Gettysburg

Fought from July 1 through July 3, 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg pitted Union forces against Confederate troops in and around the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, during the Civil War. Victory went to the Union side, and many historians regard this clash as the war's decisive turning point, one that paved the way for the eventual Union triumph and kept the nation intact. No engagement in the Civil War, nor any prior battle fought on American soil, produced more bloodshed than this one, with combined losses exceeding 50,000 men. Major General George Meade, commanding the Army of the Potomac for the Union, turned back repeated assaults from General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, stopping Lee's push northward and compelling him to withdraw.

Fresh off his triumph at Chancellorsville in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, during May of 1863, Lee marched his troops northward through the Shenandoah Valley, launching what would become his second attempt at invading Union territory. Morale ran high among his men, and Lee hoped to move the war's momentum away from a Northern Virginia devastated by fighting, aiming to push as far as Harrisburg or even Philadelphia in hopes that such gains might pressure northern leaders into ending hostilities. Lincoln, meanwhile, first urged Major General Joseph Hooker to chase down Lee's army, but then removed him from command just three days before fighting broke out at G

Background

After crushing the Army of the Potomac at Chancellorsville between April 30 and May 6, 1863, General Robert E. Lee set his sights on a second push into Northern territory, having already attempted one such campaign in Maryland back in September 1862, an effort that collapsed amid the carnage of Antietam. This new offensive promised several advantages: it would disrupt Union strategy for the coming months, potentially ease the strain on the trapped Confederate defenders at Vicksburg, and allow Lee's soldiers to feed themselves from the plentiful farmland up north rather than further exhausting Virginia's already depleted resources. With roughly 72,000 men under his command, Lee also saw an opportunity to menace Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, perhaps bolstering those in the North who favored ending the war through negotiation.

The march north commenced on June 3 as Lee's forces departed Fredericksburg, Virginia. The recent death of Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson had prompted a restructuring of the army from two corps into three, placing Lieutenant General James Longstreet at the head of the First Corps, Lieutenant General Richard S. Ewell over the Second, and Lieutenant General A.P. Hill commanding the Third. Both Ewell and Hill stepped into unfamiliar territory here, having previously served under Jackson only as division commanders. Major General J.E.B. Stuart continued to lead the cavalry division as before.

Opposing them stood the Army of the Potomac under Major General Joseph Hooker, a force exceeding 100,000 men divided among seven infantry corps, a corps of cavalry, and reserve artillery.

Cavalry clashed first on June 9 near Culpeper, Virginia, at Brandy Station. Stuart's 9,500 horsemen found themselves caught off guard by Major General Alfred Pleasonton, who brought two cavalry divisions totaling 8,000 troopers along with 3,000 foot soldiers into the fight. Though Stuart ultimately drove back the Union assault, the battle itself settled nothing definitively. It stands as the war's largest engagement dominated by cavalry, and it demonstrated for the first time that Northern horsemen could match their Southern rivals in skill and effectiveness.

Having overcome Union garrisons stationed at Winchester and Martinsburg, Ewell's Second Corps began fording the Potomac on June 15, positioning Lee's army to press into Maryland. The corps commanded by Hill and Longstreet followed suit on June 24 and 25 respectively. Hooker's forces trailed behind, careful to maintain a position shielding the capital from Lee's advance, and completed their own crossing of the Potomac between June 25 and 27.

Lee issued firm directives aimed at limiting harm to civilians encountered along the way. His quartermasters generally avoided outright confiscation of food, horses, and supplies unless residents attempted to hide such property, though the practice of paying Northern farmers and merchants with nearly worthless Confederate currency or equally dubious promissory notes bred considerable resentment. Certain towns, York, Pennsylvania chief among them, found themselves forced to hand over payments in place of goods, facing destruction if they refused. During this incursion, Confederate soldiers rounded up somewhere between 40 and nearly 60 African Americans living in the North. Though a handful were runaway slaves, most had been born free, yet Confederate guards marched every one of them south into bondage regardless.

On June 26, troops from Major General Jubal Early's division, part of Ewell's corps, drove off the newly formed 26th Regiment Pennsylvania Emergency Militia Infantry through a series of small skirmishes before taking control of Gettysburg itself. Early demanded tribute from the borough but came away with little in the way of actual supplies. His men set fire to a number of railroad cars along with a covered bridge, and they wrecked nearby rail lines and telegraph wires before moving on toward York County the next morning.

Around this same time, Lee made a decision that would later draw considerable criticism: granting Stuart permission to swing a portion of the cavalry around the Union army's eastern flank. The orders Lee gave were vague enough that responsibility for what followed falls on both men, whether for Stuart's extended absence or for neglecting to give the remaining cavalry a more useful role in supporting the main

Second day of battle

By the close of July 1 and into the following morning, the bulk of the infantry from both sides reached the field, among them the Union II, III, V, VI, and XII Corps. Longstreet still had two divisions on the march: Brigadier General George Pickett had set out on a 22-mile trek from Chambersburg, and Brigadier General Evander M. Law had left Guilford, covering 28 miles in eleven hours. Both filed in during the late morning.

