Gettysburg (59 page)

On Little Round Top, it was all coming down to the combative wills of two opposing regimental commanders. The men fought as they had been trained; discipline, pride, and stubbornness kept them to their task, despite the horrors around them. In one sense they had it easy, for they had to focus only on the small areas before them and could shut out the bloody havoc wreaked by the soft lead bullets that both sides used.

It was different for the two commanders, who needed acute situational awareness and a readiness to take risks. Neither of those traits conferred immunity to bullets. Joshua Chamberlain endured two glancing hits; one cut his foot, and the other was deflected by his sword scabbard, leaving a painful thigh bruise. Anyone looking at him would have thought him a picture of calm, but his mind was racing with the possibilities. Several of his requests for assistance or extra ammunition had been met by regretful refusals: everyone was hard pressed and low on munitions. Chamberlain knew that the bloody stalemate could not last forever. Every minute meant more irreplaceable cartridges gone, so that soon there would be nothing left to shoot. While he might not have a solution, Chamberlain never lost his determination. “We were on the appointed and entrusted line,” he later explained.

William Oates had already seen too much death this day. One of his best line officers, Captain Henry C. Brainard, had fallen with the cry “‘Oh God! that I could see my mother!’” And then there was the private who approached to advise him that the gunsmoke was too thick to see through. After Oates suggested that he duck under it, the boy did so, fired a round, and then fell with a head shot before he could reload. Oates sensed now that his men had one good effort left in them. He summoned every ounce of will for one more push against the Yankee left flank, positioned along a stone shelf. “Forward, men, to the ledge,” he cried out.

To the end of his days, Oates would believe that this last lunge had come very near to breaking the 20th Maine. “I led this charge,” he declared, “and sprang upon the ledge of rock, using my pistol within musket length, when the rest of my men drove the Maine men from their ledge.” There was no time to be lost. Without stopping to regroup, Oates again led his men charging toward what he thought was the 20th Maine’s principal line. “About forty steps up the slope there is a large boulder …, my regimental colors [were planted] just a step or two to the right of that boulder and I was within ten feet,” he reported.

But the Maine soldiers remained solid. A fusillade ripped into the yelling Rebels, and Oates could only watch in shock as his beloved brother John crumpled under the weight of multiple bullet wounds. Angry enough to cry, Oates knew that he and his men had reached their limit. He led his regiment back down the slope to a point where the shelf provided some cover. He was not yet ready to pull back, still convinced that he could find some way to take this position.

Three of John C. Caldwell’s four brigades had charged into Rose’s wheat field and fought the advancing Confederates to a standstill. Now the Second Corps division commander committed his last brigade, Colonel John R. Brooke’s, in hopes of tipping the balance toward victory. Brooke would later recollect that his line of battle “covered nearly the width of the field, [though] there was a small portion of the field on each flank, which was not covered by my line.” When formation got to about midfield, the colonel ordered a halt and then “fire at will.” “The men were firing as fast as they could load,” noted a Union officer. “The din was almost deafening.”

Brooke’s advance became slightly entangled with the movements of Cross’ brigade to the left and the composite Zook-Kelly command on the right. When Confederate riflemen began finding their range, Brooke realized he could not hold here. The choice was between forward and back. “Fix bayonets!” he shouted. It took some effort on the part of his officers to spread the word against the martial cacophony. A few flags finally began to move haltingly forward—one of them reportedly borne by Brooke himself. Soon the brigade began to pick up speed, charging toward the wheat field’s southwestern corner.

The momentum of the battle now lay with the Union. Brooke’s rush overran portions of Tige Anderson’s brigade, forcing Kershaw to backpedal from the stony hill to an area near the Rose farm. Brooke recalled halting “on the edge of the wood, fronting the Rose farm buildings. The open country was now in our front.”

Brooke’s success prompted one of the two Fifth Corps brigades that had initially been posted to the stony hill (and that had subsequently withdrawn a short distance north) to advance again to cover his left flank. Three regiments of Colonel Jacob B. Sweitzer’s brigade moved toward the southern side of the wheat field.

Also on hand to offer support were two brigades of regular United States Army troops, part of Brigadier General Romeyn B. Ayres’ Fifth Corps division. Having advanced to the northern end of Houck’s Ridge, these units were blocked in their front by the melee in the wheat field and being harassed from their left by heavy sniping from the Rebels controlling Devil’s Den. Absent any officer in overall charge, Ayres and Caldwell between them worked out a rough scheme by which the regulars could help stabilize the section held by remnants of Cross’ brigade. Caldwell believed he had closed out the fighting here, noting that up to this point, “everything had progressed favorably.”

It appeared that the Rebel effort to overwhelm the Federal flank had failed, save for Devil’s Den. But the situation was changing quickly on this hot July day.

