Gettysburg, Battle of

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GETTYSBURG, BATTLE OF

GETTYSBURG, BATTLE OF (1–3 July 1863), was the culmination of the Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania. The Confederate losses sustained at Gettysburg signified an end to the offensive capabilities of General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. The battle also forecast Southern defeat in the war, though it did not necessarily guarantee it.

Lee launched an invasion of Pennsylvania in the first week of June 1863. He hoped to relieve Virginia farmers of the burden of war and allow them to harvest crops for the Confederacy without interference. He also hoped to disrupt Union operations on the coasts of Virginia and North Carolina by forcing the Union to withdraw troops from those areas to protect Pennsylvania and the capital of Washington, D. C. Lee also hoped to encourage European intervention on the Confederacy's behalf while simultaneously encouraging the growing peace movement in the North. Lee's army was cut off from its Virginia supply base for the entire invasion but fared well, carrying all the ammunition it needed and living off the land of Pennsylvania. Major General Joseph Hooker, commanding the Army of the Potomac, slowly followed Lee into Pennsylvania but did not engage him in combat. On 28 June, President Abraham Lincoln replaced Hooker with Major General George G. Meade as commander of the Army of the Potomac. Meade's force numbered 85,000, while Lee commanded 65,000.

On the morning of 1 July, Major General Henry Heath's division from Lieutenant General A. P. Hill's Confederate corps descended upon Gettysburg looking for shoes. Gettysburg was a prosperous town serviced by twelve roads from every direction. There the Confederates encountered the Union cavalry division of Brigadier General John Buford. Armed with breech-loading carbines, Buford's division held off Hill's superior numbers until Major General John Reynolds's I Corps arrived to drive back the Confederate assault. Lieutenant General Richard Ewell's Confederate corps arrived to push Major General Oliver O. Howard's XI Corps back to a weakened position on Cemetery Hill. Lee advised Ewell to take the high ground of Cemetery Hill "if practicable." Ewell, new to corps command and unused to the discretionary orders given by Lee, felt the position too strong to attack. Union reinforcements quickly arrived to secure a formidable position upon the high ground for the Army of the Potomac.

Eastward and parallel to Cemetery Hill ran Cemetery Ridge, about 1,300 yards across the Emmitsburg Road. The ridge turned eastward at Cemetery Hill toward another summit, Culp's Hill. The Union laid out a defensive line around Culp's Hill and Cemetery Hill and extending two miles south along Cemetery Ridge to a point known as Little Round Top. The Union line was not complete by the evening of 1 July, and Lee wanted to attack it on the morning of 2 July. He assigned the assault to the corps of his senior commander, Lieutenant General James Longstreet. Longstreet believed the Union position was too formidable and argued that the Confederates should turn Meade's south flank and assume a defensive position. This would force Meade to attack the Army of Northern Virginia on ground of Confederate choosing. Lee insisted on attacking the Union left holding the southern end of Cemetery Ridge.

Longstreet did not get his troops into position until 4: 00 p. m. on the afternoon of 2 July, though Lee planned

the assault for the early morning. Longstreet had good reason for the delay. His men had marched all night to reach Gettysburg, then they were forced to take a roundabout way to their attack position because Lee's guide originally led them to a road within sight of a Union signal post on Little Round Top. Historians have also speculated that Lee chafed Longstreet by rejecting his flanking plan, and the corps commander did not approach the attack with the necessary enthusiasm. Whatever the real reason behind Longstreet's delay, the general became a postwar scapegoat for the Confederate failure at Gettysburg. Southerners accused Longstreet of disobeying the infallible Lee and thus losing not only the battle but also the entire war.

When Longstreet launched his attack on the afternoon of 2 July, he ran into the Union III Corps of Major General Daniel Sickles, who had moved his troops into an unauthorized salient position in a peach orchard. Some of the war's bloodiest fighting occurred in the peach orchard, in an adjoining wheat field to the east, and in a network of boulders known as Devil's Den. Longstreet knocked holes in Sickles's line, but Meade rushed reinforcements to plug the gaps. Big and Little Round Top were unoccupied at the opening of the assault and would have given Confederate artillery control of the battlefield, but Meade's chief engineer, Gouverneur K. Warren, rushed a brigade to secure this vital high ground. The

Twentieth Maine, led by Colonel Joshua L. Chamberlain, valiantly repulsed a Confederate assault despite being out of ammunition. This prevented Longstreet from turning the Army of the Potomac's left. Longstreet's only gain of the day was to drive Sickles back from his salient. On the Union right, Ewell captured Culp's Hill during a diversionary attack that turned into a full-blown assault. However, the Union line was too strong for him to go any farther.

Both sides suffered the heaviest losses of the battle on the second day. Despite this, Lee believed his assaults on both of Meade's flanks on 2 July had weakened his center, and Lee resolved that an attack on the Union center at Cemetery Ridge would break their line. Lee opened 3 July with a renewed attack by Ewell's corps on the Union right that was repulsed after hard fighting. Lee ordered Longstreet to attack the Union center with the divisions of George E. Pickett, James J. Pettigrew, and Isaac Trimble. Numbering 14,000 men, these divisions were to advance three-quarters of a mile across an open field and attack entrenched infantry supported by heavy artillery. To precede the charge, Longstreet ordered 150 pieces of artillery to bombard the Union lines for two hours, the largest Confederate artillery barrage of the war. However, the Confederate artillery was aimed too high and did little damage to the Union line.

With Pickett's men in the center, the three divisions at 3: 00 p. m. began the advance to Cemetery Ridge that became known as Pickett's Charge. The Union defenders, under Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, mercilessly poured rifle and artillery fire into the hapless Confederates, who were easily repulsed. Fewer than half of the 14,000 men who made the charge returned. Pickett's division suffered the most, losing two-thirds of its men, all three brigade commanders, and all thirteen colonels to either death or wounds. A small group of soldiers under Brigadier General Lewis Armistead managed to briefly penetrate the Union line before all were killed, wounded, or captured. Armistead himself fell mortally wounded, with his hat on his sword and his hand on a Union cannon in a moment glorified in the postwar years as "the high-water mark of the Confederacy." Lee withdrew from the Gettysburg area on 4 July. A combination of heavy losses, rainstorms, and uncertainty about Lee's strength prevented Meade from counterattacking.

Abraham Lincoln and the Union government hoped Meade would attack Lee and destroy the weakened Army of Northern Virginia before it escaped Pennsylvania. After much delay, Meade prepared an attack on 13 July, but overestimates of enemy strength and false intelligence reports convinced him to hold off. Lee successfully retreated back across the Potomac to Virginia on 14 July.

The losses at Gettysburg were the greatest of any battle in the Civil War. The Union lost 23,049 men, while the Confederacy lost 28,063. The Confederate population was unable to withstand such heavy casualties, and Lee's army was never able to launch another offensive invasion of Union territory. The defeat at Gettysburg, coupled with the surrender of Vicksburg on 4 July, ended Confederate hopes of European intervention in the war. The Union victory also slowed the growth of the Copperhead peace movement in the North.