CHAPTER 10

They Were Soon on All Sides of Us

THE MEN OF THE 4TH MICHIGAN ROSE AND DREW RATIONS WITH THEIR BRIGADE EARLY ON THE morning of July 1, but the march didn't start until around nine o'clock. Lt. Robert Campbell, the quartermaster, wrote that Col. Harrison Jeffords came to him that morning, concerned that many of the soldiers of the regiment had taken to wearing hats with brims rather than regulation forage caps. Jeffords, about 26, understood that a hat was better for keeping the hot sun off a man's head and neck, but the regiment would soon be marching into Pennsylvania—a good Union state. Hats just weren't “soldier-like” in appearance, Jeffords felt. “I want you to draw caps for those men, so that all may look alike,” the colonel said, according to Campbell.

The two men had gone to high school together, but Campbell had to tell the colonel that it would take requisitions by all the company commanders for him to get the caps. Jeffords wasn't interested in waiting. “Then I order you to get a cap for every man in the regiment who hasn't one,” he said. Campbell smiled at this. “All right, Colonel,” he replied, “but you must give me a written order to that effect.” The two officers went on about their business. When he saw Jeffords minutes later, Campbell thought the colonel would give him the order for the caps. Instead, Jeffords handed his revolver to Campbell and told him to never mind about the caps. “I was at the first Bull Run, on the Peninsula Seven Days' fighting, second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville,” Jeffords said, turning over the pistol. “In all these campaigns, I have never needed to use it, and it has been a heavy load to carry.”

Supply officers like Campbell were often with the wagon trains, vulnerable to raids like one Stuart's cavalry had just made. “You as quartermaster are liable to be mixed up with the guerillas and have much more need of it than I have,” Jeffords continued. “Besides, you have better means of transportation for heavy artillery than I have.” Campbell said he considered the colonel's remarks only half-serious, but he accepted Jeffords's sidearm. “Within a few minutes the bugle sounded,” Campbell remembered. Time to move out. The 4th Michigan began the long day's march with its brigade, division, and corps.1

The 4th Michigan's part of the column reached the state line in the afternoon. James Houghton of Company K wrote that Jeffords ordered the regiment to a halt after they crossed into the Keystone State. “Men,” he said, “you are now standing on free soil once more. Now give three cheers for the free states.” The soldiers roared their approval and continued on the road to Hanover, several miles away. The troops were hailed as heroes and given sandwiches and drinks of cold water as they marched through small Pennsylvania communities. “A glorious reception was given by the ladies in all the towns we passed through,” Sergeant Hewitt noted. By around 5:00 P.M. their division reached Hanover. The column turned off the road about a mile from town, the soldiers figuring this was their bivouac. They had seen dead horses in the area and other signs of the recent fight between Stuart's troopers and Michigan cavalrymen, now under the command of the young brigadier, George Custer, with whom they'd crossed the Chickahominy at New Bridge. Lt. John Bancroft of Company H and Assistant Surgeon John Watts stopped to dine with a local woman Bancroft described as an authoress, while the soldiers made their meals. But just 90 minutes after halting, they were told there would be no bivouac here—the march must go on. “While eating our supper at Hanover we had heard the heavy guns to the westward,” John Bancroft wrote years later.

The men of the Fifth Corps fell in, tramping toward Gettysburg, where other Union troops had for hours been engaged in bloody battle. Evening came on, then twilight and then moonlit night, but the march continued. A rumor that George McClellan had once been more made their commander—false but heartening—swept through the ranks, Lt. Orvey S. Barrett of Company B wrote, and officers repeated it, boosting the men's spirits. “An Aide-de-camp came riding along, saying: ‘Boys, keep good courage, McClellan is command of the army again,’” Barrett wrote. He said that he knew this was false, as did Lieutenant Campbell. But the soldiers cheered and threw their hats in the air.

It was around midnight when the tired soldiers halted and the regiment's diarists got their chance to record the events of July 1; their corps had covered over 20 miles. Irvin Miner of Company F wrote that they were within five miles of Gettysburg, “tired sore and nearly played out.” The soldiers moved off the road, ate cold salt pork and hardtack, and lay down in some woods to sleep. “We were well aware,” Houghton wrote later, “that the next day would be a day of bloodshed.”²

Gettysburg

“Rose at 4 A.M.” Henry Seage wrote about the morning of July 2, “had inspection [of] arms.” Before daylight, the march of the final few miles to Gettysburg began. The regiment, with its brigade, division, and corps, turned off the Hanover Road as they neared the Confederate-held town, going left, or south, and then west on country roads that took them to the Union army's position on the hills south of town. Lieutenant Bancroft wrote that the regiment advanced, probably with others from their brigade and division, back north toward the Hanover Road, but they were recalled before 8:00 A.M. Their brigade's commander, Col. Jacob B. Sweitzer, reported that their division was initially placed by a farm on what he understood was the Union right. This was near Wolf's Hill, high ground east of Rock Creek and south of the Hanover Road. A regiment from their brigade, the 9th Massachusetts, was chosen here for picket duty and detached, leaving the 4th Michigan, 62nd Pennsylvania, and 32nd Massachusetts to comprise Sweitzer's command.

Soon the brigade was shifted with the rest of the First Division and Fifth Corps from the right of the Union line toward the center and left. Sweitzer reported his Second Brigade was “moved a considerable distance to the left.” This was about a mile to the southwest, the point where Rock Creek passed under the road to Baltimore; soon it was moved further west. Bancroft also noted this shifting movement in account he wrote in his diary shortly after the battle. “[W]e formed in Mass and moved southward to the Baltimore and Gettysburg Pike up which we moved over a small creek and lay in the sun upon the hillside until about three[-thirty] P.M.,” he wrote. This high ground was called Powers Hill, and some accounts say the men rested in an orchard. “There we remained until late in the afternoon (the precise time I do not remember), and the command had a few hours' quiet and rest,” Sweitzer wrote. This wasn't quiet in the conventional sense; it was just that his men weren't under fire at that moment as cannon periodically sounded. The day was warm and partly cloudy; Bancroft noted the 4th Michigan moved into an open field, where the men lay down. As the sun rose higher in the lengthening afternoon, their brigade commander wondered if they would become engaged in battle at all.3

Across the woods and fields a mile or more west of where the Fifth Corps rested, two Confederate divisions moved into position parallel to and across the Emmitsburg Road, which ran south-southwest from Gettysburg. These Rebels would launch Lee's second day attack on the left of the Army of the Potomac. On the first day of the battle, July 1, attacking Confederates badly hurt the army's First Corps and sent it and the Eleventh Corps retreating through Gettysburg to Cemetery Hill, a prominent height just south of town. More Union forces arrived through the night. As a result, this high ground—a natural defensive position, was held in the early morning hours of July 2 by four strong Union corps as well as the Eleventh and the damaged First corps, their line stretching nearly two miles. The Fifth Corps now waited in reserve near the center of this line. At the same time the Sixth Corps was marching north up the Baltimore Pike to join them.

Gen. George Meade's forces should have been in a good position to defend against another attack. But early in the afternoon the commander on the Union left, a politically connected appointee, Gen. Dan Sickles of New York, ignored Meade's orders and shifted his Third Corps from that north-south ridge line anchored by a rocky hill called Little Round Top. He moved his corps as much as three-quarters of a mile forward through the landscape of boulders and ridges, oddly shaped farm fields and woodlots. This created gaps in a now-uneven line, the Union army's left wing hanging, thin and vulnerable.

