Gettysburg: The 15th New York Battery Opens on Cemetery Ridge
Pennsylvania
On the third of July, eighteen sixty-three, the men of the Fifteenth New York Light Artillery unlimbered their guns on Cemetery Ridge and waited.
Ordered to the front at dawn, they took position in the artillery battalion to the left of Battery E, Fifth Massachusetts. When Major General Hancock gave the signal, they opened with solid shot and shell against the Confederate batteries massed across the valley. Then, as about twelve thousand five hundred Confederate infantry began their long walk across the open field, the New York gunners switched to canister and held their ground. When the Confederate infantry reached the angle in the Union line, the battery directed its fire directly into the assault.
The men who served these guns were part of the wall that broke the Confederate tide at Gettysburg, the high-water mark of the Confederacy.
