This is the fifth in a five-part series about the Battle of Gettysburg, fought from July 1–3, 1863. Gettysburg was a—arguably, the—pivotal battle in the American Civil War. In reading this series, bear in mind what should always be remembered when reading history: people taking part in these events didn’t know how they would turn out. The choices that they made, the decisions that they took—in the face of what they knew, what they thought they knew but was not true, and what they didn’t know—shaped the outcome.   

Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had suffered horribly in the first two days of fighting at Gettysburg—as had George Gordon Meade’s Army of the Potomac. But Lee was convinced that he had only to deliver one more powerful blow against the Union army to smash it away. He had gone north, one of his generals later said, determined to “create a panic and virtually destroy the army.” Two days of fighting, however costly, had not changed his mind. 

On July 2, Lee had tried to attack the Union left and right. That night, he planned to aim his next blow at the center. Lee reasoned that Meade had been forced to weaken that section of the line in order to reinforce the left in the second day’s desperate fighting. All he had to do, he thought, was smash into that weakened center on Cemetery Ridge. And he had just the weapon for the task. General George E. Pickett had arrived on the field too late that afternoon to join the fight. Now his 4,600  fresh Virginia troops were ready to enter the fray.  

To complement Pickett’s attack, Lee once again wanted Dick Ewell to lead his men from their narrow hold on Culp’s Hill against the Union right. When Pickett and Ewell both broke through, Lee believed, they could join forces and effectively surround a significant chunk of Meade’s army, causing disaster for the Union. Lee planned then to send General J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry into the Union rear (Stuart had finally arrived on the field after being absent from Lee’s army for more than a week). The resulting chaos would ensure a Confederate victory. 

On the night of July 2, Meade, meanwhile, held a council of his top commanders. They agreed to stay their ground and wait to see what Lee had in mind. After the meeting broke up, Meade sought out General John Gibbon, who commanded the division under Winfield Scott Hancock that was at the very center of the Union line on Cemetery Ridge. “If Lee attacks tomorrow, it will be in your front,” Though inexperienced in command, Meade clearly knew his enemy. He explained to Gibbon that since Lee had attacked the left and right that day, he would test the center next. Gibbon expressed his readiness to handle whatever Lee threw at him. 

The next morning, Lee rode to see General James Longstreet—under whom Pickett served. “Old Pete,” as Longstreet was called, suggested that he use Pickett to attack the Union left once again. He thought Pickett could move behind the southern end of the Union fishhook-shaped line and overrun the Union troops. Lee counterd with his own plan to throw Pickett and nearly 10,000 other men at the Union center instead.

Lee said it with such determination that Longstreet knew his mind was made up. Nevertheless, he smelled disaster, and he had to try one last time. “General,” he said to Lee, “I have been a soldier all my life. I have been with soldiers engaged in fights by couples, by squads, companies, regiments, divisions, and armies, and show know as well as anyone what soldiers can do.  It is my opinion that no 15,000 men ever arrayed for battle can take that position.”  

Lee was unmoved. A direct assault on the Union line had won the Battle of Gaines Mill the year before. Lee was convinced it would work again. He ordered that preparations begin for the attack. 

While Lee and Longstreet conferred, firing began on the Union right. Meade had decided to dislodge the Confederates under Ewell who had taken part of Culp’s Hill late on the second day. The fighting lasted several hours, but by late morning Union artillery had made the difference. The Confederates were driven off, and Union forces regained the hill. Already, Lee’s plan was unraveling. 

Quiet fell over the field, an eerie calmness before what would be a most terrible storm.  

During this lull, Gibbon’s staff had found an old rooster and cooked it. Gibbon rode to Meade’s headquarters, near his position, and offered the commanding general a share of the lunch. Meade declined, stating the need to get through some paperwork, but Gibbon convinced him to take a break. Hancock joined them as well. After eating hastily, the preoccupied Meade returned to his work. 

Meanwhile, Pickett was getting his men and the others ready for their epic charge. Longstreet was making preparations, too. He amassed nearly 150 Confederate cannon on Seminary Ridge, almost all of them aimed at the Union center. Before letting Pickett go, he wanted to do everything he could to soften the Union line. 

