Epilogue

NEVER AGAIN WOULD the Confederacy come closer to achieving nationhood than on the afternoon of July 2, 1863 with Barksdale’s Charge. Despite smashing through Meade’s left-center, nearly splitting the Army of the Potomac in two and reaching the strategic objective of Cemetery Ridge, Barksdale’s effort was fated to be forgotten in the years following the war. In its stead, “Pickett’s Charge” rose up like a great phoenix to take its place as the battle’s decisive turning point. Generations of American writers, journalists, and myth-makers created endless layers of romanticism and glorification, combined with a powerful “Lost Cause” mystique, to transform the third day of the battle, when Pickett took part, into the single most decisive moment of Gettysburg.

This perspective, of course, does not stand up to scrutiny. The second day of Gettysburg, July 2, was when the Army of the Potomac was truly on the ropes. Barksdale’s men persisted longer and advanced farther than other Confederate brigades on that fateful day; however other units on the Confederate right had helped to open the way for its success. To Barks -dale’s right the gallant brigades of Hood’s Division and the rest of Mc-Laws’ men had battled mightily all afternoon, drawing Union reinforcements upon them.

To Barksdale’s left, three brigades of Richard Anderson’s Division had advanced, having an easier approach to the Emmitsburg Road than did Barksdale, but once nearing Cemetery Ridge they had been repelled with severe loss. Either due to A.P. Hill’s negligence, or Anderson’s, none of the Third Corps brigades were in the slightest supported by other troops, so when Hancock’s men, supported by batteries of Hunt’s Reserve Artillery, beat them back there was no other recourse than retreat. Of Anderson’s remaining two brigades, Carnot Posey’s stopped short of the Emmitsburg Road. Another, under William Mahone, sat stubbornly idle through the entire battle, despite repeated entreaties for it to advance. Longstreet had the sense to call back his men when he saw that the odds were too heavily against them in that twilight. He wrote afterward: “While Meade’s lines were growing my men were dropping; we had no others to call to their aid, and the weight against us was too heavy to carry.” He added, more bitterly, “No other part of our army had engaged!”561

Although the 21st Mississippi’s B.G. Humphreys, for one, protested the order to give up his gains, Longstreet at least kept control of his men. A.P. Hill had no such thought, so his three brigades that entered the battle suffered as many prisoners taken—once Federal reinforcements began to pile in—as Longstreet’s eight brigades put together.

Rans Wright of Anderson’s Division afterward claimed to have conquered Cemetery Ridge, if only for a few minutes. However, his description of the terrain, including a rocky gorge, bear no resemblance to the reality of the gentle slope in his sector. Historian Edwin Coddington has said, “General Wright … maintained that his men after penetrating the Second Corps line finally seized the top of Cemetery Ridge. His statements, however, both in his report and in a letter to his wife written five days after the battle are literally beyond belief, and none of the Union accounts in any way supported his claim of having broken through the main line.”⁵⁶²

After darkness had fallen and Longstreet’s offensive had died down, Ewell’s Second Corps finally launched attacks against the Union right. Three brigades stormed Culp’s Hill, which had been denuded of Union troops—dispatched to resist Longstreet—so that the Confederates were able to claim some unoccupied works. They were pushed out the following morning once Slocum’s Corps returned to its position after the alarm.

Jubal Early launched two brigades directly against Cemetery Hill, just south of Gettysburg, and they had excellent initial success, overrunning advanced lines of the woebegone Federal Eleventh Corps, and seizing two full batteries on the summit. But then the division to their right, Robert Rodes’, declined to attack. The Third Corps division on Rodes’ right also failed to move. Early had been prepared to throw his third brigade, under John Gordon, into support of his assault, but after seeing that his men were fighting alone against a growing concentration of Union reinforcements, he simply withdrew them down the hill.

And so ended the second day of Gettysburg, even as the Mississippi Brigade’s dead and wounded, including Barksdale himself, still littered a path, under the moonlight, from Seminary Ridge to Cemetery Ridge—a full mile of carnage—marking the true “High Water Mark” of the Confederacy.

