The Three Days of Gettysburg: Panel Discussion - Part Two

okay panelists everybody got plenty of water here or anybody need any nice okay excellent make sure you give a sacrifice yeah you told me what was there for pcc they were all nice guys everyone was nice guys good guys okay we're gonna start in about one minute everyone okay ethan ethan has a synopsis first so that's a good map don't let it go away you should've got a laser he said there was one i think one of those big there's green glue probably not before that's fine okay man i have your attention everyone okay everyone welcome to the second session of gettysburg 150. we're going to discuss the second day of the battle at this point our panelists from the to my far left terry beckenbaugh ethan ray fuse steve lauer kevin benson deb sheffer and jenny weber we're going to do a synopsis of day two and that's going to be ethan ethan before i start on day two um we've talked about the political context here and uh lee's objective in trying is his general ship is based around an assumption he can't destroy the ability of the north to make war so he's got to break the north's will to continue making the war and in 1863 um one of the things he's got to take into account is the political situation in the north and since professor webber has written an excellent book on uh the copperhead element in the north of 63 i'd appreciate if you could talk a little bit about the situ that that situation so what what lee is seeing happening up north okay well what he's what he's seeing is a north that is increasingly divided um there is a a wing of the democratic party that is growing in influence um in size in power known as the peace democrats or the copperheads they're known by both and they've become in the summer of 1862 with the union losses particularly in the east they've become more and more influential and that has grown through the rest of 1862 now with emancipation which is deeply divisive in the north initially and with the military losses in the first half of 1863. there's another factor that's going on here and that is that there is a former congressman from ohio who has been arrested tried for treason for what he has said against the government and against the war and he was sentenced to spend the rest of the war in a military prison lincoln overrides that and banishes him to the confederacy but it really became hard for him to get his 501 c 3 status right that was the big issue right well it turns out that the confederates don't really like him so much nor does he like them so they come to a mutual agreement that he should leave after about a month and right about shortly before this battle he has popped up again in windsor ontario now up in canada across from detroit and he's announced that he's running for the governor of ohio from canada and you know it does make a great and very entertaining story now but lincoln is very much on the defensive about this because it looks like this former congressman has been arrested for doing nothing more than exercising his first amendment rights so he's under fire politically now you've got this election that's going on in ohio you've got a governor's election that's going on in pennsylvania right on this ground and in the fall of 1862 you've had these peace democrats make tremendous inroads politically at every level of government and since then you've had the introduction of a draft which is also highly unpopular already and it's just ginning up they're just getting ready to start drafting people as this battle comes in so one way to think about this or any other war is a triangle and on one corner you have a corner can a triangle can't have a corner point point thank you i didn't do well in geometry um they're historians folks keep that in mind and there's a reason um okay on one point you have the civilians and their will to wage war on another point you have the politicians and what they're willing to do to push forward a war and support it either through money or through a draft law or anything else to to wage the war and then you've got the soldiers themselves and so think about how they're pushing on each other and interacting and what they're pushing each other to do okay thank you jenny you're welcome and again one thing to keep in mind is uh civil war units are not raised by the federal government they are raised by the states ah not after the draft act but for the most part the regiments are organized at the state level in by by state yeah but in with the draft law one of the things that's interesting this is my next book sorry one of the things that's interesting here is that for the first time the federal government does take charge of enrolling um men into the army and because it had been always a state level responsibility up until then not a federal responsibility you also have a problem in the army armatomic in that you have uh the three years guys been raised but you also have some two-year units have been raised and you also have some nine-month forces that have been raised and that creates a complicated problem for joe for joe hooker george meade when they're trying to calculate who and what they've got in their army who's coming who's going who's staying and the big issue the pennsylvania election ohio elections uh pennsylvania governor andrew curtin has been a stalwart republican when lincoln wants troops curtain will not say yes or no he'll say how many more than you want will i should i give you and if you've got a situation pennsylvania we've got an election between a a gov between curtain and a democrat um and there's concerns what happens if this democrat you know wins the election um and there's your books looking at draft resistance and stuff like that in pennsylvania in ohio and elsewhere right if you can stir this up with some stir further war weirdness in the north maybe change these governors that can fundamentally change the federal war effort right you already have the legislature in indiana that was threatening to bring all of its troops home or not fund them and the governor there just pro wrote the legislature just never called them into session again that's a solution yeah okay let's let's get to the synopsis of what happened all right let's get to the battle all right but again the basic thing is the connection between the war policy what happens in the battlefield these these things are very intertwined all right so we get here we got a good map up here for thinking about the situation on the second of july keep in mind this map here looks the situation in the late afternoon which is very different from the situation when robert e lee has got to think what do i do next uh the basic decision he's going to make is he is going to consult with his quarker the most important of his advisors is going to be james longstreet he's been the one who's serving under the longest he commands the first corps um but he talks with other corps commanders and develops a plan of action you can see the federals are in strong position on cemetery hill and he understands that they also occupy culps hill out to the right how far south the union line extends as leah is making his decisions he can fairly see they extend south about from cemetery hill down along cemetery ridge to what is known as the qadhari barn which is i need a laser pointer but i guess i don't don't have one as he can see it the union position does not extend very far south his basic idea is to try to do what he did at chancellorsville which is maneuver his command and attack the enemy's flank in this case the southern flank and the idea is to do through a march get into position and attack the enemy's position that's what the far right of his force will do in the center he has got ap hills command the third corps which has been just was so beat up on the first day of the battle that lee is not going to commit much of it to the engagement two divisions are badly beat up but one has just arrived under rh anderson and that will participate in today's action over on the left the far left yules command which is to the north there we go if you move your little little thingy over to the right you see yours command over there extends from there over to west of town you then head south and then you've got ap hills third corps and just arriving right behind it is james longstreet's core this is the morning of the battle the basic idea lee comes up with again is to try to do a march south get on the southern flank of the federals and seize position of a key piece of high ground that he has identified on the southern flank which is which is the distinctive feature there is there's a peach orchard and it would provide an excellent artillery platform from which to infillate the union position on cemetery hill from the south you can do that get a position he figures he'll finish off what he did what he started on the first day it is imperative that this takes place relatively quickly because he knows he can assume that mead is concentrating his forces as fast as possible and he does not want to fight a concentrated army against concentrated army situation he time does not work in his favor he understands and so he makes the decision to make this march to make this movement james longstreet does not think this is a good idea he does not believe they should continue fighting at gettysburg he believes they should leave gettysburg move south try to maneuver the whole army around meade's southern flank and try to take a position somewhere between gettysburg and washington and make the federals attack him we can this can come up in discussion and debate after when we do q a uh it's feasibility that's but lee overrules them and orders them to make this move long streets march has a number has a couple of problems um when they start heading on the route south the most important thing for this to work is it's got the two things one march security is essential and number two the federal position has got to be when long street arrives pretty much the same as it was when longstreet started marching you might think that's a ridiculous assumption but lee had made a similar assumption at chancellorsville when he sent stonewall jackson on his march that the federals would be in the same position when jackson finished his march as when jackson started his march and lo and behold the federals