A Gettysburg Journal (5)

Here I am with my hardy "Sweatysburg" tour group. We found a little shade at the Zook monument near the Wheatfield.

June 25

Last day here, and my day to be a tour guide, telling the Edward E. Cross story and following him on the battlefield on July 2, 1863. The temperature was 97 degrees. I moved a couple of the tour stops so we could talk under trees.

We first paused at the 1st Minnesota monument just south of the Pennsylvania monument on Cemetery Ridge. Under a tree across the way I told the group why. Cross had nothing to do with the 1st Minnesota’s famous charge that day. But 20 years ago, reading Richard Moe’s The Last Full Measure, a history of the regiment and its charge, inspired Mark Travis and me to seek out a New Hampshire regiment with a story to tell. That regiment turned out to be the 5th. The result was My Brave Boys, a history of the regiment’s two years under Cross, ending at Gettysburg.

The 148th Pennsylvania monument is a short walk down the road from the 1st Minnesota’s. This regiment was to the 5th’s right in Cross’s brigade, and there we picked up Cross’s story, which I had begun telling on the bus.

I had learned one new element of the story while researching and writing a later book, Our War. During the morning of July 2, as his brigade waited on the ridge, Cross became curious about what was going on down below. Dan Sickles had yet to move his corps forward, but Sickles’s right, which was supposed to connect with Cross’s brigade, had not showed up. Cross mounted his horse Jack and rode down to investigate. He stopped in the camp of the 2nd New Hampshire, many of whose men he knew. That camp happened to be in Rose’s Woods, where Cross would place the 5th New Hampshire for the Wheatfield fight late in the day.

This was the first I knew that when Cross headed for the Wheatfield at around 5 p.m., he had already been there and had some sense of the ground. The colonel had a head for terrain; his morning ride no doubt made a difference.

To reach the Wheatfield, Cross’s brigade, with the Fifth in the lead, marched past the Weikert Farm and down the ridge through fields. Overgrown with brush and high grass, this route is a hard slog today, so our tour group took the bus around to the Wheatfield Road. We first talked under the trees near the Samuel Zook marker. Zook’s brigade was in Cross’s division, and Zook was killed in fighting off to Cross’s right in an area known as the Stony Ridge.

The tour ended in Rose's Woods near the 5th New Hampshire monument.
For the tour photos I am indebted to my friend David R. Sullivan. 

In the Wheatfield we walked along the line of Cross’s brigade and then into Rose’s Woods, where the left half of the 148th Pennsylvania and all of the 5th New Hampshire extended the brigade line. Our last stop was the 5th’s monument, whose location officers of the regiment identified after the war as the spot where Cross was standing when a rebel marksman mortally wounded him.

Near this spot is the boulder behind which the marksman hid. I’d been to this place many times during the last 15 years, and the boulder has never been so overgrown. From the descriptions of the men who fought in these woods, it was a spooky place then, providing good cover for sniping. A young sergeant named Charles Phelps was dispatched to kill the man who had wounded Cross and succeeded in this mission.

Charles Phelps of Amherst, N.H.,
from a prewar tintype 

I have been hunting throughout my Gettysburg visit for the field hospital where Cross was taken from Rose’s Woods and where he died. I wanted to make that the last stop of the tour, but I am not sure I have found it.

My friend Dave Morin emailed me a website on which a guide makes a claim for the William Patterson Farm on the Taneytown Road behind the Pennsylvania monument as Cross’s death site. You can see his virtual Cross story here and here.  

There are reasons to think he’s right. It was an aid station from which men were sent to corps hospitals after initial treatment. Several officers from the 5th visited Cross before his death, and this farm’s proximity to their position the night of July 2 would have made him easy to find. The lay of the land is similar to what some of these officers described.

The negative is that the best description of the spot where Cross died, written by Thomas L. Livermore, says the field was between the Taneytown Road and the Baltimore Pike. The Patterson Farm is indeed between these two main roads, but it is right on the Taneytown Road. It is odd that Livermore would not have described it that way.

So . . . I’ll have to come back to Gettysburg sometime and continue my search. It will be a pleasure, I assure you.        

         

A Gettysburg Journal (4)

On June 25, I was to lead a tour of Col. Edward E. Cross’s actions on July 2, 1863, at Gettysburg. The tour was on the program of the annual Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College.

These markers in the Wheatfield show the positions of three regiments in
 Cross's brigade on July 2. Cross went into Rose's woods (in background)
to order a charge and never returned. 

