The Last Man

By Bill Cushing

Alonzo Cushing wasn’t sure what had awakened him so early this Friday, July 3 of 1863.

Perhaps it was the creeping heat of a summer day in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—him being used to the cooler climate of upstate New York. Perhaps his restlessness was from the anxious feeling pervading the air like smoke from the weapons fired over the past two days of intense and continuous fighting. Whatever the cause, the young Army officer rose and dressed to prepare for whatever might come from the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia.

As a cadet at West Point, Alonzo, or Lon as he preferred, was in the top half of the class of 1861 and part of a corps that graduated ahead of schedule when the Civil War became inevitable. Many of the cadets from the Southern states had resigned West Point to filter back to their home states. Like his younger brother Will, Lon was a prolific letter-writer, and in a letter to his mother, he expressed regret that none of the Southern cadets leaving the academy in anticipation of war were ranked ahead of him. That meant those departures did not help his class standing. He began his military career attached to Battery A of the 4th U. S. Artillery Regiment.

First established in 1821, Battery A was composed mainly of Irish and German veterans. He’d only been an officer for a month when the unit fought in the First Battle of Bull Run—the first major engagement of the Civil War and a disaster for the Union.

Lon not only met expectations, he exceeded them. His superiors trusted his judgment and transferred him to the Army of the Potomac as a topographical engineer. This assignment made him responsible for surveying potential battlegrounds to aid in strategy; it also put him in the Army’s elite. Engineers were considered the intellectual component and usually moved up the ranks rapidly.

Still, he yearned more for action and saw artillery as his stepping stone, but those initial duties surveying and drawing maps did prove advantageous after he returned to take command of his original unit. When Lon was reassigned and in charge of Battery A, one of the first to welcome him back was Frederick Füger, now his first sergeant.

“Willkommen, junger welpe!” shouted the boisterous older man, wrapping his arms around Lon as a father might greet a long-lost son. “And look at him. Shaving now.”

Then, recalling the situation, he composed himself to step back, back stiffened, as he shouted, “Attention!” Still, Lon had been flattered by the moment, especially since his own father had died 16 years earlier when Lon was only six. His boyish face struggled to suppress a happy grin. He was more sure than ever that Battery A was where he was meant to be.

Now 22, Lon was already a veteran of four of the major Civil War battles. At Fredericksburg, he’d been given a battlefield promotion of captain and then brevetted as a major during Chancellorsville. For an incoming officer, these temporary battlefield promotions were unusual, and other than classmate George Custer, no other Civil War officer in the Army had been promoted so quickly and at such a young age.

Now fully dressed, Lon left his tent to go to the mess area. He filled his kit with a typical battlefield breakfast of hard tack and salt pork to be washed down with some strong black coffee.

“You mind?” he asked Captain William Arnold, a fellow artillery commander from Rhode Island. Lon pointed his coffee cup to an empty chair near Arnold.

“Please,” the older officer said. The two fought together at Fredericksburg but had gotten to know each other at Chancellorsville, fighting side-by-side during that battle. While the latter campaign also proved disastrous for the Union, the two officers had acquitted themselves well and formed a bond beyond respect. Lon was also cited by his superiors for outstanding service. President Lincoln publicly noted Lon’s “conspicuous gallantry at the battle” of Chancellorsville.

“Do you ever find it strange to read about a battle you’d fought in?” Lon asked as he sat. “It’s as if newspapers knew more about the action than we. I only recall seeing little more than smoke and hearing only noise.” Taking a sip of coffee, Lon exhaled before he continued. “Everything looks frantic and confused while some ‘expert’ seems to have it all figured out.”

“Remember,” Arnold answered. “Those reporters are usually on the high ground and talking with the generals. We’re stuck in the middle of the battle.”

Like Lon, Arnold’s Yankee bloodline stretched back to the Revolutionary War. Both families shared a Puritan heritage, a faith that abhorred the notion of slavery. Those values had been instilled by Lon’s mother, now a widow for more than a decade. He hoped to write her once the day’s fighting was over.

Lon turned his attention back to the day at hand.

“Have you gotten your orders for the day yet?” Arnold asked as Lon finished up his meal.

“Not yet,” Lon said, wiping some crumbs from his lower lip. “You?”

“Actually,” the other officer said. “I can tell you yours as well. I am to take a position to your right. Both of us will entrench before the 71st Infantry from Pennsylvania.”

“Before? You mean the infantry won’t be our front line?”

“Not today,” Arnold answered. “There’s no real slope for them to create a front, so they will take their position behind our guns.”

Lon didn’t care for the idea that his own troops wouldn’t have the added protection of some perimeter riflemen.

