The Fight for Devil's Den at Gettysburg: Gettysburg 158 Live!

hey everybody gary edelman american battlefield trust that's chris white behind the camera and you're at gettysburg 158 there's chris is not right there and we're bringing you as much of gettysburg as we can virtually i hope you've already been joining us and enjoying all sorts of campaign and battle videos with our focus upon people and units more than we have done before we have you've already seen some of our guests um and we're gonna have more coming up as well and i am standing at unabashedly my favorite place this is devil's den that's a little round top right there behind me and i've got lots to say but you see i'm not speaking all that quickly at least for me yet because i'm trying to tamp it down like some people say i speak too fast and just as many people say try decaf well that's all i drink so there we are talking about july 2nd 1863 the confederate line we'll see it in a second is behind the camera and of course this is the union position i think you know what happens on july 2nd 1863 the union line is extending if there ever was an actual fish hook shape it was supposed to extend a little round top behind me the third corps commander dan sickles is going to not like some of the ground north of little round top he's going to move out and occupy occupy some of the places we now know and where we stand the emmersburg road the peach orchard the wheat field and devil's dead none of which except the atmospheric road seemed to have actually had that very name when the battle was actually going on okay so you've got sickles moving out to a line he doesn't have enough men to man general mead sees this and gets angry um of course and has the some of the language to go with it and we'll funnel 15 maybe 20 000 men into sickles line just to bail him out those soldiers have to come from somewhere right remember that when we're over around the wheat field when we're near the trussell farm when we're at culps hill okay so you've got a tenuous union position and this union position is going to end right here among the large rocks of devil's den here at gettysburg of course these are volcanic rocks they are not glacial they're much older geologists say at least 200 million years old ago they bubbled up when the appalachian mountains were formed and tectonic plates were shifting and here comes the magma and it is going to bubble up and form the rocks the igneous rocks volcanic rocks that we see here around devil's den of course this is the left flank of the union army when sickles makes that movement not little round top not anywhere else and when the fourth main takes position somewhere right around here along with smith's battery this is the left flank of the union army it had been over in the wheat field it had been over near the john t weikert farm for a while this is indeed probably the sixth or seventh or eighth left flank of the union army and it's about to change a few more times within the next hour to after this all gets started here at devil's dead let's move over and take a look at the confederate position here because they're not just sitting idly of course i think you know what's happening over there the confederates have three main core at gettysburg under yule over there hill over there and james long street over here long street only has two of his three divisions remember core division brigade regiment company there you go i'll quiz you on that later and you know long street only has two of us three divisions here pickett's division smallest division i think in the confederate army has not yet arrived so with his two divisions and part of another one he's going to launch this massive attack on july 2nd at the famous places i already mentioned little round top devil's den the peach orchard the wheatfield cemetery ridge the trosso farm all of that is a result of what longstreet called the best three hours fighting ever done by any troops on any battlefield even though the southerners didn't gain all they wanted to they were outnumbered two and a half to one because general mead kept on stripping forces from elsewhere in the army specifically the confederate troops who are going to come to fight here and make no mistake they're on the distant tree line over there okay this is hood's division that's warfield's ridge and part of seminary ridge same ridge different name once it crosses the emmitsburg road so you've got hoods division over there and if i can outline it this way laws brigade of alabamians here robertson's brigade of texans and georgians here and they're behind me that's good enough for our purposes right now right behind each of those there's a georgia brigade bennings georgians over here anderson's georgians over here they are supposed to advance like this up the emmitsburg road they're going to make a big wheel over there of course once this this operation starts things aren't going to go according to plan just like almost in every other instance of warfare okay so what's going to happen is they're going to start to move forward like this after a huge barrage between confederate batteries here at devil's den and over at the peach orchard the southerners start to move and right away there's trouble there are sharpshooters harassing the confederate flanks forcing them to not go that way so they're going to go over toward big round top if you can see it over there and they're going to start to go that way the confederates who try to follow the emmitsburg road split with the rest of them and it it co-mingles and messes up everything until half of the texans and arkansans attack devil's den and half of the texans and arkansans know our kansas they're attack little round top half the alabamians attack devils den with half the alabamians attack little round top not a good way to get started also not a way to get started have your fight and division commander john bell hood actually get wounded right at the outset so and that's probably at the near the bushman house or the bushman barn right out there that you might that might be obscured right now you're looking at the slider farm if you can see one over there okay there we go good job chris so that's really kind of the setup the union is over here the regiments that are here it is the largest brigade numerically in the union army with the most regiment more than 2 100 soldiers in john henry hobart wards brigade of uh you know new yorkers indians pennsylvania and maine soldiers he's got some u.s sharpshooters some of them are detached over near the peach orchard so he's got i don't know something like um 1800 of his soldiers here and more are going to come now they're going to be a few phases to the fighting at devil's den it's not just a sharpshooter action it's bloodier than the fighting on little round top next to here and there are going to be something just under 2 000 casualties