Glory Road (48 page)

"Sir!" concluded Hancock.
"I
am in command on this field. Send every man you have got!"
²⁷

So Wadsworth and his division went over to Culp's Hill, and the day's fighting was over. The sun went down, and the air was all tainted with smoke and death. Slocum's men came up, and some of Sickles's, and Hancock galloped back to Taneytown to see Meade. Sometime after midnight he and Meade reached the battlefield, and Meade went around to see what he could see, in the warm July moonlight, of the field where his army had begun its greatest fight. From southwest all the way around to northeast, Confederate camp-fires glowed in the night.

2.
All the Trumpets Sounded

Philippe Regis de Trobriand, French-born colonel commanding the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Division of the III Corps, climbed to the bell tower of St. Joseph's Convent in Emmitsburg, eight miles south of Gettysburg, to see what he could see. On the lawn in front of the convent his five regiments had stacked arms, and wisps of smoke from the fires of innumerable coffee boilers were floating up through the trees in the still evening air. Some guns were in park across the road, and there was a great coming and going of couriers, staff officers, and other mounted persons. Off to the north there was an uneven jerky rumble coming down the wind, faint but unmistakable. Colonel de Trobriand looked around, found that he could learn nothing in this belfry that he did not already know, and came down, his jack boots clumping incongruously in the quiet halls. At a window he came upon a group of nuns peering shyly out at this invasion of soldiers. Being a Frenchman, he stopped for a word with them, and he chided them lightly for giving way to the venial sin of curiosity.

"Permit me," he said, "to make one request of you. Ask St. Joseph to keep the Rebel army away from here; for if they come before I get away I do not know what will become of your beautiful convent."

The nuns vanished and the colonel went on down and came out on the lawn, and the brigade quieted down for the night. Early next morning—July 2, clear and warm after a rainy night—orders arrived, and the brigade fell into line and took the dusty road north toward Gettysburg, and a Michigan man in the ranks knew a moment of homesickness, reflecting that the bells chiming for morning mass sounded just like the church bells in his home town. As they went on up the road the colonel thought about the way war had broken the peaceful isolation of the convent, and years later he wrote: "I have never returned to Emmitsburg, but it would astonish me very little to hear that the two armies had gone to Gettysburg to fight on account of the miracle performed by St. Joseph, interceding in favor of these pious damsels." Meditating thus, the colonel got his brigades up to the hills south of Gettysburg and joined the rest of the army.
¹

The morning was hot and the army was tired. Most of the men who had not fought the day before had been on the roads far into the night. An air of foreboding lay upon the battlefield, heavy as the muggy weight of the July heat. There was an occasional spat-spat of picket firing, and now and then a battery loosed a few rounds at some temporary target, but these outbursts only emphasized the expectant quiet. The Army of the Potomac waited grimly, and in rear of Cemetery Ridge the 120 ambulances of the II Corps were ranked on a slope, the chief of ambulances making the rounds to see that each wagon was properly equipped—keg of water under the end of each of the two leather-covered benches, supply of beef stock and bandages under the front seat, a stretcher properly hung on each side. Tough Colonel Cross of the 5th New Hampshire, promoted recently to brigade command, rode past and grinned, and called out: "We shan't want any of your dead carts today."
²
Farther up the slope, Meade had set up headquarters in a two-room cottage.

Meade had put his men where the ground was high. His line curled around Culp's Hill on the east, ran west across the saddle to Cemetery Hill, made a ninety-degree turn to the left in a little wood called Ziegler's Grove on the western slope of this hill, and then went straight south for a mile or more along Cemetery Ridge. This ridge lost altitude, trailing off at last to lower ground covered with small trees and broken by tiny watercourses, and rising finally to two dominant hills—Little Round Top, very craggy and full of boulders, and a quarter of a mile south of it a higher hill, Big Round Top, sometimes known locally as Sugar Loaf.

From Culp's Hill through Cemetery Hill the line was held by Howard's men and Slocum's men and the remnants of the I Corps. Hancock's II Corps held Ziegler's Grove and the open ridge immediately south of it, and Dan Sickles had been told to put his III Corps in beside Hancock. It was Meade's idea that Sickles could hold whatever part of the ridge Hancock's men could not cover, and that in addition he would be able to occupy the Round Tops. George Sykes had brought his V Corps up during the night and was held in reserve behind Cemetery Hill.