“Do you know that Lee and I share the same birthday?” he asked, hoping to lighten his mood after recalling how Fredericksburg lasted four days compared to the past two days of fighting in the meadows and plains of this small Pennsylvania town as more men had already been killed in action than were lost the entire time at Fredericksburg.

“Well,” Arnold answered, “he’s still alive and kicking, so here’s to you living as long as he has.”

Lon took a final look across the Pennsylvania fields separating the two armies and stood to fill his canteen with water before making his way to officially receive his orders.

“Wonder what ‘Granny Lee’ is thinking today?” Arnold asked, using the nickname that many had attached to the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia because of his extreme caution as a military leader.

Lon smiled at the joke and gave Arnold an informal salute as he left to prepare, but both knew what was on Lee’s mind today. Most Union soldiers understood Lee had to secure a victory if the Confederacy had any chance of getting help from Europe. A decisive triumph against the Union in Northern territory would go a long way in doing that. After all, the general reasoned, the French had supported the colonists less than a century before.

After Lon received his own orders and conferred on supplies and positioning, he returned to his tent to prepare mentally for the task ahead. Sitting outside the open tent flaps, he lit his pipe and thought on his younger brother William. Lon wondered how Will was faring.

Born less than 22 months apart, the two grew up inseparable and devoted to each other, yet they lived their lives in vastly different ways, each distinct in his own personality. Lon was contemplative while Will lived so impulsively as to be almost impetuous. The older was ambitious and meticulous; the younger audacious, mercurial. As an officer, Lon exhibited the deliberation of a chess master, always staying aware of possible consequences. Lon rooted his decisions in probabilities and reality; Will never envisioned any outcome other than success.

Will was not a stellar student but had been dismissed from Annapolis for disciplinary, not academic problems. Never the best behaved, he’d exceeded the allowable number of demerits after openly humiliating one of his professors. Lon had feared his younger brother would get into trouble but not so close to graduation. Reinstated by the Navy after the war broke out, Will was assigned on ships blockading supplies to the South. Such duty was tedious and trying, and Lon doubted his brother’s demeanor could tolerate the demands of that particular task.

For Lon’s part, lack of action was rarely part of the itinerary, nor would it be on this day—this July 3. He was assigned 126 men and six cannons with the task of defending Cemetery Ridge, a low rise at the northern end of the Union forces.

Lon summoned Sergeant Füger and had him call the men to their stations. He went ahead to survey his situation and equipment.

From the other side of the battlefield, Brigadier General Lewis Armistead, one of Lee’s most respected and intelligent officers, received his own orders, which included taking the area Lon’s troops had been assigned. Lee was comforted by the sheer size of his numbers. With nearly 12,000 men under Armistead’s command, Lee was convinced that the Virginians could overwhelm the much smaller contingent of Yankees. Besides the 1,000 to one numerical advantage of his regiment, Armistead was assured that the intense bombardment from over 150 Southern cannons would demoralize the Union troops if not demolish their artillery, itself limited to about 80 pieces, many already damaged and practically useless.

At around 8 a.m., Lon heard that battery begin.

Confederate artillery lobbed a barrage of shells across the field at the Union defensive positions, creating a thunderous noise that shook roof tiles of buildings loose while people as far away as a mile thought a storm was coming. In many ways, it was a maelstrom as Gettysburg’s last day marked “the great artillery duel” of the Civil War.

Lon’s battery stood at “The Angle,” a spot so named because of the stone walls that met at an intersection that formed the troops into the shape of a fish hook. Surrounded by a thicket of trees, the Angle overlooked a vast plain. Having already tried to penetrate the center of the Yankee lines on July 1 and the southern portion the next day, it became the focal point where General Lee ordered “Pickett’s Charge” to take place on the third and final day of the conflict.

But before that charge could even happen, the morning’s shelling had done its job, hitting three chests of Lon’s ammunition, killing several men far too soon, and damaging several of his cannons. The explosions forced Lon to withhold fire so that he could safeguard his remaining ammunition as well as relocate the three moveable cannons he had left.

At noon, rations were delivered to the Union soldiers as the violent action came to a stop to allow both sides’ weapons to cool. Besides eating, it allowed the two armies to assess the damage so far, make adjustments, and allow the weapons to cool down.

Before the cannonade could continue, Lon moved his guns forward to take a spot behind a low stone wall, preparing for the Confederate infantry’s inevitable attack. Once Pickett began his charge, among the heaviest hit were the positions near Lon.

Lon had three guns but only enough men to operate two of them. Infantrymen, most of them attached to the Pennsylvania 71st, were called to replace wounded artillerymen, the replacements themselves soon became casualties.

