Little Round Top at Gettysburg: Battlefield Live

[Music] all right welcome back everybody we are up here on Little Round Top this is Gettysburg 155 live you're with the American Battlefield trust I'm Gary Edelman that's Chris White behind the camera that's Conner Townsend behind that camera we got Lieutenant Dan still looking for another battlefield promotion over there also American Battlefield trust and I'm really happy to be joined by Tim Smith and Doug Downes both licensed battlefield guides and more and we're up on Little Round Top we're gonna spend a short-time amount up here I'm gonna ask you to go back to last year's Little Round Top video that we have to fill in any gaps that we don't have here again on your desktop go to facebook american battlefield trust facebook page go to videos and you'll see a whole playlist worth it's a little harder to find on your mobile device but here we are up on Little Round Top man and we all as guides give summaries up here set us up Tim okay so we're in the area of Little Round Top and of course this is the end of the northern line of battle on July 2nd and 3rd the line we generally referred to as the fishhook so in a general sense the northern line runs from Big and Little Round Top all the way to Cemetery Hill and if you look up in that direction you'll see a light blue water tower from there which is behind the camera position from here so the southern line of battle start on the other side of Culp's Hill run around through the town of Gettysburg out to the seminary you can see a red barn with three white ventilators on it and on top of that in the edge of the woods it's the seminary building of the the Chapel of the seminary sticking up above the trees the southern line of battle ran along that wooded Ridgeline as far as you can see straight across there is a large metal tower observation tower built in 1895 by the War Department and the line continued along that ridge test that beige house where we started our hoods charge tour from this morning and then you continue on where the trees are broken up by the road that's where the Texas meinem it is located and then a little farther down at the base of our seminary Ridge under what is the ski slopes out there you can see maybe the Alabama Monument the northern line of is some three-and-a-half miles long the southern line is six miles long but the southern army have less men their line is further spread out and during the battle the southern army is crossing an open field and charging up a hill and you saw how rough some of the ground they covered was of course on the second day of the battle the northern army at the beginning of the fight is not exactly in the shape of the giant fishhook because there's a general Daniel Edgar sickles the commander of the 3rd Army Corps and for whatever reason and of course there's lots of stuff written about it he is not satisfied with the position that he has been given so he decided to move his troops forward and he ended up lining his man up from the rocks of Devil's Den across through the rows woodlot the wheat field the peach orchard and down the Emmitsburg Road past those red barns and when sickles moved his 10,000 men forward against orders he left this hill on occupied of course on the second day the battle thousands of southern soldiers would attack the southern end of the northern line and would be heavy fighting out in front of us but Little Round Top at the outset of the fight was unoccupied that sounds great Tim good great set up and let's talk about it because we know there's actually a fight for a Little Round Top who's gonna fight on Little Round Top Doug Lyall talk about ok so now we have all those troops in position let's talk about how this goes down what we're gonna realize is George Gordon means gonna ride out in the peach orchard who realize what Dan sickles has done he's gonna make four quick decisions he's gonna figure out all the pieces that need to go and support the 3rd quarter Hancock second Torrey the fifth quarters only reserved on the field in parts of the artillery reserve and one of the last decisions he makes is he gonna send his chief engineer Brigadier General guru Newark a war no standing on that Boulder he's gonna say go up to that high ground and tell me what I've missed Warren will arrive up here and stand just as he stands today with binoculars in hand and look out across these fields and find the Confederates are now advancing from that far treeline and the problem for the Union Army at about 4 o'clock on the afternoon of July 2nd is that first domino of that Confederate wave attack it's going to arrive here and never hit the Union line that's down on Devil's Den so now it's a race it's a race to get troops here who will get here first the Confederates coming from that far tree line or you the troops it will arrive all kinds of aids forwarn will be down in that Valley looking for Union troops in fact one of the couriers is gonna run into a brigade that's sitting down they're commanded by Colonel strong Vincent and he'll say I'm looking for your division batteries yeah he's in the wheat field what's that message say yeah I'm looking for general Barnes I heard it what's the message say and finally the courier is gonna give him a stand it says we need a brigade up here and Vincent will rush his brigade up here and they're gonna arrive with about 5 minutes to spare before that first timer the Confederates comes across big round top and strikes this position yeah that's really cool here you have an army of armies are 160,000 soldiers here an individual valor encourage individual decisions what grooving or Kemble worn does what we're gonna learn about what patty O'Rourke does what strong Vincent does what Joshua Chamberlain does what individual soldiers do can really help affect the outcome of this battle an important battle we don't even got to get into the what-if of what would happen if the Confederates won Gettysburg I think it depends how they won Gettysburg but let's get on the top up here and still visit some more you're watching the American battlefield Trust Gettysburg 155 live thanks for joining us here today sorry we can't interact with too