The Union position stretched from Culp's Hill east of town, curving northwest to Cemetery Hill just below the town itself, then continuing south almost two miles along Cemetery Ridge until it stopped short of Little Round Top. The XII Corps held most of Culp's Hill, survivors of the I and XI Corps guarded Cemetery Hill, the II Corps occupied the bulk of the northern stretch of Cemetery Ridge, and the III Corps was assigned ground beside them. This layout is often called a "fishhook" shape.

Facing it, the Confederate line sat roughly a mile west on Seminary Ridge, cut through the town, and bent southeast until it faced Culp's Hill. This gave Meade's army the advantage of shorter interior lines, while Lee's stretched nearly five miles.

Lee intended a broad assault on July 2. Longstreet's First Corps was to swing around the Union left, aligning itself near the Emmitsburg Road facing northeast, then fold up the Federal line starting with divisions under John Bell Hood and Lafayette McLaws, followed by Richard H. Anderson's division from Hill's corps. On the opposite end, Ewell's Second Corps was to strike Culp's Hill and Cemetery Hill once Longstreet's guns were heard, tying down Meade's reserves so they could not reinforce his left. Ewell later insisted, though the claim appears in no official account by him or Lee, that his orders had been altered to call merely for a diversion, one that could grow into a full attack if circumstances allowed.

The plan rested on poor information, worsened by Stuart's continued absence. Lee scouted his own left that morning but never inspected Longstreet's sector, and he dismissed proposals to send Longstreet around Meade's flank to threaten the Union supply line and cut off retreat.

Orders for the attack were not issued until eleven that morning. Around noon, Sickles's pickets spotted Anderson's men advancing, and the Third Corps, on whom Longstreet's line depended, did not settle into place until one o'clock. Hood and McLaws, worn from their marches, were similarly late, not opening their assaults until after four and five o'clock respectively.

When McLaws's division pushed forward on Longstreet's left, it ran headlong into Sickles's III Corps, which had no business being there. Sickles, unhappy with his assigned ground on southern Cemetery Ridge, had spotted better artillery terrain half a mile west, centered on the Peach Orchard at the Sherfy farm, and moved his corps forward without authorization to occupy the slightly elevated ground along the Emmitsburg Road. His new line ran from Devil's Den up to the Peach Orchard, then northeast along the road to a point south of the Codori farm. This left an exposed salient at the orchard, and the divisions of Andrew A. Humphreys along the road and David B. Birney to the south found themselves struck from two directions while trying to cover far more ground than their corps could hold. Confederate cannon opened up at three o'clock. When Sickles skipped a scheduled meeting of Meade's corps commanders, Meade rode out to confront him, and upon realizing how exposed his line was and how dangerous a pullback would be, refused Sickles's offer to withdraw.

Meade ended up funneling in 20,000 men to shore up the position: the full V Corps, John C. Caldwell's division from the II Corps, most of the XII Corps, and elements of the freshly arrived VI Corps. Hood's division drifted farther east than planned, losing contact with the Emmitsburg Road, and struck instead at Devil's Den and Little Round Top. McLaws, advancing on Hood

Third day of battle

Friday, July 3, found Lee intent on repeating his prior strategy: Longstreet striking the Union left while Ewell pressed Culp's Hill. That plan unraveled when, before Longstreet could act, Union XII Corps soldiers opened a dawn bombardment aimed at reclaiming ground on Culp's Hill that had been lost. A Confederate assault followed, and by roughly 11 a.m. this second struggle for the hill had ended. Historian Harry Pfanz concluded that after nearly seven hours of savage fighting, the Union line remained unbroken and stood firmer than it had before.

Forced to abandon his original intentions, Lee instead directed Longstreet to lead Pickett's Virginia division, drawn from his own First Corps, together with six brigades borrowed from Hill's Corps, against the Union II Corps positioned near the center right of the line atop Cemetery Ridge. Before the infantry moved forward, every cannon the Confederates could muster would pound the Union defenses to weaken them.

Longstreet later recalled warning Lee that the combined divisions of McLaws and Hood, even reinforced by Pickett's men, lacked the numbers to breach such a formidable position. He feared the assault would fail and that a Union counterstroke would then trap Confederate forces against the Potomac. According to his account, he insisted that success would require at least thirty thousand soldiers acting in close coordination with other units, yet only about thirteen thousand remained in the chosen divisions after two days of heavy fighting. Those men would need to cross a mile of open ground under artillery and musket fire. Longstreet also remembered pressing Lee about how large a force he intended to use. Lee answered, "fifteen thousand." Longstreet responded that no army of fifteen thousand men had ever been assembled that could take that field successfully, but Lee, weary of debate, refused to reconsider, leaving no choice but to press forward.

