Person Page - 82

Ricketts enlisted in the Union Army in July 1861 as a private and by the time the war ended four years later in spring 1865, he was a colonel and inspector of the artillery reserve for nearly the entire Army of the Potomac.
By the time the opposing Union Army of the Potomac and Confederate Army of Northern Virginia smashed into one another at Gettysburg, Ricketts had already fought in some of the war’s bloodiest engagements at the Second Battle of Bull Run, Antietam and Chancellorsville. Before his unit marshaled at noon on July 2, 1863 in Taneytown, Maryland, he had been promoted to captain and commanded a battery unit of the Pennsylvania Light Artillery that was a consolidation of Battery F and Battery G.
The order was clear. Capt. Robert Bruce Ricketts and his two companies of artillery were to hold the Union’s left flank on East Cemetery Hill just beyond the outskirts of Gettysburg. “In case you are charged here,” Ricketts’ commanding officer Col. C.S. Wainwright told him, “...you will not limber up under any circumstances, but fight your battery as long as you can.”
When Ricketts’ six cannon took their position, Confederate artillery opened fire and the Union batteries returned their volleys. As the sun quietly touched the mountains to the west, troops from Confederate Gen. Harry Hays’ famed Louisiana Tigers brigade charged the Union defenses. As written in the chapter on the Pennsylvania Light Artillery in Samuel P. Bates History of the Pennsylvania Volunteers, Ricketts’ battery fired “four discharges per minute, throwing five hundred pounds of deadly missiles full in the faces of the foe. But these desperate [Confederate] men had never failed in a charge, and nothing daunted, they closed up where their line was blown away, and rushed forward with deafening yells.” According to Ricketts, what Union infantry defended his and the other batteries on the hill behind a stone wall “commenced running in the greatest confusion to the rear, hardly a shot was fired, certainly not a volley, and so panic stricken were they that several ran into the canister fire of my guns and were knocked over.”
Ricketts’ troops were now exposed. The Louisianans opened fire, but perhaps because of the smoke and evening light, they aimed too high. “I remember well the roar of the torrent of bullets as they passed over our heads,” Ricketts wrote 30 years later.
The fight was just beginning. “I do not remember ever to have heard of any member of my command having failed to do his whole duty,” Ricketts recalled. “Only once, for a moment, when the [Union] infantry was falling back, some of my men gave back, but were instantly rallied with the cry ‘Die on your own soil boys before you give up your guns.’”
The fighting descended into chaotic hand-to-hand combat, the men using handspikes, hammers, pistols, stones or anything they could find to inflict fatal damage on their enemy. “The situation had now become really desperate,” Ricketts wrote.
The Confederates captured the left-most gun in Ricketts’ command and took three prisoners, one who would die from a mortal wounding. Ricketts lost six men killed and 11 wounded that day before reinforcements from the Union 2nd Corps, commanded by Hancock, rushed to Ricketts’ right and drove the Confederates back.
Ricketts later saw action during the Wilderness Campaign and the Siege of Petersburg.³