By the summer of 1863, the Civil War was going badly for President Abraham Lincoln and the North. The Union possessed more men, money, and supplies, yet it lost battle after battle, burdened by poor generalship. Lincoln’s frustration had grown so great that when Confederate forces captured a Union brigadier general along with fifty-eight horses, he reportedly regretted the loss of the horses more than the loss of the general. In May, Confederate General Robert E.
Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia won another stunning victory at Chancellorsville, a battle in which a Union force that outnumbered the South two to one still suffered twice the casualties. The victory came at terrible cost, however: Lee lost his most trusted lieutenant, Stonewall Jackson, to friendly fire. When Lincoln heard the news of the defeat, he was beyond consolation, weeping and crying out, “My God, my God, what will the country say? ” Those around him feared he might collapse entirely.
Lee now decided to carry the war into the North. He hoped a decisive victory on Union soil would break Northern morale, where there was growing sentiment to let the South go its own way and end the war. He also aimed to relieve pressure on Vicksburg, a vital Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi, and his army desperately needed supplies, especially shoes. For years, historians have debated whether the search for shoes actually drew the Confederates to Gettysburg.
Some claimed the shoe story was invented long after the war to explain why Lee’s army stumbled into battle there, since Gettysburg had no shoe factories and an earlier Confederate raid had come away empty-handed. Yet records show Confederates had seized supplies, including thousands of pairs of boots and shoes, from nearby towns in the days before the battle. Whatever the truth, the roads of the region converged on Gettysburg, and the two armies were marching toward the same ground. On the morning of July 1, Union cavalry under General John Buford arrived in Gettysburg.
Buford quickly recognized the strategic value of the high ground surrounding the town. He knew that if the Confederates seized those ridges, the Union army would be in grave danger. He made the bold decision to hold the ground and delay the Confederate advance until infantry reinforcements arrived. Just before dawn, the two armies collided outside the town.
Lee’s cavalry commander, Jeb Stuart, was off raiding in New Jersey and could not tell Lee that the Union army was close at hand. At first the Union forces, led by Buford and General John Reynolds, seemed to be winning. Then Confederate reinforcements under General Richard Ewell arrived, outflanked the Federals, and drove them through the streets of Gettysburg in fierce house-to-house fighting. Reynolds, one of the North’s best generals, was shot through the neck by a Confederate sharpshooter and died on the field.
The fighting was so intense that many staff officers had one, two, or even three horses shot out from under them. Eventually the Union forces retreated through town and occupied the high ground of Cemetery Ridge, forming a line shaped like a fishhook, running from Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Ridge on the north to the steep hills of Little Round Top and Big Round Top on the south. Weary Union soldiers spent the night among the tombstones of the cemetery, a grim resting place for many of them in the days to come. The first day was no minor skirmish.
More than fifty thousand troops were engaged, and roughly sixteen thousand soldiers became casualties. Standing alone, that day ranks among the twenty bloodiest days of the Civil War. Lee, pressing his advantage, sent Ewell a request to take the high ground, asking his subordinate to push the enemy if possible. Ewell, however, felt his men were too exhausted from the day’s fighting and declined to attack.
A more aggressive commander, the late Stonewall Jackson, would surely have understood the request as an order to strike. With Jackson alive, the Confederates might have seized Cemetery Ridge and perhaps won the battle and, conceivably, the war. As it was, Buford’s defensive stand had saved the Union position. July 2 brought a new Confederate assault.
General James Longstreet urged Lee not to attack the strong Union position, proposing instead to move around the Union flank and force the Federals to attack him on favorable ground. Lee refused. Confident after the first day’s success, he planned to strike both ends of the Union fishhook, with an attack on the right beginning in the morning while Ewell demonstrated against the left. Longstreet argued and delayed all morning, and Ewell, still cautious, waited to coordinate with Longstreet rather than pressing his own attack.
On the Union side, the key moment of the day fell to Colonel Joshua Chamberlain and his 20th Maine regiment, ordered to hold the far left flank of the Union line on Little Round Top. If the Confederates captured that small hill, they could roll up the entire Union line. Finally, around noon, Longstreet attacked. His men fought through a peach orchard, a wheat field, and a rocky, boulder-strewn hollow called the Devil’s Den before charging up Little Round Top.