Around one o'clock, somewhere between 150 and 170 Confederate guns unleashed what was likely the heaviest artillery barrage of the entire war. Hoping to conserve shells for the infantry assault they anticipated, Union gunners under Brigadier General Henry Jackson Hunt initially withheld their fire. After roughly a quarter hour, about eighty Federal cannons finally answered. Confederate ammunition supplies were dangerously thin, and the bombardment ultimately failed to shake the Union defenses in any meaningful way.

By about three o'clock the guns fell silent, and somewhere between 10,500 and 12,500 Confederate troops emerged from the ridge to cross three-quarters of a mile toward Cemetery Ridge. Because Pickett's division played such a prominent role in spearheading the advance, history remembers this assault as Pickett's Charge.

As the attackers moved forward, they came under brutal flanking fire from Union artillery posted on Cemetery Hill and near Little Round Top, along with musket and canister volleys from Hancock's II Corps. Union gunners at the center, having deliberately held their fire during the earlier bombardment as Meade had anticipated, convinced Confederate leaders their batteries had been silenced. Instead, those guns erupted against the advancing infantry with brutal effect.

The Union line briefly buckled and split near a bend in a low stone wall known as the Angle, close to a cluster of trees called the Copse of Trees, but fresh troops plugged the gap and drove the attackers back. The de

Aftermath

On July 4's rainy morning, with Lee's forces still positioned nearby, Meade dispatched his cavalry to strike behind Lee's lines. Soaked by heavy rain, the two armies faced each other across fields already soaked in blood, and that same day, roughly 920 miles (1,480 km) to the west, Grant accepted the surrender of the Vicksburg garrison. The night before, Lee had pulled his troops back into defensive positions along Seminary Ridge, abandoning the town itself. His men held their ground on the western side of the field, waiting for Meade to launch an assault, but the Union commander chose not to gamble, a choice that drew later criticism. Both sides turned to gathering their wounded and burying some of their dead. When Lee proposed exchanging prisoners, Meade turned him down.

As the rainy afternoon wore on, Lee began sending the noncombat elements of his army toward Virginia. Brigadier General John D. Imboden's cavalry took charge of guarding a seventeen-mile wagon train loaded with supplies and injured soldiers, guiding it along a roundabout path through Cashtown and Greencastle toward Williamsport, Maryland. Once darkness fell, the combat units of Lee's army set out on their own withdrawal, taking a shorter but rougher road that started toward Fairfield. Lee's path forward was clear, but Meade faced a trickier calculation. He had to stay put at Gettysburg until certain his opponent had truly departed, since pulling out too soon risked opening a route for Lee toward Washington or Baltimore. There was also the matter of perception: whichever army left the field first tended to be viewed as the loser.

Pursuing Union cavalry managed a few modest victories. The first significant clash came on July 4 in the mountains near Monterey Pass, where Kilpatrick's division seized between 150 and 300 wagons and captured somewhere between 1,300 and 1,500 prisoners. Starting July 6, more cavalry skirmishes broke out nearer the Potomac, around Williamsport and Hagerstown, Maryland. Swollen by rain and cut off by the destruction of the pontoon bridge at Falling Waters, the river blocked Lee's crossing and forced a delay. Meanwhile Meade's infantry did not begin a full pursuit until July 7, and despite urgent prodding from both Lincoln and Halleck, it never moved aggressively enough to finish off Lee's force. Once a new pontoon bridge went up at Falling Waters and the water level dropped, the Confederates started crossing after nightfall on July 13. Meade's infantry had arrived in the area by July 12, yet it was his cavalry that struck the Confederate rear guard the following morning, July 14. That clash netted 500 Union-captured prisoners and left Confederate Brigadier General Pettigrew mortally wounded, though Lee still managed to get his army across the Potomac. Fighting connected to the campaign persisted south of the river until the Battle of Manassas Gap on July 23, at which point Lee slipped away and Meade called off the chase.

Word of the Union triumph set the North ablaze with excitement. The Philadelphia Inquirer ran the headline "Victory! Waterloo Eclipsed!" George Templeton Strong, keeping his diary in New York, wrote of the victory's priceless results, declaring that Lee's aura of invincibility had shattered, that the Army of the Potomac had finally discovered a commander capable of leading it after a long string of demoralizing defeats, that Copperheads had been struck silent for the moment, and that the government had been strengthened many times over both at home and abroad.

That excitement faded quickly once it became clear Lee's army had slipped away intact and the fighting would continue. Lincoln vented to his Navy Secretary, Gideon Welles, lamenting that the army had held victory within its grasp yet failed to seize it. Writing to his father on July 17, Brigadier General Alexander S. Webb noted that Washington figures like Chase and Seward, unhappy with Meade, had told him they believed Lee had actually won the battle.

Yet the Confederacy had suffered both a military and a political defeat. As the battle's final hours unfolded, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens was making