are very accommodating so long street begins making his march and there's a lot of controversy about this as he begins moving south the route he is led on leads him to a rise from which he can see there's a federal signal station on little round top which is on the southern end of the battlefield right there if he continues to march along this line it's going to be detected and so that's going to be bad so what he decides to do in a rather lengthy laborious effort he's going to make a counter march another counter counter march and he's finally going to get his end his unit into position on the southern part of the field you see the little red blocks over there but by the time he's arrived there the situation has changed there are union forces occupying the peach origin these forces belong to daniel sickles whom mead had given the order of extending the federal line south from cemetery hill along what was known as cemetery ridge to cover the two high pieces of ground called round top and little round top sometimes called big round top big round top and we'll round up sql's got into position if you move the little cursor up a little bit and you see how cemetery ridge gets a little low in that area dan sickles does not like his position he sees the peach orchard out in front he sees what the sea this would be a great artillery platform and a bad one for everyone doesn't whoever doesn't have it so he decides on his own initiative he sends permission from mead can i move forward medium sickles do not like each other very much okay so sickles is inclined to disregard mead's guidance anyway he asks me for permission and mead sends out his son a staff officer and then he sends another staff officer but meade really doesn't reply to sicklet's concerns what happens then sickle sends out a reconnaissance of burdens sharpshooters they move forward to seminary ridge and they hit the southern end of ap hills command they have an engagement they fall back and this convinces sickles that i need to go grab the peach orchard he marches his men out they occupy a salient to peach orchard the position however is too long for sickles to occupy the peach orchard and cover the round tops he tries but it's not enough and the confederates when they launch their attack at launch he launches his attack with two divisions mclaughs divisions and hoods division the clause to the hoods of the south a clause to the north they smash and pulverize a sickle's position they barely nearly grab the round tops but fortunately forces from the fifth corps arrive just in time and are able to hold on to the round tops a little round top i should say but sickle's position at the wheat field and the peach orchard are smashed a huge gap is opened up in the federal line and george but george mead is able to seal the center of the line by bringing reinforcements from elsewhere one of the places he's pulled the reinforcements from is a place called culps hill which is where dick yule has the position was given the mission of conducting a demonstration in favor of longstreet's attack or something more if the opportunity arose in the late afternoon in the evening yule launches his attack on the 12th course position on culp hill culps hill is critical and you see where the word wadsworth is because you see that little road right there called the baltimore pike that is meade's supply line back to his railroad depot at westminster so culp still is pretty critical but due to the crisis created by sickle's move all the 12th corps has left there is a single brigade under george greene only 1400 men to face the 6 000 men that dick yule is going to launch against that position green however digs trenches he's got a very very strong position and is able to hold on to culp hill that night in a very hard fought fight in addition ewell launches his attack on cemetery hill with two brigades commanded by hayes and avery and that breaks into the 11th chorus position but fortunately there's enough artillery cemetery hill to finish fighting that off the day ends and the federals have held the field perhaps most importantly though the entire army potomac has arrived at gettysburg and lee is faced with such a question of i hit him i was successful the first day hit him hard on their flanks on the second day what do i do on the third day george mead is faced with a similar question i got hit hard on my flanks today i've got my whole force up what do i do tomorrow okay thanks ethan uh terry i want to start with you uh ethan has kind of covered lee's thinking but uh can i give your perspective on lee's plans for the day and what his key to victory was well you know as ethan mentioned you know lee's plan is based on horribly flawed information and again i think here where's where you could fault stuart for not being around uh you know what what lee does and this might this is uh maybe kevin could comment on this in terms of planning but uh what lee does he sends out the topographical engineer of the army of northern virginia out on the night of the first and the second uh that evening to find out where the southern flank of the army of the potomac is now this name was johnson right johnston johnson he goes out he jumps he goes out and he he tells lee i've been to the top of little round top i've seen that where there's no federals anywhere near there uh and there's all kinds of speculation as is what he actually where he actually was because he probably wasn't a little round top uh he's not familiar with this with this area uh there are a lot of small like like uh i don't know i always say small hills i guess you could you could say in that area even a little round top does stick out like a sore thumb but any for whatever wherever he was he told lee he was on little round top so the best intel he has is that lee has now is that there's still only two cores there and they're not on little round top they're barely down cemetery ridge so lee decides to make this plan a as as you know ethan said and and the plan to sound i mean even though you know when we look i think you have to look at the second day's fighting even though the confederates don't finish off the battle it's essentially a replay at chancellorsville they don't quite catch uh sickles in the flank quite as as well as they did the 11th corps but they do virtually destroy the third quarter during the fighting uh they destroy parts of the of the fifth corps too so you know the the idea is for that for the confederates to attack up you know i don't have up there but to attack up the emmitsburg road and again take the peach orchard and use that artillery as an artillery platform the plan makes sense if the intel is right the problem is it's not correct anymore and this is going to be a big problem because when long street and these guys go out there they're like uh there's a whole core here there's a lot more people here that we expected nobody here until we got well over the peach orchard and establish our artillery and then we can kind of just keep going and push these folks off of cemetery hill and in effect into a vice it doesn't work that way and through the ball there were no defenders yes well yeah and that's going to be a big problem uh you know lee's lease plan is not necessarily bad but you know if you have faulty information your plan is going to be faulty because it's based on the faulty information so realistically what lee is doing is he's going with the intel he has available you know he can't make up stuff well i wish they were there he has to go with what what they have and so because you know again i think this is a big problem where stuart is not there he doesn't have cavalry out there scouting he doesn't have good maps of the area i mean we take that for granted you know with gps and all those kinds of things he doesn't have maps uh so he just going with this you know this i think was colonel johnston uh had gone out and came back in the middle of the night and said yeah there's nobody there and in fact there's a there's a kind of a a an interesting episode with johnston is the guy who leads long street on the counter march on this march and they get to this this rise around this place called the black horse tavern which is if you've been together it's out behind the eisenhower farm it's way behind seminary ridge and one of the the orderlies comes back and says sir they can see us from the uh from little round top there's a signal station up there they can see us well first off there's a signal station there that's news okay wait what are they doing up there nobody's supposed to be there and secondly uh they they also as ethan mentioned you know bernan sharpshooters they're starting to run into troops from the third quarter they're like wait a minute the third quarter is supposed to be on the battlefield and and this is really the dilemma that lee faces at casebury and i i'm trying to be quick about this but when you look at how the armies are structured the army of northern virginia is a army that does not have a big logistical component in other words it does not have massive supplies but the counterweight to that is it moves very quickly it's very maneuverable and so lee likes meeting engagements like what happened on the first day the problem is as ethan mentioned time is working against him also the configuration of the fish hook at gettysburg works against the the confederates as well the can because the federals are almost in a circle it essentially negates lee's maneuverability advantage so as time continues the federals are slower but they have a big artillery advantage they have a big logistical advantage it's time the first day the situation favors lee it's a meeting engagement he gets a big chunk of the federal army but it's easily manageable the second day it starts to stabilize by the third day and we'll talk about this later it's totally a bad situation for lee the entire army potomac is up they know it the army of the public is essentially in a big circle they know that and all the advantages that the federals have are going to come into play on the third day with as we'll see disastrous results so i think that that's something to kind of keep in mind when you talk about the characteristics of the army because the it's much more striking here out in the east than it is in say vicksburg or out around here like when