Hallowed Ground - James M. McPherson [7]
Heth's division numbered seven thousand men, but he deployed only half of them. Most of Buford's cavalry fought dismounted, a tactic increasingly prevalent during the Civil War, when the greater range and accuracy of the new rifled muskets over the old smoothbores made mounted charges against infantry suicidally obsolete. One of every four troopers held four horses about two hundred yards to the rear while his comrades fought. Although outnumbered, Buford's men had one advantage. Like most Union horse soldiers, they were armed by this stage of the war with Sharps single-shot breechloading carbines. Infantrymen carried single-shot muzzle-loading rifled muskets. These weapons had a longer range and greater hitting power than cavalry carbines, but even a good infantryman could get off only two or three shots a minute while a trooper armed with a breechloader could fire twice as fast.
As Heth built up more and more power, Buford climbed to the cupola of the Lutheran seminary building (still there) on the next ridgeline, appropriately named Seminary Ridge. He looked anxiously to the south for Reynolds and his promised reinforcements. As Buford's tired troopers were about to give way, Reynolds came galloping across the fields, followed at double time by two brigades of his leading division. One of them was the famous Iron Brigade, containing one Indiana, one Michigan, and three Wisconsin regiments, and considered the toughest unit in the army. As Reynolds personally led this brigade into line at about 10:30 A.M., he suddenly slumped in the saddle and fell from his horse with a bullet through the base of his skull—the first and highest-ranking general killed at Gettysburg. A small monument on the east side of the Herbst Woods (now usually called McPherson's Woods or sometimes Reynolds’ Woods) marks the spot where Reynolds fell.
A quarter-mile to the north, across the road and next to Buford's monument, is a large equestrian statue of Reynolds. It introduces us to another dispute about a supposed Gettysburg myth. Two of the hooves of Reynolds's horse are raised. Generations of battlefield guides have explained that this pose conforms to a pattern indicating that the rider was killed in the battle. If one hoof is off the ground, the rider was wounded—and that is true of the equestrian monument to Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, who was wounded at Gettysburg. If all four of the horse's feet are on the ground, the rider was unharmed in the battle—and that also is true of all the rest of Gettysburg's monuments (save the newest one—of which more later). Some park personnel and guides, however, now debunk this “myth” as well, and insist that the relationship between hooves and the rider's fate is purely coincidental. But that strikes me as unlikely. For centuries a convention has existed among sculptors of equestrian statues to symbolize the rider's fate in battle by the placement of the horse's hooves. So I will continue to tell that story about the equestrian monuments at Gettysburg.
After Reynolds's death, Major General Abner Doubleday took command of the Union First Corps. (Doubleday did not invent baseball—that indeed is a myth.) The Iron Brigade counterattacked one of Heth's brigades through the Herbst Woods and down the slope to Willoughby Run. These woods were open and parklike at the time, even more than they are today after the Park