Gettysburg Day One: the Iron Brigade sees early action

Claude-Etienne Minié, a French military officer, invented, in 1849, a "... conical-cylindrical soft lead bullet, slightly smaller than the intended firearm barrel's bore, with ... exterior grease-filled grooves and a conical hollow in it's base. The bullet was designed by Minié with a small iron plug and a lead skirting. Its intended purpose was to expand under pressure and obturate the barrel and increase muzzle velocity. It greatly increased accuracy. It came to prominence in the Crimean War and the American Civil War." [Wikipedia]

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Major General John Reynolds was, in effect, a "wing" commander, in that he was in overall charge of more than one corps of the Army of the Potomac, with individual corps commanders under his direction. Certainly he was Meade's equal (or superior) in experience and ability, if not in actual fact.

As the balance of the Federal First Corps continued to come up to Gettysburg from the south, General Reynolds personally directed the deployment of the First Division of infantry on McPherson's Ridge, and supervised the placing of the artillery in such a way as to cover the infantry as they were advancing into position.

The 1st Brigade of the 1st Division of the 1st Corps was called the "Iron Brigade," among the best in the Union Army. They would be sorely tested today. Time was of the essence. Fences were knocked down and haversacks and blankets were discarded as the brigade stripped for action and deployed in the path of the rapidly advancing Confederates. It would be the job of the First Division to hold out until the rest of the Corps could join the fray.

Reynolds arrayed the Iron Brigade en echelon - with the 2nd Wisconsin front right, nearest the Cashtown road from where Pender's Confederate division was approaching; followed by the 7th Wisconsin, the 19th Indiana, and the 24th Michigan. The final regiment (6th Wisconsin) was held in reserve slightly to the south on Seminary Ridge. Obviously they weren't going to hold off Heth and Pender for long, even with Buford's cavalry still engaged. But their object was to hold and delay until the rest of the corps got up. General Abner Doubleday (later the inventor of baseball) was commanding the division next in line of the upcoming First Corps, and he was making all haste to get up on Reynold's exposed right flank. The Confederates weren't waiting for that, though.

As the artillery from both sides began to boom, General Heth's brigades came in from the Northwest, led by General Archer's Alabamians. Artillery claimed the first lives of the battle on both sides. As they approached closer, the lead Confederates could hear the strains of the Union First Division's band: "The Girl I Left Behind Me". I don't know about you, but I think that took balls. At least it might have put a final smile on the faces of the Iron Brigade to hear their theme song, in the face of what was about to happen to them.

If Heth still held illusions that he was only up against unmounted cavalry and poorly-trained Pennsylvania Home Guard, he was immediately disabused of that notion. The Iron Brigade wore their legendary black sombreros with the right side turned up and pinned with the light blue infantry ribbon and sporting a plume, a la JEB Stuart; there was no chance Heth would mistake the Iron Brigade for amateur Home Guard. He let loose with more artillery and bodies began to fly. The Union guns answered. Showtime.

After directing the deployment of his infantry and guns, General Reynolds sent off a courier with an urgent message to General Meade, informing him that he had engaged the Confederates in force, and that a major battle would be fought at Gettysburg, not Pipe Creek. His message to General Mead said in part: "The enemy are advancing in strong force and I fear they will get to the heights beyond the town before I can. I will fight them inch by inch and, if driven into the town, I will barricade the streets and hold them as long as possible."

Although Pettigrew had the day before, several times, given Heth and Hill the lay of the land of Gettysburg, and had asserted that McPherson's Ridge was where the Federals were likely to defend, and General Archer had been standing right there listening, he hadn't heeded. Now the Federals were on McPherson's Ridge and were splitting his brigade.

The top of McPherson's Ridge was a farm, owned by a politician by that name, and on that farm was McPherson's woods. Into that woods went Archer's Alabamians, followed closely by the 2nd Wisconsin, followed by the Iron Brigade. Archer's Alabamians were in trouble and Archer knew it. Spilt, they were in danger of being double flanked. General Reynolds himself was directing this textbook envelopment. Unfortunately (for the Union), he recklessly exposed himself as he directed his troops. From the side, he could see the Confederates in the woods but he continued riding his big black horse and exhorting his troops, wearing his senior general's uniform: an obvious target.

Some books say it was from a sniper in a tree, but it didn't have to be: the Alabamians were fully in the woods now and had formed a skirmish line. It could have come from anyone there in that clump of trees. The Minié ball struck General Reynolds in the back of the head and came out his eye. He slumped on his horse, then fell.

