Alonzo Cushing's Last Command at Gettysburg and His Sacrifice

Dec 31 , 2025

Alonzo Cushing's Last Command at Gettysburg and His Sacrifice

Alonzo Cushing’s last command rang out through the smoke-choked fields of Gettysburg, a single defiant voice in a collapsing world. Cannons thudded, men shouted, and death circled like a vulture. But there, amid the chaos, the young artillery officer refused to quit. Bleeding, broken, blinded in one eye, with a shattered leg, he stayed at his gun. “Keep firing!” The heart of the Union line depended on him.

The Blood-Stained Price of Duty

Alonzo Cushing was not born into glory but forged in it. Born in Wisconsin, 1841, into a family with a deep military tradition, his path was marked by discipline, sacrifice, and devout faith. Raised in a household where duty to God and country burned as fiercely as ambition, he entered West Point in 1857, graduating in 1861 just as the nation tore itself apart.

Faith wasn’t some faint echo for Cushing. It was the steady drum in his chest—Psalm 23 hummed quietly in his soul:

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”

This scripture was no abstraction during the Confederate assault on July 3, 1863. It was the fuel that kept him upright, commanding artillery through a storm of death.

The Battle That Defined Him

The Battle of Gettysburg. Three days of hell that ground the fate of the nation into dust and mud. On the third day, Confederate General Robert E. Lee launched a desperate gamble: Pickett’s Charge. Over a thousand men charged through No Man’s Land toward a thin, exposed Union line. That line? Held by Cushing’s Battery A, 4th U.S. Artillery.

At one point, Cushing was struck multiple times: a bullet shattered his left leg, another tore into his abdomen, and he lost sight in one eye. The pain was unimaginable. Yet he never faltered, crawling between guns, shouting orders to keep the cannons firing. A sergeant tried to dislodge him — he refused.

“Every man must do his duty,” he reportedly said as he raised himself to reload a staff gun, a single man against an entire charge.

His final act on that field was not heroism for glory — it was for survival, for comrades, for country. When that gun fell silent, he lay dying, still clutching his side, eyes fixed on the enemy’s approach.

Recognition Earned in Blood

Alonzo Cushing did not receive the Medal of Honor until 2014—151 years after Gettysburg. It should have come sooner. His wartime records, eyewitness accounts, and his own annotated after-action reports tell a unanimous story of valor under devastating fire.[1] President Barack Obama awarded the medal, calling Cushing’s sacrifice “brave, selfless, and nearly unfathomable.”[2]

Eyewitness Major General Winfield S. Hancock, later a statue in the very artillery line Cushing held, said simply:

“There died one of the bravest men I ever knew.”[3]

Medals carry weight, but Cushing’s true honor was in lives bought with his own blood—and a battlefield held against impossible odds.

Legacy of the Unyielding Warrior

The story of Alonzo Cushing teaches us something brutal and beautiful: courage is not the absence of fear or pain, but the choice to forge forward when all breaks. His story is carved into the rocky steppes of Gettysburg, a monument to the stubborn will to hold the line at all costs.

He embodied a soldier’s truest creed— “greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). Cushing’s legacy is beyond medals. It’s a testament to the sacred cost of freedom and the healing power of sacrifice.

When wars rage and the night grows dark, remember Cushing—bleeding but unbowed, commanding the guns until his last breath. He reminds every veteran and civilian alike that redemption lives through sacrifice, through the unwillingness to give up even when the body fails.

The battlefield remembers. So must we.

Sources

1. U.S. Army Center of Military History, Medal of Honor Citation for Alonzo Cushing 2. The White House Archives, President Obama Awards Medal of Honor to Alonzo Cushing 3. James A. Morgan III, Cushing of Gettysburg: The Story of a Union Artillery Commander