At about 3:00 P.M. Meade ordered the Fifth Corps to march to the left to support Sickles. When the order reached the First Division, officers shouted, bugles and drums sounded, and the soldiers shouldered their rifles and packs in the afternoon heat. The 4th Michigan's James Houghton wrote that the men were issued 20 extra cartridges, “which we put in our haversacks where we could get them handy.” The brigades of their division—the Third, the Second, and the First—marched west from Powers Hill on a lane called the Granite School House Road about three-quarters of a mile to the Taneytown Road. “We then proceeded to the front and left by a small by-road,” Bancroft wrote of this movement, “passed the ammunition train on our left[,] just as they were drawing off, the rebels having begun to shell them.” His reference to the Confederate barrage meant it was about 4:00 P.M.4

Other accounts indicate the First Division column marched south on the Taneytown Road for a short distance and turned right, moving west across country and through some woods. They were greeted by the familiar punch and roar of Confederate artillery on hills to the west and the reply of Union guns. The 4th Michigan was probably near the center of the column as it briefly halted its march to join the left wing of the Union army. The zigzag line ahead of them was held by three brigades from Sickles's Third Corps and bolstered by artillery batteries. It covered about a thousand yards, jutting southeast to northwest from a strange glacial pile of gigantic boulders called Devil's Den, to their left, over sometimes broken ground variously covered by trees, fields, scrub growth, and stone fences to the Emmitsburg Road. As artillery echoed over this landscape, Rebel infantry emerged from the woods to the south and west.⁵

Two brigades of Confederate troops, including some of the South's finest fighting men in the division of Gen. John Bell Hood, led the assault, advancing east over the farms in front of a large, tree-covered hill called Round Top, which lay just south of Little Round Top. Their assignment was to smash and turn the Union left. Less than an hour earlier, Meade's chief engineer, Gen. Gouverneur Warren, found out that Sickles had left Little Round Top undefended. He was stunned, for it was clear that a major attack by Rebel infantry was about to begin. He immediately sent aides to find a brigade to hold that hill. Those aides rode hurriedly down to find Fifth Corps officers who could provide troops, and it was about this point that the head of the First Division of the Fifth Corps stopped on the low ground northwest of Little Round Top, the men waiting for officers to determine where they would take their positions.⁶

Warren's urgent message had reached General Sykes, the Fifth Corps commander, and he sent an aide riding up to the First Division's column, looking for Brig. Gen. James Barnes. The aide was intercepted by Col. Strong Vincent, commander of the division's Third Brigade. When told that troops were needed to hold Little Round Top, Vincent turned his brigade and made for the hill, arriving there just ahead of Hood's men. That left Barnes's division with only two brigades to help Sickles—the First Brigade, under Col. William S. Tilton, and the short-handed Second Brigade, which included the 4th Michigan with its 316 enlisted men and 26 officers. They moved forward on the Millerstown Road, soon to be known as the Wheatfield Road, to join the Third Corps.

As the Second Brigade marched on, Colonel Sweitzer reported, they skirted some woods. This was likely a triangular-shaped parcel of trees called Trostle's Woods that lay just north of the wheat field owned by farmer John Rose. There was also a larger woodlot nearby on undulating land to the south, called Rose's Woods. This lot was roughly five hundred yards wide with a strip of trees at its western end, extending north toward the Wheatfield Road. The Wheatfield, estimated by different historians to have been between 11 and 20 acres in size, stood directly east of this band of trees and north of the main portion of Rose's Woods. In addition to the trees bordering the Wheatfield, there were stone fences enclosing it along the southern and eastern sides. The Wheatfield Road ran at an angle along the northern edge of the field.

As the guns pounded and the 4th Michigan marched with its brigade by the yellow field of grain, the next wave of Confederates in two more brigades came from the west, heading toward Devil's Den and Rose's Woods. Some of the soldiers the 4th Michigan would soon face were among these attackers—Georgians under Brig. Gen. George “Tige” Anderson. The Georgians had a terrible march across the fields as Union artillery fired. The 4th Michigan filed into position in the woods on the western end of the Wheatfield, a stand of trees about 500 feet wide. “There was also a battery planted there that was feeding the Rebbels with grape and canister as fast as they could,” James Houghton wrote. Possibly he was referring to guns positioned along the Wheatfield Road just west of where the Michigan men waited, but he may have meant a New York battery there in the Wheatfield.

The wooded strip where the 4th Michigan and its brigade took their position stood in part on a wide rocky ledge the soldiers later called Stony Hill and also on some low ground slightly west and south of the Wheatfield, below the hill. Some of this low ground was open and wet but some was covered by the trees and brush of Rose's Woods. The Stony Hill wasn't a commanding height like the Round Tops, but a rise of ground like a wide rocky shelf above the field, reaching a height of several feet. Their brigade occupied this area, with the 4th Michigan on the Stony Hill at the far right of their line, facing west-northwest. Those who had a view from the trees saw rolling land stretching west toward the Peach Orchard and the Emmitsburg Road. Their comrades from Tilton's First Brigade connected in Rose's Woods on their left, at an angle. Tilton's troops faced south.

A few hundred yards further south, Sickles's men on the extreme left of this jagged line became involved in firefights with attacking Rebels. These Union soldiers near Devil's Den and the southeastern portion of Rose's Woods were under the command of Brig. Gen. J. H. Hobart Ward. Other troops, mostly under the command of Col. Philippe Regis de Trobriand, were posted along the southern edge of the Wheatfield, linking with Tilton's brigade. Volleys of rifle fire spread down their line as Anderson's Georgians and other Confederate troops came on. The shooting intensified and at least two Union regiments fighting in the trees southeast of the 4th Michigan's position retreated north across the Wheatfield when they were hit by Confederate fire from the front and flank.7

The arrival of Tilton's and Sweitzer's brigades allowed other Third Corps regiments on or near the Stony Hill to join the fighting near Devil's Den and in Rose's Woods, where they were soon needed. “We…marched near to where the Third Corps was fighting,” Houghton recalled. “The regiment that we was to relieve was stationed in the north end of a narrow strip of woods that lies directly west of the Wheatfield.” But with no Confederates in front of the 4th Michigan or the regiment to their left, the 62nd Pennsylvania, Colonel Sweitzer ordered them to change positions, turning to the south to support the one regiment of their brigade, the 32nd Massachusetts, that became involved in the fighting on the lower, southern portion of the wooded hill. The 4th Michigan continued waiting.

An anonymous account of the battle in a letter by an officer of the 4th Michigan (probably Lt. John Bancroft), published in Detroit a month after the battle, echoed these preliminaries. “[W]e formed, in the edge of a wood, facing west, a battery in open ground on our right, and part of [the] Third Corps on our left, facing south, and engaged with the enemy in the woods to our left,” the officer wrote. Bancroft's diary and postwar Gettysburg account, in substantially similar language, agreed. Though the 4th Michigan wasn't in the front line, bullets were “whizzing, buz[z]ing and spatting all around us,” Houghton remembered. “We were ordered to [lie] down as we could do no firing while there was other troops in front of us.” Soon the walking wounded, soldiers on their way to find medical attention, began to limp by. Houghton said that those who could do so shouted at the waiting Michigan soldiers, “Go in and give them hell!” The 4th Michigan hadn't yet fired a shot.8

Unable to break the Union line in Rose's Woods, General Anderson pulled his brigade back and the firing died away. It was about 5:00 P.M., possibly later. But this lull didn't last long; Anderson's troops attacked again as more Confederates came into the fight—about 1,800 South Carolinians under Brig. Gen. Joseph Kershaw, followed by another brigade under Brig. Gen. Paul Semmes. Kershaw's target was the Stony Hill and the guns that stood nearby along the Wheatfield Road. Again Union artillery cut down scores of Rebels as they advanced. Late afternoon was turning to evening and Union soldiers in the woods on the southern part of the Stony Hill traded rifle fire with some of Kershaw's and Anderson's troops.

