A Day of Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, 1863
The Time Travel Series
The Time Travel Series - Daily Episode Guide: using AI to relive past events.
On the morning of July 3, 1863, Private Thomas Caldwell — nineteen years old, a former printer’s apprentice from the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia — lay behind a low stone wall on Cemetery Ridge near a slight bend known as “the Angle,” having survived two days of the bloodiest battle yet fought on American soil. He served in Company D of the 71st Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry in the Army of the Potomac.
Caldwell had enlisted in August 1861 at seventeen, lying about his age, and had already endured Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville — battles that had winnowed his company from ninety-eight men to fewer than forty. On his person he carried a .58-caliber Springfield Model 1861 rifled musket, a leather cartridge box containing roughly forty paper cartridges of Minié ball ammunition, a brass-tipped cap pouch, a tin canteen in a soiled wool cover, a canvas haversack containing a scrap of salt pork and three hardtack crackers, and a socket bayonet in a leather scabbard. He had not bathed in eleven days. The stone wall before him — roughly two and a half feet high, constructed of local fieldstone — would, within hours, become the most famous barrier in American military history, and Caldwell would witness from behind it the single most dramatic infantry assault of the Civil War: the attack history would call Pickett’s Charge.
July 3, 1863 — 4:38 AM — Behind the stone wall, Cemetery Ridge, near the crest, approximately 200 yards south of the copse of trees. Gettysburg, Adams County, Pennsylvania.
The sky over the eastern rim of Cemetery Hill is the color of a bruise turning yellow. Caldwell wakes not from sleep but from a half-stupor, curled on bare ground against the rear base of the stone wall, his rifle cradled across his chest, his blanket roll serving as a pillow that smells of mildew and another man’s sweat — it belonged to Corporal Eddings, killed yesterday near the Peach Orchard. The ground beneath him is damp with dew and something darker that has seeped through the soil. Thirty feet to his right, a dead horse from a II Corps artillery battery lies bloated, its belly distended to grotesque proportions, legs rigid and extended, the smell so thick it coats the back of his throat like tallow. From the northeast, beyond Culp’s Hill, comes the sudden crack-crack-crack of musketry — the XII Corps resuming its fight for the breastworks lost the evening before. The sound carries cleanly in the still air. Around him, men of the 71st Pennsylvania stir in the half-light — someone coughs wetly, someone mutters a prayer, someone urinates against the rear of the wall with no attempt at privacy. First Sergeant Frederick Fuger of Cushing’s Battery A, 4th U.S. Artillery, positioned just uphill behind them, can be heard barking orders to his cannoneers to check friction primers. Caldwell’s hands tremble — not from cold, though the July morning is cool enough to raise gooseflesh, but from the residue of two days’ sustained terror. He does not yet know this will be the worst day.
July 3, 1863 — 6:15 AM — The same position, Cemetery Ridge, behind the stone wall at the Angle. Temperature rising, already near 70°F.
