Gettysburg, Battle of

Gettysburg, Battle of (1863).One of the most decisive battles of the Civil War raged from July 1–3 1863 at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. General Robert E. Lee decided to invade Pennsylvania and threaten Harrisburg, Baltimore, and Washington, not only to carry the war to the enemy but also to relieve the pressure on the siege of Vicksburg. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, 75,000 strong, crossed the Potomac in June and the Union Army of the Potomac, 88,000 strong, moved to stay between the Rebels and Washington. Command of the Union army had been given to Gen. George Gordon Meade on June 28 and he determined to find and fight Lee.

Union and Confederate troops met each other near Gettysburg. Rebels were looking for shoes and other supplies; Yanks were looking for Rebs. Fighting erupted near Gettysburg early on 1 July as outnumbered Union cavalry under John Buford skirmished with Rebel infantry. Reinforcements came to both sides, but by afternoon, Union Maj. Gen. John Reynolds had been killed and Federal troops retired southeastward from the town to Cemetery Hill and Cemetery Ridge. Lee arrived and vainly urged Lt. Gen. Richard S. Ewell to attack Cemetery Hill. This wasted chance gave Meade time to get his army set in a fish‐hook line, with his right anchored on Culp's Hill, the center on Cemetery Ridge and the left on a hill later called Little Round Top. Lee's men deployed during the night along the lower Seminary Ridge to the west. The first day went to the Rebels, but at high human cost.

Daylight on 2 July showed the two armies formed, with open country yawning between the lines. The initiative was with Lee, who ordered Lieutenant General James Longstreet's Corps to attack the Union left while Ewell's corps struck the Union right at Culp's Hill and Cemetery Ridge.

Lee's orders were delayed and compliance lagged (the source of much controversy later); Longstreet, Lee's “Warhorse,” opposed the plan (he thought the Confederate army should move south, get between Meade and Washington, pick a good defensive spot and receive attack); troops were shifted, time passed.

While the Confederates were shuffling their plans, Union III Corps commander Maj. Gen. Dan Sickles, worried about being flanked, initiated an advance into the Peace Orchard, Devil's Den, almost to the Emmitsburg Road between the two forces—and, hence, offered a weak salient to the enemy.

The whole Union line depended on the left flank position at Little Round Top—a fact noticed by Meade's chief engineer, Maj. Gen. G. K. Warren, who was horrified to see that hill unoccupied. Warren saved the day by pulling in brigades and batteries just as Longstreet's men charged Little and Big Round Top and nearly took the high ground. The Twentieth Maine, under Col. Joshua Chamberlain, held out against furious Confederate attacks and saved the flank. Longstreet's efforts against the Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield, Devil's Den, the lower slopes of the Round Tops and on to the Emmitsburg road were successful and Sickles finally retreated to Cemetery Ridge.

About dusk, too late to help Longstreet, Maj. Gen. Jubal A. Early, of Ewell's corps, fiercely attacked the Union right at East Cemetery Hill and nearly took the crest. No help came to Early and he abandoned the hill at about 10 P.M. A similar fate, at roughly the same time, met Maj. Gen. Edward Johnson's energetic divisional drive against Yankee positions on Culp's Hill.

Fighting on 2 July went to neither side but casualties were high and controversies were brewing: Longstreet's efforts were slow, Lee's attacks uncoordinated; Sickles had blundered and the Union high command had nearly missed the importance of Little Round Top.

Meade, steady in crisis, suffered uncertainty as night fell on 2 July. His left and right had held. Would Lee try them again or switch to the center? Or would the wily Rebel leader simply slip away and appear somewhere closer to Harrisburg or Washington? Calling his corps commanders together after midnight, Meade discussed possibilities. Unlike his predecessors, Meade did not urge retreat; instead he decided to wait for Lee's next move. He expected a strong Rebel attack on his center and ordered men and artillery there from the flanks. Union morale remained high.

Lee was not well. Stomach trouble plagued him and he had chest problems. Illness, and Gen. J.E.B. ( “Jeb”) Stuart's absence on a wagon hunting raid with most of the cavalry, edged Lee's temper and subordinates noted him unusually touchy that night. By morning his temper was shorter. He had decided to test the Union center, since the flanks were strong. This decision irked Longstreet, who felt the center would be tougher than the rest of the line. Why hit the one untouched Union position on the field? Why a frontal attack against so many visible enemy guns? Unmoved, Lee ordered Maj. Gen. George Pickett's division of Longstreet's corps, with some of Gen. A. P. Hill's units, to attack on 3 July.