you're talking about price's rate or you're talking about the the fight of p rich wilson's degree anyone else have a perspective they'd like to offer on lee's plan on day two what was the key to victory for lee uh i basically if he could get a little round top and if he could get uh parts of uh parts of cemetery ridge under under control especially if he could set up the artillery platform on the peach orchard i think he could have been in good shape okay let's flip that let's talk a little about a little bit about the union forces what was mead's plan on this day of the battle hang on actually meet arrives about midnight on the first of july and he arrives at cemetery hill and he talks with howard he talks with hancock about the situation and his big question is is the right place to fight because then they say yes he says that's good because i've already ordered the army here so we can't turn reverse it now and then he rides along i mean it's dark out so he's trying to figure out the situation is but he make pretty much makes sound dispositions he he's concerned about his right because culp still covers his supply route back to baltimore um initially most of his attention is up there one of the reasons sickles is able to do what he's doing is because mead's not paying a really lot of attention to his left flank because he's concerned about his right he initially has slocum and how governor warren who was his chief engineer conducted reconnaissance and briefly thinks about making an attack against jewel's position but they tell him the nature of the terrain the towns there it's it's not very feasible in any case we've still got the fifth core which is on in route to the battlefield and the sixth core which is the biggest of the core in route to the battlefield so essentially me decides to sit tight and see with the see how the situation develops and when it when so he's not really keeping much of tabs on what sickles is doing and finally about mid afternoon on three o'clock with sedgwick's core finally arriving on the field mead decides to call his core commanders together to discuss what to do then we now we've got the army concentrated now we make a decision about what we can do but at that point he gets the message that he learns that sickles has moved forward he rides forward to sickle's position and finds out sickles is too far forward and it's too late to call him back because low here come the confederates uh so from this point on he's going to be in reaction phase for the rest of the for the rest of the day that's pretty much what means and then plugging the gaps that sickles move created yeah what was mead reliant relying upon to happen this day his uh winfield well one thing is one big things relying on winfield's scott hancock um when sickles this command gets smashed at the peach orchard uh the third quarter starts falling apart he puts the whole part of the battlefield under hancock's command and hancock fighting works like crazy on this day to plug that gap so he realized a great deal on winfield scott hancock and hopes for hope he can plug the gaps and he's playing firefighter here he's just putting out fires as best he can yeah i mean mead's in reactive mode all day uh once he determines he's not going to attack in the morning uh and remember the fighting doesn't really start until four o'clock in the afternoon i mean you know 3 30 4 o'clock remember there's no standardized time yet standardized time is something that doesn't happen until 1881. so literally what one guy i mean there's nobody says synchronized watches uh in fact to the best of my knowledge us grant's the first general to do that right at vicksburg he on the may 22nd assault he calls his uh core commanders in and says synchronize watches so that when he says that's actually a pretty revolutionary thing when grant does that uh but lee does not do that and so that they you know and of course long street takes that long time to do that but um it the the fighting starts anywhere between 3 30 4 o'clock it goes to well past uh sundown so it starts late in the day and this is one of the big the big problems that the confederates have is that not only is time running against them in terms of federal troops arriving the sun is going down there's that whole rotation of the earth thing the sun goes down and night fighting is something nobody likes and it's very rare yes it is it's very very rare in fact this is one of the few battles where you see night fighting during the civil war yeah and there's also is a lot less light pollution if you think about i mean if you go outside it's amazing how much light there is just from the street lamps from all this stuff if you were to go outside in 1863 it would be black except for the moon isn't there a full moon at this time i think there was yeah one of the nights there is july the night of july yeah one of the nights there is yeah no i do i think there's a full moon when they're fighting at culps hill which is this day and overnight that's when pendleton moves there moves his artillery in preparation for the attack he does it at night when pendleton moves his artillery the confederator in preparation for the third day he's doing it at night and he makes the comment that it was easy to move the artillery because of the bright moon okay any other perspectives on mead and and the union army going into the the second day okay let's let's focus a little bit on some key elements some some key things that happen and i'm just going to throw them out and ask you guys to talk about them and comment on them what about uh sickles and his uh what happened to him the peach orchard i would i'll take this um because this actually goes to my comments about politics sickles is a political general lincoln appoints him because he raised a brigade in new york city he was actually a democrat and so this is important for lincoln to demonstrate to the country that he has a bipartisan force beneath him so so sickles has no training no background in military arts whatsoever he has a huge ego um he shot his wife's lover to death in front of his house in the 1850s who was the son or grandson of francis scott key he was the first person to ever get off on a murder charge on a claim of temporary insanity so he was already a known quantity uh when the war broke out and uh and you know you want to talk about somebody with an ego this is somebody who had an ego and um on his own thought moved out uh into the peach orchard now there is a huge debate among historians still i think uh as to whether this was a good idea or a bad idea but his his men got hit really really hard out there in the peach orchard and the wheat field and he left the round tops open and little round top is a key point because if you can get artillery up there you can you can be shooting down at a quite broad field and doing a lot of damage in there so it's critical whoever has control of that really i think controls that whole end of the battlefield and so this is the problem that sickles created for the union forces and i can talk a little bit more about what happened to sickles later sickles men actually loved him they thought that anyone who would murder someone in the way that he did and for the reason he did would make a good aggressive leader so they looked up to him for this reason and okay so i'll get into the next thing about sickles which is also because he had an ego he was afraid okay so he was shot um i believe off his horse with a cannonball and it shattered his leg and he knew he was going to lose his leg and as they were carrying him off the field on a litter he asked one of the litter-bearers for a cigar and then asked him to light it because he was concerned that his men would be so devastated to think if that he had been killed that they wouldn't be able to fight well anymore and so he wanted them to know see the smoke coming out of the cigar to know that he was still alive by the way he sent his leg the remnants down to um what would be uh to read walter what would become it already was walter reed no no and his leg went on exhibit there the bones and he would take his new girlfriends there every year on the anniversary of the battle to go visit his leg bones and there's now a museum of medic military medical history and you too can go visit the bones now of general sickles legs they're on display still i've seen them yes they are what what happened to sickles uh troops they got beat up yeah they get they get virtually uh i would say annihilated but they they certainly get chewed up very badly it was awful sickles sickles men are in and that that's the thing you know there's debate what what's sick and sickles the debate starts between sickles essentially meat you know meads has you almost ruined lost the day and sickles in typical fashion says actually i saved the day i pulled your chestnuts out of the fire it came at a tremendous cost though the third core was essentially not a viable fighting force by the night of the second and uh it it really i would argue i tend to side with meat on this one i think that that while i understand why if you go and this is one of those things where you know we take guys on staff majors on staff rides i can tell you you know about on the map that okay this is high ground but if you go to gettysburg and you look at you yeah that's that's high ground uh when but as mead i think it was me that said to sickles at one point well if you keep going to the next higher ridge you're going to end up at south mountain and that's that's to a certain extent true but i think that you know there's also some context about what happened to sickles at chancellorsville at chancellorsville sickles did not get out flanked but sickles was ordered by hooker to give up a piece of ground called fairview oh sorry hazel grove hazel grove uh and at hazel grove it's a perfect artillery platform and what happened was sickles reluctantly gave up that piece of high ground and the confederates immediately put artillery on and started pounding the third chord to to bits and so i i think you can't look at sickles move up to the peach orchard in the wheat field without thinking of what happened to him with chancellorsville in fact he even says to one of his age look at that ground we're not going to let it happen to us again and that that's a key part in what what what ensues later on okay as a result of this long street smashes through both of these locations and takes them and heads to the center and i believe it's rights brigade of georgians willards they actually crest crest it momentarily and briefly we'll get to more of that tomorrow but the center had to hold and so how did it hold hancock comes along and says oh my gosh i need people i need people you guys first minnesotans get over here and they have to plug the center and i think 262 went down to less than 60. 