Gettysburg in Three Days and the Charge That Failed on July 3, 1863

Nobody picked Gettysburg. Neither commander wanted a battle there, neither had planned for one, and the town itself, a prosperous crossroads with a seminary and a lot of roads, was on the map for the reason that most decisive places are: a great many roads met there. Two armies stumbled into each other on the morning of July 1, 1863, and by the evening of July 3 the course of the war had changed.

I intend to tell it in order, because Gettysburg is too often told as a single dramatic moment, a charge across a field, as though it were a play with one scene. It was three days of decisions made by captains and colonels and sergeants, most of them on ground they had never seen, under orders that did not survive the first shot. The great charge on the third day is the famous part. The battle was won before it, in small places, by men who held on.

Why they were there

In June 1863 Robert E. Lee, fresh from his victory at Chancellorsville, took the Army of Northern Virginia north for a second invasion of the Union, this time into Pennsylvania. His aims were to draw the Union army away from Virginia, to feed his men from Northern farms, and to strike a blow on Northern soil that might break the will of the Union to continue. His cavalry, under J. E. B. Stuart, had ridden off on a long raid, leaving Lee for several days without his usual eyes. The Army of the Potomac, which had been commanded by Joseph Hooker, passed on June 28 to a new commander, George Gordon Meade, who had three days to learn his army and to find the enemy.

Both armies converged on Gettysburg because the roads did. A Confederate division marched toward the town on the morning of July 1 to see what was there. Waiting for them, on the ridges west of town, was a Union cavalry division.

Day one, July 1: Buford holds the ridge

John Buford, a Union cavalry general, had ridden into Gettysburg the day before, seen the ground, and understood at once what it meant. South of the town were hills and ridges, Cemetery Hill and Cemetery Ridge, that would make a superb defensive position for an army that got there first. Buford's job was to hold the high ground for the infantry that was marching up behind him.

On the morning of July 1 his troopers, dismounted, with breech-loading carbines that let them fire faster than the muzzle-loading infantry facing them, fought a delaying action along McPherson Ridge against the advancing Confederate division of Henry Heth. They held long enough for the first Union infantry, the I Corps under John Reynolds, to arrive. Reynolds was killed early in the fighting, a major loss. The battle grew through the day, with more units on both sides arriving piecemeal.

By afternoon, Confederate reinforcements pressed on both flanks, and the Union I and XI Corps were driven back through the streets of Gettysburg in disorder, losing thousands of men as prisoners. It was a Union defeat. But the retreat ended on the high ground south of town, on Cemetery Hill, where the Union general Winfield Scott Hancock, sent forward by Meade, arrived to organize the defense. Lee, watching the Union retreat, sent Richard Ewell an order to take Cemetery Hill "if practicable." Ewell, cautious, did not. Two words, "if practicable," have launched more counterfactual histories than any others in the language, and generals have been writing orders with them ever since, which tells you something about generals. This is one of the great "what ifs" of the war. By morning the Union held the hill, and the line that would become famous, shaped like a fishhook, was forming along the ridges.

Day two, July 2: Little Round Top and the Wheatfield

By the morning of July 2, Meade had most of his army up. The Union line ran from Culp's Hill, at the fishhook's barb, along Cemetery Hill and down Cemetery Ridge toward two hills to the south, the Round Tops. Lee had most of his army on Seminary Ridge to the west, with the open fields between them.

Lee decided to attack both ends of the Union line. The main blow was to come on the Union left, with James Longstreet's corps swinging around to roll up the line from the south. Longstreet argued for a different plan, a move around the Union flank to force Meade to attack on ground of Lee's choosing, but Lee had made up his mind. The attack, delayed through much of the afternoon, started around four o'clock.

Meanwhile a Union general, Daniel Sickles, commanding the III Corps, had decided that the ground assigned to him on the left of Cemetery Ridge was poor, and without orders he moved his corps forward to a salient around a peach orchard, putting his men in a position that could be attacked from two sides. It was a blunder, the kind of improvement on the plan that every committee chairman and every corps commander is sure he can make, and it meant that the Confederate assault hit the Union line far out in front of where Meade intended. The fighting that followed raged through the Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield and the jumble of boulders called the Devil's Den. The Wheatfield changed hands several times in a few hours, and the losses were heavy on both sides. Sickles was wounded and lost a leg.

