Well, it’s official… Don is now officially insufferable.
I just learned that he just learned from relatives in Michigan that he is indeed related to BGen. J. Johnston Pettigrew who personally led one-third of the assaulting Confederate troops in Pickett’s ill-fated charge at Gettysburg 146 years ago today; in fact, just about now.
I can see the lineage in the general’s receding hairline.
The disastrous decision(s) is known as the “High water mark of the Confederacy” as some of the Rebels momentarily breeched a small portion of the Union lines. The assault over a mile of open ground, in fact the entire battle, are considered the worst battlefield decision made by Lee during the entire Civil War.
Commanding his unit on Pickett’s left, Pettigrew's horse was shot out from under him, and he continued on foot. Reaching within 100 yards of the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge partially held by his cousin John Gibbon, he was severely wounded in the left hand by canister fire.
(At right is a photo taken from near the middle of Pickett’s Charge, the distant obelisk denotes the Union lines, some 200 yards distant)
Despite great pain, Pettigrew remained with his soldiers until it was obvious that the attack had failed. Holding his bloody hand, the despondent officer walked toward Seminary Ridge where he encountered General Lee. Pettigrew attempted to speak, but Lee, seeing the horrible wound, spoke first: "General, I am sorry to see you are wounded; go to the rear."
With a painful salute, Pettigrew said nothing but continued to the rear.
Don and I have long appropriated as kinsmen, BGens Pettigrew and Edward P. Alexander, (left) best known as the commanding officer of the massive artillery bombardment preceding Pickett’s Charge on the third day, but he is also noted for his early use of signal and observation balloon intelligence in combat and is well regarded for his postwar memoirs and analyses of the war.
Ahh, of course… the innovator, the historian/ writer genes.
Sadly, Gen. Pettigrew was killed in action during the the Confederate retreat to the friendlier confines of Virginia. Or as Don would have it, “.. killed in action during a retrograde maneuver to outflank pursuing Federals.”
On the morning of July 14, Pettigrew's brigade was one of the last Confederate units still north of the Potomac River, when the Union troopers closed in. On foot and in the front line, Pettigrew was directing his soldiers when he was shot by a Union cavalryman from the Michigan Brigade (ironically where most of Don’s Pettigrew relatives reside) at close range, the bullet striking him in the abdomen.
He was immediately carried to the rear and across the Potomac, having refused to be left in federal hands. He died three days later near Bunker Hill, W. VA. His brigade, which lost an estimated 56% casualties, had been ruined as an effective combat organization.
Born into a wealthy North Carolina family, Pettigrew’s mother and Union general John Gibbon’s mother were first cousins, making Gibbon and Pettigrew second cousins.
Pettigrew was clearly gifted from an early age. He enter Chapel Hill at age 15, excelled in mathematics and classical languages, and led his class in fencing and boxing. He was appointed an assistant professor at the U.S. Naval Observatory and later studied law in Baltimore and Germany. He remained in Europe for seven years where he learned to speak and write French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and to read Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic. He wrote a travel book, Notes on Spain and the Spaniards, and spent time in the diplomatic service.
(At right a latter-day Pettigrew inspects a monument constructed just behind the Union lines against which Gen. Pettigrew’s command clashed.)
Back home in 1856, Pettigrew was elected to the South Carolina legislature. Considering his background, he could have had just about any high level government post in the coming Confederacy but opted for military service.
Despite his gift of foreign languages and civil knowledge, Pettigrew leaned toward the military as a way to serve his country and his state and would participate in the negotiations between the governor's office, South Carolina military authorities, and the commander of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.
Pettigrew later accepted a commission as a colonel and commanded the 12th (later renamed the 22nd) North Carolina Infantry. Both President Jefferson Davis and Gen. Joseph E. Johnston urged him to accept higher command, but he declined because of his lack of military experience. However, as the need for qualified officers in the became acute, the new colonel was soon ordered to Virginia to accept a promotion to brigadier general in early 1862.
When a young relative requested a "safe place" on Pettigrew's staff, he replied, "I assure you that the most unsafe place in the Brigade is about me. By all means let him get rid of this idea of a safe place, which he will regret after time. The post of danger is certainly the post of honor." He was true to his word.
General Alexander acquitted himself well for the remainder of the war, absent from the battlefield only for a period of convalescence after suffering a serious shoulder wound during the Siege of Petersburg Virginia over the summer of 1964.
At Appomattox Court House, it was Alexander who made the famous proposal to Gen. Robert E. Lee that the army disperse into the hills for a guerrilla war, rather than surrendering. Lee rebuked him and Alexander later wrote about regretting his suggestion.
Incredibly, the actual decision to order Picket et al to charge the Union center fell to Alexander, only a colonel at the time; Lee’s disastrous vagueness is considered one of the greatest command failures in military history. It is clear that Alexander, Pickett and all the rest were following Lee’s intent, but remarkably, Lee never literally gave the order himself and so on down the chain of command to Alexander.
While I have not searched exhaustedly, I haven’t verified communication between Alexander and Pettigrew on July 3 before what should rightly be called the "Pickett-Pettigrew-Trimble Assault"… as Pickett only led one-third of the attack. (Gen. Isaac Ridgeway Trimble’s division was positioned just behind Pickett’s in the assault.)
Nonetheless, Pettigrew and Alexander were certainly well-acquainted as infantry and artillery commanders in those days would of necessity maintained close association.
It now falls to me to either confirm or rule out any possible claim of genealogical connection to a tragic chapter in Southern history.
The Union Dead of Gettysburg lie in their ranks in the Gettysburg National Cemetery, not far from the battlefield where the Confederacy lost the war, though Lee’s men held out for almost another two years.
Union Losses – in just three days.
23,055
3,155 killed
14,531 wounded
5,369 POW/MIA
Confederate Losses
23,231
4,708 killed
12,693 wounded
5,830 POW/MIA Overview account of the battle here.
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