Gettysburg (48 page)

Lee learned from Longstreet that all of McLaws’ Division was on hand and ready to march, and that Hood’s lacked only Law’s Alabama brigade to be complete. Law’s men were expected soon, so Longstreet asked to delay starting his flank march until they arrived. By Longstreet’s account, “General Lee assented. We waited about forty minutes for these troops.” At some point during the delay, Longstreet waved up Edward P. Alexander, who at his direction was operating with the authority of First Corps artillery chief. Alexander later wrote, “My recollection is that a lot of our infantry was halted not far off & some of their generals were around, & quite a lot of staff officers. In Gen. Lee’s presence Longstreet pointed out the enemy’s positions & said that we would attack his left flank. … He … suggested that I go at once … & get an idea of the ground, & then go & bring my own battalion up.” Not needing to be told twice, the officer hurried away.

Few units had as hard a time waiting this day as Brigadier General Harry T. Hays’ brigade, of Jubal Early’s division. It was one of two all-Louisiana brigades in Lee’s army, and of the pair it was Hays’ men who reveled in their unsavory reputation as the “wharf rats from New Orleans.” Fierce
fighters in combat, verging on uncontrollable when not under fire, the twelve hundred or so soldiers, grouped into five regiments, were cocky and proud of being nicknamed the Louisiana Tigers.

They were very much caged tigers during most of the daylight hours of July 2. According to Captain William J. Seymour of Hays’ staff, Richard Ewell had intended to press his entire line close to the enemy but had discovered soon after daylight that the topography prevented him from doing so. By then, however, the Louisiana Tigers had already been positioned, so they were stuck, strung out along a little ravine that followed the course of a creek called Winebrenner’s Run. The open ground in their rear was commanded by Yankee cannon frowning on them from Cemetery Hill, rendering it impossible to withdraw the brigade “without an immense loss,” noted Seymour. Federal sharpshooters made their situation miserable: it was, Seymour observed, “almost certain death for a man to stand upright” from the scant cover provided by the ravine.

Matters were even worse on the picket line. A Louisiana lieutenant posted behind a fence recalled that “if any one showed themselves or a hat was seen above the fence a volley was poured into us.” Men dropped almost every hour as snipers harvested the unwary or unlucky. July 2 would turn out to be another hot, sticky day, making the ordeal of so many unwashed men cramped together in a muddy ravine even more wretched.

Sharing the experience of the Louisiana soldiers were the nine hundred North Carolinians of Hoke’s Brigade, fighting at Gettysburg under the command of Colonel Isaac Avery. While his three regiments were not snugged quite as close to the enemy as Hays’ men, they were posted along another inhospitable section of Winebrenner’s Run. One officer would later recall only “lying all day under a July sun, suffering with intense heat, and continually [being] annoyed by the enemy’s sharpshooters from the heights.”

The acting brigade commander was a large and popular man who won praise for his “chivalrous bearing.” Like his men, he spent this hot day crouching or lying along Winebrenner’s Run, with “enemy … balls hissing all round us,” in the words of an aide. When his nervous subordinate suggested moving somewhere less exposed, Avery laughed and pointed around them, saying that there was no such place.

Any hope George Meade had of staging an attack from his right flank vanished when Gouverneur K. Warren reported his reconnaissance. “I did
not think that the ground was favorable for directing an attack with proper intelligence and vigor,” Warren recalled. His assessment was that the area was “rough, being the valley of a considerable stream with dams upon it, that therefore it was favorable to the defense and not to the attack, and that artillery could only be moved with difficulty through woods and marshy places.”

Hardly had Meade begun considering what to do next when an anxious-looking Daniel Sickles arrived. The Third Corps commander was more certain than ever that the Rebels were targeting his flank. “I found that my impression as to the intention of the enemy to attack in that direction was not concurred in at headquarters,” Sickles later declared. According to another account, Meade dismissed his concerns with the comment, “‘O[h], generals are all apt to look for the attack to be made where they are.’” “I asked General Meade to go over the ground on the left and examine it,” Sickles recorded. But the commander declined to leave his headquarters, and when Sickles requested that Warren be deputized for the task, Meade indicated that his engineer officer had other things to do. “I then asked him to send General [Henry] Hunt, his chief of artillery, and that was done,” the Third Corps chief reported. Together the two men rode off to inspect the left flank of Meade’s Gettysburg position.

