Fourteen years after the Battle of Gettysburg, Confederate General Henry Heth claimed he had sent his troops into the town looking for shoes. That explanation, offered long after the fact, remains one of the most debated details of the Civil War’s most famous battle. The idea that the clash began over footwear has been questioned by historians who find it hard to believe that a commander as skilled as Robert E. Lee would allow his army to stumble into an unintended major engagement simply because of a shortage of boots.
Others argue that Heth’s later account does not make the story false, and that Confederate troops were indeed desperately short of supplies by the summer of 1863. If a shortage of shoes did not draw the armies to Gettysburg, the geography almost certainly did. The town was a junction where major roads converged, making it a natural point of collision for two armies on the move. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia had just won a costly victory at Chancellorsville, losing Stonewall Jackson to friendly fire.
The Union, meanwhile, was reeling from that same defeat, and President Abraham Lincoln was reported to have been devastated by the news. Lee decided to invade the North to relieve pressure on Virginia and to demoralize an enemy that was already hearing whispers about allowing the South to secede. His army was under-supplied, and shoes were among the critical items it needed. Days before the armies met at Gettysburg, Confederate troops had seized flour, sugar, bacon, and 2,000 pairs of boots and shoes from the town of York.
This confirmed that Southern forces were actively gathering supplies as they moved north. On July 1, 1863, Union cavalry under General John Buford reached Gettysburg first. Recognizing the strategic value of the high ground around the town, Buford decided to hold the position until infantry reinforcements could arrive, understanding that if the Confederates seized those ridges, the Union army would be dangerously exposed. Fighting erupted at dawn.
Union forces under Buford and General John Reynolds initially held their ground, but Confederate reinforcements under General Richard Ewell soon arrived and outmaneuvered them. During the heavy combat, Reynolds was fatally shot through the neck by a Confederate marksman. The Union line was driven back through Gettysburg, with street fighting breaking out in the town itself. The Northern troops fell back to Cemetery Ridge, where they formed a defensive line shaped like a fishhook, anchored by Culp’s Hill on one end and the Round Tops on the other.
Exhausted Union soldiers spent the night among the graves on Cemetery Ridge, a place many of them would permanently occupy in the days ahead. The first day of Gettysburg was not a minor skirmish. More than 50,000 soldiers fought, and roughly 16,000 became casualties, making it one of the deadliest days of the entire Civil War. One critical failure that day belonged to Ewell.
Lee gave him a courteous order to press the Union troops if possible, a phrasing that contrasted sharply with the decisive action the late Stonewall Jackson would likely have taken. Ewell, feeling his troops were too exhausted, did not press the attack, and the Union was allowed to secure the high ground. Compounding the problem, Lee’s cavalry leader, Jeb Stuart, was off raiding in Pennsylvania and was not available to report the Union army’s whereabouts. Many historians believe the two armies simply encountered one another by accident.
On the Union side, General George Meade’s forces occupied a formidable defensive line along Cemetery Ridge. Lee, confident after driving the Union back on day one, planned an aggressive offensive for July 2, ordering a two-pronged assault on both ends of the Union fishhook. General James Longstreet argued throughout the day against attacking, insisting the Union position was too strong. He delayed, and Ewell also waited.
Lee grew impatient, reportedly insisting that the enemy was exactly where he wanted them. Longstreet responded that if Meade remained in place, he could not move the army. Lee retorted that he would attack and either whip the enemy or be whipped himself. The second day saw one of the most famous actions of the battle.
Colonel Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine were ordered to secure the far left flank on Little Round Top. Chamberlain, a former college professor, commanded troops that included mutinous soldiers from Maine who had been assigned to his regiment. They repelled repeated Confederate assaults, and when they were nearly out of ammunition, Chamberlain ordered a bayonet charge against overwhelming odds. The charge succeeded.
Historians believe the Confederates retreated because they assumed the counterattack signaled the arrival of large Union reinforcements. The action saved Little Round Top and the entire Union flank. Elsewhere, General Daniel Sickles dangerously exceeded his orders. Instead of guarding the left flank as Meade had directed, he overextended his Third Corps into the Peach Orchard.
Confederate forces exploited the error. Sickles lost a leg in the fighting and later donated it to the Army Medical Museum in Washington. At the other end of the Union line, Ewell finally attacked late in the afternoon but was repulsed at Culp’s Hill after brutal hand-to-hand combat. The hill belonged to the family of a Confederate soldier named Johnny Culp, who had gone south to join the Confederate army.
Some accounts say he died near his family’s farm during the assault, a doubly heartbreaking loss for his family. By the morning of July 3, both armies were entrenched. Lee ordered Longstreet to assault the Union center. Longstreet, who had lost three children to fever weeks earlier, begged Lee to retreat.
Lee refused, insisting the enemy was there and he was going to strike him. Longstreet, once Lee’s close friend, would resent that decision for the rest of his life. Before the infantry charge, the Confederates launched a two-hour artillery bombardment, the largest concentrated barrage the continent had yet seen. The noise and destruction were so intense that some Union soldiers, seated beside dead comrades, could only describe the horror of the air being saturated with shells.
Then came the infantry assault. Between 13,000 and 17,000 Confederate soldiers marched across an open mile of ground toward Cemetery Ridge, exposed to artillery and rifle fire from behind a stone wall. The charge nearly broke the Union line before reinforcements sealed the gap. Among the leaders, General Lewis Armistead pushed deepest into the Union position, hat raised on his sword, in what is often described as the high-water mark of the Confederacy.
He fell, mortally wounded, attacking a position defended by his friend, General Winfield Scott Hancock. As he died, Armistead bequeathed his watch to Hancock. Lee witnessed the carnage. After the charge failed and thousands of his men lay dead, wounded, or captured, he rode out to the survivors and told them, “It is all my fault.
Hear me, I pray you. ”
The Confederate forces retreated. Pickett’s shattered division fell back, leaving the field in Union hands. The final day of the battle coincided with the surrender of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863, a double blow from which the Confederacy would never fully recover.
Lee withdrew his army from Gettysburg and returned to Virginia.