Beneath a Northern Sky by Steven E. Woodworth

Author:Steven E. Woodworth [Woodworth, Steven E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780742571396
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2013-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

Hood rode to the front of his division’s line and called out to the Texas brigade he had once commanded, “Fix bayonets, my brave Texans; forward and take those heights!” As the Confederate and Texas flags at the center of each regiment’s line sloped forward and the men stepped out, the First Texas’s Lieutenant Colonel Phillip A. Work shouted, “Follow the Lone Star Flag to the top of the mountain!” On the Texans’ right, Law’s Alabama brigade strode forward through a field of standing wheat amid a chorus of Rebel Yells, their weariness forgotten as they raised “that wild, indescribable battle yell that no one having heard ever forgot.” The time was approximately 4:30 P.M.15

The Union artillery began hitting them from the moment they started their advance, and gray-clad bodies littered the division’s track. “Men were falling, stricken to death,” recalled a member of the Fourth Alabama. The passing shells sounded like partridges in flight but burst, spraying lethal fragments. Junior officers urged the men forward, but they needed little encouragement. Private Rube Franks of the Fourth Alabama called to his fellow soldiers, “Come on, boys; come on! The Fifth Texas will get there before the Fourth! Come on, boys; come on!” A shell fragment struck down the exuberant soldier, but the Alabama line strode on.16

Also among the first to fall was Hood himself, knocked out of the fight with a nasty shrapnel wound in the left arm. His division would have to make its attack without his direction. Already the rough, uneven terrain, houses, barns, and patches of woods, combined with the inevitable confusion of battle, had begun the process of shuffling the divisions’ formations. Law shifted two of his Alabama regiments to the left to counter the Union battery above Devil’s Den, but that turned out to be in the Texas Brigade’s sector, and the two regiments found a place in the middle of that brigade’s line, between the First and Fourth Texas regiments. Union skirmishers fell back before the Confederate advance. Law’s three right regiments followed them up and over Round Top, then wheeled left and headed down the slope toward neighboring Little Round Top to the north. The Texas Brigade, along with the other two regiments of Law’s Alabamians, bore a bit farther left and headed in the general direction of Devil’s Den.17

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