On the afternoon of July 1, 1863, Confederate infantry drove the Union Army of the Potomac through the streets of Gettysburg in triumph. The retreating Federals fled south to a chain of high ground centered on Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill, ground that lay open and largely unoccupied as dusk settled. Robert E. Lee, commanding the Army of Northern Virginia, understood the importance of the position and sent his order to Richard Ewell, the corps commander whose victorious troops had just cleared the town: take those hills if practicable.
Ewell had built his reputation under Stonewall Jackson, the Army of Northern Virginia’s most aggressive commander, and he now led Jackson’s old corps. Scouts told him the heights ahead were only lightly held. Every military calculation pointed toward immediate action. Yet Ewell hesitated.
He called his division commanders together, weighed the risks, and concluded the attack could not be made before dark. He pulled his men back and waited for morning. That night, Union reinforcements poured onto Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill. Winfield Scott Hancock, dispatched by General George Meade to take command on the field, rallied the broken Union units and anchored a defensive line on the ridges south of town.
The hills Ewell had declined to seize became the unbreakable foundation of the Union position. Historians have debated the moment ever since, wondering whether Ewell simply lacked Jackson’s ruthlessness, misread the ground, or was paralyzed by the burden of his new command. What is certain is that the high ground stood empty at dusk and was occupied by dawn, and the Confederates had lost the tactical advantage of the first day. The morning of July 2 broke with Lee still committed to forcing a decision.
He ordered James Longstreet to strike the Union left flank as early as possible, expecting a crushing blow that would roll up the Federal line. Longstreet had opposed the entire campaign into Pennsylvania, and he had argued against attacking at Gettysburg. He wanted Lee to maneuver, to find stronger ground and force the Federals to attack him instead. His objections were overruled, and he set his corps in motion, but the hours slipped away.
Longstreet’s men spent the morning marching and countermarching under the July sun, their movements concealed in woods and behind ridges. Six hours passed before the assault finally went in, late in the afternoon around four o’clock. By that time, Union commanders had seen the danger and begun shifting troops southward. The delay had cost the Confederates their best chance to strike a weakened flank before reinforcements could arrive.
When the attack finally struck, it came in ferocious succession along the Union left: the Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield, Devil’s Den. Fighting was savage, the dead piling up among the rocks and farm fields. But the decisive point of the entire battlefield was a rocky, wooded knob at the southern end of the Union line called Little Round Top. It dominated the entire southern approach; artillery placed on its crest could enfilade the Union position end to end.
The Federals had left it nearly unguarded, assuming the rough terrain made it unusable. Union chief engineer Gouverneur Warren rode to the hill during the afternoon, saw the danger, and raced to find troops to occupy it before the Confederates arrived. He diverted a brigade, and among the units that scrambled up the slopes was Colonel Joshua Chamberlain’s 20th Maine, which took position on the far left of the Union line. Minutes later, Confederate infantry surged up the boulder-strewn hillside in wave after wave.
The 20th Maine held, running low on ammunition and countercharging downhill to break the final Confederate assault, but the margin was measured in minutes, not hours. The question that haunts the battle is how Lee and Longstreet could have planned a massive flank attack without ever identifying the most commanding terrain on that flank. The hill was visible, it was empty, and it was decisive. Confederate reconnaissance failed at its most fundamental level, leaving the Confederates to fight uphill against defenders who had only just arrived in time.
By July 3, Lee faced a choice. His army was battered but still dangerous. The obvious alternatives were withdrawal or maneuvering to force the Federals into a disadvantageous position. Instead, Lee ordered what became the most infamous assault of the war.
He reasoned that the Union center had been weakened by two days of fighting on its flanks, and he believed a determined strike at the middle would break Meade’s line. Longstreet warned him the center had not been weakened, that the Union position there remained strong. Lee insisted. Throughout the morning and early afternoon, Confederate artillery massed on Seminary Ridge and hammered the Union line on Cemetery Ridge.
It was the largest bombardment of the war. It looked and sounded overwhelming, but Union artillery chief Henry Hunt saw through the smoke and ordered many of his guns to cease fire, saving ammunition for the infantry assault he knew was coming. Much of the Confederate barrage overshot the Union infantry, which sheltered safely behind stone walls. Then the infantry stepped off.
Roughly 12,500 men, including George Pickett’s fresh division from Virginia and the battered brigades of Pettigrew and Trimble, crossed a mile of open ground toward the Union center. Union artillery opened on them from the flanks, then from the front. The assault collapsed in about fifty minutes. Lewis Armistead led his brigade to the stone wall and briefly planted his men on the Union line, falling with his hand on a captured cannon.
Other commanders died on the field. The survivors streamed back across the valley under fire, leaving the slopes thick with dead and wounded. The charge violated established military doctrine, contradicted the strongest advice of Lee’s own officers, and attacked the most obvious and best-fortified point in the Union line. Why Lee ordered it remains the battle’s greatest riddle.
It has been described as overconfidence, as desperation, and as a fatal misreading of Union resolve, but no single explanation fully accounts for it. Beneath all of these failures ran a deeper problem: Lee was blind. His cavalry commander, J. E.
B. Stuart, had taken most of the army’s mounted force on a wide ride around the Union army in the days before the battle, seeking to raid and circle east of the Federals. He had been absent during the opening contact at Gettysburg and remained absent through the first two days of fighting. Lee entered battle without knowing the enemy’s strength, position, or intentions.
He committed his army to a decisive engagement he had thought he would fight under different circumstances, and he made choice after choice without reliable information. Stuart finally reached the field on July 2, but by then the damage was done. His absence was a professional failure, a cavalry commander abandoning his core responsibility of reconnaissance at the campaign’s critical moment. But the responsibility did not end with Stuart.
Lee had tolerated the arrangement and had no contingency plan for operating blind. The Confederate army had marched into Pennsylvania with its eyes closed, and it paid for that throughout the battle. The fighting ended on July 3, and Lee withdrew the following day, leading his battered army back toward Virginia. The casualties were staggering: over fifty thousand men killed, wounded, captured, or missing in three days of fighting.
Meade’s army was too damaged to pursue aggressively, and the war would grind on for nearly two more years, but the Confederate invasion of the North was over. The five fractures in the Confederate command—Ewell’s hesitation at the high ground, Longstreet’s lost morning, the overlooked dominance of Little Round Top, the ordered slaughter of Pickett’s Charge, and Stuart’s absence—fit together into a sequence that defies easy explanation. Each failure fed the next. Gettysburg was not simply a defeat suffered against superior numbers.
It was a defeat shaped by decisions that still remain difficult to explain, and the questions left behind have never fully closed.