Walking Pickett's Charge

Battlefields:  Civil War:  Gettysburg

To understand a battlefield you must walk it, so I’ve asked Civil War historian Ed Bearss to lead me along the route of Pickett’s Charge.  I want to get a sense of what those soldiers faced, the ground truth of that day.  The Confederate attack was the climax of the Battle of Gettysburg, when the fate of a nation hung in the balance.
Ed and I stand at the edge of Spangler Woods where Robert E. Lee had massed his forces on Seminary Ridge during the last day of battle.  The Confederate general had decided to risk the outcome of the battle in a desperate attempt to break the Union hold on Cemetery Ridge a mile to the east. 

A ball cap sits on Ed’s head, and he wears a pair of jungle boots on his feet, well worn from the more than 300 days a year he spends guiding throngs of enthusiastic history buffs.  A veteran of World War II, he can still out-walk most of those who follow him across the old battlefields.  As he points out a landmark, I notice the bullet holes scarring his left arm. 

He knows the terrain and disposition of the troops, where each regiment stood in line, their strengths at that moment of the battle, and their commanding officers.  He knows the times these leaders have hesitated in a fight and the times they have shown extraordinary courage.  He also knows what fates lie in store for them, those who will die this day, those who will survive, and those who will wish they hadn’t.  In fact, he knows much more than the generals did who fought here on a July afternoon in 1864.

Major General George Pickett's division formed the center of the Confederate line.  Before the attack he talked with one of his brigade commanders, General Richard Garnett.  “I advise you to get across those fields as quick as you can," Pickett said, "for in my opinion you are going to catch hell.”

The two of us look across the open fields to the ridge beyond.  The former chief historian for the National Park Service knows the landscape as they saw it – the woods more open then, a patchwork of smaller fields, the post-and-rail fences sturdier, the ridgeline clear of monuments.  We stand where Garnett’s Brigade began the attack.  “It’s July 3,” Ed says, “and the temperature will reach 86 degrees.”  Pickett spoke to the soldiers waiting to advance, and Ed bellows out his words.  “Men of old Virginia, prepare to charge the enemy!” 
Three divisions, some 12,600 Confederate soldiers, moved forward.  The first line advanced with men marching elbow to elbow, their rifles over their right shoulders and bayonets flashing in the sun.  Thousands of feet tramped to a steady drumbeat as a second line followed less than two yards behind the first.  The soldiers, dressed in faded grays and butternut brown, marched in perfect order.  A veteran of the charge called it as “an inexpressibly grand and inspiring attack . . .  My God, it was magnificent!” 

Ed and I step out across the open field, the ground soft from recent rains, and retrace the route taken by Garnett’s Brigade.  Mud lies in the low spots and grass grows thick, no different than any farmer’s pasture in this part of Pennsylvania.  When I first visited a battlefield as a kid, I was surprised to discover that such a tremendous event hadn’t left some trace of its passing.  To the eye it’s only common ground, but the collective memory has transformed these fields into something more powerful, more timeless. 

As we walk, Ed tells me about leading a Vietnam veteran across this field with a plate in his head and missing one leg and half of the other.  “He walked all the way,” Ed says.  “I was impressed.  He fell down crossing the stone wall, and people rushed to help him, but he waved them aside.”  After walking a few steps in silence, Ed picks up the battlefield narration where he left off, speaking in a commanding voice.  With a rising cadence and a sense of immediacy, he draws a listener into those far distant times.  “Now,” he says, “they are taking heavy casualties.”

Shells burst among the Confederates, exploding in geysers of dirt and metal and tearing bloody gaps in the ranks.  The soldiers filled these holes without hesitation, and the lines moved on unbroken, marching at a quick step of 80 steps a minute.  Allowing for a pause midway to swing left and close the gap with the next division, they came to grips with the Union defenders in 15 minutes.  Ed knows this by having covered the ground himself at a precise, quick-step pace. 