Then came Little Round Top. The hill, at the southern end of the Union line, was undefended when a Union engineer, Gouverneur Warren, climbed it and saw Confederate troops moving toward it. He sent for troops. A brigade under Strong Vincent got there just in time. On the extreme left of that brigade's line stood the 20th Maine, commanded by a former professor of rhetoric, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. His men, attacked again and again by Alabama troops, ran short of ammunition. Chamberlain ordered a bayonet charge, swinging his line downhill like a door, and swept the Confederates away. Vincent was mortally wounded. The hill held. If it had fallen, Confederate artillery on its summit could have enfiladed the whole Union line.

At night, there was another fight on the Union right. The Confederates attacked Culp's Hill and East Cemetery Hill. A thin Union brigade under George Greene held Culp's Hill's entrenchments, having built breastworks quickly, and an assault on East Cemetery Hill was driven back. By midnight, the Union line was bent but intact. Meade called a council of war and his generals voted to stay and fight.

Day three, July 3: the charge

The morning started with a fight for Culp's Hill, which the Confederates had partly occupied in the night. Union troops spent the better part of the morning retaking it. Lee's original plan for the day was to coordinate an attack on the Union right with a strike in the center. When the Culp's Hill attack failed, he went ahead with the center.

His plan was to batter the Union center on Cemetery Ridge with artillery and then send in infantry. Longstreet, in command of the assault, did not like it. He argued against it. Lee overruled him. The attack would be made by roughly twelve thousand men (estimates run from about 10,500 to 13,500) in three divisions, commanded by George Pickett, Johnston Pettigrew and Isaac Trimble, across about three-quarters of a mile of open ground, uphill, toward a stone wall and a small clump of trees that Lee had picked out as a target.

At about one o'clock in the afternoon, a Confederate artillery barrage of well over a hundred guns opened on the Union lines. The Union artillery responded for a time and then slackened, partly to conserve ammunition and partly to make the Confederates think their barrage had succeeded. It did not succeed.

In the middle of the afternoon the infantry stepped out of the woods on Seminary Ridge and formed their line. What came next must be among the most dreadful sights in American military history. A line of battle a mile wide, flags flying, marched across the open fields in perfect order. As they came into range the Union artillery tore holes in their ranks. At the Emmitsburg Road, they had to climb fences under fire. The Union infantry behind the stone wall, many of them Hancock's II Corps, held its fire and then delivered volleys. The lines thinned, drifted toward the clump of trees, and dissolved.

A few hundred men reached the wall. The Confederate brigadier Lewis Armistead, with his hat on the point of his sword, led a small group over it with his hat on the point of his sword, as most accounts have it, and was mortally wounded within the Union line. Alonzo Cushing, a Union artillery officer, though mortally wounded, kept his guns firing until he was killed at the wall, and was awarded the Medal of Honor in 2014, 151 years later. After a few minutes of hand-to-hand fighting at the angle in the wall, the survivors fell back or surrendered. The charge had lasted less than an hour, and more than half of the men who made it had fallen.

Lee rode out to meet the survivors as they came back. He is reported to have told them that the fault was his. Whatever the exact words, the reports agree on his bearing, which was calm and conciliatory.

Casualties

The number of men lost in the three days was large, and it is reasonable to state it at the level the documents support. The Union army lost some twenty-three thousand men killed, wounded, captured or missing. Confederate losses are harder to count, because the records are incomplete, and estimates range from about twenty-three thousand to somewhat more than twenty-eight thousand. By either estimate it was the costliest battle of the war and of the whole American record, with roughly forty-six to fifty-one thousand casualties on the field in total, depending on which Confederate estimate you use. A town of a few thousand people was left with thousands of dead and wounded in its fields and homes, and the citizens of Gettysburg spent weeks, and in some cases months, tending to them.

Meade's pursuit

On July 4, Lee began his retreat, in a driving rain, with a wagon train of wounded that stretched for many miles. Meade has been criticized ever since for not destroying the Confederate army. The Potomac, swollen by rain, was too high for Lee to cross, and for several days he was backed up against it with his army entrenched. Meade followed, cautiously, and when he came up to the Confederate position decided against a heavy attack. By July 13 and 14 the river had dropped, and Lee's army crossed into Virginia.

