Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (52 page)

Of Vincent’s four regiments, the 44th New York led the way, followed by Vincent’s own 83rd Pennsylvania, the 20th Maine, and finally the 16th Michigan. Vincent placed the 16th Michigan on the right, where they would line up below the first of Charles Hazlett’s guns, as they were rolled one by one into position; beside the Michiganders, “in a semi-circle formation” that curled around the south face of Little Round Top, were the 44th New York, then the 83rd Pennsylvania; on the very end of the brigade and facing south toward Big Round Top was the 20th Maine, commanded by a man who, up till a year before, had been a professor of rhetoric at Bowdoin College, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Vincent, who had been in such a hurry that he didn’t bother unstrapping his sword from his saddle, but went into action armed with nothing more threatening than a riding crop, dressed the lines of the 20th Maine and solemnly warned, “I place you here! This is the left of the Union line. You
understand. You are to hold this ground at all costs.”
You
, at this moment, included everyone who could stand up: “Pioneers and provost guard” were “sent … to their companies,” drummer boys “seized the musket,” and “the cooks and servants not liable to such service asked to go in.” Even Vincent’s brigade bugler dismounted, took up a rifle, and found a place on the line.
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They did not have long to wait. “The brigade had scarcely formed line of battle and pushed forward its skirmishers” when the
pop-pop
of Confederate skirmishers could be heard from the woods at the base of
Big Round Top, and quickly “three columns”—two regiments each of McIvor Law’s Alabamians and the third composed of the 4th and 5th Texas—“approached.” The 47th
Alabama pressed to “within fifteen yards” of the 83rd Pennsylvania, before going to ground “behind the rocks” and keeping up “a deadly fire upon our troops.” Over on the left of the line, Chamberlain and the 20th Maine could see the rebels filtering through the woods “in rear of their line engaged,” trying to curl around the end of his last company. Chamberlain “stretched my regiment to left,” the men opening intervals of “3 to 5 paces” between themselves and bending their line back so that the left of the 20th Maine “was nearly at right angles with my right.” The Alabamians came up “in three lines on a double-quick … with
bayonets fixed,” with the heaviest weight of the attack hitting the 83rd Pennsylvania and 44th New York in the center. There was one coordinated
volley—“most destructive to our line,” wrote a soldier in the 5th Texas—and “for the first time in the history of the war,” the Texans began to “waver.”

In front of Chamberlain’s 20th Maine, the Alabamians caught their wind, and “pushed up to within a dozen yards of us before the terrible effectiveness of our fire compelled them to break and take shelter.” A soldier in the 44th New York saw a Confederate officer take off “his coat, and swinging it over his head … ran directly in the rear of the line as fast as he could go from one end of it to the other, pushing and urging his men right up to … the very face and teeth of our men on the slope of the hill.” The powder
smoke became so thick in the woods that the major of the 20th Maine could at first only see the legs of the Confederates.
Theodore Gerrish remembered “how rapidly the cartridges were torn from the boxes and stuffed in the smoking muzzles of the guns; how the steel rammers clashed and clanged in the heated barrels; how the men’s hands and faces grew grim and black with burning powder,” all of it joining in “a terrible medley of … shouts, cheers, groans, prayers, curses, bursting shells, whizzing rifle-bullets, and clanging steel.”
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The Alabamians came again, breaking into Chamberlain’s lines and making the fight “literally hand-to-hand.” The Alabamians were pushed back again, and the Maine men pounced on ammunition and weapons from any “disabled friend or foe on the field.” At last, the Alabamians gathered
themselves “in two lines in
echelon
by the right” for a fourth try, and “came on as if they meant to sweep everything before them,” shrieking the rebel yell. Chamberlain beat them to the punch. Fixing
bayonets, Chamberlain launched a spoiling attack of his own (like that of the 124th New York at
Devil’s Den) with the bayonet, “and with one yell of anguish wrung from its tortured heart, the regiment charged.” The surprise of it rocked the Alabamians back on their heels. “In this charge the bayonet only was used on our part,” wrote Chamberlain four days later, “& the rebels seemed so petrified with astonishment that their front line scarcely offered to run or to fire.” The company Chamberlain had detached to cover his left now swung around and added their fire into the fleeing Alabamians, and that “cleared the front” so completely that Chamberlain had to restrain his jubilant men from pursuing the rebels “to Richmond.”
