Gettysburg (75 page)

Throughout the morning of planning and preparations, Robert E. Lee had never wavered in his belief that the assault he had ordered against the enemy’s center would succeed. “A careful examination was made of the ground secured [on July 2] by Longstreet,” he later reported, “and his batteries placed in positions, which, it was believed, would enable them to silence those of the enemy. Hill’s artillery and part of Ewell’s [were] ordered to open simultaneously, and the assaulting column to advance under cover of the combined fire of the three. The batteries were directed to be pushed forward as the infantry progressed, protect their flanks, and support their attacks closely.”

His own survey of the ground, supplemented by information regarding yesterday’s advances by Wright’s Brigade, convinced Lee that his men would not suffer serious losses covering the distance from Seminary Ridge to the Emmitsburg Road. There were ripples and folds in the land that would shield them from the worst, at least until they lost that cover crossing the Emmitsburg Road, with something like a thousand feet to go.

For that last stretch, Lee was counting on the aftereffects of his unprecedented artillery bombardment, which he assumed would have scoured the facing slope of enemy ordnance. Here his expectation was likely no different from that of his artillery chief, William Pendleton: “With the enemy, there was advantage of elevation and protection from earthworks; but his fire was unavoidably more or less divergent, while ours was convergent,” Pendleton observed. “His troops were massed, ours diffused. We, therefore, [should suffer] … much less.”

If the bombardment did its work, if the flanks were protected, and if enough of the artillery advanced with the infantry, Lee believed that his superb soldiers would cleave the Yankee army in twain. He hoped the Federal soldiers would lose their nerve and felt utterly confident that his own would press the attack all the way to Cemetery Ridge. He had planned carefully, brought the best elements together, and made clear to all what he had in mind. There was no more for him to do; it was all in God’s hands now.

James Longstreet was not surprised by the tone or content of Edward P. Alexander’s reply to his note. He was not yet prepared, however, to abandon this last possibility of postponing the effort. “I still desired to save my men,” he later explained, “and felt that if the artillery did not produce the desired effect, I would be justified in holding Pickett off.” So he sent a second message to Alexander:

Longstreet’s follow-up did not lessen the unease Edward P. Alexander was feeling. “I hardly knew whether this left me discretion or not,” he reflected, “but at any rate it seemed decided that the artillery must open.” He passed the note on to Ambrose Wright. “‘He has put the responsibility back upon you,’” Wright said after reading it. Alexander later recalled, “I felt that if we went [as far as opening fire] … we could not draw back, but the infantry must go too.” He looked at Wright, whose brigade had made it across those very fields not twenty-four hours earlier. “‘What do you think of it?’” he asked. “‘Is it as hard to get there as it looks?’”

“‘Well, Alexander, it is mostly a question of supports,’” Wright responded. “‘It is not as hard to get there as it looks,’” he said, then added, “‘There is a place where you can get breath and re-form.’” Perhaps he paused here, thinking of the confusion of last night’s fighting and the frustration of standing at the threshold but having no one to help him over. “‘The real difficulty is to stay there after you get there—for the whole infernal Yankee army is up there in a bunch,’” he finished.

Still uncertain, the artillerist rode over to George Pickett. He had no intention of sharing the contents of Longstreet’s communications with him, but he needed to know if Pickett himself believed he could do it. “He was in excellent spirits & sanguine of success,” Alexander noted. That settled it. He scribbled a last message to Longstreet:

The temperature was passing 80 degrees, which, combined with the high humidity, exacted a toll on the soldiers waiting behind the Confederate guns. “The tension on our troops had become great,” wrote a staff officer in Pickett’s Division.

Alexander’s concluding message to Longstreet had stated his position with stark clarity. With all the burden back on him, Longstreet decided to take one last survey of his options. “I rode once or twice along the ground between Pickett and the Federals, examining the positions and studying the matter over in all its phases so far as we could anticipate,” he recollected. It was approaching 1:00
P.M.
when Longstreet sent off the fateful message, this time directing it to the actual commander of the First Corps’ artillery, James B. Walton.