suffered in and around the den itself not too many people fought in the actual rocks of the den it's a hassle they keep formations in there they avoided it as best they could they the battle swirled around the devil's den you're with the american battlefield trust i'm gary adelman we're at devil's den this is gettysburg 158 we hope you'll share this with your friends we you probably have some history friends out there you don't even know about um and maybe one will get interested and and you know come with you on a trip to gettysburg which is our real hope of course and other battlefields as well now the fight here goes in a few phases first there's going to be an intense fight right around here with new yorkers fighting texans and arkansans then there's going to be another phase that's going to take place in the valley of death when the confederates sort of capture this area the union will move to the top and recapture it and then a bunch of georgians remember how there were georgians behind the texans arkansas and alabamians they show up here as well and capture devil's den sorry to spoil the end now i want to get into those um just a little bit but let's take a look at where we're standing here the triangular field you can't really go to it right now man it's high with grass is right out there behind me um and of course a seminary ridge is beyond that and that terrain is nastier than it looks i recommend that if you're in sufficient shape preferably not on a 100 degree reel field day like today you go ahead and start over on the other side according to park regulations and to the degree possible do this hike it is nasty it's thorn bushy and everything you can imagine uh you know uh you know bugs and all sorts of water courses along the way so uh it's just it's rougher than most people think a lot of declivities so some soldiers said the worst rough ground that could have been traveled over it increased fourfold the difficulty of our advance okay notice when they started there's no rocks on seminary ridge this is where the rocks are on the union flanks not by accident geologically they were put here by a sill that erupted on an angle here at devil's den so we're looking at the triangular field and these woods here are in my opinion the most terribly costly for american soldiers on both sides costly woods in america there are 9 000 casualties in and around those woods between 4 p.m and 7 p.m okay so rose woods you want to look for the worst place at gettysburg probably not pickett's charge probably not devil's den the wheat field and the woods around it are probably the worst place and look for our video coming up where we'll be at the wheat field the union line under ward is going to extend over here there's a new york regiment in the woods there from new york uh led by a syracuse fire chief former benjamin higgins over there beyond that there's some uh indians under john wheeler uh you know and he was trained at camp tippecanoe he was a newspaper editor in crown point indiana uh maybe there's someone from crown point watching right now beyond that there's some pennsylvanians who will eventually be rushed over here colonel uh major john moore who will live out the civil war attain his colony and one of those rare regiments that over the 200 number the 203rd pennsylvania and he will be killed by a bullet in the attack at fort fisher a place where chris and i just were shooting with our good friends over there okay coming more into what you can see here you've got some new yorkers the 124th new york is occupying some of this ground under the commander back there augustus van horn ellis you might be looking at a photo here of one of the memorial groups here at that monument the best story about ellis he's a sea captain before the civil war uh you may have heard this before accepts i think in 1860 command of the hawaiian navy and uh you know goes all the way to hawaii to see the king to become you know the leader of that navy there's no panama canal there's no transcontinental railroad this guy has to take a ship from new york around florida around south america it's months to get there he gets there and finds the king has not a single ship he quickly turns around comes back and ends up fighting uh leading a company in a new york unit then raising and becoming colonel of 124th new york from orange county new york the orange blossoms almost certainly uh the regiment on which uh stephen crane based the red badge of courage okay uh colonel ellis will be fighting in his last day his young major under his command will fight in his last day his lieutenant colonel will also be terribly wounded here they're going to lose more men killed than any other regiment at devil's den even though it's the smallest and then we've got the 99th pennsylvania who shows up here um in the middle of the fighting we'll get into that a little bit um now there's one more unit that i'm not really showing you here and i mentioned earlier the fourth main and they were here next to and and with the guns of the fourth new york independent battery james smith uh james smith is up here was told he'd probably lose his guns because of the confederate juggernaut coming toward him and he his guns by the way are not down there we are certain they are up here okay he's very clear about her and even henry hunt said if you'd have placed your guns down where the monument is i'd have arrested you for incompetency and you can't point down toward those guns from anywhere but up here on the crest two guns were behind us four guns were out here james smith what felt vulnerable as a lot of artillery men do and he felt vulnerable that the confederates would come from that direction yeah they would thousands of them thousands and thousands but he would feel better if the 287 men of the fourth main uh commanded by a guy named elijah walker um who is a uh i think a former cotton merchant no no i'm confusing sides here i can't remember exactly what he is but he says hey walker could you go down there protect my guns he's like no way i like it up here i like the high ground smith goes to war the brigade commander ward coming from a military long military family he had a grandfather mortally wounded in the revolutionary war he had a father wounded in mexico he also himself served um in mexico himself where he might have been wounded as well and smith goes to ward and says hey could you order the main troops down there to protect my guns he's like sure so he sends the main troops down to the valley of death and they're going to do the best service they can down there before they come charging back up here a little bit later so that's the union side on the confederate side here and we eventually we'll walk around and show you a whole bunch of devil's 10 but i want to get some of this stuff started we've got the texas brigade the famous hoods texas brigade which was really