“I took up that line because it enabled me to hold commanding ground,” Maj. Gen. Daniel E. Sickles told the Committee on the Conduct of the War. Had he not done so and had the enemy been allowed to take the commanding ground “as they would have taken it if I had not occupied it in force,” he went on to testify, the Federal left would have been untenable. In his judgment, the Confederates would have turned the fortunes of the day “hopelessly against us.”¹ And so he marched his Third Corps forward to the high ground above the west branch of Plum Run and along the Emmitsburg Road and deployed it there far outside the position assigned to that corps by General Meade.

Sickles's left was neither at nor on Little Round Top. Instead it rested at Devil's Den, west of Plum Run, five hundred yards to the front of Little Round Top's crest, though not nearly so far from its base. Devil's Den is an extensive rock formation whose massive granite blocks spill like the fruit of a cornucopia from the south end of the low, short ridge (referred to hereinafter as Devil's Den Ridge) that forms the west wall of Plum Run Valley opposite Little Round Top.² The granite rocks of Devil's Den are an assortment of huge boulders, slabs, and chunks, some the size of small houses or automobiles, all jumbled together with holes and crevasses between them. This formation extends to the base of Round Top, where it constricts the valley of Plum Run into a gorge. Devil's Den was a wild sort of place, useful at best as a poor site for grazing cattle or as a wood lot and not much more. It covered an area of about ten acres, and no Civil War unit could have attacked through it in formation. Just north and west of its rock spill a knoll rises about seventy feet over Plum Run. This knoll and another one about four hundred yards north of it were key features of Devil's Den Ridge forming the west wall of the Plum Run Valley in front of Little Round Top.

The west wall of Plum Run's valley, like the west face of Little Round Top, had been logged for timber not long before the battle and was essentially bare (p.125) of trees. This clear cutting extended around the south and west slopes of Devil's Den to include a sloping, rocky field shaped like an equilateral triangle that was enclosed by stone walls each about 150 yards in length. The cleared area gave troops posted above Devil's Den an unobstructed view across the fields 1,000 yards to the west to that portion of Seminary Ridge south of the Emmitsburg Road.³ Just north of the triangular field and west of the knoll Rose's Woods covered the west slope of the ridge for a distance of about three hundred yards to the south edge of the Wheatfield.

The position assigned to Birney's division on Cemetery Ridge north from Little Round Top had been deemed undesirable not only because it was a little lower than the high ground along the Emmitsburg Road but also because trees on and in front of it made it unsuitable for use by artillery. Good battery positions had to have certain characteristics. Most importantly they had to have fields of fire. At Gettysburg, as elsewhere during the Civil War, field batteries employed what later was called “direct fire.” Like riflemen, gunners aimed their pieces directly at their targets. There was practically no lobbing of shot and shell from the protection of hills or woods at unseen targets, for there was no practicable way to control such fire. The guns of a battery had to be up on the firing line where the gunners could see their targets and aim directly at them.⁴

Batteries also fired best from ground that was relatively smooth, level, and bare of obstructions. Such surfaces permitted gun crews to work efficiently around their pieces, point the guns, bring up ammunition from the limbers, load, fire, and push the guns back to their proper places after recoil. The guns themselves had no recoil mechanisms and had to be free to roll back sufficiently when fired to take up the shock of recoil. There was an advantage to having guns posted on ground that sloped slightly uphill to the rear, for then gravity might shorten their rollback and cannoneers could more easily push the guns back into battery after firing. It was also advantageous to have gun wheels level to minimize “cant,” a sidewise tilt of the axles and barrels that skewed the trajectory and made accuracy more difficult to achieve. Probably the ground surface above Devil's Den did not meet these requirements well.⁵

Battery position also had to be accessible if guns were to be hauled in and out quickly and if limbers were to be parked close enough to supply the guns with ammunition. Because batteries were on or near the infantry line, the guns were vulnerable to assault and had to be readily movable to avoid the possibility of capture. To permit prompt movement and to make ammunition readily available, the noses of the lead pairs of the limbers' six-horse teams were halted and held close behind their guns.⁶

The Peach Orchard area provided good battery positions, as Sickles, Birney, and Captain Randolph readily recognized. This was not so with the left of Sickles's new line. Only one place there offered the most essential requirement—a field of fire. This was the area above the boulders of Devil's (p.126)

(p.127) Den and behind the triangular field. At Captain Randolph's direction, Capt. James E. Smith's Fourth New York Battery took position there and symbolically marked the Third Corps's left.

The Fourth New York Battery was a New York City unit and was armed with six ten-pounder Parrott rifles. These guns had cast iron barrels with 2.9-Ínch bores and wrought iron reinforcing jackets around the breech. Like the three-inch Ordnance rifle, a comparable piece that had a wrought iron barrel without the reinforcing jacket, they were reasonably accurate according to the standards of the day and had ranges in excess of one mile. This distance, of course, was farther than gunners could aim their pieces with any accuracy. Captain Smith saw that the usable space above Devil's Den would not accommodate all six of his guns (the prescribed interval between pieces was fourteen yards), so he placed four there (probably just to the right of where the battery was later marked) and put the other two in the Plum Run Valley to his right and rear. The rear section could sweep the valley as far as the tree-covered slope of Round Top and the rocks of the gorge of Devil's Den. In doing so, the rear guns could give some protection to the flank of the four guns in front. Captain Smith wrote nothing specific about the location of his limbers or of how his crews got ammunition to the four guns above Devil's Den. A sergeant of the 124th New York Regiment noted that each round had to be carried to the guns from the foot of the ridge. This would have been very difficult and slow, and crews might have piled some rounds near their guns—a practice usually forbidden.⁷

Smith's four guns could reach Seminary Ridge and any Confederate guns posted there, but Smith still worried. Any Confederate infantry that could gain the tree-covered slope of Round Top nearby or the rocks of Devil's Den could approach Smith's guns under cover, snipe at his cannoneers, and neutralize his battery,⁸

Birney assigned Ward's brigade to the left of his division's line and to the support of Smith's battery. J. H. Hobart Ward was an old soldier with a rather unusual background. Born in 1823, he left college at the age of eighteen and enlisted in the Seventh U.S. Infantry. He served with that regiment during the War with Mexico, was wounded at Monterrey, and in time became the regiment's sergeant major. He left the Regular Army by 1851 and became New York State's assistant commissary general. He went on to serve as the state's commissary general from 1855 to 1859. When the war came, Ward was in his prime, with military experience in both the field and administrative positions and with obvious political connections. It is no wonder, then, that he was commissioned a colonel and given a regiment, the Thirty-eighth New York Volunteer Infantry. After participating in the Army of the Potomac's early campaigns, he succeeded to the command of the Second Brigade, First Division, Third Corps, in October 1862 and received his star. Ward was an old soldier who could be expected to give a good account of himself.⁹

Initially Ward had five regiments in his brigade's line: the Twentieth Indiana, (p.128) the Fourth Maine, the Eighty-sixth and 124th New York, and the Ninety-ninth Pennsylvania, His three other units, the Third Maine and the two sharpshooter regiments, as we have seen, were on the skirmish line elsewhere along the Third Corps's front. At about noon, at Birney's order, Ward advanced his brigade from its morning location south of the George Weikert farmyard across the Wheatfield Road to the Wheatfield, where it halted in the yet untrampled wheat. After a pause in the wheat, the brigade shifted to the left and took position on and near Devil's Den Ridge.¹⁰