The position was strong, and some of the officers remarked that if the Rebs attacked here it would be Fredericksburg in reverse, and they frankly liked the idea. But Sickles was not happy. He held the low part of the ridge—it was so low where he was that it practically ceased to be a ridge at all—and he believed that the ground would be very hard to defend. The Round Tops would be a good anchor, but Sickles did not think he could stretch his two divisions to reach them. Meade's orders did not seem clear, and Sickles had some of his men posted farther west than Meade had intended, down in flat land bordering a little brook known as Plum Run. As the morning wore on Sickles grew very uneasy, and he kept looking out at the Emmitsburg road in front of his position.

This road ran southwest from Gettysburg, skirting Ziegler's Grove and going down over rolling country, getting farther and farther away from Cemetery Ridge. Half a mile due west of the low ground which Sickles was occupying the road passed over a broad flat hill on top of which there was a peach orchard, and this hill was somewhat higher than the ground where Sickles's men were. Sickles believed that if the enemy put men and guns in the peach orchard they could drive him out. He noticed, too, that an uneven fold of high land ran off southeast from the peach orchard in the direction of the Round Tops. This ground was rugged, with little hills and ravines and woods and rocky ledges, and if the Rebels got in there they would be squarely on the Federal left flank and it might be extremely hard to dislodge them.

Sickles finally grew so worried that he rode over to headquarters and asked Meade to come down and have a look. Meade refused. Ordinarily he was a front-line operator, but now that he was army commander he was a little immersed in details at headquarters. He believed that morning that the real fighting was apt to break out near Culp's Hill, and anyway, he did not care much for Sickles, and at last he bluntly told Sickles to put his men where the original orders told him to put them, and be done with it. When Sickles still protested, Meade unbent enough to send Artillerist Henry Hunt over to survey the ground and make a recommendation. Sickles and Hunt went away, and Meade went back to his other concerns.

To make Sickles feel still worse, when he got back to his troops he found that the cavalry was gone. Buford's troopers had been covering the left flank, but through some misunderstanding Pleasonton had taken them away from there without sending anyone in to replace them. Sickles felt naked. He put a skirmish line out on the Emmitsburg road, and the skirmishers kept having little brushes with Rebel patrols, and around noon Hunt suggested that Sickles make a reconnaissance to find out just what the enemy was doing off to the west. So Sickles called in Colonel Berdan and told him to take four companies of his sharpshooters, with the 3rd Maine Infantry for support, and go out to investigate.
³

Noon came, and everything was quiet except for a vicious little fight on the skirmish line in front of Ziegler's Grove, where General Alexander Hays was posted with the third division of Hancock's corps. In the empty land halfway between his line and the enemy's there was a big barn, and Federal and Confederate skirmishers were bickering over it, each side wanting to possess it as an advanced post for sharpshooters. The firing grew rather heavy, and General Hays decided he would ride out and look into it. He would go alone, he said, except for one mounted orderly.

A little Irish private on a big white horse was detailed for this job, and Hays looked him over and asked him brusquely if he were a brave man. The private grinned and said nothing, but Hays was a brigadier general, and when he spoke to an enlisted man he liked to get an answer, so he barked angrily: "Will you follow me, sir?" The Irishman saluted and said: "Gineral, if ye's are killed and go to hell it will not be long before I am tapping on the window." So the general and the private made the trip, Hays carrying his divisional flag and the orderly riding close at his elbow. Neither of them was hit, and Hays got the skirmishers straightened out.
⁴

Meanwhile, Berdan was leading his men west. They crossed the highway and passed through a belt of woods, coming out on the southern part of Seminary Ridge, and before long they passed a farmhouse. A small boy, who must have been having a big day for himself, came out from behind the barn, big-eyed and excited, and pointed to another wood ahead of them, crying: "There are lots of Rebels in there—in rows!" The men laughed at him and doubtless told him to go down in the cellar and be safe, and they kept on going. They found out shortly that the small boy knew exactly what he was talking about.