The entirely self-made Daniel Sickles had risen to the pinnacle of Civil War military status through a complex mixture of ambition, ruthlessness, cronyism, patriotism, personal magnetism, and luck. All of these things had compelled him to act as he had done this day, when he gambled with the fate of an army with no more concern than he would exhibit while squandering several fortunes over a colorful lifetime that would carry him into the twentieth century. Whether one of his possible prizes might be a place in the White House would depend to a great extent on how well his luck held today. If he could maintain his position even to a tactical draw, his cunning and connections would let him weave his tale of near disaster into a glowing paean to victory. At his headquarters near the Trostle farm, Sickles may have sensed that Meade’s forthright efforts to bolster his line were apparently stemming the Rebel tide, and for a few moments he may even have allowed himself the sly pleasure of counting the payoff of a high-stakes risk.

Sickles’ dreams began to fade, however, when William Barksdale rode to the front of his assembled brigade, about a mile to the west of the Trostle place. “‘Attention, Mississippians!’” he shouted. “‘Battalions, Forward!’” As the 1,400 men began to move, their throats swelled with the eerie “Rebel yell,” purpose-designed to inspire and terrorize. With their commander in the lead, Barksdale’s Mississippi troops advanced in close ranks across the open fields toward Sherfy’s peach orchard, their formation’s compact front no more than 350 yards wide. An Alabama soldier watching from farther north proclaimed the entire scene “grand beyond description.”

In the years following the battle, many Mississippi veterans would claim that their charge to the Emmitsburg Road had been overpowering, suggesting that the Yankee infantry and artillery had had no effect. It was true that both union branches were depleted after the long artillery exchanges and the heavy skirmishing preceding Barksdale’s advance. Nevertheless, the Federals were stubborn. John K. Bucklyn’s 1st Rhode Island Light Artillery, Battery E, located on the western side of the road,
blasted canister into the Mississippi ranks, even as several advanced Union regiments maneuvered frantically to keep as many guns as possible trained on the enemy force. “Our men began to drop as soon as they came to attention, and were well peppered in covering the distance to the enemy,” remembered a member of the 21st Mississippi. “All [regiments] met with stiff resistance.”

But William Barksdale was not to be denied. His men drove forward, a living definition of unstoppable. Overwhelmed Federal units began to scramble out of their way, batteries limbering to the rear, regiments falling back in hasty disorder. “The shattered line was retreating in separated streams[,] artillerists heroically clinging to their still smoking guns, and brave little infantry squads assisting them with their endangered cannon over the soft ground,” wrote a Federal caught in the cauldron. A member of the 17th Mississippi recollected that the stunned Yankees “ran in crowds. You could not shoot without hitting two or three of them.” The final collapse of the Federal salient anchored in Sherfy’s peach orchard was not explicitly dramatic, but it was tactically decisive. Once the angle had been breached, the lines connecting to it on the east and north were doomed.
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Barksdale’s regiments were just beginning to congregate throughout the peach orchard when their commander was approached by one of his officers. The man counseled a halt to correct the troops’ alignment after the inevitable confusion of the charge. Barksdale was emphatic: “‘No! Crowd them—we have them on the run. Move your regiments.’” As one of the battered Federal regiments retreated from the peach orchard toward Cemetery Ridge, the officer in charge was met by Daniel Sickles. “‘Colonel!’” Sickles exclaimed. “‘For God’s sake can’t you hold on?’” The bleary-eyed officer looked at the pitiful soldierly remnants around his regiment’s flag. “‘Where are my men.’” he asked plaintively.

William Oates may have had a stubborn streak, but he was not foolhardy. His maximum effort had nearly folded the 20th Maine in on itself, but the attempt had failed. A soldier sent to scout for the next friendly unit to the west came back to report that there was none, so far as he could see—only Yankee troops were moving in that area. Then Oates’ right wing began taking hits from the concealed skirmishing company that Joshua Chamberlain had sent out earlier.

For a few moments, sheer pride filled the Confederate colonel with a determination never to yield, but instead to “sell out as dearly as possible.”

Then common sense asserted itself: it was time to get out. This withdrawal would not be a parade-ground maneuver, he knew: “I … advised [my officers] that when the signal was given every one should run in the direction from whence we came, and halt on the top of the [Big Round Top] mountain.”

Oates’ opposite number had come to a decision as well—one born of the same anger and desperation that gripped the Alabama officer, but leading in a totally different direction. “My thought was running deep,” Joshua Chamberlain later admitted. What he did, and the events of the next minutes, have been filtered through the gauze of popular history into a single action executed in smooth unison. But what actually transpired was the result of a complicated combination of elements that left even its architect somewhat confused.

It began with a courageous resolution by Chamberlain. “Desperate as the chances were, there was nothing for it, but to take the offensive,” he later wrote. He shouted, “Bayonet!,” and the men nearest him passed along the command even as they began unshipping the weapons from their belts. Amid the noise and confusion, the word did not make it all the way down the line; left wing leader Ellis Spear, for one, never heard it.