As the Confederates' renewed attack commenced on the Stony Hill and toward the Wheatfield Road to the northwest, a surprising order from General Barnes came to Colonel Sweitzer: When it came time to pull out, his brigade should fall back to the cover of Trostle's Woods. That order upset the commander of the 32nd Massachusetts, whose men had been more involved in the fighting than any other regiment in the Second Brigade so far. Prepare to retreat? But why? Yet Sweitzer soon learned that Tilton's First Brigade, to his left, was indeed pulling out. Soon Barnes ordered Sweitzer to withdraw his troops, too, concerned his men were about to be flanked by the Rebels attacking across the fields to the west. Barnes thought his two brigades should fall back and form a new line, since there was only a line of Union artillery to his right—guns that were vulnerable because they were unsupported by infantry. He was also concerned about the large gap between those batteries and his men's position on Stony Hill.

Much to the surprise of Colonel de Trobriand, Barnes's First and Second brigades, including the 4th Michigan, dropped back. And to the surprise of Confederate General Kershaw, the Union forces on the Stony Hill “seemed to melt away.” The 4th Michigan, along with its fellow regiments, withdrew to the north, across the Wheatfield Road into Trostle's Woods. Now the remaining regiments of the Third Corps near Devil's Den and the Wheatfield, some fighting stubbornly and incurring high casualties, were driven back. Nearly two hours had gone by since the Confederate attack began, and so far the 4th Michigan had played no role in the fighting. As their brigade marched to Trostle's Woods across from the Wheatfield, more Confederate infantry was heading their way.9

The Wheatfield

About the same time the 4th Michigan was pulled off Stony Hill with its brigade, a critical message reached Maj. Gen. Winfield Hancock, commander of the Second Corps, near the center of the Union line: Reinforcements were needed on the Union left. Hancock ordered a division under Gen. John C. Caldwell into the fight and soon Caldwell's four brigades were forming in or near Trostle's Woods. As Sweitzer's and Tilton's brigades waited in the western part of those woods, Caldwell's brigades marched out, one after another, across the Wheatfield Road into combat in Rose's Woods and on the Stony Hill. In the meantime, Sickles's vulnerable positions were hit hard and driven back by advancing Confederates. Caldwell's fresh troops confronted Anderson's and Kershaw's brigades, forcing most of these Rebel soldiers to retreat. It appeared that the Union reinforcements halted the Confederate assault and regained lost ground. The Rebel troops had fought hard and suffered serious losses even before Caldwell's division drove them off the Stony Hill and out of the Wheatfield. Most retreated into Rose's Woods.¹⁰

As the 4th Michigan waited with its brigade in Trostle's Woods, their part in this bloody battle began to unfold. Colonel Sweitzer initially reported that his men had been in those trees for 15 minutes (though in a supplemental report he admitted he couldn't say how long it was) when General Caldwell rode up to him. “[He] said his brigade was driving the enemy like hell over yonder in the woods, pointing at the same time beyond the wheat field, and asked if I would give him the support of my brigade,” Sweitzer reported. “I referred him to General Barnes, who was not far off.” Caldwell quickly consulted with Barnes, who gave his consent. The 4th Michigan and the other two regiments of Sweitzer's brigade, about 1,000 soldiers and officers in all, were called to attention and Barnes made brief, patriotic remarks. The soldiers responded with a cheer, “and we started off across the wheat-field in a line parallel to the road, our right flank resting on the woods,” Sweitzer wrote in his initial report. That “right flank” of his brigade was the 4th Michigan, at the western edge of the field.

In the moments before they advanced, it is likely that Colonel Jeffords gave commands to his regiment, with the color guard, bearing the U.S. flag Lieutenant Campbell picked out back in March, stepping out six paces ahead of their line. Officers of the three regiments of Sweitzer's brigade would have barked orders down the lines: “Regiment, shoulder arms—forward, march!” The Michigan troops, along with the Pennsylvania and Massachusetts regiments, moved south over the Wheatfield. James Houghton recalled that “we moved up in line of battle to the South end of this narrow strip of woods that lies west of the Wheat field.” The brigade commander noted that the 4th Michigan headed into low ground covered by brush and trees, the area where the 32nd Massachusetts had been posted earlier.¹¹

But all was not going well for the Union soldiers in the woods up ahead. Houghton said that in the minutes before they'd moved out, he saw other Union outfits—“the battery and Infantry that was in front of us”—stop firing and move in the direction of Little Round Top. They were retreating, pulling back to the east. The guns he mentioned were Capt. George Winslow's Battery D, 1st New York Light Artillery, which had been posted in the Wheatfield. Other Union troops in Rose's Woods were fiercely engaged by Rebel troops, and Union batteries to the northwest at the Peach Orchard were about to come under attack by the brigades of Confederate generals William Wofford and William Barksdale. Lieutenant Bancroft saw wounded Union troops streaming back, and he also figured they were from the Third Corps, though certainly many of these soldiers were from Caldwell's division of the Second Corps. Other witnesses indicated some of the retreating soldiers soon included the 4th Michigan's own comrades in the First Brigade. “The 3rd Corps were badly cut up in the woods and wounded men were coming back through our ranks when we were ordered forward,” Bancroft wrote. Houghton said that the 4th Michigan “moved up and occupied their position.” Now it was after 6:00 P.M.12

There was good reason for these Union soldiers to retreat. Though Rebel troops from the brigades of Anderson, Kershaw, and Semmes had been driven out of those trees earlier when Caldwell's division hit them, they refused to quit. Along with Wofford's men coming from the west, they reformed and advanced. In fighting that was sometime hand-to-hand, these Confederates engaged and enveloped the Union troops and drove them back. With some Northern soldiers running out of ammunition and others seeing their positions being turned, Caldwell's men, like the Union soldiers who'd been out near the Emmitsburg Road, retreated. Many were killed and wounded. Some accounts say that it was at this point that Caldwell turned to General Barnes for additional troops—he needed these men because his own brigades were hard pressed. The Union line from Rose's Woods to the Peach Orchard and beyond was giving way.¹³

Though the sound of fighting raged that evening, James Houghton wrote, there seemed to be a lull just before the 4th Michigan marched across the Wheatfield with the other two regiments of their brigade. Col. Sweitzer reported his troops advanced to the stone fence in the trees south of the field, the 4th Michigan on the far right. He believed his men were going to support “our friends in the woods in front,” and that Tilton's First Brigade was going to connect with his Michigan troops in the trees up ahead. In reality, the only friends in the woods up ahead were retreating. In the letter extract published in Detroit a month later, the unnamed 4th Michigan officer wrote that his regiment had skirmishers out in those woods before the brigade advanced, but these skirmishers came back and rejoined the regiment—a point made by Lieutenant Bancroft in both his July 2 diary entry and in an account he would send to the Michigan adjutant general years later.

Even as the 4th Michigan marched south, Rebels they couldn't yet see were advancing fast on their right, heading for the trees on the Stony Hill. These were Wofford's men, helping silence the batteries at the Peach Orchard and Wheatfield Road along with Barksdale's troops. With Kershaw's men they soon reached the Stony Hill west and northwest of the 4th Michigan's position. At the same time to the south and southwest, the brigades of Anderson and Semmes again advanced into Rose's Woods.

“We moved across the wheatfield and opened fire in response to the stray shots that were coming from the rebels in our front,” Bancroft wrote. Those shots, fired from points south of the 4th Michigan line, were probably from Anderson's men. The unnamed officer from the 4th Michigan whose account was published after the battle stated that Company A was on the far right of the regiment's line as it marched to its position—a distance he estimated was about 500 feet—and some of its men saw Rebels coming from the west. Word was sent to Col. Jeffords about these Confederates on their right, the officer wrote. The regiment came to a halt as the firing commenced with the Rebels in the trees directly before them. Now the 4th Michigan and the other two regiments from their brigade would discover they had marched into a deadly situation.14

It was a hot evening in Rose's Woods. Houghton said he and his comrades opened fire “in good earnest” at “the Rebs that was south of us.” These included Capt. George Hillyer's 9th Georgia Infantry Regiment, part of Tige Anderson's brigade. Because this regiment had lost so many officers, Hillyer was in command. The 9th Georgia had been fighting since shortly after 4:00 P.M. Hillyer wrote that he and his men were in line with their brigade near a branch of Plum Run that flowed through Rose's Woods. The Georgians took cover in the bed of the creek, in the low ground near the southwest corner of the Wheatfield, their rifles resting on the top of the bank. Through the trees they had watched Union troops cross the Wheatfield.