They found a line of Rebel skirmishers, got into a fight with them, and when the skirmishers withdrew and Berdan's men pursued they ran into any number of Rebels all in rows, just as the boy had said. For twenty minutes the opposing lines blazed away at each other under the trees, the 3rd Maine coming up beside the sharpshooters. Berdan realized at last that he had found what he was looking for, and he took his men back to Sickles's line east of the road and told Sickles that a solid body of Rebel infantry was moving around to the left.
⁵

That was enough for Sickles. Here was Chancellorsville all over again, with the Confederates marching through the wood past Sickles's front, and hot-blooded impetuous Sickles was unable to contain himself. This time he did not jump to the conclusion that the Rebels were in retreat. On the contrary, he knew perfectly well what they were up to—a smash at the Federal left flank—and the only trouble was that Sickles decided to answer the threat himself without waiting to consult headquarters, and in his haste he came up with the wrong answer. He did ask Hunt if he could move forward to the Emmitsburg road, but Hunt warned him that this was a question for Meade to answer, and then Hunt rode away. So Sickles issued his orders anyway. He took his whole corps forward, a mile-long line of battle with waving flags and rumbling batteries rolling west in the afternoon sunlight. John Gibbon, commanding Hancock's 2nd Division on Cemetery Ridge, looked out in amazement and wondered if a general order to advance upon the enemy had somehow missed him.

What Sickles got out of his advance was a longer line than he had had before. He wanted to hold the road and the peach-orchard hill and to bend the rest of his line back to the Round Tops, and he did not have enough men for it. Humphreys's division took position in the road, and Birney's division crammed the little orchard with men and guns and extended its line back toward the southeast, down a little slope from the orchard, across a rolling wheat field, and up through a maze of thickets and boulders and rocky crevices to a little hill which went by the descriptive name of Devil's Den. At Devil's Den, Birney ran out of troops. He got s
ome guns up there beside his in
fantry—uncommonly rough work it was, too, manhandling the clumsy weapons up the little hill through rocks and trees and gullies—and he managed to plant one regiment and two guns down in a valley that separated Devil's Den from the Round Tops, but he could do no more than that. His line was thin, and he had no reserves.

Just as the men were getting into their places Meade decided to call a conference of his corps commanders. Sedgwick was coming up with his VI Corps, his men winded after an all-night hike of thirty-five miles, and the army was complete at last. Meade issued the conference call, but before the generals assembled Meade heard about what Sickles had done and he rode over, at last, to see about it personally.

When he joined Sickles and looked out at the new line he became wrathy. Sickles's corps was half a mile out in front of the rest of the army. Its left had no support, on the right all connection with Hancock had been broken, and the peach orchard looked to Meade like a vulnerable spot which the enemy could assail from three sides at once. He spoke of these matters with some heat, and Sickles asked him if he should take his men back to the original line. Meade said that he should, and then what the army had been waiting for all day began to happen, starting with an earsplitting crash of artillery. Confederate James Longstreet had put forty-six guns in line where they would bear on the orchard and the rest of Birney's line and they all began firing at once. A long cloud of smoke went rolling up above the distant trees, and Birney's fine was laced with exploding shell.
⁰

Meade immediately reversed himself. He barked at Sickles that it was too late to withdraw now—Sickles would have to stay where he was and the rest of the army would try to support him. Then Meade went galloping back to headquarters, where he told Sykes to get his corps down to the left end of the line as fast as he could. He had no sooner given this order than another cannonade opened on the right of the Federal line, and the hills to the northeast and northwest became alive with a long semicircle of flashing guns. Enormous echoes went rocking back and forth from the ridges, Gettysburg was ringed in fire and smoke and shaking sound, and the Federal gun positions on Cemetery Hill were caught in a cross fire that smashed tombstones, splintered gun carriages, tore men's bodies apart, and sent the horrible mixed fragments flying through the blinding smoke. So confusing was this fire that a Massachusetts regiment which had been crouching behind a stone wall facing north finally crawled over on the enemy's side of the wall, figuring that it was on the whole somewhat safer.