George Pickett’s inspector general, Walter Harrison, made a face that clearly conveyed his opinion of the cup of Gettysburg well water he had just been handed by Cadmus Wilcox. Harrison would later celebrate it as the “coldest, hardest water that ever sprung out of limestone rock.” Harrison, Wilcox, and Richard Garnett were sitting near Sherfy’s peach orchard, sharing a piece of cold mutton from Wilcox’s larder. Harrison finally decided to mix a little Pennsylvania whiskey with the water—the only way, he suggested, to keep it from “freezing my whole internal economy, and petrifying my heart of hearts.”

The three were enjoying the moment when, as Harrison remembered it, the “first signal-gun broke mysteriously upon the long tedium of the day.”

Longstreet’s courier found James B. Walton near Sherfy’s peach orchard, where he was holding station with Major Benjamin F. Eshleman’s Washington (Louisiana) Artillery. Walton gave the order to Eshleman, who had it carried out by two guns of the battalion’s third company, commanded by Captain Merritt B. Miller. Eshleman would later report that the two signal guns had been fired “in quick succession,” though some of the crew would remember that a bad friction primer had made for a pause between the shots. In any case, the interim likely felt longer than it was, but then the second shot sounded. According to Eshleman, this was “immediately followed by all the battalions along the line opening simultaneously upon the enemy behind his works.”

L
ieutenant William Peel and the 591 other members of the 11th Mississippi Regiment, in Joseph
R.
Davis’ brigade, were crouched down on Seminary Ridge, just behind Captain Hugh
M.
Ross’ six-gun battery, part of the Georgia “Sumter” Battalion. Peel had barely registered the sound of the signal guns when, almost “at the same instant, along the whole line, there burst a long loud peel of artificial thunder forth, that made the ground to tremble beneath its force.” Lieutenant John Dooley’s 1st Virginia (209 strong) was backing up the core of Edward P. Alexander’s cannon row, perhaps a thousand feet west of the Klingle farm. “Never will I forget those scenes and sounds,” Dooley later swore. “The earth seems unsteady beneath this furious cannonade, and the air might be said to be agitated by the wings of death.”

On the receiving end of all this attention, Lieutenant Frank Haskell was lounging with John Gibbon and the rest of Gibbon’s staff. At the sound of the signal guns, all present sprang to their feet. Then the first salvos of the Rebel barrage consumed the few seconds it took to cover the distance from ridge to ridge, Seminary to Cemetery. “The wildest confusion for a few minutes obtained among us,” Haskell recorded. “The shells came bursting all about. … The horses, hitched to the trees or held by the slack hands of orderlies, neighed out in fright, and broke away and plunged riderless through the fields. The General at the first, had snatched his sword, and started on foot for the front. … I found [my horse] … tied to a tree near by, eating oats, with an air of the greatest composure, which under the circumstances, even then struck me as exceedingly ridiculous.”

To Sarah Broadhead, again huddled in her home’s cellar, it seemed “as if the heavens and earth were crashing together.” Albertus McCreary noted that the “vibrations could be felt and the atmosphere was so full of smoke that we could taste the saltpeter.” Charles McCurdy thought it “the most terrific cannonading that we had heard,” while John Rupp declared it an “awful thunder.” Henry Jacobs’ cellar, from which he had seen the soldier killed on the sloping door, had been invaded by two maiden ladies who made a macabre game of the proceedings. “It was possible to distinguish the fire of the opposing sides,” Jacobs remembered, “and as the cannonade made its thunderous calls and responses, they would exclaim: ‘Their side—our side! Their side—our side!’”

It was Henry Hunt’s intention that the Federal artillery should reply only sparingly, if at all, to the massive Rebel challenge. He recognized the effort for what it was: a well-planned barrage meant to “crush our batteries and shake our infantry.” In such a situation, the greatest contribution his guns could make would be to smash the enemy’s infantry when it appeared. That meant that his crews had to refrain from gun-to-gun fights that would use up their ready supplies of spherical case and shell.

