By the summer of 1863, the Civil War was going badly for Abraham Lincoln and the North. The Union had more men, money, and supplies, yet it seemed to lose battle after battle under incompetent generals. Lincoln’s frustration had grown so bitter that when the Confederates captured a brigadier general along with 58 horses, he reportedly regretted the loss of the horses more than the loss of the general. That June, Robert E.
Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had just won another costly victory at Chancellorsville. The triumph had come at a terrible price: Stonewall Jackson, Lee’s right-hand man, was killed by friendly fire. The North was equally devastated, having suffered twice the casualties despite outnumbering the South two to one. When Lincoln heard the news, he was beyond consolation, moaning, “My God, my God, what will the country say?
” before fleeing the room in tears. Those around him feared he might collapse mentally or even take his own life. Lee now decided to carry the war into the North. He hoped a victory on Union soil would break Northern morale, where growing numbers of people were talking about letting the South go its own way.
He also wanted to relieve pressure on Vicksburg, the vital city on the Mississippi, and he needed supplies, especially shoes. The question of shoes would become one of the most debated details of the battle that followed. Some historians argued the story was a myth, noting that Confederate General Henry Heth did not mention shoes until fourteen years after the battle, when he claimed he had sent a brigade to Gettysburg to find them. The argument went that Gettysburg had no shoe factories, and that Jubal Early had already passed through demanding fifteen hundred pairs of shoes and ridden away empty-handed.
Some believed the shoe story was a cover for the embarrassing fact that Lee, a brilliant commander, had allowed his army to blunder into battle at an unplanned location. But just because Heth waited to write his memoirs did not mean the story was false. Days before Gettysburg, the Confederates had requisitioned supplies from the nearby town of York, taking flour, sugar, bacon, and two thousand pairs of shoes and boots. Many historians concluded that the two armies simply ran into each other at Gettysburg because the roads all converged there.
Union cavalry commander John Buford arrived in Gettysburg first. He recognized the town’s strategic importance immediately, understanding that if Confederate forces seized the high ground around it, the Union would be in a vulnerable position. Buford made the bold decision to hold the ground and delay the Confederate advance until reinforcements arrived. At dawn on July 1, the two armies collided outside the town.
Lee’s cavalry commander, Jeb Stuart, was off in New Jersey, so Lee had no idea the Union army was nearby. At first the Union, under Generals Buford and John Reynolds, appeared to be winning. But Confederate reinforcements under General Richard Ewell arrived, outflanked the Union line, and chased the Federals through the town, where house-to-house fighting broke out. During the engagement, General Reynolds, one of the North’s best generals, was shot through the neck by a sharpshooter and died.
The fighting was so fierce that many staff officers had between one and three horses shot out from under them. Eventually the Union forces were pushed back through Gettysburg and took up positions on the high ground of Cemetery Ridge. The line formed a fishhook shape, with Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Ridge to the north and Little Round Top and Big Round Top to the south. Many weary Union soldiers slept among the tombs on Cemetery Ridge, a place where thousands of them would soon take up eternal residence.
The first day was no minor skirmish. More than fifty thousand troops were engaged and roughly sixteen thousand soldiers were killed, making the opening day alone one of the twenty bloodiest days of the war. That evening, Lee requested that Ewell press the Union forces on the high ground, using the gentlemanly language he had used with Stonewall Jackson. Jackson would have understood that the request meant attack.
Ewell, however, felt his men were too spent and held back. Historians would speculate for generations whether a more vigorous commander could have taken the high ground and possibly won the war. What is certain is that Buford’s decisive action to hold the ground saved the day for the Union. For some men, the day was not over.
Union soldier James Winchell was badly wounded in the arm. Unlike the South, the North usually provided chloroform before amputations, but none could be found for Winchell. He told the doctor to go ahead, even waving off the need to hold his legs down. The doctor was so impressed that he told his assistant, “He’s pretty spunky.
Let’s make a good job of it. ” Winchell endured the amputation without any painkiller. On July 2, Confederate General James Longstreet urged Lee not to attack the Union positions, arguing they were nearly perfect and that the Confederates should move south and east, get between the Union army and Lincoln, and find good high ground where the Union would have to attack them. Lee refused.
“No, the enemy is there, and I am going to strike him,” he said. Confident after pushing the Union back the day before, Lee ordered a pincer attack on both ends of the Union fishhook. Ewell was to demonstrate on the left while Longstreet attacked on the right. Lee told them to advance at their leisure, diplomatic language that Stonewall Jackson would have known meant attack now.
But Jackson was dead, and Ewell felt the enemy was too strong, so he waited for Longstreet. Longstreet argued away the morning, insisting that Lee had never given him a direct order to attack. The critical moment came on the Union left flank at Little Round Top. Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, a former college professor, commanded the 20th Maine, ordered to hold the far left of the Union line.
If the Confederates took the hill, they could roll up the entire Union army. Many of Chamberlain’s men were mutineers from other regiments, but at Gettysburg, nearly all of them would fight bravely. Longstreet finally attacked at noon, pushing through a peach orchard, a wheat field, and a rocky area called Devil’s Den. His men then charged Little Round Top, nearly breaking through.