Ward posted the 124th New York to the right and rear of Smith's battery. The left of the 124th, therefore, was in the open ground just behind the crest of the ridge, but its right extended beyond a fence to the front side of the ridge and into the east end of Rose's Woods just northwest of the knoll above Devil's Den. Shortly afterward, Ward placed the Fourth Maine to the left of the 124th and behind Smith's four guns, thus extending his infantry line into the upper portion of Devil's Den. The Eighty-sixth New York prolonged the 124th's right north into Rose's Woods, and the Twentieth Indiana and the Ninety-ninth Pennsylvania carried it north to the Wheatfield, though in a short time these two regiments advanced down the slope toward the west branch of Plum Run in support of the skirmish line. Thus, Ward's brigade had a single line, without supports, that extended from Devil's Den northerly along the crest of the ridge, through the east end of Rose's Woods, and up to the south border of the Wheatfield, a distance of about four hundred yards. Except for the Fourth Maine and the left wing of the 124th New York, which faced across the essentially open fields toward Seminary Ridge, Ward's infantrymen overlooked a wooded and rocky slope that ran down about three hundred yards into the west branch of Plum Run.¹¹

The Wheatfield was beyond a stone wall that ran at a right angle to Ward's right. The Gettysburg area had scores of wheat and oat fields, all yellow in July with ripening grain, and several of them were on the battlefield. Only one, however, became “the Wheatfield”—that on Rose's farm about midway between Devil's Den and the Peach Orchard. It was about twenty acres in extent and virtually surrounded by woods. Although open, the field contained a few scattered boulders whose presence in the wheat was marked by clumps of bushes and trees. The field was highest along its northern and eastern sides. It drained south and west, and its southwest corner was marshy ground that was part of the valley of the west branch of Plum Run. The run was no more than 120 feet away. A rail fence, which ran back almost perpendicular to the stone wall that bordered the field on the south, separated the Wheatfield proper from the marshy ground into which it drained and from the stony hill and woods along its western side.¹²

The Wheatfield had some of the attributes of a good artillery position, though the fields of fire of any battery posted in it would have been confined practically to the field itself. Nevertheless, Captain Randolph posted Capt. George B. Winslow's Battery D, First New York Light Artillery, on high (p.129) ground fronting south across the field and roughly parallel to the Wheatfield Road. A space of about a hundred yards separated the right of the battery from the trees on the hill that formed the west boundary of the Wheatfield. Battery D was a veteran unit. It had been organized in western New York by Winslow and Thomas W. Osborn, its first commander. Osborn commanded it through Chancellorsville, and then he became the artillery chief for the Eleventh Corps. The battery had had a unique experience in the summer of 1862 east of Richmond. Osborn rigged one of its pieces, a three-inch Ordnance rifle, to fire at a Confederate balloon and scared the balloonists off with three shots. That was good fun, of course, but there was more serious work elsewhere. The battery particularly distinguished itself at Chancellorsville on 3 May when, according to Winslow, it fired canister at less than a thirty-yard range until it ran out of ammunition and had to retire.¹³

Battery D traded its three-inch Ordnance rifles for Napoleons after the Peninsular campaign. These bronze guns, whose barrels weighed more than 1,200 pounds, had smooth bores that measured 4.62 inches in diameter, and they fired round iron projectiles. The solid shot for a Napoleon weighed twelve pounds, hence the designation “twelvepounder.” It was named for Napoleon III, then Emperor of France, under whose regime this light field gun had been developed. Because of their large, smooth bores, the Napo-leons were particularly useful for firing canister and for short range work of the sort characteristic of the wooded theaters of operations of the American Civil War. Therefore Winslow's battery, so armed, was particularly suited to the cramped Wheatfield position. From the gun line in the north portion of the field, Winslow's pieces could cover the Wheatfield without difficulty, for the maximum range in view was no greater than three hundred yards. They could shoot into Rose's Woods in their front, of course, as they did, but hitting a specific object would require a lot of luck, for the gunners could see neither their targets there nor the results of their shooting. Furthermore, the woods on both of the battery's flanks created a potential danger. If not protected, they would permit Confederate infantry to approach the battery and take it under short-range fire.¹⁴

But that ought not to happen. The woods to the east were behind Ward's line. De Trobriand's brigade occupied the woods to the west, and it in turn was supplemented by Barnes's division of the Fifth Corps. This wooded area warrants special attention too, for it was also a bastion of Birney's line.

Gettysburg area farmers were thrifty people who confined their wood lots to nonarable land. The strip of woods on the west side of the Wheatfield had these characteristics. The high ground at the Peach Orchard slopes down-ward gradually for five hundred yards to these woods and to a small bare rise that separated them from the Wheatfield Road. The woods were shaped something like a right-hand mitten, palm down. Their fingertip end touched the bare rise by the Wheatfield Road, and their wide cuff was three hundred yards to the south along the open, marshy ground between the southwest (p.130) corner of the Wheatfield and the Rose farmyard. Their thumb pointed toward the Peach Orchard, and the Wheatfield ran along their east side. Within the woods the ground sloped sharply east and formed an amphi-theater facing toward the Wheatfield. The floor of the woods was strewn with boulders and was marshy in its lower areas by the Wheatfield.¹⁵

Birney assigned his Third Brigade, commanded by Col. Philip Regis de Trobriand, to this wooded area. The brigade had five regiments: the Third and Fifth Michigan, the Seventeenth Maine, the Fortieth New York, and the noth Pennsylvania, which had but six companies. The brigade had arrived at midmorning from Emmitsburg and rested somewhere within the Third Corps area (even the Bachelder Map does not show where), on the slope of high ground near Little Round Top. Wherever it was, de Trobriand regarded the site as a potentially good position and was reluctant to leave it.¹⁶

Although de Trobriand believed that the new Third Corps position offered “some great inconveniences and some great dangers,” his portion of it was not so bad.¹⁷ His brigade's initial deployment is somewhat hard to figure out. The Fifth Michigan and the 110th Pennsylvania were in line along the south side of the woods on the stony hill overlooking a cleared area by Plum Run. The 110th Pennsylvania was on the right. The Fifth fronted toward the Rose buildings, apparently, and its skirmishers linked up with the skirmish line of the Third Michigan, which connected the Rose farmyard and the Peach Orchard.¹⁸

The big Fortieth New York, six hundred strong and one of the largest regiments in the Third Corps, was to the rear along the west edge of the woods facing toward the Emmitsburg Road, and the Seventeenth Maine was on its right. The men of both regiments could probably see the skirmish lines of the Michiganders, but the Seventeenth in particular was in support of the Third. Both regiments, as it turned out, would soon leave these positions for others to the left.¹⁹

Another regiment, the Third Maine, was on the Third Michigan's right. After its adventures in Pitzer's Woods, Birney had ordered it to the south front of the Peach Orchard rather than back to Ward's brigade. The Maine men took a hasty meal from the contents of their haversacks and took position behind a rail fence there. The Third's right touched the Emmitsburg Road, and its left probably connected with that of the Third Michigan's skirmish line.²⁰

Charles K. Graham's brigade occupied the Peach Orchard behind the Third Maine and held the Emmitsburg Road as far north as the Trostle farm lane. Graham was thirty-nine years old in 1863. His military career began at seventeen when he entered the navy as a midshipman. Seven years of service with the fleet followed, including duty in the Gulf of Mexico during the Mexican War. After that war, Graham left the navy to study engineering, and in 1857 he went to work as an engineer at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he constructed dry docks. A skeletal description of Graham's prewar life suggests (p.131) that he would have had little in common with Daniel Sickles, and yet they were old friends. Both Graham and his brother Joseph had been associated with Sickles in Tammany Hall affairs. Joseph Graham was a hard-drinking lawyer who gained some notoriety by horse-whipping the newspaper tycoon James Gordon Bennett. It was Sickles who managed to have Charles Graham's predecessor at the Navy Yard fired and Graham given the job in his place, an act of patronage that caused the injured man to make an unsuccessful attack on Sickles.

