J.J. Pettigrew: The Last Fallen Star

by Diana Loski

J.J. Petigrew

(Library of Congress)

On June 3, 1863, encouraged by his success from the recent Battle of Chancellorsville, Robert E. Lee and his army left Fredericksburg, Virginia, intending to head north.

It was the beginning of The Gettysburg Campaign.

In the Civil War, a campaign was a plan by a military commander that usually involved a great battle, or multiple battles, to achieve a certain outcome. The Gettysburg Campaign, then, was decided by General Lee, in an attempt to strike a decisive blow to the Federals somewhere on their home turf. While no one yet knew that the campaign’s culmination would be the town of Gettysburg, Lee needed to fight above the Mason Dixon Line to give his beloved South a reprieve from war. He hoped to give a battle far from Virginia, to threaten the Northern populace with war torn fields of their own. He needed to feed and outfit his severely malnourished and ragged troops. And, he wanted the war to end. Lee’s doctor had, in late March of 1863, diagnosed him with a fatal condition: irreversible heart disease. All of these factors led to the crossroads town of Gettysburg.

One of many in Lee’s ranks was a young brigadier who was a scholar and true gentleman. He was personally against the continuation of the slave trade, and was a native of North Carolina – one of the states that had reluctantly seceded in the spring of 1861. He proved to be the last general to fall in the Gettysburg Campaign. His name was James Johnston Pettigrew.

Pettigrew was born on the plantation Bonarva, in Tyrell County, North Carolina, on July 4, 1828. The property had been part of his family heritage since 1779. He was the youngest son of a large family. His father, Ebenezer, was a wealthy planter, an Episcopalian bishop and a statesman. His mother, Anne, was the daughter of a prominent businessman from nearby New Bern. His paternal line was descended from Protestant French Huguenots, and the name means little one in French. The man, whom his family affectionately called Johnston, was by no means one of little accomplishment.1

In his formative years, Johnston showed early signs of being a prodigy. His ability to learn was quick and intense – and it caused no small amount of awe among his relatives and teachers.  He passed the entrance exam to the University of North Carolina at the age of fourteen.  He graduated there in 1847, at age eighteen, leaving behind an aptitude for learning that was legendary for the time.2

Shortly after his graduation from the university, President James K. Polk appointed Pettigrew as assistant professor at the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. While there, Johnston worked as an astronomer. Soon, he chafed under the inactivity, and left to pursue a law career.3 

Because of his wealth and family connections, Pettigrew often traveled to Europe and spoke several languages, including French, German, Spanish and Italian. He received a law degree from the University of Berlin in 1852. He returned for a time to his native country and settled in Charleston, South Carolina, opening a law practice. He was soon elected to the state legislature and became colonel of the state militia in 1856.4

During the 1850s, there were multiple epidemics of fevers and other contagious diseases. In 1858, one of the worst yellow fever pandemics ravaged Charleston. While most of those who had homes elsewhere fled the city, Pettigrew remained at great peril to his life. He spent his days caring for the sick and dying, and fortunately survived. Shortly after the plague faded, Pettigrew led “a gallant fight” in his state against the reopening of the slave trade – to no avail. After that loss, Pettigrew again sailed to the Continent, learning that a second war for Italian independence against the Austrian Empire had begun in 1858. He hoped to join the fight, but arrived too late, as those fighting on Sardinia acquiesced in early 1859. Undaunted, Pettigrew left Italy for Spain. He wrote a book about his adventures, entitled, Notes on Spain and the Spaniards in the Summer of 1859, with a glance at Sardinia. His thoughts on the unlucky Sardinians reflected his feelings on his own nation. He knew war was imminent and he longed to fight in that war.5

Because he lived in Charleston, his sympathies were with the South Carolinians. He believed that with fortitude and careful planning, the South could successfully break from the centralized government of the North. Even before the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860, Johnston Pettigrew, as head of the state militia, was working feverishly to procure weapons for the Palmetto State.6