We go slower, pausing at critical points to comment on the action.  I hold back my questions to keep from breaking the mood,.  As he talks I begin to get a sense of the battlefield from the feet up.  There’s a momentary easing of tension when we enter a shallow swale, reducing our exposure to artillery fire.  “We’re safe now,” he says, “we’re as safe from those guns as if we’re in the hands of Jesus!”  And then we find ourselves on a slight rise, and the entire ridgeline comes into view.  Still listening to Ed, I notice the strength draining from my legs, a visceral dread of what is about to happen.

The Virginians reached the Emmitsburg Road, lined with heavy post-and-rail fences.  Holes had been knocked through sections of it while other parts remained intact.  Some soldiers crossed the road without trouble; for those who had to climb the fences it became a nightmare.  Exposed to deadly fire, men dropped by the dozens.  The brigades, under a continuing bombardment and hit by rapid musket volleys, had difficulty reforming their lines.  Exploding shells tore through what formations they managed to pull together, cutting men in two as the arms and legs of others were sent flying.  In the defending roar orders had to be shouted to men standing a foot away.  One soldier recalled hearing nothing, his senses overwhelmed by the terrific din.

Garnett’s Brigade now formed the tip of the spear, and he ordered his men to double-quick across the dead zone between the road and the stone wall.  Along the route of attack, Union regiments swung in to face the Confederate flanks, the jaws of a trap ready to close.  These farmlands became a killing field as a lethal crossfire ripped into the attacking forces.  Captain Michael Spessard of the 28th Virginia, one of Garnett’s regiments, came upon his wounded son.  He stopped to cradle him in his arms for a moment and kiss him goodbye, before rejoining the attack.

Bunched together, the Confederates rushed the defenders, each soldier bent forward as if bracing against a gale.  At 75 yards from the enemy they opened fire, and soon Garnett’s Virginians reached the wall where it formed a right angle.  By now the companies, regiments, and even brigades had lost cohesion.  The attackers crowded together in broken ranks up to thirty men deep, gasping for air in the choking smoke.  The sun burned red through it, and they found themselves in a twilight of their own making. 

All the defenders could see were the red battle flags rising above the pall and the steady pulse of muzzle flashes.  Through the chaos of battle could be heard a savage, human drone.  “The men do not cheer or shout,” remembered Frank Haskell, a Union officer defending Cemetery Ridge; “they growl, and over that uneasy sea, heard with the roar of musketry, sweeps the muttered thunder of a storm of growls.”

Confederates surged over the stone wall, breaching the Union line.  Soldiers grappled in fierce hand-to-hand fighting, clubbing each other with the butts of their rifles, thrusting bayonets, and firing guns at point-blank range.  “We were crazy with the excitement of the fight,” recalled Lieutenant William Harmon of the 1st Minnesota.  “We rushed in like wild beasts.  Men swore and cursed and struggled and fought, grappled in hand to hand fight, threw stones, clubbed their muskets, yelled and hurrahed!”

As the 14th Virginia crossed the wall, cannon opened on them with canister.  “They are vaporized,” says Ed.  “And suddenly there is going to be a crisis.  The 69th Pennsylvania, led by Colonel Dennis O’Kane look to their right and see the Rebels coming over the wall.”  They fall back to a clump of trees, reform, and fire as rapidly as possible at those firing just as desperately at them. 

“Alonzo Cushing has had two of his guns pushed up here,” Ed continues.  “He’s had them double-charged with canister.  He’s been shot in the fleshy part of the leg, shot in the groin, shot in the fleshy part of each of the arms, and he gives the command, ‘Fire!’ and as he pulls the lanyard a bullet goes in his mouth so we don’t know if he could have fathered children with that shot in the groin because he’s dead.”  The two of us stand next to Cushing’s guns, facing the stone wall. 

“The Confederates are coming on fast," Ed says, "they’re crowding up, it’s a mob, they’ve lost all order whatsoever.  Garnett with a high fever is riding a horse with his overcoat on.  There is an explosion, lots of smoke, the horse, badly wounded, will come out of the smoke, and they’ll never see Garnett again.  Garnett’s watch and sword will show up in a Baltimore pawnshop in the 1880s.  He’s undoubtedly one of the Confederates buried as unknown by the Yankees.