It was 10:15 a.m. on the first day of Gettysburg.

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Fun trivia: The Hardee Hat, with it's turned up side (reminds me of the Aussies) had been authorized to be worn by the First Brigade of the First Division in the late 1850s by the Secretary of War. At that time, the U.S. Secretary of War was a man by the name of Jefferson Davis, soon to be President of the Confederacy.

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I am drawing these accounts from several (many) books, and gluing the various authors' accounts together with my own comments and narrative. Hopefully it doesn't sound too disjointed. I am, of course, leaving much out. My collection of books on the Civil War has grown large over the years. I'll publish a main bibliography at the end of this series of posts. I can't put more than this in a blog post, and, in fact, will be drastically summarizing the rest of the Gettysburg battle. I will shorten the posts because I would rather get into analyzing the battle and tactics rather than describe each individual contribution as I have up until now. In between the battle timeline, I will try to do posts on what the various generals were planning and doing along the way. I want to analyze Ewell's failure to pursue his first day's victory, and the consequences: did it lose the battle and perhaps the war for the Confederacy? I want to give my opinion about the importance of JEB Stewart's absence the first two days of the battle. Of course I want to second guess Lee's decision to frontally attack the dug-in Union's center, just as all historians have done over the past 150-odd years. I have some personal comments to make on the quality of the senior commanders of the Confederate Forces. I want to debate why Lee left the field (he wasn't really beaten after Gettysburg) and why Meade didn't pursue more aggressively. Oh, all kinds of more interesting things to argue about than simple troop movements and statistics. Hang in there. Soon I will stop describing and we can start arguing. :)

Military organization. Or is that an oxymoron too?

In an effort to make it even MORE fun to follow these Gettysburg posts (both previous and upcoming), please try and memorize the following information. If there are no corrections within 1 blogging day, I will assume the information is correct.

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An army is broken down into specially-named organizational units. These units have "commissioned officers" who are in command. The larger the organizational unit, the higher in rank is it's commander. Usually. Following is a list of the organizational units found in an American army. They are the same names now as in the Civil War. The Confederate Army had the same organizational structure as well. They are shown in order of size:

army (commanded by a general)*

corps (commanded by a lt. general)*

division (commanded by a major general)*

brigade (commanded by - of course - a brigadier general)*

regiment (commanded by a colonel or lt. colonel, depending on size)

company (commanded by a major or captain, depending on size)

Following is a list of the ranks of "commissioned officers" in a current American army. In the Civil War, these modern ranks were also used by the Confederacy. The Union ranks for generals in the Civil War were the same except for the top generals, explained at the bottom. The ranks, from lowest to highest in today's American army (and in the Confederate Army of the Civil War are/were:

2nd Lt.

1st Lt.

Captain

Major

Lt. Colonel

Colonel

Brigadier General (1 star)

Major General (2 stars)

Lt. General (3 stars)

General (4 stars)

*In the Union Army in the Civil War, they only had Brigadier Generals and Major Generals. There was only one Lt. General (3 star) in the Union Army, and that only from 1864. That was Lt. General Ulysses S. Grant, promoted to that rank only shortly before the end of the war, when he was made commander of all the Union Armies. Also, technically, Winfield Scott was still on active duty and he was a brevet Lt. General. There were no full (4 star) generals in the Union Army back then.

Foot soldiers (or cavalry, for that matter) such as privates and corporals and sergeants, are not commissioned officers.

Commissioned officers in the Civil War had swords (sabers) and they rode horses. Cavalry of all ranks rode horses. In close fighting, cavalry would (very often) prefer sidearms to sabers. Generally, sabers were only sharpened on one side near the tip, since sabers were mostly just used for breaking collar bones and upper arms. When slashing or probing was required, the tip sufficed. Rifles were next to useless for mounted cavalry in combat, but were used, of course, by "mounted foot" who dismounted to fight in skirmish lines. Even then, carbines (rifles with much shorter barrels) were preferred. Here, it should be noted that 25% of "mounted foot" were wasted, since one man in four had to hold the four horses (which would otherwise bolt in terror, especially with incoming artillery explosions) while the other three used their rifles. Artillery was drawn by horses. Supply wagons, ammunition trains, and ambulance trains were drawn by horses. There were a LOT of horses in the Civil War. More horses than you can probably even envision were at Gettysburg and died at Gettysburg.

