George Pickett’s name is forever tied to the most famous failed charge in American military history. But the story of what he actually thought of Robert E. Lee is rarely told in full.
Sometime after the war, a group of veterans gathered around Pickett and asked him a seemingly simple question. They wanted to know why the charge at Gettysburg had failed.
Pickett answered without lowering his voice. “I’ve always thought the Yankees had something to do with it,” he said.
Then he paused and added something the men never forgot. He said that old man had his division massacred.
He was not talking about Ulysses Grant or George Meade. He was talking about Robert E. Lee, the man whose name was already carved into Southern mythology.
George Pickett blamed Lee, resented him, and by most accounts never stopped.
That exchange has lived in Civil War memory as a footnote, a curiosity, a moment of bitterness from a man some historians have dismissed as vain or limited. But dismissing it is the easier path, not the honest one.
When you follow Pickett’s story across the whole arc of his life, what emerges is not a simple tale of resentment. It is a story about what it cost to be used and then discarded.
Pickett graduated last in his class at West Point in 1846, 59th out of 59. That fact follows him through every biography, usually offered as evidence of some fundamental inadequacy.
But his record in Mexico said something different. At Chapultepec, a 22-year-old Pickett carried the regimental flag over a wall under fire after the man ahead of him fell. He was the first American officer over that wall.
James Longstreet, who would later become one of the most capable corps commanders in the Confederate Army, was right there and remembered it for the rest of his life. When Pickett planted that flag, Longstreet considered him a man of uncommon physical courage.
Courage in Pickett’s case was never the question. What the last place finish at West Point indicated was less about intelligence than about temperament.
Pickett was not a man who bent himself to institutions easily. He had a performer’s vanity, an actor’s need for an audience, and a romantic’s compulsion to inhabit whatever role the moment seemed to demand.
He wore his hair in long perfumed ringlets that men remarked on with both admiration and discreet amusement. He wrote letters to his young fiance, La Salle Corbell, with a passion that bordered on the theatrical.
He was, in short, a man who wanted to be the protagonist of his own story. And the Civil War, at least in its early months, seemed to promise him exactly that.
When Virginia seceded in 1861, Pickett resigned his United States Army commission and cast his lot with the Confederacy. He was given a brigade and performed well enough in the early campaigns of the Army of Northern Virginia to earn a promotion to major general.
By the spring of 1862, he commanded a division. The appointment placed him within the orbit of Robert E. Lee, and everything that followed, the glory, the catastrophe, the bitterness, grew from that proximity.
Lee, in those years, was building something the Confederate High Command had never managed before: a coherent, aggressive, unified army with a single commanding intelligence behind it. He was systematic in a way that impressed those who worked closely enough to see it.
He was also cold in the way that certain kinds of brilliance tends to be cold. He processed his subordinates as instruments.
He could appreciate them, praise them in dispatches, mourn them when they fell, and still regard them, at bottom, as means to an end. That was not unusual for commanders of his era, but it carried a cost that would only become visible later.
George Pickett was the one who paid most of it.
The relationship between Pickett and Lee before Gettysburg was not one of deep mutual confidence. Lee had better opinions of other division commanders: Hood before he was wounded, D.H. Hill despite the friction, and above all Stonewall Jackson, whose death at Chancellorsville in May 1863 tore something essential out of the army’s structure.
After Jackson died, Lee reorganized the army into three corps. Pickett’s division was assigned to Longstreet’s First Corps, and Longstreet protected Pickett in the way that older officers sometimes protect subordinates they have genuine affection for.
That protection would become important at Gettysburg, and more important in the arguments that followed.
Pickett’s division arrived at Gettysburg on the evening of July 2nd, 1863, after a long march. They had not fought on the first or second day. The men were relatively fresh in the context of that exhausted army.
That freshness was a factor in what Lee decided to do with them.
On the morning of July 3rd, after two days of brutal, inconclusive fighting, Lee settled on a plan that nearly every officer around him regarded with varying degrees of private alarm. He would send a column across nearly a mile of open ground against the center of the Union line on Cemetery Ridge.
The force would include Pickett’s three brigades plus several brigades from A.P. Hill’s corps, commanded in total by Pickett, since his division would bear the burden of the assault.
Longstreet opposed the plan. His opposition is well documented and was, by his own later account, as close to a direct objection as a subordinate could voice without crossing into insubordination.
He told Lee the assault would not succeed. Lee heard him and proceeded anyway.
