On the afternoon of July 3, 1863, roughly twelve thousand Confederate soldiers stepped out of the tree line at Seminary Ridge and began walking toward a low stone wall three-quarters of a mile away. They advanced in parade formation, rifles shouldered, battle flags catching the Pennsylvania wind. The men who survived would spend the rest of their lives trying to explain what they saw. The man whose name history attached to the catastrophe, the man for whom the charge was named, was nowhere near the front of it.
George Edward Pickett, Major General commanding a division of Virginia infantry, was positioned so far behind the advancing line that some of his own officers could not locate him when the assault collapsed. While his men were dying by the hundreds, he was standing behind the Codori Farm, watching through field glasses, and writing a dispatch. Pickett had graduated last in his class at West Point in 1846, behind classmates including George McClellan. He was charming, vain, and possessed of a certainty about himself that had no particular basis in evidence.
His hair was oiled and curled in ringlets that fell to his shoulders, and he cultivated this look with the attention other officers gave to their maps. He had fought bravely in Mexico and served on the frontier. By the summer of 1863 he was thirty-eight, newly engaged to LaSalle Corbell, a woman nearly eighteen years his junior. He had not yet seen serious action as a divisional commander.
His division had spent much of the preceding months guarding supply lines in southern Virginia and arrived at Gettysburg on July 2 without participating in the first two days of fighting. His men were fresh, making his division the most intact and rested on the field. Robert E. Lee saw this.
On the morning of July 3, Lee conceived an assault on the Union center along Cemetery Ridge, believing the federal line had been weakened by the previous day’s fighting. James Longstreet argued the position was impregnable. Lee overruled him. Pickett’s division would form the right prong of the assault, with divisions under James Johnston Pettigrew and Isaac Trimble advancing on the left.
Together they would move in a line roughly a mile wide and converge on a small copse of trees at the Union center. Longstreet’s opposition shaped his conduct throughout the day. When Pickett asked him directly, “General, shall I advance? ” Longstreet turned away and bowed his head.
He said nothing. He gave a gesture that might have been a nod, or might have been grief. Pickett, interpreting this as best he could, went back to his division and ordered them forward. The Confederate artillery preparation began at one in the afternoon.
More than 150 guns opened simultaneously, producing a sound that men in Harrisburg, thirty miles away, reported hearing. The barrage lasted nearly two hours and accomplished far less than the Confederate gunners believed. The Union artillery largely survived, and the federal infantry behind the stone wall largely survived. What the barrage did achieve was burning through an enormous quantity of ammunition at exactly the moment when a supporting barrage would be needed to cover the infantry advance.
By the time the men stepped off, the Confederate guns were nearly silent. Pickett’s division advanced in two lines. The first consisted of Kemper’s Brigade on the right and Garnett’s Brigade on the left. The second line was Armistead’s Brigade following roughly two hundred yards behind.
All three brigadier generals led from the front. James Kemper rode ahead of his men. Richard Garnett, who had been publicly accused of cowardice by Stonewall Jackson the previous year, rode into the assault on horseback despite being physically unable to walk. Lewis Armistead advanced with his hat on the tip of his sword so his men could find him in the smoke.
All three were hit. Kemper was seriously wounded. Garnett was killed, his body never recovered. Armistead made it over the wall and died inside the Union lines.
Where was Pickett? Accounts vary, and the variance itself is revealing. He was positioned behind the Codori Farm, roughly a third of the way across the field. Some accounts place him further back at the Spangler Farm.
He was not at the wall. He was not with his brigades. He was, by his own admission in the dispatch he wrote during the assault, watching the attack unfold and reporting its progress to Longstreet. Pickett’s defenders argue this was standard practice for a divisional commander, whose role was coordination and communication rather than leading from the front.
The argument has some merit. But it collapses under scrutiny. First, Pickett had no reserves to direct. All three of his brigades were committed to the assault.
Second, the other divisional commanders in the assault, Pettigrew and Trimble, were both forward with their troops. Both were wounded. Third, when the assault collapsed and the survivors streamed back across the field, Pickett’s own officers could not find him. He was not there to rally them.
He was not there to cover the retreat. There is a dispatch that Pickett wrote to Longstreet during the assault, requesting to know where he should go. He was asking his corps commander where he should personally position himself during an assault that was already in progress. The answer, if it came back at all, made no difference to the thousands of men dying between the two ridges.
