Hallowed Ground - James M. McPherson [31]
The answers to the questions are complex, as one might imagine, but they can be boiled down to the two motives expressed by the title of my book For Cause and Comrades. Most of the soldiers who fought at Gettysburg (and elsewhere) were volunteers. They had enlisted because they believed in the Cause (with a capital C) for which they were fighting: the very survival of their respective nations. If the North lost the war, the words “United States” would become an oxymoron. If the South lost, the Confederacy would exist no more. When the bullets started flying, however, the abstraction of Cause might fade into the background of the clear and present danger presented by those bullets. No sane person would walk alone for a thousand yards across open fields plowed by exploding shells, knowing that if he made it that far, grim men with rifles were waiting to shoot at him during the next three hundred yards. But if his comrades were going forward, he couldn't let them down by lagging behind. His fear of their contempt for his cowardice was greater than his fear of those shells and bullets. “You ask me if the thought of death does not alarm me,” wrote one soldier to his sister. “I will say that I do not wish to die.… I myself am as big a coward as eny could be, but give me the bullet before the coward when all my friends and companions are going forward.”
So, forward they went into a chaos of exploding shells that dropped men at almost every step. On they marched, closing ranks and keeping alignment almost as if they were on the parade ground. It was an awesome spectacle that participants on both sides remembered until the end of their lives—which for many came within the next half hour. We share that awe as we walk across these fields toward the Union line, hearing in our imagination the explosions of shells and the screams of the wounded.
As they approached the Union line, Pickett's division obliqued left so that the concentrated force of the attackers focused on that six-hundred-yard front. Yankee artillery and infantry waited behind their breastworks of fence rails and piled dirt and, for three hundred yards of that front, the protection of a stone wall. That wall made a ninety-degree turn to the east for sixty yards before resuming its south-north direction. As the attackers crossed the Emmitsburg Road, the spearhead of the assault headed toward that angle in the stone wall. Union artillery switched to canister (bullet-sized balls packed into casings), and Northern riflemen sent sheets of lead into those dense gray lines of infantry. On the right flank of Kemper's brigade, two Vermont regiments swung forward from the Union line and raked the Virginians with a devastating enfilading fire. Six hundred yards to the north, the Eighth Ohio did the same thing to Virginians and Mississippians in Pettigrew's division, aided by several companies of the 108th and 126th New York. The Ohioans deployed through the grounds of what was for decades the Home Sweet Home Motel. The National Park acquired this property in 2002 and razed the motel. The nearest building now to the rear of the Eighth Ohio's position is General Pickett's Buffet and Battle Theater—which would amuse the Ohioans if they could come back.
In the face of these counterattacks, the Confederate flanks melted away like butter on a hot summer day. In the center, too, all was chaos. Longstreet's worst fears were coming true. Trimble went down with a wound that would cost him a leg. Pettigrew received a flesh wound in the hand. Garnett's riderless horse bolted out of the smoke; his master's