When the order was formally given, Longstreet, by his own admission, could not bring himself to speak the command aloud. He nodded.
That nod sent 12,000 to 15,000 men into the open field.
What George Pickett experienced in the next hour did not leave him. He watched from behind the lines as his division, men he had commanded, trained, and written about in letters to LaSalle, walked into a furnace.
The Union artillery, which had largely survived the Confederate bombardment that preceded the assault, opened on the advancing column when it reached close range. Men fell in rows.
The brigades compressed, drifted, lost their alignment. Some reached the stone wall. A few went over it at a place that would afterward be called the high water mark of the Confederacy before being surrounded and cut down or captured.
When the survivors came back, and most of the survivors came back running, Pickett’s division had ceased to exist as a functional combat force. Of the roughly 5,500 men in his three brigades, nearly 3,000 were killed, wounded, or captured in under an hour.
Lee met Pickett as the wreckage of the assault came back across the field and told him to rally his division for a possible Union counterattack.
Pickett, barely containing whatever was inside him at that moment, said that he had no division.
That exchange appears in multiple accounts and is usually cited as evidence of Pickett’s emotional instability. It might also be read as an accurate battlefield report.
He had no division. He had fragments and corpses and men wandering in shock across the Southern Pennsylvania grass.
But the real break, the wound that never healed, did not come on the field. It came afterward in the paperwork.
Robert E. Lee filed his official report on the Battle of Gettysburg in January of 1864, six months after the fighting. In that report, he described the assault of July 3rd with language that was measured, muted, and notable for what it omitted.
He did not explain with any precision why he had chosen to make the attack against the advice of his senior corps commander. He did not apportion responsibility.
He accepted the failure in general terms, noting that his troops had approached the enemy’s lines with steadiness and pressed to the very muzzle of his guns. That language was not inaccurate, but it distributed credit and blame so broadly as to render the specific experience of any single unit invisible.
Pickett’s division was the division that had bled out on that field. Pickett expected that the report would say so.
He expected that the record of what his men had done and suffered would be entered into the official history with some specificity, some acknowledgement. It was not.
The report treated the assault as a general Confederate effort, not as the catastrophic expenditure of one particular division whose commander had watched it happen from behind a fence post, helpless, unable to order a retreat, waiting for orders that came too late to matter.
Pickett filed his own report on the engagement. The report was, by the accounts of officers who read it at the time, blunt, detailed, and angry in the way that only official military prose can be angry.
It named what had happened. It made clear the scale of the losses. It implicitly, and in some readings explicitly, raised questions about the decision to make the assault in the first place.
Lee read it. Lee returned it to Pickett and told him to destroy it.
The reason given was that the report would be demoralizing to Southern morale if it entered the official record. That was the reason given.
Pickett destroyed the report. No copy has ever been found.
That act, the erasure of Pickett’s account of his own men’s deaths, says more about the relationship between the two men than almost any other episode in the war.
Lee was not trying to cover up incompetence in the narrow sense. He believed, with the conviction of a man who had staked everything on his own judgment, that what he had done at Gettysburg was the right call given what he knew and believed at the time.
What he was not willing to do was allow a subordinate’s grief and rage to enter the permanent record and complicate the narrative he was building. The narrative of a noble, coherent army fighting against impossible odds.
Pickett’s report was a crack in that narrative. It had to go.
Pickett went back to Virginia with a command but no division. The men who had survived at Gettysburg were folded into other units, transferred, dispersed.
For months, Pickett existed in a kind of administrative limbo waiting for replacements and reassignment. He spent some of that time with LaSalle, whom he had married in September of 1863 in a ceremony at Petersburg.
He spent some of it writing letters that historians have pored over for clues about his state of mind. What those letters reveal is a man trying very hard to maintain the romantic persona he had constructed for himself while privately understanding that something had ended at Gettysburg that was not coming back.
He was eventually given a new assignment commanding the Department of Virginia and North Carolina. In February of 1864, he led an expedition against New Bern, North Carolina.
The expedition failed. The campaign required coordination between Pickett’s land forces and a naval element that did not materialize.
Pickett returned without having achieved anything. And the failure, modest as it was, reinforced in Lee’s mind a judgment he had perhaps been forming since Gettysburg: that Pickett was not a general whose independent command could be relied upon.
That judgment was never stated directly. It was expressed through the kinds of assignments Pickett received in 1864, which were the assignments given to men who are not expected to do anything that matters.
