...

A.P. Hill was riding up and down behind the firing line ensuring that the men of Heth's Division, now commanded by James Pettigrew, saw their corps commander up front with them. He had led them at the double-quick from their place in reserve while Wilcox, his flank now bent back to anchor on the Pitzer's Run, had held on for dear life holding the army's flank.

Birney's Division had swung across the Emmitsburg Road and pivoted north to strike Hill's open flank, while Humphreys' brigades had struggled unsuccessfully to break through Spangler's Woods, now held by Wright's Brigade. With Hill bringing up Heth's Division, Anderson was the senior 3rd Corps officer on the spot, and, under Lee's direct observation, this often sluggish officer was performing well. He had led up Wright's Georgians when Perry's 'Florida' Brigade had been overwhelmed and stopped Carr's advance cold. He was riding through the woods encouraging his men. Private Josiah Williams of the 72nd New York saw him flitting through the trees behind the Confederate firing line. He pointed him out to the men on either side, and they all fired at him. One bullet tore through his left shoulder and another into his left leg; a third struck his horse in the chest, bringing both to the ground in a heap. The horse screamed in agony, flailing around with its iron-shod hooves until a soldier shot it. As some of Wright's Georgians attempted to pull Anderson to safety, Humphreys committed his third brigade.

Colonel George C. Burling's five New Jersey regiments charged through the opening between Carr and Brewster and burst out of the woods and into the meadow behind. Burling led his men forward in pursuit, sweeping over one of Poague's batteries and around Wilcox's flank, held fast by Brewster's Brigade.

The flank of the army was about to collapse, as Lee rode out from Spangler's Woods and into the fleeing Floridians in the field behind. His presence was unmistakable on his white horse. In small groups and individually the fugitives stopped and faced about. Reserves were nowhere in sight, and Burling's men were closing. 'General Lee, please, Sir, do not expose yourself,' implored Colonel Armistead Long, his military secretary. Already men were failing around him as Burling's regiments surged forward. He should have saved his breath. Lee was majestic as Lang's broken regiments magically coalesced around him. The men might as well have been around an angel of the Lord, so transformed were they. Colonel Lang, his right arm soaked with blood and his left clutching his sword, placed himself at Lee's right. Again Long implored him to come away. Lee simply said, 'There is a price of leadership, Colonel.'[8] Private Shelby Carter of the 5th Florida, carrying his regiment's colors nearby, was amazed to see that Lee did not carry a weapon of his own, and that he had to borrow Colonel Long's sword.

The situation was not lost on Lang: he would never live it down if Lee died redeeming his brigade's honor. Stepping out in front of the denuded regiments, he shouted, 'General Lee, never let it be said that the men of this brigade needed the commander of this army to stiffen their courage.' Then to his Floridians, 'Forward, boys! General Lee is watching!'[9] They stepped forward with a cheer and advanced a dozen yards as Burling's Brigade came up and fired. The Confederates staggered at the blow. The tiny regiments seemed to disintegrate; all the colors and the surviving field officers went down. Colonel Lang fell dead with the last of his staff in a jumbled heap. Of the 400 men who had rallied on Lee, every second man was down, but the survivors stood and returned fire, feeble though it was. Burling ordered the advance, sword in hand, as the wall of bayonets behind him leveled and surged forward, colors waving along the unbroken line. His charge through the woods had left Wright's flank wide open. The Georgian pulled it rapidly back, disengaging from Carr. Humphreys was quick to spot the gaping ruin to his front, and sent Carr's Brigade through Spangler's Woods to join Burling's advance. Humphreys rode forward and placed himself in the center of his two advancing brigades. There was only what seemed to be a skirmish line in front of his 3000 men.

The skirmish line was the dying 'Florida' Brigade. Behind them were Lee and his staff. Even Lee could see no point in hanging on before the irresistible blue tide. Anderson was missing, and the brigades he had ordered forward were nowhere to be seen. Brigadier General Carnot Posey had, indeed, received Anderson's orders to move to support the right, but three of his four regiments were dispersed across the corps front as skirmishers; he had no brigade readily at hand to move. Brigadier General William Mahone's brigade was waiting in the woods in readiness to move. Anderson's aide was relieved to see them so as he rode up to Mahone and delivered his message. To his amazement, Mahone merely replied that he had orders to hold his position and would not leave it. The aide answered, 'I am just from General Anderson and he orders you to advance.' Mahone replied, 'No, I have my orders from General Anderson himself to remain here.'[10] Nothing the aide could say would move Mahone from his position that an order given in person by his division commander took precedence over one transmitted by an aide. It was cold comfort for Lee to turn his back on the advancing Federals at the last minute to find that Wright had run his brigade out into a cornfield in the path of the onrushing enemy. No other reserves were in sight.

