108 Nortu Carorina Troops, 1861~'65.

purse, and some keep-sakes to his old comrad
eock, to be forwarded to his family, and then ier ae
river to rest under the shade of the trees.”’ i
And while Armistead and his heroic followers were over
in the Angle, where were Pettigrew’s and Trimble’s thinned
but gallant battalions? They were making a des arenes
fort to storm the high stone wall eighty yards ss of the
Angle and were being mowed down like grain before th
reaper by the double line of infantry behind that wall A
one men reached it, but finding it too high to leap over. could
do nothing but surrender. Others made a near approach to
it, but found their ranks so thinned that further effort was
plainly useless. The larger proportion, both of officers wind
“posh stretched upon the ground killed or disabled about
alf w ay between the Angle and the stone wall which the
were assailing. General Trimble, Colonel Marshall and Col
onel Fry were wounded and made prisoners. General Pet-
tigrew had his horse killed under him. Brockenborouch’s
Brigade, weak in numbers, and a few companies of the left
Davis’ Brigade, forming the Confederate line north of the
raid barn, had been from the first vigorously assailed by
ankers, as has been already mentioned, and when they were
charging on the main Union line posted there on a high em-
bankment, the One Hundred and Twenty-sixth Nei. York
Regiment was wheeled to its left and thrown upon their
left teu, inflicting heavy losses, and a terrific fire from the
line of infantry in their front and a storm of grape and canis-
vig brs Woodruff’s Battery soon cut them to pieces and ren-
er further efforts hopeless. By this time the entire line
under Pickett, Pettigrew and Trimble, was overwhelmed and
repulsed. The defeated Confederates fell back shattered and
disorganized across the fields over which they had advanced
so gallantly and proudly and the famous assault was over
: I | not mentioned Wilcox’s Alabama, and Perry’s Flor-
pig rigades because they, in fact, and without any fault of
eirs, really had no part in the assault. About twent
minutes after Pickett’s Division started, they were enlaces
to advance and support it on its right. But the dense cloud
ef smoke over the field concealed from them the left oblique

LONGSTREET’S ASSAULT AT GETTYSBURG 109

course which Pickett had taken after passing them, and so
they marched straight forward, which caused a wide, wedge-
shaped gap between them and Pickett’s right, into which
Stannard threw one of his Vermont regiments and captured
the flag and about 100 men of the Eighth Florida. Colonel
David Lang, who commanded the Florida Brigade, once
visited Gettysburg and went with me over the ground ; and he
told me that when they reached the Emmitsburg road near the
Rogers House, he saw through a rift in the smoke that Pick-
ett’s and Pettigrew’s forces were being overwhelmed, and he
would have turned back at once, but he thought it safer for
his brigade to go forward at a double-quick and thus reach the
bushy swale on Plum Run and escape by going down that
southward to the Trostle Place and thence westward, as this
route was not so directly swept by the Union artillery ; and
both his and Wilcox’s Brigades did this, with the above-men-
tioned loss to the Eighth Florida and considerable losses also
to the other regiments of both brigades.

A few more words will close this paper, and those words
will be devoted to showing how unwise and undeserved it is
for any of the magnificent heroes who took part in that final
bloody struggle at Gettysburg ever to impugn each other’s
chivalry on that occasion. I was not myself a participant in

“it; I was away over at Round Top with the Fourth Alabama,
hammering away at the Yankee infantry and cavalry and,
strange as it may seem, we did not even know of that fatal ep-
isode two miles north of us until about sunset, and could
searcely believe it then.

I have re-affirmed the well-known and truthful account of
how gallantly Pickett’s men fought, what they did, and how
far they went. They had not been in the battle on the pre-
vious two days and were fresh and well organized with all
their officers in their places. Their losses in that assault in
killed, wounded and captured were a fraction over 63 per
cent., which is much above the average losses of troops in bat-

tle.
T have also stated whither and how far the faithful veterans

of Pettigrew and Trimble advanced, which was near the high
stone wall before mentioned eighty yards farther east than