Gettysburg (77 page)

On his way back to his command, Pickett received Alexander’s second note, confirming his actions.

East of Gettysburg, the scrapping along Cress Ridge was becoming more and more contentious. The dismounted skirmishing between the Virginia troopers from Jenkins’ Brigade, under Vincent Witcher, and the Michigan men under Custer lasted an hour or more, giving the lie to Jeb Stuart’s later claim that these Virginians (not part of his regular command) had entered the action with only ten rounds apiece.

Stuart’s plan, such as it was, called for his brigades to use the skirmish line as a screen behind which they would move southward to drive a wedge between the Federal cavalry along the Hanover Road and the Federal infantry over toward Culp’s Hill. For his part, David McMurtrie Gregg had three brigades on the field, two representing his own division and one on reluctant loan from Judson Kilpatrick. Gregg’s intentions were purely defensive. He formed a blocking position with Custer’s regiments at the intersection of the Low Dutch Road and the Hanover Road, and placed Colonel
J.
Irvin Gregg’s brigade west of that along the Hanover Road. Colonel John
B.
Mcintosh’s brigade meanwhile took station north of Custer, off the Low Dutch Road, with many of the men being posted in a patch of woods on the farm of one Jacob Lott.

Trouble brewed as each side sent reinforcements out to its skirmishers, first additional dismounted units, then mounted ones that flowed around the flanks. As each new force appeared, the other side would respond by sending forward one of its own. Reaction was the motivation, and initiative a hot potato flying from one side to the other. A mounted charge against the Michigan skirmishers by squadrons from two Virginia regiments of
W. H. F.
Lee’s brigade, then commanded by Colonel John
R.
Chambliss, was answered by one from the 7th Michigan, with the long-haired Custer at its head. This in turn sparked a riposte by the 1st North Carolina and the Jeff Davis Legion of Brigadier General Wade Hampton’s brigade. Sorting out who had done what to whom would be virtually impossible in the years to come. “It is yelling, shooting, swearing, cutting, fight, fight—all fight,” recalled a Michigan trooper.

Needing someplace to go, James Longstreet rode down to where Edward P. Alexander was stationed. Alexander had a mix of news for him, good and bad. The young artillery officer was encouraged by the fact that the guns had been either silenced or driven away from the center of the enemy’s line; that was all to the good. On the debit side, the close support he was to provide for the attacking troops was in jeopardy.

Alexander had been counting on using some short-range howitzers from A. P. Hill’s corps, passed to him by William Pendleton and subsequently sent by himself to a safe nearby position to the rear. He had just learned, however, that the guns had been moved—where to or by whom, no one seemed to know. While this story would loom large in Alexander’s postwar thinking about the battle, either he or Pendleton had the facts wrong. The battery identified by Alexander—”Richardson’s”—contained long-range rifles, not short-range howitzers. The guns’ disappearance may have resulted from Pendleton’s jumping the chain of command and speaking directly to the battery officer without informing his direct superiors. It was that officer’s battalion commander, knowing nothing of Pendleton’s “deal” with Alexander, who had shifted the battery’s position.

Far more important than these details was Alexander’s now-dour estimate of the number of rounds he had on hand for the direct support of Pickett’s advance. It was an important aspect of Lee’s plan that as many guns as possible move forward with the infantry, but they could not proceed without sufficient ammunition, and most did not have enough. This news startled Longstreet, who had never imagined that his cannon would run out of shells. “‘Go & halt Pickett right where he is,’” Longstreet said, “‘& replenish your ammunition.’” Alexander shook his head. To avoid the enemy’s counterfire, the reserve train had been moved well out of range. It would take more than an hour to bring it forward again to refill the nearly empty limbers, the artillerist explained, “‘& meanwhile the enemy would recover from the pressure he is now under.’”

Longstreet rode ahead of Alexander a little way and looked through his glasses at the Union line along Cemetery Ridge. “‘I don’t want to make this attack,’” he said, pausing between sentences as if thinking aloud. “‘I believe it will fail—I do not see how it can succeed—I would not make it even now, but that Gen. Lee has ordered & expects it.’” There was nothing Alexander could say to ease Longstreet’s pain. “So I stood by,” he recalled, “& looked on, in silence almost embarrassing.”

I
t was time for Lee’s infantry to form for the assault. Mississippian William Peel felt the “momentary [lull], of men resuming their places in line, and silence—a silence as awful as the thunder of the minute before had been—settled itself around us. All ears were straining for the command we knew fulwell must follow soon.” “I tell you there is no romance in making one of these charges …,” declared John Dooley of the 1st Virginia. “When you rise to your feet …, I tell you the enthusiasm of ardent breasts in many cases
ain’t there
, and instead of burning to avenge the insults of our country, families and altars and firesides, the thought is most frequently,
Oh
, if I could just come out of this charge safely how thankful
would I be!
”

An aide to George Pickett described how the major general “rode along the long lines of his brave veterans and calmly bade them look at the heights they were ordered by Gen. Lee to take. He told them they could see the greatness of the undertaking and appreciate it as well as he could & that it
must
be done; he begged them to
remember they were Virginians
, and exhorted them to stand to the work.” Halting alongside Richard Garnett, Pickett said, “‘I have no orders to give you, but I advise you to get across those fields as quick as you can, for in my opinion you are going to catch hell.’”