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Things did not go nearly so well along the rest of Vincent’s brigade line. “Repeated charges were made on the center of the brigade” and at moments the fighting degenerated into “a terrible, close bayonet fight.” It reminded a man in the 4th Texas of “Indian fighting” more “than anything I experienced during the war.” John Stevens, in the 5th Texas, remembered that “the enemy in front … were not over 25 or 30 paces from us,” and the Texans ended up firing off some “10 or 12”
volleys, one after another. Waving his riding crop in the air,
Strong Vincent was shouting, “Don’t yield an inch now men or all is lost,” when a bullet ripped into his groin. (He was done for this battle and all other battles, and would die five days later in
Lewis Bushman’s farmhouse.) But they
were
yielding. The 48th Alabama and the 4th Texas began edging around the right flank of the 16th Michigan, and finally the Michiganders began to crack. The lieutenant colonel,
Norval Welch, and the color party of the 16th Michigan drifted backward, and then stumbled down the reverse slope of Little Round Top. The Texans had lost all order climbing up the rock-strewn slope, “occasionally pulling each other up on account of the rocks.” But at that moment the way was open for the Texans to “overlap, and turn” the entire length of Vincent’s line and Little Round Top with it.
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And then, over the crest of the hill, led by a sword-waving officer in muttonchop whiskers, ran Union soldiers, companies A and G of the 140th New York, piling into the unprepared Texans from the north end of Little Round Top. They were the men Gouverneur Warren had gone looking for.

A year earlier, Warren had been busy commanding a brigade in the 5th Corps, in the days when George McClellan’s closest friend,
Fitz-John Porter, had been the corps commander. And when Warren came madly loping down the north face of Little Round Top on that late July afternoon, it was his old brigade, now under the acting command of
Stephen Weed, which he met on the road at the base of Little Round Top, heading to the relief of Dan Sickles.
Directly in his path was the rear regiment of the brigade, the 140th New York, commanded by
Patrick O’Rorke. “Paddy” O’Rorke was born in County Cavan, Ireland, but in 1836 his parents brought him to Canada with them as a small child, finally emigrating again to Rochester, New York, in the 1840s. When his father died in 1850, O’Rorke was left the principal breadwinner of his family. But he won a city-wide college scholarship competition in 1855, and then a place at West Point in 1857. Less than 2 percent of the ranks of West Point’s cadets were foreign-born. But O’Rorke placed at or near the top in every department but languages, and was commissioned into the Corps of Engineers in 1861. He circulated through a variety of staff duties until being named colonel of the 140th New York in the fall of 1862, and now his old brigade commander was bearing down on him, shouting something that startled O’Rorke.
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Warren “called out to O’Rorke, beginning to speak while still some eight or ten rods from us,” and he did not mince words:
Paddy, Give me a regiment
. Startled, O’Rorke protested that “General Weed is ahead and expects me to follow him.” “Never mind that,” Warren cut him off. “Bring your regiment up here and I will take the responsibility.” And so O’Rorke turned his regiment around, and got them moving up the north face of Little Round Top in column of fours. Warren gave him a parting warning—at the top, don’t bother to pause for dressing the regiment’s line. “No time now Paddy, for alignments. Take your men immediately into action.” And then Warren was off, looking for
Stephen Weed in hope of persuading Weed to send the rest of the brigade as well. Meanwhile, O’Rorke and the 140th (guided by Warren’s aide, Lt.
Washington Roebling) went up the slope of Little Round Top at the double-quick, and at the crest O’Rorke dismounted, threw his reins to his regimental sergeant major, and shouted, “Down this way, boys!”

The first two companies went headlong into the milling and astonished Texans without even pausing to load. “Here they are, men,” O’Rorke shouted. “Commence firing.” The Texans succeeded in getting off only one ragged
volley, but it was close enough that a bullet sliced through O’Rorke’s neck and spine, killing him instantly, along with two other officers and twenty-five of O’Rorke’s New Yorkers. Then the 140th New York was all through them, taking prisoners and driving the shattered Texans off the hill “in disorder.” It was 5:30, and O’Rorke was dead, and Vincent was down, but they had held Little Round Top—even if it had been by the skin of their teeth.