only under hood for a few months but it's forever known as that they were the um you know first fourth and fifth texas and the third arkansas but they had become such a part of the group sometimes they called them the third texas um you know the commander of the first texas didn't get along too well with their brigade commander jerome bonaparte robertson perhaps a cooler name than he would be to have as a cool brigade commander work would end up saying robertson wasn't a witness to anything that happened during the fight in this area here pretty interesting and pretty harsh as a matter of fact and then on his right of course is the senior brigade commander of the division evander m law evander macgyver uh law and law has his alabama regiments some of which attack uh uh little round top and some of which attack devil's dead and we'll get into a little bit more about some of those people as well as those in benning's georgia brigade a lot of them centered around columbus georgia so you're with the american battlefield trust gary edelman chris white behind the camera and we're at gettysburg 158 we're covering some of the fighting the units and the people here at devil's den okay and this was an intense fight here uh right behind me where the first texas began coming up this slope here the third arkansas is in the woods but they're suffering because there's some flanking fire coming from the wheat field over there when you come and you get a chance walk from devils down to the wheat field they're not that far apart it's the same fight okay so they're getting flanked they have to bend back their line they're gonna suffer more casualties than anybody else on the confederate line who fought around here so they're bogged down but they're keeping two or three union regiments busy in the meantime the first texas starts coming up here they're threatening smith's guns that are on this ridge right here 124th new york is a much smaller unit the first texas has 12 companies the only ones at gettysburg with a company m check that out and they're coming up here and one of the men the excitable major major james cromwell who has on his breast a locket with a picture of his young new bride there says come on colonel alice we need to charge those confederate soldiers before they come up charge them and ella says no way ellis uh cromwell comes up and tries again and says yes yes let's lead a charge we'll hit them before they can hit us and um horses are brought up for ellis and cromwell and one of the captains comes up and says no don't go in on horseback and ellis famously said then famously the men must see us today you know summarizing what civil war officers had to do sometimes display reckless sometimes irresponsible reckless bravery in front of your troops you are going to have uh ellis and cromwell leading you know parts of the regiments along with their lieutenant colonel moves forward and 238 men attack more than 400 texans uh the texans real for that for a time but they quickly reform they get support from some of the georgians bennings georgians who were supposed to follow laws alabamians to little round top got confused by some trees ended up following the wrong unit imagine if 1300 more georgians had been behind the alabamians on a little round top chew on that for a little while okay so they are going to reform and start to pour lead into the 124th new york just as the 44th alabama one of law's troops remember how i told you some of them come to devil's den as well they end up right on the flank just like this so now the 124th new york has fire in the front and in the flank and all of a sudden james cromwell gets hit badly wounded mortally wounded his horse freaks out that's the official term takes takes his body his uh dying body um over into the confederate lines ellis rises up to say your major's down save him save him and the regiment moves forward not long before ellis is uh hit in the head toppled foremost among the rocks the regiment surged forward enough to get ellis and cromwell's bodies putting them back on a large rock no we don't know which rock it is people love to say that they do but we just don't we just know it's a large rock and there those bodies sat as the fight continued okay the confederates come up and they're now threatening smith's guns smith begging anybody he can find my god don't let them take my guns from me and he described it like this well first of all he said he was running out of ammunition he was told that they were out of all of the canister and they said damn them give them solid shot give them case shot give them shrapnel god damn them give them anything okay and he said that the fight here went on for 40 minutes almost certainly an exaggeration and he said that in every one of those 40 minutes was 60 seconds and each one of those seconds was packed a lifetime and we do know how time can slow down when intense and important things are actually happening smith despite being told he'd lose his guns was mortified he got one of his disabled guns which had actually again been hauled against uh his his lieutenant colonel uh the lieutenant colonel of 124th and they get the disabled guns off and the confederates captured three of smith's guns here three of the seven they captured at gettysburg were captured right here smith will spend the rest of his life defending the loss of his cannons here the southerners however take the crest they take the cannons and by now hazlitt or hazlitt's battery is up on little round top you've got confederates over there indiscriminately dropping shells among the crest here they found it more dangerous to be up here than anywhere else and they are going to uh you know abandon the crest move back a little bit and to take position on the side of the hill but not before and let's actually start walking chris i can't believe it not before a guy named uh if i'm correct wilson barbie uh supposedly you know a very fiery young man and he's going to get on a large rock we don't know which rock it was there are descriptions of it that you could be wedged between it and another rock so i like to think about some of those rocks over there cause it seems plausible but i do not know he went onto a large rock and he's firing at the enemy there and then he is shot off and he manages to climb back up and he's firing more and he's shot off again and he got wedged between a couple of rocks and he was cursing the people um for not helping him get up up up upon another apparently a texan named george brainard went up onto a rock around here and was waving a texas flag in the full effulgence of glory i think what it is and uh we've got somebody on our facebook page joe owen that's sending us accounts of what the texans did at gettysburg i don't know every two weeks it's the longest message i get so thanks for those joe you're with the american battlefield trust we're at devil's den