Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (59 page)

Barksdale’s four Mississippi regiments contained just over 1,600 men, but their most colorful asset was William Barksdale himself. A big, fleshy caricature of a Southern politico, Barksdale had been one of the most violent secessionist fire-eaters in Congress in the 1850s. In 1858, he was involved in a full-scale brawl on the floor of the House of Representatives which featured “Congressman Barksdale’s wig” being “torn from his head.” Barksdale had no trouble obtaining a commission as colonel of the 13th Mississippi, and rose to command an all-Mississippi brigade in late 1862. But he did not have a particularly lengthy combat record; his best moment had been at Fredericksburg, contesting the
Rappahannock river crossings. He had been slow getting his brigade deployed to move with Kershaw toward the stony ridge, and by the time he was ready, Longstreet was having second thoughts, and instead he allowed Wofford (who had originally been formed up behind Barksdale) to bring his men up to the line “on Barksdale’s right.”
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This only made Barksdale more eager to get moving. “I wish you would let me go in, General,” he pleaded with Longstreet, pointing to one of the Federal batteries in the peach orchard, 600 yards away. “I would take that
battery in five minutes.” Longstreet refused. “Wait a little,” he said, “we are all going in presently.” Getting nowhere with Longstreet, Barksdale appealed to McLaws “two or three times” for permission to attack, begging almost like a child, “General, let me go; General, let me charge!” Finally, at 6:30, Longstreet gave the go-ahead, and a jubilant Barksdale, “radiant with joy,” brought his four regiments out of the treeline and took them forward. Wigless and hatless, Barksdale rode “fifty yards in front of his brave boys,” and his bald pate and long white hair, streaming behind him, reminded one of McLaws’ staffers of lines from Macaulay’s
Ivry
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The
Mississippi brigade drove forward at the double-quick and “literally rushed the goal,” yipping the rebel yell “with the savage courage of baited bulls.” They struck the peach orchard squarely on its angle, the 21st Mississippi wrapping around to crush the south side of the orchard, and the remaining three regiments rolling straight for Graham’s brigade. Three of Graham’s regiments moved to the east side of the road to support one of the
3rd Corps artillery batteries beside the Sherfy barn, but they did not stay there long. As the Mississippians advanced “to within 40 yds,” the 68th Pennsylvania, which “formed an angle fronting on the pike,” was first to fold. Hit from two sides, the 68th crumbled “retiring slowly and contesting the ground inch by inch.” Next to go was the 114th Pennsylvania, whose gaudy Zouave uniforms promptly began littering the yard around the Sherfy barn, windmill, and canning house. “Every door, window and sash of the Sherfy house was shivered to atoms” and the barn was “riddled like a sieve from base to roof.”
George Gerald, the major of the 18th Mississippi, led a surge up to the barn, kicked in the barn door, “and within less than two minutes we had killed, wounded or captured every man in the barn.”

The battery the
Zouaves had tried to save—Battery E,
1st Rhode Island Light Artillery—had a long association with the regiment, but there was nothing to do for them now. The battery’s commander, Lt.
John Bucklyn, lost “nearly one-half of our horses and one third of our men were either killed or wounded,” and Bucklyn was reduced to hauling off his guns by their
prolonge
ropes. As they pulled back, a domino effect overcame Graham’s last two regiments on the
Emmitsburg Road—the 57th Pennsylvania and 105th Pennsylvania—who only “checked the advancing rebels for a few minutes”
and then came unstitched and ran like the rest. (At the last moment, an officer in the 57th Pennsylvania remembered that he had posted a fifteen-man detail inside the Sherfy buildings; anxious not to leave them behind, he bolted into the Sherfy house, up the stairs, and “ran from one room to another” to get them out before the Confederates closed in.)
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In the peach orchard itself, “showers of branches fell from the peach trees” and made pulp of the near-ripe fruit. Three Union regiments—Graham’s 141st Pennsylvania, the 2nd New Hampshire from
George Burling’s reserve, and the orphaned 3rd Maine—were holding the south-facing boundary of the orchard, and, since “the foliage of the peach orchard screened” the infantry, occasionally, “an officer would … saunter out … to take in the situation.” But the confidence of these mismatched regiments could not have been very high. It was not that they lacked for numbers: together, they probably had about 1,000 men, whereas Barksdale may have had not more than 1,600, which should have made for a fairly even fight. But numbers are rarely the deciding consideration. The French veteran of the Crimea Ardant du Picq learned from experience that “four brave men who do not know each other will not dare to attack a lion,” but “four less brave, but knowing each other well, sure of their reliability and consequently of mutual aid, will attack resolutely. There is the science of the organization of armies in a nutshell.” And what told fatally against Graham’s regiment in the peach orchard was that none of them had ever fought side by side before.

