The Battle of Gettysburg occurred during Confederate General Robert E. Lee's second attempt to invade the North, known as the Gettysburg campaign. Following his success at the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863, Lee led his Army of Northern Virginia through the Shenandoah Valley with the intention of shifting the focus of the summer campaign away from war-ravaged Northern Virginia. Lee hoped to penetrate as far as Harrisburg or Philadelphia, believing that such an offensive operation would convince northern politicians to end the war.
The battle was fought in and around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, from July 1–3, 1863, between Union Major General George Meade's Army of the Potomac and Confederate General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. The Union forces defeated Confederate attacks during this three-day engagement, halting Lee's invasion of the North.
The Battle of Gettysburg is widely considered the turning point of the American Civil War, ultimately leading to Union victory and the preservation of the nation. It was the bloodiest battle of both the Civil War and any battle in American military history up to that time, claiming over 50,000 combined casualties. Lee's defeat forced his retreat from the North, ending his second invasion attempt and marking a crucial shift in the trajectory of the war.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) was the deadliest conflict in American history, killing an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians. The Confederate States of America, formed by eleven seceding Southern states, faced the Union in four years of warfare across 23 states and territories. Major engagements included First and Second Bull Run, Antietam (the bloodiest single day in American history, September 17, 1862), Chancellorsville, Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), Vicksburg (surrendered July 4, 1863), and Sherman's March through Georgia and the Carolinas (1864–1865). President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, transforming the war's stated purpose to include the abolition of slavery and enabling the enlistment of approximately 180,000 Black men in the United States Colored Troops. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. The war resolved the question of secession and ended American slavery, though Reconstruction would face sustained resistance in its attempt to secure civil rights for formerly enslaved people.
Over 50,000 combined casualties
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.