While Hillyer didn't know the identity of these Northern men, historian Harry P. Pfanz believed they must have been from the 4th Michigan. Hillyer saw a Yankee color-bearer marching proudly, a handsome man carrying a fresh-looking flag, several feet in advance of his regiment's line, which halted in the woods. This soldier waved the flag, seeming to flaunt it at the Confederates, before he stepped back into position. Hillyer said this line of Union troops opened fire at about 40 yards from the Georgians, but the volley passed over his men, protected by the creek embankment. He ordered his men to fire and they did so rapidly. Soon through the smoke he could only see the legs of the Union soldiers—and then the smoke was so thick that he couldn't see anything.¹⁵

But as the men in the 4th Michigan's line traded fire with these Georgians, some heard “a rattling of canteens and a heavy tread of Infantry” coming from behind them, Houghton said. It was the sound of Confederate troops coming through the trees over the Stony Hill. One old soldier from the 4th Michigan's Company E later said that the wood and bushes where they stood were such a thick tangle that the men couldn't see what was happening on their flank: “[W]e entered an underbrush so dense we were unable to see through to defend ourselves,” recalled Jacob H. Perine. Both his brigade commander and a historian of the 32nd Massachusetts, which had been engaged with the Rebels here earlier, gave similar descriptions of this low ground on which the 4th Michigan stood, facing south.¹⁶

The account of the officer published in Detroit stated that Lieutenant Colonel Lumbard, on the right, tried to turn that portion of the regiment to face the new threat, but it was too late. With the attention of most of the 4th Michigan focused on the Confederates before them, this Rebel attack hit the right and rear of the regiment with effective, deadly surprise and force. Lt. Michael Vreeland of Company I, part of the regiment's right wing, would tell his son that the first he realized that Confederates were on their flank was when a bullet struck him in the back. It tore through his lung and smashed into his ribs. According to his grandson's account of this experience, Vreeland staggered and tried to shout a warning to his men, but quickly felt blood rising in his throat. As he raised his sword to point to the enemy on their flank, another bullet struck his right hand, knocking him down. Two of the company's sergeants, William H. Jackson of Detroit and John H. Kydd, were both hit and were among the soldiers who fell dead or dying in the woods.17

Vreeland's small company was essentially wiped out in the moments that followed. In an undated statement made after the battle, Vreeland described to the War Department the dire circumstances to explain how his men lost 22 Springfield rifled muskets and other equipment. “The Right Wing of the Regiment to which my Company belonged was surrounded by the Enemy,” Vreeland wrote. “Of my Company five (5) men were killed, ten (10) wounded and the remainder taken prisoners.” Corporals Charles H. Ladd, about 25, and David Laird, 19, both of Company A and also part of the regiment's right wing, were among many others hit. Ladd was killed, and Laird fatally wounded in the back. Lieutenant Bancroft of Company H agreed with Vreeland's description of the attack. “[T]hey were soon on all sides of us,” he wrote of the Rebels.¹⁸

In the meantime the Second Brigade's commander, Colonel Sweitzer, saw Union regiments retreating from the woods just beyond the 4th Michigan, but he thought these troops were being relieved by other Union infantry protecting the Michigan soldiers' right flank. “I observed also that there was considerable firing diagonally toward our rear from these woods, which I thought were shots from our troops aimed over us at the enemy in the woods beyond and falling short,” he wrote. Yet there were so many bullets ripping from the trees west of the Wheatfield—how could all these shots be accidental? The soldier carrying the brigade colors, Ed Martin, seems to have realized the truth first. “Colonel,” he said, “I'll be damned if I don't think we are faced the wrong way; the rebs are up there in the woods behind us.” As Confederate gunfire crackled from the trees and their flank attack struck the 4th Michigan, urgent messages reached Sweitzer: The enemy was enveloping the 4th Michigan and the 62nd Pennsylvania, to its left. The colonel ordered the regiments “to change front,” to turn to face these Rebels. As he gave the order, the firing around them became “rapid and severe.”¹⁹

Those men of the 4th Michigan who hadn't been killed or wounded in the volleys coming from the right and rear turned to see soldiers charging out of trees behind them. “[W]e saw that they wore the gray uniform and was not over 10 rods [165 feet] distant,” Houghton wrote; “they were on [the] double quick passing through the woods out into the Wheat Field east of us.” Jacob Perine said the Rebels pressed their attack, coming closer, and he scrambled to get away. As he and his comrades fell back, a bullet grazed his elbow and another stung his side. He'd been struck in the hip, but not seriously. A third bullet cut a button on his shirt, just above his belt. “We came out of the brush and mixed with the confederates,” Perine said of this moment. They were as close as 10 or twelve feet. Though his arm was paralyzed temporarily, he was determined to escape. “And I've never run so fast in all my life,” he said. Scores of his comrades were captured. Kershaw's and Wofford's brigades pursued the escaping troops into the Wheatfield, yelling as they came.²⁰

As the Rebel musketry exploded from the woods west of the Wheatfield, Colonel Sweitzer saw his short-handed brigade had no protection from this attack. He sent an aide, Lt. John Seitz, riding back to find General Barnes across the road in Trostle's Woods. But then Barnes and his staff saw the Rebels streaming into the Wheatfield and enveloping Sweitzer's men, and they knew they had to leave quickly. Barnes's aide, Lt. Charles Ross, told the general that “he might bid goodbye to the Second Brigade, as he did not think he would see any of them come out again.” By the time Seitz reached Trostle's Woods, Barnes was gone and Confederates were coming down the Wheatfield Road. They shot Seitz's horse from under him, so he ran back to Sweitzer with the news that was already dreadfully obvious—the brigade was nearly surrounded “and in damned bad shape.” Confederate musketry was hitting the Second Brigade's line from three different directions, cutting men down. There was no help coming; Sweitzer ordered his men to retreat. “Our good Old Regiment was now in a criticle Situation,” James Houghton wrote; “there was Rebels South west, North and Northeast of us. There was now only two things for us to do[,] that was to Surrender or pass directly in front of their lines and receive the contents of their well loaded rifels.”21

John Bancroft, writing in his diary account, and Henry Seage, writing years later, agreed that Colonel Jeffords and Lieutenant Colonel Lumbard gave orders to turn the 4th Michigan to face the Rebel attack from the right and rear, so that the regiment could retreat fighting. But was there time and room to effectively execute such maneuvers while under fire at close range, as they were nearly surrounded? Some accounts said they did, but others said the situation was chaotic, with scores of Michigan men captured. The anonymous 4th Michigan officer's published account told of the regiment falling rapidly “back toward the east, in tolerable order.” But other witnesses and survivors indicated little or no order. Seage wrote to a Gettysburg historian that the regiment was executing Jeffords's order when “we became mixed up with the Rebs. Of course, it was ‘every man for himself.’” In his diary Bancroft wrote that the regiment “fell back slowly,” but years he later told the state adjutant general: “We broke crossing the Wheatfield, many of the men never left the woods and were taken prisoner.”²²

