Gettysburg (54 page)

A member of the 1st Texas recollected, “We moved quietly forward down the steep decline, gaining impetus as we reached the more level ground below.” “We could see the Federals on the hills to our left,” wrote a comrade in the 4th Texas, “and the Stars and Stripes waving at us.” Already there were problems. Some of the Alabamians, wound taut by the marching and waiting, began moving too rapidly and had to be slowed by their officers. The battle lines wriggled like prescient entities as portions navigated fences, bushes, trees, and marshy ground. To these obstacles was added the enemy fire, for once the leading waves emerged into the open, every Federal gun that could bear began targeting them.

Although the fighting here was on a much smaller scale than that breaking out to the south, the area around the Bliss farm, opposite the Federal center, heated up again now as well. The mixed force of companies taken from New York, New Jersey, and Delaware regiments had held on to the farm throughout the afternoon, until Carnot Posey, across from them, received and acted on two sets of orders. The first instructed him to watch the brigade of Ambrose Wright, just to his south, and to be prepared to match any advance it might attempt. The second seemed to contradict the first by detailing Posey “to advance but two of my regiments, and deploy them closely as skirmishers.” One way to reconcile the contradiction would be to have the two regiments clear the pesky Yankees off his front; then, if Wright advanced, Posey would be free of any obligation and could follow. He therefore directed two of his regiments—the 19th and 48th Mississippi—to advance in skirmishing formation toward the Bliss farm and link up with elements of the 16th Mississippi already engaged there.

The combined force quickly scattered the Federals holding that position. Once again, Edward P. Harris was in charge, and once again he hastily cleared out. Sergeant George D. Bowen of the 12th New Jersey joined the hurried exodus, “soon catching up with Lieut. Col. Harris of the 1st Del. … [who] was getting to the rear as fast as he could. … [He] swung his sword around, called me a hard name, telling me to go back. … [This] I did not do but made a detour around him.”

A counterattack by skirmishers from the 106th Pennsylvania, posted south of the farm, failed. The Bliss farm was once more in Rebel hands.

Accompanied by Private Oliver W. Norton, carrying the brigade flag, Strong Vincent stood on the vacant southern crest of Little Round Top and considered how to position his four regiments. No sooner had he begun his survey than a Rebel shell crashed into some nearby rocks and boulders. Vincent realized that the headquarters pendant that Norton was holding so proudly was giving some distant gunner a perfect aiming point. “‘Down with that flag, Norton!’” he yelled. “‘D—n it, go behind the rocks with it!’” The young private scrambled for cover as his grim-faced commander returned to a task made the more urgent by the long lines of Confederate infantry visible in the distance.

Some fifteen hundred feet almost due west, artilleryman James E. Smith was also eyeing the approaching enemy. “The four guns were now
used to oppose and cripple this attack and check it as far as possible,” he later wrote. “I never saw the men do better work; every shot told; the pieces were discharged as rapidly as they could be with regard to effectiveness, while the conduct of the men was superb.” It was not easy. “Every round of ammunition had to be carried from the foot of the ridge,” a watching infantryman marveled. “Man after man went down, but still the exhausting work went steadily on.”

The Army of the Potomac’s artillery chief, Henry Hunt, paid a brief visit to offer encouragement and advise Smith that he would likely lose his guns. Descending into the Plum Run valley, Hunt found the path to his horse blocked by a “herd of horned cattle” that had been driven into a frenzy by the shelling. “All were
stampeded
,” Hunt recorded, “and were bellowing and rushing in their terror, first to one side and then to the other.” Ignoring the ironic possibility that he might be gored to death, Hunt made it through the herd to his horse and rode off.

Smith was getting help from the other big guns posted west of him in the wheat field and peach orchard, as well as from the twelve score or so small guns being wielded in the fields to the southwest by more of the elite United States Sharpshooters, members of the 2nd Regiment under Major Homer Stoughton. Earlier this day, Stoughton had deployed six companies in a fairly traditional picket line screening the area southwest of the Third Corps. After Buford’s cavalry withdrew, and some of his own scouts began reporting the enemy buildup behind Warfield Ridge, the major carefully deposed his sharpshooters in four-man cells along a paperthin line stretching north from Bushman Hill (southwest of Big Round Top) to the area around the Slyder farm. Their assignment was not to hold any specific position but rather, by operating independently, to delay and harass the Rebels.

Already their stings were having an effect. A few marksmen infiltrated the Confederate picket lines to begin picking off gunners in Captain James Reilly’s Rowan (North Carolina) Artillery. This in turn provoked Evander Law to detach three companies from the 47th Alabama to handle the threat. The three were soon followed by two companies from the 48th Alabama, which would be further reinforced from Hood’s second line by 375 Georgians belonging to Anderson’s Brigade. Each such subtraction weakened the assault power of the Rebel units.

As it happened, however, it was not sharpshooters but instead an unidentified artillery crew who dealt Longstreet’s advance a crippling blow just minutes after it began. Having watched his beloved Texas and
Arkansas troops commence their movement, John B. Hood rode down the slope toward the center of his line. He had just reached an orchard on the grounds of the Bushman farm, from which point he probably intended to oversee the deployment of the supporting brigades of Benning and Anderson, when a sputtering fuse touched powder twenty feet over his head. The explosion of the Yankee spherical case rained iron fragments down onto Hood. “I … saw him sway to and fro in the saddle and then start to fall from his horse, when he was caught by one of his aides,” observed the commander of the 1st Texas. Hood had received a bad wound in his left arm.