There was also the matter of the hangings at Kinston. During the New Bern campaign, Pickett had ordered the execution of 22 men captured while fighting for the Union on the grounds that they were Confederate deserters who had broken their oaths.
The executions were by military law arguably defensible, but they were brutal even by the standards of a brutal war, and they would haunt Pickett after the peace. Union officers eventually opened an investigation.
For a period after the surrender, Pickett was at genuine legal risk of prosecution, and it was Ulysses Grant who quietly intervened and argued that the terms of Appomattox should cover the matter.
Grant’s intervention likely saved Pickett from trial. It was a grace note that Pickett received from an enemy and not from his own commanding general.
While Grant drove south and Lee bled out his army in the Wilderness, at Spotsylvania, and at Cold Harbor, Pickett held Petersburg. The siege that began in June of 1864 reduced his role further, from a general commanding an active force to a kind of garrison officer watching miles of earthwork.
It was not the war Pickett had imagined for himself. It was not the war in which the charge that bore his name had promised him a permanent place in history.
The end came at Five Forks on April 1st, 1865, one week before Appomattox.
Five Forks was the southwestern anchor of the Confederate defensive perimeter around Petersburg, and holding it was essential to keeping the supply lines open. Lee told Pickett directly that Five Forks had to be held at all costs.
Those were nearly his exact words: held at all costs.
Pickett understood what was at stake. He was also, by every account, a man exhausted to the bone by nearly four years of war and 20 months of siege.
On the afternoon of April 1st, while Union forces under Philip Sheridan and Gouverneur Warren were preparing the assault that would overrun his position, George Pickett was at a shad bake.
One of his cavalry commanders, Tom Rosser, had set up a picnic on the banks of the Nottoway River, roughly two miles behind the front lines. Pickett went. Fitzhugh Lee, who commanded the Confederate cavalry in the sector, also went.
The three men ate fish and likely drank and certainly did not hear the sound of the battle beginning because a freak acoustic shadow, a documented meteorological phenomenon, swallowed the sound of the guns and kept it from reaching where they sat.
By the time Pickett learned that his lines had collapsed and rode back to the front, the position was gone. Sheridan had punched through with overwhelming force.
The Army of Northern Virginia’s last viable supply corridor was cut. Within a week, Lee would surrender at Appomattox.
What the shad bake episode has always invited is a simple verdict: dereliction. An officer absents himself from his command at the critical moment and the position falls.
That verdict is not entirely unfair, but it sits uncomfortably next to the question of what exactly Pickett was supposed to do differently after 40 months of a war that had consumed everything he had brought to it.
The army in April of 1865 was a ghost of what it had been. The replacement troops filling out his division’s rolls bore almost no resemblance to the Virginians who had walked up that slope at Gettysburg.
Grant had more than 80,000 men in the field against the remnants of the Army of Northern Virginia. Whether George Pickett attended a fish fry or sat rigid at his headquarters that afternoon, Five Forks was not a position the Confederacy could hold.
Sheridan’s force was too large and the strategic situation too far gone. The moment Pickett’s absence made possible was a moment that the broader mathematics of the war had already made almost inevitable.
The shad bake gave the defeat a human face, a single culpable decision, a clean story. Armies prefer stories over arithmetic when they are trying to explain their own destruction.
Lee certainly did.
What happened next is one of the more revealing moments in the entire story of these two men. During the chaotic retreat west from Petersburg, Lee encountered Pickett among the retreating columns.
The specific words that passed between them are disputed, but multiple witnesses recalled that Lee looked at Pickett with something that was not sympathy and asked, in words or in tone, what Pickett was still doing there with the army, as if Pickett no longer belonged.
Some accounts have Lee saying this directly. Others describe it as an expression, a look, a brief remark that everyone present understood the same way.
What they understood was that Lee had written Pickett off. In Lee’s judgment, the failure at Five Forks had been Pickett’s failure, and Pickett had no further claim on the army’s shrinking resources or its collapsing identity.
Pickett was effectively relieved during the retreat, though the formal paperwork was never completed because there was no army left to process it.
He surrendered at Appomattox with Lee, but as a ghost in the formation, no longer in meaningful command of anything.
He did not go to Lee’s funeral in 1870. He was never part of the veterans organizations that built the Lost Cause mythology in the decades after the war.
He watched Lee ascend into a kind of secular sainthood: the marble general, the selfless commander, the embodiment of Southern honor. And he said almost nothing publicly.