When the war came, Graham traded the rather arid life of dry dock construction for the glamor of soldiering as practiced by Daniel Sickles and the Excelsior Brigade. He raised the Fifth Excelsior Regiment, or the Seventy-fourth New York as it was designated by the state, and became its colonel. He campaigned on the Peninsula with the Excelsiors and became a brigadier general in 1862. His promotion resulted in an unusual assignment for a New Yorker not of the Old Army, for his new brigade was composed entirely of Pennsylvania regiments. Graham commanded the First Brigade, First Division, Third Corps, at Chancellorsville and led it to Gettysburg.²¹

Although Graham's brigade's occupation of the high ground at the Peach Orchard and north of it along the Emmitsburg Road symbolized Sickles's decision to incorporate this high ground into his position and hold it, the occupation had taken place in a gradual, almost tentative, way. Five infantry regiments plus companies of the First U.S. Sharpshooter Regiment had been there as skirmishers, or in their support, when Buford's cavalrymen pulled out for Westminster. Sickles's decision meant that solid formations of infantry would replace the fluid, flexible cavalry units. More important, the high ground would be protected by the batteries of the Third Corps and the Artillery Reserve.

The infantry of Graham's brigade advanced uphill from their position southwest of the Trosde farmyard early in the afternoon, perhaps at 1:00 P.M., and formed a line east of the Emmitsburg Road between the Trostle lane on the right and Maj. John A. Danks's Sixty-third Pennsylvania Regiment at the Peach Orchard. Company B of the Sixty-third had erected a lunette of fence rails there, one of the few such defenses that the Third Corps seems to have constructed that day. The Sixty-third manned a skirmish line in the fields toward Seminary Ridge, its right resting north of the Wheatfield Road near the Sherfy buildings.²²

The 105th Pennsylvania, the Wildcat Regiment, recruited from the Scotch-Irish in Western Pennsylvania, was on the right of the line. It had been on the skirmish line near the Sherfy house that morning in support of its comrades of the Sixty-third but had been called back to the brigade's first position near the Trosde buildings, where it was on the right of the support line. When the brigade advanced, the 105th formed northeast of the Sherfy house with its right on Trostle's lane.²³

The Fifty-seventh Pennsylvania, two hundred strong and still armed with (p.132) Austrian rifles, was opposite the Sherfy house, and the 114th Pennsylvania was on its left.²⁴ The 114th was a Zouave regiment—Collis's Zouaves it was called, after its colonel, Charles H. T. Collis, who had been wounded at Chancellorsville. It was still a large regiment with a strength of 460 at Gettysburg and showy in its red pantaloons, white leggings, and blue jackets. But there were not 460 men on line, for the regiment still had a band and drum corps, not to mention surgeons and sick, all of whom reduced its numbers near the Sherfy house to about 400. It also had a viviandière—Marie Tebe (Mary Tepe), or “French Mary”—who, at one time at least, wore a blue blouse, a yellow bodice, scarlet trousers, and a straw hat with a large feather. French Mary was described as being about five feet tall, robust and strong, educated, and well spoken. She carried a small keg of whiskey for medicinal purposes, and a pistol to protect herself and the keg. In Collis's absence, Lt. Col. Frederick F. Cavada, brother of General Humphreys's aide, commanded the Zouaves.²⁵

The Sixty-eighth Pennsylvania, Philadelphia's Scott Legion, was on the ι 14th's left near the Peach Orchard crossroads and behind the skirmish line of the Sixty-third. Its commander, Col. Andrew H. Tippin, had served in Mexico with the Eleventh U.S. Infantry and was said to have been the first American to scale the Mexican ramparts at Molino del Rey. The Sixty-eighth had captured the flag of the Tenth Virginia at Chancellorsville, where it had been heavily engaged. Now, at Gettysburg with only ten months of service and 383 strong, it manned a key position near the Wentz buildings, initially in support of Clark's battery. Tippin ordered his men to lie down to escape the missiles fired at the batteries near them.²⁶

Graham's remaining regiment, the 141st, like the Sixty-eighth, was less than a year old but had taken about 60 percent casualties at Chancellorsville and had a strength of only two hundred. Although deployed initially at the center of the brigade, it was shifted to the left by Graham to support the batteries in the Peach Orchard. There it was to suffer heavily from artillery fire.²⁷

In the meantime, after General Hunt's visit with Sickles along the Emmitsburg Road, the artilleiy chief reported back to army headquarters and then rode on to Cemetery Hill to see why batteries there were firing. He found that the fire meant nothing serious: the batteries were only harassing some Confederate troops seen marching to the Confederate left. Hunt might have cautioned them not to waste ammunition and then rode directly from Cemetery Hill to the Third Corps front, where he found that great changes had taken place in his absence. The infantry had occupied the high ground that had so concerned General Sickles, and he saw Meade conversing with Sickles. Because of Meade's presence there, he assumed that the commanding general had approved Sickles's move, and he went to work with a will to assist Captain Randolph in providing the new position with adequate artillery support.²⁸

(p.133) Hunt found that the Third Corps batteries were pretty well in position and that Randolph was placing additional guns in the Peach Orchard area. Neither Randolph nor others mentioned which batteries were posted first. It seems likely that he would have shown Smith and Winslow where their guns were to go and then given his attention to the Peach Orchard area, where several other batteries could have been employed more effectively.²⁹

Although the Third Corps batteries did not take position at the time Graham's brigade went on line, Randolph had three batteries at hand—Bucklyn's, Clark's, and Battery G, First New York Light Artillery, under Capt. Nelson Ames. Ames's battery was from the Artillery Reserve. Ran-dolph probably posted Clark's battery first. Both Clark's and Bucklyn's batteries had been in position that morning with the infantry southwest of the Trostle buildings. Later, at 9:30 according to his report, Clark took his guns forward and to the left and placed them in line on the fold of ground about midway between the Trosde buildings and the Peach Orchard. No one wrote why he did this; probably Birney or someone else of rank perceived a special threat to the skirmish line along the Emmitsburg Road and wanted a battery nearby in case it was needed. (It must have been about this time that Calef's battery was placed in position briefly at the Peach Orchard.)³⁰ Clark's New Jerseymen remained there until midafternoon, when troops of the Third Maine reported seeing Hood's division filing across the Emmitsburg Road 1,400 yards south of the Peach Orchard. At Sickles's order, Clark's battery rushed forward to the orchard, dropped trail, and shot at the Confederate column. Each gun fired a half-dozen rounds of shell and case shot, slowly and with good effect, making what Randolph believed were excellent shots and driving the Confederate column to cover. Then Clark's men limbered up again and hauled their guns to the left beyond the east edge of the orchard where they would be sheltered by the high ground at the orchard from threats to their right. There, fronting south and the artillery of Longstreet's right, they prepared to continue their afternoon's work.³¹