Cross’s brigade, including his old regiment, the 5th New Hampshire Volunteers, arrived on the south end of Cemetery Ridge at 7 a.m. on July 2 after days of arduous marching. The right-most regiment of Gen. Dan Sickles’s 3rd Corps was supposed to line up on the 5th’s left. Instead a large gap in the line began at that point after Sickles willfully misinterpreted his orders and moved his corps forward to the Emmitsburg Road.

Cross’s brigade witnessed Sickles's move and then waited nearly all day in the sun before being ordered to march quickly to the Wheatfield to take it back from attacking Confederate forces.

June 24, 2013

Up early and to Cemetery Ridge. There, for tomorrow’s tour, I scoped out the position of Cross and the 5th. This was at least my sixth visit to the spot, and it is always hard to be sure I’ve found it. Most of the monuments along the ridge as it slopes south toward the Weikert farm are 3rd Corps markers from July 3, the third day of the battle. No marker locates the position of either the 5th or Cross’s brigade on the second day.

One regiment of the brigade – the 148th Pennsylvania – does have a marker. It is also a third-day monument showing approximately where that regiment waited in reserve during Pickett’s Charge. The depleted 5th was up there, too. My guess is that on the second day those two regiments, which were side by side, waited to go into battle just south of the 148th’s reserve position.

From the Ridge we drove to the Peach Orchard and once again walked from there to the Wheatfield. I love the perspective this walk yields. The pieces of the battlefield seem discrete because of their post-battle names – Cemetery Ridge, the Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard, Devil’s Den, Little Round Top. But in reality they fit together like pieces of a puzzle, and the puzzle is a narrative of the battle, with what happens in one place affecting and often determining what happens in another.

- - -

Tim Smith, a Gettysburg battlefield guide, holds a 3D blowup of bodies on the field after the battle atop the boulder
before which they lay when the photographers found them. The picture was taken in a field near Rose's farm. 

This afternoon we toured the places where Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan and James F. Gibson took their famous photographs of the Gettysburg dead after the battle. A large batch of these photos came from a field near Rose’s farm. This is south of the woods where the 5th New Hampshire fought on July 2 and where Col. Cross was killed.

The entrepreneurial spirit moved Gardner and the others to label some of their pictures as having been taken elsewhere on the battlefield. This ruse lasted until the mid-1970s when William Frassanito, after an amazing piece of sleuthing, published a book that disclosed where the pictures were actually taken. He did this by finding the one thing on the vast battlefield that time and nature had changed only slightly: the rocks.

Tim Smith, our tour guide, debunked the myth that Gardner & Co. had moved bodies about willy-nilly to dramatize the scenes they created. They did place weapons on bodies, and in a single documented case they did move a body, but no more. The body they moved was the Confederate sharpshooter in Devil’s Den. He had been killed in the field below.

The tour provided a moment that bent both time and reality. After passing out 3D glasses to the tour group, he stood beside a boulder in George Rose’s field. Atop the boulder he displayed a colorized 3D blowup of a Gardner-O’Sullivan-Gibson image. (Such detailed blowups were made possible, he said, by the huge size of the glass negatives the photographers used. The wagon in which they traveled included a portable darkroom because they needed to make negatives shortly after shooting.) In the image Smith held up, several dead bodies were lined up for burial in front of the very boulder on which he was propping it up.

To add to the surrealism, Smith suggested that because these were Confederate bodies and Lee’s army had moved on by the time the photographers arrived, there was a chance the bodies were buried beneath our feet.

Next: The 5th New Hampshire at Gettysburg, a tour

A Gettysburg Journal (3)

June 22, 2013

Up early and rode out with Monique, my friend Dave Sullivan and his friend David Sommers to continue the search for where Col. Edward E. Cross died. We are all participants in the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, an annual conference on the war.

We went first to the 2nd Corps Hospital on Hospital Road, but the plaque said that the hospital was established on July 3, 1863, after Cross's death. The plaque confirmed that the original hospital had been on the grounds of the Granite School House but had been moved when over-shots from the Confederate artillery barrage before Pickett's Charge began landing among the wounded.

Thus we returned to Granite School House road, where we looked yesterday. We stopped at the house nearest where I thought the hospital might be. The couple who lived there were working in their garden. The man was Dan Rathert, a longtime battlefield guide who knew precisely where the hospital had been and was lobbying to have the site marked.

The school stood on the opposite side of Granite School House Road just north of the Rathert house. It is a few feet beyond and across from a small cavalry marker on the west side of the road. The site was thickly forested, and we could not find the school's cellar hole (if there was one), but the ground was slightly rolling and boulder-strewn. Thomas Livermore, who had served under Cross and arrived at his side shortly after he died, described the field that way.

