• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 6817 0

off to-day at all.” The sudden explosion of Confederate artillery at 4:45 P.M. gave the answer. An hour later, Longstreet ordered his corps to storm the Federal defenses. Fremantle was amazed by Lee’s behavior once the fighting began. The general sat by himself on a tree stump. No one spoke to him. He received only one report and sent just one message. He had become an observer in his own battle. “I know not whether I am mistaken,” Lawley wrote later; “Lee struck me as more anxious and ruffled than I had ever seen him before, though it required close observation to detect it.”17 In previous battles, Lee had encouraged his subordinates to use their initiative, but at Gettysburg the practice allowed for increased confusion. Without a leader to coordinate its movements, the Confederate assault was like a random firecracker display. To add to the strangeness of the scene, a Confederate marching band “began to play polkas and waltzes, which sounded very curious, accompanied by the hissing and bursting of shells.”18

The cannonade sounded “one deep prolonged bellowing roar,” wrote Lawley. “A thick canopy of smoke, constantly rent by bright darting flashes of flame, cast its dense pall over the struggling, bleeding thousands who toiled and died in its centre.”19 Lee’s plan called for a specific type of attack known as “en echelon,” meaning that the divisions were to attack in sequence, parallel to one another—first hitting the south side of Meade’s line, which held Little Round Top hill, and then the north side, which overlooked the cemetery near the town. En echelon assaults were complicated, requiring precision timing and execution; it would have been a risky maneuver for Lee under the best of circumstances, and to attempt one now, when two of his three corps commanders were new and untried, was asking a great deal. The Federals had orders to hold Little Round Top “at all hazards”; Father William Corby, one of the chaplains of the Irish Brigade, climbed to the top of a boulder and called out that any soldier killed on the battlefield would be given a full Christian burial, but God help those who ran away.22.3 20 Almost half the brigade was killed or wounded that day, shot to pieces in the infamous Wheat Field, which lay near the bottom of Little Round Top. Meanwhile, General Ewell’s attacks against Meade’s northern lines along Cemetery Hill teetered on the brink of victory, but fierce Federal counterattacks drove the Confederates back to the town. When the sun went down, each army had suffered almost ten thousand casualties.

Lee was hemorrhaging men, yet he still believed that one more assault would dislodge the Federals and allow him to pick off the fleeing divisions one by one. He wanted all 65 batteries and 282 guns ready and primed for action for the next day, July 3. Longstreet had argued against fighting the Federals at Gettysburg, and he now vehemently protested against Lee’s proposal to attack the Union center, which, as far as he could tell, would simply be a repeat of Fredericksburg, only this time with the Confederates on the plain and the Federals firing at them from above. Lee was confident that if he sent Jeb Stuart to attack Meade from behind at the same time as the assault in the front, the Federals would be too confused to repel both.

General Meade sensed that Lee was going to throw at him everything within his grasp. Conscious that he was the sixth general to lead the Army of the Potomac, he invited all the generals to a war council at the little white farmhouse that served as his headquarters. The dozen or so commanders discussed whether to retire or continue the battle and then took a vote: they would remain at Gettysburg for one more day and, since they held the higher ground, allow Lee to launch another attack.21

The Confederate reserve artillery was ordered into position, facing the center of Meade’s line. One of the English volunteers who had run the blockade in the spring, Captain Stephen Winthrop, was assigned a battery and told to take it to Captain Charles W. Squires of the Washington Artillery.