The division commander was out of the action. Gone with him was any prospect that the “digression” he had intended would be implemented, for he had shared his decision with no one. Instead of making a wide sweep around the Yankee flank (for the first wave) and then following that up on an inside track (for the second), Hood’s units would be guided by the exigencies of the moment—exigencies that immediately began to assert themselves.

From the start of the advance, the Texas Brigade’s commander, Jerome B. Robertson, believed that he was to keep the Emmitsburg Road close on his left, to provide a pivot point on which the two brigades would swing around to face north. He now observed that the road veered more northward than he had anticipated, and for some reason Law’s Brigade was pushing almost due east, showing no sign of turning to the north. Even before he could react, his brigade began to pull apart. His two right regiments, the 4th and 5th Texas, angled more to the east to maintain contact with the Alabama men, while his left pair, the 3rd Arkansas and 1st Texas, tried to hold to a northeasterly course.

Faced with a choice between Law and the Emmitsburg Road, Robertson decided to abandon the latter. But even now he was losing his ability to manage events. His orders instructing the 3rd Arkansas and 1st Texas to rejoin the rest of the brigade were ignored, as the two units had settled on a more pressing objective: the guns of Smith’s battery, now spitting death at them from Devil’s Den.

Tillie Pierce could hardly believe the events of the past twenty-four hours. Terribly frightened by the July 1 fighting, she had fled her family’s home on Baltimore Street, found temporary refuge in the Evergreen Cemetery gatehouse, then extended her odyssey as far as the Jacob
Weikert farm, just off the Taneytown Pike on the eastern slopes of Big and Little Round Top.

The first part of this day kept her busy providing water and bread to the Federal soldiers as they marched past on their way to the front. All that changed, however, when “toward the middle of the afternoon heavy cannonading began on the two Round Tops just back of the [Weikert] house,” she recorded. “This was so terrible and severe that it was with great difficulty we could hear ourselves speak. It began very unexpectedly; so much so, that we were all terror-stricken, and hardly knew what to do.”

What had begun as an orderly row of nine regiments in one grand Confederate line of battle rapidly underwent a complicated reshuffling as the units moved eastward from the Emmitsburg Road. The two leftmost regiments in Hood’s two-brigade front had veered to the northeast soon after leaving the point of departure, heading toward Devil’s Den. Law’s Brigade, along with the 4th and 5th Texas Regiments, continued more directly east, swatting at the 2nd U.S. Sharpshooters while trying to hold course through the gorge between Devil’s Den and Big Round Top. When this formation reached a tangled outcropping of woodland spilling off Bushman Hill, it became impossible for the 48th Alabama (the rightmost regiment) to advance farther, so it halted before sidestepping in behind the 15th Alabama.

The Bliss farm now changed hands yet again. It had been controlled by the two Mississippi regiments of Posey’s Brigade for about thirty minutes, but Union Brigadier General Alexander Hays was not going to let that situation continue. Once more he organized a strike force, this one taken predominantly from the 12th New Jersey. There was no subtlety in his plan, just a straight dash right down the middle. A determining factor in the choice of this direct route was the guns carried by the New Jersey soldiers: sixty-nine-caliber smoothbore muskets. These weapons were useless at long range, but up close their “buck and ball” load made them the equivalent of shotguns. So the more quickly the men closed the range, the better.

The command to advance was given, and two hundred New Jersey soldiers raced toward the Bliss farm buildings. “When we were within a short distance of the barn, our column halted, delivered their fire, then charged with a cheer, surrounding first the barn and then the house,” recollected a sergeant. “The Rebels [held] until we poured in through the doors and windows and almost [met] them face to face, [whereupon they cried] out for quarters: ‘We surrender Yanks—don’t, don’t shoot!’”

The charge cost the New Jersey command almost 20 percent of its strength in killed and wounded. But the Bliss farm was once more in Union hands.

The will-o’-the-wisp U.S. sharpshooters were rarely in one place long enough for any of Law’s Alabama troops to get a good bead on them. Only when the Rebel battle line approached the somewhat open area around the William Slyder farm did several sharpshooter companies spontaneously coalesce, behind a stone wall, into a momentarily firm line that chewed at the enemy. So fierce was this brief stand that the area would afterward become known as the Hornet’s Nest. As Law’s men, assisted by some of Robertson’s Texans, flanked this line, the Yankee marksmen reverted to their more flexible four-man cells, some falling back toward Devil’s Den while others backpedaled up the slope of Big Round Top.

When the moment arrived for Evander Law to wheel his composite strike force to the north to enter Plum Run Gorge, the sharpshooters made another significant contribution that mitigated the strength of the blow. The green-clad soldiers so bedeviled Colonel William Oates, commanding Law’s two-regiment right wing, that he directed the 15th and 47th Alabama Regiments to continue pursuing them up Big Round Top. “I received an order from Brigadier General Law to left-wheel my regiment and move in the direction of the heights upon my left,” Oates later reported, “which order I failed to obey, for the reason that when I received it I was rapidly advancing up the mountain.”

Strong Vincent may not have been a warrior born, but at the moment of his greatest martial trial, he acted with a cool intelligence that any military professional would have envied. By the time James Rice brought the head of his quarter-mile-long brigade column to the southern end of Little Round Top, Vincent had decided to post his four regiments along the lower ledge of the southern and western slopes, thus allowing the enemy less room to maneuver than would have been the case if the Yankee line had been positioned closer to the crest.