PART OF THE BATTLEFIELD OF GETTYSBURG.
(From a War Department photograph.)
BRIGADIER-GENERAL FRANCIS T. NICHOLLS, C. S. A.

The story of the critical struggle for the possession of Little Round Top, or at least of an important portion of it, has been graphically related by Adjutant Porter Farley, of the One Hundred and Fortieth New York Regiment, which went up at the same time with Hazlett's battery. Captain Farley writes:

"Just at that moment our former brigadier, Gen. G. K. Warren, chief engineer of the army, with an orderly and one or two officers, rode down toward the head of our regiment. He came from the direction of the hill-top. His speed and manner indicated unusual excitement. Before he reached us he called out to O'Rorke to lead his regiment that way up the hill. O'Rorke answered him that General Weed had gone ahead and expected this regiment to follow him. 'Never mind that,' answered Warren, 'I'll take the responsibility.' Warren's words and manner carried conviction of the importance of the thing he asked. Accepting his assurance of full justification, O'Rorke turned the head of the regiment to the left, and, following one of the officers who had been with Warren, led it diagonally up the eastern slope of Little Round Top. Warren rode off, evidently bent upon securing other troops. The staff officer who rode with us, by his impatient gestures, urged us to our greatest speed. Some of the guns of Hazlett's battery broke through our files before we reached the hill-top amid the frantic efforts of the horses, lashed by the drivers, to pull their heavy pieces up that steep acclivity. A few seconds later the head of our regiment reached the summit of the ridge, war's wild panorama spread before us, and we found ourselves upon the verge of battle. It was a moment which called for leadership. There was no time for tactical formation. Delay was ruin. Hesitation was destruction. Well was it for the cause he served that the man who led our regiment that day was one prompt to decide and brave to execute. The bullets flew in among the men the moment the leading company mounted the ridge; and as not a musket was loaded, the natural impulse was to halt and load them. But O'Rorke permitted no such delay. Springing from his horse, he threw the reins to the sergeant-major; his sword flashed from its scabbard into the sunlight, and calling, 'This way, boys,' he led the charge over the rocks, down the hillside, till he came abreast the men of Vincent's brigade, who were posted in the ravine to our left. Joining them, an irregular line was formed, such as the confusion of the rocks lying thereabout permitted; and this line grew and was extended toward the right as the successive rearward companies came upon the seen of action. There, while some were partly sheltered by the rocks and others stood in the open, a fierce fight went on with an enemy among the trees and underbrush. Flushed with the excitement of battle, and bravely led, they pushed up close to our line. The steadfastness and valor displayed on both sides made the result for some few minutes doubtful; but a struggle so desperate and bloody could not be a long one. The enemy fell back; a short lull was succeeded by another onslaught, which was again repelled.

"When that struggle was over, the exultation of victory was soon chilled by the dejection which oppressed us as we counted and realized the cost of all that had been won. Of our regiment eighty-five enlisted men and six officers had been wounded. Besides these, twenty-six of the comrades who had marched with us that afternoon had fallen dead before the fire of the enemy. Grouped by companies, a row of inanimate forms lay side by side beneath the trees upon the eastern slope. No funeral ceremony, and only shallow graves, could be accorded them. In the darkness of the night, silently and with bitter dejection, each company buried its dead. O'Rorke was among the dead. Shot through the neck, he had fallen without a groan, and we may hope without a pang. The supreme effort of his life was consummated by a death heroic in its surroundings and undisturbed by pain."

It has been well said that Gettysburg was the common soldier's battle; that its great results were due, not so much to any generalship either in strategy or in tactics, as to the intelligent courage and magnificent staying powers of the Northern soldier. If any one man was more than another the hero of the fight, it was General Hancock, who for his services on that field received the thanks of Congress. Senator Washburn, who saw him the next year at the Wilderness, remarked: "He was the finest-looking man above ground; he was the very impersonation of war." Hancock not only chose the ground for the battle and set things in order for the conflict of the second day, but seemed to be everywhere present, animating the men with the spirit of his own valor and enthusiasm. He was especially conspicuous during the terrific cannonade that preceded the great charge of the third day, riding slowly up and down the lines. It is said that when he began this ride he was accompanied by thirty men, and when he finished it there was but one man with him—the horseman who carried his corps flag. All the others had either been struck down by the missiles of the enemy, or been called to imperative duty on different parts of the line. As he rode slowly along, he stopped frequently to speak to the men who were lying upon the ground to avoid the shells and balls, and clutching their rifles ready to spring up and meet the charge which they knew would follow as soon as the artillery fire ceased. While this famous charge was in progress, Hancock rode down to speak to General Stannard, whose Vermonters were to move forward and strike the charging column in flank, and at this moment he was most grievously wounded. A rifle ball struck the pommel of his saddle, tearing out and twisting a nail from it, and both bullet and nail entered his thigh. Two of General Stannard's aids caught him as he fell from his horse, and put him into an ambulance. Here he wrote a note to General Meade urgently advising that, as soon as the Confederate charge was over, a return charge be made with the comparatively fresh troops of the Sixth Corps. Some think that if this had been done the Army of Northern Virginia would have found the end of its career then and there, instead of at Appomattox a year and a half later. But General Longstreet says he expected such a charge and was prepared for it, and that if it had been made Sedgwick's men would have fared as badly as Pickett's.

It is a little difficult to understand why so much has been made in literature of this charge of Pickett's, unless, perhaps, it is owing to the picturesque circumstances. It was at the close of the greatest battle of the war; it was heralded by the mightiest cannonade of the war; it was witnessed by two great armies; it was made in the middle of the afternoon of a summer day, on a gentle slope, with the sun at the backs of the assailants, the best possible arrangement for a grand display; it exhibited magnificent courage and confidence on the part of the soldiers that made it, and quite as great courage and confidence on the part of those who met and thwarted it. It is, perhaps, for these reasons that it has been made unduly famous; for, after all, it was a blunder and a failure. There were other charges in the war that tested quite as much the devotion and endurance of soldiers, and they were not all failures. The charge of Hooker's and Thomas's men up the heights of Lookout Mountain and Mission Ridge was even more picturesque, and was a grand success. The National position at Gettysburg is always represented as being along a ridge, and this, in a general way, is true; but near the centre the ridge is so low that it almost dies away into the plain, and Pickett's men, being directed toward this point, had only the very gentlest of slopes to ascend. Gen. Alexander S. Webb, whose command was at this point, said in conversation: "We had no intrenchments there, not a sod was turned." "But why did you not intrench?" "Because we never supposed that anybody would be fool enough to charge up there." The peril to the charging column was more from the cross-fire of the batteries on the higher ground to the right and left, than from the direct fire in front.