many of your questions here connectivity down on this part of the field um gets difficult and now we're going up to the very crest of Little Round Top and during the Battle of Gettysburg there's going to be one battery up here not really advantageous Lee placed it can't really reach down into the valley of death or anywhere where the Confederates are actually attacking and to be clear the attacks on Little Round Top are not coming from the beautiful view from the West they are coming mostly from the south over on that side but to get guns up here is what the battery members remembered of battery D v us Charles hazlit's battery and these soldiers didn't say man I saw a lot of my friends die Wow I got to watch Pickett's Charge what they mostly wrote about was it was really hard to get these guns on top a Little Round Top these barrels were 800 900 pounds each they had to be brought up here by manpower alone only one was able to get up here with a horse and hazlit is over here and he's with his friend general weed general weed in command of a brigade was supposedly standing on this rock right behind me and he is shot by a Confederate I think it was probably a minie ball we don't know where it came from we never know where it came from hardly in the Civil War and he falls upon the rock and says I am cut in two I want to see haslund room supposedly you know hazlit bends over to here weeds dying words he is shot dead upon the body of his dying friend now there's some people that question that story and and the location as well but I'll tell you this the accounts point toward Reid falling on a rock near hazlit's rightmost piece and from what I can tell and I've done a lot of research on this hazlit's rightmost piece was right behind the camera over there this makes sense to me not to mention that the first monuments on the battlefield are not big granite ones like this one but rather they are rock carvings maybe the camera can go around one way or the other and see and this rocking carving has been here since October of 1864 or maybe into 1865 as Tim Smith likes to say it says C II has a fellow here commanding co M ' G battery D 1/5 US artillery in battle July 2nd 1863 this thing has been here since right around the time of the Civil War during the Civil War it was carved and we don't know who carved it but it seems to be in the right location now this monument here used to sit where that monument is a right past it then Pennsylvania appropriated more money they built a larger monument that's what 1,500 bucks bought you back then and then they put their smaller monument on this rock and dedicated it to the memory of general weed their brigade commander awesome so let's go down here and let's figure out when colonel strong Vincennes rushes his brigade up here and it's unique Brigade it's not made up of all men from North New York or Pennsylvania or Ohio it's a mixed Brigade it's made up a man from Michigan New York Pennsylvania and Maine and what he's gonna do is he's gonna bring them down and put them in a position from where the threat is coming from this is the southern side of Little Round Top and so we can start to make out some of the markers the 16th Michigan just off to our right front the 44th New York the largest regimental marker on the field 44 feet high and if you come in the middle of that castle monument it's 12 feet by 12 feet also for the 12th New York so you can see where the right two regiments of Vincent's men go good so as we're coming up here again I think I'm not sure if you mentioned or not so Vincent was smart he didn't put his men way up on the top where his men would form a convenient silhouette he puts them down there as Doug mentioned I'm the military crest with a great field of fire with with you know without forming the silhouette with a way that artillery can fire over your head as you go now we're gonna pass by a plaque in a couple of mine minutes we'll come back to to this afterward but really gonna go over to the side of the hill where everything happened see the Texans and Alabamans who attacked here they reached this part of the hill first it's closer to them the Alabamians who ended up fighting in the woods against the 83rd Pennsylvania in 20th May they had to go all the way to the top of big round top down the other side and then make this attack two three four or five times depending on what you call an attack so let's get over here I don't know if Tim Smith wants to do the attacking on this side of the hill if he demure zile do it so let's see if Tim does his famous Tim run and comes up to the front here well it's kind of a fast walk go ahead Tim okay so you know a little round tops kind of interesting that in the fact that a part of Little Round Top is wooded and part of it is open and Vincents brigade that formed the Union line of battle occupied the open area here in front of us and if you troll yourself an imaginary line from Little Round Top to Devil's Den up the seminary Ridge that's where George fought against general sickles advance position but south of this imaginary line this is where the Texans and Alabamians swung up and over big round top and hit the area the hill in front of us Vince's Brigade arrived a few minutes before the attack very quickly there were more southern soldiers and northerners an initial attack the Texans worked their way around on the low shelf and the Michigan soldiers started to fall back at that moment colonel strong vincent jumped up on a rock behind us somewhere supposedly and he was mortally wounded and at this point it looked like the southern army might be successful but i think dan we're gonna talk a little bit actually let's on the way let's continue the vincent story then we'll move over to the hundred forty so right now this is a perilous position right Vince it's honest Rock the 16th Michigan is falling back oh my god let's talk about Vincent for a second real quick if we may because you know again Vincent's got a death marker about seventy yards away from here it's just down the hill it's one of the early monuments on the battlefield in fact one of the first two outside the National Cemetery but 14 or 13 or 14 years before that somebody