Dan Sickles & The Peach Orchard of Gettysburg | History Traveler Episode 130

[Music] whenever you are on any battlefield um kind of the the unwritten rule is that topography is everything it's it's very easy to look at a flat map and do a bunch of monday morning quarterbacking and talk about what what troop movements should or should not have looked like well right now i am on the gettysburg battlefield right in the spot where some of the most notorious fighting took place at peach orchard and and nowhere that i can think of does topography play more of a role than what it does right here now i know a little bit about peach orchard i know a little bit about gettysburg but i prefer to surround myself with people who are much smarter than i am like eric lindblade who is a licensed battlefield guide here at gettysburg he is also co-host of the battle of gettysburg podcast which is a brilliant podcast that i've benefited very much from we're here with peach orchard and we're going to dive into what things look like on july 2nd of 1863. [Music] do [Music] all right so we are standing right now on what would be considered the southwest corner of joseph sherffy's peach orchard and as you can see behind me you'll see the ground kind of drops down significantly you might even see the paved road running between the fences there that is the emmitsburg this is the road that dan sickles is going to come up on july 1st he's approaching gettysburg where he is going to see this peach orchard here on this bit of high ground so when we talk about what sickles does on july 2nd we have to go back to july 1st and think about what has he seen as he arrives in the battlefield what's drawing his eye what's catching his attention and certainly this raised peach orchard along the emmitsburg road the ridge that it sits on certainly drew his eye on july 1st and of course into july 2nd and some will say have potentially catastrophic impacts on the army of potomac here gettysburg so i've moved to a different part of the battlefield and and where i am now is along cemetery ridge so if you look at the union line and that famous fish hook pattern this is kind of right in the the middle of the shaft of the fish hook and this is where general sickles would have been positioned by general mead on the second day of the battle now it was pretty well known that mead did not like sickles sickles did not like mead they did not get along very well and whenever you're standing on this part of the battlefield one thing you notice you can't see anything from here [Music] now it may be a little bit hard to tell the lay of the land from the camera angle here but but you can kind of see the along cemetery ridge we're in a low spot so this is looking to the north and you can see how it rises up and then if we look to the south you can see the round tops and this view right here is the view that dan sickles would have had now he ended up sending out a scouting party to take a look at his front he he knows what the peach orchard looks like uh and that and that there's high ground in front of him and whenever his scouting party bumped into some confederates and he knew that there were confederates that had moved to his front well that's whenever sickles makes the unilateral decision to move his lines forward you know this really kind of puts an exclamation point on why it's really good to have a battlefield guide whenever you come to some place like gettysburg because i mean we're just right here along the road right now most people are just driving by this uh and and really don't know the significance of this spot uh but whenever you know that this is where dan sickles started out and whenever you kind of walk out amongst this this area and you see how marshy and rocky and uh unsuitable for artillery it is well it kind of makes sense why dan sickles wouldn't like this spot and why he might think that mead had just kind of shoved him to an unimportant part of the battlefield anyway we're going to go over to the peach orchard now and see the spot where sickles moved his lines out to [Music] so we've moved back up here into the peach orchard and whenever you get up here and and look around the the big difference right off the bat from where we are now as opposed to where sickles line originally was is that right here i mean you can you can actually see that you have a panoramic view of seminary ridge and the area to the south so while i may not agree with the decision in the end i can see what sickles was thinking by moving his line up to this point uh the big problem that i have with where we're standing right now is there's no cover and concealment uh you're just kind of naked out here uh on on this hilltop and really from a leadership perspective uh one of the big things that sickles did is he didn't communicate up and down the chain of command he didn't communicate with his peers which you know i get it i've i've been there myself there have been times where uh you know i've kind of stepped out and made decisions but forgot to tell everybody around me and kind of watched everything blow up in my face and learn from it and we can learn from sickles too [Music] for the sake of reference i'm looking south right now from the peach orchard and this is the the rose farm that we're looking at and this is the spot where general kershaw with the confederates would have attacked the union salient here from um and i guess that the the artillery uh loaded up canister shot which is basically like turning your cannon into a giant shotgun and they just ripped the confederates apart so from where we are now we are looking west across the emmitsburg road at seminary ridge where the confederate lines were were staged up and at about 6 pm which is about a half hour after kershaw's attack uh barksdale and wolford's brigades from the confederates struck the peach orchard from the west it said that they came across the field shrieking like indians and it's it's this attack that is going to collapse the sickle salient we're gonna jump across the road here and check out the home of a family that got caught right in the crossfire of this terrible battle all right so we're standing on the property owned by joseph sherfy and his family in 1863 and as we kind of look around most people say okay you're on the battlefield i would argue we're actually in a little bit of a neighborhood in 1863. we're at the house of joseph cherfena's family if we look off into this area here you'll see the war fields and other families you'll see the wence family here you'll see the klingons over there you'll see the spanglers over there so we think about these battles are raging over the homes and property of just regular citizens and every citizen here at gettysburg had a choice you know do you stay do you go each one of those has its own bit of consequences and and yes should i stay no i shouldn't or where i go adding to this is that a lot of citizens that lived west and north of gettysburg when the battle begins in july 1st retreat to the east and to the south fleeing the guns well if the battle begins to the west into the north and then it shifts to the south and i fled to the south guess where i am now i'm right in the middle of july 2nd and the fighting so this is an area that when we look at this there's still battle damage on the surface house that we see