Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg Read online

  From the Peach Orchard we will head south on the Emmitsburg Road and bear left onto South Confederate Avenue. One-third of a mile farther on the right is the Alabama state monument, which marks the position from which Evander Law's tired and thirsty brigade led off Longstreet's attack. Looking to the northeast we can see the highest part of Little Round Top looming above the intervening woods. In 1863 most of those woods were not there, and the five Alabama plus two Texas regiments would have been visible from Little Round Top as they moved across the open fields toward the Round Tops in late afternoon. If the Park Service carries out its restoration plans, eighty-eight acres of woods that were not there then will be gone again by the time this book appears. Maybe.

  In 1863 these troops were spotted from Little Round Top. When Longstreet's assault began, the only Union soldiers at this key position were a handful of signal corpsmen. Meade had sent the army's chief of engineers, Brigadier General Gouverneur K. Warren, to check on affairs at Little Round Top. As Warren later told it, he asked a Union cannoneer to send a shot toward a woodlot a mile away. Confederate soldiers concealed there jerked suddenly, and Warren saw the glint of sunlight reflected from their rifle barrels. The story sounds rather fanciful, especially since the late-afternoon sun was behind the Confederates. More likely the signalmen told Warren there were Confederate troops across the way, and he soon saw them moving out from the treeline. Hurriedly sending orders for reinforcements to double-time to Little Round Top, Warren earned his niche in history.

  The brigade that came was commanded by Penn-sylvanian Strong Vincent, recently promoted from colonel to brigadier general. As millions of readers and viewers of the novel The Killer Angels and the movie Gettysburg know, one of the regiments in this brigade was the Twentieth Maine, commanded by Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, ex-professor of rhetoric and modern languages at Bowdoin College. Vincent posted the Twentieth at the left of his four-regiment brigade, getting the whole brigade in position just minutes before enemy regiments began their assault on Little Round Top.

  We can easily find our way to the Twentieth Maine monument, about 250 yards southeast of the Little Round Top parking area. When I first visited Gettysburg in the 1960s, scarcely any tourist knew about the Twentieth Maine, and few ever saw its monument, which is tucked away from the others that are back on the west face of Little Round Top. After The Killer Angels was published in 1974 and won the Pulitzer Prize, the Park Service put up a sign pointing to the regiment's monument and position. After Ken Burns's video documentary The Civil War in 1990, which prominently featured Chamberlain, and the movie Gettysburg in 1993, two interpretive markers, more directional signs, a paved walkway, and an auxiliary parking lot just below the monument materialized. Now this site is the most heavily visited in the Park.

  Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain became an iconic figure in the 1990s. More people on the tours I have led want to see where he fought than anything else. Powerful emotions have gripped some of them as they stared at the simple stone and bronze monument and their imaginations drifted back to those desperate moments about 7:00 P.M. on that July 2. I remember one such occasion in particular. In April 1987 I took a group of Princeton students on a tour of the battlefield, as I have done many times. This year one of those students had written her senior thesis on Chamberlain, but had never before actually been to Gettysburg. As we came to the place where the Twentieth Maine fought, she could no longer hold back the tears. Nor could the rest of us. Although I have experienced other powerful emotions while walking Civil War battlefields, none has ever matched that April day in 1987. The world has little noted what I said there, but it can never forget what they did there.

  Several of Chamberlain's ancestors had fought in the American Revolution. His father had wanted young Lawrence (as his family called him) to pursue a military career. But his mother wanted him to become a clergyman. She seemed to have gotten her way; Lawrence graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Bowdoin and earned a B.D. from Bangor Theological Seminary. In 1855 he accepted a professorship at Bowdoin, succeeding Calvin Stowe, whose wife, Harriet Beecher Stowe, had written Uncle Tom's Cabin while Chamberlain was a student there. Chamberlain knew Mrs. Stowe, and like thousands of others he was moved by her novel to work for the abolition of slavery.

  In 1862 he got his chance. Although thirty-three years old and the father of three children, he considered it his duty to fight for Union and freedom. To dissuade him, Bowdoin offered him a two-year sabbatical to study in Europe. Instead, Chamberlain went to the state capital and accepted a commission in the newly organized Twentieth Maine. He was probably the only officer in either army who could read seven foreign languages—these seven, at least: Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, French, and German.