i'm going to try not to fall on our way down here as we walk cross country chris please watch yourself when you're walking around here of course as we approach the monument to smith's battery which has unfortunately been subject to vandalism over the years on at least two occasions in the 90s it was actually pulled over by someone with a rope and a car i mean what did that really accomplish um it was refurbished it's put back up you know uh so this there is a long history unfortunately of monument vandalism it was here during the 1913 reunion um and i hope that what we're seeing now or in recent weeks is is only another you know pop of it that will not continue there's a better way to go about things than to indiscriminately damage monuments especially not knowing the stories of who was up there this is one of the old style plaques here that really did a good job describing uh you know the fighting up here on devil's den and elsewhere i mean this is simple look at this you can see sickle's line if if i was confusing you and getting into fast voice and i suspect that i did you know there's sickle's line and here's his problem because the confederates are all over him here he did not have enough men to land the line he had and you've got strong confederates coming in with reinforcements and this is one of my favorite signs on the battlefield another one is on east confederate avenue and it's one of these old ones as well that shows the union fish hook really well we'll probably go a little bit silent while we go down here but we're gonna go down here and check out the popular you know main rocks at devil's den and talk about the fight for the fourth main and a bunch of other things as well i've got i think the most useless piece of information you'll you'll hear today and that says a lot for me because you know both chris and i break out a lot of things like that um you see some of the trails here and we have to be careful picking across them because these are older trails as they are at little round top little round top and devil's den are being loved to death and little round top itself will close for at least one year starting later this fall um you can see this rock right here the largest one this is the table rock it might weigh around 200 tons we don't know but that's been an estimate i've heard before the national park service became concerned that this rock was going to fall on somebody someday so in the 1970s they actually got an archaeological or architectural firm engineering firm out here to determine you know whether it would fall and they said yes it's gonna fall we just don't know when okay so they made little hash marks here and i can we can probably show you that these hash marks have not moved since the 1970s what i'd be more concerned about and those hash marks also haven't moved so that's great is that is not much larger than two two of my hands like so this whole 200 ton or however heavy boulder is being held here by a contact point the size of a of a large basketball let's say i guess all basketball is supposed to be the same size so forget i said that uh we're gonna back out here the table rock this rock that we're under here is the best known rocket devil's den and therefore everybody wanted to have their picture taken here because they did the early photographic firms in the 1880s 1890s early 1900s set up cameras here see in the old days you didn't take the camera with you you went to the camera and because people have their pictures taken here the local people went up and said oh man we're going to inscribe our initials in the rock i'm gonna put my whole name in the rock i'm gonna put everything on the rock and this thing was just subject to graffiti i think i sensed that chris is probably looking um for a photo showing some of the rock carvings while he's doing so i'm gonna try to do the same as well because i think i know i have one good blow up here showing just how pervasive this was so when the government came in they could not deal with this um i see chris showing this now you can see maurice fox who interestingly was a paraplegic somebody else carved that for him you can see some some well-known local people we know who some of them are but when the government came in they started to carefully remove uh these things you can see maurice fox being blocked out here when i say carefully removed they took chisels and pounded them out of the rock i don't know any other way they really could do it people love calling them the government chiselers for those who get that reference this is what the rock of rocks of devil's den looked like for more than a decade the fresh scars on the rocks for the first time since the battle this time in order to remove graffiti but you can see those chisel marks all over every one of these rocks they are in great profusion and then people have come to visit this rock and taken their picture here for every year and decade ever since so this is what everybody wanted to do now a lot of people would come here and say well i've been to that rock that's devil's den right we don't actually always agree on that devil's den was supposedly something much more specific that we'll get into later now check this out and by the way we're entering right now the valley of death and the first unit to fight in the valley of death was the fourth main whose obelisk monument you're going to see shortly over here the fourth main remember was the unit that was sent down here by general ward of wards brigade to guard the guns up on top of devil's den there right so you know they were down here and you see they have some rocks you might say oh they're lucky but you know what there's not a whole lot of rocks to actually defend an entire regiment so you're going to be lucky if you're behind one of these boulders here right the fourth main they are fighting here they're in this orientation here getting ready to block the confederates but the 44th alabama is coming from here or half of it the 48th alabama is coming over there and then there are four or five more confederate regiments attacking little round top so they're going to get terribly outflanked either way the fourth main puts up a good fight that is until they see confederates texans up on top of devil's den there that's where smith's guns are okay talk about being flanked try being flanked from above okay so people could be hitting you with head shots in a flanking fire at once colonel walker knew they couldn't stand that he falls back 100 yards and then charges back to the top and along with the help with some from those pennsylvanians whose monument you saw earlier they recaptured the top and devil's den was stronger than it had been all day but then up comes the 1300 georgians under henry l benning the 15th and 20th georgia the 17th georgia and the second georgia and they're going to tip the scales for the confederates at