I am not certain this is the spot, but it could be. What argues against it is that it is so far from the place near the Wheatfield where Cross was shot.

- - -

Troy Harman talks to our group near the fields where Pickett's men formed. 

In the evening Michael Birkner [my longtime friend and a history professor at Gettysburg College] and I joined a group led by Troy Harman, a park ranger, and the author Jeffry Wert to follow the route of Pickett's Charge.

This was the right wing of the Confederate force, led by Pickett. These men took a route much different from the one I have walked before from the Virginia monument (Lee on horseback) on Seminary Ridge to the Copse of Trees on Cemetery Ridge. This is known as the High Water Mark of the Confederacy, but it was so named -- and by a New Hampshire Yankee -- long after the war.

Harman took us through the woods from the Virginia monument on the trail Pickett's division used to reach the fields where it formed for the march. Horse pucky marked the narrow trail all the way, as though Jeb Stuart's cavalry had finally showed up and ridden before us.

The Spangler farmhouse, near the staging area for Pickett's Charge.

Green fields stretched up to the east from the farmhouse and barn. It was in these fields that Pickett's men waited for the order to move out. Looking to the east, they saw a ridgeline perhaps 250 yards above the farmhouse. This ridgeline was high enough to protect them from the view of Union troops on Cemetery Ridge.

We headed up toward the ridge through the grass, as Pickett's men  had done 150 years ago on July 3. We were curious about what we'd see when we got there, but it was an idle curiosity, a curiosity without dread. The ridge lies right on the Emmitsburg Road. Almost directly across the way is the Klingle farm, where the 12th New Hampshire Volunteers had been routed the previous day.

We could see when we crested the ridge that from this moment forward in Pickett's Charge, the men would have been totally exposed to the Union line on Cemetery Ridge. Standing on the ridge today and thinking about the low open field before us took my breath away.

We crossed the road from there for the walk up to the ridge. The grass was high, the ground uneven. The grass hid holes in the ground and boulders rising from it. Harman explained that heavy and effective Union artillery fire zeroed in on Pickett's right flank, driving those men toward the center and turning the formation to the left. Things only got worse as the division moved on.

One of our speakers at the Civil War Institute during the day had asserted that Lee had had several successes with frontal assaults before ordering Pickett's Charge. His implication was that the charge was not as foolhardy as it might look to the eye.

Our slog through the high grass did not bolster his case.

Next: Photos of the dead at Gettysburg.

The view from the Spangler barn up toward Emmitsburg Road Ridge, where the charge began. 

A Gettysburg Journal (2)

This is the second post from my recent trip to Gettysburg. One segment chronicles the first phase of a quest to find the death site of Col. Edward E. Cross, the first commander of the Fifth New Hampshire Volunteers. Some background is in order before we start.

The Fifth fought in Rose’s Woods just east of the Wheatfield on July 2, 1863. Cross was the regiment’s brigade commander that day. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock’s Second Corps ordered his First Division, including Cross's brigade, from Cemetery Ridge to the Wheatfield to check a threatened Confederate breakthrough.

The 5th New Hampshire monument in Rose's Woods
rests on the spot where Col Edward E. Cross was
standing when he  was shot on July 2. He was ordering
a charge though the Wheatfield at the time.

At the Wheatfield, Cross’s brigade waded into the wheat and captured rebel pickets in the field before halting on a slight ridge. With his men exposed, Cross decided to order an attack on a Confederate line behind a wall ahead. He told his regimental commanders in the Wheatfield to move out when they heard the bugles of the Fifth New Hampshire.

Cross entered Rose’s Woods and was giving the attack order when a marksman’s ball hit him in the belly button. He was carried to the rear of the Union line and died in a field at 12:30 a.m. on July 3.

Several officers of the Fifth described his death scene, including the area where he died. For Our War Tom Jameson of Houston, Tex., supplied me with the only firsthand account I have read of Cross's actual death. It was in a letter from Jameson’s ancestor, Capt. Frank Butler, to his family. Butler had ridden to Gettysburg beside Cross with another officer, Charles Hale, on the other side. Hale later wrote a detailed account of Cross at Gettysburg, including the moment Cross walked into the woods to find the Fifth and deliver his order to charge.   

Mark Travis and I tried in vain to find Cross’s death site before we wrote My Brave Boys, our history of Cross and the Fifth.   

