Despite their setbacks on Day 1, the Union forces still held the critical Cemetery Hill as the sun rose on July 2, 1863. A ridgeline ran south from Cemetery Hill (and away from the town of Gettysburg) for more than a mile to a pair of hills called Little Round Top and Big Round Top. As new Union troops arrived at the battlefield, they were deployed along this ridgeline.
Lee intended to simultaneously attack both flanks of the Union position but decided that Cemetery Hill in the north was too strongly defended, so he ordered General James Longstreet to attack the southern end of the Union line. Longstreet opposed such an attack and was slow to get started. (After the war, he became the target of withering criticism from Virginians who held him responsible for losing the battle because his tardiness allowed the rest of the Union army to get into position on the ridgeline and Little Round Top – In 1998 a controversial statue of Longstreet (shown above) was erected at Gettysburg. The controversy is due to the abnormally small size of Longstreet’s horse and the fact that it stands on the ground, not on an elevated base as is the case with every other General’s statue).
While Longstreet was hesitating, the Union commander, General George Meade, was plagued with his own troublesome subordinates. Meade had ordered all units into defense positions along the ridgeline (known as Cemetery Ridge), but his left wing commander, Gen Dan Sickles moved his entire corps a half mile forward to some high ground. He positioned his units in an upside down “V” with one side of the V in a peach orchard and the other in a wheat field that ended in a maze of boulders called “Devil’s Den.” Although this gave Sickles some high ground to defend, it left his men unconnected to the main union line and vulnerable to attack on their flanks. By the time Meade learned of this disposition at 4 pm, Longstreet had already launched his attack.
During the next few hours, some of the war’s bloodiest fighting took place in the peach orchard, the wheat field, and at Devil’s Den. Sickles’ corps was crushed. A brigade from Alabama advanced on the undefended Little Round Top. If they captured that hill (which dominated the entire Union line) the Confederates would win the battle.
When Longstreet’s attack began, only a handful of Union signalmen were atop Little Round Top. When Union Gen Gouvernor Warren (an engineer from Massachusetts) discovered this precarious situation, he found the nearest brigade and sent it running up the hill. It arrived just before the Confederates.
The heavily-wooded left and rear of Little Round Top was defended by the 20 th Maine Regiment commanded by Colonel Joshua Chamberlain. For two hours they held off repeated Confederate assaults until one-third of them were casualties and the survivors were out of ammunition. Another Confederate attack began.
In his official report, Chamberlain wrote
It was imperative to strike before we were struck by this overwhelming force in a hand-to-hand fight, which we could not probably have withstood or survived. At that crisis, I ordered the bayonet. The word was enough. It ran like fire along the line from man to man, and rose into a shout, with which they sprang forward upon the enemy, now not 30 yards away. The effect was surprising; many of the enemy’s first line threw down their arms and surrendered.
Chamberlain won the Congressional Medal of Honor for his defense of Little Round Top.
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