The odds against Lee were piling up even higher as Birney's Division of 5000 men swung around the disintegrating flank. Now facing north, they came on quickly. Colonel Charles K. Graham's 1st Brigade broke into Pitzer's Woods from the south, forcing back the one regiment that Wilcox could spare from his fight with Brewster. Colonel J.H. Hobert Ward's 2nd Brigade splashed across Pitzer's Run unopposed into the meadows beyond. The 3rd Brigade under Colonel P. Regis de Trobriand was in reserve to the rear. Sickles rode up elated with his attack and the splendid alignment of his corps. Aides from Humphreys found him in the woods and passed on to him the equally splendid news of the 2nd Division's success. The whole Confederate flank was crumbling, and he was now behind it as well. To his staff, he said, 'This is the end of the mighty Lee. This is repayment for Chancellorsville and Second Bull Run. By God, we have got him, boys!' The heady moment was too much for what little discretion he had. 'And now that I have won Meade's battle for him, there is nothing anyone can do.'[11]

A.P. Hill rode up past the farm of E. Pitzer, leading the first of Heth's brigades, that of Brigadier General Joseph R. Davis. Davis' only recommendation for command had been his family relationship to the Confederacy's president. His conduct on the first day of the battle had been scandalous. He had lost control of his command and stayed conspicuously out of the way. It was now Davis' Brigade in name only. Hill had made it clear that its senior regimental commander would command, and Davis was now as inconspicuous as he had been the day before. Brigadier General Pettigrew, the acting division commander, was welcome at Hill's side. The other shrunken brigades were all under new commanders since the slaughter of the previous day. He had to handle these men carefully. Most of the brigades had taken terrible losses. Davis and Archer's had been badly led. Losses had almost reached forty-five per cent for the division. As Jomini wrote in his classic on the art of war, the Spanish have a saying: 'He was a brave man that day.' That day was yesterday, and most of the survivors were still stunned at the shredding of their regiments. Lee had recognized, as did Hill, that the reservoirs of courage were low. But were they too low for the work ahead? He would find out shortly. The smoke and noise from a desperate fight was only just ahead as he passed the Pitzer Farm.

He knew it would be a hospital. Already dozens of wounded men had converged on it by instinct. One of them was Private Bailey McClelen of the 10th Alabama. He had been shot in the right leg charging a battery. Two of his comrades tried to take him to the rear but were ordered by the regiment's commander to put him down and get back into the firing line. For McClelen, it was safer to move on than remain where he lay:

I did not really know at the time whether I could walk or not. Seeing our wounded passing me for the rear so numerously, I did not lie there long until I concluded to make an effort to walk. I left that spot faster than any walk. I made several stations on my way to the rear by reason of the shells I heard coming towards me from the enemy's batteries. I would fall flat until they passed me, then I would rise and try it again. I repeated this kind of tactics several times on my retreat ... At one station I had stopped at a fence, the shell that caused that stop exploded so close to me that the pieces flew all over and around me and hit the fence within two feet of me, and just after I crossed the fence another round shell came nearly over me but was some feet higher than my head. By this time I was nearing a stone building which was a good protection.[12]

Luckily he had found the brigade surgeons just behind the building. He did not record whether he saw Hill and Heth's Division marching past.

Wright's Georgians had held up Humphreys' men for fifteen minutes of dreadful pounding, He was outnumbered more than two to one as the volleys flamed across the small deadly space. His men in the edge of the corn field were dropping fast. Carr's New Jersey regiments were tough, but blue-clad bodies were piling up in their firing line as well. Wright was never prouder of his men, especially now that they were under the eye of Lee himself, who would not leave the fighting. 'Please, General Lee,' Wright asked him, just as Long had, 'kindly move to the rear, to a safer position until reserves come up. I will not have it said that you were hurt on my firing line, Sir.'

