Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (80 page)

But Lewis Armistead was not interested in bogging down into a slugging match around the trees. Directly ahead he saw the ruined guns of Cushing’s battery, and behind them Alexander Webb’s last reserve regiment of the
Philadelphia Brigade, the “Fire
Zouaves” of the 72nd Pennsylvania, and beyond them … 
nothing
. Nothing but the
provost guard and the dead horses and
overturned wagons in the Taneytown Road, nothing but daylight and victory and the destruction of the Army of the Potomac and the end of the war and independence and peace, and so he lowered his
sword and called,
The day is ours, men, come turn this artillery on them
. And for a moment, the balances shivered and teetered, unsure which future world to bless.
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Alexander Webb watched his
Philadelphia Brigade, his new command, crack open before his eyes. “The Army of the Potomac was never nearer being whipped than it was here,” Webb would later write, and like David Birney, he “almost wished to get killed.” He went down “the whole line during the melée,” using his sword alternately to point out targets and, in one case, to “put it into a man … one of my own men” who tried to flee. A “charge of buckshot” winged him in the right leg, and he could see a rebel officer pointing at him to get someone to take another shot. He and his aide,
Frank Haskell, stopped the pullback of the 71st Pennsylvania, and then, “as the damned red flags of the rebellion began to thicken and flaunt along the wall,” Webb turned to his last hope, the 72nd Pennsylvania.

The “Fire Zouaves” began trading fire from the crest with the Virginians in the angle, and together with the fire from the 69th Pennsylvania they hit Armistead. “He swerved … as though he was struck in the stomach,” dropped his sword and hat, staggered for “two or three … steps,” then collapsed with his left hand on the muzzle of one of Cushing’s silent guns. Two or three of Armistead’s men clustered around their fallen chief, but the others now began to pause, drift backward, drop to the ground, or turn and run back the way they had come. The sight of Armistead’s fall enthused Webb, and he began waving his sword over his head, calling on the 72nd to charge: “Yes, boys, the enemy is running, come up, come up.”

But more than a few men in the 72nd had no idea that Webb was their new brigadier, and when he got no response, he rode up to the color sergeant of the 72nd,
William Finecy, ordered him forward, and then tried to seize the colors himself. Webb had almost given up and turned back toward the mass of rebels when Finecy bolted forward, flourishing the floors and crying, “Will you see your color storm the wall alone?” That was enough of a signal. Finecy went down, hit thirteen times, but the line of the 72nd sprang forward, surged around Armistead and the remains of Cushing’s guns, and rolled, pell-mell, all the way down to the stone wall “without any special formation,” more a “melée than a line of battle.”
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This one regiment alone (even if they were backed up by the two companies of the 106th Pennsylvania who stood at the rear with them) would not have been enough to clean the Virginians out of the angle without the unlooked for assistance of Norman Hall’s brigade. As the pressure from Kemper’s attack eased, Hall’s men could look to their right and easily see Armistead’s
Confederates breaking into the angle, and normally this would have been an open invitation to find the first path to the rear. Instead, “a strange, resistless impulse seemed to seize the whole Union line,” and company officers called out, “To our right and front,” pointing toward the trees. One of Hall’s colonels caught sight of Winfield Hancock and appealed directly to Hancock for permission to plunge into the gap where the rebel “colors are coming over the stone wall.”
Go in there pretty God-damned quick
, Hancock shouted in response, and Hall’s brigade swung backward in a rough wheel, then plunged straight for the clump of trees and into the angle. (Hancock later remarked that “it was not done in the way he wanted, but still it was splendidly done.”) No one could remember whether “the command ‘Charge!’ was given by any general officer”; if anything, “it seemed … to come in a spontaneous yell from the men, and instantly our line precipitated itself on the enemy.”

