In the summer of 1863, the war that had torn the United States apart for two years reached a small crossroads town in southern Pennsylvania. The tiny community of Gettysburg had barely two thousand residents, but by the end of the first three days of July, its fields would be soaked in the blood of more than fifty thousand soldiers. The Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by General Robert E. Lee, had marched north to invade Union territory.
The Army of the Potomac had raced to stop him. Both armies converged on the same quiet valley, and neither side intended to turn back. Lee had chosen this gamble out of necessity. Two months earlier, at Chancellorsville in Virginia, he had won his most brilliant victory, crushing a Union force twice the size of his own.
But the cost had been staggering. His most trusted lieutenant, Stonewall Jackson, had been mortally wounded by friendly fire during the chaos of that battle. The South could not outproduce or outnumber the North. The Union had three times the population and ten times the industrial capacity.
Every month of war drained the Confederacy further while the North grew stronger. Lee knew the South could not win by defending its own soil. He had to strike north, win a decisive victory on Union ground, and break the will of the Northern public to continue the war. By the middle of June, seventy-one thousand Confederate soldiers had crossed the Potomac into Maryland and pushed deep into Pennsylvania.
They took food, horses, and supplies from the rich farmlands the war had not yet touched. But Lee was marching blind. His flamboyant cavalry commander, Jeb Stuart, had taken most of the cavalry on a raid around the Union army and vanished for days, leaving Lee with no idea where the enemy was or what he was planning. The Union army had problems of its own.
President Abraham Lincoln had lost confidence in the commander of the Army of the Potomac, Joseph Hooker, who had missed his chance to destroy Lee at Chancellorsville. On June 28, only three days before the great battle, Lincoln replaced him with Major General George Meade, a respected but cautious corps commander who suddenly found himself responsible for nearly a hundred thousand men. On June 30, a Confederate spy brought Lee astonishing news. The Union army was not where he had believed it was.
It was much closer, dangerously close. Lee ordered his scattered corps to concentrate at Gettysburg, a crossroads town where ten roads converged. He sent strict orders to his commanders: they were to identify the enemy force but not bring on a general engagement until the entire army had assembled. Events were about to slip beyond anyone’s control.
Early on the morning of July 1, Confederate infantry under Brigadier General Henry Heth moved toward Gettysburg looking for the enemy. Shortly after seven thirty, they spotted Union cavalry along Willoughby Run, a stream a few miles west of town. The federals were led by John Buford, a cavalry officer who understood exactly what was at stake. If the Confederates seized the high ground south of Gettysburg, the Union army would be ruined.
His 2,500 heavily outnumbered troopers dismounted and opened fire with their rapid-firing carbines. Buford knew his men could not hold forever. They only needed to hold long enough for the infantry to arrive. The Confederates advanced in waves, confident they were facing a green militia that would scatter at the first volleys.
Instead, they found seasoned troopers fighting from behind fences and hedgerows, giving ground slowly and making every yard cost blood. By mid-morning, Union infantry began streaming onto the field. Major General John Reynolds, commander of the Union First Corps, arrived around ten o’clock. He immediately recognized the tactical situation and began deploying his men when a Confederate sharpshooter’s bullet struck him behind the right ear.
He was dead before he hit the ground, the highest-ranking Union officer killed at Gettysburg. His famous Iron Brigade, men from Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan, fought on with fury after the loss of their commander, but Lee was massing his forces faster than the Union could react. By early afternoon, Confederate reinforcements arrived from the north and the west, pressing the federals from two sides. Union troops, vastly outnumbered, fell back through the streets of Gettysburg in growing chaos.
Women and children huddled in cellars as bullets shattered windows and shells tore through homes. In a single devastating afternoon, the Union army lost nearly nine thousand men, killed, wounded, or captured. But as the survivors fled south through town, salvation loomed before them. Before Gettysburg rose a large rocky hill topped by a cemetery.
Cemetery Hill. Union troops staggered up its slopes, exhausted and nearly out of ammunition, but now they held defensible high ground. As Confederate General Richard Ewell studied the position from the streets of Gettysburg, he saw Union artillery taking position and reinforcements arriving. His men were exhausted and scattered by the pursuit through town.
He made the decision to attack Cemetery Hill if practical, but he chose not to, and the moment passed. Lee was not finished. On the morning of July 2, he ordered an attack on both ends of the Union line. James Longstreet, his most experienced corps commander, argued that a frontal assault against such strong positions would be suicide and pressed for a flanking movement instead.
Lee was adamant. He pointed toward Cemetery Hill and declared that he would attack the enemy there. Longstreet’s assault finally began at four in the afternoon after a series of delays. Thirteen thousand men slammed into the Union left.
The fighting exploded across ground that would become legendary. The Wheatfield changed hands six times in two hours, its twenty acres thick with bodies. In the Peach Orchard, Union General Dan Sickles badly injured. But the assault had struck a protruding Union position that gave the rest of the army precious time to respond.