John S. Conant of Company H gave a simple description of what happened, writing to his family three days later. “Just before night my regiment went into the fight,” he wrote, “we were flanked by the enemy and lost a good many men[;] we had to break and run.” John Coxe, a private in the 2nd South Carolina Infantry, later wrote the Union retreat was indeed disordered. Part of Kershaw's brigade, he witnessed this when his comrades and Wofford's brigade charged into the trees at the west end of the Wheatfield, driving the Yankees out. “It became a regular rout,” Coxe wrote later, “and while the panic-stricken enemy fell by the scores and hundreds, Wofford lost only a few men…. Emerging from the woods on the other side, we drove the enemy across a wheat field.” A soldier-historian of the 32nd Massachusetts, on the left of the brigade line, wrote that the Confederate attack struck before Jeffords could turn his regiment. He described the attack on their brigade's right and rear, specifically on the 4th Michigan, as “curling it and the 62nd Pennsylvania up like a worm at the touch of fire, and throwing them in the greatest confusion.”²³

The Michigan soldiers were hit by what William Tolford, 32, of Company F called “a severe cross fire,” but James Houghton of Company K indicated later there was order in the retreat. “Soon the order came to about face double quick march,” Houghton wrote, “and in less than two minutes our Regiment was passing out acrost the wheat field directly in front the Rebels[.I]t was here that the crash came[,] a storm of lead swept through our ranks like hail.” As the smoke lifted from the woods between Plum Run and the southwestern corner of the Wheatfield, Captain Hillyer's Georgians stepped up the banks of the creek, for the rifle fire coming at them had died away. Hillyer walked forward, expecting to find that proud Yankee flag carrier dead or wounded, but it was as if the man had disappeared. For by the time the smoke cleared, the line of Union troops was gone, broken and pushed back by his Confederate comrades, Wofford's and Kershaw's men. The 4th Michigan's retreat was under way, moving east across the bloody Wheatfield with Sweitzer's other two regiments. Hillyer's men joined in the pursuit.24

As the Second Brigade's line broke and men fell back, there was close-quarters fighting, “personal combat,” and firing at point-blank range. Colonel Sweitzer reported that the 4th Michigan and the 62nd Pennsylvania had “become mixed up with the enemy, and many hand-to-hand conflicts occurred.” One was the struggle for the 4th Michigan's U.S. flag. A military unit's colors were a tempting prize for the enemy, and the regiment's national banner could hardly have been more vulnerable than it was at this moment. The unnamed officer whose account appeared in the Detroit Free Press explained that while the 4th Michigan's right wing was broken up and “mostly taken prisoners,” the men from the regiment's left wing followed the flag of the 62nd Pennsylvania as they hurriedly retreated. That left only “a very small squad near our colors,” the officer wrote, when a bloody melee for the 4th Michigan's flag occurred.²⁵

A regiment's flag (or flags, if a regiment had a national banner and a blue regimental flag) was carried at the center of their line of battle, where it would be the most visible, and this officer's description indicated that the 4th Michigan's U.S. flag and color guard was where it was supposed to be. But with the regiment's right broken and the left retreating, the color guard paid a heavy price. Lt. Edwin H. Gilbert, 23, of Company D informed the brother of Charles W. Phelps that Charles lost his life protecting the flag. “The day your Brother was killed,” Gilbert stated, “he was a Corporal of the Color Guard and was killed defending the same and the 4th Michigan could not boast of a braver or better Soldier.” Phelps was hit by a gunshot. Harrison Daniels of Company G would write that his friend William H. Plummer, then about 23 and from Washtenaw County, was also a member of the color guard. Plummer was wounded in the leg and remained on the field until Daniels found him after the battle. Sgt. Edwin G. Tripp, 21, of Company H, from the town of Mosherville, may have been a member of the color guard, for he would be remembered later as a man who “fell pierced by five rebel bullets at Gettysburg in defense of the old flag.” Tripp died of wounds to his legs and buttocks less than two weeks later. He was one of many men to suffer multiple gunshot wounds.²⁶

Corporal Thomas Tarsney, a Company E soldier from the community of Ransom in Hillsdale County, was said to have been carrying the 4th Michigan's flag that day, Henry Seage stated in a letter to a Gettysburg historian years later. “It is reported that just at this juncture our color bearer Thos. Tarsney either surrendered or threw down the colors and ran,” he wrote. Tarsney, then 20, escaped while his teenaged brother, John C. Tarsney, was wounded and captured.²⁷

One of the attacking Confederates grabbed the flag. “Col. Jeffords seeing our colors (close by) in possession of the Rebs called on my brother [Richard Watson Seage] who was the adjutant of the regiment and 1st Lieutenant M[ichael J.] Vreeland commanding Co. ‘I’ (since died) to rescue the colors,” Henry Seage wrote in 1884. “Those three made a dash for the colors.” This description of Vreeland in the fight for the flag is at odds with the account Vreeland shared with his family, in which he described being shot as the Rebel assault struck the regiment's right and rear, as well as his own statement that his company, part of the right wing, was surrounded and wiped out. Vreeland's grandson wrote that the struggle for the flag took place “a few yards away” from where Vreeland had fallen wounded.²⁸

It was a bloody and personal fight. Henry Seage claimed in his later account that Jeffords “secured the colors or at least had his left hand on the staff,” while Lt. Richard Watson Seage swung his sword, killing the Rebel who was struggling with Jeffords. In his diary entry for July 3, 1863, however, Henry Seage wrote that Jeffords fought Confederates with his sword, cutting down the man who grabbed the flag. The unidentified 4th Michigan officer whose account was published in Detroit agreed, stating the colonel “cut down one or two in a melee around our colors.” R. W. Seage was near Jeffords and also “struck them down with his saber, and fell at last severely wounded,” the officer wrote. The Reverend John Seage, who wasn't present but soon learned what happened, later reminded Governor Blair of his son's actions. Richard, he wrote, “was terribly wounded in the Battle of Gettysburg defending the Colors by the side of our much love[d] Colonel Jeffords.” Richard Watson Seage was hit by two gunshots from two different directions, one striking under his right arm and another in the back below his left shoulder. Both bullets tore through his torso, one damaging his right lung; he was also bayoneted in his left leg, in the inner thigh above the knee.29

And the flag? “In the fight the colors were torn in shreds (what little remained),” Henry Seage wrote in his postwar account, “By this time these three were surrounded by Rebs, and in the act of fighting the way out, Col. Jeffords was killed, by bayonet thrust through the body.” In fact, various soldiers, Colonel Sweitzer, Lt. Col. George Lumbard, and others would write that Jeffords was not killed in action, but mortally wounded by what an army surgeon noted was a “Bayonet thrust through chest.”³⁰

John S. Conant, after telling of his regiment breaking and running, also told his family of this. “[O]ur colonel was wounded so he died the next morning,” he wrote. “There was a rebel undertook to get our colors[.] the colonel cut him down[,] then they bayoneted him and shot him[.] my Captain fell probably wounded an a prisoner.” James Houghton wrote that he was only about 30 feet away from his colonel's deadly fight for the flag when his tent mate, James Johnston, a 19-year-old man who'd been drafted from Shiawassee Township, near the town of Owosso, was shot down. Houghton heard Johnston say, “I am killed.” “The rest was groans,” Houghton wrote; “there was no help for him.”