And not only Hall’s brigade. The handfuls of survivors from Harrow’s brigade—the 1st Minnesota, the 15th Massachusetts,
Francis Heath’s 19th Maine, the 82nd New York, regiments which had sustained the highest casualty rates of any brigade in the
2nd Corps—“hurried to the right and joined the troops in front of Pickett’s men.” Jammed together “five and six deep,” these undirected men formed a crescent with the 69th Pennsylvania along the south end of the angle, standing and firing in a loose mob “until all appearance of formation was lost.” Even Henry Hunt, who had ridden up to
Freeman McGilvery’s batteries when the infantry attack started, now galloped into the writhing tangle of
smoke and fire, firing his revolver and shouting crazily, “See ’em! See ’em!” until his horse was shot down and some of Cowan’s cannoneers had to extricate him. (A few yards away, Alexander Webb noticed that Hunt “had ridden up,” and in the strange stress of combat Webb “had to laugh” because Hunt “looked so funny, up there on his horse, popping at them.”)
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For “perhaps five minutes,” the men were simply a motionless mass of shooters. “Every time a man stops to load, others crowd in ahead of him so that he will have to elbow his way through in order to get another chance to fire.” The smoke rolled in so thickly that men had to shoot at their enemies’ feet, “which was about all we could see of them at the time.” This served “to prevent” any further advance by the Confederates, but otherwise “our shots affected them little,” and the masses of humanity in the angle foamed together in a bloody equipoise. Then, over top of the mayhem, the voice of a soldier in the 15th Massachusetts, George Cunningham of Company B, roared:
For God’s sake let us charge, they’ll kill us all if we stand here
. “The men sprang forward like a thunderbolt.” The color-bearer of the 19th Massachusetts knocked down the color-bearer of the 14th Virginia “with his color staff,” while all around him men “just rushed in like wild beasts … and struggled
and fought, grappled in hand-to-hand fight, threw stones, clubbed muskets, kicked and yelled and hurrahed.” With Armistead down and the Federals closing in, the dwindling mass of Virginians “started on the run towards the
Emmitsburg Road.” The Federals kept up firing “until they got out of range,” and then it was over.
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A small knot of Union soldiers from the 72nd Pennsylvania gathered around Armistead, some of them imagining that he was actually
James Longstreet. The judge advocate of the
2nd Corps,
Henry Bingham, had been “on the right and alongside of Webb’s brigade,” and he stopped “several privates” who were carrying Armistead rearward. Bingham himself had just sustained a nasty wound to his scalp, but almost as though he were helping the victim of a road accident, Bingham halted the little group, and introduced himself to Armistead as a member of General Hancock’s staff. Hancock? Armistead gasped.
Winfield Scott Hancock? Yes, replied Bingham. Hancock is “an old and valued friend,” Armistead said. Tell him, Armistead continued, “that I have done him and you all an injury which I shall repent the longest day of my life.”
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It would have sharpened his repentence immeasurably if Armistead had known that, only a few minutes before, Hancock had joined the wounded himself. Riding down to rally Hall’s and Stannard’s brigades, Hancock was hit in the right thigh by a bullet that drilled through the pommel of his saddle and drove itself, several splinters of wood, and a bent ten-penny nail four inches up into his groin. These deadly fragments barely missed an artery, and the 2nd Corps’ chief medical officer,
Alexander Dougherty, was able to extract the nail and contain the bleeding sufficiently that Hancock could, even “lying down,” continue to “observe the operation of the enemy and give direction accordingly.” But by this point, there was not much left to direct. Hancock dictated a quick message to Meade—“Tell General Meade that the troops under my command have repulsed the enemy’s assault and that we have gained a great victory”—and sent it off with his aide
William Mitchell. Meanwhile, the wrecked pieces of Pickett’s three brigades “fled to the rear over dead and wounded, mangled, groaning, dying men, scattered thick, far and wide” and “officers and privates side by side, pushed, poured and rushed in a continuous stream, throwing away guns, blankets and haversacks as they hurried on in confusion toward the rear.”
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Johnston Pettigrew may not have been the best choice to take over command of Harry Heth’s division—he had only seen serious action in this war on
the Peninsula, where a bullet damaged his windpipe and should have killed him—but he was a better choice than either of Heth’s other brigade commanders, Joe Davis and John Brockenbrough, in addition to having
seniority over both. The same was true of the decision to give command of the two brigades borrowed from Pender’s division to
Isaac Trimble (who was also senior on the Confederate Army list to both Heth and Pender).

All of these men belonged to Powell Hill’s corps, and Hill proposed to Lee putting in everything he had left, which would have added Pender’s remaining two brigades (Thomas’
Georgians and
Abner Perrin’s South Carolinians) and perhaps the underused brigades of Mahone and Posey from
Richard Heron Anderson’s division. Lee disagreed. He needed some form of reserve for the rest of the army, and besides, Pettigrew’s role was more in the nature of support for Pickett. (Longstreet’s first design had, in fact, been to place Pettigrew in the
rear
of Pickett.) This was small comfort to the men Pettigrew would be commanding, who spent “about four hours or more” while George Pickett’s division was getting into position looking glumly over the cheerless fields they would shortly have to cross, “every veteran … counting the probable results.”