One Pennsylvanian was so badly wounded, he pleaded for someone, anyone to put him out of his misery. When no one would, he pulled out his pistol and ended his own life. The battle intensified as a hailstorm of bullets mixed with the whistle or shriek of cannon fire.

“Hold your positions,” Lon screamed to the collapsing line of men. “First man to leave his post, I’ll blow his brains out!”

His refusal to retreat kept the shaken and confused troops in place. He was now down to two guns, but who dared leave when this almost angelic-looking officer stood his ground?

Around 1:40 in the afternoon, a cannon ball exploded near Lon, its fragments tearing open both his thighs, ripping cloth and flesh and his genitals as it went by, becoming his first wound. He stayed his post.

A little before 2:30, the Confederate infantry began its slow march toward Lon’s position in a line stretching almost a mile across, presenting a show of strength so massive that one Union officer later described it as “magnificent, grim, and irresistible.”

If such was the case, then Lon and his troops became the “immoveable object.”

Capt. Arnold’s unit had suffered the least damage, so he redirected his line of fire toward Lon’s section of the Angle in the hope of helping his comrade-in-arms in defending against Armistead’s advance.

Lon was then wounded in his shoulder. He refused to remove himself from the line for a doctor to examine him. Lon viewed this as a practical matter more than heroics. Amputation had become the preferred treatment of frontline surgeons. Lon preferred to deal with Confederate rifles rather than a bone-cutting saw. Now wounded twice, he stayed on, resigned to the fact of his death. He became a soldier seeking his particular bullet.

“Here comes the Johnnies,” one infantryman shouted out as Armistead’s troops let loose the blood-chilling “Rebel yell” the Southerners made famous.

Defending his position during the charge, Lon refused to leave his post despite the bleeding and pain of his injuries. He saw that there was no way his force of less than 40 or 50 men could hold up against the thousands of butternut-clad troops moving toward his position.

“If I might, sir,” Sergeant Füger growled in his thick German accent, “perhaps you’d best to be getting back to the medical station.”

Lon refused. Instead, he ordered his first sergeant to prepare a triple-cannister load for a final shot.

“Cushing,” commanded a superior officer, “go to the rear!”

“No, sir,” he shouted back, “I stay right here and fight it out or die in the attempt.”

Bleeding out from his earlier wounds, Lon realized this was his last day on earth. He stopped intestines from spilling out by clamping the flat side of a stray food canteen against his stomach. Leaning against his remaining cannon, Lon sucked at a fleshless thumb. He hadn’t been wearing the padded lather glove that protected handlers from the searing heat of venting gases that escaped after each volley, so that finger had been burned to the bone.

With the enemy within a hundred yards and almost on the ground where the last gun had been drawn up, Lon stood as straight as he was able.

“Give them one more shot.” he cried, adding above the din, “Goodbye!”

Then, as an iron ball from a charging infantryman’s musket struck him in the mouth, traveling through his throat and out the back of his head. He stumbled and fell into Sgt. Füger’s arms, killed instantly. The cannon shot represented the last of Battery A’s ammunition and was fired by the steadfast Sgt. Füger.

It was only one cannon shot, but it tore a wide hole in the advancing enemy, now inside the Angle and among the remains of Battery A. Confederate troops continued climbing the rise as Armistead’s men hurdled the fence line and came through the smoke, but Lon and his men had delayed the attack long enough for reinforcements to arrive and beat back the charge, allowing the Union to win the battle and later the war itself.

On July 4, the day after Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia retreated, it began to rain as if nature wished to wash the site clean of the blood soaking it from the bodies littered across the fields. Gettysburg, historically called the “high water mark of the Confederacy,” was perhaps best identified by one of its surviving combatants as “a bountiful harvest for the Angel of Death.” That quote is hardly hyperbolic. Of the 175,000 involved in the fight, around 50,000 were either wounded, captured, or missing while over 7,000 were killed.

As to Lon, he died six months short of his 23rd birthday. In the poem “John Brown’s Body,” Stephen Vincent Benet called him “the last man at the last gun.”

From that time forward, the 4th Artillery Regiment, Battery A would exist under the name of “Cushing’s Battery” and now operates out of New York state as a ceremonial unit.

Still, it wasn’t until November of 2014—following decades of petitions and letters to Congress and the White House from family, military historians, and Civil War buffs—that Alonzo Hereford Cushing was at last awarded the Medal of Honor.

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Bill Cushing lived in numerous states, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. Returning to college at 37 after serving in the Navy and working on ships, classmates at the University of Central Florida called him the “blue collar writer.” Earning an MFA in non-fiction writing from Goddard College, he now resides in Glendale, California. Widely published, Bill has four poetry collections published and is currently revising a memoir about his years on ships.