Civil War: The Hero of Little Round Top

BY USACE OFFICE OF HISTORY

On the second day at the Battle of Gettysburg, July 2, 1863, Gouverneur K. Warren, chief engineer, Army of the Potomac, saw what no one else had seen –that Little Round Top, key to the Union defensive position, was exposed and undefended. He ordered troops to the hill in time to blunt a rapidly approaching Confederate attack. Almost two years later on April 1, 1865, at the Battle of Five Forks, Maj. Gen. Phil Sheridan relieved him from command and sent him to the rear, shattering a once promising career.

Portrait of Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren taken during the Civil War years.

OFFICE OF HISTORY HQUSACE

Warren was a top graduate of the West Point class of 1850, and had accepted a commission as a second lieutenant in the Corps of Topographical Engineers. Prior to the Civil War he worked with Andrew A. Humphreys on both the Mississippi River survey and the Pacific Railroad surveys, where he produced the first map of the American West. After Gettysburg, he became one of the youngest major generals in the Army, and eventually secured command of the vaunted Union V Corps, which saw heavy action at the battles of the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg.

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At Five Forks, his corps fell under the temporary command of the irascible cavalryman Phil Sheridan, and the two locked horns. Although Warren successfully defended his position and contributed to a sweeping Union victory, Sheridan found him wanting and, in one of the most controversial moves of the war, relieved him of command “for cause.”

Warren was devastated, and later requested a report of inquiry, but the end of the war, Lincoln’s assassination, and Johnson’s impeachment all got in the way. He was eventually exonerated, but it came too late for Warren, who died in August 1882. At his request, his family buried him in civilian clothes and without military ceremony at the family plot in Newport, Rhode Island. AE

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