400. 497 497 47 came back 47 came back i must be talking about the next day then with my numbers sorry about that but um the first minnesota plugs the hole that resulted from sickles decisions yeah and i want to talk about that i think it's very good point uh deb i want to talk about that in a little bit more depth and kevin i want to get uh your insights on this because you and i talked extensively about this what did hancock see and what did he choose to do and why did he do it well i think at the moment as ethan and terry have been saying in all of us actually when hancock arrives what he sees is the remnants of sickle's core coming back and an organized force of confederates that are building up momentum and the center is at risk and now it becomes someone said the arithmetic part of the arithmetic in the equation there is time how how much time do i need to buy in order for the rest of my core to come up and other units that are coming as again as we've said what was mead's plan hang on and plug the gaps so people coming up in units organize units to plug the gap i need 10 minutes and 10 minutes is colonel commanding first minnesota attack that take those colors and the colonel commanding the first minnesota he can he's not an idiot he can look across the field and he sees a couple of thousand screaming confederates coming organized with artillery support i'm going to my death and all of my men are going with me and yet they still attacked because they knew they had to buy time for the rest of the federal forces to come up and a hope to hold the line so there's honor culture there's pride in your regiment we're the first by god minnesota we're going to attack we're not going to say no steve and i have walked that ground together when we were a little bit younger than we are now and it just made me i haven't to this day i have a hard time conceiving the courage that that took they knew they were going to die and you see this though with it's not just the first minnesota i'm the iron brigade on the first day it has a very similar story the iron brigade does not exist anymore after the first day at gettysburg it's gone i was reading a guy's letters ten days ago in an archive from a regiment in upstate new york he was in the wheat field they went in with 600 men in their regiment and came out with fewer than a hundred so it's the bloodletting on this field is frankly unimaginable i do this professionally i read about this almost every day and i cannot imagine the kind of losses that this is and i read the letters of trying to walk over bodies or how many or that you lose all of your friends in one day in one hour and i cannot fathom it i cannot wrap my head around that i think that's partly why we we all kind of do this i mean you know i've told you i've been to gettysburg probably well over a hundred times you know as a boy you know my dad would take me to gettysburg multiple four or five times the summer i grew up about half an hour away and it never gets old um you know we we would if you're if you're marching if you're walking over like say cults hill you know that would would so we would usually go to the library xerox the or as again this is the days before the internets were invented and uh yeah it was always very serious i mean dad you know yeah we had a good time terry o.r oh official records i'm sorry the official records of the war between warriors of the war the rebellion well that's the official name the government calls the war the rebellion um but you read their words and you see this is the ground they talk about i mean and it really is humbling i i get chills every time i go there uh you'd think it gets old i mean i'm 46 and i've been there you know probably well over more than once or twice per year if you average it out in my life and um it's it's still i think that's one of the reason why gatesburg is so compelling because it's so it is an emotional experience for people who who want to get into it um and that's that's that's that's part of what why it's so cool that's probably why i assume a lot of you are here yeah when you stand on get on little round top where strong vincent o'rourke chamberlain stood and you look out at what they were looking at because it looks the same today especially essentially and you imagine the hordes of rebels coming at them you cannot help but be just chilled to the bone okay let me go back to first minnesota we talked about what the colonel what the men must have felt what was the confederate reaction what was the other side how did they react uh did they understand that they were only being attacked by what a company did they understand that or no i mean they just they're surprised that that they're being attacked first off um and it it doesn't route them but it does force them to to stop and reorganize and that's essentially what hancock wants he wants them to buy time and because of the tactics because of the technology if you just have a disorganized mob it's just a it's just an armed disorganized mob it's the formations that give them that kind of combat power and if you're not in the formation if you're not in the line of battle like uh you really aren't nearly as effective as you would be normally so by forcing them to stop forcing them to try and get some kind of semblance of water it's going to take some time and that's that's really what hancock wants so even though it's it's a brutal math we talk about the math again and it's a brutal math hancock it was it worked it served the purpose i mean and that's part of what and this is something more that kevin and steve can talk about because they were in the military but that's part of what you have to do i would assume as an officer is that you have to make difficult choices at times in that kind of situation that's what hancock was trained to do his entire life and terry talks about when men turn into a just a mob and need to reform part of the importance of that is that the morale and courage partly came from the guy on your left and the guy on your right and being in formation and in contact once that contact was lost and some of the guys on the field talk about when they lost contact with one another they felt alone and it was much easier to go the other way okay uh steve uh kevin you guys want to offer any perspectives on on hancock's decision well the other thing that helps is and again this is hard for us to imagine now but the smoke created by the black powder and and the temperature held the smoke down so it added to again as terry pointed it wasn't the shock but like holy cow someone's actually attacking me and i couldn't see them until they got close because of the smoke and the haze on the battlefield and all that were kind of groping forward so but the decision itself you're right it is that's the only form of military schooling these people had was west point except for self-education which you know some of the officers did hardy's tactics was the book that they all read hardy a confederate officer but but was one of the union before the great battles began that's what they knew but the man on horseback at that moment had to take a decision and that was the decision that he took as as brutal as it was the math of war grinding on but it was successful needed 10 minutes he got i think from all the books that i've read about 15 yeah so and that was just enough but it's important also look at the terrain when these organizations form on a battlefield they're forming in straight lines and as they go through this terrain as you pass through the wheat field they'll try and get to the devil's den instead of where this counter attack is going to take place all that formation is gone so all these individuals are moving no longer elbow to elbow which is where they're trying but they want to be in where the train to be they're moving in in into as individuals taking advantage of terrain so when they're trying to reform and and hancock sees this attempt to reform these men as they come off of that terrain it is the absolute correct moment to hit them because they are not prepared for a an actual organized attack and although they're far more of them than there are the first minnesota and they make the minnesota unit pay it adds to the confusion of men trying to find their file find their squad find their company and get back in line and you see this again when they confederate attack off of round top down and into the gully and then up onto little round trap they're they're all they're not attacking in a in a line they're attacking as a melee if you will a group of individuals all moving individually so when when we get to this in a moment when they and that counterattack occurs off the top of the hill as an organized body of men all those individuals are no longer touching and that that morale factor which i can touch the guy next to me and where that's how we're supposed to fight is very powerfully lost when you are individuals and so the the opportunity to turn around and look for your guys and walk backwards is far greater when he's not at your elbow okay i want someone to take a little bit of time all of you jump in on this uh let's uh switch gears now to the defense of culps hill why is that important what happened well first of all here was the the timing of it that was later on as as ethan terry pointed out earlier forces have been taken away so the southern plan is working to a certain extent because it's an echelon attack and the natural reaction is to try to move to counter it so i'm taking units away from areas that are unengaged and so now there's one brigade unfortunately oh god i just spaced his name green green george here's green yeah has his men dig in so there are fortifications but it's still a brigade facing 6 000 or so there's another tough fight you know the 1400 have to stand and fight and fight and when