Few Federal units came to Gettysburg with as much to prove as the Third Brigade of Alexander Hays’ Second Corps division. Commanded by Colonel George L. Willard, its four regiments bore the stigma of having surrendered with the union garrison at Harper’s Ferry in September 1862. Although they had not then been brigaded together, the fifteen hundred men nonetheless felt the humiliation that had been heaped upon them for events over which they had had no control. One of the regiments, the 126th New York, had been especially singled out for failing to hold an exposed position.

Following a dreary stay in a U.S. parole camp awaiting proper exchange, the dispirited regiments had been joined into a brigade and assigned to Washington’s defenses, where they were put under the stern leadership of Alexander Hays. Under him the men were rigorously prepared for their next combat experience, and they responded with a will. Soon even the hypercritical Hays was writing that the “Harper’s Ferry boys have turned out trumps, and when we do get a chance look out for blood.” The brigade had been appended so quickly as the Second Corps
passed Washington that it arrived at Gettysburg lacking a corps battle flag and the proper corps insignia for the men’s uniforms. Nevertheless, the Harper’s Ferry brigade, in the words of one of its members, “panted to remove that stigma.”

In joining the Army of the Potomac, Alexander Hays had been elevated to command the division, leaving the brigade to the colonel of the 125th New York. It was the first decent break Willard had gotten since the war began. He had transferred from the regular army to the volunteers seeking promotion, only to have his aspirations stalled by the Harper’s Ferry debacle. Now, finally, he was leading his men into what everyone felt would be an important battle. It was a good match: four regiments yearning for vindication led by an officer desperate for validation.

Willard’s brigade joined Hays’ other two on Cemetery Ridge, connecting on their right with the Eleventh Corps and fronting the Bliss farm, some two thousand feet away. The Harper’s Ferry boys, designated the division’s reserve, were withheld from the first line, save for the 39th New York, which was drawn into the Bliss farm action.

In its hurried march to Gettysburg, the Second Corps had outpaced its supply wagons, so many foot soldiers went hungry today. One of them recollected that “by a diligent search of our pockets and haversacks we got coffee enough to give [us] a swallow or two apiece. … We gave our belts a hitch and all who smoked indulged vigorously while we awaited events.”

The fighting around the Bliss farm fell into a grim pattern. After one side gained control, there would be a roiling lull as the other began increasing the pressure. Then things would erupt into brief violence that would dispossess the party holding the buildings, thereby starting the whole cycle again.

The ten companies that Alexander Hays had sent forward after the eviction of the 1st Delaware maintained control of the Bliss farm until about 11:00
A.M.
Then Brigadier General Carnot Posey’s all-Mississippi brigade took over the sector and promptly reinforced the Confederate voltigeurs. “The enemy occupy a very commanding position having their artillery planted on a high ridge, with their infantry in rear,” observed one of them. A Yankee described “a lively skirmish” around the Bliss farm
that again ousted the Union soldiers. Still determined to control the advanced post, Hays cobbled together a reaction force from the 125th New York, the 12th New Jersey, and even the 1st Delaware and sent it forward to regain the farm buildings.

Some of the artillery on Cemetery Ridge was now getting into the fray as well, with several batteries arrayed along the high ground opening fire on the farmhouse and barn. Among them was the 4th United States, Battery A, Lieutenant Alonzo Cushing commanding. The Yankee cannon were answered by Rebel guns posted in the vicinity of the McMillan Woods.

Henry Hunt would long remember his ride along the Third Corps line that July 2. As they left army headquarters, he told Sickles that he “did not know anything of the intentions of General Meade” and asked the Third Corps commander for his ideas. Sickles, Hunt recalled, “wished to throw forward his line from the position in which it was then placed, and where it was covered in its front by woods and rocks, with a view to cover the Emmitsburg road.” Instead of moving south to follow Cemetery Ridge, Sickles led Hunt on a tangent that took them along the Emmitsburg Road.