devil's den they're eventually going to capture the crest um be the third unit to claim the capture of smith's guns they're going to move through the valley of death here getting ready maybe to attack a little round top even but then up come the 6 new jersey in the 40th new york two more units fighting like tigers really here to um you know affect the withdrawal of wards brigade there's going to be one medal of honor episode where harvey mansell from the 99th pennsylvania um was was uh concussed by a blast and he fell on the flag and let the battle line go over him and wait until it was safe and then rescue the flag and he will be awarded the medal of honor after the civil war um in any case you know you have these confederates here at this point the fight for little round top is really heating up you could see texans attacking that side of little round top over there you can't see the fight of the alabamians and the main men from here so you'd think these confederates are ready to attack right but they're they're almost out of ammunition so they wrote we are talking about um them having lost one third of their soldiers already and um they all use the same word to describe little round top impregnable and trust me trust chris it does not look like as steep as it is on film when you're here little round top looks a lot more like a wall and the southerner saw it with smoke coming from the top it looked like a volcano with with a couple of thousand blue coats and glistening bayonets up there and none of the confederates who fought at devil's den truly attacked little round top maybe the 48th alabama provided a little bit of assistance and the second georgia a guy named william terrell harris who had taken over that regiment not too long before this his horse was shot on the way up and he supposedly leaped from the horse and hit the ground running he was ready and after they captured devil's den proper he tried to lead his men across plum run which is right inside those trees over there and um he will be you know shot through the heart none of the men followed him anyway and that was that for him now um you can see the fourth mains flank marker over there right you can see it right there right um that's fine and everything but when they first put the monument up in the early 1890s they accidentally put the left flank marker over there we have a picture of it we know it was over there the union soldier so that unit came and said no we weren't facing toward the rocks we were facing that way they also noticed they left the colonel's name off of the monument that the third core the red diamond and by the way they were proud to wear that red diamond that's called the kearney patch if you fought at gettysburg and wore the kearney patch you were proud of that and it was falling off because they attached it with gypsum um and the monument was in danger of leaning and they got the casualty figures wrong they fixed everything they moved the flank marker attached the red diamond with cement uh they uh uh put the colonel's name on the front he designed the monument they forgot to put his name on it or he did and then they fixed the casualty figures and dug a little trough that you could still see draining water onto that rock now if you don't believe me about all that too long before we think the monument was actually put there on a rock past the monument maybe you'll go find it there's a nice big rock carving the letters about this big that says fourth m e on it uh pretty interesting i'm not sure if maine was abbreviated as me until uh you know actually after post office sort of state abbreviations came along but you all can do some research on that as well chris anything to add here i've been talking constantly for i fear too long we're at 27 minutes all right so we hope everyone's been watching the entire time and uh just just to make a few quick notes um you know the third core they're gonna fight down here for the union dan sickles he led this score at chancellorsville the battle prior to gettysburg and he leads it here at gettysburg obviously uh but you know what dan i think underestimated was the fact that his core had shrunk by nearly half between chancellorsville and gettysburg a lot of people don't realize it was three divisions 18 000 men plus strong at chancellorsville here at gettysburg two divisions 10 000 men strong so he's not going to be able to cover that same line he could have at chancellorsville a lot of attrition at chancellorsville third core sustains the second highest casualties at the battle and they lose two of their three division commanders so it's really going to to weigh on uh the third quarter adding to the problem uh george gordon mead really likes the second division commander here a guy named andrew humphries and when he when mead finds out that there's problems on other parts of the field he disregards the fact that sickles is in charge sends word down to uh humphries and tries to get them pushed to another part of the field not knowing just how desperate the battle became down here and the third quarter loses what we call unit cohesion they're chaining commands an entire mess dan sickles goes down we have uh george burling's brigade which is split up all over the field we have regis detrobrion's brigade split up all over the field so it's a real hodgepodge tough to keep track of but if you're a third core uh if you're a third quarter aficionado hit us with your comments good good thanks chris that's really cool stuff now um you know if we were to come here in the you know 1900 1920 we'd have seen a series of sort of cannonballs on top of cement pedestals and they would be connected by chains you know sort of like guard chains keep people off the grass they had a lot of keep off the grass signs and in today's edition of the most useless thing i'll share with you today here is the sole remnant of one of those chains this right here is where it actually met this particular rock here so this is the last remnant of what we know um of a uh cannonball and chain decoration um actually at devil's den you know and i know some of you are interested in this you can't escape okay perhaps of more interest if i can find the right photo actually chris has it is if we walk over here um alexander gardner actually recorded a two-plate panorama from right about here looking in this direction chris you know the one i mean he's looking for it now so after he finds it he's going to follow me over here and the guy that keeps on trying to stay out of the camera who is now checking out the uh guard ball and chain because we know you want to check it out too uh not quite the most useless thing i know at gettysburg and that doesn't teach us anything about the battle of gettysburg but it does teach us a little bit about the battlefield and how it's changing okay so it looks like chris has found it i call these it's super