110 Norra Carorina Troops, 1861~’65.

the Angle and to the left and northward of the spot where
the noble Armistead fell. Does any one Woubt the accuracy
of that statement? If so, I must suggest the undisputed
fact that the best proof of where a line of soldiers went to
is where they left their dead; and where that was in this
case 1s established beyond question by multitudes of disin-
terested witnesses. A great many officers and soldiers of
the Union Army, who were in the battle here and went over
the ground where that final struggle took place, very soon af-
terwards, have talked with me about it and emphatically con-
firmed the facts as stated above. For instance, (to name one
of them), Colonel E. B. Cope, the Engineer of our Gettys-
burg Park Commission, a gentleman of the highest character
and a Union officer in the battle here, has often told me of
how he was invited by one of General Meade’s staff officers
in the evening of that third day, to go with him up on the
ve and ( to quote the words of the officer who invited him)
see such a sight as he had never before seen on a battlefield.’
The Colonel says he went and was deeply impressed by what
hesaw. The dead, he says, were very numerous in the Angle
around the spot where Armistead fell and between that and
the stone wall over which he and his men had charged south
of the Angle; but they were much more thickly strewn on the
ground in front of the high stone wall which Pettigrew’s and”
Trimble’s men had tried to storm and which runs northward
to the Bryan barn.
In 1895, Colonel John K. Connally, of Ashevill
Colonel of the Fifty-fifth North Gurelsan gnaw ee
Brigade, Lieutenant T. J. Falls, of Cleveland County, and
Sergeant J. A. Whitley of Martin County. N. CG. wile had
also served in that regiment and been in the battle have made
a visit to Gettysburg and went with me over the field Colo-
nel Connally had lost an arm in the first day’s fight ; wid (by
the way) Lieutenant-Colonel M. T. Smith had been killed
and Major A. H. Belo had been wounded on that day, so that
the regiment on the third day was under command of a Cap-
tain. Lieutenant Falls and Sergeant Whitley showed me the
ground over which they had charged and the point the
reached, which point, as noted on our maps and in my ‘iii

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LonGstTREET’s ASSAULT AT GETTYSBURG. 111

is twenty steps south of the Bryan barn and just nine yards
west of the stone wall which Pettigrew and Trimble tried to
storm. Whilst we were driving stakes to mark the exact
spots reached by them and also where Captain Satterfield, of
Person County, had fallen dead near by them, several officers
and men of the Thirty-ninth New York Regiment of Wil-
lard’s Brigade, who were on a visit to the battlefield, came up
to the stone wall near us and said that while, of course, they
could not identify the men, they could swear that a thin line
of “rebels” did reach the very spot where we were driving
those stakes, and that it extended all along in front of the wall
and about the same distance from it all the way to the Angle;
which was the whole front of Pettigrew’s and Trimble’s
column.

By reason of the death or disability of their generals and
other officers, very imperfect reports have come down to us as
to the numbers of men in the six brigades under Pettigrew
and Trimble in that final assault and of the losses they suf-
fered; and the reports we have do not discriminate between
the losses of the first and third days. We have, however,
some scant data from which one can in a measure divine how
those battered battalions of the first day suffered also on the
third. For instance, the Twenty-sixth North Carolina, of
Pettigrew’s own brigade, had entered the battle of the first
day with 820 muskets, and lost in killed and wounded 584
men (71 per cent.), and also its Colonel, the gallant Bur-
gwyn. It went into the fight of the Third day with 236 men
and had but 80 left, a loss of over 66 per cent. Its brigade
(Pettigrew’s own) lost its commander, Colonel Marshall,
mortally wounded and captured, and came out commanded
by Major John T. Jones, the only field officer left, and its reg-
iments led by Lieutenants. Archer’s Brigade lost five out of
seven field officers, and its commander, Colonel Fry, was
wounded and captured. All the field officers of Davis’ Bri-
gade were disabled, and the losses of Scales’ and Lane’s were
as heavy as those of the other brigades. But why prolong this
story, already much longer than I had intended? As the old
Quaker once remarked at the close of the meeting, “A suf-