Krzyżanowski's Charge

The most famous bayonet charge on this date in 1863, the middle day of the Battle of Gettysburg, was from Little Round Top, on the southern, left flank of the Union line, when Col. Joshua L. Chamberlain led the out-of-ammunition 20th Maine to drive away their Confederate attackers.

But there was another one later in the day, after dark, at the other end of the Union Line on Cemetery Hill (where Lincoln, four months later, delivered the Gettysburg Address).

The previous day, July 1, the Union forces had been driven back and through Gettysburg. Among the units taking heavy casualties were the Second Brigade, consisting of five regiments commanded by Col. Vladimir Krzyzanowski, of the Third Division, commanded by another immigrant soldier, Major General Carl Schurz, of XI Corps (led by Maj. Gen. O.O. Howard). The brigade's total losses at Gettysburg were 698 killed, wounded or missing. Krzyzanowski himself was injured and knocked unconscious that first day when his horse was shot, but he stayed with his men.

The Confederate attacks on Cemetery and Culp's hills at the depleted north end of the Union line came late in the day of July 2, and the Louisiana Tigers brigade (in the division of Major General Jubal Early) did take the summit of East Cemetery Hill. But Schurz and Kryzanowski immediately led two of the regiments in the latter's brigade, the 58th and 119th New York, with fixed bayonets to retake the position, which they did with assistance from Col. Samuel Carroll's brigade of II Corps (dispatched by Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock). The 119th, led by Krzyzanowski, pursued the Confederates to the base of the hill, then lay down to allow Union artillery to fire over them.

By 1885, Krzyzanowski was working in the same US Customs house in lower Manhattan from which Herman Melville had recently retired, and he is a recurring character in The Last Circle of Ulysses Grant. (Schurz comes up as a subject of conversation and criticism -- for his turn against Reconstruction -- by Nadine Turchin.)