Standing in the line of battle, the Civil War soldier needed to know one thing above all others—that the men on either side of him would not run. “There is a profound and mysterious gratification to the reciprocal agreement to protect another person with your life,” writes
Sebastian Junger, the modern journalist, “and combat is virtually the only situation in which that happens regularly.” A soldier sandwiched between two strangers will be constantly checking to the right and the left to make sure he is not left alone, and if he senses weakening and hesitation, the soldier will at once begin to look to his own safety. Men begin to waver, drop back by ones and twos, then turn and walk away or bolt at high speed, and in short order an entire brigade can go to pieces.
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That was the price now paid by Graham and his men. The 2nd New Hampshire watched the
Mississippians approach in “a compact mass of humanity” to “within point-blank range,” where they fired a staggering volley. Thirty men out of the 209 in the 141st Pennsylvania went down, and as they pulled back from the perimeter of the orchard, the colonel,
Henry J. Madill, “takes up the rent, shot-pierced flag and bears it from the field.” The
3rd Maine collapsed next, caught between Barksdale’s Mississippians on their front and flank. “It literally melted away,” wrote a survivor. “Every man of the color-guard was either killed or wounded” and “in a short time, measured by minutes, a third at least of the one hundred and fifty men” in the regiment were down. The 2nd New Hampshire went last, under “a perfect hail of metal.” The remaining artillery in the peach orchard—
James Thompson’s Pennsylvania battery of 3-inch
Ordnance Rifles—“were pounced upon, and half of them taken in a trice, whilst the others limbered up and made off.”
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Trying to stem the collapse by his own personal example, Charles Graham rode into the morass of Federal soldiers, had one horse shot dead underneath him, mounted his adjutant’s horse, lost his bearings, and then mistook “a line of men … seen approaching from the flank” for reinforcements. They were actually Mississippians, and when they called on him to stop, Graham wheeled around and defiantly shouted, “I won’t surrender. I’m a Brigadier General, and I won’t surrender.” The Mississippians, unimpressed, shot Graham’s mount from under him a second time, “which in falling rolled upon the General, holding him as in a vise, in which condition he was captured by the enemy.” Nor was Graham the only one. “As our onrushing line sped down the slope from the Peach Orchard … many of the enemy were outstripped and left behind as prisoners.” One of them, curiously, took the moment to shake his captors’ hands and compliment them on “the most splendid charge of the war.”
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Nervously, the New Yorkers in
William Brewster’s brigade along the
Emmitsburg Road looked to their left and saw Graham’s brigade “melting away through the
smoke, and our wounded in hundreds … streaming back over the Emmitsburg Road, and riderless horses went dashing among them in bewilderment and fright.” Andrew Humphreys could also see how easily the disintegration of Graham’s brigade would expose his own division, and he hurriedly rallied the last regiment of
George Burling’s reserve brigade and tried to lay down a new line perpendicular to the Emmitsburg Road before the Mississippians swung leftward to grasp the flank of his division. Humphreys might have stood a chance if Barksdale had listened to the advice of two of his colonels who, “covered with dust and blackened from the smoke of battle,” tried to talk the fiery Mississippian into stopping to reorganize. But Barksdale was having none of it: “No! Crowd them—we have them on the run. Move your regiments.”

To add more punch to Barksdale, Longstreet seized this moment to order Porter Alexander, who had been directing the artillery firing on Sherfy’s peach orchard, to take forward a full battalion of artillery—six batteries’ worth, including the four 24-pounder howitzers of
George Moody’s
Madison Artillery—to the newly captured peach orchard and set up shop. This was the
sort of order Alexander lived for, and forward they all went, “some cannoneers mounted, some running by the sides,” all of them “in a general race and scramble to get there first” and begin pummeling Humphreys’ division along the
Emmitsburg Road. The only obstacles were the omnipresent fence lines, but one of the battalion officers corralled “several hundred” Yankee prisoners and ordered them “with an oath” to pull down the fences. “The frightened prisoners rushed at them, and, each man grabbing a rail, the fences literally flew into the air.”