June 21, 2013

The best of the day was walking the battlefield with Monique [my wife]. We first set out in search of the field hospital where Colonel Cross died. He was shot in Rose’s Woods six or seven hours earlier and transported back by ambulance to a field between the Taneytown Road and Baltimore Pike. “That’s a lot of territory,” my friend Michael Birkner, a Gettysburg College historian, said when I told him what we were about.

We started at the visitors’ center, where the ranger sent us on a wild goose chase. We wound up at the 11th Corps hospital at the Spangler farm. We looked at other promising ground in the area, climbing Powell’s Hill and checking out what turned out to be regimental markers.

I say “promising” because the land looked like what the officers who visited the dying Cross described: slightly rolling ground, mostly cleared field but with boulders here and there, and big ones.

A fellow at the Spangler farm who seemed to be an expert on such things said the Second Corps hospital, where Cross would have been taken, was nearby. There was no marker identifying it, and the building on the site, the Granite Schoolhouse, was now just a cellar hole, he said.

Because of heavy rains in Pennsylvania this spring, the foliage is lush, the grass high, and the guy didn’t like our chances of finding it. He was right. It is on none of the maps we brought today, and we drove the length of School House Road slowly without seeing it. But I think we’ll find it before we go.

---

From the Baltimore Pike we drove around to the Peach Orchard on the Emmitsburg Road. After gazing at all four sides of the Second New Hampshire Monuments, an elongated pyramid on a pedestal, we walked through the Peach Orchard toward the Wheatfield.

The 2nd New Hampshire marker stands in the southwest
corner of the Peach Orchard. The Emmitsburg Road is
visible in the background. On July 2, the regiment
supported an artillery battery here until enemy forces
overwhelmed it and crushed in Sickles's 3rd Corps line.

My purpose was to see the premise of my Our War chapter on the battle from a different perspective. This was a reverse perspective, from the Third Corps position up to Cemetery Ridge, where the Fifth spent most of the day before rushing to the Wheatfield, rather from Cemetery Ridge looking down toward the positions of the Second and Twelfth New Hampshire on Emmitsburg Road.

This had several benefits. It was a hot day but a clear one, providing sight lines that could not have existed once the shooting started on July 2 and battle smoke hung over the field. As we walked east toward the Wheatfield, we looked up and saw the Fifth’s position on Cemetery Ridge. That position was the vertex of a triangle, the two base angles being the Wheatfield, where the Fifth headed from the ridge, and the Peach Orchard, where the Second fought. We were walking on the line between the base angles.

Seeing things this way dissolved the chaos of the battle itself and gave me another way of considering the battlefield and the battle.

Similarly, we could look east as we walked and see how three critical points on that part of the field – Peach Orchard, Wheatfield, Little Round Top – formed a relatively straight line. Martin Haynes of the Second New Hampshire looked back from the Peach Orchard during the fighting and described Little Round Top (though he didn’t know its name) as an erupting volcano.

Along this line, it is not too much to suggest, the fate of the Union was decided on July 2, 1863.

Next: The real Pickett’s Charge

On July 2, the 12th New Hampshire Volunteers fought near the Klingle Farm on the Emmitsburg Road. A 3rd Corps
regiment, the 12th collapsed under simulaneous attacks from its front and its left flank. Its left was vulnerable after
the 2nd New Hampshire and other regiments in the Peach Orchard faced a similar attack from two directions. The
12th's monument is visible to the right of the white shed on the right. It faces the Emmitsburg Road.

A Gettysburg Journal (1)

A Gettysburg farm near the rise on which the eternal Peace Light was erected in 1938, the battle's 75th anniversary. 

This is the first of a series of journal entries I made during several days of roaming the battlefield at Gettysburg:

June 20, 2013

Our friends Michael Birkner and Robin Wagner were out when we arrived, so we headed up to the Peace Light, which is near their house. From there we walked out Confederate Avenue into ground contested on the first day of the battle, July 1, 1863. The sun was shining, the temperature in the 70s. A woman on a tractor was cutting hay in the field.

The 17th Pennsilvania Cavalry monument at Gettysburg.

Since time was short, we didn’t go as far as the Gen. John Reynolds statue and McPherson’s Ridge, instead looping around to the observation tower near the road. We climbed it just as a tour guide was finishing his spiel about the first day at Gettysburg with the story of Confederate Gen. Richard Ewell’s failure to take Culp’s Hill. The guide had been reading about the battle since boyhood, he said, and had changed his mind several times about Ewell’s culpability (no pun intended) in this.