reinforcements finally come they have to be cycled in because the other thing that we have to recall is the the weaponry at the time the the rifling such as it was that gave what accuracy these weapons had started to get fouled after repeated firing and the effectiveness of fire becomes less and less so you have to have time to come off clean your weapon take a breath get a gun you know take a sip from your canteen and then go back so that's that's my first comment started off uh an incredibly hard fight that was just as vital as what happened at little round top just as vital as what happened with first minnesota at least my reading yeah i think that mead was very fortunate to have you know general general greene there he's kind of a unique individual he's a west pointer he's the oldest brigadier right yeah he's the oldest brigadier in the in the army tell me he's 61 years old at the time of the battle uh his men when the war starts are kind of like what this old man's gonna lead us uh but they find out very quickly that the old man knows what he's doing and you know old pap as they call him old papi green he understands green is clear understands the value understands how the the the potential of the technology they're using and he understands the best way to safeguard the lives of his men green's one of the few officers the army potomac who routinely digs in when he gets a chance uh and in fact on top of culp's hill he has to send several messages to to request to dig in and and basically they say well go ahead if you really want to go ahead uh and and green immediately has the men dig in and it's very fortunate that they did because had the confederates attacked them uh they may have been able to hold because green's men were a pretty pretty solid brigade but the fact that they were dug in is a what what you know kevin and steve would call a combat multiplier it makes it gives one man the power of two or three in terms of his capability to defend a piece of terrain and green did have the advantage of cycling that the south did not have so the north was cycling in and you know reloading and resting a little bit and the confederates were just still hammering and so they didn't have any opportunity at all for those kinds of things there is a question though even if the confederates take these positions whether they can actually hold them afterwards because the 15 000 men of cedric's men arrived but they're not they made it was a 36 mile march in 24 hours something like that so they need a little bit of time to rest but at some point even if they'd taken culpable the next morning on the the third of the federals are able to you know reclaim what they had before because they've got reinforcements to bring from elsewhere in the field also question comes up with a little round top if they you know if they take a little round top how much further can they push uh laws guys just to reach the starting point for the march had already marched if you one of the things that's interesting from the battlefield as you go a little round top you look way out to the mountains and you know where cash town gap is you know how far laws brigade has marched that day and without water i mean they've been a huge physical exertion so by the time they got to even if they they'd taken a little round top i the second second core or fifth chord reinforcement comes up there to drive them off there they probably would have been pretty weak um but again that that's presuming that this does not create some huge cascading effect within the army of the potomac and it just begins collapsing but again these are sort of questions that you got you raised you know how decisive was little roundtop versus culp sale what do the federals have in reserve how was meat prepared for these contingencies and things like that but it you know again the corposal fight doesn't get very much attention in part because the movie the book um and for the longest time it was it's sort of it's kind of it was kind of out of the way on the battlefield and ever since they built the new uh visitor center but closer to culp sale on baltimore pike it makes a little more accessible and it's a good site to visit and again standing on culp sale it's the terrain the terrain terrain i mean green has got a it's pretty formidable thing that johnson's division has got to attack um and keep in mind they made a huge march the previous day they were out in the cumberland valley they marched them through cash down gap reached the battlefield they're tired too so you know great performance by by green uh but he had a pretty nice piece of terrain to hold on to and the progress that the confederates do make on culp hill late that night we'll play a role in the next day's fighting as we'll soon see okay let's let's i should have done this earlier but somebody established a little context we're talking about the physical exertion uh first of all what was the climate like uh in pennsylvania gettysburg at this time of year it was in july i mean so it had to be hot right humidity and and address address deb or anybody address the physical demands of of being a soldier in the civil war and one of the things kevin and i and talking about the movie kevin remarked that he kind of doubted that there were very many overweight soldiers as many of the actors were who who participated in the movies and but but speak to those topics for a little bit well i'll start with that um you have the physiology of deadly force encountering and reaction to those things you have men who are already probably dehydrated exhausted not fed well have marched a long ways in i believe it was in the upper 80s these days with high humidity if you've ever been there it is very miserable so they were already not at their peak so when you get the physiology of deadly force encounter these only exacerbate their physical condition that they already have officers would comment that um they would have to remind soldiers to fire their weapon instead of just reload it because they would forget or they wouldn't hear it because of the noise of the battle they would also the soldiers would just completely fall asleep after a battle because they were so depleted uh they had an adrenaline depletion through the battle and you know that the only way to recover from that is to sleep so um all of these things played a huge factor when you have the heat and when you have the ground conditions the fighting conditions these guys are going to suffer no one is strong enough or big enough to avoid some of these physiological reactions okay and also when you're talking about the marching the road from chambersburg to or the chambersburg to gettysburg that was an academized road even back then so it would have been hard if you're in bare feet or you're wearing crappy shoes as most of the soldiers on both sides were but the the thing you weren't dealing with was was dust most of the other roads in the area were dusty and i don't know if you if you if you remember that that scene from the in this hidden gesture but the good the bad and the ugly where he comes up and uh he's like uh hey viva jefferson davis and they realize that they start taking the dust off but the uniforms are blue and they arrest them well that that kind of thing is fairly common it might sound silly but i mean guys are constantly especially if you're not in the front rank of the marchers you're eating a lot of dirt and and that's a common thing and and you think okay well how about if it rains well if it rains then you're walking in mud i mean just imagine you know if you had a mud a dirt road and about 15 000 people walked over the dirt muddy dirt road before you and what that would be like and that's kind of what you're dealing with here because it had rained uh previously and it also rains on july 4th the night the day after the battle very hard okay we've talked about first minnesota we've talked about cult hill let's talk a little bit about little round top can somebody kind of describe the situation there and what occurred well i think ethan mentioned it a little bit earlier there's warren the signal officer uh no sorry he was the engineer goes up finds a signal station now the purpose of signal station then they were not doing semaphore but it was called a wig wag system different numbers of times up and down trying to send information and these were scouts but that's the only union soldiers that were up there warren pretty good officer you know right at that moment takes in the situation sees there's no troops seized the men who were hoods division i don't think he knew it was hoods division at the time but he saw confederates coming and on his own accord diverts a brigade he was up ultimately two brigades to the vicinity to hold the hill because he recognizes how important it was now and that's again there's a different kind of courage but he's a brigadier general he's on the staff of mead but he really isn't isn't known to these folks he just drives out he bribes he rides out and on his own accord i'm a brigadier general you know follow me actually the the units that came up were from the fifth core and warren had been had been a commander he knew that that's right that's right yeah so that's right it was petty work you're right so he knew stephen weed and haslett personally because they had worked together before so when he came up to them and said i need you to do this because most of the the division that they vincent belongs to is uh james barnes division and they fight in the wheat field um but their the rear brigade is the one that uh warren pulls off and sends up to little round top to win it's great fame uh so there's a lot of personal relationships that that situation play a large circumstance if dan sickles who'd ask him to do it they probably would not um but again it's just there are these cross tensions and personality issues within the army like they're all within all arms so that plays a big part of it and again warren is the chief engineer of the army and his job is to understand positions identify positions pick them out uh before the but when me took command of the army on the 28th of june um he inherited hooker's chief of staff dan butterfield which me did not think was good because he did not like butterfield or hooker um but i think warren was one of two people he asked to take