Clark was attempting to avoid the fire from the Confederate batteries closest to the Emmitsburg Road position, the guns of Cabell's and Alexander's battalions that were going in behind the wall along Seminary Ridge about seven hundred yards west of the Peach Orchard. This was a short range, one ideally suited to Napoleons. Bucklyn's battery had six such guns, and Randolph placed them along the Emmitsburg Road in the 150-yard space between the Wentz buildings and the Sherfy house. The battery's left and center sections were between the Wentz house and the Sherfy barn. For some reason Lt. Benjamin Freeborn's section was farther right beyond the barn in a garden near the Sherfy house. As will be shown, Alexander's guns were already in position when Bucklyn's dropped trail, and they took the Rhode Islanders under fire as soon as they appeared.³²

Capt. Nelson Ames's battery, recruited initially in Oswego County, New \fork, reached Gettysburg with the Artillery Reserve on the morning of 2 July. (p.134) It had six Napoleons. It first parked east of the Taneytown Road, where its drivers fed and watered their horses. About 11 :00 A.M. Ames received orders to report to General Sickles. The battery moved out without delay, but when it reached the Third Corps sector found that there was no immediate need for it. It then parked near the Trostle barn and spent three or four hours there. Ames sent the battery wagon back to the Reserve Artillery park, the cannoneers filled their canteens and the sponge buckets, and Ames explored the ground where there might be fighting.³³

Randolph ordered the battery to the Peach Orchard about 4:00 P.M., after Graham's regiments had taken their places along the Emrnitsburg Road. It was a short but not an easy trip. The battery passed to the left of the barn and probably crossed the lane, entering the field south of it through a gate opposite the farmyard. It then rolled up slope through a corn field and other fields. In spite of the Third Corps's having been there all morning, fences still stood in the battery's way, and it had to halt twice to clear its path. These were dangerous halts within view and range of Cabell's gunners who, fortunately, killed only two horses. When the battery reached the Peach Orchard, the guns went left oblique into battery a few yards south of the Wheatfield Road, all six pieces going into line facing southwest in the direction from which Cabell's fire came. Ames ordered his chiefs of section to fire at will at the guns in their front. He stayed closest to his center and left sections because their lieutenants lacked experience. Since the foliage of the orchard was still relatively undamaged and heavy, he could not see his right section.³⁴

As Ames's guns began to boom, the sergeant from the No. 1 piece on the far right burst through the trees. “For God's sake,” yelled the sergeant, “come and tell us where to place our guns; we have been running them up and down all over this field, no place is satisfactory to the lieutenant; all my men and Sergeant Hutchinson are tired out.” With an oath, Ames hurried through the trees to the right to see what the fuss was all about. He spoke to the lieutenant of the first section, who, among other things, wanted to cut down some trees before his guns opened. Ames was in no mood for delays; the battery was in a perilous spot and had to fire on the enemy batteries before they rained fire upon it. In adamant tones Ames advised the lieutenant to settle down and get busy or else he would take the lieutenant's sword from him and send him to the rear. About this time a shot whizzed by their heads, giving emphasis to Ames's words. Soon the first section opened and the lieutenant calmed down.³⁵ Not long after Ames's guns opened, General Hunt rode up and asked the captain how long his battery could hold its position. Until the battery ran out of ammunition, the stubborn captain replied. He would get a chance to prove it.³⁶

Birney's division was now in place and reinforcements were sent to help it, to try to plug gaps in its long line and to support or replace units already there. Much of this support came from Humphreys's division, which was off Graham's right when the battle opened. Although General Birney had been (p.135) heavily involved in the actions of the Third Corps on that fateful morning, his fellow division commander had marked time in something of a vacuum. Humphreys could see what was taking place to the north along Cemetery Ridge to his right, for that ground was essentially open, but much of the position of his own corps was screened by trees. He must have seen Graham's brigade's advance to the fields southwest of the Trostle farmyard with great interest and must have regarded the bits of information that he received with concern. Many things were happening that affected his division, yet he remained essentially uninformed and not directly involved.³⁷

Humphreys's isolation that morning was most curious in a corps where all of the ranking officers but him were non-Regulars who needed the best advice that they could get on establishing a defensive position. Yet, in this particular area, Humphreys until recently had been something of an amateur too. Andrew Atkinson Humphreys was a native of Philadelphia, born in 1810 into a family of distinction. His grandfather, Josiah Humphreys, had designed some of the navy's great ships including the Constitution and Constellation. His father, Samuel Humphreys, was in turn the chief constructor of ships for the navy in the years before the War with Mexico, and his mother's father had been an officer in the British army.

Andrew Humphreys turned his back on ships and shipyards and went to West Point, graduating in 1831 in time to serve as a lieutenant of artillery in the Seminole War. This life must have had little attraction for him, for he resigned his commission and went to work for the army as a civilian engineer constructing fortifications on the Delaware River. He was not a civilian long. In 1838 he returned to the army as a lieutenant in the Corps of Topographical Engineers and, like Generals Lee and Meade, became involved with civil works surveys of the Mississippi River and its delta. He also surveyed portions of a railroad right-of-way between the Mississippi and the Pacific. Humphreys won an international reputation for his work as an engineer, but he saw no service with the army in Mexico. Therefore, when the Civil War began, Humphreys had little experience with troops either in garrison or in the field.

Experience came quickly. He joined McClellan's staff as a major in December 1861. In March 1862 he became chief topographical engineer of the Army of the Potomac, and in April of the same year, a brigadier general of volunteers. He commanded the Third Division, Fifth Corps, at Antietam and led it against Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg and at Chancellorsville. He transferred to the command of the Second Division, Third Corps, after Chancellorsville and marched it to Gettysburg. Humphreys became Meade's chief of staff after Gettysburg and ended the war as commander of the Second Corps. On the basis of Humphreys's service after Gettysburg, Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana termed him “the great soldier of the Army of the Potomac.”³⁸

Unlike Sickles, Humphreys had little charisma and was not a popular (p.136)

commander. He was a strict disciplinarian, and his spectacles gained him the nickname “Old Goggle Eyes.”³⁹ He could express himself forcefully. Dana thought him “one of the loudest swearers” he had ever known and ranked him with William T. Sherman as a man of “distinguished and brilliant profanity.” But Dana found him also to be a charming man, destitute of vanity. Theodore Lyman, who served under him on Meade's staff, described Humphreys as a nice old gentleman (he was no more than fifty-five) who was boyish, peppy, and extremely neat, “continually washing himself and putting on paper dickeys.” In addition, he was fond of conversation with his military family after meals and had knowlege of many things. Fortunately, he developed a fondness for field service and regarded the military profession as a “godlike occupation.” Like George Washington and Robert E. Lee, he had a personal fondness for battle and observed once that war was a “very bad thing in the sequel, but before and during a battle it is a fine thing!”⁴⁰