  As the shadows lengthened toward evening on July 2, Chamberlain found himself responsible for preventing the enemy from rolling up the Union left. His orders from Vincent were to “hold that ground at all hazards.” Chamberlain soon found out what that meant. For more than an hour, repeated assaults on Vincent's brigade (eventually reinforced by another brigade) surged back and forth, constantly increasing the pressure on the left flank held by the Twentieth Maine. Chamberlain and his senior captain, Ellis Spear (one of Chamberlain's former students at Bowdoin), extended and bent back their line in an attempt to prevent this disaster. Meanwhile, off to Chamberlain's right, on the west face of Little Round Top, the battle raged fiercely as Alabama and Texas regiments advanced from boulder to boulder up the hill. Vincent was mortally wounded, a colonel and the general commanding the reinforcing brigade were killed, and the commander of an artillery battery that had struggled into position was also killed.

  Chamberlain seemed likely to meet the same fate. He had already been slightly wounded twice. With a third of his four hundred men down and the rest of them nearly out of ammunition, with the enemy apparently forming for yet another assault, the Twentieth Maine seemed finished. As Chamberlain later wrote, at this crisis “my thought was running deep.… Five minutes more of such a defensive, and the last roll-call would sound for us. Desperate as the chances were, there was nothing for it but to take the offensive. I stepped to the colors. The men turned toward me. One word was enough,—’BAYONET!’ It caught like fire, and swept along the ranks.” With a wild yell, the survivors of this two-hour firefight, led by their multilingual fighting professor, lurched downhill in a bayonet charge against the shocked Alabamians. The Twentieth drove them across the front of the next Union regiments in line, the Eighty-third Pennsylvania and the Forty-fourth New York, and together these three regiments captured more than two hundred of them (Chamberlain claimed almost four hundred).

  The hero-worship of Chamberlain has prompted a minor backlash among some historians and park rangers who have grown tired of exaggerated questions and claims by visitors who want to see where Chamberlain performed these exploits. The revisionists claim that the men of the Twentieth spontaneously charged, or that Ellis Spear deserves the credit for the bayonet assault (though no one denies that it was Chamberlain who gave the order to fix bayonets). They quote the report of Colonel William C. Oates, commander of the Fifteenth Alabama (who, like Chamberlain, later became governor of his state), that he was in fact preparing to withdraw when the Twentieth Maine came screaming down the hill, and that the withdrawal was a retreat, not a rout. Oates doth protest too much. But there is no doubt that the Alabamians were exhausted and dehydrated after seemingly endless uphill fighting following a twenty-five-mile march to the battlefield.

  It seems clear, however, that Chamberlain deserved the Congressional Medal of Honor he won for the defense of Little Round Top. He went on to become one of the war's most extraordinary soldiers. He rose to brigade command and, on June 18, 1864, was shot through the pelvis while leading his brigade in an assault at Petersburg. Such wounds were almost always fatal; Ulysses S. Grant promoted the supposedly dying colonel to brigadier general on the field—one of only two such occasions in the war. Chamberlain beat the odds and recovered
to lead his brigade in the final campaign to Appomattox. At the battle of Quaker Road on March 29, 1865, he took another bullet, this one just below the heart, where it would have killed him had it not been deflected around his ribs by a leather case of field orders in his breast pocket. Chamberlain suffered two cracked ribs and a bruised arm, but continued to lead his brigade in several more fights during the next eleven days until the surrender at Appomattox. So impressed was Grant with his fighting professor that he selected Chamberlain to take charge of the Army of Northern Virginia's formal surrender at Appomattox.

  In 1886, Chamberlain and other veterans of the Twentieth Maine returned to Gettysburg to dedicate their monument on Little Round Top. As we stand at the same spot, listen to Chamberlain's words on that occasion: “In great deeds, something abides. On great fields something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear, but spirits linger, to consecrate the ground for the vision-place of souls. And reverent men and women from afar, and generations that know us not and that we know not of, heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them…” Little wonder that my students could not hold back the tears when I read these words to them here in 1987.

  The Twentieth Maine was not the only Union regiment whose heroics helped to save the day at Gettysburg. We will walk back to the west face of Little Round Top to study the interpretive markers and a dozen monuments there. One of the latter is a bust of Colonel Patrick O’Rorke, who graduated at the top of his West Point Class of 1861, the same class in which George Armstrong Custer, now a brigadier general, had finished last. O’Rorke fell dead with a bullet through his neck while leading his 140th New York in a counterattack that saved that flank of the Union position from collapse. We can also stand on a granite boulder next to a bronze statue of General Warren looking to the southwest where he professed to have seen the glint of sunlight reflected from enemy rifles.

