On the morning of July 1, 1863, Lieutenant Colonel Rufus Dawes, just twenty-four years old, received orders that carried the weight of an entire army. The Union line on McPherson’s Ridge was collapsing. Confederate forces had broken through on the right flank, and the only reserve left to Major General Abner Doubleday, commanding the Union First Corps, was Dawes’s regiment: the Sixth Wisconsin, 442 men of the legendary Iron Brigade. If the gap was not plugged, the whole position would fall, and Robert E.
Lee’s invasion of the North might end in victory on the first day. Dawes did not hesitate. He mounted his horse, rode to the front of his regiment, and gave a simple command: forward, double quick. The men moved at a run toward the sound of gunfire, passing retreating Union soldiers as they went.
When they reached the fence line along the Chambersburg Pike, Dawes ordered a halt. The men loaded their weapons. Through the smoke, they saw a long, ragged line of Confederate infantry advancing, firing as they came, about two hundred yards out. Dawes waited until they were close enough.
Then he gave one word: fire. The volley of 442 rifles checked the Confederate charge. The line wavered and stopped. But this was only the leading edge of the assault.
The real danger lay in an unfinished railroad cut that ran parallel to the pike, a deep trench up to twenty feet deep in places, holding five to six hundred Confederate soldiers under Brigadier General Joseph Davis. Davis was no ordinary officer. He was the nephew of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and his brigade carried the weight of that name. From the cut, his men poured fire into the Union line.
The position seemed unassailable. The cut was both a fortress and a trap: the Confederates inside could fire out, but Union soldiers could shoot down into it from above, and once trapped inside, there was almost nowhere to go. Dawes understood the situation in an instant. Retreat was not an option.
Holding the fence line would only bleed his regiment dry. The only way to stop Davis was to charge the cut itself. He gathered his officers and told them what he intended. The Confederates inside would not have time to reload or reposition if the Sixth Wisconsin reached them quickly.
The men looked at each other. A charge across open ground, uphill, toward a dug-in enemy, was nearly suicidal. Most of them probably would not make it. But nobody broke.
Nobody asked questions. The men fixed bayonets and waited for the order. Dawes gave it. Charge.
The 442 men surged forward. Confederate fire raked their line. Men fell, holes opened in the formation, and the survivors closed ranks and kept moving. The regimental color bearer was struck down.
Another man took the flag, and he too was shot down. Ten color bearers fell in that charge, but the flag kept moving forward. Dawes rode ahead of his men until his horse was shot in the chest. He rolled from the saddle, came up on his feet, and kept running, sword in hand.
As the Sixth Wisconsin reached the cut, the Confederates inside made a fatal mistake. Because the trench was so deep, they could not aim downward at the Union soldiers at the edge. The Union men poured fire into the cut from above, and then the fighting turned hand to hand: bayonets, rifle butts, men climbing out, men surrendering. Dawes jumped into the cut and landed among Confederate soldiers.
He drew his sword and shouted for the commanding officer. A Confederate major, John Blair, stepped forward. Dawes pointed his sword at him and demanded surrender. Blair looked at the Union soldiers surrounding the cut, looked at the hundreds of his men trapped and defeated, and handed over his sword.
The surrender was a humiliation for the Confederacy. Davis’s brigade, commanded by the nephew of the Confederate president, had been routed by a single Union regiment. Hundreds of men from the Second Mississippi and other units threw down their weapons. Accounts vary, but between 232 and 250 prisoners were taken, and seven Confederate officers surrendered their swords to the young colonel.
Dawes, unsure what to do with the bundle of weapons, simply stood holding them as the battle around him settled. The charge lasted perhaps fifteen minutes from start to finish. The regiment lost over one-third of its men killed, wounded, or missing. Among the fallen was Corporal James Kelly of Company B, mortally wounded.
Before he collapsed, he opened his shirt to show Dawes his wound and asked one final favor: write to my folks that I died a soldier. Dawes promised he would. Another of Dawes’s men, Corporal Francis Waller, captured the battle flag of the Second Mississippi. The flag was passed to Sergeant William Evans, badly wounded in the chest.
Later that day, as Gettysburg fell to Confederate forces, Evans hid the flag inside his mattress with the help of civilian women of the town, allowed himself to be captured, and kept the secret while in Confederate hands. After the Confederate retreat, he retrieved the flag and returned it to Dawes. By stopping Davis’s assault at the railroad cut, Dawes and his men bought the Union army something that proved decisive: time. The Confederate breakthrough was halted, and McPherson’s Ridge held long enough for reinforcements to arrive.
Over the next two days, the battle raged across the ridges and slopes around Gettysburg. The Sixth Wisconsin and the rest of the Iron Brigade fought on, helping to repel Pickett’s Charge on July 3. But the pivotal moment had come on the first day, when a young officer with 442 men turned certain defeat into a captured brigade. The Iron Brigade paid a price unmatched in the war: proportionally, it suffered more casualties than any other brigade in the Civil War.
Its men, known to the Confederates as those damned black-hatted fellows, earned their reputation on that field. Dawes himself continued to serve, fighting at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg. He declined a promotion to full colonel in July 1864, mustered out in August, and left the army as a brevet brigadier general. After the war, Dawes returned to Ohio, became a businessman, served a single term in Congress, married, and raised a family.
He wrote a memoir, Service with the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers, still regarded as one of the finest firsthand accounts of the war. One of his sons served as vice president of the United States. Dawes himself never built a public legend. He died in 1899 at age sixty-one, largely unknown to the nation he had helped preserve.
The men he commanded never forgot him. At the fiftieth anniversary reunion at Gettysburg in 1913, the surviving veterans of the Sixth Wisconsin gathered at the railroad cut and told the story again: the charge, the fallen color bearers, the surrender of Davis’s brigade. One of them, Josiah Cass, lived until 1947, nearly eighty-four years after that July morning, carrying the memory until he died at age one hundred. In 1888, the Sixth Wisconsin raised a monument near the railroad cut.
The granite obelisk lists the regiment’s casualties and bears a simple inscription: On this ground the Sixth Wisconsin captured the colors and many prisoners of the Second Mississippi. Elsewhere on the monument are words Dawes wrote long after the war: “Where has the firmness of the Iron Brigade at Gettysburg been surpassed in history? ” The railroad cut is still there. The monument still stands.
And the story of what 442 young men from Wisconsin accomplished in fifteen minutes still echoes across the battlefield.