Hallowed Ground - James M. McPherson [32]
Perhaps two hundred men with Armistead had broken through the line at the angle in the stone wall, only to be shot down or captured by Union reserves who counterattacked to close the breach. Armistead received a mortal wound as he placed his hand on an enemy cannon to claim its capture. By four o'clock it was all over. Unwounded but dazed Confederate survivors stumbled back to their starting point. Barely half returned. Of the forty-two regiments that took part in the primary attack, twenty-eight lost their colors to the enemy—by far the highest total for any one action in the war. In addition, of the eight supporting regiments that finally came forward—too late to help—one lost its flag as well.
A stroll around this “high water mark” of the Confederacy is well worth the time it takes to read the interpretive markers and absorb the information on the three dozen regimental monuments and the dozen or more tablets originally placed by the War Department. One Union monument in particular attracts our attention: the Seventy-second Pennsylvania monument with its bronze soldier atop a pedestal preparing to strike the enemy with his clubbed musket in hand-to-hand combat.
The Seventy-second was part of the Philadelphia brigade—four regiments from that city (69th, 71st, 72nd, and 106th Pennsylvania) which held the Union position that bore the brunt of the Confederate attack. The Seventy-second was originally in reserve about fifty yards to the rear of this monument (at a spot marked by an earlier regimental monument). When the veterans of the Seventy-second proposed in the 1880s to erect a second monument at the advanced position along the stone wall, the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association refused permission. The veterans took the association to court. Several battle participants and witnesses testified for each side in this case. The brigade's commander, Brigadier General Alexander S. Webb, testified that at the crisis of the battle he had ordered the Seventy-second forward from its reserve position. They refused to go, he said. He tried to grab the national flag from the color sergeant to carry it forward, but the sergeant wouldn't let go. (Webb had been in command of the brigade for only a few days, so most of the men may not have known who he was.) Only after the enemy breakthrough had been contained and the assault repulsed, Webb claimed, did the regiment go forward to the place of honor where these craven cowards wanted to place their monument. Others disputed Webb's testimony, and in the end the judge ruled in favor of the Seventy-second's veterans. They got their second monument, on the front line. And perhaps they deserved it. Statistics of killed and wounded are a rough index of how hard a regiment fought. The Seventy-second had sixty-four killed and 125 wounded at Gettysburg—one-third of the brigade's casualties. It appears that they did quite a bit of fighting after all—or at least they took a lot of punishment.
Descendants of Confederates have had their own controversies about the placement of monuments at the high-water mark. That designation long belonged to the monument marking the spot where Armistead fell, about thirty yards on the Union side of the stone wall. But North Carolinians have disputed this placement of the high-water mark. They insist that a few men in the Twenty-sixth North Carolina penetrated twenty yards farther than the Virginian Armistead. Whatever the merits of this claim, the Twenty-sixth North Carolina unquestionably earned other distinctions. With a total of 840 men going into action on July 1, it was the largest regiment in either army. Its twenty-one-year-old “boy colonel,” Henry Burg-wyn, killed on July 1, was the youngest to hold that rank in either army. The regiment fought on both July 1 and