The tour guide was a Carolinian, and the group had come up from North Carolina that morning. After saying that the next day he would lead the group on a tour of Gen. James Longstreet’s actions on the second day of the battle, he called for a prayer. He said how much he loved the idea of praying on federal property, to which his audience chuckled and nodded. He then read an eloquent prayer that blended God, flag and the Lost Cause.

I wish I had heard more of what was obviously a southern narrative of the battle. It would be interesting to hear the story as filtered through the Red-Blue, Evangelical-secular humanist, white southerner-Obama’s America divide of our time. From the little I heard, his different perspective seemed strongly based in interest and knowledge

I just read Allen Guelzo’s account of the first day’s fighting in Gettysburg: The Last Invasion. I liked it, and I was also comfortable with it. For all of Guelzo’s good research on the Confederate side, his book tells the story of a Union victory and is driven mainly by the accounts of the victors. I wondered, for example, how the Carolinian tour guide would handle slavery, race and politics as they relate to the battle -- subjects Guelzo handled very well in his book. 

Part 2: Looking for the spot where Col. Cross died.

Gettysburg: the terrain as teacher and informer

I am nearing the end of a five-day stay at Gettysburg. I've been busy attending sessions of the Civil War Institute, an annual seminar on the war, at Gettysburg College. Today I'll lead a tour of Col. Edward E. Cross and his brigade on the south end of the battlefield.

In addition to the lectures and discussions, I've made time each day to explore some aspect of the battlefield. I've been here 20 or 30 times before, but for all the reading and listening I've done, it is the battlefield itself that remains the best teacher and informer.

Just one example: In Our War I wrote a chapter on three New Hampshire men who fought on July 2. I had been in the spots where each of them fought -- the Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield, the Klingel Farm -- many times before. But this time I have twice I walked the road from the Peach Orchard to the Wheatfield and learned new things about how their actions intertwined on that day and how landmarks on the battlefield related to each other geographically.

I keep a journal and have been writing accounts of my battlefield walks throughout the Civil War Institute conference. Over the next few days I'll share some of my observations along with photos my wife Monique and I have taken. I'll also share some of the views of speakers here who have studied the battle far more closely than I have.

Gallery: Old Soldiers (1)

The afterlife of many Civil War soldiers centered on the Grand Army of the Republic. In an era in which fraternal organizations flourished and only men could vote, the GAR became a powerful political force as well as a place where veterans could socialize among fellow veterans and look to the needs of their one-time brothers-in-arms. The federal pension system that provided income to many of these men and their families was a forerunner of the social programs that serve all Americans today.

John Wesley Adams, chaplain of the 2nd
New Hampshire from late 1863 until the
regiment disbanded in December 1865. 

Of course, the Civil War veterans are long gone, but in many towns and cities in New Hampshire and other Union states, GAR halls remain. Often put to new uses, they were once symbols of the strength of the various GAR chapters.

Adams during the war.

The chapter in Somersworth, in the eastern part of New Hampshire near the seacoast, was Littlefield Post No. 8. As of 1902, its membership was 68, and an inspector found it robust and active.

The other day, two of my re-enactor friends, Dave Morin and Dave Nelson, shared a collection of photographs of the old soldiers of the Somersworth area – men from both New Hampshire and Maine. Nelson photographed these images courtesy of the historian of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, a still-active successor of the GAR.

I’ve done a little research on some of them and will post a few

galleries of these men here. The first group comprises veterans of the 2nd New Hampshire Volunteers, which fought at both Bull Run battles, on the Virginia Peninsula, at Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Drewry’s Bluff, Cold Harbor and Petersburg. The regiment lost 337 men killed, mortally wounded or from sickness.

Joseph B. Read, a 27-year-old Vermont native who lived in Somersworth when the
war broke out, joined the 2nd New Hampshire as a corporal. Wounded at Second
Bull Run and again -- severely -- at Gettysburg, he left the regiment in late 1863
for a captain's commission with the 19th U.S. Colored Troops.

Jared P. Hubbard joined the 2nd New
Hanpshire as a private in August
 of 1862 and served until just after
the war's end. He made sergeant.

Alonzo F. Austin of Somersworth was 18
when he volunteered in 1862.
 He served as a private  in the 2nd for
 nearly three years.

Andrew G. Bracy. who was also 18 when
he enlisted in 1861, rose to lieutenant.
He was wounded at the second battle
of Bull Run.

Alden C. Kidder enlisted at 18 as a
private at the start of the war. He was
captured at the first battle of Bull
 Run. He served his 3-year term and
mustered out after Cold Harbor in 1864.