At first Hunt assumed that Sickles’ interest in covering the road was related to his absent artillery train, which might be using that route. By the time they reached the Sherfy peach orchard, however, he had realized that the general wanted to do more than push out a covering force: he wanted to reset his entire corps along the road’s axis. Ever the professional, Hunt had to admit that a position starting at the peach orchard and continuing north along the Emmitsburg Road would have its advantages. Small ripples of ridges, he later remembered, “commanded all the ground behind, as well as in front of them, and together constituted a favorable position for the enemy to hold.” Hunt also recognized that any line set on the peach orchard would have to bend sharply back toward Little Round Top, creating a difficult-to-defend salient angle that would be susceptible to enfilading fire; but he felt that the rolling ground offered enough protection to “reduce that evil to a minimum.”

Sickles’ scheme had a critical flaw, though, and the Army of the Potomac artillery chief put his finger on it, noting that “it would so greatly lengthen our line … as to require a larger force than the Third
Corps alone to hold it.” Stopping at the orchard, Hunt pointed to a patch of woods across an open field to the west, lying along a ridge line. If the enemy got in there, he said, it would make it very difficult to hold the Emmitsburg Road. He suggested that Sickles send in some troops to check out the area, known as the Pitzer Woods.
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Off to the north, the Bliss farm was erupting in another skirmish cycle, again involving artillery on Cemetery Ridge. Upon hearing the cannon boom, Hunt decided that his place was with his gunners, not riding with Daniel Sickles. He offered a hasty explanation and made a quick exit, promising to swing around toward Little Round Top before stopping at Meade’s headquarters to pass along what he had learned.

Before Hunt could break away, Sickles asked him “whether it would be proper to move forward his line.” No, Hunt answered, adding that the Third Corps commander “should wait orders from General Meade.” He then rode off, leaving Daniel Sickles convinced that he intended to obtain the necessary permission himself. Until those orders arrived, there was the reconnaissance to be conducted into the Pitzer Woods.

Of the fifty-one Union infantry brigades gathered at Gettysburg, few were more distinctive or more proudly conscious of their distinction than five regiments in Brigadier General John C. Caldwell’s Second Corps division, self-styled the Irish Brigade. Organized in 1861 by the popular Erin emigre Thomas Francis Meagher, the little brigade was perhaps 530 strong this day. The three New York regiments representing its 1861 nucleus were still present, though barely at company strength; also short-handed was the 116th Pennsylvania, which, with the 28th Massachusetts (224 strong), rounded out the command.

The Irish Brigade had reached Gettysburg this morning with the rest of the Second Corps, after a march of only a few miles. Following an hour’s pause as a reserve while the threat to Cemetery Hill was being evaluated, the Second Corps had been positioned southward along Cemetery Ridge. Along with Caldwell’s three other brigades, the Irishmen were “massed” near the George Weikert farm. “Here we stacked arms, and the men were ordered to rest,” reported an officer in the 116th Pennsylvania. “Every movement of the enemy was watched with interest,” remembered an officer, “and the hours seemed long on that bright summer day.”

The large number of men grouped in one place, coupled with the ominous portents of battle, suggested to the brigade’s spiritual adviser, Chaplain William Corby, that his duties on this day included lifting the burden of sin from his flock through the act of conditional absolution. Although the most frequently cited account of this ceremony places it late in the afternoon, when combat was imminent, another, more contemporary source puts it at midmorning, when there would have been time for it.

“The brigade stood in a column of regiments, closed in mass,” wrote an officer in attendance. “Father Corby … addressing the men, [said] … that each one could receive the benefit of the absolution by making a sincere Act of Contrition and firmly resolving to embrace the first opportunity of confessing his sins, … and remind[ed] them of the high and sacred nature of their trust as soldiers. … Then, stretching his right hand toward the brigade, Father Corby pronounced the words of the absolution. … The service was more than impressive, it was awe-inspiring.”

Many of Gettysburg’s residents tried their best to carry on with their normal routines. Sarah Broadhead, for one, made a point of preparing a solid dinner, including shortcake and ham (using the last of the meat she had). She remembered that “some neighbors coming in, joined us, and we had the first quiet meal since the contest began.”