The next day, July 3, much to Longstreet’s chagrin, Robert E. Lee resolved to attack again. The plan resulted from the curious premise that what could not be achieved by eleven fresh Confederate brigades on Day 2 could now be achieved by only three fresh ones—Pickett’s—accompanied by six brigades from Hill’s Corps that had been severely damaged on the battle’s first day. And this time, instead of achieving surprise, or a semblance of one, the entire Army of the Potomac would be waiting for them on their ridge, as George Pickett, Johnson Pettigrew, and Isaac Trimble crossed nearly a mile of open ground to meet them.

Seldom in the annals of military history has there been a more spectacular display of gallantry than when “Pickett’s Charge” attempted to retrieve the fortunes of the Army of Northern Virginia. In a veritable amphitheater, with both sides looking on, they crossed the open field under bright sunlight in the face of intense fire—first artillery, then musketry. The left flank of the assault line was crushed almost immediately; enfilade fire from infantry and artillery on the right funneled the attackers toward the center. But Pickett’s men refused to stop and actually pierced the Union center on Cemetery Ridge. But by then the few survivors were all alone and veritably swallowed by the Union response rushing in on them from all sides. They could only fall to Union fire, try to flee, or be taken prisoner, as there were no other Confederate formations to support their breakthrough.

Pickett’s men did exeedingly well, though in a last sort of forlorn hope for victory. In truth they never stood a chance. Longstreet had hardly been able to bring himself to sanction the assault, while Lee afterward claimed a curious variation of honor by arriving on the scene afterward, telling the broken debris of the Virginia division that it was “all my fault.” Yes, it may have been.

The climax of the battle had come the day before, which was the day that Pickett’s Division should have gone in had it been arranged to arrive at the battle earlier. If it had been able to reinforce Barksdale’s Brigade when it had created an open avenue to Cemetery Ridge, was fighting on the verge of the very crest, and when one more Rebel push would have toppled the entire Potomac Army, that’s when gallants like Armistead, Kemper and Garnett would have gone down in history as victors rather than tragic footnotes, as casualties.

Naturally Union writers afterward much preferred to write about Pickett’s Charge, which they crushed, rather than Barksdale’s Charge, which made them retreat, sometimes in panic, for a mile and then barely hang on by a thread. Confederate writers were mysteriously also drawn to the valor of the Virginians rather than being forced to dwell on the lost opportunities and disappointments of Gettysburg’s tumultuous second day.

Ironically, after the war, even Mississippi Confederate veterans, who had embraced the “Lost Cause” mythology, contributed to the obscurity of Barksdale’s Charge by focusing on the efforts of Mississippi regiments in “Pickett’s Charge.” One orator at the dedication of a monument in Carroll County, Mississippi, to former Magnolia State soldiers in 1905, went so far as to declare that “Pickett’s Virginians were made up largely of Mississippians [General Joseph R. Davis’ brigade], a fact which the historians and poets seem often to overlook.”563 Incredibly, in the postwar period, Mississippians even entered the heated postwar controversy about “Pickett’s Charge” by emphasizing in no uncertain terms how Davis’ troops “went farthest up those fatal heights and broke the enemy’s line of defense at the only point it carried in the charge.”⁵⁶⁴ Clearly, even in Mississippi of all places, the romantic lore, enduring legend, and universal appeal of “Pickett’s Charge” obscured the importance of Barksdale’s Charge in almost winning the most important battle of the war.