“Now, Confederate General Lewis Armistead will push himself to the head, put his hat on his sword, and the 71st Pennsylvania breaks as the Confederates come over the wall.  That folds back the right of the 69th Pennsylvania, O’Kane is mortally wounded, and the Confederates, men of Armistead and Garnett, crowd together.  They will press forward as a mob – no order at all, and will continue to advance into this area here.  Reaching this point, Armistead will symbolically place his hand on one of Cushing’s guns and will be shot down with a body wound.  Now the Union will begin a counter-attack.”

Reinforcements rushed forward in a fighting mass with regiments tossed together without order and each soldier firing at will into the attackers.  No more than a few hundred Confederates had crossed the Union lines, and their momentum quickly faltered.  “In five minutes,” Ed says, “it’s all over.”

Cheers swept along the Union lines as the greatest battle ever fought in America came to an end.  Of the nearly 12,500 Confederates who began the final assault, more than half lay dead, wounded, or missing when it was over. 

A Union officer, wounded earlier in the day, returned to Cemetery Ridge at sundown.  The carnage left in the wake of the final attack spread out below him.  “No words can depict the ghastly picture,” wrote Captain Benjamin Thompson. 

“The track of the great charge was marked by bodies of men in all possible positions, wounded, bleeding, dying and dead.  Near the line where the final struggle occurred, the men lay in heaps, the wounded wriggling and groaning under the weight of the dead among whom they were entangled.  In my weak and exhausted condition I could not long endure the gory, ghastly spectacle.  I found my head reeling, the tears flowing and my stomach sick at the sight.”  The horror of what he witnessed would haunt him the rest of his life.
Ed and I loop back to our car on Seminary Ridge, retracing the Confederate line of retreat.  The historian continues his account, relating tales of desperation and despair, detailing where the survivors reformed and commenting on how defeat tests the character of men.  Walking back over those fields, we slowly resurface and leave the past behind.

Lessons:  Hot Chilis:  El Paso, Texas One morning outside El Paso, I pulled into a cafe near the border on the theory that the closer to Mexico, the better the Mexican food.  The waitress brought an order of spicy chorizo sausage mixed with eggs and wrapped in a tortilla.  But something about the chili pepper sitting next to it made me hesitate.  Unable to identify the variety, I took a nibble and let it sit on the tongue for a few moments – using the same precautions for testing an unknown plant in the wild.  With no immediate burning, I swallowed and waited.  It had a pleasant, fresh taste, and without a second thought, I took a big bite.  And then the realization suddenly hit – I had made a serious mistake. The slow burn picked up momentum and quickly passed the pain threshold.  My tongue felt blistered.  Putting down the newspaper, I tried to think.  A sip of coffee only made it worse.  My nose began to run and my eyes began to water as sweat broke out on my upper lip.  By the time the pain receptors on the tip of the tongue had numbed, those on the back kicked in.  The thought of death by chili became a stark reality, and I mentally checked my vitals.  While traveling south of the border, I had eaten my share of hot foods.  A group of friendly mountain climbers once invited me to a party on the side of a volcano at 15,000 feet.  They had packed up a bottle of tequila, a guitar, and a can of  jalapeño peppers.  The leader offered me one – a big one, and the others turned to watch its effects.  But I’d already learned to eat a jalapeño the way a dog eats a bumblebee – all teeth and no lips, then one fast gulp.  You have to swallow it whole and smile while doing it.  This El Paso chili was hotter than a jalapeño, probably a local variety nicknamed levanta muertos, the infamous “raise-the-dead” chili.  Hundreds of different varieties are grown in the Southwest, a region where some people eat chilies with every meal, and many are selected for one trait only – their pyrotechnic effect.  Usually the more innocent looking, the hotter they are, so I should have known before biting into this one.  Now all I could do was grip the table and wait, trying to imagine who the first person was to eat a hot pepper and call it food. Radio commentary, National Public Radio, www.npr.org.   Listen to commentary: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1137171   click here for past voices