Humphreys must have felt some relief, then, when, about 11:00 A.M., Sickles asked him to send a regiment to the skirmish line. He referred the request to Brig. Gen. Joseph B. Carr, commander of his First Brigade, and Carr sent the First Massachusetts to the Emmitsburg Road to relieve the Fourth Maine of Ward's brigade. The Fourth returned to Ward and was posted beyond Smith's battery at Devil's Den.⁴¹

(p.137) The morning passed into afternoon. Graham's brigade had been west of Plum Run and southwest of the Trostle farmyard much of the morning, and Sickles ordered Humphreys to post his division on Graham's right. Humphreys was to extend Graham's line northward and connect with the left of Caldwell's division of the Second Corps. These were the orders, but it was not quite that simple. Caldwell's division was back on the crest of Cemetery Ridge to the right of where Humphreys had been massed all morning. Caldwell had no orders to advance, and if Humphreys's division did so, Caldwell's left would be in Humphreys's rear. Humphreys reminded Sickles of this, but Sickles ordered him forward anyhow.⁴²

And so it could be said that at 1 :oo P.M. Humphreys's division occupied its first position of the day. Carr's brigade and the Seventy-first New York Regiment of the Excelsior Brigade formed its first line. The Seventy-first was on the left near Trestle's lane and briefly near Graham's right regiment, the 105th Pennsylvania. The line of Carr's brigade ran north from there more or less parallel to and three hundred yards east of the Emmitsburg Road to a point about five hundred yards in front of Caldwell's left. Brewster's brigade was in “a line of battalions in mass” two hundred yards behind the first line, and the Third Brigade massed two hundred yards in the rear of the center of the Second. Although there was a gap of about five hundred yards between Humphreys's first line and Caldwell's division back on the ridge, it did not concern Humphreys at that time. He thought that his position there was only temporary and, if worse came to worse, the offset could be covered by fire from the ridge and plugged by the two rear brigades.⁴³

Humphreys made additional changes. He ordered another of Brewster's regiments, the Seventy-third New York, forward to the Klingle house on the road in front of Carr's center. Humphreys told Brewster that the Seventy-third was to hold its position “at all hazards”—an interesting challenge for a regiment posted, not as skirmishers, two to three hundred yards in front of its division's main line.⁴⁴

The Klingle house was the home of Daniel Klingle, a shoemaker and farmer; it was and is a small structure. It was said that it already housed some wounded Confederates, victims of the previous day's battle, although if that was so, one may wonder how they ended up so far from the battlefield. About midafternoon some officers, probably from either the First Massachusetts or the Seventy-third New York, urged Klingle to leave. Klingle's first response was, “If I must die, I will die at home,” but the officers insisted that the Klingle family take refuge in the cellar or leave and offered a detail of soldiers to help them move out.⁴⁵

Soldiers scoffed at the Gettysburg civilians and the concern that some exhibited for their personal welfare, but it could not have been easy for them to face with equanimity the probable destruction of their hard-earned property. Probably Klingle weighed the threat to his family against the loss of its belongings and soon elected to take the family east to a friend's house (p.138) somewhere near Rock Creek. As they trudged east, a mounted officer rode by them and snatched the hat from Klingle's head, an act more often associated with Confederates in Pennsylvania than with the defenders of the Union. Apparently the hat was a valued possession, not readily surrendered. Klingle siezed the bridle of the officer's horse and held it until the officer paid him for the hat. The Klingles reached the Round Top area and stopped there while Klingle returned to the house for some clothing that had been left behind. He met his neighbor, Joseph Sherfy, near Trestle's Woods. Sherfy told him that there was fighting around his house. Klingle then returned to his family, and on his way found a soldier's hat in a pool of muddy water. He rinsed the hat off and carried it with him. As he neared Little Round Top an officer accosted him and asked him to accompany him to the top of the hill. There he identified some terrain features for the officer, who was possibly a signalman. While they were there, artillery fire opened on Seminary Ridge, and Klingle left the hill. He and his family went on to Rock Creek.⁴⁶

Shortly after Humphreys's division advanced, Humphreys received an order from Sickles to send his Third Brigade to the left as a reserve for Birney and make it subject to Birney's orders. The brigade's assigned commander was Gershom Mott, who had been wounded at Chancellorsville and had not yet returned to duty; Col. George C. Burling of the Sixth New Jersey commanded in Mott's absence. The brigade had four New Jersey regiments—the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth—together with the Second New Hampshire and 115th Pennsylvania regiments. Captain Cavada guided the brigade to Trestle's Woods, where it was close to Birney's division in the Wheatfield and the Peach Orchard. A stone wall along the west edge of the woods and low ground there provided some cover, but the brigade would not be there long to enjoy it.⁴⁷

It was time for another contact between the Third Corps and army head-quarters. As Major Tremain recounted it (unfortunately, his version is the only one available), he told General Meade of the results of Berdan's excursion into Pitzer's Woods. What, if anything, was said about the Third Corps advance Tremain did not relate, but there was some conversation about the need for more artillery on the Third Corps line. At the Cemetery Ridge position there had been no space for extra batteries, but manywere needed in the new position. Without seeming to appreciate the necessity for the additional batteries, Meade made them available from the Artillery Reserve. It was in this interview, according to Tremain, that General Meade dismissed his report of Sickles's fears with the offhand remark that generals were always expecting attacks on their own fronts. The commanding general's seeming lack of cordiality and empathy for General Sickles's concerns, as Tremain saw it, left Tremain feeling “frosted,” and he rode back to Third Corps headquarters with the report of his latest interview.⁴⁸

After talking with Sickles, Tremain rode up to the Peach Orchard. He found General Graham there with Clark's, if not Ames's, guns. McLaws's (p.139) division had obviously arrived on Seminary Ridge, for the balls fired by its skirmishers zipped into the orchard area so plentifully that the officers with horses had dismounted and were moving about on foot. Graham took Tremain to the edge of the trees where he could see Hood's brigades crossing the Emmitsburg Road to the south. The fears of the Third Corps commander finally were being realized, and the specter of a spurious Chancellorsville loomed large. Tremain hurried back down the orchard's east slope, mounted, and galloped back to corps headquarters.⁴⁹

Sickles listened to Tremain's report of what he had seen and sent him once more to see General Meade. Meade's response to Tremain's report was to ask that Sickles come to army headquarters. But to Tremain the request did not seem imperative, and he reported it so to Sickles. Sickles decided that other matters were more pressing at the time and did not go to headquarters. Soon thereafter an aide arrived from General Meade with a second invitation. Sickles asked to be excused, stating that the enemy was in great force on his front and he was preparing to meet an attack. In a short while a second messenger rode up with a peremptory order for Sickles to attend a meeting with the commanding general. There could be no more refusals. Sickles turned his corps over to Birney and galloped off with Tremain toward the Widow Leister's house. As they rode away, they could hear the sounds of gunfire on Birney's front.⁵⁰