At 1:07 (a Gettysburg resident carefully noted), those guns began to spew smoke, fire, and ball. Volley after volley smashed into the Union army. Gibbon called the scene “the most infernal pandemonium it has ever been my fortune to look upon.” One Union soldier, looking back years later, said simply that “the air was all murderous iron.” Another observed, “It seemed that nothing four feet from the ground could live.” 

Union artillery batteries were being pummeled by the fire—which was a problem. The Confederates were hitting the crest of the ridge, but the Union infantry was positioned slightly downhill. The scores of shells that the cannon delivered were falling behind the infantry, doing little to soften the Union defenses. And the Confederate gunners could do nothing to correct their aim. The constant firing left them enveloped in smoke. They could not really see what they were firing at. Men behind the lines, meanwhile, clambered for cover, but little could be found. Noncombatants fled to the rear. 

Meade’s headquarters was clearly in the range of some of the Confederate cannons. A newspaperman estimated that two to six cannonballs exploded around the house taken as headquarters each second. Meade was nearly hit by one ball that slammed into a door jamb. After a while, he decided to move his headquarters out of range. 

Hancock was bolder. As if to prove why he was nicknamed “The Superb,” he mounted his horse and rode behind the lines of his corps (three divisions of men), much to the chagrin of his aides, forced to accompany him. As the cannonballs whistled around them, Hancock calmly rode on. One aide protested: “General, the corps commander ought not to risk his life that way.” Hancock dismissed the objection: “There are times when a corps commander’s life does not count.” 

Adding to the smoke and the noise was the roar from Union guns, which hoped to quiet the Confederate artillery. The sound grew so loud that some reports claim it was heard in faraway Pittsburgh. The Union shells also overshot their mark, landing behind the Confederate guns—where the infantry waited patiently in the heat and smoke and noise to begin their advance. “Such a tornado of projectiles it has seldom been the fortune or misfortune of anyone to see,” one recalled. Another, spying a creature running to find shelter, called out “Run, old hare. If I was a old hare, I’d run too.” But he did not run. None of them ran. 

The artillery duel continued for more than an hour and a half. Around 2:30, General Henry Hunt, Meade’s artillery commander, decided to quiet his guns. He wanted them to save their ammunition for the attack that was likely to follow the Rebel bombardment. About a half an hour later, the Confederate guns also silenced.  

Once again stillness fell on the field. 

At 3:00, Longstreet reluctantly gave the order for Picket to advance. Pickett roused his troops: “Up, men, and to your posts! Don’t forget today that you are from old Virginia!” 

Pickett, hoping finally for a chance for glory, was optimistic. Longstreet was not. Years later, he described his sense of foreboding: “My heart was heavy. I could see the desperate and hopeless nature of the charge and the hopeless slaughter it would cause. . . .  That day at Gettysburg was one of the saddest of my life.” 

Thus began Pickett’s Charge, though that name is something of a misnomer. For one thing, Pickett’s Virginians made up only about a third of the attackers. Also, the advance was not the kind of furious dash that the word charge suggests. The beginning was more of a full-dress field exercise, as Confederates emerged from under the trees on Seminary Ridge, in a line several deep and a mile wide, and began to stride forward in a steady, determined, dignified pace, battle flags and regimental colors rising above them and snapping crisply in the breeze. A Union soldier later described the scene: “Beautiful, gloriously beautiful, did that vast array appear in the lovely little valley.” 

That little valley was a nearly three-quarter-of-a-mile wide expanse of open land. The proud, measured marchers were dreadfully exposed. Within minutes, whatever beauty the sight of Pickett’s men offered was lost, as the Union cannon opened fire again. 

Shells exploded above the advancing soldiers’ heads. Others tore into the ranks. But the Confederates kept coming. As regimental flags were shot down, a new man seized the banner. As holes were blown into the line, the remaining soldiers reformed. When they reached a little dip in the land, the Confederates paused to reestablish their lines. Then they resumed the advance. 

At 200 yards, Union infantry opened fire. Confederates across the line crumpled, but the rest pressed on. Union regiments on the northern and southern ends of their line moved forward and turned, the first group facing south, the second facing north, to rake the edges of the advancing Confederates. Meanwhile, Union cannon fire kept blasting holes into the attackers. On Pickett’s left, the men of J. Johnston Pettigrew’s division staggered under the withering flanking fire. On the southern end of the line, which Pickett held, the advance began to shift slightly to its left, in the natural desire to get out of the way of the flanking fire devastating it.  