Because of his anti-slavery stance, Abraham Lincoln’s ascendancy to the Presidency proved the breaking point for the people of South Carolina. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina was the first Southern state to formally secede from the Union. Lincoln had not yet taken the oath of office, and the sitting President, James Buchanan, sat idly by and attempted nothing to stop the rising tide of rebellion. Johnston Pettigrew was in Charleston when the secession occurred, and later witnessed the firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. He wrote, “The devil is unchained at last.” He accepted a commission in the Hampton Legion, and was later elected colonel of the 12th South Carolina.7

When his native state seceded in the spring of 1861, Pettigrew returned home to raise a regiment. He became the colonel of the 22nd North Carolina Infantry. As he worked his men to prepare for battle, his superiors noticed his ability and camaraderie with his men. Richmond offered him a brigade command in February 1862, but Pettigrew turned them down. He explained to an offended Jefferson Davis (who demanded an explanation) that he preferred to lead troops in battle first.8

With the urgent need for generals in brigade command, Pettigrew’s superiors insisted that he take the promotion, which he reluctantly did. His first fight was the Battle of Seven Pines, part of the Peninsular Campaign in May 1862. Pettigrew was severely wounded in the fight on May 31. A minie ball ripped through his throat, another tore through his upper arm, and he was bayonetted in the leg. As his wounds were extreme, Pettigrew was left on the field and captured. He spent two months as a prisoner in Fort Delaware, on an island in the middle of the Delaware River between Delaware and New Jersey. He was then exchanged. His wounds had miraculously healed in spite of the scant medical attention he received. His arm, however, never completely healed and bothered him for the remainder of his life.9

After his liberation, Pettigrew received the command of another brigade, and most of them he would lead at Gettysburg: the 11th, 26th, 44th, 47th, and 56th North Carolina regiments. For the next several months, Pettigrew led his brigade against Union forces in his native state, including engagements at Goldsboro, New Bern, and Bount’s Creek. Although these battles were minor compared to what would transpire at Gettysburg, the fighting nevertheless prepared the troops for what lay ahead in Pennsylvania.10

In May 1863, after the Battle of Chancellorsville, General Lee was forced to reorganize his army with the losses incurred in the recent battle. Because of that reorganization, Pettigrew’s Brigade was sent to the Army of Northern Virginia. Pettigrew and his troops became part of Harry Heth’s Division, in the new Third Corps, led by General A.P. Hill. 

Shortly after receiving the needed supplements to his army, Lee led his men northward, intent on drawing away the Union army from Washington, still led at the time by General Joseph Hooker. They crossed the Potomac River on June 15. By June 26, some of Lee’s men reached Gettysburg. Lee had waited on intelligence from General Jeb Stuart on the position of the Union forces, which never came. On June 28 he was told by a spy that the Federals, now led by George Meade, were much closer than Lee had anticipated. He called for his army to concentrate at Gettysburg.

It was Johnston Pettigrew who requested sending a detail into the town of Gettysburg in search of shoes. Many of his men desperately needed them, and both Heth and Hill allowed the trip. On June 30, Pettigrew rode into Gettysburg with a portion of his brigade, and to his astonishment, he saw significant numbers of men in blue – Union cavalry under the command of General John Buford. He hurried back to Cashtown, where A.P. Hill was found, and told him of the Union presence.11

Apparently, Heth and Hill were not aware of Pettigrew’s intelligence and capability. They believed their new addition was not aware of the difference between state militia and the veteran members of the Army of the Potomac. They ignored his warning. Frustrated, Pettigrew brought his aide, Louis Young, to confirm the sighting, which he promptly did. He, too, was ignored.12

Their dismissal led to catastrophe for the Army of Northern Virginia.