The assault failed. It failed at the stone wall, which the Confederates briefly crossed before being driven back. It failed in the open field, where Union artillery firing canister and rifle volleys turned the advance into chaos. It failed because the flanks collapsed first, exposing Pickett’s men to enfilading fire.
It failed because the supporting brigades either moved too late or not at all. It failed because 157 Confederate guns had spent two hours failing to suppress the federal batteries that would now destroy the attack. But it also failed because at the moment when a commander’s presence might have made a difference, there was no one there who had that authority. Armistead was dying inside the Union lines.
Garnett was already dead. Kemper was wounded. And Pickett was at the Codori Farm. When it was over, Lee rode out to meet the survivors.
He told them it had been his fault. He said it more than once. He did not relieve Pickett. He received Pickett’s after-action report and, reportedly, told him to burn it.
The report no longer exists. Pickett’s critics argue it must have contained something sufficiently damaging. Pickett’s defenders argue it was destroyed to protect the army’s morale. Either way, the suppression of the document tells you something about what it would have shown.
After Gettysburg, Pickett was never the same officer. His division was rebuilt, but his relationship to command had fundamentally changed. At New Bern in February 1864, he ordered the execution of Union soldiers he claimed were deserters from Confederate service. At Five Forks in April 1865, just days before Appomattox, Pickett was absent from the battle that destroyed his command.
He was attending a shad bake, a fish dinner with fellow officers behind the lines, while his men were overrun. When Lee discovered what had happened, he was seen watching the broken remnants of Pickett’s command retreating through the trees. He reportedly turned to an aide and said, “That man. ” Pickett was subsequently relieved of command, one of only a handful of officers Lee ever removed.
The relief came three days before Appomattox. After the war, Pickett returned to Virginia and took up the insurance business. He also took up the grievance business, holding Lee personally responsible for Gettysburg until Lee died in 1870. He spent the remaining years of his life constructing a narrative in which he was the loyal general whose men were expended by a commander who did not value them, and in which his own distance from the assault was either irrelevant or tactically sound.
Sally Pickett, his young widow after his death in 1875, became the most aggressive manager of his legacy. She wrote a memoir and multiple accounts of Gettysburg in which she placed her husband at the very front of the assault. She invented dialogue and scenes that no historical evidence supports. She fabricated a meeting between Pickett and Lincoln that never occurred.
The men who actually survived the charge knew something different. William Fry, who served under Garnett, wrote years later that he never saw Pickett during the assault. James Crocker, a regimental officer in Garnett’s brigade, stated in private correspondence that he had searched for his division commander in the aftermath and had been told by aides that Pickett had remained at the farm. These accounts circulated among veterans in private for decades before finding their way into formal historical writing.
The deeper question is not whether Pickett was a coward in the conventional sense. What he appears to have displayed is something more subtle: a fundamental confusion about what command requires. The most effective commanders in the Civil War were effective partly because their men knew they were present. Not necessarily at the front, but close enough to see what their soldiers were seeing, close enough to adapt to the chaos of battle.
Pickett watched from afar. When his shattered brigades came back across the field, he wept. When Lee told him to rally his division, he said, “General Lee, I have no division. ” The men who heard this treated it as a statement of grief.
It is also a statement of absence. He had no division because he had sent it forward without going with it. His men are buried in a long line at Gettysburg, on the Union side of the wall, because Confederate soldiers who died in Pennsylvania were initially buried where they dropped. Richard Garnett’s body was never found.
Lewis Armistead died inside the Union lines within yards of his oldest friend, Winfield Scott Hancock, who commanded the Union forces defending exactly that section of Cemetery Ridge. At the moment Armistead fell, Hancock was wounded fifty yards away. Neither man knew how close they were. The field at Gettysburg today is wide and green and crossed by roads and monuments.
The Virginia Memorial stands at the point where Pickett’s men stepped off, with a bronze statue of Lee on Traveler gazing east toward Cemetery Ridge. Near the angle in the Union wall, there is a marker indicating the high water mark of the Confederacy. If you stand at the wall and look back toward Seminary Ridge, you can trace roughly where Pickett was standing. He could see the wall, or at least the smoke above it, and his men dying in the space between.
He watched all of this and wrote a dispatch asking where he should go. The answer to that question was already in front of him. It had been there since the moment the first of his men stepped into the open. The answer was the wall.
The answer was forward. The answer was with his men. He was somewhere else.