The crisis of the battle came at Little Round Top, a rocky, wooded hill at the extreme left of the Union line. When the Union chief engineer discovered it was completely undefended, he knew that if the Confederates seized it, they could bring artillery to bear on the entire Union position. The battle would be lost. A messenger raced to find reinforcements.
Colonel Strong Vincent, a brigade commander from the Fifth Corps, took the initiative without waiting for orders. He rushed four regiments up the hill, reaching the summit moments before the Confederate advance. The 20th Maine, commanded by Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, held the far left of the entire Union line. For more than an hour, the 15th Alabama threw wave after wave of desperate attacks against Chamberlain’s 386 exhausted men.
The federals beat them back five, perhaps six times, but the ammunition was running out. Wounded men lay everywhere among the rocks. Chamberlain, who had never wanted to be a soldier, faced an impossible choice. Retreat would mean losing the position.
Standing in place would mean being overrun. He chose a third option. He ordered a bayonet charge down the hill, straight at the Confederates. The men of the 20th Maine fixed bayonets and screamed down the rocky slope.
The exhausted Alabamians, anticipating another defense, were so shocked by the sudden counterattack that their line collapsed. The Confederate commander ordered a withdrawal. Little Round Top held. The Union left wing was safe.
Lee attacked both flanks on July 2 and failed. He suffered devastating losses. A rational commander would have withdrawn. Lee did not.
He decided on one final gamble: a massive assault against the center of the Union line, where he believed, or convinced himself, the enemy had weakened his defenses to reinforce the flanks. Longstreet protested, pleaded, and offered alternatives. He told Lee plainly that no fifteen thousand men could take that position. Lee had made his decision.
Throughout the morning of July 3, the Confederates struggled with delays. The troops stood in formation for hours under the brutal July sun. At one o’clock in the afternoon, 150 Confederate cannons opened fire in what was intended to be the largest bombardment of the war. For nearly two hours, the guns roared so loudly they were heard 150 miles away in Pittsburgh.
But most of the shells flew over the Union lines. The Union artillery commander ordered his batteries to slow fire and then fall silent deliberately, creating the illusion that the Confederate bombardment had succeeded. Then, at about three o’clock, the guns fell quiet. From the tree line emerged about 12,500 Confederate soldiers, infantry from George Pickett’s fresh Virginia division joined by other units, advancing across the open fields in perfect parade-ground formation.
Their battle flags fluttered in the breeze. The Union defenders behind their stone walls described it as beautiful and terrible at once. Then the Union artillery, supposedly silenced, opened fire again. Shells tore into the Confederate ranks.
Men fell by the dozens, then by the hundreds. The Confederates closed ranks and kept coming. By the time they reached the Emmitsburg Road, their beautiful formation was coming apart. Vermont and Ohio and New York regiments poured fire into their flanks.
A small group, perhaps 250 men led by Brigadier General Lewis Armistead, reached the Union line at a point on Cemetery Ridge where the stone wall made a right angle known afterward as the Angle. For a few brief minutes, the Confederate battle flag flew over the ridge, the farthest point a Confederate army ever reached on Union soil. Then Union reinforcements swarmed in from three sides. Armistead fell, mortally wounded.
His men were killed, wounded, or captured. The breakthrough collapsed. Of the 12,500 men who began the charge, only about 6,500 made it back. Losses approached sixty percent.
Pickett, who had watched the destruction of his division, later explained the failure in bitter terms: he always thought the Yankees had something to do with it. Lee walked among the survivors, taking full responsibility. He told the shattered remnants of Pickett’s division that it was all his fault. On the Fourth of July, under pouring rain, Lee began his long, painful retreat back to Virginia.
The army of Northern Virginia had escaped, but it was no longer the force that had marched so confidently into Pennsylvania. The numbers tell the story of those three days. Roughly 23,000 Union soldiers and 28,000 Confederates were killed, wounded, captured, or missing. Nearly a third of Lee’s army was gone.
Nine generals were killed or mortally wounded, the most lost in any single battle of the war. It remains the deadliest battle in American history. The war itself continued for another brutal twenty months. But Lee never again possessed the strength to invade the North.
Combined with Ulysses Grant’s capture of Vicksburg on July 4, which split the Confederacy in two, Gettysburg marked the turning point from which the Confederacy could not recover. The South could still win battles, but it could no longer win the war. Four months later, Abraham Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg to dedicate the national cemetery for the soldiers. In his 272-word address, he redefined what the war meant.
It was no longer only about preserving the Union. It was about a new birth of freedom, about whether government of the people, by the people, for the people would perish from the earth. Gettysburg remained a witness to those three days in July 1863, when the fate of a nation was decided in the fields of Pennsylvania.