Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (140 page)
The Wheat Field Lane looking east from the stony ridge across the wheat field and Houck’s Ridge toward Little Round Top; the monument in the center marks the place where Brigadier General Samuel Zook was mortally wounded on July 2, 1863.
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Confederate dead, probably of Paul Semmes’ brigade, on the Rose Farm, looking north toward the Wheat Field Lane; the stony ridge rises to the right.
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Colonel Francis Edward Heath (1838–1897), 19th Maine Volunteers, who refused Andrew A. Humphreys’ frenzied order to have his regiment turn their bayonets on Humphreys’ own men.
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Union skirmishers in houses at the base of Cemetery Hill, looking north up Baltimore Street, at the intersection with the Emmitsburg Road.
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The wreckage of John Bigelow’s 9th Massachusetts Artillery in the Abraham Trostle farmyard, as it appeared on July 6th or 7th, 1863.
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Officers and staff of the 69th Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Brigade.
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Brigadier General Cadmus Marcellus Wilcox (1824–1890) graduated from West Point in 1846, in the same class as George B. McClellan and “Stonewall” Jackson, and commanded an Alabama brigade in R. H. Anderson’s division. Wilcox’s attack on July 2nd delivered the final knockdown to the 3rd Corps of the Army of the Potomac, but was eventually stopped by the suicidal charge of the 1st Minnesota.
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A prewar image of William Barksdale (1821–1863), with his wig. A congressman from Mississippi before the war, he had served in McLaws’ division of Longstreet’s corps for a year before Gettysburg. He was mortally wounded on July 2nd when his brigade was finally halted by George Willard’s “Harpers Ferry Cowards,” and he died in Union hands that night.
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Edward Porter Alexander (1835–1910), Longstreet’s liaison with Pickett’s Division. Like so many of the officers clustered around Longstreet, Porter Alexander was a non-Virginian (he was born in Georgia). His postwar memoirs are among the most valuable observations of the commanders of the Army of Northern Virginia.
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Meade’s headquarters at the Widow Leister’s cottage, looking north to Cemetery Hill; the Taneytown Road is visible to the right. It was (according to John Trowbridge) a “little square box of a house … scarcely more than a hut, having but two little rooms on the ground-floor, and I know not what narrow, low-roofed chambers above … whitewashed outside and in, except the floor and ceilings and inside doors, which were neatly scoured.”
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The angle where Richard Garnett’s and Lewis Armistead’s brigades fought with the Philadelphia Brigade at the apex of Pickett’s Charge; from a stereo view made in 1882, looking south toward the Round Tops.
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Albertus McCreary beats a hasty retreat from his rooftop perch. “From this trap-door we saw Pickett’s charge … While we were watching this charge, a neighbor was watching it also, from his trap-door. He was peeping around the chimney, when a bullet struck just above his head and knocked off a piece of brick. He disappeared so quickly that we both laughed. Almost immediately two bullets struck within a foot of my head in the shingles of the roof, and we followed our neighbor’s example and dropped out of sight also.”
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