that's canister that was being fired at confederates from the peach orchard just across the street from us their barn is going to burn to the ground as a re as a result of battle their subsistence garden is going to be trampled their beautiful orchards that they have here are going to be destroyed anything in the house is taken you can see what the impact this is going to have on the citizens here we often talk about when it comes to a battle the heroism we see of the soldiers and certainly i can spend a lifetime talking about heroism of each individual soldier that fights here but to me the unsung heroes it's the locals it's the families like the surfies or the klingons or the spanglers or the wences that when this is all said and done they've got to pick up pieces they've got to clean up these properties they've got to rebuild their lives and it's not like today we're having fema and other agencies come in to help the rebuild in many cases these families are on their own and will be for the foreseeable future [Music] whenever you're standing here at the surfy house man this really is quite amazing so there's the peach orchard up there which was the the tip of the salient for the uh the union army over here is where the confederate lines were located along seminary ridge and right in the middle is where the surfy house is so these people were just right in the crossfire and i want to go up here and show some of the the battle damage that we were just talking about so you can see these little divots knocked out of the brick here on the surfy house quite a few of them located right there around the windows these were all places where canister shot from the cannons basically as i've mentioned in other videos and in this video taking your cannon and turning into a giant shotgun this is where canister shot hit the side of this house and if we go over here well you can see a few more spots where this canister shot would have hit the brick now if it can do that to brick imagine what it would do to human flesh now there's this crazy story about how on the second morning of the battle there was a bullet that went through the dress of sherfy's mother-in-law she ended up picking it up and putting it in her pocket but um at that point they decided it was time to uh to move along but can't imagine what these people came back to now if you come here to the surfy farm at gettysburg the the big red barn that you see on the property is actually not the original barn the original barn burned down during the battle and there's really a tragic story that is attached to that after the the second day of fighting there were wounded from the union pennsylvania zouaves uh who were laid up in this barn and on the third day of the battle an artillery shell struck the building struck the barn and obviously there's hay it's made out of wood very flammable it caught fire burned down and there's stories of confederates trying to get some of these guys out but couldn't get them all and uh yeah some of them ended up burning to death inside of this barn so if you go to the cemetery here at gettysburg there are some graves that are marked unknown and it's because uh it's because they died here in this fire but anyway i have one more stop that we're going to make here at the peach orchard we are currently at the trossel farm which dan sickles chose as the spot for his command post now one thing that i haven't really mentioned is that uh the move that sickles made to you know push out into the peach orchard really caused some problems in the union line and created some big gaps those are gaps that mead knew would have to be filled so as the the line was collapsing you can imagine here you know behind me uh confederate troops just pouring over uh the hillside there uh a group called the ninth massachusetts artillery was placed here by sickles headquarters at the abraham trosso farm and they were basically being sacrificed so that these gaps could be filled and that cemetery ridge could be protected and this was the site of some fierce artillery bombardment as evidenced [Music] by this barn right here [Music] so right there on the south facing side of the trosso barn you can see where a confederate artillery piece poked right through the south facing brick wall so if you ever come to gettysburg that's definitely something to be looking for [Music] i mentioned that the trosso farm is where sickles had his command post set up and in the distance there you can see the red barn of the surfy farm right over here is the peach orchard and i'm standing at the exact spot where sickles would have been mounted on his horse and observing and commanding the battlefield when a confederate artillery piece sailed over and struck him right in the leg at this very spot this is a marker showing the exact point where daniel sickles was wounded on july 2nd 1863. i've heard one battlefield guide hypothesize that perhaps the horse may have seen the shell coming in and like flinched because the horse remained unscathed it didn't get hit but but sickles did and his leg had to be amputated as a result and this is the spot where it happened [Music] now as i've mentioned before this is not meant to be like a full-on documentary about the battle of gettysburg to really get a fuller picture of this battle uh you really need to go to the american battlefield trust youtube page and their website there's just a wealth of information there that will fill in a lot of these gaps but there is some things that we can learn about dan sickles and peach orchard a lot of people have been critical of sickles in the years since the battle of gettysburg about his decision to move troops out here to peach orchard and also devil's den and the wheat field but ultimately any failure in any organization is a failure in leadership and like it or not the leader on the battlefield here at gettysburg was general george mead sickles was not a professional soldier he was a a politician mead as the leader on the battlefield should have recognized that put aside any differences that he had and helped sickles out a little bit more and maybe spent some more time explaining what he needed and if he didn't want to do that then he should have fired him and replaced him with somebody that uh would have done the job the way he wanted so anyway those are lessons that we can learn not necessarily monday morning quarterbacking but but learning the lessons from history all right well we still have a few places from the sickle salient that that we need to take a look at so in the next few episodes we're going to be going to the wheat field and the infamous devil's den i know that a lot of people are pretty critical of dan sickles and some of the command decisions that he made during the battle of gettysburg but do you have an avenue named after you i didn't think so you

Channel: The History Underground

Views: 86,225

Rating: 4.9739585 out of 5

Keywords: history, civil war, travel, gettysburg, battle of gettysburg, army of the potomac, army of northern virginia, robert e lee, seminary ridge, battle of gettysburg documentary, gettysburg movie, history traveler, history underground, american battlefield trust, gettysburg documentary, peach orchard, dan sickles, battlefield tour, battlefield guide

Id: rqVcrN4DnAA

Length: 19min 36sec (1176 seconds)

Published: Sun May 16 2021