"Dependent on size" tells us that military organizations are always in flux, especially during battles (people get killed) and therefore you can't really say things like "a company has 150 men; a regiment has 600 men; a brigade has 3,000 men." But those are nice targets. Otherwise, an army can have as many corps as needed; a corps consists of 3 divisions if it is fully manned; a division consists of 3 brigades when fully manned. How many regiments in a brigade? As many as it takes to make up 3000 or so men. Regiments are always being merged and supplemented as people die and newly recruited regiments arrive. It is really impossible to try and say with exactness how many soldiers make up this or that organization. That is true for our modern army today as well.

In today's modern army, there are also battalions (larger than a company), platoons (smaller than a company) as well as squads and fire teams. One solitary soldier is a "troop". Not to be confused with horse cavalry units, (of the Indian Wars and of some Civil War units) some of which were also called troops collectively. "Battalions" in the Civil War often referred to the artillery units, and there were artillery brigades and even divisions, and the same applies to cavalry. A cavalry division had a LOT of horses, and long feed trains to feed them. Confederate cavalry, incidentally, brought their own horses, by and large. 60 days were given to a Confederate cavalryman to procure another horse if his got killed, and if not able to procure one, he got to be in the infantry. Artillery units will be talked about separately for those still awake at that time. The above information is intended to mainly refer to infantry. Today's cavalry is speedy ground (Bradleys, Humvees, Strykers, some tanks - perhaps ALL tanks, depending upon the mission and your definitions) and "air cavalry" consisting of helicopters instead of horses, but the purposes (recon, raids, rescue, disruption, blitzkrieg, and breaking through lines) remain the same. Although we don't usually think of major armor engagements like Patton and Rommel and Montgomery as being cavalry allegories, they really were. And certainly Patton was as much of a maverick as Stuart ever was.

Companies and regiments were recruited by the states (both sides) and sent off to war. Some larger cities could recruit entire regiments (several hundred people) but most were made up from companies recruited by smaller towns and counties. Regiments were assigned numbers followed by their state name (both sides.) Many had nicknames as well for various reasons.

Confederate generals of all four ranks wore the same insignia of rank, shown below, not 1-star, 2-stars, 3-stars or 4-stars like the army does today. Generals in the Confederate Army were appointed by the Confederate President directly. Obviously recommendations for promotions were made to him. As higher general ranks were authorized, the Confederate Congress began having to approve those high ones. The Confederate President was the Commander-in-Chief of all Confederate Army, Naval, and Marine forces. President Lincoln was Commander-in-chief of the Union forces. Incidentally, both sides had air forces, if you count air balloons which were used for (rather scary) reconnaissance work. As I understand it, they often went up tethered so as not to float over the enemy lines (that would be the scary part, otherwise.)

Many, many more tidbits keep popping into my mind that would be enhance your understanding of this battle a bit better, but I think it best to stop here since I realize a few of you are not as interested in the American Civil War as I am, and would rather analyze other things.

Confederate General Insignia (all)

Interesting (to me) trivia: Robert E. Lee was one of only six (surviving) full generals in the Confederate Army at the time of Gettysburg, in command of the entire Army of Northern Virginia. None of the other generals of the other Confederate Armies outranked him. Yet, Lee chose to wear the insignia only of a colonel (three big stars, no oak leaf encirclement). I don't remember ever having read "why" he did this, other than he was a modest man, and that doesn't make sense. I (of course) have a theory about this, which I will share in a later post.

Gettysburg, Day One: Hell's to pay.

Often it is hard to put complete faith in the history books our children are taught from. Here's an example, still being printed here on the web as if it were gospel:

"The Battle of Gettysburg began quite accidentally. Two Confederate Brigades under the overall command of General Heth moved in to occupy the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Unbeknownst to them, the town was already occupied by two Union Calvary Brigades commanded by General John Buford. The fighting broke out around 8 a.m. as the Confederate Brigades moved in from the Northwest. They expected little resistance but were quite surprised to find the Union Brigades."

What a load of bullpucky! If Heth and his boss, corps commander A.P. Hill, were "surprised" to "accidentally" discover the Union cavalry in Gettysburg, it was only because their heads were too thick to allow their ears to function.

Nothing about "procuring" shoes, which was why Heth had taken 2 brigades from his division down into Gettysburg in the first place. Well, I'll bet Pettigrew and Young weren't surprised to see the Yankee cavalry parked in Gettysburg.

And cavalry usually means a main army is not far behind.