A bullet hit Lt. Orvey Barrett of Company B in the left leg; he fell to the ground, the action surging around and then beyond him as his comrades retreated, pursued by the Rebels. The Union soldiers had no cover as they stumbled back, and the Confederates kept up their fire. According to Michael Vreeland's grandson, a Rebel stood over the helpless lieutenant, ready to stab him with a bayonet, when an officer stopped that soldier. Though the fighting again raged in the Wheatfield a short time later when other Union forces hit back, Barrett said there was nothing these soldiers could do for those who'd fallen. “They had no time to scoop any of the wounded,” Barrett wrote, “as they had all they could attend to in getting out themselves.” John Seage would tell the governor of Michigan his son remained on the battlefield until “the next day.”³¹

Sweitzer's brigade hurried off the field now littered with dead and wounded men. “[We] were driven back with a heavy loss,” Henry Seage wrote in his diary that night. The survivors of the 4th Michigan, the 62nd Pennsylvania, and the 32nd Massachusetts crossed the stone fence at the east end of the Wheatfield. There were friends here, Union soldiers who rose up from behind the wall to fire into the pursuing Confederates, Houghton wrote; their “deadly volley…checked the Rebels and sent them back.” His brigade comrades weren't the only Union soldiers retreating. While they'd gone in to support Caldwell's division, two brigades of U.S. Army regulars from the Fifth Corps's Second Division joined the fighting further to the left in the Wheatfield and Rose's Woods. After a short fight, these men were also driven back and retreated to Little Round Top.32

Captain James B. McLean of Livingston County, commanding Company K and wounded in the left leg and heel and chin, managed to limp off the field, helped by his men. As they made it to the protection of Union guns, reinforcements and soldiers reforming along lines on Cemetery Ridge, McLean asked if Houghton would get him to one of the hospitals set up by army surgeons. “He put his hand on my Sholder and hobbled along,” Houghton wrote. He believed they took a road that wound between the Round Tops, but no such road then existed. Perhaps he referred to a road that lay just north of Little Round Top. While he and others the aided wounded, officers regrouped the remnants of their companies. With an initial estimate of over 171 men from the 4th Michigan killed, wounded, missing, and others scattered, less than 100 soldiers gathered when Lt. Col. George Lumbard tried calling the regiment together after its brigade reached Little Round Top. A letter by a 4th Michigan officer noted there were only 50 men initially, with the number eventually growing to 80.

“With [our] Lt. Col. we rallied by a battery on the hill and met the Pennsylvania] Reserves just going in to regain the ground as darkness set in,” Bancroft wrote in his diary. Those Pennsylvania Reserves, in two brigades, made up the Fifth Corps' Third Division. They charged from the north slope of Little Round Top and drove the Confederates back into the Wheatfield. Other Rebel soldiers were ordered to fall back, since they had no reserves to meet the fresh Union troops. As night fell Confederates occupied the western part of Rose's Woods and the Stony Hill, the ground where some of the 4th Michigan's wounded lay.33

The fighting ended as evening gave way to night. Along Cemetery Ridge to the Round Tops stood reformed units, newly arrived Union reinforcements and guns. It was the position that General Meade had wanted in the first place, but that General Sickles, now badly wounded, abandoned by moving his corps out to the Emmitsburg Road. His Third Corps had been effectively destroyed. In front of the hill where the survivors of the 4th Michigan gathered, out in the field, rocks, and the woods lay thousands of dead and wounded men. James Houghton said that while he helped his captain to a hospital, the men of the regiment, their hands and faces smeared with burnt powder, were formed in a defensive line along a path on the western face of Little Round Top that evening.³⁴

At some point during the night, these men were moved north with the other outfits from their brigade and division to the edge of Weikert's Woods. Bancroft wrote that he and others worked until after midnight, helping to gather the wounded. Henry Seage bedded down with one of his comrades, who made it off the field slightly wounded. Sgt. John Hewitt of Company E from Hillsdale County sat down and took out his diary. “Having marched 120 miles in 5 days we took a position near Gettysburg,” he wrote. “here we met the Rebels & the battle was terrific[.] here the Col. Jeffords was run through with a Rebel bayonet while attempting to retake the colors which are captured.” This terrible event—their colonel stabbed trying to rescue the flag—was similarly recorded by Henry Seage in his July 3 diary entry and John S. Conant in a letter home, as well as in the battle report of their division commander, Brig. Gen. James Barnes. And it was reported and published a month later in Detroit in an extract of the letter from that 4th Michigan officer.³⁵

At least 25 men had been killed from the 4th Michigan that day, and at least three more would die of their wounds in the days ahead, with others surviving for weeks before succumbing to complications. A modern tabulation would show that 43 from the regiment had been killed or mortally wounded or were missing and presumed killed. Some 66 men were initially reported as wounded, with even more men missing. Men who made it off the field knew that that some of those taken prisoner were also wounded. Lt. Col. George Lumbard soon reported 79 officers and men from the 4th Michigan had been taken prisoner, a number that included Company F's Corporal Irvin Miner. Nineteen of these captured men would die of disease, wounds, or the effects of starvation and Rebel violence over the next two years. But 18-year-old Albert Boies, who'd lost two fingers when he was wounded in the right hand, was only briefly a prisoner. Captured by a lad his age from the 24th Georgia Infantry, Boies was one of the few men who managed that night to escape back to Union lines. He was lucky. His regiment went into battle with 342 men and officers; it came out with 139.³⁶

Lt. Orvey Barrett, like scores of other wounded, lay on the battlefield for several hours before he was brought back to one of the Union hospitals. Henry Seage's diary reflects that he wouldn't learn until the next day that his brother Richard Watson Seage was carried back to a hospital after the battle. Not far from these wounded comrades, near the western edge of the field, Lieutenant Vreeland was also alive but severely wounded. He told his son later that his last recollection of the day “was of the blood-red sun sinking in the west through the smoke and haze of battle…a sun he never expected to see again.”37

After nightfall, ambulances and stretcher bearers went out on to the battlefield. So did volunteers like Lieutenant Bancroft. Some veterans later said there was an informal truce in the Wheatfield area, which lay between the pickets, but others said Rebel pickets fired at those who ventured into the field. The Fifth Corps of which the 4th Michigan was part had 81 ambulance crews working until 4:00 A.M. July 3, bringing in 1,300 wounded. Other Union corps also had ambulances and stretcher bearers at work, so the ultimate number of battlefield casualties brought in that night, though not reflected in official reports, was much higher. Some of the 4th Michigan's wounded were closer to Confederate lines than their own and even behind their picket line. Frank Clark, 21, from Morenci, in Company F, had suffered a shattered leg. He was removed by Confederates and taken to one of their hospitals at a farm some three miles west of Gettysburg. Mark W. Taylor, 23, of Company E, was also badly wounded and near Rebel lines; a Confederate picket gave him a drink of water.

But many of the 4th Michigan's wounded were in the Wheatfield area and taken to Union field hospitals that night. Barrett said he, with others, was loaded into an ambulance at about 2:00 A.M., July 3. “Groans and oaths of the wounded were heard on every hand,” he wrote. Lieutenant Vreeland, too, was carried back to Union lines. “After the battle was over he was found by his brave comrades still alive, [and] sent to the hospital where he was kindly cared for,” stated a Civil War–era newspaper clipping filed with Vreeland's papers. Harrison Jeffords survived his bayonet wound for several hours. “Col. Jeffords died to day at 4:15 am,” Sergeant Hewitt noted in his journal on July 3.³⁸

Who carried Harrison Jeffords off the battlefield and when remains uncertain. Did his own men carry him off in the retreat from the Wheatfield? Or was he, like Vreeland, Richard W. Seage, and Barrett, removed hours later under the cover of darkness? While a survivor of the battle would state in a stirring speech years later that 4th Michigan men carried Jeffords and the flag off the field, this is not reflected in the available contemporaneous diaries, letters, records, or reports from members of the 4th Michigan.³⁹ Nor do Jeffords's records answer the question of who removed him. Henry Seage's diary entry for July 3, 1863, showed he was sent that morning to collect Jeffords' body at a Union field hospital, and he wrote about what had happened to the colonel:

 

Started with a stretcher with some of the Pioneer Corps & went about a mile to the front to a Hospital to get Col. Jeffords. Soon found him & brot [sic] him down to our Regimental Hosptl. He died yesterday from wounds. One ball through the leg & a bayonet wound through the side. The Col. was killed in trying to save the colors. The colors fell and a Reb got them. The Col. cut the Reb down with his sword and another Reb run his Bayonet through him. The Pioneers carried him back & will try to send him home.40

 

Henry Seage wrote further in his diary that after he brought the colonel's body back from that unspecified hospital at the front to the regimental hospital, he went on to a division hospital, where he set up a tent and got dinner. Now he learned that his brother Richard had been brought in from the field alive. It appears that Henry's statement that “the pioneers carried [Jeffords] back” referred to the unnamed men who had gone with him that morning to bring the colonel's body from a hospital so arrangements could be made to bury him in Michigan. But could it mean stretcher bearers brought him off the darkened battlefield, dying, in the hours after the fighting ended? Could it mean that they carried him back as the regiment retreated on the evening of July 2?

