of them.”

At Pickett’s urging, Wilcox marched out twenty minutes after the Virginians—twenty minutes too late. To Alexander, Wilcox’s men moving across a field empty except for the dead and suffering “looked bewildered, as if they wondered what they were expected to do, and why they were there.” They suffered more than ten-per-cent casualties before the brigade reached the road. The men entered a small ravine east of the road and exchanged purposeless fire with Union infantrymen while Wilcox studied the field for the troops he was supposed to support.

By now Pickett’s and Pettigrew’s survivors were drifting out of the smoke, on the start of their journey back down the hill. Seeing no one to support, as he duly recorded in his official report, Wilcox sensibly kept his troops where they were. Later they retired, sustaining a loss of 204 out of 1,200 to no purpose whatsoever.

Colonel Lang, with the three Florida regiments that composed Perry’s brigade, started out bravely enough after Wilcox and got lost in the going. As his description of the woods where his men floundered coincides with no known part of the field in his area, Colonel Lang must have been as confused as his troops. The wreckage of that little brigade, wandering about among heavy Federal reinforcements after the attack was all over, represented the most hopeless waste of all.

Even after that brigade disintegrated, Wright and Posey started out as belated supports, but Longstreet stopped their movement to save useless loss of life. It was when the attack was over that Longstreet began thinking again as a soldier. Aware of the possibility of the enemy opening a counterattack, he assumed an active supervision on his front for the first time that day. With that appearance of stolid self-assurance which spread confidence around him, the corps commander looked to the immediate details of infantry and guns which could be organized for a defensive stand. He was back on his own ground now, working on tangible physical problems.

Things happened very fast from the time the charge began. Some estimated that scarcely more than twenty minutes passed between the appearance of Pickett’s men out of the woods and Armistead’s death beside Cushing’s gun. The advance groups could have covered the distance in fifteen minutes, and they were probably no longer than five minutes at the fence.

From the moment that the first half-stunned men reappeared out of the smoke along the stone fence until the last started downhill, perhaps another twenty minutes elapsed. Two captains from Kemper’s division, John Holmes Smith and Robert Douthat, remained that long in a small stand of timber below the stone fence.

Smith and Douthat had reached that point in the charge with a few men from their companies, and they estimated time by watching the passage of a messenger, “Big Foot” Walker, sent back for reinforcements. When Walker’s big figure disappeared beyond the opposite crest of Seminary Ridge, the two captains knew that no reinforcements were coming. The privates had known it long before, and had left. The captains one with a badly bleeding leg wound, were left alone on the hill with enemies gathering all around them. When they started the run downhill, one helping the other to hobble on one foot, Captains Smith and Douthat were probably the last Confederates to leave the crest.

While Longstreet assumed responsibility for a defensive line and the thin streams of men began trickling down the slope from Cemetery Ridge, Pickett was fighting against the realization that his division was broken and the assault had failed. At no precise moment did he learn that supports were never coming on his right, or that the left could not be stabilized. He sent a staff officer with an order for Dearing’s supporting battalion to open on the Federals advancing against his right flank, where Alexander was trying hopelessly to hold back the tide. A lieutenant of one of Dearing’s batteries confessed that though the gun crews had come out as ordered because of the moved ordnance wagons their caissons contained but three solid shot and no canister. Under the staff officer’s urging the cannoneers dutifully unlimbered one gun and opened with solid shot on advancing lines. The first shot missed; the second hit one man; the third missed. That was the close artillery support.

Knowledge that one flank was irretrievably gone and the other would not be supported came to Pickett through the visual evidence of the remnants of his command moving—walking staggering with comrades, running—past him. He was restrained by his staff officers from a nearly hysterical effort to rally them. The captains forced on him the realization that it was over. Pickett’s division, the first time it ever fought a major battle as a unit, was destroyed forever. He must turn his attention to the survival of his command.

In the midst of retreating groups as casually disorganized as strangers strolling in a park, Pickett turned his black horse around and recrossed the road. The dandified general was now almost completely out of self-control. In less than one hour his dreams of glory had reached what seemed their point of fruition and then collapsed in a rejection of his aspiration beyond any horror he could have imagined.

No Confederate force had ever before retired from a field in such a state of debris. All officers above the rank of major were gone save one, and gone were two thirds of the men who had lived, trained, and fought together for more than two years. Some among the fallen had been neighbors and friends since childhood, some had been kinsmen, most had been in the full flowering of their manhood. One father, Captain Spessard, had given water to his dying son, then fought his way in and out of the angle.

A representative company was one from Albermarle County, in Colonel Henry Gantt’s 19th Virginia of Garnett’s brigade. Of the 32 men listed by age, 21 were in their twenties, 3 under twenty, 7 between thirty and thirty-five, and one was older, a forty-four-year-old bricklayer. Four stood six feet or better and 3 under five feet four and one half inches. The rest measured from five feet five to five feet ten and one half, for a company average of about five feet eight—above the general average for their day.