  From there we will head down the north slope of Little Round Top and continue on Sedgwick Avenue for a half-mile, where it becomes Hancock Avenue at about the point where it also begins to rise gradually from a swale to the higher ground of Cemetery Ridge. On the right, soon after the road becomes Hancock Avenue, is another impressive bronze statue, of Father William Corby standing with his right arm raised in blessing. Father Corby was chaplain of the famed Irish Brigade of Major General Winfield Scott Hancock's Second Corps. These five regiments, composed mainly of Irish-American Catholics, were much depleted by their losses in battle the previous year but still full of fight.

  As the Third Corps was being pushed back from the Rose farm and the Wheatfield, Meade ordered Hancock to send a division to their support. That division included the Irish Brigade. Before they marched away from this spot, Father Corby climbed onto the boulder where his statue stands, and blessed the troops. After doing so, he added ominously that “the Catholic church refuses Christian burial to the soldier who turns his back upon the foe or deserts his flag.” He then pronounced the Latin words of absolution for those who would not come back. Men from other regiments standing nearby also bowed their heads and accepted absolution even though they were Protestants; after all, it couldn't hurt.

  The Irish brigade went into action three-quarters of a mile southwest of where Father Corby stands; its position is marked by a monument on Ayres Avenue that includes a bronze relief of the brigade mascot, an Irish wolfhound. Father Corby is one of the few Civil War chaplains honored by a monument (erected in 1910 by veterans of the Irish Brigade); he is surely the only one commemorated by two monuments, the second at Notre Dame University, where he served as president for many years after the Civil War.

  A quarter-mile north of Father Corby's statue, on the left side of Hancock Avenue, stands one of the most impressive and moving monuments on the battlefield. It depicts a soldier running forward atop a high pedestal. The monument commemorates the attack by eight companies (262 men) of the First Minnesota against an entire Alabama brigade of 1,500 men. The First Minnesota had been in service longer than almost any other regiment in the Army of the Potomac. It had fought in nearly all of the battles since First Bull Run in July 1861, suffering some 260 killed and wounded before Gettysburg. There it would nearly double that total.

  As the sun was setting on July 2, the First Minnesota was in line supporting an artillery battery (six guns) near the spot where the monument stands. Fragments of retreating Third Corps units streamed toward the rear while out of the haze of gunsmoke appeared a line of Alabama troops emerging from a thicket three hundred yards away. All other Union infantry in this sector had gone to the Wheatfield earlier. In a few minutes the Alabama brigade would breach this crucial position unless it was stopped. Hancock galloped up and shouted, “My God! Are these all the men we have here?” Reinforcements were on the way but they could not arrive for ten minutes. Hancock needed to buy that much time, even if it cost every man in the regiment. Turning to Colonel William Colvill, Hancock pointed to the Alabamians and yelled, “Advance, Colonel, and take those colors.”

  Without hesitation, the 262 men fixed bayonets and began double-timing forward. “Every man realized in an instant what that order meant—death or wounds to us all,” wrote Colvill, who was wounded in the attack, “and every man saw and accepted the necessity for the sacrifice.” With a yell they tore into the Alabamians and bought Hancock his ten minutes and more. The Confederates made it no farther. Seventy Minnesotans didn't make it at all, and another 145 were wounded or missing. This casualty rate of 82 percent of those engaged was the highest of the war for any Union regiment in a single action.

  As the fighting died away at dark on the Union left, the volume of artillery and rifle fire a mile or two northeast at Culp's and East Cemetery Hills continued unabated. This part of the battlefield was the most visited by tourists in the 1870s and 1880s, for it was the first land purchased by the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association, a private group formed in 1864 to preserve and commemorate the battlefield. Today, however, it is the least visited portion of the battlefield, partly because it is only on the “optional” route of the Park Service's self-guided auto tour, and partly because all of the action described in The Killer Angels and the film/miniseries Gettysburg occurred on other parts of the battlefield. But the Culp's Hill/East Cemetery Hill fighting was intense, and just as important to the battle's outcome as elsewhere. If the Confederates had captured this position or achieved a breakthrough, it would have been as disastrous for the Union cause as the loss of Little Round Top or Cemetery Ridge.

  From the First Minnesota monument we proceed north a tenth of a mile, turn right on Pleasonton Avenue, left onto the Taneytown Road (Route 134), and right at Hunt Avenue, following it for a half mile to a T-crossing at the Baltimore Pike (Route 97). We'll turn right there, then after three-tenths of a mile left onto Slocum Avenue, which will wind through the woods for a half-mile to the optional auto-tour stop at Spangler's Spring. The interpretive markers in this area describe the actions that took place on the evening of July 2 and the morning of July 3. The many monuments alongside the road as one proceeds up the steep grade to the observation tower commemorate the Union regiments that fought here. We will follow that route in a few moments, but first we pause to consider another long-standing Gettysburg myth.

  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 inter
pretive 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.