The report of Capt. James A. Bates, the Fifth Corps chief ambulance officer, stated that stretcher bearers went with the corps when it went into action that day, but his ambulances didn't go onto the battlefield until darkness, after the fighting ended. The letter by the unnamed 4th Michigan officer published in Detroit a month later made reference to the fact that “the point where we fought lay between the pickets all night and next day. The Colonel was helped off by some of our men, every attention being given him by those around.” This could mean that he was brought off by men of the 4th Michigan as they left the field, but it could indicate he was carried from that no-man's land between the pickets during the night, as were Barrett, Vreeland, Richard Watson Seage, and hundreds of others.⁴¹

Whenever he was removed, Jeffords received the attention of a Union doctor, though his life could not be saved. Both Colonel Sweitzer's supplemental report and a reminiscence by Lt. Robert Campbell stated Jeffords, dying, spoke. “He lived till the next day [July 3],” Sweitzer wrote, “was conscious and able to give an account of the occurrence.” What Jeffords said and to whom wasn't recorded by Sweitzer and is not reflected in Jeffords's record. Campbell's later account agreed that a doctor looked after the colonel as he lay dying. “He lived in a semi delirious condition for a short time,” wrote Campbell in his memoir, “and the surgeon who attended him told me that the last words that he uttered were “Mother! Mother! Mother!”⁴²

Though some of the 4th Michigan survivors thought Jeffords had been killed in action or otherwise died on July 2, casualty reports by Lieutenant Colonel Lumbard and General Barnes, like Sergeant Hewitt's diary and John Conant's letter, indicated that he died on July 3. “Thrust through with a bayonet while gallantly attempting to rescue his colors from the grasp of the enemy,” Barnes's statement said of Jeffords. A veteran of the 4th Michigan who visited the battlefield in several years later would sum up what had happened in a similar manner: “Just over there on that little rise of ground, is where the gallant Jeffords fell, trying to save our colors.”⁴³

What became of the 4th Michigan's U.S. flag remains a mystery. Four days after the terrible fight in the Wheatfield, a report appeared in the New York Herald by correspondent L. A. Hendricks, giving an account of the fighting by the Fifth Corps on July 2. Within this lengthy report, datelined July 4 from corps headquarters, Hendricks gave a dramatic account of the death of Harrison Jeffords and his fight for his regiment's flag:

 

It was from a bayonet thrust that Col. Jefferds [sic] fell. It was in the thickest of the fight. A rebel officer had seized the regimental colors. Col. Jefferds shot the rebel dead with his revolver, took the colors in his own hand, reared them aloft and cried out, “Rally round the flag, boys.” A rebel bayonet pierced his vitals, and he fell dead, his hand still clutching the flagstaff. The man at whose hands he lost his life was a moment after gasping in death. A bullet from Major Hall's revolver had entered his brain. Conspicuous for gallantry in the hand to hand conflict was Capt. [William F.] Robinson. He killed six rebels with his navy revolver and was then one of the officers to snatch the musket and cartridge box of a dead soldier and kill others.44

 

These few sentences from Hendricks's report, with minor variations in wording and spelling, were quoted in part on July 8 in the Detroit Free Press. Other papers in Ann Arbor, Hudson, Monroe, and Jonesville broke this account into individual anecdotes about the three officers. At almost the same time the Herald's report was published, a story by correspondent L. L. Crouse appeared in the New York Times stating that Sweitzer's brigade had “won great honors” making a last charge on July 2 with Caldwell's troops. This, too, was recapped in the Free Press, which noted that news reports said the 4th Michigan was part of a brigade that “made some splendid charges.”⁴⁵

In reality, Sweitzer's brigade had made no splendid charges that day. It had gone into position south of the Wheatfield only to be overwhelmed and battered, with half of its 900 men killed, wounded, or captured. Jeffords was fatally wounded, not killed in action. His officers and men recorded that he fought with his sword, not a revolver. Both New York papers were correct in their overall reporting that the battle of Gettysburg was, after July 3, an important victory for the Union army. But these reports did not reflect the specific, terrible circumstances in which the 4th Michigan and its brigade suffered on July 2 when they were nearly surrounded and driven off the field.

Lt. John Bancroft saw the Herald's report and emphatically dismissed it in a July 21 letter to a friend back in Detroit. “Want of time forbids me to speak of Gettysburg and why and how we were so badly used,” he wrote, “or to say anything of the foolish lies printed by the N.Y. Herald and copied by the Mich. Papers.” That was all he said on the matter of the press reports, for Bancroft spent most of the letter discussing who would be the regiment's next commander.⁴⁶ But fifteen days after Bancroft wrote those words rejecting the news report that described Jeffords's last fight, a lengthy account appeared in the Detroit Free Press, headlined “How it Happened the Regiment was so Badly Cut up at Gettysburg.” Described as the extract of a private letter written on July 29 by an officer in the 4th Michigan, then camped near Warrenton, Virginia, the account is similar in content, phrasing, and structure to the account in Bancroft's diary and to one he would send to the state adjutant general in 1889.

Regardless of which officer wrote it, the letter published in Detroit gave an accurate description of the regiment's positions and movements and how the 4th Michigan was nearly crushed by the Confederate attack. It described how the regiment's right wing had been shattered and its men taken prisoner, and how the left wing followed the 62nd Pennsylvania in a fast retreat. This officer, who believed that Jeffords had initially been wounded by a bullet, wrote that the colonel was bayoneted in a struggle near the regiment's flag. And he wrote that “Lt. Leage” (Seage misspelled by a typesetter or editor) also fought Rebels hand-to-hand until he was wounded. “[T]here was but little chance of re-forming or making any check to a [Confederate] force coming double-quick,” this officer explained.

The officer challenged the New York Herald's account about the 4th Michigan, questioning where the information came from and disputing the individual deeds it described. “There was a report printed in the N.Y. Herald, written by a reporter who saw no one of us,” the officer charged. “Major Hall did well, as he always has, but here he had no personal encounter [close-range or hand-to-hand combat], and was distinctly impressed with the idea we ought to fall back as any.” Nor was it true that William F. Robinson shot down several Confederates with his pistol. “Capt. Robinson carries no revolvers,” the officer continued, “and was wounded immediately on leaving the [regiment's] first line.” Lastly, this officer pointed out that Jeffords died from his wounds (meaning that he had not been killed in action) and that the regiment's U.S. flag had been lost.47

Despite this officer's criticism, the New York Herald's brief account, suggesting that Jeffords had saved his regiment's flag, became the basis of the accepted version of the struggle for the colors in the Wheatfield. Adding an even more dramatic dimension to this picture of the fight was a letter written in the fall of 1884 by Henry Seage to Gettysburg historian John Bachelder. In it, Seage wrote of “the recapture of our Regt. Flag” by Jeffords, his brother Richard, and Michael Vreeland, though also noting it was torn to pieces. Historians and authors writing about this struggle have accepted Seage's statement that the 4th Michigan's flag was rescued, though no report, diary, or letter from any soldier or officer from the regiment in the days and week after the battle stated that it was saved.⁴⁸