The resentment he carried was not the resentment of a man who had lost a war. It was the resentment of a man who felt that what had been taken from him had never been acknowledged, and that the person who took it had been rewarded with immortality.
There was one more meeting between them sometime in the years after Appomattox that those close to Pickett discussed afterward. The details vary by source, but the shape of it is consistent.
Lee came to call on Pickett out of courtesy, out of an old general’s habit of checking on the men who had served under him, out of some impulse that neither man seems to have fully understood. Pickett received him.
The conversation was brief and did not go well. After Lee left, Pickett was overheard saying something about Lee to the friend who was with him.
The friend, writing about it years later, recalled that Pickett described Lee not with hatred, but with a kind of flat finality: as a man who had never truly seen the soldiers under his command as anything other than pieces in a problem he was trying to solve.
Whether Pickett said exactly those words or something like them is less important than the consistent emotional core behind everything he said about Lee in the last decade of his life.
That Lee had been brilliant, and that Lee had been cold, and that in the long run, the brilliance had served Lee’s reputation, while the coldness had served nothing but the ground it filled.
The most quoted line he ever spoke about Lee, “That old man had my division massacred,” is usually treated as a measure of his bitterness, proof that he lacked the emotional equipment to process what Gettysburg meant in the larger context of the war.
But consider the arithmetic of what he was saying.
He lost roughly 3,000 men in under an hour at a point in the battle when the Confederate high command had already failed to take the flanks on July 1st and July 2nd, when Longstreet’s explicit objections had been overridden that same morning, when the Union artillery was intact and waiting behind a stone wall on elevated ground.
He was told those men’s deaths were part of a necessary gamble, a calculated risk by a commander with a larger picture in view.
He watched Lee absorb the result of that gamble into a narrative of Confederate nobility, a narrative in which his own destroyed division was a background detail, a brushstroke in a painting where Lee stood at the center.
And then he was sent back out.
That is the part that gets lost in the argument about Pickett’s character. He was not simply a man who lost a battle and complained.
He was a man who lost a battle, lost his report about that battle, lost his effective command, and then, after Five Forks, lost his standing in the army he had sacrificed everything to serve.
He was used, and he knew it. And after the war, when the mythology hardened, he could not say so in any public forum without being dismissed as a malcontent who was trying to dirty Lee’s memory.
John Singleton Mosby, the Confederate guerrilla commander who by the end of his life had become a Republican and an admirer of Grant, said something after the war that aligned with what Pickett had privately said for years.
Mosby argued that Gettysburg was a grave mistake, that Lee had no business attacking on July 3rd, and that the reverence poured over Lee in the postwar years was based on a selective reading of his record that excised the failures.
Mosby paid for those opinions with his social standing in the South.
Pickett, who lacked Mosby’s combativeness and political nerve, never organized his grievance into a sustained argument. He kept it close, expressed it in private, and died in 1875 at the age of 50.
Ten years later, LaSalle sat down to write the memoir that would try to rehabilitate his memory and, in the process, invent several things he had never actually said.
LaSalle’s memoir is its own complication. She was 23 years younger than her husband, survived him by 50 years, and spent much of those decades crafting a version of George Pickett that was more romantic and more heroic than the evidence fully supported.
Some of the most famous Pickett quotes, including elaborately tender exchanges with Lincoln, whom Pickett had known before the war, appear in her writing and nowhere else.
Historians have been carefully peeling away the invented details for generations, but the core of what she was responding to, the sense that her husband had been used and discarded and then written out of the story he had bled for, was not her invention.
That was real.
George Pickett’s genuine opinion of Robert E. Lee is not reducible to a single bitter line said in private to a group of veterans. It was a position assembled slowly over 12 years, from the afternoon he watched his division disappear in the smoke above Cemetery Ridge to the afternoon someone asked him what went wrong and he told them.
It was a position that took the full account of a man’s military career: the early promise, the Mexican War courage, the genuine leadership at the start of the rebellion, the catastrophe in Pennsylvania, the erasure of the written record, the Bermuda Hundred assignment, Five Forks, the look in Lee’s eyes during the retreat.
And it drew the only conclusion that all of those facts, taken together, honestly supported.
He thought Lee was a man who asked more of his soldiers than the situation warranted and then managed the memory of that asking so skillfully that the soldiers who survived came away grateful for the experience.
He thought Lee possessed a kind of greatness that was inseparable from a kind of ruthlessness. Not the brutal obvious ruthlessness of a man who does not care about his men, but the colder kind, the kind that cares about them in the abstract while spending them in the particular.
