On the afternoon of July 3, 1863, roughly 12,500 Confederate soldiers formed ranks at the edge of an open field nearly a mile wide. There was no cover, no trees, no natural protection. Across that field, on the ridge of Cemetery Ridge, the Union Army’s artillery and infantry waited. Many of the men on both sides understood what was coming.
The Confederate commanders knew the attack was nearly hopeless, and most of the soldiers knew it too. Still, the order was given, and the infantry stepped off into the open ground directly into enemy fire. Fifty minutes later, the assault was over. A few hundred men reached the Union line, and most of those were killed, wounded, or captured.
The survivors stumbled back across the field in disorder, stepping over their dead and wounded comrades. The attack became known as Pickett’s Charge, and it is remembered as the turning point of the American Civil War. It was not merely a defeat. It was a command decision that sent thousands of men to their deaths with the outcome largely predictable before the first shot was fired.
The Battle of Gettysburg had already consumed two days of bloody, inconclusive fighting. Confederate General Robert E. Lee had brought the Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania, seeking a decisive victory on Northern soil. Such a triumph could weaken Northern support for the war and perhaps convince Britain or France to recognize the Confederacy.
Lee was not looking for a defensive success. He wanted a campaign-ending blow. On July 1, Union forces had been pushed back through the town of Gettysburg and onto the high ground to the south. That retreat turned into a strategic advantage.
The Union line occupied strong positions along Cemetery Ridge, Culps Hill, and Little Round Top. On July 2, Lee attacked both flanks of that line with ferocity. There was heavy fighting at Little Round Top and Devil’s Den, and again at Culps Hill. The Union line held, but only at great cost.
On the morning of July 3, Lee reassessed the situation. His flank attacks had failed. He reasoned that Union commander General George Meade had probably weakened his center to reinforce his flanks. Based on that assumption, Lee decided to strike the middle of the Union line with a direct infantry assault, preceded by a massive artillery bombardment.
The plan was bold, simple, and extremely risky. Lee’s most trusted subordinate, General James Longstreet, objected bluntly. During an early morning meeting, Longstreet told Lee that no 15,000 men ever arrayed for battle could take that position. He advised withdrawing and forcing the Union army to attack the Confederates on ground of their own choosing, a tactic that had served them well throughout the war.
Lee refused. Perhaps driven by the pressure of the previous days, perhaps by confidence in his soldiers, he gave the order to attack. Longstreet continued to voice his concerns as the preparations moved forward. In his post-war memoirs, he admitted that he could not verbally approve the order that morning and only gave his assent with a silent nod.
The disagreement between the two generals at that critical moment became one of the most studied command failures of the war. Lee’s confidence was rooted in his past successes. He had won victories against numerically superior enemies through bold, aggressive tactics, most notably at Chancellorsville. He had come to believe his soldiers could accomplish nearly anything.
But the situation at Gettysburg was different. The enemy held the high ground, and the ground over which the attack would be launched was completely open and exposed. Around 1:00 p. m.
, the Confederate artillery opened fire. Some 150 to 170 guns launched one of the most intense bombardments seen in the Western Hemisphere up to that time. The goal was to silence the Union artillery and weaken the infantry line. The result fell far short.
Most shells overshot their targets, landing among rear support units or in empty fields. Range calculations were off, and smoke from the guns obscured visibility. The bombardment was so loud it was reportedly heard hundreds of miles away. Union artillery commander General Henry Hunt made a crucial decision during the exchange.
After returning fire for a while, he ordered his guns to cease firing to conserve ammunition. The sudden silence created the false impression on the Confederate side that their bombardment had succeeded and the enemy artillery had been knocked out. In fact, the Union guns were being saved for the infantry assault to come. Hunt’s decision is now regarded as one of the smartest tactical moves of the war.
When the Confederate bombardment ended around 3:00 p. m. , the infantry stepped off. Three divisions, commanded by General George Pickett, General James Johnston Pettigrew, and General Isaac Trimble, advanced in a disciplined line as if on parade.
Pickett’s division was made up almost entirely of Virginia regiments, fresh and well trained after resting for two days. Pettigrew’s and Trimble’s divisions had already suffered heavy losses the day before and entered the attack exhausted. At first, the advance was relatively quiet. The Union artillery waited until the Confederates came into range.
Then the cannons opened fire, first with shrapnel and then, as the distance closed, with canister shot. Each round scattered hundreds of small metal pieces across a wide area, functioning like a giant shotgun into the tightly packed Confederate ranks. Every shot knocked down dozens of men. Still, the lines closed up and kept advancing.