In the words of one fortunate survivor of the battle, Private McNeily of the 21st Mississippi, in regard to the Mississippi Brigade’s unparalleled performance, Barksdale’s success was achieved despite the disadvantages “of its wholly isolated attack upon the enemy’s key point, it went far beyond all … its course was kept free from the fatal chain of error, miscalculation, and inopportunity that makes Gettysburg the worst wrought out of all Lee’s battles. In no other was the ‘team work’ so poor. From all the counts in the indictment of ineptitude and error, Barksdale’s bri -gade is free—it neither failed nor faltered, boggled or wobbled. It alone did all that was required of it, and more.”⁵⁶⁵

From the west, even General Hood, although not from Mississippi, and who attempted in vain to capture Little Round Top on that bloody July 2, grew disenchanted with the excessive promotion of the Virginians’ exploits at Gettysburg at the Mississippians’ expense. After the war Hood deeply lamented how “no shaft marks the spot where [Barksdale fell because] Federal authorities refused to allow the point they reached to be designated by appropriate stones, but that gallant charge is written upon the hearts of his countrymen, and will be told in song and story as long as gallant deeds and heroism are virtues.”566

Most revealing, no one in the Army of the Potomac was more keenly aware of how July 2 was actually the most crucial day at Gettysburg, and how close his army had come to defeat, than General Meade himself. In his official report, Meade concluded how Sickles’ unauthorized advance to the Peach Orchard was “an error which nearly proved fatal in the battle.”⁵⁶⁷ Captain John Bigelow concluded that the Mississippi Brigade was presented with the “great opportunity for entering the lines of the Army of the Potomac, offered to them.” The Peach Orchard salient’s dramatic collapse just “barely escaped bringing disaster to the Army,” said the artilleryman. “The way was open for Barksdale’s Confederate Brigade … to enter, unopposed, our lines between Little Round Top and the left of the Second Corps.”⁵⁶⁹ Among Longstreet’s various reflections on the battle was a singular explanation of why his attack on July 2 had failed. In regard to the splendid effort of his brigades, Longstreet “attributed their failure chiefly to Hood’s wound and Barksdale’s death.”⁵⁷⁰ Indeed, the fall of Barksdale explained in part why the most successful charge at Gettysburg was ultimately repulsed.⁵⁷¹

On July 4, 1863, Lee’s army began to retreat from Pennsylvania, and on that same day the mighty Confederate fortress on the Mississippi River, Vicksburg, surrendered. With a battle nearly won by Mississippi troops in the east ending in failure, simultaneous with the fall of the strategic citadel in Mississippi itself, the Confederacy’s prospects had begun to look dim. However, there would still be nearly two more years of fighting. The Northern army had been crippled as much by Gettysburg as the Southern one, needing time to recover, and after which both sides would continue to grapple until the irrefutable logic of demographic and industrial arithmetic finally drove Dixie fully down.

On the 4th of July, 1863, while comrades, friends, neighbors, and relatives lay dead in the killing fields around the Peach Orchard, the Emmitsburg Road, Plum Run, and just below Cemetery Ridge’s crest, where Barksdale and his men had once vividly envisioned red battle-flags flying in triumph, Lee’s bone-weary survivors, traumatized and numbed by Gettysburg’s surreal horrors, trudged south through a pelting rain that seemingly mocked the Confederates’ lost opportunities. With thoughts yet consumed by the misery of defeat and the searing pain of having lost so many comrades, the surviving Mississippi boys marched through the clinging mud and toward a tragic one-way destination and a sorrowful fate that could no longer be denied. Up ahead lay what was now inevitable: the ultimate death of the Confederacy’s experiment in nationhood.

Meanwhile, on hundreds of middle-class farms across Mississippi, the neat rows of corn, with ears covered in thick, tasseled tops, was high and luxuriant in the fields. The long-awaited harvest, now drawing near, promised to be a good one. But many of the young men and boys who had once plowed the farms of the Magnolia State now lay in final resting places in the equally fertile soil of Adams County, Pennsylvania. Their General, William Barksdale, was also now in the ground. But the weary survivors of one of the most devastating charges of the Civil War managed to keep on going, while maintaining hope in the future, because they embraced a single consolation among the encroaching clouds of despair: that they had almost won it all at Gettysburg and brought Lee’s army, the hard-pressed Confederacy, and the Southern people closer to decisive victory than ever before. It could still not be known for certain that, despite Barksdale’s and the Mississippi Brigade’s best efforts on July 2, 1863, they would never be marching on Washington, D.C., as so vividly envisioned and almost realized at the zenith of Barksdale’s Charge.