He thought Gettysburg was not the high water mark of Confederate valor. He thought it was a catastrophic error committed by a commander who believed in his own judgment more than the evidence in front of him justified.
None of this means Pickett was right about everything.
He was vain and limited in ways his own record confirms. His independent campaigns were failures. His reputation before July 3rd, 1863, was built largely on Longstreet’s patronage and the quality of the men under his command, rather than on any strategic vision of his own.
He was not, by the standards of the war’s best commanders, a great general.
But the question of whether George Pickett was a great general is different from the question of whether what happened to his division at Gettysburg was justified.
And it is different again from the question of whether Lee’s decision to erase Pickett’s report and fold his men’s deaths into a larger myth of Confederate nobility was an honest reckoning with what had actually occurred.
Pickett’s Charge is now the name for something that happened to Pickett. He did not plan it. He did not order it.
He led it in the sense that he sent the brigades forward under orders he did not originate and could not refuse. And he watched it from behind the lines because a division commander in 1863 was not supposed to lead an assault on foot.
The charge is named for him the way a disaster is sometimes named for the person closest to the wreckage, rather than the person who decided to put them there.
When you stand at Gettysburg today and look across that field from Seminary Ridge toward Cemetery Ridge, you understand physically what the men who walked it could not have understood until it was too late.
The ground rises. The Union position is elevated. The approach is exposed on the flanks. There is nowhere to take cover.
The men who made that walk knew, some of them, what they were walking into.
Brigadier General Richard Garnett, who led one of Pickett’s brigades, was suffering from an injury severe enough that he could not walk easily, but rode a horse into the charge because he had been unfairly accused of cowardice at Kernstown the previous year and needed to prove something.
Garnett was killed on that field. His body was never positively identified.
He rode into an open killing ground to clear his name because the culture of the army he served allowed no other way to do it. That culture was Lee’s culture.
George Pickett came home from the war to a country that had no place for Confederate officers in any formal sense and a South that was rebuilding its identity around the men who had led it to defeat.
He tried selling insurance. He tried farming.
He watched former colleagues, Longstreet, Jubal Early, others occupy the public conversation about what the war had meant and why it had gone the way it had.
He did not enter that conversation, not in writing, not in lectures, not in the columns of Southern newspapers. He was not a man built for the retrospective argument.
What he had was the private knowledge that he had been there, that he had seen it, that he had known the men who died and written their names in reports that no longer existed.
He had the testimony of his own experience against a national myth that was growing stronger with every passing year.
Robert E. Lee had died in 1870 and immediately begun the process of becoming something other than a man, something more like a symbol, a principle, a monument.
Pickett had no interest in that process. He had no use for the marble general. He had known the actual one.
He died in July of 1875 in Norfolk, Virginia, officially of a throat infection, having spent the last decade of his life in a kind of slow diminishment that the war had started and the peace had finished. He was 50 years old.
LaSalle buried him, then outlived him so long and so determinedly that by the time she died in 1931, she had spent more than five decades telling the story of a man she loved in the only way she knew how to love him. By making him larger, grander, more tragic than the facts alone would allow.
The facts alone are enough.
A man of genuine early promise was given a division, sent up a slope at the wrong moment by a general who did not listen to his best subordinate’s objection, watched those men die in sufficient numbers to empty the rolls of three brigades, filed a report on what happened, and was told to burn it.
He obeyed. He always obeyed.
That was the central tragedy of George Pickett’s relationship with Robert E. Lee. Not that he was betrayed in any dramatic sense, not that Lee was a villain, but that Pickett was the kind of soldier who followed orders to the end and then discovered that following orders in the accounting of history does not protect you from being assigned the bill.
He never forgave Lee.
The more interesting question, the question that the long view of the war and its memory keeps pressing back into the foreground, is whether he was wrong not to.
The historical consensus has largely chosen Lee. The general’s audacity, his string of improbable victories, his conduct at Appomattox, all of it weighed against the ledger of a few catastrophic decisions, and judged worthy of the monument.
George Pickett made a different calculation. He looked at the same ledger and read the losses column first because the losses column had his men’s names in it.
History gave Lee the statue. Pickett kept the grief.
That is not bitterness talking. That is a man telling you, as plainly as he knew how, what it actually cost to serve at the top of the Army of Northern Virginia, and what it looked like from the bottom of that slope.