original um no not that one uh let me just find it in my book here it's it's a long wide panorama chris and i are actually scrolling through the studio right now uh to find it uh i know it's in there somewhere i'm gonna find it in here because it's worth it so you're with the american battlefield trust we're at devil's den we're talking as much devil's dense stuff as we possibly can and man i just hope i can find this thing in rather short order so that i don't have to bog us down too much more because this should just be complete failure if i do it did all this for absolutely nothing and oh i'm getting concerned because now it's moving over to the table raw here we go so here's one plate from the two plate panorama do you see this rock here this is right where our artillery man there is standing right next to that rock it doesn't look that big here but this rock is that rock okay and then this rock here chris is right past it and then this sort of whale-like sort of humpback rock is this one right here okay now let me see if i have the other half of it it looks like i don't but trust me there's a second half of that one that shows all of little round top it is just one of our best it is our best visual cue forever for what this looked like uh just three days after the battle july 6 1863 there's actually a dead soldier visible next to uh that biggest boulder next to the plum run bridge over there yup no no but we're going to go over there shortly too so chris just pulled up another photo or is about to pull up another photo we're going to talk about the slaughter pen here we're not going to do it in great profusion but um that's devil's den but as we cross this road suddenly we're in the slaughter pen this was apparently named you know by alfred wadd the sketch artist and alexander gardner who were here wad himself posed on a nearby boulder over here um and alexander gardner took uh i think it's the second most photographed place at gettysburg with human carnage is the slaughter pen the first being the rose farm which we might be able to show you here now the photo chris is going to show you was actually taken right here um rather low down here okay and what i'll ask you to do is look for a rock with a split in it over there right past a pond okay so chris is going to refine this photo this is my fault i gave chris like 40 photos and he's scrolling through them on a small phone on a bright day here so you can see it right over there and as he okay that's a different one chris just pulled up the second of the two photos that are there so chris pulled up um yeah that's it this is sometimes we just got to go back to old school stuff so chris is showing you a photo here of two dead confederates i'm sorry to be laughing before we talk about this right over here they're probably from alabama or georgia and we probably have them narrowed down to 30 or 40 different people based on who died in the hospital and who died where at this particular spot they had to be in unlikely the left of the 48th alabama more likely the right of the 44th alabama the rightmost companies or the second georgia which is known to have charged through here so based on those records we can identify some of these guys and this location here if you're still looking at it you know you could see one two three one two three those rocks even these two rocks right here if you're looking at them they're sitting there buried now the pond is no longer there except when it rains a whole lot there's been a lot of erosion here and that has affected things now the photographer then went out on this rock which is still right over there and took this close-up and terrible photo actually of this soldier here and chris might be pulling that one up for you there but this is a disfigured confederate soldier uh one of the same guys visible in the other picture there and um you know there's a hole in his head and his brain matter is leaking out into a little puddle uh next to him and i actually have a close-up like of that if you want to see it sorry but you know i think this is what we need to be doing um this tells me that this guy was not mortally wounded based on where he was shot and because of the brain matter i fear you know he was not probably dragged to this location that's where he died and that will help us to come closer to identifying him remember this guy charged in a battle full of life looking like a normal human being until this terrible battle and then until he was succumbing to putrefaction okay so i think this is the best we can do for them and even if i can't identify him maybe we need to try or at least come as close as we can good the rest of the slaughter pen is over here it's currently overgrown so see some of our other videos and we have hundreds of gettysburg videos to learn about that and one day i will take all of our gettysburg videos and i will put them on a map so that you can conglomerate all of our videos in one place and see the places that you want um based on that map let's see looks like they're gonna let us go chris there's one car and we're not sure who's going first um here you can see the main face of devil's den uh this is the main rocks and of course it has the devil's den sign so i guess this is devil's den no said the first park historian john badger batchelder john batchelder felt that the devil's den was something very much more specific not the big rocks here but rather a cave under the rocks that's masked by an immense boulder that's very hard to get into we'll check this cave out in a minute you know and the stories go the devil's den while there's no evidence that it was called devil's den before the battle it started being called out within days of the battle the devil's den the devil's cave and as to why either because of the terrible fighting here or because every rocky place in america is often called devil devil's tower devil's lake devil's bath devil slipper devil's this devil's that okay so we got several devils things here including the devil's bath uh right behind me the devil's down we've got the devil's kitchen over there the devil's slipper over on south confederate avenue now um you know the early stories sort of you know the local stories talk about this being called devil's den long ago because of an enormous snake that inhabited these rocks and they say the indians even saw it before their great-grandparents and they called it heap big snake it supposedly had the width the size of an ordinary man's waist it could swallow a whole dog it was also known as the raccoon den here and in any case the story goes that they tried to rid the country of these terrible beasts and they never could so they named the snake the devil they figured he died there in his lair and that's why this is the devil's den it makes a good story um probably not true but it's something we love to tell kids you know that snake's gonna