carved this on the rock obviously the same person colonel strong Vincent fell here commanding coem apostrophe G 2nd Brigade or 3rd Brigade 2nd Brigade I thought it was 3rd 1st division 5th corps ok ok this third okay it's hard to tell for sometimes when people put ink in the inscription they do it correctly of course they did it correctly with the backwards-ass umm pretty cool so in this case I'll say that you know we don't know who carved this thing um but in this particular case they seem to have gotten it right again by all accounts the Vincent was rallying them in as a 16th Michigan whose monument see right over there this one seems to be correct it seems like the other one erected by the members of the 83rd Pennsylvania wanted to place Vincent's fall inside their lines but the documents show that they were up this way as well so again you can learn from the battlefield by learning about the battlefield which is really cool now so as you said it's perilous moment Vincent falls down mortally wounded the 16th Michigan with their flag part of which has retreated up to the hill it's a horrible moment Dan we're headed over now to the monument for the hundred 40th New York infantry it's one of the more popular monuments here on Little Round Top how do I shave this morning I probably look like the gentleman who's on it Patrick H Aurora O'Rourke is an Irish immigrant he'll finish first in his class at West Point in June of 1861 he's an engineer in the early stages of the war but here he's going to command the 140th New York infantry and the 114th New York is on its way to Little Round Top and they get up to the crest of the hill where we're standing at a fortuitous moment the 16th Michigan the right end of Vincent's line is about is giving away or works gonna bleed his men up over the top of the hill down the crest and as he's moving down through these rocks he's gonna be struck down he's gonna fall amidst the rocks over to the cameras left but the 140th is gonna push ahead they're gonna engage the first Texas and push the first Texas back and stabilize the line now you may notice the patina on her works knows it for good luck visitors to Little Round Top rub his nose ok rapid-fire quiz right here impromptu okay he's first in his class in West Point who's last night saying George Armstrong Custer Wow God okay we gave him his cavalry moment they're a court to the monument how many people are in this regiment 526 526 good where these guys from Rochester New York Monroe County Regiment and had these guys loaded their guns before they came crashing over the hill no you know no we really don't know I think no but I'm not really sure at least they're leading company do not yeah good very cool let's go clean before we leave here so they are the cool thing cuz we talked about the monument so they're good for Corning cool things if you look at the top of this it says valor returnee patriotism and duty and those are all the values for which men wore the uniform but here's the rub gang four hundred five hundred twenty six men from the state of New York don't come charging down this hill into a bunch of screaming Texans for those values they charge down there Sill because a guy like Patti O'Rourke leads them since you're talking about to go last in this class but you know Custer had hopped overs entire class and rank in two years and Custer was a general at this battle how did that happen and you're going to have cavalry commanders boosted in June of 1863 skipping from captain through major through lieutenant colonel through colonel all the way to Brigadier General you've got one of them as Custer who else do we got Custer's nose was a different color oh okay you're watching the American battlefield Trust Gettysburg 155 live you're out here with with the American Battlefield trust and other guest historians thanks so much for watching make sure you share this with your friends on Facebook we're gonna go down a little bit of precipitous um you know path to get to where we're going out into the woods where the 83rd Pennsylvania and the 20th Maine is going to fight that's where we're gonna end this particular video so we're gonna walk it a decent clip excuse me sorry cameraman as we go let's focus for a sec so we're actually now on the old roadbed before the you know cars came around there were all sorts of small twisting roads all over the battlefield many of which are gone and this road we're gonna walk on up here is also part of a road that is called Sykes Avenue but now it's perfectly straight it used to zigzag up to the top of the hill and down I wonder if Tim's able to get to the front of the crowd here so he can talk about battlefield roads man do we love talking about roads and since we're walking on one it seems like a good time to do it well you know it's interesting that at the time of the Civil War obviously there were no roads that led to the top of Little Round Top there were just trails probably trails constructed by Jakob Weichert the farmer who owned the back side a Little Round Top and then of course the battle was fought and during the battle the army since there's a large amount of people here created their own trails to get to these areas and then the gbma started to lay out various roads and trails on the battlefield to get to the areas that they had purchased and they constructed a road system and then in the 1890s the War Department took control the battlefield and they placed a road system on our battlefield and then in the 1930s when the Park Service took control the battlefield the National Park Service built roads so we have roads on top of roads on top of roads on top of roads on top of trails and it's interesting as you tour the battlefield you can see the different roads from the different errors of battlefield tourism that are on top of each other and this is this area we're walking on is now a trail but this used to be a road and what was the name of this road Gary well this is Sykes for now and then it was Chamberlain Avenue um I'd like to wait Tim to you what you can't see here is that there's woods right behind us the edge of a trail and Tim keeps walking closer and closer to the camera forcing