But if Hunt’s self-control and self-discipline were of the highest order, his subcommanders’ restraint was often lacking. Perhaps most disappointing to Hunt in this regard was Major Thomas Osborn, the otherwise capable commander of the Eleventh Corps’ artillery, which was under fire from the east (Benner’s Hill), north (Oak Hill and along the Chambersburg Pike), and west (Seminary Ridge). Osborn’s practiced eye saw that while the Rebels had the range down pat, their elevation was high, so most of their shells were passing some twenty feet overhead. Most, but not all: the Confederate cannon on Benner’s Hill “raked the whole line of [the Eleventh Corps] batteries, killed and wounded the men and horses and blew up the caissons rapidly. I saw one shell go through six horses standing broadside.” Osborn soon had his cannoneers actively returning the fire.

The enemy shelling was especially concentrated on the Second Corps batteries positioned along the center of Meade’s Cemetery Ridge line. In this area were posted the six guns under Alonzo Cushing (4th United States, Battery A), the six under Captain William A. Arnold (1st Rhode Island, Battery A), and the six under Lieutenant George H. Woodruff (1st United States, Battery I). These guns, too, began to retaliate. A member of Cushing’s crew later wrote that the “fire that we were under was something frightful, and such as we had never experienced before. … Every few seconds a shell would strike right in among our guns, but we could not stop for anything. We could not even close our eyes when death seemed to be coming.” A cannoneer on Cemetery Hill would always remember the mixed sounds of the different shell types as they rushed overhead, “making discordant music that must have pleased the death angel.” Another artilleryman retained a vivid memory of how the concussion from his battery’s blasts sent “waves” rippling outward into the grass fields in his front “like gusts of wind.” The experience was less poetic for the Union soldiers positioned in the cannon’s blast zone, where the concussion “caused blood to flow from the ears and noses” of some men.

There was an ominous silence from one powerful row of Yankee guns. Building on the wall of cannon he had used to plug a hole in Meade’s line the day before, Freeman McGilvery had packed eight batteries into a compact front of some fifteen hundred feet. Although the thirty-nine guns were aligned along the military crest of Cemetery Ridge, two slight swells of ground rising just to the west blocked easy viewing of them from Seminary and Warfield Ridges, so for the most part they were not targeted in the Confederate fire plan. That was just fine with McGilvery, who ordered his batteries not to return the shelling that was landing everywhere but on them.

There was no fixed time for the start of the Confederate bombardment, so just about everyone was surprised by it. Robert E. Lee was working at his headquarters when the guns opened. He crossed the Chambersburg Pike and made his way to a piece of high ground on the northern side of the railroad cut, from which he observed Captain William J. Reese’s Jeff Davis (Alabama) Artillery in long-range operation. According to a letter to a hometown Alabama newspaper, Lee praised the sweating gunners for “their unsurpassed chivalry.” A. P. Hill took station just south of Lee, near the Lutheran seminary, where he watched the crew of Captain David Watson’s 2nd Richmond (Virginia) Howitzers go into action.

From his position just north of Sherfy’s peach orchard, Edward P. Alexander could detect no moderation on the part of the Yankee batteries opposing him. As best he could tell, the “whole [enemy] line from Cemetery Hill to Round Top seemed in five minutes [from the commencement of the bombardment] to be emulating a volcano in eruption.” Alexander also noted that his battalion was taking hits. A South Carolina infantryman near the peach orchard looked on as one Union gun got the range on a nearby Southern battery. The first three enemy shells “went high over our gun,” he reported. “All the others struck the ground in front of our gun and then safely ricocheted over our gunners, but at the same time covering them with dirt and dust.” The soldier thought that the “coolness of the officers and men was wonderful.” A Florida man in Perry’s Brigade “would look at the cannon around us, some of which were not over twenty feet away; could see the smoke and flame belch from their mouths, but could not distinguish a particular sound, it was one continuous and awful roar.”