eat little kids for breakfast every day now go into his cave okay and we're gonna check that out now this was for a time part of a park owned by samuel wiley crawford who fought not 600 yards from here in the valley of death um and he owned this area and crawford always wanted to put the text of the gettysburg address actually right on this boulder here i like to think that that would have been an interesting thing to see the gettysburg address associated with devil's den now chris a chance to walk safely and me as well the actual devil's den cave used to have a spring in it but when they laid sickles avenue in 1897 the spring stopped flowing the flow of the demonis waters were stopped forever um but to be clear this isn't devil's den that's devil's death okay and bachelor wasn't kidding it's very hard to get into and i'm not encouraging you to or not but it's not just people my size that can fit in there okay you know like i was with a group yesterday and a lot of people chose to crawl through there it goes in about 15 feet you have to crawl and then it goes about another 15 feet and you come out the other side you know school kids like doing it more than adults i'll say but there are six different entrances and exits to the actual original devil's den um it's pretty interesting to think that there was a spring here at one time and that you know we talk about the flow of the demon as waters because a hundred years later devil's den would become a haven for ghost stories made up ghost stories so that people could make money and sell books and have specials on cable tv and whatnot there was only one real ghost story associated with gettysburg for a long long time and that is iverson's pits another place we might talk about or might have talked about um on a previous oak hill or oak ridge video okay um let's see let's see let's test chris a little bit see if he can do this with a camera here you're gonna get another good view well done by the way um of the slaughter pen i mean the confederate soldiers said it was more like indian fighting than anything else we'd experienced during the war they were picking themselves between these boulders i mean these are large boulders too so make no mistake i'm going to read a couple of accounts here if i can find them our track record isn't so good yet so especially mine um so let's see i will read that william flake perry or flank perry i like the latter better and i've not been able to confirm which one it actually is who actually helped found uh he he was the architect of alabama's public school system he was an educator but here commanding the 44th alabama he was prostrate prostrated by exhaustion okay somewhere over there i don't know exactly where and he said this buried in the recesses of the rocks i could only hear it is seldom that a soldier in comparative security and perfect composure can enjoy the privilege of listening the incessant roar of small arms the deadly hiss of many balls the shouts of the combatants the booming of cannon the exploding of shells and the crash of their fragments among the rocks all blended together in one dread chorus whose sublimity and terror no power of expression could compass i like that you know i mean and when we try to experience the civil war when i'm trying to bring it to you and chris is giving a tour or something like that what are we trying to do we're trying to get you stuff that you you know that can resonate with you right and somehow smell hearing walking like it's a hot day today and here we are devil's den experiencing at least one thing the soldiers did we're not wearing wool i didn't stay up all night march over a mountain to get here but it's one more element and if you could imagine you know that sound while you're also maybe smelling a campfire or a terrible set of people that would also do it for you in the case of if you're anywhere near an army uh they'll give you an idea of maybe some of the fighting here on the slaughter pen uh people did not like this fight they couldn't fight the way that they did you know when some people are obsessed with an area they're like oh they're so lucky they fought at the mule shoe no these are terrible places to fight and devil's den is one of them one person said white winged peace did not um you know you know reign around this area nobody could remember a snap of the lord's prayer or even care about it at all both sides were whipped and all were mad about it okay so they did not enjoy this fight here and most of the places we go the places that we study the places that you come along with us as we visit you know are these sort of places that uh uh you know you wouldn't want to been maybe that's an obvious statement but we should do anything but glorify them but we should learn from them and we can enjoy them the veterans did um you know so you need to interact uh with your battlefield in the legal uh way that you want to now i wanted to bring us over here toward benning's uh plaque over here we're not going to go too much longer but this is henry rock benning's brigade plaque here so we tried to call this benning's knoll it's really hard to name something and get it to stick i've been calling it for that for more than 24 years so tell that to your friends this is benning's null okay because this is about the center or right center of his line um with the uh you know second and 17th georgia and the 20th and the 15th georgia coming over there they've got a bunch of new colonels here and ultimately benning and three of his colonels will be buried in lyndhurst cemetery if i have the name right in columbus georgia actually these guys of course the second and the 20th were defending burnside bridge that's when they were in toombs's brigade and one of the colonels here dudley dubose who commanded the 15th georgia married one of toombs's daughters you know there's all sorts of connections between all of these things and two of the colonels the one i already mentioned william terrell harris will die here as well as the 20th commander john a jones a guy named i think loki was charging up that slope right over there and he said he came across the body of their colonel his head blown half off you know there's all sorts of terrible stories of what's going to go out out in that field and you're actually looking for the first time into the triangular field right over there you can see one of the walls of the triangular field over there and there's all sorts of things up there loki also told the story that he kept going up the hill and one of his comrades said don't go up there you'll get shot loki went up there a little bit further he's in i think the 17th or the 20th georgia it is the 20th and he went up there and he was just taking aim with his enfield rifle he said and he was shot in the leg and he said i've got it um and people you know would say that i haven't heard a lot of soldiers saying