Chamberlain, almost out of ammunition, ordered a bayonet charge. His men swept down the hill, even picking up rocks and throwing them at the rebels. The charge worked. How could eighty-some men drive back thousands?
The most likely explanation is that the Confederates believed Chamberlain would never have countercharged without reinforcements, so they concluded they were facing a much larger force and retreated. Chamberlain’s bravery was not the only notable story of that day. General Daniel Sickles, who before the war had killed his wife’s lover and used the then-novel insanity plea to escape conviction, made the day dangerously exciting by exceeding General George Meade’s orders. Instead of holding his position, he overextended his Third Corps into the peach orchard and was overrun.
Sickles lost a leg and proudly donated it to the Army Medical Museum in Washington. The Confederates could not fully exploit his blunder, though one man came close. General William Barksdale led his Mississippians in a stunning charge that almost carried the day, but soldiers from Minnesota held the line. Half of Barksdale’s men were killed or wounded, and Barksdale himself suffered mortal wounds.
His last words were, “I am killed. Tell my wife and children that I died fighting at my post. ”
On the other end of the fishhook, Ewell finally attacked late in the afternoon and was turned back at Culp’s Hill after brutal hand-to-hand combat. Johnny Culp’s family owned the hill.
He had gone south to fight for the Confederates, and some historians claimed he was killed only twenty yards from his family farm. On July 3, Lee decided that since the flank attacks had failed, he would strike the Union center. Longstreet begged him to retreat and fight another day, arguing that any attack would be uphill over open ground. Lee refused.
Longstreet, who had lost three children to fever months earlier, would remain angry at Lee for the rest of the war and beyond. But he obeyed, ordering some thirteen to seventeen thousand men to advance across an open mile toward Cemetery Ridge in what became known as Pickett’s Charge. Curiously, General George Pickett, whose name the charge would carry, had been commissioned as an officer by Abraham Lincoln before the war. They were good friends, and Pickett would not allow anyone to speak ill of Lincoln in his presence.
The Confederates opened with a two-hour bombardment, the largest concentrated artillery attack in history up to that point. A Union soldier named Samuel Wilkinson, sitting next to his dead son, described the horror of the shelling. He watched an ambulance driven by a frantic conductor, a horse running on three legs, its hind one shot off at the hip. Confederate infantry then stepped off across the mile-wide field into the teeth of Union artillery and rifle fire.
Many men, gripped with fear, loaded cartridge after cartridge without firing. One gun was found afterward with twenty-three unfired cartridges in it. Historians claimed that over six thousand rifles were found with three to ten loaded rounds still in them. Pickett’s men nearly broke the Union line, but Union reinforcements closed the breach at the critical moment.
The charge disintegrated, and the survivors fell back. General Lewis Armistead, hat and sword in hand, led his men bravely and is considered to have reached the high-water mark of the Confederacy. Armistead, who was mortally wounded, had been a good friend of Union General Winfield Scott Hancock, who was also wounded that day. Upon his death, Armistead left his watch and other possessions to Hancock.
Thousands of Confederate soldiers lay dead, wounded, or captured. Lee rode out to meet the survivors and took full responsibility for the defeat. “It is all my fault. Hear me, I pray you,” he told them.
A Union veteran later described seeing Lee during the retreat. Badly wounded, the Union soldier raised his hands, looked Lee in the face, and shouted hurrah for the Union. Lee stopped, dismounted, and walked over to him, his face so sad that all fear left the man. Lee extended his hand, grasped the soldier’s firmly, and said, “My son, I hope you will soon be well.
” The veteran said he would never forget the expression on Lee’s face: a defeated general, retiring from a field that had cost him nearly everything, stopping to speak kindly to a wounded enemy soldier who had taunted him. Lee’s battered army retreated back to Virginia. Gettysburg was the largest battle ever fought in North America, with over fifty thousand casualties. It was the turning point of the Civil War, for the South would never again threaten the North so powerfully.
Combined with the fall of Vicksburg, the North had real reason to celebrate the Fourth of July. But the war would continue for two more bloody years. Lincoln mourned the failure to pursue and destroy Lee’s retreating army, and days after the battle, draft riots erupted in New York, requiring armed force to put down, leading to the deaths of over five hundred people. Lincoln still appreciated the magnitude of the victory.
He told the recovering one-legged General Sickles that he had locked himself in his room, gotten down on his knees, and prayed mightily for victory at Gettysburg, vowing that if God would stand by the Union boys, he would stand by God. He believed the victory was the result of divine intervention. The only civilian killed in the battle was Jenny Wade, a twenty-year-old seamstress. On July 1, as fighting raged through town, she fled with her family to her sister’s brick house.
Her sister had just given birth, and Jenny cared for her while also helping Union soldiers by filling canteens and baking bread. On July 3, Confederate sharpshooters targeted homes in the area, but Jenny returned to the kitchen to knead dough, believing the thick brick walls would protect her. A stray bullet pierced two doors, struck her in the back, and killed her instantly. Nine days later, her fiancé, Corporal Jack Skelly, was killed in Virginia.
On the afternoon of July 4, Jenny’s mother, ever practical, baked fifteen loaves of bread from the dough Jenny had been kneading when she was shot.