Meade had announced the meeting by means of a circular to all corps commanders, but the purpose of the meeting was not indicated. In his later, battling years Sickles stated that the probable purpose of the meeting was to discuss and decide whether or not the Army of the Potomac should withdraw from Gettysburg.⁵¹ But that seems patent nonsense spawned by Sickles's militant self-interest. Probably it was called for the purpose of exchanging information and making certain that all corps commanders understood the army's situation and its commander's intentions. General Meade had just sent a dispatch to General-in-Chief Halleck telling him of conditions at Gettysburg, and it is likely that Meade wished to express his views to the corps commanders and get their reactions to them. To Halleck, Meade wrote that his army was concentrated and that the Sixth Corps was arriving, fatigued from its long march. He said that the Army of the Potomac had awaited the attack that day, for it was in a strong defensive position. In turn, he was not yet determined to attack until the enemy's position was more fully developed, and he wished to wait until the Sixth Corps was up and rested. He was expecting a battle, however, and had ordered his trains to the rear. If his army was not attacked and he could get positive information on the enemy that would justify his attacking, he would do so. On the other hand, if such an attack would prove hazardous or if he found that the enemy was moving to get between the Army of the Potomac and Washington, he would fall back on his supplies to Westminster. In closing, he said that he felt his responsibility and would act with caution.⁵²

(p.140) It was a cautious statement, yet it indicated a desire to fall back only if the enemy was found to be attempting to get between the Army of the Potomac and Washington or if, after probing, it appeared overly hazardous to attack. When such probing would be completed and a decision made, General Meade did not say. Certainly it would have been after the entire army was up and rested and not in the hours immediately ahead, as Sickles later stated.

The corps commanders gathered and had a discussion. Sometime in the course of the brief gathering before Sickles arrived, General Warren reported that the Third Corps was not in position. He had heard this and had sent an officer out to investigate. This was a surprise to General Meade, but it need not have been if there had been communication between Sickles and army headquarters and if General Meade's own staff had been doing its job. After hearing this news clearly—for the first time it seems—Meade turned to George Sykes and ordered him to take the Fifth Corps from its place in reserve to the left and hold the left “at all hazards.” He would meet Sykes on the left and help him post his corps.⁵³

It was at this time, as the meeting was breaking up with unexpected urgency, that Sickles, Tremain, Captain Moore, and probably some orderlies as well, thundered up to the Leister house in a figurative cloud of dust. Artillery fire could be heard back on the Third Corps front, and General Meade was in a decisive, if not a snapping, mood. There was no time for pleasantries. Captain Paine recalled, “I never saw General Meade so angry if I may so call it. He ordered General Sickles to retire his line to the position he had been instructed to take. This was done in a few sharp words.” His temper cooled, Meade then told Sickles not to dismount—there was firing on his front, and he was needed there. He would join Sickles at the Third Corps position. With this the Third Corps officers reined their horses around, applied their spurs, and galloped away.⁵⁴

In later years, when the sound of gunfire was but a memory, replaced by thundering oratory, and when Meade and Sykes were dead, Daniel Sickles fought the continuing battle of Gettysburg with a long and mighty oration. In it he related many things, and among them he said that he received no orders on his troop dispositions after sunup on 2July and that the meeting he missed had been called to determine whether or not the army should leave Gettysburg. Fortunately, the battle opened, ending what Sickles implied was a budding retreat.⁵⁵ Sickles spoke rot on both accounts. Nevertheless, it is apparent that communications between the two headquarters left much to be desired and that there was grist enough for Sickles's mill.

It was the contention of Sickles and his partisans that the activities of the Third Corps were an open book, that they had tried to tell General Meade of their concerns, and that they had been ignored and their concerns dismissed. Sickles stated that Generals Hunt and Warren and Col. Edmund Schriver, the inspector general of the Army of the Potomac, had all visited the left and not one of them had given him any orders respecting his position. In addition, (p.141) Schriver had reported his position of the late morning. Sickles also alluded to messages carried to army headquarters by his aides—Tremain and Moore. If army headquarters personnel were ignorant of the situation on the Third Corps front, it was their responsibility, not his.⁵⁶

The Third Corps commander blustered in an effort to mitigate his own blunder but had a good point. At 11:oo A.M. General Meade had ordered his staff, Schriver included, to gather information on the various corps and their positions, and presumably Schriver, who had particular responsibility for liaison with the Third Corps, had done so.⁵⁷ What Schriver reported and to whom we do not know. As indicated in Chapter 5, after Captain Meade's morning visit, the Third Corps took positions that seemingly were not in accord with the commanding general's instructions and intent, yet they seem not to have been questioned by anyone with authority at army headquarters or even by Hancock, whose corps they affected directly and who should have been greatly interested in them. Hunt must have seen Birney's position in front of Trostle's Woods at the time of his late morning visit, and Hancock must have been aware of the advance of Humphreys's division just after noon. Yet until Warren's comment at the 3:00 P.M. meeting, no interest was evidenced or questions asked, as far as we know, about the position of the Third Corps. Tremain's communications, even if much less candid than he implied in later years, ought to have raised some questions, but they seem not to have done so.

Without doubt, General Meade's mind, initially at least, was not on his left, and his vaunted staff served him poorly with respect to the Third Corps's activities. In later years Captain Meade wrote that people wondered why the general himself had not gone the short distance from his headquarters to the Third Corps front and settled things to his satisfaction. To this good question Captain Meade replied that until 3:00 P.M., presumably the time of the afternoon meeting, General Meade believed that the Third Corps was in position. He had not heard otherwise and knew nothing of Longstreet's movements.⁵⁸ Clearly, either the commanding general was less than truthful about his knowledge of what was taking place, which was not at all in accord with his character, he was functioning poorly—perhaps out of fatigue—or he was poorly served.

General Meade's lack of concern for his left must have resulted in part from information provided by his signalmen. Those few messages of which copies are extant, if they are typical, must have diverted his attention from that flank. At 11:55 Lt. Aaron B. Jerome signaled that the woods in his front, Pitzer's Woods, were full of Rebels and that Federal skirmishers were retreating before them. Undoubtedly this referred to Berdan's foray and should have given credence to the report of this action given to Meade by Tremain.⁵⁹

But there were no additional messages reporting crises on the left that are known to us, even from the vexatious station on Little Round Top. To the contrary, at 1:30 P.M. Capt. James S. Hall signaled Butterfield from there that (p.142) he saw a heavy column of infantry, 10,000 strong, moving from the Federal “extreme left” toward the right. The meaning of this message is vague today and must have been so to Butterfield, for at 2:00 P.M. Hall signaled clarifica-tion—-the column was passing Dr. Hall's house toward Herr Tavern on the Chambersburg Pike, and a train of ambulances was following it. The Hall house on Herr Ridge was visible from Little Round Top, as were other segments of the road on Herr Ridge. Captain Hall had no way of knowing it, but he probably saw a portion of Longstreet's corps, perhaps Hood's division, countermarching in the course of its approach march. He had no way of knowing that when it disappeared from his sight, it would change direction and head toward the Union left.⁶⁰

As a result, Meade reported to Halleck at 3:00 P.M. that the enemy was moving on both of his flanks but that it was “difficult to tell exactly his movements.”⁶¹ Each commander was thus in a quandary about the intent of the other on 2 July, and neither was served as well by his subordinates as he ought to have been.

