Section #1 - Three Days At Gettysburg
Chapter 28: Day Two: 5:30–6:20 PM on the Confederate Right
Around 5:30, Longstreet re-directs McLaws, ordering him to advance against Sickle’s salient in the Peach Orchard. While he hopes that Law’s attack on Little Round Top will have siphoned off some of Sickle’s forces this will not prove to be the case.
Union General David Birney’s 1st Division receives the first rebel blow, with J.B. Kershaw’s South Carolinians and William Wofford’s and Paul Semmes Georgians heading through the Peach Orchard and toward a large Wheatfield in its rear, defended in part by the Frenchman, Col. Regis de Trobriand.
As Sickles rides along his defense line, his right leg is shattered by a shell, and he is carted off to a hospital where it is amputated. Shortly after, the rebel thrust into the Wheatfield is halted by re-deployed units of General Hancock’s II Corps under 1st Division General John Caldwell. The price to pay, however, includes the deaths of Col. Edward Cross and Generals Steven Weed and Samuel Zook.
William Barksdale’s brigade of Mississipians are next into the breech, claiming the Peach Orchard and nearly a thousand prisoners. The exuberant Barksdale then points his sword toward his next goal, Cemetery Ridge, before being shot in both legs and the chest. He dies in agony the next morning.