Lee replied, 'General, I suggest you move a regiment to the right. Those people will flank you otherwise.'[13] Burling's Brigade had extended around Wright's right flank and was getting ready to close in on him. Wright took one look and shouted for the major commanding his last reserve, the 2nd Georgia Battalion of 150 men. The little band did a right face and ran off to the flank, beating Burling's men by seconds. Lee stayed where he was, and Wright did not presume to offer any more suggestions. He had other things to worry about. The close nature of the fighting left little room between the enemies, and Carr's Brigade came on in a rush that closed the gap almost instantly. They were fresh, and fell on the Georgians with a determination and ferocity the Confederates were not used to from their enemies. In places the fight was hand-to-hand, with bayonet and fist, sword and pistol, as the blue lines surged forward and blurred with the gray to stain the ground red. The mass of struggling men heaved back into the cornfield.

During all this Lee rode behind the line, inciting the men to a ferocity of their own by his mere presence. Colonel Long had long since stopped urging him to remove himself from danger; his body lay behind the line among the dead and wounded. Only one lieutenant remained at Lee's side, and he was bleeding from a head wound that left a crimson smear through his red hair. It seemed to those who saw him amidst this maelstrom that Lee bore a charmed life. Captain William S. Johnson, who led the 3rd Georgia's small reserve - Company B - into the bloody breach that the 1st Massachusetts had driven through the regiment, saw Lee at his most magnificent. He was sitting on Traveler, alone, behind the very point where the Baystaters broke through in their Puritan fury. The haze of smoke in front of them blew away to reveal the great old man, sword in hand at his side, majestically still. There was not a man in the Army of the Potomac who had not seen countless likenesses of Lee. Many knew him better than their own army commanders. They stopped cold, the white heat of battle somehow frozen. He stared them down for a heartbeat, before Johnson's men came howling at them with the bayonet and rifle butt, rushing past Lee to smash the enemy back. 'I will never forget Lee sitting like God Almighty atop Traveler as we attacked past him,' recalled Johnson. 'The boys cheered at the sight of him, desperate more to save him, I think, that to drive back the enemy.'[14]

It was this scene that Hill and Pettigrew saw - Wright's Brigade turned at right angles being bent back by a blue vice of two brigades. In the van of Hill's reserve was the 11th Mississippi, fresh and rowdy, almost 600 strong. Alone of all the regiments in Heth's Division, it had lost not one man in Thursday's slaughter. Instead it had idled as the division train guard. Now it was out to avenge yesterday's losses. No scrappier regiment existed in the Confederate service. Raised among sharpshooting, wild backwoodsmen, it also had one company of university students who prided themselves on being 'always undisciplined and impulsive', an apt description of the entire regiment, of which it was written: 'No more disorderly mob of men ever got together to make an army.' Indeed, a former brigadier was reported to turn the air blue on the numerous occasions when the 11th's deeds off the battlefield were reported, but always ended by saying, 'Damn 'em! I wouldn't go into battle without 'em.'[15]

The Mississippians double-quicked from column to line in a fluid motion that impressed Hill; they had not been in his old Light Division, but they would have done it proud. He could work on the discipline later.

Buford had no time to reflect on the fact that the impending crash of cavalry against cavalry was the opposite lesson to that he had taught the horsemen of the Army of the Potomac. If he had, he would have agreed with Thoreau that 'foolish consistency was the hobgoblin of little minds', if he had ever read Thoreau. But Fitzhugh Lee was a Gordian Knot only the saber could cut, Buford cantered at the head of his division and felt the mass of men and horses trotting behind him knee to knee, sabers at the rest on every man's shoulder. The bugles blared, and the pace accelerated into a limited gallop. A hundred yards later the buglers sounded the charge, and the mass broke into a full gallop. The sabers arched up and then down, pointing straight at the enemy, as the flags and guidons fluttered overhead like a mediaeval host. All along the thundering line the deep roar of a Union shout boomed. Across the shrinking interval, the keening Southern yell echoed back in defiance as the gray host lowered its own saber hedge.

Adrenaline pumped through the veins of 4000 men, the very sensation described by an officer at Brandy Station: 'Who can describe the feelings of a man on entering a charge? How exhilarating, and yet how awful! The glory of success in a charge is intoxicating! One forgets everything, even personal safety, in the one grand thought of vanquishing the enemy, We were in for it now, and the nerves were strung to the highest tension.'[16] Even the horses caught the fiery spirit of their masters and strained every muscle to race forward.

