Hallowed Ground - James M. McPherson [23]
We are advised not to drink the water from Spangler's Spring today. But no such advisory existed in 1863, when this unpolluted water was a godsend for thirsty soldiers. The lines of the opposing armies were close together near the spring on the night of July 2-3. As the theme of Blue-Gray reconciliation grew to powerful proportions from the 1880s onward, a story arose that on this dark night both Confederate and Union soldiers went to the spring to fill their canteens. There they encountered each other, called a truce, talked over the battle, and traded jokes before returning to their own lines. This story fit perfectly with the spirit of joint Blue-Gray veterans’ reunions that began at Gettysburg as early as 1887.
For decades, battlefield guides and the Park Service's interpretive marker and literature told the romantic tale of fraternization at Spangler's Spring. But there is no truth to it, and today the guides and marker tell the real story. When a captain in the Forty-sixth Pennsylvania approached the spring with several empty canteens, he discovered enemy soldiers filling theirs. He backed away silently and returned to his own lines, thanking his lucky stars he had escaped capture. That is the fact, but it is far less interesting than the legend and did not fit the theme of North-South reconciliation, which explains why legend long prevailed over fact.
Confederates controlled the area around Spangler's Spring because five of the six brigades of the Union Twelfth Corps had gone to the left in response to calls for reinforcements against Longstreet's assault. (As it turned out, most of them were not needed.) They left behind only the five New York regiments of Brigadier General George S. Greene's brigade to hold the hill. This move opened a splendid opportunity for the Confederates. Lee's plan for July 2 had called for Ewell's corps to convert its demonstration against Culp's Hill into a real attack if and when Meade weakened his right to reinforce his left. Meade did so, but Ewell was slow to seize the opportunity. The attack against Culp's Hill by Major General Edward Johnson's division and against Cemetery Hill by two brigades of Jubal Early's division did not get started until almost dusk.
Attacking up the steep east side of Culp's Hill from the valley of Rock Creek, Johnson's three brigades of seventeen regiments outnumbered Greene's New Yorkers by more than three to one. Greene contracted his lines to defend four hundred yards of trenches along the upper slope, abandoning the other four hundred yards leading down to Spangler's Spring. Traces of these trenches can be seen east of Slocum Avenue as we ascend the hill. The attackers overran the empty trenches. They then turned right to attack the Union line end-on. Holding this flank was the 137th New York, commanded by Colonel David Ireland, whose predicament here was the same as Colonel Chamberlain's at the other end of the Union line. Just as Chamberlain bent back his line to the left, Ireland bent his to the right. And the 137th fought just as courageously against superior numbers as the 20th Maine did—lacking only the bayonet charge. But no novelist has told the story of the 137th, and few visitors stop to view its monument on the right of Slocum Avenue about a hundred yards past the intersection with Geary Avenue. It is worth our while to stop and contemplate this monument before going on to the top of Culp's Hill and climbing the observation tower that rises next to the splendid bronze statue of General Greene, who remembered his successful defense of Culp's Hill until his death thirty-six years later at the age of ninety-eight.
Looking northwest from the tower, we see open fields in the near foreground. At dusk on July 2, two brigades of Jubal Early's division swept across this swale between Culp's Hill