As soon as he saw Pickett’s division emerge from the woods and pause to deploy into line, Pettigrew had his men up, too, putting the four brigades of his newly acquired division in a first line (with the regiments in columns formed by five-company battalions), and then Trimble’s two brigades in a second.
Birkett Fry, who was now in charge of Archer’s depleted brigade, occupied the right-hand slot in the front line, and would serve as the brigade of direction for the charge, trying to keep an eye out for the movements of Pickett’s division, 400 yards farther to the right. Of the twenty-seven regiments Pettigrew would lead, only four (Brockenbrough’s brigade) were
Virginians; fifteen were
North Carolina regiments, and so it seemed only natural that Pettigrew would ride across their front, exhorting them, “For the honor of the good old North State, forward.” But it was from the throats of the
Tennesseans in Fry’s brigade that the shrill yipping of the rebel yell went up, and the whole line went forward.
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The impetus began to slow almost at once. For one thing, Pettigrew was following Pickett by three or four hundred yards, and the temptation to let Pickett attract as much Federal attention as possible was irresistible. There were also the interminable
fences to be climbed, making alignments “so imperfect and so drooping” that it looked like Pettigrew was leading a wedge rather than a line. Pettigrew stopped them once they reached the smoldering ruins of the Bliss farm, trying to adjust and dress the lines, but as he did so he found that John Brockenbrough’s always unreliable brigade had disappeared—parts of it may actually have failed to move at all—and Joe Davis was lagging far behind. Then, “halfway over the plain,” the Federal
artillery on Cemetery Hill opened up on Pettigrew’s division. Pettigrew’s line was “at once enveloped in a dense cloud of smoke and dust,” from which “arms, heads, blankets, guns, and knapsacks were thrown and tossed in the clear air.”
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The principal advantage Pettigrew had was the lay of the land: the slant of
Seminary Ridge and the
Emmitsburg Road meant that his division had a far shorter distance to cover than Pickett’s. “From the top of Seminary Ridge,” it took Pettigrew only “about eight minutes” to reach the Emmitsburg Road. But the pounding of the artillery was already cracking the steadiness of Joe Davis’ brigade.
Isaac Trimble was alarmed to see “Pettigrew’s troops” stopping and “firing against orders,” and soldiers from the 11th and 26th North Carolina “ ‘Turkeyed’ in fine style.” They were slowed down still further by a Union regiment which materialized on the left flank of Pettigrew’s line; this was the 8th Ohio, the only regiment of Samuel Carroll’s brigade which was left behind the evening before when Carroll went off to push
Jubal Early’s division down east Cemetery Hill. A large portion of the 8th Ohio had been out on the skirmish line at noon, but rather than recalling them at the beginning of the Confederate attack, their colonel,
Franklin Sawyer, instead “by a still further advance and left wheel” (just as
George Stannard was doing several hundred yards away) flung the regiment out on a line perpendicular to Pettigrew’s advance. “Facing the left flank of the advancing column of rebels, the men were ordered to fire into their flank at will.”

Then the rebels hit the big
fences on either side of the road. “The Confederates did not mind the stone wall” in front of them or the “picket fences” behind them, claimed a member of the 14th Tennessee, “but this mortised post and rail fence checked the charge and confused the whole command.” It did not help their confusion that the Emmitsburg Road, at this point, sank into an even deeper embankment than the one encountered by Garnett and Kemper. “The time it took to climb to the top of the fence seemed to the men an age of suspense,” and then they spilled over the immovable fence into the deep roadbed. There, an embarrassingly large number of them stayed, “and no orders, threats or entreaties could induce them to again face the iron storm.”
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The Union soldiers forty yards away at the crest had stored up a good deal of malice for these rebels. Alex Hays sited both of his remaining brigades behind a low stone wall, one of them where it could connect to the two rear companies of the 71st Pennsylvania, and the other—the
“Harpers Ferry Cowards”—on the right, around the Bryan barn, with
George Woodruff’s battery on their flank as an anchor. They thought the advance of Pettigrew’s division “was a splendid sight to see,” and it was intimidating enough that several hopped up to “start for the rear,” while an officer of the 111th New York
buried his face in the ground and tried to hide ridiculously behind an empty box of hardtack. But in the 12th New Jersey, a regiment which had stuck stubbornly with its old .69 caliber “buck-and-ball” smoothbore
muskets, the men were busy repackaging their paper
cartridges with multiple rounds, like buckshot, while the 1st Delaware and 14th Connecticut “collected all the spare guns … and laid them in rows beside them.” Alex Hays, riding up and down the line behind them, was brief and to the point: “They are coming, boys; we must whip them,” and to the 12th New Jersey, “You men with buck and ball, don’t fire until they get to that fence.” And they did wait, until “the Confederates began to climb the hither fence” and Alex Hays could shout,
Show them your colors and give them hell, boys
. When they did, “the storm of lead was beyond description.” After that, the rebels “melted away like wax.” Many of those in Pettigrew’s first line went no farther forward than “about five yards,” then “returned to and laid down in the pike.”
Isaac Trimble had the impression that Fry’s brigade crossed the road, but this may have been no more than “some fifty or seventy five of the most reckless.”
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