The dawning of the third day at Gettysburg found the Confederate troops still occupying Seminary Ridge while the Union army was stretched from Little Round Top on the left in a fishhook to Culp's Hill on the right.
Gen. Robert E. Lee still thought he could break through the federal line and ordered up the division of Maj. Gen. George E. Pickett of Lt. Gen. James Longstreet's 1st Corps, which had been left the previous day at Chambersburg, Pa., to guard the Confederate supply trains.
Longstreet, who preferred the strategy of taking strong defensive positions and waiting for the enemy to attack, opposed Lee's plan to attack the Union line straight on. Longstreet writes in his account of Gettysburg in "Battles and Leaders of the Civil War" that he told Lee he thought the wisest course was to move around the Union left, find good defensive ground and wait for the Union army to attack.
But Lee would have none of that.
" 'No,' [Lee] said, 'I am going to take them where they are on Cemetery Hill. I want you to take Pickett's division and make the attack,' " Longstreet recounts.
Making one last protest, Longstreet told Lee, "That will give me 15,000 men. I have been a soldier, I may say, from the rank up to the position I now hold. I have been in pretty much all kinds of skirmishes, from those of two or three soldiers up to those of an army corps, and I think I can safely say there never was a body of 15,000 men who could make that attack successfully."
Lee seemed to be somewhat impatient at Longstreet's remarks and he said nothing more.
Firing begins
Shortly after 1 p.m. July 3, two Confederate guns at the Peach Orchard sounded the opening of the Confederate artillery bombardment, and more than 100 cannons began firing at the Union line. In response, more than 80 federal guns opened fire.
"The destruction was, of course not great," Long-street writes. "But the thunder on Seminary Ridge, and the echo from the Federal side, showed that both commanders were ready. The armies seemed like wild beasts growling at each other and preparing for a death struggle."
The artillery barrage continued for two hours, until about 3 p.m. Then the federal guns ceased firing and several withdrew from their positions, a strategic move to save ammunition before the anticipated infantry attack. Col. E.P. Alexander, Longstreet's chief of artillery, sent word to Pickett that now was the moment for the attack to proceed.
Pickett rode to Longstreet's headquarters to get approval to start the advance.
"I was convinced that he would be leading his troops to needless slaughter and did not speak," Longstreet recalls. "He repeated the question, and without opening my lips I bowed in answer."
Pickett, leading his division, marched over the crest of Seminary Ridge and passed Longstreet as he began descending the slope.
"As he passed me he rode gracefully, with his jaunty cap raked well over on his right ear and his long auburn locks, nicely dressed, hanging almost to his shoulders," Longstreet recalls. "He seemed rather a holiday soldier than a general at the head of a column which was about to make one of the grandest, most desperate assaults recorded in the annals of war."
Infantry moves forward
The long gray line of Confederate infantry moved forward slowly in close ranks, emerging from the woods into the open field. "Before them lay the ground over which they were to pass to the point of attack," Longstreet writes. "Intervening were several fences, a field of corn, a little swale running through it and then a rise from that point to the Federal stronghold."
As the Confederate army came into view, the federal artillery began firing, but the line continued to advance.
After Pickett crossed the Emmitsburg Road and drew to within 400 yards of its line, the Union artillery began firing canister that showered the Confederate ranks with metal balls. Federal sharpshooters also took their toll. "The slaughter was terrible, the enfilade fire of the batteries on Round Top being very destructive," Longstreet writes. "At times one shell would knock down five or six men."
The right and left wings of the Confederate army took a terrible punishment and broke ranks. The attack now depended on the center. Brig. Gen. Lewis A. Armistead, leading about 200 men, converged on the Angle, a point in the Union line where soldiers were positioned behind a stone wall, pouring fire on the Confederate ranks. Steadily running up the slope toward the wall, pausing only to reload their rifles, Armistead's men overtook the Angle and for a brief few minutes engaged in hand-to-hand combat with their enemy.
Longstreet, watching from Seminary Ridge, saw that his troops could not hold. "The Confederate flag was planted in the Federal line, and immediately Armistead fell mortally wounded at the feet of the Federal soldiers," he writes.
"The wavering divisions then seemed appalled, broke their ranks and retired," he writes. "Immediately the Federals swarmed around Pickett, attacking on all sides, enveloped and broke up his command, having killed and wounded more than 2,000 men in about 30 minutes. They then drove the fragments back upon our lines."
Longstreet recalls Lee meeting the battered troops as they fell back to their lines at Seminary Ridge, begging them to re-form their ranks in anticipation of a Union counterattack: "It was then he used the expression that has been mentioned so often: 'It was all my fault; get together, and let us do the best we can toward saving that which is left of us.' "
"General Lee," Pickett told his commander, "I have no division now."
Meade never counterattacked and the next day, in a driving rain, Lee's troops withdrew.
Thus ended the Battle of Gettysburg and the high-water mark of the Confederacy.
Lewis Armistead: Leading charge
Brig. Gen. Lewis A. Armistead commanded a brigade of Pickett's division during the climactic charge on the third day at Gettysburg. The brigade included 2,055 men and was made up of the 9th, 14th, 38th, 53rd and 57th Virginia Regiments. Company B of the 9th Virginia was made up of Maryland men who had enlisted in that regiment in 1861.
Armistead, waving his hat on his saber, led his men to the crest of Cemetery Ridge under withering fire from the Union troops at the summit. About 200 Confederate soldiers broke through, but they were not reinforced and were quickly overwhelmed by a counterattack. Armistead was mortally wounded and captured. To Capt. Henry H. Bingham, a surgeon who was trying to help him, Armistead said, "Say to General Hancock for me, that I have done him, and you all, a grievous injury, which I shall regret the longest day I live." He died two days later.
Armistead, born in North Carolina in 1817, was appointed to West Point but was dismissed for breaking aplateover thehead of Jubal A. Early, who became a Confederate lieutenant general. Nonetheless he was commissioned in the regular Army in 1839 and served in the Mexican War. He entered the Confederate service as a major in 1861.
Armistead's father claimed his body and took it to Baltimore, where it was placed in the tomb of Maj. George Armistead, Lewis Armistead's uncle, who had commanded the defense of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. He was later buried at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, according to Daniel Carroll Toomey's account in "Marylanders at Gettysburg," published in 1994.
Armistead was not the only Southern general to fall in Pickett's Charge.
Brig. Gen. Richard B. Garnett was killed near the ridgeline while leading the Tennessee brigade of Heth's division. His body was never recovered from the battlefield, but his sword eventually turned up years later in a pawnshop in Baltimore, according to Albert A. Nofi's account in "The Gettysburg Campaign," published in 1986.
Of the 15,000 men who made the charge, about 60 percent were killed, wounded or captured.
Pub Date: 6/28/98