Gettysburg: The Last Invasion by Allen C. Guelzo

miles on the 2d,” Pickett’s division “bivouacked about four miles from Gettysburg on the Chambersburg turnpike” for the night, and even when they got moving again “at 3 o’clock A. m. to take our position in line of Battle,” the entire maneuver was not finished until at least “11 o’clock A. M”—if even by then. (Alexander remembered that as late as noon, he was still waiting to hear whether “Pickett was ready.”) In the meanwhile, Longstreet wanted Alexander “to take a position where I could see the field well & take one of Picketts couriers with me, & that I must send Pickett word when to charge.” Once the infantry was finally in place, Longstreet would signal Walton to open fire with “all the guns on the line … simultaneously,” and Walton’s own signal to the artillery would be “two guns [fired] in quick succession by theWashington Artillery” at the peach orchard. Alexander’s job would be to observe the effect of the artillery bombardment, and once it was clear the batteries of Federal guns onCemetery Ridge had been silenced, he would send off Pickett’s galloper with the signal for the infantry to advance. 8
    Pickett’s three brigades moved down theCashtown Pike, filed off to the southwest on theKnoxlyn Road, and then worked their way across theFairfield Road—behind the Lutheran seminary, behind the divisions from Hill’s corps which would go into action with them—until by eight o’clock they moved into position in a hollow “four hundred yards or so from the top, under the crest” ofSeminary Ridge. It was a “shady quiet march,” ending under the grateful cover ofHenry Spangler’s woods, almost due west from Hancock and the2nd Corps. There, “arms were stacked” and the men fell out “with the understanding that when two signal guns were fired” they would “take arms and lie flat on the ground.” Kemper’s brigade had the lead on the march in, so the three brigades, when they finally deployed for the attack, would create a front rank of Kemper’s and then Garnett’s brigade, with Armistead’s drawn up a hundred yards behind.
    Guiding off Pickett would be Harry Heth’s division, “formed in line of battle” and now commanded by Johnston Pettigrew; the four brigades of the division would be lined up with James Archer’s thinned brigade (directed byBirkett Fry, since Archer’s capture two days before),James Marshall’sNorth Carolina brigade (Marshall having stepped in for Pettigrew as brigade commander), Joe Davis’ North Carolinians, andJohn Mercer Brockenbrough’s woebegoneVirginia brigade. Drawn up behind them would be two of Dorsey Pender’s North Carolina brigades, forming a sort of semi-division, marching(for the time being) under the garrulous Isaac Trimble. Several of these brigades were not in good form:Birkett Fry’s brigade was down by 250 men from the 1,200 who had marched so confidently down theCashtown Pike on July 1st; Joe Davis’ 2nd Mississippi had come out of therailroad cut with only 118 men; Pettigrew’s own brigade was, likewise, down by almost a thousand from July 1st, and with all the internal administrative disruption this could imply. 9
    Added up on paper, Pettigrew and Trimble would be, at best, able to provide 6,200 men to support Pickett. Pickett himself would be able to count just over 5,000. Almost as an afterthought, Lee decided to let Longstreet use Cadmus Wilcox’s well-used brigade, along with Lang’sFlorida brigade. But after their battering the day before, they would add only another 1,700 men to the attack. There would be around 13,000 men in the attack—if all of them could be gotten to move. 10
    And many of them did not like the prospect of moving once they had seen where they would be going. Cadmus Wilcox formed his brigade just forty yards behind the crest ofSeminary Ridge, giving his men a far better vantage point than Pickett’s to see ahead, and what they saw set them to “ominous shakes of the