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At that moment, it seemed to both Barksdale and Humphreys that the entire Federal left flank was caving in, that the road to
Cemetery Hill was yawning open, and that the most complete victory of the war was beckoning to them. For the first time that afternoon, a Confederate brigade was obeying the original directive to wheel left at the Emmitsburg Road and drive northward, as Barksdale’s troops slowly shifted direction. “Brave
Mississippians, one more charge and the day is ours,” bawled the exuberant Barksdale, with his sword upraised “at an angle of forty-five degrees,” as though striking the perfect military tableau. “When I saw their line broken & in retreat,” wrote Porter Alexander, “I thought the battle was ours,” and he exultantly waved his artillerymen into position on the north side of the peach orchard with the promise that “we would ‘finish the whole war this afternoon.’ ”
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Just 600 yards north,
Andrew Atkinson Humphreys’ spirits sank in direct proportion as Alexander’s and Barksdale’s rose. “For the moment, I thought the day was lost,” and with it, Humphreys’ own career. Humphreys was a West Pointer, graduating two years after Robert E. Lee, and perhaps the best engineer officer in the prewar army. (He was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in 1857 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1863.) Humphreys had been a devoted member of McClellan’s staff on the Peninsula, and rose meteorically to division command in the fervently McClellanite
5th Corps in September 1862. (His “special aide,”
Carswell McClellan, was George McClellan’s nephew.) After Chancellorsville, Humphreys was put in charge of a division in Sickles’
3rd Corps, where he had not been at all happy with the mincing bootlickers with which Sickles liked to surround himself. David Birney he loathed above all the others, and now the destruction of Birney’s division looked like it was about to drag him down with it.
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Humphreys’ improvised line could not have lasted long. The regimental
chaplain of the 120th New York declared that they stood up to the Mississippians for “an hour or more,” but
George Burling thought that “all the troops were forced back, in a few moments.” The likeliest guess is that Burling, along with help from Brewster’s Excelsiors, held on to their improvised line until 7:30, or about twenty minutes. All the while, stragglers from Graham’s
brigade “passed through our lines” without stopping, gabbling all kinds of demoralizing predictions:
It’s all up with us, boys
and
We are overpowered
and
My regiment is all gone
and
We did the best we could, but we could not whip the world
. Rounds from Porter Alexander’s newly unlimbered artillery in the peach orchard were slicing into Brewster’s Excelsiors without much hindrance. A captain in the 120th New York was narrowly missed by a solid
shot that tore away his haversack; and when he turned to make small talk of it, a second shot “came along and killed him.” Both Humphreys and Brewster “took positions personally in the rear of our lines, Humphreys, being mounted and Brewster on foot,” Humphreys “walking his horse up and down our line” and Brewster acting “as a file closer with our own line officers.” The colonel of the 120th New York tried to find out from Humphreys, “as we were pacing up and down the line behind,” if there was any help on the way, but “neither he nor Brewster” were “opening their mouths during that tedious combat.”
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The Excelsiors might have made a longer fight of it, but new troubles were already descending on them. At seven o’clock, the officer in charge of Joseph Carr’s skirmishers warned Andrew Humphreys that two more Confederate brigades were “deploying from the wood” in front of the
Emmitsburg Road, and were coming across the fields in “three heavy lines of battle.”
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The destruction of Charles Graham’s brigade at the peach orchard and around the Sherfy house opened up the vulnerable flank of Humphreys’ division along the Emmitsburg Road. It also opened up the even more vulnerable line of artillery batteries which Sickles hoped would cover the open space to the left of the peach orchard, along the wheat field road. Ever since wheeling into line, these four batteries—Clark’s New Jersey battery, plus the three batteries from the artillery reserve under
John Bigelow (9th Massachusetts),
Charles Phillips (5th Massachusetts), and
Patrick Hart (
15th New York Light Artillery), had been having the day to themselves, keeping down the heads of Kershaw’s South Carolinians around the
Rose farmhouse. Clark’s New Jersey battery estimated roughly that “in our front were over 120 dead from three
South Carolina regiments.” No wonder: Clark’s battery alone had fired off 1,342 rounds that afternoon. But the pressure had been slowly mounting, and by 6:30 Clark’s gunners were firing three tins of
canister at a time to clear the ground on the other side of the wheat field lane. These four batteries were, in fact, “so intent upon our work that we noticed not” until Charles Phillips “happened to see our infantry falling back in the Peach orchard,” and Bigelow “saw that the Confederates (Barksdale’s Brigade) had come through and were forming a line 200 yards distant.”
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