On the morning of July 1, 1863, Heth’s Division headed toward town to retrieve the fictitious shoes they erroneously believed were in Gettysburg. Instead, they met the Union troops led by Buford whom Pettigrew had seen the day before. It was the beginning of the Battle of Gettysburg. General Pettigrew led his men into Herbst Woods on McPherson’s Ridge, where they fought against the veteran Iron Brigade of the Union First Corps. Thousands fell in the woods on the first day from both sides. Pettigrew’s two largest regiments, the 11th and 26th North Carolina infantries, were hit especially hard, with staggering casualties. One of the officers of the 52nd North Carolina, a regiment of Pettigrew's Brigade, remembered, “The ground was covered with men…the eleventh and the twenty-sixth, very large, were perfectly riddled of officers and men.” Pettigrew and his troops eventually were successful in driving the tenacious men in blue from their position, at heavy cost. Harry Heth also fell in the fight, and was fortunate to survive. The battle, however, had only begun. Lee was determined to hit Meade and his Union troops again.13

Pettigrew’s Brigade was not engaged on the second day’s battle. He was, however, called back into action on July 3.

General Lee had attempted hitting the flanks of the Union line at Gettysburg – and he had not succeeded in dislodging them. For his second attempt at crushing the Federal line, he went back to the textbook. Napoleon had written that, if a flank attack was not successful, to then hit the center of the enemy line. Lee did so, initiating what was later known to history as Pickett’s Charge.

The Confederate troops who survived the first day’s fight were called to participate. Walking wounded were not exempt from fighting, as Lee needed every man in the ranks. Because General Heth was down with a head wound, Johnston Pettigrew was asked to lead his division in the charge. The fatal wounding of another division commander, General William Dorsey Pender, required another to replace him in the charge. His men were led by a supernumerary (a general without a command at the time), General Isaac Trimble.

The charge required the troops to run across nearly a mile of open field to the Union breastworks on Cemetery Ridge. The Union, well entrenched, were anticipating the attack and were prepared for the central assault.

When the men in gray emerged from the woods on Seminary Ridge on the afternoon of July 3, 1863, the day was hot and the temperature was brutal. Pettigrew rode on horseback among his men during the first part of the charge. “For the honor of the good old North State, forward,” he called to his men. Soldiers remembered that his face “lit up with the bright look it always wore in battle.” Pettigrew made a conspicuous target, and his horse was soon shot. He continued the rest of the way on foot. As Federal batteries pummeled the lines, General Pettigrew advanced with temerity. He pressed forward toward the Emmitsburg Road.14

As the work of death continued, it was Pettigrew’s men who advanced farthest toward the Union lines near the Bryan Farm, even though they never crossed the Angle, as Armistead’s Virginians did. Many of Pettigrew’s men were killed and captured as they attempted to advance to the Union wall. During the charge, Pettigrew was wounded again in his afore-wounded arm, and his hand was hit by a piece of canister. He managed to escape back to Seminary Ridge with a handful of his men, one of the last to reach it. Captain Haynes of the 11th North Carolina remembered, “We were all cut down.”15

July 4th was a solemn day for the Confederate forces in Gettysburg. General Lee had decided to retreat that day during a blinding rainstorm. The road back to Virginia was a morass of mud as the defeated men in gray left, many of them in wagons. It was Johnston Pettigrew’s 35th birthday – and his last.

The retreat to Virginia was an arduous one, with the merciless storms exacerbating the retreat. Lee, however, lodged his men in the foothills and mountains, making it impossible for the Union troops to successfully reach them. When Lee’s army reached the Potomac River days later, the flooded waters were impossible to cross.

On the morning of July 14, 1863, at a place appropriately called Falling Waters, the river had receded enough to allow a crossing. Union forces, though, were still fighting them, on the Maryland side of the area known as Williamsport. A group of Federal cavalry, men from Brigadier General Custer’s Brigade, relentlessly attacked Pettigrew’s Brigade.