butterfield's place uh and warren said no so mead had to take had to take butterfield and the staff that he inherited from hooker to come in which is going to create issues for me later on because these guys were friendly with sickles and when there's a controversy with meat and sickles they're in a very well strategic position to do do george meet a lot of damage i think though that was probably the correct decision yeah and if you're thrust in like that really the last thing you want to do is okay uh chief you're fired uh you're a new chief and nobody knows what the heck is going on and that was that was warren's right orrin said rather stay as a chief engineer i think andrew humphries approached it all she said right through a division commander and so jesus was stuck with butterfield but again the chief of staff commander relationship is pretty important in an army um they don't quite have yet this the prussian system but it's still a pretty important position so what happens on a little round top i guess most people probably know that story but take a couple moments to go back through it to recap well there is this large guy who was once started a move with jim carrey and he took command up which has been mentioned today already jenny mentioned dumb and dumber there was and there was this irish guy i guess who was in it and uh all kinds of things happened and now what happened a little round top was the the warren arrived saw he could look at and one of the things they've done on the battlefield the last few years is they've been doing a huge rehabilitation to remove trees and things like that so you can really see from a little round top what warren would have seen looking out toward the map looking out to warfield ridge and you can imagine long lines of hoods division deploying and just the words that would have gone through warren's head and when he saw that out there to see and he grabbed me somebody anybody and he grabbed uh the first brigade was vincent's brigade from barnes's division and sent him up to little roundtop to holt the southern part of it there was a problem in the confederate attack the hoods division was deployed the way was four brigades up the two brigades up two brigades back in the lead on the right he had laws brigade which again had just made a 20-mile march at least to just reach the field on the left was robertson's brigade was the old texas brigade which hooded formerly commanded and the right in the second line the right was not sims but bennings brigade brennan's georgia brigade and the left rear was gt anderson's brigade gt anderson fears off to the left to go fight in wheat field the other three make the attack on little round top devil's den haux ridge and into the valley of death uh problem develops there are splits that develop their hood gets wounded early on by shell fire and so the division just loses whatever centralized direction it has and regiments begin flying off in all different directions the attack on little round top takes place there's attack in front by elements from robertson's brigade texas brigade to texas units and there's the element of forces that are coming over round top and then attacking into the saddle uh to try to get around to the rear of little round top those are the forces that josh will launch chamberlain's command vincent deploys his command with the 16th main i think city mainer michigan on the right michigan on the right 44th new york 83rd pennsylvania and then this the 20th maine and the 16th the 43rd the 44th they face the attacks of the texas brigade and if you go on low round top texas brigade attacking up these up is really rocky it's a it's every man for himself lines are not they're just trying to attack up there and they're just about to break through when stephen weeds brigade arrives and patrick or works brigade regiment shows up and manages to drive them back serious problems on the left of the 20th main because oats is has two regiments and he attacks the 47th alabama and the 15th alabama and they make a number of determined attacks on chamberlain's position and at times it gets hand to hand the battlefield right now does not give you an exact image of what happened because in the 20th century something called chamberlain avenue was built and that that altered the spur between big round top and and little round top but you can still get a pretty good idea of what if you go out to that position there at least before the 1960s you know people didn't go out there but with the publication of killer angels in the movie everybody goes out there now um chamberlain's a rock star uh but i mean the the the 47th and 15th make their attacks on chamberlain's position and eventually they forced chamberlain to go from two lines to one rank lines meanings have two two lines he's got one and eventually he decides he's got to pull back the left wing of his regiment uh in order to prevent the alabamians from reaching around his flank and then they begin running out of ammunition and chamberlain orders the bayonet there is some controversy about what happened next the movie bayonet they make the charge there's also there's there are other accounts that say what had happened was after the alabamians fell back some members of the 20th maine said we should go get out some of our so collect some of our wounded and dead who are out there still in the battlefield and when they started moving out to do that that sort of carried a momentum of all its own and the 20th main just started going forward and chambers oh okay yeah all right and the alabamians were so exhausted at that point uh like i mentioned they're just the 20 the march with no water and they get they they fall back and chamberlain um is going to ride if it's a couple decades later chamberlain's gonna write about his experiences he's gonna write one of these popular magazines that they've got in the north he writes an account and again after the battle chamberlain was not viewed as any great above anybody anybody else who fought at gettysburg but he writes his account this effort from tom dardran who's written some really good stuff on the uh i hope i remember what he told me to write but what happened was they wrote this article chamberlain wrote this article he submitted it and then the editors the editors did as they want to do made it this incredibly melodramatic story so much so that when chamberlain saw what they'd done to it he disowned it and he said this is this this isn't accurate this is too much you know i was i fought hard but i didn't come on calm down um but then the story comes you know so the 20th century begins and moves along and you know chamberlain's no view is no great shakes over no green or anybody else and then what happens is there's this english this is american author by the name of michael shara michael nutt yeah michael sharma right the son is jeff the son yeah and shara is he meets with his fellow english professors and they give him a little bit of job that there's no great american no great american lancelot a great night no no a story of this kind of thing and so character is looking for this american night and he comes across this this this magazine article about joshua challenge chamberlain that makes him that again chamberlain himself has said this is too much shah takes it adds his own little bit to it okay so on top of being too much for chamberlain it's now going to be more than that they've published before and this goes into the movie the book the killer angels so now of course everybody wants to buy the joshua moore's table shaman t-shirt at gettysburg and then of course the movie takes it even further and so the the popular image of it is like three or four steps removed from the original thing and one of the great dangers of it is is because of so much myth making there is a danger people you know you know pushing back against it and losing sight of just how in fact heroic the chamberlain performed in at gettysburg i mean it was an extraordinary experience um that he turned started performance he turned in at little roundtable again at the same time the danger is we slight the members of 140th new york in work and 83 pennsylvania the 44th and the 16th michigan who who themselves put up incredible and again not just mention you know who is the man at the other end of the line from chamber it's the 137th new york with greens guys and so there's all these interesting cross currents i think dangerous was sort of serving its service towards the historical consultant to it and you know the image you get of chamberlain was he's this big big guy that's because jeff daniels is six foot two and uh that garden said that when he was the consultant for and he met daniels he his he saw daniel says you know daniel's you know you know he's you know reality chamberlain's only about five foot six and daniel's response was well in the movie he's going to be six foot two okay and that that's just the way that just the way the the the layers are added to the story and it's just it's a fascinating subject okay i'm gonna go around because i want to get everybody's opinion quick opinion on this question which action and if you think all three were equal or if you want to rank them that's fine too but move quickly which action was most important on on day two uh the defense of culps hill first minnesota's attack or little round top let's terry i'm going to start with you we're just going to go right around the panel i would say little round top okay ethan uh i would have to say the first minnesota in the context of the general performance of hancock uh closing up the center okay steve little roundtable kevin i'm with ethan first minnesota deb first minnesota little round top okay no love for george green wow the the the the the it continues poor george green i didn't make a movie about him he didn't ask who was the most skillful okay now uh we're going to open it up to your question after one more question but i want to throw this one out to the panelists too and i'd like each of you to to jump in as you as you see fit who is more important in deciding the outcome of day two the commanders or the troops who really decided who really decided and explain a little bit behind well i mean i think you know because and not so much i'm not really going to talk that much about lee or mead because realistically