On the third day, Confederates who participated in “Pickett's Charge” and lived to tell about it, recalled that 143 Southern guns bristled in the lines and that the sun etched things sharply. It was a strange kind of day, one fragmented by small memories. Men noted the flights of birds, some listened to a band, many lay on soft ground and waited as Federal shells probed the trees on Seminary Ridge, and many of them died. One, a sergeant in Company A, 14th Tennessee, could hear, years later, the things he said to himself. June Kimble was his name, his was a center regiment, and he was curious. In a lull after a morning shelling he walked to the fringe of the woods and looked at the place his men would go. Guns crowning the Federal hills, the little clump of trees that fixed so many an eye that day, the low stone wall thronging with bluecoats—the whole position lay shimmering far away across almost a mile of open, rolling land. There, up there, into that line of black guns behind the low stone wall, there his men would go. Kimble was scared, almost sick at the sight, and began mumbling to himself: “June Kimble, are you going to do your duty today?” And he answered, “I’ll do it, so help me God.”

Confederate artillery started a thunderous and wasteful artillery duel in the early afternoon that lasted almost two hours. Union fire slacked off—both to conserve shells and to fool the Rebels into thinking that the Southern guns commanded the field. During a lull in the bombardment a grandly mounted General Pickett scratched a brief note to his fiancee, talked briefly to Longstreet, then rode to one of gallantry's last great gestures.

Confederates came out of the woods at about 3:15 P.M. Yankees counted many battle flags; and noted the formation was trim as the enemy march began slowly, to allow for distance and rising ground. Some direction changes were accomplished by the 12,000 to 15,000 Southerners marching. Silence. Union gunners waited. Steadily the “Johnny Rebs” marched, lines dressed and closing. Across a small stream they went, through a fence, then straight up the hill toward the trees, the guns, the infantry. Men remembered how it was on the way; to some the silence crowned the world, then broke in a clap so awful it was more than sound, in a roar so angry it was tangible, in an endless crack of doom. Union shells raked lines, cut gaps in ranks; the gaps closed, the lines moved on, faster; men leaned forward against some great wind that winnowed them, bunching as Yankee batteries ate away the flanks. Then they ran, crouched, flags waving as they began their “Rebel yell.” Some stopped to fire near the wall at the little clump of trees, took a withering volley right in the face, recoiled, went on and carried the wall. Then the charge faded in carnage. “Men fire into each other's faces,” a witness wrote. “There are bayonet‐thrusts, sabre‐strokes, pistol shots; … men … spinning around like tops, throwing out their arms, gulping up blood, falling, legless, armless, headless … ghastly heaps of dead men…” A handful, maybe 300, rode the Southern tide to its height; most of them died in an angle by the clump of trees, including Confederate Gen. Lewis A. Armistead.

Back down the slope scarcely 5,000 survivors fled, razed and raked and maimed again. Many heard Lee greet them. “All this is my fault. Too bad! Too bad! Oh, TOO BAD!”

Meade wasted a chance to counterattack, and two days later on a rainy night, Lee began a woeful journey back to Virginia with a wounded column seven miles long.

An incredulous President Abraham Lincoln fumed that Lee's army had escaped. “We had them within our grasp,” he lamented. “We had only to stretch forth our hands and they were ours.” He blamed Meade's excessive caution. Although Meade had a fresh corps available for pursuit, his caution came from his own casualties as well as appreciation of local conditions. More than 3,155 bluecoats were dead, 14,529 wounded and 5,365 missing—a total of 23,049, about a quarter of Meade's force. More than 2,500 Rebels were dead, nearly 13,000 wounded and almost 5,500 missing—some 21,000, or nearly a third of Lee's army, along with 25,000 weapons. Lee's men reached Virginia on 13 July.

Lincoln's anguish was understandable. Vicksburg, the main Rebel bastion on the Mississippi, fell on 4 July, and had Meade destroyed Lee's army, the twin victories might have ended the war.

Gettysburg nonetheless stands as America's greatest battle; it stopped further Confederate invasions, and the South could never make up the losses in men and equipment. The tide of the war had changed.
[See also Civil War: Military and Diplomatic Course; Gettysburg National Military Park.]

Bibliography

George R. Stewart , Pickett's Charge: A Microhistory of the Final Attack at Gettysburg, July 3, 1863, 1959.
Edwin B. Coddington , The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command, 1968.
Michael Shaara , The Killer Angels: A Novel, 1974.
Harry W. Pfanz , Gettysburg: The Second Day, 1987.
Alice Rains Trulock , In the Hands of Providence: Joshua L. Chamberlain and the American Civil War, 1992.
Harry W. Pfanz , Gettysburg: Culp's Hill and Cemetery Hill, 1993.
Richard Rollins, ed., Picketts Charge: Eyewitness Accounts, 1994.
Carol Reardon , Pickett's Charge in History and Memory, 1997.
Gabor S. Boritt, ed., The Gettysburg Nobody Knows, 1997.

Frank E. Vandiver