Among the small parcels of ground that made up the Battle of Gettysburg, none earned a more terrible reputation than the Wheatfield. By acreage, this modest expanse of land saw between four and six thousand casualties — men killed, wounded, or captured — during roughly two and a half hours of fighting on July 2, 1863. The number alone is staggering, but what made the Wheatfield unique was the nature of the combat itself. Battle lines here were almost impossible to define because they shifted constantly.
The field changed hands approximately six times over the course of the afternoon, as Union and Confederate forces attacked, counterattacked, were driven off, and then returned to fight over the same contested ground again. The constant swirling movement of troops gave the location its grim nickname: the Whirlpool of Death. The difficulty in understanding what happened at the Wheatfield lies in the geography. The field sits in a natural bowl, surrounded on nearly all sides by higher ground.
When Confederate forces swept in and captured the position, they found themselves in this depression, vulnerable to fire from the surrounding ridges. Union troops would then counterattack, driving the Confederates back to their earlier positions. But the Union soldiers who occupied the field found themselves isolated and exposed in turn, and Confederate counterattacks would push them out once more. The cycle repeated itself with a terrible rhythm, each wave of soldiers sucked into the same bloody vortex.
The larger situation that drew so many men into this small field began with a risky decision by Union Major General Dan Sickles. Commanding the Third Corps, Sickles advanced his troops forward without orders, creating a salient that jutted out from the main Union line. The Wheatfield lay at the heart of that exposed position. By advancing, Sickles left his troops vulnerable to attack from multiple sides, and his left flank was dangerously open.
The Confederates moved to exploit that weakness. Among the units ordered into this precarious position was the 17th Maine Infantry Regiment, commanded by Colonel Merrill. The regiment arrived at the Wheatfield in the late afternoon of July 2, tasked with reinforcing the Union left flank. Merrill had 357 men under his command, many of them farmers and woodsmen from Maine.
They took their position behind a low stone wall that bordered the field, with a marker at the right of their line and another some distance away marking the left. Roughly 350 men were arrayed between those two points. As the 17th Maine settled in behind the wall, facing into the woods, the soldiers began to see shadowy figures moving through the trees. At first, these shapes were not soldiers but cattle, driven through the undergrowth by someone else — someone more sinister.
Soon enough, the shadowy figures of Confederate soldiers appeared, advancing across the regiment’s front. The Confederates were not necessarily coming straight at them, which gave the Mainers a devastating opportunity. Positioned along the wall, the 17th Maine could fire enfilading volleys into the exposed flank of the Confederate unit before them, the Third Arkansas. The exchange of fire that followed was brutal.
One private recalled, “We peppered them well with many bullets. ” The woods filled with smoke and the flash of muzzle blast, creating a chaotic and terrifying scene. The 17th Maine held its ground, but the situation was deteriorating on its right. The unit immediately to the regiment’s right had to withdraw, charged and outflanked by South Carolinians coming up the road.
With his right flank now exposed, Colonel Merrill was forced to bend his line into an L-shape, pulling the right portion of his regiment out across the road to defend like a mini fortress. The regiment now found itself fighting on two fronts. After hours of fighting in this position, the 17th Maine began to run low on ammunition. The men were ordered to withdraw across the Wheatfield to the north.
But the fighting was not over for them. As they retreated, the divisional commander, General David Birney, personally appealed for them to turn around and make another stand. With no bullets left, the 17th Maine was ordered to fix bayonets and charge back into the field. They were joined by a Union regiment from Michigan, the 5th Michigan, in one final push.
Together, they charged back across the ground they had just ceded, returning to the wall at the point of the bayonet. The cost was severe. Of the 357 men who deployed along that wall, 132 were killed or wounded — roughly a third of the regiment gone in a single afternoon. The bayonet charge of the 17th Maine is far less famous than the charge of the 20th Maine under Joshua Chamberlain on Little Round Top, but it was just as heroic and considerably more bloody.
Chamberlain, a gifted self-promoter who wrote a book about his exploits, secured his place in history. The 17th Maine had no such advocate, and its story faded into the larger tragedy of the Wheatfield. One small detail from that desperate charge has survived. The 5th Michigan carried a mascot into battle: a dog named Sally.
As the men fixed bayonets and charged, Sally ran alongside them, barking and snapping at the legs of Confederate soldiers. The anecdote is a reminder of the animal companions who accompanied soldiers into battle on both sides, throughout the war and in conflicts long after. For the men who fought there, the low stone wall that bordered the Wheatfield became something more than a simple fence. Lieutenant Varrell of Company C described running across the field while bullets whizzed past on either side, a sergeant falling dead beside him.
Under normal circumstances, the wall was just a common, old-fashioned stone fence, about thirty inches high. But in the chaos of battle, it was transformed into the best stone wall the 17th Maine ever came across in its travels. It provided ready-made breastwork for the soldiers, a crucial shield between them and the enemy fire that swept the field. The human cost of the Wheatfield is difficult to fully grasp, but one story from the aftermath captures the strange, weary humanity that persisted even after hours of slaughter.
As night fell on July 2, thousands of dead and wounded lay scattered across the field. In the eerie silence that followed the fighting, a Confederate soldier west of the field began to sing hymns. He finished with a moving rendition of “When This Cruel War Is Over. ” Hearing the song drift across the darkness, nearby Union soldiers responded with cheers and applause for the man who had been trying to kill them hours before.
The Wheatfield itself, for all the blood spilled over it, had no real strategic importance. The ground was contested so fiercely simply because it sat in the path of the larger Confederate assault on the Union left. The repeated cycles of attack and counterattack, the constant shifting of lines, and the sheer density of casualties in such a small area turned this unremarkable patch of farmland into one of the bloodiest sections of the entire Battle of Gettysburg.