the camera people off into the poison ivy so thanks to Tim now Doug maybe you could come on up here as we walk out to the 20th Maine's position could you set up the 83rd and the 20th out here are they posted first last one yeah so this makes sense we leave that front that we talked about that was so open because the front of the hill gets cleared for lumber sever seasons before this battle spot the back side is never clear so when we come out here the vegetation looks very much the same we talked about the roads aren't going to be here and we also see some Stonewall's up here now they're not here all of these are built on the evening of July 2nd with the expectation that they would fight here on the morning of July 3rd so those aren't here either remember these Union troops arrived here with five minutes to spare and of course as they bring them out we now have the next part of the connection we are now at the very left end of the Union line the 83rd Pennsylvania off to our right and we have now the 20th main set up right here and just like we could talk about on the front side of the hill they're gonna be down off the top of the crest on the military crest and that's where the preliminary line of Chamberlain's gonna be so actually there are two walls here the far one is actually that built by some of the members of the fifth Corps I think it's Tilton's brigade that actually builds those on the night of the second because the 20th Maine and the 83rd Pennsylvania are going to move on and they are a big round top at this point in the battle when they're building those walls after the battle a lot of good it did him then thank you um well that was an interesting noise telling me to look at the camera I really like my dog I thought it a little bit inappropriate but if it was a dog thing then I'm cool with it um so this wall was built just after the battle that one appeared sometime in the 1880s or something like that afterwards so without getting into too much detail and hopin if you guys want to do this so what you have here is the 20th Maine right here they're left rests upon where the monument is right now okay you all know the story they're left of the Union Army happens to meet almost perfectly with the right of the Confederate Army that's the 15th Alabama in front of us the 47th Alabama off over that way and they're going to almost meet perfectly it is an intense fight they charge once they charge twice falling back with deadly casualties each time they're about equal numbers here and the Confederates almost capture Little Round Top on that side and they're gonna almost capture it on this side ultimately the Confederates William C oats are gonna stretch their line out and come from that direction over there famously the 20th Maine will Bend back their position here so they're refusing the line it's a thinner line but now they have something to meet two Confederate onslaught it goes back and forth that way when famously from the Gettysburg movie what's the maneuver called how are they going to swing out they're gonna swing no no hold on swing like a door walk they're gonna swing like a door and major spear of course in the movie says what do you mean charge and they do they charge into the Confederates who feel like they're surrounded because there's some sharpshooters and skirmishers behind them as well they ran like a herd of wild cattle where they have to go these exhausted Alabamians the ones who had marched the farthest to get here the ones who had stayed up all night marched over and down a mountain ones without or not without any water have to go back up big round top and from what I can tell from what I've read you're not thinking about rotting away in a northern prison at this point you're thinking I need to rest right now okay because these are physiological beings just like us and if you're tired hungry and thirsty you're thinking about food water and sleep not independence and slavery and the my new show battle they're people just like us guys so for Chamberlain as he swings down into this valley to the tears of the 83rd Pennsylvania of course this secures the very left of the Union Army and of course for this he will eventually be awarded the Medal of Honor this is going to help secure a Little Round Top from our walk to the front to this point and of course with this now Warren will be considered the savior of Little Round Top Little Round Top is now a Union island but for all the other things taking out on this battlefield the collapse of Devil's Den with a wheat field where we'll get to later the crushing of the peach orchard all those Union troops are retreating across this field and this will still anchor the Union line but there's a massive gap now between Little Round Top and where the rest of the Union line sits on Cemetery Ridge that's really cool so you all thanks so much for joining us on these little John's of ours I know some of you wish that they would be different on that maybe we would cover something else in more detail that the Sun would be in a different position maybe that I would jump around a little bit less man one of you has really worked up about that more worked about how much I get worked up and I am worked up in the first place but this is free we're out here on some of the hottest days of the year we're doing the best we can for you so really sit back enjoy share this with your friends don't watch it if you don't like it we hope you still we hope you do but you know we can't please them all so come on out join us for the rest of the day and more than anything else thank you thank you to the members and supporters of the Civil War trust the American battlefield trust the Rev War Trust for all that you do in supporting battlefield preservation and education you

Channel: American Battlefield Trust

Views: 22,108

Rating: 4.9120879 out of 5

Keywords: historic preservation, Battle of Gettysburg, Civil War Trust Facebook Live, American Battlefield Trust, Gettysburg Live, Second Day at Gettysburg, Civil War Trust, Little Round Top, American Battlefield Trust Facebook Live

Id: ltBRWM_NAbw

Length: 21min 40sec (1300 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 20 2018