On they came. As Pickett’s Virginians neared the center of the Union line—Gibbon’s position—they surged forward. General Lewis Armistead led the way, a black hat held aloft on the point of his sword as he urged his men forward. 

But they were far too few. The mass of the Confederate advance had been broken, and only a few hundred men could reach the walls behind which the Union infantry fought. Hancock, wounded in the thigh by a Confederate artillery shell, coolly moved two regiments forward to stop the Confederates.

The fighting became a mad tussle between two battered heavyweights, neither willing to concede. The voices of soldiers fighting, and the terrible moans of the wounded, converged. The result, one observer recalled, was “strange and terrible, a sound that came from thousands of human throats, yet was not a commingling of shouts and yells but rather like a vast mournful roar.” Armistead fell, dead.* Gibbon was already down, wounded.   

And then, slowly, and at different times in different areas of the field, the fighting faded. Some of the Confederates began to stream back toward their starting place. At the Confederate left, an aide to one of Pettigrew’s brigadiers asked his general if he should ride out to rally the men. “No,” the general replied. “The best thing the men can do is get out of this. Let them go.”  

All across the Confederate front, soldiers reached the same conclusion. Some of those nearest the Union lines threw down their weapons to surrender; others scrambled back to Seminary Ridge. The Union soldiers’ fire grew desultory and then gradually died out. 

Pickett’s Charge was over. Of the 14,000 or so men who had set out not long before, only about half returned. Lee, mounted on his horse to see the shattered remnants of his army, was shaken. “It’s all my fault,” he told his soldiers. “It is I who have lost this fight.”** 

Lee and Longstreet organized the Confederates remnants in case Meade chose to follow up with a crushing blow. But the attack would never come. Meade’s men had been exhausted by three days of intense fighting with heavy casualties in summer heat. He did not think it possible to ask them to do more. 

Once again quiet settled over the battlefield. Wounded soldiers crawled back to their lines to find field hospitals. Crews moved around recovering bodies and burying the dead. Others collected the weapons left behind. Weary soldiers repaired defenses. From time to time, some stopped to marvel at what had just happened. 

Lee held his positions on the morning of July 4, wondering if Meade would attack then. Meade declined the invitation. He feared that an attack of his own would meet the same result as Lee’s failed assault. “We have done well enough,” he told one officer.

A violent storm blew in about noon, adding drenching rain to all the other miseries on the field. In the afternoon, in the mdist of the rain, Lee’s army began its painful and doleful retreat.*** 

Lee had lost 25,000 or more men in the fighting. Not only were his bold plans for a successful invasion dashed; his army had been severely damaged. For the rest of the war, Lee would be on the defensive, trying to stave off disaster rather than moving toward a smashing victory. For the rest of the war, he would struggle with the difficult task of facing an increasingly stronger enemy with increasingly diminishing resources.  

Meade, too, had suffered heavy losses—about 23,000 men. (The nearly 50,000 or so combined casualties in those three days of fighting were more than four times the total number of casualties in the entire Revolutionary War.) But the Army of the Potomac had gained something, too. It had convincingly beaten the army that had defeated it time and time again. It had driven the vaunted Army of Northern Virginia off the field. From then on, the men of the Army of the Potomac knew they what they were capable of. 

Gettysburg did not end the Civil War. Nearly two more terrible years would follow, and tens of thousands more soldiers would suffer, as would their widows, fatherless children, and mourning parents.  

But it was the beginning of the end.  

* Armistead and Hancock had been close friends in the regular army before the war. Just before he died, near where Hancock was perched on a stretcher, Armistead gave a Union soldier his watch, his spurs, and some other mementos to give to the Union general as a reminder of that friendship.  

** Pickett no doubt agreed. When he returned to Seminary Ridge, Lee met him. The commanding general said, “General Pickett, place your division in the rear of this hell, and be ready to repel the advance of the enemy should they follow up their advantage.” “Sir,” Pickett responded tartly, “I have no division.” 

*** The same day that Lee began his retreat, another shoe dropped for the Confederacy. After weeks of siege, the starving Rebel army at Vicksburg, Mississippi, surrendered to General Ulysses Grant. The fall of Vicksburg gave the Union control of almost the entire Mississippi River and weakened the South further.

Words © 2009 AtHome Pilgrim

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