once the fighting i mean lee lays out the original plan but he pretty much you know it kind of takes a life of its own i think when you look at especially how the federal army reacts i mean i'm not going to say that mead was worthless that day that's totally unfair but i think when you look at some of the key decisions were made they were made not by mead hancock makes the decisions warren makes a key decision for the most part the federal the federal lower ranking officers may consistently make the right decisions the confederate officers either they're faced with a difficult and almost insurmountable task or they don't make the right decision and so i think it's a combination of the men and the officers the low-ranking officers who were at the the sharp end of the spear i can't personally make it a distinct i mean of course you want oh the soldiers of course i mean because i mean i mean they fought like both sides fought extremely well that day long street later wrote afterwards there was never a finer piece of fighting done in any battlefield than his command did at gettysburg that day um for positive reasons you want to thank for positive the soldiers for negative the commanders but again the commanders are working under such stressful in the same circumstances the same problem physical limitations and issues that the at on top the stress of command it's just it's it's it's a lot that these guys are carrying at this battle anybody else want to comment on that i can concur with ethan i think it's we all want to say it's the soldiers who do this and the soldiers are the ones who do the most of the fighting and the dying but officers in the civil war are in front of their soldiers for the most part and the officer casualties that go through this are enormous throughout these battles and in fact but in fact the officers are the ones who place the men in the position to do what they're doing and so without the without some officer's direction to be there uh the things good or bad that occur there could not have happened and to the extent that as even straight there their inability to see the ground to see the smoke through the smoke all those things are the typical things that occur on a battlefield and once the once this motion is set in place in gear if you will the uh the soldiers themselves are really captive of that and have to go forward where they're told to go and uh and so i think there's it really would be very difficult to separate the two here and say one or the other is more important than the other they are equally uh either doing good things or causing bad things to occur and what you said the front line commanders they are i mean at one point the gap in the union line the only thing in the in the union gap in the line is george meade and his staff at one point in the battle he is up front in the battle any other thoughts kevin deb jenny i'm inclined to go with the soldiers i'm i'm with terry on this because i think that under the circumstances the the demands on the individual are so are really quite extraordinary in a lot of these cases of having marched were so far with no sleep or little sleep not much food not much water and then to be ordered into battle after that i think um at that point it's a it's a personal achievement to be able to do anything and to function at all and while i'm not going to go you know dis the commanders what i would say is that um i would say it's the the regimental officers uh who who i would give the most credit to for executing and and getting the minute more than me but that would be my inclination and i don't know how many of the regimental officers fell dead and wounded but it was significant and so that shows right there that they were definitely in the front lines and trying to do their best kevin you guys absolutely with jenny actually all the reading i've done and all the just thinking about this the soldiers had to have something to believe in and i think they believed in their regimental officers uh and i think that went both ways and i think that was the key uh can i can i butt in on this because we haven't talked about this you were my professor you know we haven't talked about this at all about um really what the soldiers are there fighting for and what they believe in and if you if north or south by the time you get to this point in the war they're fighting for each other as much as anything and they may fight for their officers but they're more fighting for each other the unit cohesion there is really important i think plays a really big role in explaining why more people aren't running away that and we get back to this honor culture idea of boy you know if you run you better believe that this guy next to you is going to be riding home and his mother lives next to your mother and suddenly you know you've got a reputation because the individual companies are raised by home towns so literally if you do run you're not going to you're not going to go back home right and hometown people if they felt like uh men weren't enlisting soon enough or fast enough they might even go so far as to provide that man with a white apron to show that they they really did not i think they started i think that's early in the war yeah yeah early in the world not at this point that's how the hometown people fell when george me takes command well the first thing he does is he's an order and says any soldier who doesn't do his duty his officers are authorized to put him to death i mean that i mean that that's you know the army you know a lot of incentives are getting in but the army makes it very hard for you it creates a great deal great number of disincentives for you not to do your job exactly so i was definitely talking about early on in the war by this point like jenny says a lot of things have changed about battle motivation one of the one of the key factors that impacts their cohesion is this idea that officers who in this particular at all times actually but especially here as well officers who instill requirements for discipline requirements for health and welfare who stand in front of them or have uh an extraordinary impact on both the cohesion that develops within the unit and the fact that the unit is there all in the fight uh the weakest you know the weakest performing units were always those units at least in the literature of the letters with those units where the officer did not influence or require discipline behavior principally this one behavior not necessarily in the line of battle but in things like uh what we call them hygiene personal hygiene yeah uh the the very fact that they were kept clean that they had to change that officers had to inspect them to see that their their feet were okay that they they dug latrines as an example behind their positions uh recognizing that there's you know the disease was the primary killer of soldiers in the civil war uh i did a study of three companies in in florida who enlisted in 1862 that had 35 deaths in the civil war all 34 of the 35 deaths were diseased only one soldier out of these three companies that died in battle so i think the idea that that when you the cohesion that develops within a unit is fundamentally based on where they come from this idea you come from the same hometown uh you come from the same state in the confederate army the state that you came from the reason why the south had so much difficulty in consolidating regiments was because they refused to be consolidated because they would lose their state identity their officers were generally chosen from amongst them if they were junior officers and that was true that was true in the union army too they they elected their officers and i think one of the impacts in this battle that is powerful is the presence of robert e lee on the south side and the we talked earlier the the belief that if you're going to have me do this and leaves present on the battlefield it must be okay and i'm gonna go forward and do this but i think that and all of these soldiers in this battle in particular almost all these are are veterans these are soldiers that have been in battle for they've been fighting each other there's a tremendous amount of respect between these two these two armies that will play out in the last after the last day because they have fought each other tooth and nail for since 1861 and uh so i think the cohesion of the soldier is is powerful but the the impact of the officers who who lead them and what they do with them what they require of them is a very powerful impact on their ability to go forward okay we're going to open it up to your questions and answers if you have a question please queue up in the back corner and we will get to it we'll try to do as many as we can we're going to conclude at precisely at 4 15. okay let's go brief brief question we're talking about day one and day two and day three what about night one and night two you mentioned mead arriving at midnight with a full moon uh what happened to the troops did they have time to rest did they sleep were they too wound up uh there was mention of greenspan digging in what did again mean does it mean digging foxholes and was the red cross present age levels of these troops on both sides and what happened to the dead and wounded okay i'm gonna collapse that and try to get that into one question that we have our panelists address just address what the truth what happened to the troops at night some of them might have been fighting some were trying to sleep what were they trying to do they pretty much dropped where they were i think that was it on the third day or the second day hancock was up early and they heard guns in the distance and the soldiers around them were still just sleeping soundly even over the sound of the guns it depends on soldier depends on the unit i mean if they're in the sixth core they're probably marching if they're in the 11th corps they are probably trying to get the best sleep they can on cemetery hill if they're in the the 12th corps they're in one place it just depends on the unit in terms of medical care after the battle they did establish a series of hospitals in the vicinity of gettysburg if you go to gettysburg today a lot of the buildings that were used for hospitals are indicated by have been purchased by the park service or have been marked by the park service as a bronze