Frank Haskell, the lieutenant on John Gibbon’s staff, was silently grateful to be alive. “The Artillery fight over, men began to breathe more freely, and to ask:—’What next I wonder?’ The Battery men were among their guns, some leaning to rest, and wipe the sweat from their sooty faces,— some were handling ammunition boxes, and replenishing those that were empty. Some Batteries from the Artillery Reserve were moving up to take the places of the disabled ones:—the smoke was clearing from the crests.”

Haskell found his commander, who said “he inclined to the belief that the enemy was falling back, and that the cannonade was only one of his noisy modes of covering the movement. I said that I thought that fifteen minutes would show that, by all his bowling, the Rebel did not mean retreat.” Glancing up, Haskell saw Henry Hunt moving with much more haste than usual and gesticulating to his gunners with a sense of urgency. Gibbon called for horses. The staff officer who brought them forward looked pale but excited. “‘General,’” he confided, “’they say the enemy’s Infantry is advancing.’”

The Union batteries within ground zero were affected to varying degrees by the Rebel barrage. George Woodruff’s (1st United States Light Artillery, Battery I) was the least disrupted, sustaining only slight damage from falling tree limbs and the loss of a few horses; after some minor cleanup, the six cannon posted in Ziegler’s Grove were ready for action. “Woodruff had his guns run to the crest of the hill, and gave the necessary orders to prepare for the struggle that was coming,” wrote one of his crew. “He would not fire a shot until the enemy got in close range where our canister would be most effective.”

William A. Arnold’s six tubes (1st Rhode Island Light Artillery, Battery A), lacking the tree cover enjoyed by Woodruff’s men, were badly battered. One of Arnold’s crew would never forget that “awful, rushing sound of flying missiles, a sound that causes the firmest hearts to quail.” Four of the guns were withdrawn, and a fifth disabled one was left in place; the last, with all the remaining ammunition, was pushed up close to the stone wall.

Alonzo Cushing’s battery (4th United States Light Artillery, Battery A) had also taken a terrible beating. Several caissons had been exploded, numbers of Cushing’s men had been mangled by shell fragments and explosions, two cannon had been hit and disabled, and the wheels of several others had been shattered, forcing the sweating cannoneers to swap in spares as deadly shells hissed around them. Even so, two more guns were lost. A hit so cruelly injured Private Arsenal H. Griffin that the agonized gunner put a pistol to his head, called out, “‘Good-by boys,’” and shot himself. Still the grimly determined Cushing remained undeterred; when Alexander Webb came over to offer his opinion that the Rebel infantry would be coming soon, Cushing replied, “‘I better run all the guns right up to the stone fence, and bring all my canister.’” “‘All right, do so,’” Webb replied.

The 1st Rhode Island Light Artillery, Battery B, next in line after Cushing’s, was also in bad shape. The unit had lost its commander, Lieutenant T. Fred Brown, and twenty-two comrades on July 2. Today, two limbers had been exploded, thirty horses had fallen, and three of the six guns had been knocked out. Many crewmen were down as well. A dazed survivor recollected that the shells “came so thick and fast, there was no dodging them.” A less lucky comrade had his shoulder ripped open by a shell fragment; as his life drained away with his blood, he died shouting, “‘Glory to God! I am happy! Hallelujah!’” The battery itself was almost as far gone, so a call went to the rear for a substitute to come forward and replace it.

The last in this set was Captain James M. Rorty’s 1st New York Light Artillery, Battery B. It shared much of the fate of Cushing’s and Brown’s outfits. By the time the enemy fire lifted, young Rorty was dead, and his successor was down to one cannon operational out of four—and that only because he had managed to draft some nearby infantrymen to help his decimated crew. Despite the carnage, Rorty’s battery showed no signs of pulling back.

The advance planned by Lee and Longstreet comprised two wings that would begin their movement with a gap of several hundred yards between them. Pickett’s force, the right wing’s principal element, was formed in two lines. On the left of the front line was Richard B. Garnett’s brigade. Citing his horse-kick injury as an excuse, Garnett ignored the instructions calling for officers to advance on foot and instead was mounted. To the right and slightly to the rear of Garnett’s Brigade was that of James Kemper, who was also on horseback. Behind those two, though primarily in back of Garnett, was Lewis Armistead’s large command. Once the front formation had cleared out of the way, Armistead was to oblique slightly to his left and come up even with Garnett in order to form a continuous line connecting to Heth’s Division, even as Garnett’s men closed to their left.

Questions remain regarding the role to be played by the other two commands immediately associated with the right wing: Wilcox’s and Perry’s Brigades (the latter still led by David Lang), both from Richard Anderson’s division of Hill’s Corps. George Pickett thought they had been designated as reinforcements, to be called up should his advance stall. A. P. Hill, for his part, maintained that the pair were meant to be available to exploit any success realized by the assaulting force. And Robert E. Lee, in his report, indicated that he had intended for the two brigades to guard the vulnerable right flank of the advancing lines. Wilcox, meanwhile, made it clear in his own report that it had been his understanding that he was not to move until he received positive orders to do so. Such unnecessary confusion as to the goals and objectives of these important units marked another abandoned piece of Lee’s careful plan for the attack.