Sgt. John Hewitt was not the only Gettysburg soldier to record the loss of the regiment's flag. The 4th Michigan officer whose letter extract was published in Detroit put it this way: “With Col. Lombard [sic] we had about 50 men that night,” he wrote, summing up the aftermath, “and got about one hundred in two or three days. It was found that we had lost the United States colors drawn from the government last winter.”⁴⁹ Others from their brigade and division noted the loss of the 4th Michigan's flag. Lt. Charles Salter from Detroit, a young officer in the 16th Michigan who survived a harrowing fight on Little Round Top, told friends about this: “The 2nd Brigade, to which the 4th Mich. belongs, did not succeed so well,” he wrote 10 days after the battle. “The rebels attacked them with a large force and drove them back about ½ mile. The 4th Mich., 62nd Penn., and 32nd Mass. Regts., all lost their colors…. A rebel officer had seized the colors of the 4th and Col. Jeffreys [sic] was defending it with his sword. He was bayoneted by the rebels, as also the color bearers, and many others who were trying to recover the colors.” Tim Regan of the 9th Massachusetts, which rejoined the battered Second Brigade in the Union line after the battle, recorded the news in his journal. “[T]he Fourth Michigan was nearly annihilated, having lost their Colonel and their colors,” he noted.⁵⁰

Another unnamed soldier from the Army of the Potomac who wrote to a Monroe newspaper that month also mentioned the loss of the 4th Michigan's flag in hand-to-hand combat. “Their loss was heavy and they lost their colors, also,” he wrote of the regiment, “but the latter circumstance was no disgrace to them, considering the great loss of life they suffered and the desperate character of their engagement.”⁵¹

Lieutenant Campbell of the 4th Michigan, giving an address in 1902, said he had heard the story that the banner had been ripped apart, but he knew it was gone. As regimental quartermaster, he had to replace it. “[O]ur flag was lost, said to have been torn to pieces in the general melee,” he said. “I procured another one for the regiment, this time the American eagle, surrounded with stars upon a blue field.” He also didn't believe news account that had Jeffords shooting the soldier he'd fought for the flag. “Some have stated that he shot the Rebel with his revolver, but he gave me his revolver the day before,” Campbell stated. “I still have it as a relict.” Two different members of the 32nd Massachusetts who authored histories of their regiment also wrote that the 4th Michigan's flag was lost. One, Francis Parker, noted that “Colonel Jeffers [sic] of the 4th Michigan…died in defence of his flag,” while the other, Henry B. James, wrote that “Jeffers…and a color sergeant of the same regiment were killed, trying to save their flag, but it was captured, and a part of the regiment were taken prisoners.”52

The U.S. flag was a considered more than just a symbol in the 19th century, but a kind of living incarnation of the country to be revered and protected at all cost. If the 4th Michigan's flag had been rescued, even if only tatters remained, it would have been treated as a sacred object in Michigan and the rest of the pro-Union North. But no memoir or reminiscence or report by a survivor ever addressed what became of the colors Henry Seage claimed 21 years later had been recaptured, yet torn into pieces. To lose a flag to the enemy was something most soldiers didn't care to admit or discuss. Indeed, most letters from the 4th Michigan's officers and men wrote about the battle said nothing about it; they wrote about their friends and neighbors killed or wounded. Of course, other Union regiments also lost flags in this fighting of July 2, and little if anything seems to have been written about them. But Colonel Jeffords had been mortally wounded fighting for his flag, and in doing so evoked a tragic but powerfully heroic image that struck an emotional and patriotic chord with those who believed in the Union cause. Adding to the enormity of Jeffords's sacrifice was that the bayonet was rarely used in Civil War combat; the fact that a Union colonel had been run through was shocking. This news quickly spread to the 4th Michigan's comrades and then far beyond in press reports.

While official reports from Wofford's brigade and Southern newspaper accounts showed that these troops captured three or four Union flags in the Wheatfield on July 2 in hand-to-hand fighting, none was identified as the U.S. flag of the 4th Michigan.⁵³ According to a history of some of the Georgia soldiers who fought in the Wheatfield, General Wofford wrote a letter that summer in which he passed along information from one of his officers about a Yankee flag that had been grabbed by one of his men that day. “Private Thomas Jolly was bayoneted and killed with a stand of colors in his hand,” Wofford wrote (mistakenly, since Jolly, of the Phillips Legion, actually survived his wound). Two of Jolly's comrades, privates named McGovern and Blanton, “avenged” Jolly by each bayoneting a man, Wofford continued, while a third Georgian named Austin grabbed a pistol from the belt of another Yankee, shooting him and two others. What happened to the flag Jolly had in his grasp? Wofford's men weren't sure. The Rebel brigadier wrote that though the Union soldiers lost that stand of colors, it was “supposed to be in the hands of some other regiment.”⁵⁴

Was this the 4th Michigan's flag, taken in a hand-to-hand fight in which at least five Union soldiers reportedly were killed or wounded? Capture of a flag was considered a triumph, and Confederate soldiers who did so were rewarded—the mid-August letter by Wofford shows that in other instances, his men handed over to officers Yankee flags they'd taken in bayonet fights. But Confederate troops had become mixed up by company and regiment during their assault, and they were blasted by Union artillery as they neared Little Round Top. Then the Pennsylvania Reserves attacked, pushing the Rebel advance back.55 After the battle of Gettysburg was over, soldiers buried the Confederate dead in mass graves on the battlefield. Could it be that Rebel officers never accounted for or reported they had taken the U.S. flag of the 4th Michigan because a Georgian or South Carolinian tucked it into his shirt or haversack, only to be killed minutes later? Did the U.S. banner for which Charles Phelps and Harrison Jeffords fought and died end up buried at Gettysburg? Or was it just that the Rebels who took that U.S. flag didn't know the identity of the regiment from whom they'd captured it?

Whatever became of the 4th Michigan's colors that day, Colonel Jeffords, a brave and respected young officer, became a martyred Union hero, memorialized on the battlefield when a monument was dedicated to his regiment with the image of an officer in bas-relief, clutching the flag. “A better man never lived,” wrote Company A's William Gibson about his colonel, who Gibson said was shot and bayoneted after “he cut down a reb in the act of capturing our colors.” James Houghton would remember Jeffords as “our Nobel [sic] Colonel.”⁵⁶

But the immediate response, for the some of the survivors from the 4th Michigan and others from their brigade, division, and corps was anger—anger at the Rebels, for stabbing a respected and well-liked officer, and anger at the Union commanders who had, as Bancroft put it, “so badly used” the regiment and the others in the Second Brigade. Soldiers obviously knew they could be killed or maimed in combat, but they were willing to take this risk as they formed in line of battle, faced the Rebels, and traded volleys with them. They had done so at Gaines' Mill and Malvern Hill a year earlier. But at Gettysburg didn't get that chance, because they'd been badly flanked, taking fire from three directions. Some held their commanders responsible for this vulnerable position. “Gen. Barnes, commanding the division…ought to have known what was going on upon his extreme right,” complained the 4th Michigan officer whose account was published a month later. “Col. Sweitzer, commanding [the] brigade, also was there [on the right, where the 4th Michigan was hit] a few minutes before the advance was made.” In later years, some soldiers continued to blame the high casualties on “the mismanagement of General Barnes,” though others who fought that day would live to read the arguments that Gen. Dan Sickles created this deadly situation by moving his Third Corps into an untenable position.

Regardless of the fate of the regiment's flag, the 4th Michigan had lost nearly 200 men and officers, killed, wounded, and missing. “I often wonder,” Henry Seage wrote later, “how it was that so many of us crossed that wheatfield and live to tell the story.”⁵⁷