i'm hit they would say i've got it or i'm done for i want to see my mother and things like that any case he came limping down the hill and that same guy because people are people just like they are now was just like i told you not to go up there and you'd get shot and i like to imagine what loki said i mean the dude's been shot in the leg and this guy hits him with a smarty comment there um so that fight is particularly intense and as you know the georgians actually capture the crest of devil's dead and i'm glad chris was panning over here because this is one of the best views of devil's den and if i had to describe the fighting from one place it wouldn't be the crest it would be right here right in this area on top of the knoll where you can see the fight for the triangular field you can see the struggle for the crest and you can see the terrible terrain of the slaughter pen right over there and the ultimate goal little round top the new left flank of the union army that's the irony the fourth main was the left flank by the time this fight at devil's demo was over there was already one or two more left flanks on little round top then famously held by the 20th main and we'll cover at least a video on little round top if not one with more of a focus on the 20th main with a special guest as well chris anything to add while we walk i think you need it need to remember that you know this is going to be like gary said a very vicious fight down here a fight that these guys didn't exactly expect and and what they've run into down here is a lot of problems and the fact that john bell hood goes down they're division commander then you have to promote evander law half of his brigade goes one way half goes the other way same with jerome robertson's brigade jerome robertson goes down george anderson will go down so hood two of his brigade commanders both go down he'll lose 12 regimental commanders in this battle so it's really going to be a much harder fight than i think the third core and the first core army northern virginia get credit for out here good excuse me i was just drinking from my new hydration backpack thanks doug i love this thing already um who suggested i get it here um so we're gonna finish up right up here and i think chris's point is real good and this will come up again when we talk about little round top because for all these people that say oh the confederates capture a little round top they have all sorts of reinforcements that they can bring to the field okay you know many of their commanders are down they're out of ammunition they've lost a third of their soldiers there are no other reinforcements everybody that's coming on the field is um you know is already here and in the meantime the union has nearly 10 000 soldiers on the way that have fresh cartridge boxes that haven't been in battle that didn't march 30 miles to get here so important to keep in mind now i don't think this place here will be a surprise to many of you uh this is the home of the rebel sharpshooter who actually wasn't a sharpshooter who wasn't actually killed here i think you know this a very high-res picture here and at any point if chris wants to pull up marc maritado's hand color none of this modern stuff um where it happens in an instant i remember many 15 years ago the artist mark maritado actually hand colored i believe it was um you know this particular picture here and i think this is compelling for a few reasons a you can come to the spot but b this soldier doesn't look like the other soldiers i was showing you or any other soldier who was killed at gettysburg this soldier looks like he could be your brother your son you know maybe even your father or something like that right so he he has not yet succumbed to putrefaction there could be a number of reasons for that not the least of which is that he might have you know lingered or not even died until july 4th or something like that but we do know that he was actually you know first photographed four times on the slope over there um and i think i have some pictures of that we have four photos of him down there and then two up here making him the most photographed corpse of the entire civil war actually a dubious honor indeed but you can clearly see it's the same soldier frederick ray actually in the civil war times illustrated first demonstrated this about 99 years after the photo was taken the folds in his clothing are identical his face is the same he's got the same abrasions on his face as well and this photographer it's not like they were all over the place we know where the photographer's traveled with a couple of important uh you know uh you know exceptions we have three other photos that i could show you of that we also know the photographer was down there shooting another photo in the triangular field okay so he was dragged up here in a flash of creative excitement where you could see a little round top in the background where you have the perfect 3d photo with rocks coming together most civil war photos were recorded in 3d and it became one of the most famous photos of the civil war and i wouldn't be surprised if every single one of you had seen this photo before okay and you know people come here and act like i said in a variety of ways i've seen people get angry sad i've seen them you know absolutely gaped i've seen them lash out um i've seen many people myself included lay down in the spot because they're trying to get closer to this historic event you know so like i said there is no exact rule there are laws you can't break but there's not exactly a rule on how to engage with a battlefield and how you're supposed to feel and that's because everybody engages differently um i think i'm going to wrap it up here just by pointing over to where we started so that tallest monument on your farthest left is the 99th pennsylvania they come up with the fourth main and they help to stem the tide for a while which will really just affect the union retreat after benning's georgians get here so when you come to gettysburg come to devil's den there's a lot to see man i only covered little bits of it we've got lots of videos we even the trust has a specific app for just july 2nd that only covers devil's den and little round top if you want to get some more detail and see a much younger me on video telling you all about those particular places so thanks to chris for holding our camera and stabilizer this time thank you all for watching thanks for sharing this with your friends and thank you for supporting battlefield preservation and education you

Channel: American Battlefield Trust

Views: 47,389

Rating: 4.9464884 out of 5

Keywords: American Battlefield Trust, Civil War Trust, 158th anniversary of gettysburg, gettysburg tour, devil's den tour, why is it called devil's den

Id: JBpeA7jxsTs

Length: 48min 25sec (2905 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021