The meeting broke up as Sickles and his staff galloped away and General Meade prepared to follow him. His favorite mount, “Old Baldy,” was not at hand. Not wishing to wait until he was brought up, General Meade accepted the loan of General Pleasonton's horse. The animal was unaccustomed to Meade's style of riding and his handling of the curb bit. This minor matter led to a situation that will be mentioned below.⁶²

General Warren rode along with General Meade. As they passed over Cemetery Ridge, Warren pointed south toward the Round Tops and said, “Here is where the line should be.” Meade replied that it was too late to place it there, and Warren, with Meade's permission or direction, left the commanding general's party to ride on to Little Round Top.⁶³

Meade started his ride to the left with a small party, but it grew as aides and staff officers left behind in his hurried departure caught up with him. It is hard to know who was with him. The entourage grew to include Meade's senior aide, Major Biddle, Maj. Benjamin C. Ludlow, Captains Mason, Meade, and Cadwalader, Lt. Paul Oliver, and Capt. James Starr, commander of the escort companies of the Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry at army headquarters. Starr acted as an aide when his other duties permitted. In all, orderlies included, it must have been a sizable group. In later years Oliver admitted that the general would have been better off had he been essentially alone.⁶⁴ After the party left Cemetery Ridge, it passed through the area posted by Humphreys's division to the accompaniment of cheers from some of its soldiers. It was probably the first time that these men of the Third Corps had seen their new commander.⁶⁵

General Meade found General Sickles and his staff by the Wheatfield Road at the Peach Orchard. Sickles was seeing to some changes in the Third Corps line, possibly the placing of additional batteries and regiments in the (p.143) Peach Orchard area. The two mounted generals and their staffs must have made an attractive target for any Confederate gunners who could see them.⁶⁶

Some present claimed to recall some of the key portions of the generals' conversation. According to HISTORICUS, Meade asked, “Are you not too much extended, general? Can you hold this front?” “Yes,” replied Sickles, “until more troops are brought up; the enemy are attacking in force, and I shall need support.” Meade then expressed some doubt—“his mind was still wavering”—about the extent of the ground to be occupied by the Third Corps, and Sickles was said to have observed, “General, I have received no orders. I have made these dispositions to the best of my judgment. Of course, I shall be happy to modify them according to your views.” “No,” said Meade, “I will send you the Fifth Corps, and you may send for support from the Second Corps.” “I shall need more artillery,” added Sickles. “Send to the Artillery Reserve for all you want,” replied Meade; “I will direct General Hunt to send you all you ask for.” And then, wrote HISTORICUS, the conversation was ended by a heavy shower of shells. General Meade rode off, and General Sickles heard no more from him that day.⁶⁷

HISTORICUS was Daniel Sickles's alter ego, his partisan, if indeed he was not the general himself. But Sickles could speak for himself and did so before the Committee on the Conduct of the War. General Meade, said Sickles, examined his dispositions and the situation and remarked:

that my line was too extended, and expressed his doubts as to my being able to hold so extended a line, in which I coincided in the main—that is to say, I replied that I could not, with one corps, hold so extended a line against the rebel army; but that, if supported, the line could be held; and, in my judgment, it was a strong line, and the best one. I stated, however, that if he disapproved of it it was not yet too late to take any position he might indicate. He said “No;” that it would be better to hold that line, and he would send up the 5th corps to support me. I expressed my belief in my ability to hold that line until supports could arrive. He said he would send up the 5th corps on my left, and that on my right I could look to General Hancock for support of my right flank. I added that I should want considerable artillery; that the enemy were developing a strong force of artillery. He authorized me to send to General Hunt … for as much artillery as I wanted. I then assured him of my entire confidence in my ability to hold the position; which I did.⁶⁸

Major Biddle, Meade's aide, whose perspective was somewhat different, gave an account that was similar in the main but with a significantly different emphasis. In it the commanding general spoke not as one who recognized that the Third Corps commander had taken the best position possible and merited all of the support that could be given him. Instead, he spoke as one who believed that the Third Corps commander had made an unwise move, (p.144) that it was too late to undo what had been done, and that they would have to make the best of the situation. Biddle recalled that General Meade asked General Sickles why he had not connected with the Second Corps left as he had been ordered to do. To this Sickles answered that he had advanced his corps to possess the high ground between Hancock's left and the enemy. General Meade then replied, “General Sickles, this is neutral ground, our guns command it as well as the enemy's. The very reason you cannot hold it applies to them.” Sickles then asked if he should move his troops back. Meade pondered a moment and replied, “You cannot hold this position, but the enemywill not let you get away without a fight, & it may as well begin now as at any time.” The two generals then parted.⁶⁹

In one of these two accounts, General Sickles's points are made, and he is offered the help that he needs—a virtual blank check. In the other he is chided by General Meade but is promised support. Both accounts were concerned with the propriety of the move, but neither was concerned with other subjects that might have been discussed or with the later ordering of Humphreys's division to the Little Round Top area.

The end of the talk and of this series of events was not without some drama. The large gathering of mounted men did draw Confederate fire, and one round spooked the horse that General Meade was riding. The horse plunged and bolted, carrying on his back the man who bore the fate of the Union.⁷⁰ One can wonder what might have happened that day had Meade been thrown and hurt.

It was when Sickles received Meade's reluctant approval to hold his corps on its advanced line that he ordered Humphreys's division (less Burling's brigade, which had been sent to Birney) to the Emmitsburg Road. Humphreys started his two brigades forward, and the two brigades moved as one, Carr's advancing in line and Brewster's Excelsiors in “battalions in mass.” They had only a short distance to go, 250 to 300 yards perhaps, and the movement ought not to have been difficult. While they were moving, an officer of Meade's staff, said to have been Major Ludlow, rode up with a message from General Meade. After Meade's conversation with Sickles, apparently, Meade had received a request from Warren for troops to occupy Little Round Top. Heavy firing indicated that there was an emergency there, and without hesitation Meade sent Ludlow to General Humphreys with orders to take his division to the important hill.⁷¹

Humphreys sent his aides galloping off immediately with instructions for his brigades to march by the left flank. By chance, perhaps, the brigades changed direction “with a simultaneousness of a single regiment.” Amid shells coming in from beyond the Peach Orchard, Humphreys's two brigades marched away from the Emmitsburg Road toward the Wheatfield and the Round Tops beyond.⁷²

But what about the Emmitsburg Road? Humphreys told Ludlow to hurry to Meade at once with a message: in turning from the road he would leave a (p.145) large gap between Graham's right and the left of the Second Corps back on Cemetery Ridge. Ludlow spurred away, and Humphreys galloped to the head of his division's column to show it where to go. This done, and quickly, he started for Meade to talk with him personally, but soon he met the returning staff officer. Ludlow shouted that the order was cancelled, the Fifth Corps was going to the hill, and Humphreys should return his division to the road. Soon after, one of Sickles's officers galloped up with the same order. Humphreys did not delay. He gave the necessary commands, and the brigades turned, retraced their steps, and took their places on the new line.⁷³

This march and countermarch did not take long. Humphreys remembered it afterwards as “done with the precision of a careful exercise,” but it was more than that. Unlike Birney's advance, it took place in full view of the Second Corps and others and became symbolic of the advance of the whole Third Corps. In the words of Glenn Tucker a century later, Humphreys's advance showed that “Old Dan Sickles was going to the war.”⁷⁴ Maj. St. Clair A. Mulholland of the 116th Pennsylvania watched it from CaldwelPs division's line and described it effusively in later years:

Soon the long lines of the Third Corps are seen advancing, and how splendidly they march. It looks like a dress parade, a review. On, on they go, out toward the peach orchard, but not a shot fired. A little while longer and someone calls out “there,” and points to where a puff of smoke is seen arising against the dark green of the woods beyond the Emmitsburg pike. Another and another until the whole face of the forest is enveloped, and the dread sound of artillery comes loud and quick, shells are seen bursting in all directions along the lines. The bright colors of the regiments are conspicuous marks, and the shells burst around them in great numbers.⁷⁵

William F. Fox wrote of this for New York's official account:

The sun shone brightly on their waving colors, and flashed in scintillating rays from their burnished arms, as with well-aligned ranks and even steps they moved proudly across the field. Away to the right, along Cemetery Ridge, the soldiers of the Second Corps, leaving their coffee and their cards, crowded to the front, where they gazed with soldierly pride and quickened pulse on the stirring scene. Conspicuous among the moving columns of this division was the old Excelsior Brigade, each one of its five regiments carrying the blue flag of New York…. They marched with no other music than the rattle of the rifles on the picket line; they were inspired only with the determination to acquit themselves worthy of the State motto, which the brigade had adopted as its name.⁷⁶

Chaplain Joseph Twichell, who was nearby, wrote soon after the battle that the bugles sounded and “with a firm step with colors flying the bravest men in the army marched into the open field. It was a splendid sight.”⁷⁷ And so it (p.146) must have been, for it remained vivid in men's memories long after less splendid sights seen that day were all but forgotten.

Carr's brigade halted just east of the road. The Twenty-sixth Pennsylvania was on the brigade right about three hundred yards south of the Codori barn and above the low ground just south of the barn. It had a strength of 365 on a front of about one hundred yards.⁷⁸

The Eleventh Massachusetts was next in line, near the Rogers house, a small white frame building on the west side of the road, the home of Peter and Susan Rogers and Josephine Miller, an unmarried woman of about twenty-three. The Rogers buildings might have provided some protection for those behind them, but more likely they offered a bull'seye for Confederate gunners who wanted to fire at Union infantry in that area and needed a specific target to aim at. The men of the Eleventh had a special vista from their position and could see troops preparing for battle in all directions. There were Confederates in their front and as far to their right front as they could see. Their own brigade stretched to their right and left, and the Second Corps was on the ridge in their rear. A herd of a dozen or so cows grazed nearby, providing a scene in contrast to the martial display, and a flock of pigeons fluttered in the trees of the Rogers farmyard, disturbed by the gunfire and the commotion below them. Some of the men purchased chickens from the family, and Josephine Miller baked bread for some of them.⁷⁹

Humphreys placed Lt. Francis W. Seeley's Battery K, Fourth Artillery, in the space between the Rogers and Klingle buildings. Seeley's six Napoleons exchanged fire with Patterson's collection of smoothbore pieces eight hundred yards in their front.⁸⁰ Carr's remaining three regiments, the Sixteenth Massachusetts, Twelfth New Hampshire, and Eleventh New Jersey went on line to the left of the Eleventh Massachusetts. The Sixteenth was on the right of the Klingle buildings and to Seeley's left rear. General Carr detached one hundred men from the Sixteenth and posted them in the house area itself. They relieved the Seventy-third New York, sent there to hold at all hazards, and some men occupied the house. They turned the Klingle residence into a fort by preparing to fire from its windows and through holes poked in the chinking between its logs. The Sixteenth's line ran 20 or so yards behind the road so that the troops in the main line were sheltered by the crest in their front. All but the artillerymen and the officers who believed that they had to demonstrate their bravery hugged the ground and waited for things to warm up.⁸¹

Carr's First Massachusetts Regiment was on the skirmish line beyond the road, where it had been much of the day. Its right was forward of the midway point between the Rogers and Klingle buildings, essentially in front of the brigade right, and its left was at Spangler's lane. Activity on the First's front picked up at noon, and Lt. Col. Clark B. Baldwin, the regiment's commander, became concerned. Carr's response to his request for orders was only that the First should hold on as long as possible. Baldwin translated this (p.147) to his company commanders by saying that in case of attack they should push their companies forward to the skirmish line and fight there. If forced to fall back, they should do so in good order. Baldwin made sure that his order was understood by riding along his line and repeating it to each company commander. A short time later, from Baldwin's perspective, Carr moved the whole brigade forward to his support.⁸²

The name of Brig. Gen. Joseph B. Carr, commander of the brigade, was not a household word in 1863, but he had earned his assignment. He was born in Albany of Irish parents in 1828 and later moved to Troy. He became a tobacco merchant by trade but at one time worked as a dancing master. Carr had been unusually active in militia affairs and in time became colonel of the Twentieth New York State Militia Regiment. When war came, he recruited the Second New York Regiment, became its colonel, took it to the field, and led it at Big Bethel. He commanded the Third Brigade of Hooker's division on the Peninsula, received a promotion to brigadier general, and was then given command of the First Brigade, Second Division, Third Corps, which he led at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. In eulogizing Carr after his death, someone observed that “a profane or objectionable word was never heard from his lips.” If so, Carr had the patience of a saint. In later years a veteran of the Sixteenth Massachusetts complained about the cruelty of generals and wrote that one, presumably Carr, had taught dancing in “schools of low character,” though he did not say how he knew this to be so. But once this became known, the men of the brigade razzed him, surreptitiously of course, shouting, “right and left” and “promenade the bar” as he rode by them. Such things can be trying on difficult days.⁸³

Although Carr's brigade formed as a unit, the Excelsior Brigade did not. The Seventy-third Regiment had been at the Klingle house but was relieved there by Carr's men and then formed briefly on the left of the support line before going off to Graham's aid.⁸⁴ Probably because Carr's brigade could not cover all of the front assigned to Humphreys's division, the general extended its line by simply bringing Brewster's regiments forward where needed. The Seventy-second took position on Humphreys's left by Trostle's lane and Graham's right, and the Seventy-first was between it and Carr's left regiment, the Eleventh New Jersey. The Seventy-fourth went to the support of the right of Carr's line and formed in the rear of the Twenty-sixth Pennsylvania, while the remaining two regiments, the Seventieth and the 120th, remained in the rear as the division's reserve.⁸⁵ The Third Corps line occupied a mile of front along the Emmitsburg Road from the Peach Orchard almost to the Codori barn.

General Sickles's Third Corps now held the high ground that had worried him so and that he had coveted increasingly as the hours passed. The new corps front measured 1½ miles from flank to flank, about double the width of that prescribed for it on Cemetery Ridge. With less than 10,000 infantrymen, the corps was too small for such a line. Its flanks were in the air, and there was (p.148) a large space between Graham's brigade at the Peach Orchard and de Tro-briand's on the west side of the Wheatfield. There were soft spots along its front; there was virtually no reserve strength within the corps; and the enemy was beginning his assault. But Sickles had been promised support from the Fifth and Second corps and from the Artillery Reserve. Would this support arrive soon enough to help the Third Corps hold its new line and hurl back the Confederate assault? A very short time would tell.