Confederate and Union horse artillery batteries had positioned themselves on the flanks and fired into the oncoming tides, slamming horses and men into bloody jumbles into which rear ranks crashed. Yet the hurtling masses still surged around the kicking heaps and into each other with a mighty crash. The impact brought scores of horses to the ground, their riders thrown into the trampling storm. Everywhere the combat immediately disintegrated into hundreds of individual duels, as a Confederate participant recounted:

A passage of arms filled with romantic interest and splendor to a degree unequaled by anything our war produced ... Not a man fought dismounted, and there was heard but an occasional pistol shot and but little artillery, for soon after the opening of the fight the contest was so close and the dust so thick that it was impossible to use either without risk to friends ... It was like what we read of in the days of chivalry, acres and acres of horsemen, sparkling sabers, and dotted with brilliant bits of color where their flags danced about them, hurled against each other at full speed and meeting with a shock that made the earth tremble.[17]

Buford's horse had gone down in the initial shock, spilling him to the ground. He threw himself free and rolled to avoid the hooves of the close-packed horses around him. A Rebel cavalryman leaned over to hack at him but fell back as a bullet exploded into his forehead. Buford pushed the corpse out of the saddle and leapt up. An aide, forcing his way through the press, offered him his own red-stained saber, but before he could take it more of the enemy swarmed around them. The aide fell in the glittering flash of steel as Buford swung down on one side of his horse, Plains Indian fashion, to avoid the same fate. As he came up again, Stuart himself was a short distance ahead of him, trading blows with a Union sergeant, who collapsed and fell forward in the saddle even as he watched. Stuart looked about him for another challenge, and almost instinctively Buford spurred forward, reached out his open hand, and struck him on the shoulder. Stuart jerked around to see Buford glide past, the sweep of his own saber too late to catch him. Buford had counted coup on Stuart in imitation of, and admiration for, the heroism of a lone Brule Sioux warrior during the Battle of Blue Water Creek in 1855, who had similarly ridden up weaponless to touch him, in the supreme act of Lakota chivalry and courage. Buford's warrior heart had been touched as well. Stuart turned to him, a strange look on his face, then charged. Buford drew his pistol, aimed coolly, and shot him out of the saddle. Stuart's staff rushed up and lifted him bleeding back onto his mount while three troopers went after Buford, but the swirl of battle engulfed them as men of the 3rd Indiana swarmed around amid the screams of horses, shouting of men, and clang of steel on steel.

As Buford's men fought their way to their beleaguered commander, his trump card played itself. The division reserve, the almost 600-strong 8th New York Cavalry, came crashing into the right rear of the melee, while up the Taneytown Road from the south, in plain sight, came a bristle of bayonets above a human river in Union blue, the van of VI Corps.

Struck from the rear, and with a mass of approaching enemy infantry only minutes away, Lee's Brigade began to unravel and stream away north. Buford's men were after them, the exhilaration of the fight fed by the even greater astonishment that they had driven the gray cavalry from a fairly fought field.

-------------------

[8] A.L. Long, 'There is a Price of Leadership', MAC, vol. XVI (1881), p.193. Colonel Long here continues his hagiography of Lee, but his account is well-supported by the numerous eyewitnesses in Wright's Brigade, for many of whom fighting under the direct eye of Lee was a singular honor.
[9] Long, ibid, p. 195.
[10] Freeman, op.cit. pp. 127-8.
[11] John W. Campbell, The Court Martial of Major General Dan Sickles (Swinton and Sons Publishers, Boston, 1927) p.201
[12] Bailey George McClelen, I Saw the Elephant (White Mane Publishing Co., Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, 1995) p.42
[13] Long, op.cit. p.96
[14]William S. Johnson, A Georgian in Gray: The Civil War Memoirs of William S. Johnson (Stars and Bars Press, Savannah, 1967) p.162
[15] George W. Stewart, Pickett's Charge: A Microhistory of the Final Attack at Gettysburgy, July 3, 1863 (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1983) p.43. Stewart relates an incident that highlighted the regiment's renowned marksmanship: 'Someone once came to report the loss of a hog within their lines, testifying that a shot had been heard and a squeal. General Whiting replied soberly, "I am satisfied you are mistaken. When an 11th Mississippian shoots a hog, it don't squeal."'
[16] Samuel Carter III, The Last Cavaliers: Confederate and Union Caralry in the Civil War (Saint Martin's Press, New York, 1979) p.157.
[17] W.W. Blackford, War Years with JEB Stuart (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge and London, 1993) pp.215-16. This account is also of Brandy Station.

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