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If you were a bird with sharp eyes, as most birds have, and you happened to find yourself flying from south to north over the soon-to-be Gettysburg battlefield, what you would see, as you flew, would look something like this:

You would see wheat fields, orchards, farmland, pasture, scattered woods, big rocks - with three roads coming up from the south, all converging into Gettysburg, and two more roads from the west, also converging on Gettysburg, and two more roads from the east, also converging on Gettysburg, and more roads to the north coming in from Carlisle et al. Well, you get the picture - Gettysburg was an important crossroads for travelers of all directions. You would see ridges on the left and some distinct hills and another ridge on the right, with the open land in between the two sides of ridges less than a mile wide. You would see several creeks running generally north and south; you would see the town of Gettysburg up dead ahead of you.

And, if you were making this flight of yours in the early morning of July 1, 1863, you would also see, on the road from the west, Pender's Confederate Division coming up from Cashtown. Upon another one of those roads, coming up from the south, you would spy dust clouds for as far as your sharp bird's eyes could see behind you; dust produced by tens of thousands of boots and hooves and wheels. As a bird, you would have no way of knowing this, but those boots and hooves and wheels belonged to the First Corps of the Army of the Potomac, under the extremely able command of Major General John Reynolds.

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The left-hand, or west, ridge just south of Gettysburg was called Seminary Ridge. Because... umm... because there was a 3-story brick college (Lutheran Seminary) built on top of that particular ridge. Seminary Ridge would soon host the battle headquarters, a small cottage, of one Robert E. Lee, but at the moment, the Union Cavalry General, John Buford, had climbed up into the seminary's cupola and was nervously surveying the surrounding territory to the northwest. What he saw was confederate infantry moving in a proprietory fashion down towards the town of Gettysburg, and Pender moving in from the west.

Buford's cavalry had already abandoned the town and had ensconced itself upon McPherson Ridge just to the west of town. Buford rode south to the seminary to reconnoiter while his men engaged the Confederates.

General Heth, division commander of Pettigrew's brigade and others, he of the deep desire for new shoes and a penchant for ignoring advice about the enemy's troop movements, was pondering his options. Who to kill first? In his wisdom, he "felt out" the enemy and decided he faced nothing but unmounted cavalry, so, first things first, he decided to go brush the Union Cavalry off McPherson Ridge.

Buford saw from his high perch that his own men were fighting Heth's boys well, but falling back of course. As it turned out, they would continue to fall back, all the way from McPherson Ridge to Seminary Ridge, then across town all the way to Culp's hill on the other side, just north of the Cemetery, and halfway up that hill. They would have reinforcements long before then, but, then, so would the Confederates.

General Buford, of course, had sent a courier out riding fast to the south with a message to the corps commander that contact with the enemy had been made and to come at once. PLEASE come at once. He was depending on fast help from its commander, his friend John Reynolds.

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If someone were to say that John E. Reynolds was the best general in the Union Army, there would be few who would dispute that statement. A 1841 graduate of West Point, he had served in Florida and in the West and, of course, in the Mexican War, under Zachary Taylor. Later, he was commandant of Cadets at West Point and also taught artillery, cavalry, and infantry tactics.

Reynolds was an outstanding horseman - some say the best the army had, equaling even J.E.B. Stuart, who would later fight for the South. Some recalled, without proof, that they had seen Reynolds pluck a dime from the ground at a gallop, back in their younger days in the West. Ah, well. I don't think I'm believing that.

Known only by General Reynolds and a handful of other people in Washington was the fact that Lincoln had offered him command of the army after Hooker resigned. Lincoln refused Reynold's condition that he be completely autonomous, and so he recommended to Lincoln that he choose Meade. Meade didn't know this, of course.

At 42, General Reynolds was still a fine horseman and he had galloped ahead of the corps and was now dismounting on top of Seminary Ridge. He had seen the Confederate columns from afar, and had smelled enough battlefields in his day not to need to wait for a courier to come tell him what was afoot. Looking around, he immediately sensed that he needed to get a division up on the heights before the Confederates moved up first.

General John Buford was probably getting more and more nervous in his perch up in the seminary cupola. He turned last to the south, and saw, what must have seemed like an endless dark line approaching up the Emmitsburg Road. Then, barely, he made out the guidon of the 1st Corps, and, next to it, the stars and stripes. Buford must have heaved a big sigh of relief: he KNEW his friend John Reynolds wouldn't let him down. He turned to climb down the steep ladder out of the cupola, anxious to buck up his troops with the news. He was startled by a familiar voice next to him.

"What's the matter, John?"

It was Reynolds, far out ahead of his corps. Buford must have been relieved beyond measure, but he only spoke the obvious:

"Hell's to pay."