plaque on them although informally virtually every house in gettysburg became a small hospital they're with so many wounded okay let's go to the next question please this would be for all of you is there anything wrong was there anything wrong with lee's command structure intrinsically wrong with a very small staff were his commanders his field commanders less able to make command decisions during the action as opposed to the north there's anything fundamentally wrong with his command structure but he was understaffed um he had what i think five eight um i mean good lord i mean i i guess be careful what i say here but you know at fort leavenworth we have a general come on post and i mean it's like a it's like a free-for-all like 50 people i swear coming in the building and say i must be another general here um you know and i i marveled that lee had five uh lee should have had significantly more than that i mean i don't know kevin what would a what would a a person of lee's rank equivalent today have in terms of staff that was a very skillful shifting field army commander now would have well jiminy crickets the field army that i was in we had about 1500 in all different kinds of staff section from personnel to logistics to controller doing you know tracking money i've always been astounded by how well these armies did with how small their staffs were well to put this in some context though lincoln had two secretaries yeah sure that was his entire staff yeah but i mean i mean sam curtis during the p ridge campaign uh you know in 1862 he has a staff the size of lee's which is not terribly big i mean by the standard he's only commanding army about 12 000 men lee's commanding an army of about 70 000 men and has five guys each each of the core have their own staff have their own quarter masters have their own ordinance officers and again i don't see anything in the gettysburg campaign that you can mark up as a problem that you can attribute at a failed staff work i i i think you to a certain extent the whole thing on the night of the first and the second is up says poorest when you have one guy you send out there and he comes back and says it's clear i was on top of a little round top uh you'd think that there'd be more than one person i mean yes you can blame someone else stuart but i think that you know that's that's asked an awful lot to put an awful lot of pressure on one guy to get it right okay let's go to our next question could you help us understand the experience of just the average soldier in the middle of a charge did they run did they walk how much weight did they carry if somebody fell did they stop to help them what's that very intense spirit flesh and blood experience like for the frontline fighter i don't know if anybody can answer that yeah i mean in terms of weight i mean they they carry packs when they march but the confederates traveled a lot lighter uh usually before going to combat a unit would dump everything that was on their back so if they were going to make a charge they generally didn't carry all that stuff with them into combat but those packs were 60 to 70 pounds yeah and then they're carrying a gun that's about 20 pounds figure oh 10 pounds or so of ammunition and the average soldier was 145 pounds in the union army right 445 pounds yeah yeah i know when i was a kid you go to gettysburg used to have all these uniforms and they still do but they used to in the old visitor center and i just think my god there's a lot of little kids in the federal army well actually no that's that was the size of the of the men but you know those men were what's the average age 20 26 20 25 or 6 i believe okay so yep yeah so but the thing you have to understand about a civil war battlefield it'll be interesting there's a documentary that's being made right now that's going to try and do like a saving private ryan type civil war experience i don't know that they're ever going to be able to get it because the fundamental problem with the civil war battlefield is as as kevin mentioned they're using black powder if you're in a firing line and you're firing a lot in about five i don't know maybe two three shots in about a minute you're not going to see maybe 10 feet away from you especially with artillery fire yeah if our toilet fires even worse i mean you you might not know what's happening a hundred yards away from you um and that's gonna that's one of the problems about a civil war battlefield like today they use they use smokeless powder and so and they also use steel tipped bullets so when a bullet goes into a person it not only has a much higher muzzle velocity and so it's going much faster it usually goes in makes a hole that big and leaves the other side leaves a hole that big in the civil war they're using lead bullets and so when a bullet hits you first of all it's a bigger bullet it's a 69 caliber usually it's just a slug yeah but when the bullet hits you it squashes so it makes a hole this big if it goes three it comes out like that big so i honestly i i i i've read all kinds of accounts i'm sure you have too of you know like canister being used and canister basically is a giant just imagine a gigantic shotgun it's artillery and i've read accounts of people quote evaporating in pink mist i think honestly if you were going to try and do a saving private ryan thing you'd almost have to get a triple x violence rating i mean you can get a triple x rating not just for for sexual issues but you can also get one for extreme violence and i mean people's arms getting blown off heads getting blown off brains getting through i mean it's not a pretty sight right and then you a lot of these guys honestly are so paralyzed by what they're experiencing that they think they're shooting and they're not um it's only a fraction of the men who are actually shooting their weapons uh and the rest of them are just so caught up that they don't realize they're not shooting there was one gun they found on the gettysburg battlefield with i think 13 rounds just you know the guy kept loading new rounds he didn't fire but forgot that he wasn't firing which by the time you have the 13th round is in there is probably just as well that he didn't yeah let's go to the next question oh just a real just uh real quick on this issue of what happens to them when they're when they're going in about they dump most of this heavy load before they attack and so they're really carrying in the battle just their their weapon and ammunition and maybe a few personal items but the but the issue of what happens to the guy to the right and left of them you'll see particularly on the third day when uh what happens when a cannonball an iron shot bounces into a into a line it'll take out two or three guys the order given by the com by the cap their company commander is is guide to your right or close up so when somebody is blown out of the line what the soldiers do is they simply take a step to the right and close the hole well you see what happens with artillery mounted on places like little round top when this attack occurs is this round shot is going through the entire the entire line from from the flank and so it'll take out an entire file all the way across this length you may find 10 or 15 people will be wiped out by a single cannonball and they step over them the next line and move forward so the idea that they're witnessing very horrible things is absolutely true everything around them when they're in this attacks are are horrible and yet what you find and this has to do with their cohesion and their training and the fact they're veterans for the most part they simply go forward they close ranks and they move forward they close ranks they move forward until there isn't enough there aren't enough of them left to continue to close ranks and move forward okay let's go to the last question for this session uh thank you uh i'd like to uh thank the panel the dole institute for this great presentation it's a you know it's a rare opportunity to get to talk to so many experts about something but here here's my question we had some discussion earlier about some of the fantasy uh around joshua chamberlain and i had read that he was at appomattox and he ordered his men to give the soldier salute to the surrendering south and it was actually the first act of of healing after the civil war and i was wondering if that was true and and exactly what is a soldier's salute thank you i think that's true speaking of your mics please i believe that's true he also did win the medal of honor so he was a man of real courage regardless of what did or didn't happen at gettysburg elsewhere he he was a man of demonstrated courage and he was wounded six times during the war and did he lead also the grand army of the republic did he lead the final parade to what the victory parade in washington was in his regiment he was selected after mathematics to receive the surrenders of the rest of the army in northern virginia and the story is they're marching past him on the the road the lynchburg road that stage road that he ordered his men to shoulder arms and salute to the confederates um there's been some questions issues raised about this because one of the main sources that i think is john brown gordon who has been shown to be nod above making up stuff and but i you know sure you know let that you know keep it but chamberlain had a distinguished military career and a distinguished career afterwards um hey wasn't your two-time governor of maine or something like governor maine president of bowdoin yeah okay i'm desperately trying to remember the manual of arms because it's not present arms when you hold your weapon out like this i think it was didn't they it's something i harry it was like you know the the soldier's salute if i recall correctly was uh the weapon up against your shoulder uh and just held uh down near the uh the trigger your fingers on the trigger just like that but that was the soldier salute okay that can i'm sorry that concludes uh session two uh it's 4 17. uh we'll get started on the third and final day of gettysburg at 4 30 don't miss it

Channel: The Dole Institute of Politics

Views: 7,081

Rating: 4.52 out of 5

Keywords: 2013, Battle of Gettysberg, Dole Institute of Politics, History

Id: l43NE9P3SaU

Length: 92min 13sec (5533 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 20 2013