Lincoln was furious. He wrote a letter to Meade expressing his disappointment, and then did not send it, a discipline that anyone who has ever hit "reply all" would do well to study. The reasons for Meade's caution were not trivial: his army had taken severe losses, his corps commanders were wary, and a failed assault on entrenched veterans would have been a catastrophe. The fair judgment is that Meade did the main job, which was to win the battle, and fell short of the greater prize.

The strongest objection

There is a version of Gettysburg history that goes like this: the battle was a draw that the Union happened to win because Lee made mistakes, and its place in memory is inflated by the speech Lincoln gave there in November. Confederate armies fought on for nearly two more years. Vicksburg, which surrendered to Grant on July 4, was the more decisive strategic loss for the South. If you want to find the true turning point, look to the Mississippi.

That is a serious argument, and there is something in it. Vicksburg gave the Union control of the river and split the Confederacy in two. Some of the great historians have made the case that Gettysburg's significance is partly retrospective. Four points in answer.

One. The two events were linked, and the pairing mattered. In the same week, Lee's army was thrown back from the North and Grant's army took Vicksburg. The news came together, and the effect on both sides was a blow to Confederate hopes of foreign recognition and a lift to Northern morale.

Two. Lee was never again able to invade the North. The army that crossed the Potomac in June 1863 was Lee's best chance to carry the war out of Virginia. After Gettysburg, the Confederate army fought defensively. The initiative, in the east, passed to the Union.

Three. The losses could not be replaced. The Confederacy had fewer men to lose, and the officer corps took casualties that it could not make good. Many of its best regimental and brigade commanders fell on those three days.

Four. The war's purpose was being decided in public. The Union victory came at a time when Northern support for the war was fragile, and a Confederate victory on Northern soil in the summer of 1863 might have strengthened the voices calling for a settlement. The result strengthened the hand of a president who was fighting for a Union that would end slavery. The speech at the cemetery four months later, read closely in The Gettysburg Address Read Closely Sentence by Sentence, tells what the battle was for.

The high tide

The monument at the wall marks the "High Water Mark of the Rebellion." The phrase is apt. The images suit a battle that came at the end of a long Confederate advance, the farthest the army would go. Lee's army had come as far north as the line of battle at Cemetery Ridge, and it never came further. Everything afterward was a retreat, a defense, or a siege, until a surrender at a courthouse in Virginia, which we narrate in Appomattox and the Generous Surrender Terms That Began to Heal a Nation.

What a conservative reader should take from it is a point about the common soldier. Gettysburg was decided by a cavalry trooper with a carbine on a ridge at dawn, a brigade that built breastworks overnight, a colonel who ordered a bayonet charge when his ammunition was spent, and a line of men who stood behind a stone wall and waited for a mile-wide line of infantry to come to them. The Founders, who feared standing armies and trusted citizen soldiers, would have recognized them. The men who fought at Gettysburg for the Union were largely volunteers and draftees from farms and workshops who had been called to defend a government that was theirs. The same virtue appears in the men of Valley Forge, described in Valley Forge Was a Winter of Hunger That Turned Farmers Into an Army, and in the soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts, whose assault on Fort Wagner came just two weeks after the fight at Gettysburg, and whose story is in The 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner and the Soldiers Who Proved Doubters Wrong.

The case in brief

1. The battle began on July 1, 1863, when Buford's dismounted cavalry delayed Heth's division on McPherson Ridge until Union infantry could arrive, and the Union fell back to the high ground south of town.
2. On July 2 the Union held the fishhook line against attacks at the Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield, Little Round Top, Culp's Hill and East Cemetery Hill.
3. On July 3 the Confederate artillery barrage and the charge of roughly 12,000 men across open ground failed at the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge, at a cost of more than half the attackers.
4. The Union army lost about 23,000 men and the Confederate army about as many or more over the three days, and Lee retreated on July 4 without being destroyed.
5. Gettysburg, with Vicksburg, marked the high tide of the Confederacy, because Lee never again invaded the North.

What you can do: use the National Park Service's online battlefield map for Gettysburg to trace the three days on the ground, and then read the Gettysburg Address aloud.