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This did not guarantee that Little Round Top had been rendered permanently safe for the
Army of the Potomac. Warren found Weed, got the rest of Weed’s brigade turned around and headed for Little Round Top, and eventually they came trotting up the same path blazed by the 140th New York. (The last of Hazlett’s guns was being hauled up, and the crew “plunged
directly through our ranks, the horses being urged to frantic efforts by the whips of their drivers and the cannoneers assisting at the wheels.”) But the Confederates showed little taste for another grand assault: Robertson’s
Texas brigade, like the rest of Hood’s division, had been on its feet since first light, had attacked and carried a bitterly defended position on
Houck’s Ridge and
Devil’s Den, and, by the time Robertson led them toward Little Round Top, three of the four regimental commanders in the brigade were down. The Alabamians “were fainting and falling, overcome with heat and weariness, and in spite of exhortations from their officers.”
William Oates, commanding the 15th
Alabama, would later claim that he had ordered the 15th and 47th Alabama to retreat
before
Chamberlain launched his bayonet charge, and with good reason:
W. F. Perry, the colonel of the 44th Alabama, had been “prostrated by heat and excessive exertion”; the colonel of the 47th Alabama,
Michael Bulger, had taken a bullet through his left lung (he would, marvelously, survive); and three of Oates’ company captains in the 15th Alabama were missing. Of 2,000 Alabamians who started the day in Law’s brigade, 27 percent were casualties; of the 1,700 or so in Robertson’s brigade, over 30 percent were out of action. Both brigades were only inches away from organizational breakdown.
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Nevertheless, Confederate skirmishers across the ravine in Devil’s Den kept up a steady sore-loser fire from behind the boulders in the Den and along Houck’s Ridge, and in short order “the bullets were flattening themselves against the rocks all about.” Among their victims was
Stephen Weed, who had just ordered his brigade bugler to blow officer’s call to get his regimental commanders around him. He was felled by a “shot through the lungs,” which left him paralyzed and dying. Charles Hazlett, in the act of dismounting after hearing of Weed’s wounding, was himself “shot in the left side of his head,” lost consciousness at once, and died after midnight. (Both Weed and Hazlett had been officers in the 5th U.S. Artillery at the start of the war, and were supposed to have been such “dear friends” that Hazlett was killed while bending over Weed to catch his words.)
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In the decades after Gettysburg—and especially from the 1890s onward—the fight for Little Round Top assumed a stature almost equal to the entire balance of battle at Gettysburg. Gouverneur Warren would pay himself the handsome compliment of having seen “that this was the key of the whole position,” and Warren had at least some confirmation for this claim when McIvor Law conceded that Little Round Top was “really the key to the whole position of Gettysburg.” Union veterans, and battlefield tour “delineators,” unfailingly pointed to Little Round Top as “the key of the field in front beyond a doubt,”
and popular historians upped the ante to the point where Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine “saved the Union at Little Round Top.”
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It takes nothing away from the tenacity of the fighting—the last-minute arrivals, the desperate and sometimes hand-to-hand combat, the just-in-time swing and flow of the action—to say that the drama of Little Round Top has been allowed to run away with the reality. Credit for defending it belongs primarily to Gouverneur Warren,
Strong Vincent, and
Patrick O’Rorke, and only after them to Chamberlain. But the others faded from view for reasons that left the stage open to the former Bowdoin professor. O’Rorke died there, and Vincent followed him after five days of suffering, which removed the two principal nominees for celebration; and Warren (who would be pilloried by
Philip Sheridan for misconduct at Five Forks in 1865) was far from looking like the laurel-wearing type. Chamberlain, however, would survive three wounds in 1864 (one of them near-fatal), win the
Congressional Medal of Honor, and end the war as a major general. Between Appomattox and his death in 1914, Chamberlain would serve four terms as governor of Maine and as president of Bowdoin College, and in the process he would have the time to publish at least seven accounts of Gettysburg, giving himself the starring role on Little Round Top, and Little Round Top the starring role in the battle as the last extension of the Union left flank. Other veterans of Vincent’s brigade were not impressed: “Chamberlain,” complained
Porter Farley of the 140th New York, “is a professional talker and I am told rather imaginative withal.” Chamberlain’s charge was indeed a beau geste, but it was only one of several such
spoiling attacks that day, and Little Round Top was more of an outpost than the real flank of the Union line. Mortality, and the ex-professor’s considerable flair for self-promotion, vaulted him ahead of the others.
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