Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation by Clifford Dowdey

Author:Clifford Dowdey
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2011-08-31T12:00:00+00:00

While he sang, the rifles continued to bang away, and the Confederate sharpshooters in Devil’s Den took a steady toll of the gunners on Little Round Top. With their own artillery not up, it was the only way to silence cannon.

No counterattack was coming. The Federal troops were holding by the skin of their teeth, themselves awaiting another assault. The men of both sides were fighting literally—and only—for their own lives, and the toll continued to mount in the savage personal combats among the rocks.

So the day was ending for Hood’s division, with only General Law aware of the failure to take the key position. The men had done all that could be asked of mortals.

Attacking a position of forbidding natural strength, under enemy guns out of reach of their own and in the confusion of improvised battle plans, they had wrecked Birney’s division while fighting off flanking movements from other troops. With great stretches of almost impossible ground taken, they had halted only when fresh brigades on the top of the mountain came at them after they were physically spent and disordered from the prolonged action. That they had lost one third of their number in taking barren ground was not their responsibility.

Nor was Evander Law responsible for the fact that he had been delayed so long in taking the barren ground that his men were late, just too late, in reaching Little Round Top.

The battle plans had called for Lafayette McLaws’s division to sweep forward on their left, through the peach orchard, when Hood’s men advanced. But Hood’s division had attacked alone.

Its open left, where McLaws was supposed to be, had been exposed to merciless enfilade fire. At their climactic moment on the southern end of Little Round Top, when they were minutes and yards away from taking the crest, no other troops had exerted pressure on the Union troops to the north. Their own left brigade, G. T. Anderson’s Georgians, clung to a foothold on the northwestern wall of Little Round Top, making their own ragged line intact on the ground from which they had driven Birney’s wrecked division. That was as far as Hood’s division could go.

Evander Law, who did not have that day the luck of the brave, recognized that the troops could do no more than hold on. After sending his “compliments” to Major Rogers, the acting division commander rode across the frightful field, his horse picking its way among the corpses and the wounded, to discover what had happened to McLaws on the left.

14

Longstreet had happened to McLaws. Having pressed McLaws to the point of committing his troops to an assault that all general officers on the field regarded as impractical, Old Pete joined the division commander only to order him to wait until Hood went in. Then, when Hood’s men plunged forward, Longstreet gave no orders for supporting Hood.

Instead, in irrational anger, he pointed to a spot where the narrow back road by which they had approached the front emerged from the woods.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.