Having failed on July 2 to turn either of Meade’s flanks (Culp’s Hill and the Round Tops), Lee decided on the 3rd to assault the Union center. James Longstreet, who would command the attack, wrote later that he told Lee: “General, 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 should know, as well as anyone, what soldiers can do. It is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position.” But Lee had made up his mind — and he had already issued the orders. Two divisions from A.P. Hill’s Third Corps and one — Pickett’s — from Longstreet’s First Corps were to make the advance. It’s known as Pickett’s Charge, but more correctly it is the Pickett-Pettigrew-Trimble Charge.
To prepare for the assault — to cripple the Union defenses — Lee order a massive artillery strike. The 163 Confederate cannons began firing at 1:07 PM. The Union artillery returned fire with nearly the same number. The Confederate aim was high and smoke curtained the targets. Little damage was done to the Union infantry. After a time, Union artillery commander Henry Hunt ordered his guns to cease firing — to save ammunition, cool the guns, and lure the rebels forward.
Forward they came, 14,000 men in a formation a mile wide, moving across open fields for three-quarters of a mile. The Union artillery opened on them with shot and shell and ultimately canister (shells filled with metal). At 200 yards, the Union infantry on the Confederate front opened fire, while other Union units moved out to attack both sides of the charge. Of the 14,000 in the advance, perhaps 200 breached the first Union line before being repulsed. Of the 14,000, half did not return.
Lee was defeated and withdrew from Gettysburg. While the war lasted 22 more months, the brief moment when the 200 reached the Union line was considered the high-water mark for the confederacy. Gettysburg totals: 25,000 Union casualties; 28,000 Confederate casualties.
Teary eyes, lump in the throat, B I G sigh…. It happens every time I even attempt to contemplate Gettysburg. 53,000 men dead in one fell swoop. All those souls leaving their bodies in mass bewilderment. It must have been chaos of the highest order… on Earth, as it is in Heaven.
Sad indeed, but there is the consolation of knowing that every one of them would be dead by now anyway.
NMK, the pragmatist.
It’s the all-at-once-ness of it that gets to me. I know that people are dying all the time, all over the world. But not usually that many in one place, and in so short a time. And the bewilderment… because you go into battle knowing you could die, might die, probably even will die, but still hoping, likely even praying, you won’t.
Death in battle is so sudden and violent. If there is anything even approaching a thread of awareness or consciousness after death, it must be a shock to depart that way. 53,000 at once overwhelms me. (In perspective, the World Trade Center deaths numbered about 3000, and look how we reacted as a nation.)
I have been to Gettysburg twice, and both times it was an extremely emotional experience for me. Ditto for the Vietnam Wall in D.C., where I stood and wept, even though I hadn’t known any of them personally.
It’s the spent lives and lost potential, combined with the grief of those left behind, that pains me so. What could they have accomplished, had they not been cut short at 18, 20, 22 years old? What art, poetry, literature, science, or feats of greatness and discovery did we sacrifice in the name of a “cause”? I understand the politics, but that knowledge doesn’t diminish the loss.
Think of all the surplus population we’d have now if all those young men had lived to procreate.
FYI less than 6,000 deaths total were reported at the time of the battle. Probably that many more died of wounds, etc., within a week. The term casualties referred to dead, wounded, missing and prisoners.
I recommend Drew Gilpin Faust’s award-winning This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, a historical account of the war’s massive death toll.
Oh, and I’m not disagreeing with the terrible tragedy of battle.