Union officers had ordered their men to hold their fire until the enemy was fully in range. The discipline paid off. The Confederate soldiers crossed the Emmitsburg Road, where a fence line forced them to slow down and climb over while exposed to rifle fire. Some brigades lost more than half their strength just crossing that fence.
The few who reached the stone wall at the Angle, the strongest point of the Union line, briefly broke through. General Lewis Armistead led a small group into the Union artillery battery, placing his hat on the tip of his sword to inspire his men. That moment, the furthest point the Confederacy ever reached in the war, became known as the high water mark of the Confederacy. It lasted only minutes.
Union reinforcements rushed to the breach, and close-quarters fighting erupted with bayonets and pistols. Armistead was severely wounded and died shortly afterward. Most of the men who had broken through with him were killed or captured. The breach was sealed.
The retreat was worse than the advance. The survivors had to cross the same open ground under continuous fire, leaving their wounded behind. The entire charge lasted no more than an hour. Of the 12,500 men who began it, roughly 6,500 were dead, wounded, or captured.
An estimated 1,100 to 1,500 were killed, about 4,000 were wounded, and 1,500 to 1,800 were taken prisoner. The casualty rate exceeded 50 percent. General Lee rode forward to meet his retreating soldiers. He told them the failure was his fault, a rare admission of responsibility from a commanding general.
When he ordered Pickett to rally his division, Pickett replied, General, I have no division now. Over the three days of fighting at Gettysburg, combined casualties on both sides exceeded 50,000, the highest toll of any battle ever fought on the North American continent. The town of Gettysburg became a giant open-air hospital. Houses, churches, and barns were filled with wounded men, and civilians spent months caring for soldiers from both armies.
The consequences of the charge reached far beyond the battlefield. Pickett’s division, drawn heavily from Virginia towns and counties, suffered a demographic catastrophe. Some counties lost nearly half their young male population. Entire communities were left without enough men to marry, farm, or rebuild.
The economic and social damage lasted for generations. Lee’s decision to attack has been debated ever since. Some historians point to the pressure of two days of failed attacks and a belief that passivity would further lower morale. Others emphasize Lee’s confidence in his soldiers, born of past victories.
Still others note that Lee was physically exhausted and likely suffering from heart trouble. Modern historians also point to the absence of reliable cavalry intelligence. Lee’s cavalry commander, General J. E.
B. Stuart, had been on a long, self-directed raid and failed to provide timely information about Union positions and strength. With better intelligence, Lee might have realized the Union center was far stronger than he believed. The attack was not an unforeseeable disaster.
Several experienced officers predicted it would fail. Longstreet was not alone. Brigade commander Cadmus Wilcox told his officers before the attack that the mission was suicide, but he obeyed the order because military discipline left no room for refusal. General Richard Garnett, suffering from health problems that made even mounting a horse dangerous, joined the attack in person and died.
His body was never identified. In the years after the war, responsibility for the failure was gradually shifted away from Lee. The Lost Cause narrative transformed Lee into an almost sacred figure, and criticism of his decisions became taboo in the South. Blame fell instead on Longstreet, who was already unpopular for joining the Republican Party after the war.
For much of the twentieth century, claims that Longstreet deliberately delayed or sabotaged the attack were presented as fact. Modern historians have largely rejected those claims. Longstreet’s objection was real, but the failure of the charge came from the tactical impossibility of the attack itself. The defeat at Gettysburg, combined with the fall of Vicksburg to Union forces the same week, marked the turning point of the war.
Lee’s army never again mounted a large-scale invasion of the North. The initiative passed to the Union, and the Confederacy was forced increasingly onto the defensive. When Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox in April 1865, the outcome of the war had been effectively sealed at Gettysburg nearly two years earlier.
The battlefield itself became a place of memory. In November 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the dedication of a national cemetery on part of the battlefield. He did not mention Pickett’s Charge directly, but his words about honoring the dead and ensuring their sacrifice was not in vain gave lasting national meaning to the enormous loss. Today, the field where the charge took place is preserved at Gettysburg National Military Park.
Visitors can walk the same mile of open ground and stand at the Angle, the point marked as the high water mark of the Confederacy. In 1913, on the fiftieth anniversary of the battle, surviving Union and Confederate veterans gathered at Gettysburg. Elderly former enemies met at the stone wall and shook hands across it, a powerful symbol of how the wounds of war could, at least on an individual level, eventually heal.