Chamberlain’s regiment, made up partly of mutineers from Maine who had been assigned to him in disgrace, repelled wave after wave of Confederate attacks. Low on ammunition, Chamberlain ordered a desperate bayonet charge, and his men swept down the hill, even throwing rocks at the enemy. The attack worked. The Confederates, believing that Chamberlain would never have risked such a charge without massive reinforcements, retreated.
Little Round Top and the Union left flank were saved. Elsewhere on the field, General Daniel Sickles, who before the war had killed his wife’s lover and used the then-novel plea of insanity to escape punishment, disobeyed his orders and advanced his corps forward into the peach orchard, dangerously extending his line. His corps was overrun, and Sickles himself lost a leg, which he later donated to the Army Medical Museum in Washington. General William Barksdale and his Mississippians came close to breaking the Union center in an assault often overshadowed by the more famous charge of the next day, but Minnesota troops held the line.
More than half of Barksdale’s men were killed or wounded, and Barksdale himself was mortally hurt, saying he died fighting at his post. At the other end of the line, Ewell finally attacked in the late afternoon and was repulsed at Culp’s Hill after savage hand-to-hand fighting. One story holds that a Confederate soldier named Johnny Culp was killed in that assault just yards from his family’s farm, an irony that must have made the loss doubly heartbreaking for his kin. On July 3, Lee decided that since the flank attacks had failed, he would strike the center of the Union line.
Longstreet begged him to retreat and fight another day, warning that any attack would be uphill over open ground. Lee refused, saying the enemy was there and he would strike him. Longstreet, who had lost three children to fever months earlier and was carrying tremendous personal anguish, obeyed as a soldier. Some thirteen to seventeen thousand Confederates, many of them Virginians under General George Pickett, formed for the assault that became known as Pickett’s Charge.
Pickett, once commissioned as an officer by Abraham Lincoln before the war and still a friend of the president, led his men across a mile of open ground directly into the mouths of Union artillery and rifle fire. To soften the Union line, the Confederates unleashed a massive two-hour artillery bombardment, the largest concentrated artillery attack in history up to that time. The Union artillery answered in kind. The rebel infantry then advanced into a storm of solid shot that could cut a man in two, exploding shells that hurled deadly shrapnel, and canister rounds that turned the field into a giant shotgun blast.
Terrified men loaded cartridge after cartridge without firing, and after the battle, rifles were found packed with multiple unfired rounds, some with nearly two dozen. Pickett’s men came close to breaking through the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge, and General Lewis Armistead reached the Union line with his hat raised on his sword, the moment often called the high-water mark of the Confederacy. But Union reinforcements closed the breach, and the charge disintegrated. Thousands of Confederates lay dead or wounded, and the survivors fell back toward their own lines.
Lee rode out to meet the retreating men, taking full responsibility for the disaster and telling them, “It is all my fault. ” A wounded Union soldier who had taunted Lee as he rode past described how Lee stopped, dismounted, and came to him, grasping his hand and wishing him a speedy recovery. The soldier later said he could never forget the sorrow on Lee’s face. The battle cost more than fifty thousand casualties, making Gettysburg the largest battle ever fought in North America.
Lee’s battered army retreated into Virginia, and the South would never again threaten the North in such force. Combined with the Union capture of Vicksburg on the Fourth of July, the Confederacy was deeply weakened, and the North could finally celebrate independence day with genuine cause. Yet Lincoln mourned the Union army’s failure to pursue and destroy Lee’s retreating force, and days after the battle, draft riots erupted in New York City, requiring armed troops, including men fresh from Gettysburg, to quell. More than five hundred died in the violence.
Lincoln himself was convinced that the victory at Gettysburg came through prayer and divine intervention, telling the wounded, one-legged General Sickles that he had made a solemn vow to stand by God if God would stand by the Union soldiers at Gettysburg. In the midst of the carnage on the first day, twenty-year-old seamstress Jennie Wade fled with her family to her sister’s brick house in town, where her sister had just given birth. Jennie helped care for the new mother and aided Union soldiers by filling canteens and baking bread. On July 3, as Confederate sharpshooters fired into homes, Jennie returned to the kitchen to knead dough, believing the thick brick walls would protect her.
A stray bullet pierced two doors and struck her in the back, killing her instantly. She was the only civilian killed during the battle. Nine days later, her fiancé, Corporal Jack Skelly, was killed fighting in Virginia. On the afternoon of July 4, Jennie’s mother, ever practical, baked fifteen loaves of bread from the dough Jennie had been kneading when she died.
The South never rose again, but Jennie Wade’s bread rose anyway.