“We called General Heth’s attention to them,” remembered Louis Young, Pettigrew’s aide. “He was uncertain, he thought they were ours.” Again, General Heth did not heed the warning of Pettigrew’s men. As General Pettigrew attempted to return fire, he tried to mount his new horse, but his wounded hand and disabled arm rendered the task impossible. He fell to the ground. Rising, he ran toward a fence, noticing a young soldier in blue taking aim right at him.16

Pettigrew shouted at his men to shoot the cavalryman, but they, recently awakened after a hard march, were slow to react. General Pettigrew, armed with a pistol, raced toward the soldier to do the deed himself. Instead, he was shot in the abdomen by his target, and mortally wounded.

As Lee’s army escaped over the Potomac on July 14, the Gettysburg Campaign came to an end. It also proved to be the final days of J.J. Pettigrew, who was carried to a farmhouse on the other side of the river. He died there three days later, on July 17, 1863, the last general to be killed in the Gettysburg Campaign.17

His remains were taken to Bonarva.  He was laid to rest in the burial grounds of his childhood home, next to the grave of his father. Captain Young, who had been at his side to the last, succinctly wrote of his passing, “Sad, indeed, to lose such a man.”18

Captain Young, who was with Pettigrew to the end, survived the war. In the years after the war, there were recriminations cast at those who failed to reach the Union line at Gettysburg. Aspersions were cast on General Pettigrew for the failure at Gettysburg, and at the crossing of the Potomac afterward. Young defended his general by saying, “In my judgment, no blame rests on him, and it would be unjust to suffer the reputation of one to be tarnished… whom few armies have known [as] a more vigilant and capable officer.”19

To Pettigrew falls the honor of being the last of Gettysburg’s fallen stars – and they were many. He died within view of the Potomac, for a cause that, like him, perished soon afterward.

Among the hundreds of thousands of men who died in the Civil War, Pettigrew was just one of many. Still, a melancholy thought is wondering what might have been. We can never fully realize the price that was paid on these now quiet fields, and the lives that were cut short, many of whom would definitely have contributed great things for the nation, had they merely had the chance. It was one that they were cruelly denied.

Sources: Eaton, Clement. The Freedom of Thought Struggle in the Old South. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1964 (reprint, first published in 1940). Freeman, Douglas Southall. R.E. Lee. Volume 3, New York: Charles Scribner’s Son, 1934. Letter, unsigned, to “Mother”. July 29, 1863. 11th North Carolina File, Gettysburg National Military Park (hereafter GNMP). James Johnston Pettigrew Family Tree, ancestry.com. Pfanz, Harry W. Gettsyburg: The First Day. Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Rollins, Richard, ed. Pickett’s Charge! Eyewitness Accounts. Redondo Beach, CA: Rank and File Publications, 1994. Warner, Ezra J. Generals in Gray: Lives of the Confederate Commanders. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1959. Wilson, Clyde N. The Most Promising Young Man of the South: James Johnston Pettigrew and His Men at Gettysburg. Abiline, TX: McWhitney Foundation Press, 1998. Young, Louis. Louis Young to Editor, Raleigh Observer, n.d. fragment, Pettigrew’s Division File, GNMP.

End Notes:

1. J.J. Pettigrew Family Tree, ancestry.com. Wilson, p. 25. Warner, p. 237.

2. Wilson, p 29.

3. J.J. Pettigrew Family Tree, ancestry.com. Warner, p. 237. 

4. Ibid. 

5. Eaton, pp. 54-55. 

6. Ibid. 

7. Wilson, p. 32. 

8. Eaton, p. 55. 

9. Warner, p. 237. 

10. Pfanz, p. 377. Wilson, p. 35. The 44th and 56th NC were not with Pettigrew in battle at Gettysburg. 

11. Pfanz, p. 27. 

12. Young, Louis to ed., Raleigh Observer, GNMP. 

13. Letter to Mother, July 29, 1863, 11th NC File, GNMP. The 52nd NC was part of Pettigrew's Brigade at Gettysburg. 

14. Rollins, p. 277. 

15. Ibid., p 267. 

16. Young to Ed., Raleigh Observer, GNMP. 

17. Ibid. 

18. Warner, p. 238. Young to Editor, Raleigh Observer, GNMP. 

19. Ibid.