At three in the morning on June 28, 1863, a staff officer from Washington entered a tent in Maryland, woke a sleeping general, and told him to get up and dress. The general thought he was being arrested. He said as much in the moments that followed, and he wrote the same thing to his wife a few days later. His quarrels with his superiors were well known.
The Army of the Potomac had just suffered a humiliating defeat in Virginia, and the arrival of a sealed order from the capital in the middle of the night rarely brought good news. He was not being arrested. He was being given command of the largest army the United States had ever fielded, nearly ninety-four thousand men. The enemy had already crossed into Pennsylvania, no one at headquarters could say exactly where, and their commander was regarded by professional soldiers on both sides as the finest field commander in North America.
The new general had three days. He was the fourth man to command that army in ten months. He had never led more than a corps. He did not want the assignment, and he was in no position to refuse it.
Three days later, roughly 165,000 men were locked in battle around a market town of 2,400 people, and by the end of the third evening more than 50,000 of them were dead, wounded, captured, or missing. Everyone knows the outcome. Almost no one can say how it began or who made the decision to fight there, because the man who made that decision arrived with no infantry, no order to hold anything, and just 2,700 cavalrymen. Was the ground around that town really worth a battle no one had planned?
And why did the army that won spend the next twenty years destroying two of the three officers who chose the field? Start with why Robert E. Lee was in Pennsylvania at all. The argument was sound, even if the result was not.
In May 1863, at Chancellorsville, Lee had taken sixty thousand men, split his force twice in the face of an enemy army of 130,000, and beaten them. It is generally regarded as the boldest tactical performance of his career. It cost him about thirteen thousand casualties he could not replace, and it cost him Stonewall Jackson. It changed the strategic situation by not an inch.
Two years of war in Virginia had stripped the region of the supplies needed for another full campaign season. The Confederacy was losing in the West, where Union armies were tightening a siege around Vicksburg on the Mississippi. In the North, an election year was approaching, and a real and measurable political movement favored ending the war through negotiation. Lee’s answer was to move north.
Feed the army from Pennsylvania’s farms for one summer. Threaten Harrisburg, Baltimore, or Philadelphia. Force the Army of the Potomac out of its fortifications and into battle. Destroy it in the open field and let the political consequences follow.
He crossed the Potomac with 71,000 men in three corps in mid-June. He advanced with confidence, and the confidence was not unreasonable. In fourteen months, this army had beaten the Army of the Potomac under four different Union commanders at the Seven Days, Second Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. Lee was reported to have told an officer that if properly led, this army was invincible.
Whether he used those exact words matters less than the fact that the belief was real, from corps commanders down to the rank and file. Then he lost his eyes. On June 25, Major General Jeb Stuart rode out with three brigades of Confederate cavalry on a ride around the Union army, under an order from Lee so vague that historians still argue about it. The ride was supposed to take a few days.
Union columns on the road pushed Stuart further east, and he became separated, lost communication, captured a wagon train, and did not rejoin Lee until the evening of July 2. For eight days in enemy territory, on an operation whose entire premise was knowing where the other army was, the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia had no intelligence. On June 28, he learned not from his own cavalry but from a hired scout that the Union army had already crossed the Potomac and was far closer than he thought. He immediately ordered his three corps, scattered across sixty miles of Pennsylvania, to concentrate near a road junction east of South Mountain.
The junction was Gettysburg. Ten roads met there. Now consider the man approaching that same junction from the south on the morning of June 30. Brigadier General John Buford was thirty-seven, born in Kentucky, raised in Illinois, West Point class of 1848.
He was a professional dragoon who had spent his prewar years on the plains and in Utah. He was so reserved that he was described as taciturn. He smoked a pipe and was considered the most professional and capable division commander in the cavalry corps. He commanded the First Division, two brigades under William Gamble and Thomas Devin, about 2,700 men.
He reached Gettysburg that morning, drove off a Confederate brigade approaching the town from the west, then pulled back and did something that changed the battle. He studied the ground. He saw low parallel ridges running north-south with the town in a shallow bowl between them: Herr Ridge, McPherson Ridge, and Seminary Ridge west of town, none more than a few dozen feet high, all crossing the roads coming in from the west. South of town was an entirely different feature: a long ridge running south from a hilltop cemetery, ending in two rocky heights.
Buford understood two things immediately, and he wrote both in his dispatch that night. First, Confederate infantry was massing to the west and north and would be on the roads within hours. Second, the high ground south of town was the best defensive position in the region, and whoever held it would fight on his own terms. So a cavalry officer with 2,700 men and no order to hold anything decided to fight a delaying action west of town on ground he knew he would lose, so that the ground south of town would remain in Union hands until the infantry arrived.
In 1863, cavalry did not charge into infantry in direct frontal combat, and everyone knew it. Buford’s men could fight dismounted. That was the math of the morning of July 1: one man in every four had to hold the horses, leaving about 2,000 men with rifles. They carried breech-loading carbines, Sharps and Burnside, which could be loaded and fired far faster than a muzzle-loading rifle musket from behind a fence.
The carbine had shorter range and lighter bullets, useless in a sustained long-range fight, but from cover at two to three hundred yards, a dismounted cavalryman could produce a volume of fire that made a thin line feel strong. Buford placed Gamble on Herr Ridge across the Chambersburg Pike with orders to fall back by stages, gave Devin the northern roads, and sent cavalry south to find the nearest infantry. Around seven in the morning, the lead brigades of Major General Henry Heth’s division came down that pike and attacked. Heth had told his corps commander he wanted to go to Gettysburg for supplies.
The popular version of the story says the supplies were shoes, although Gettysburg had no shoe factory and many historians consider the tale a fabrication that survived because it was memorable. What is not disputed is that Heth advanced with about 7,000 men, expecting to brush aside militia, and spent nearly three hours making little progress against 2,000 carbineers. Buford fought exactly the battle he had planned. His line gave up Herr Ridge and fell back to McPherson Ridge, trading distance for time.
He spent most of the morning in the cupola of the Lutheran Seminary with field glasses, watching Confederate columns thicken to the west and north and sending messengers south. Around ten the infantry arrived, and the first man to reach the field was Major General John Reynolds. Reynolds commanded the First Corps and was regarded by his peers as the most respected officer in that army. In early June, Lincoln had called him to Washington to discuss taking command of the Army of the Potomac.
According to accounts from his family and staff, Reynolds said he would take the position only if there were no interference from Washington, and the conversation ended there. He galloped to the seminary, found Buford, and asked what the situation was. Buford told him. Reynolds immediately ordered his corps forward, sent word that he would hold the enemy as long as possible, and rode ahead to bring the Iron Brigade into McPherson Woods.
Within the hour he was dead, shot behind the right ear, killed before he hit the ground. What followed was one of the most intense infantry fights of the entire war. In McPherson Woods, the Iron Brigade broke Archer’s Brigade and captured James Archer, the first general officer captured from Lee’s army since Lee had taken command. North of the pike, in an unfinished railroad cut, Davis’s Confederate regiments were trapped and hundreds surrendered.
Then, in the early afternoon, numerical superiority arrived. Two Confederate divisions under Robert Rodes and Jubal Early came down from the north on the Eleventh Corps, which was deployed on open low ground with no natural defensive line. This was the same corps that had been routed by Jackson’s flank attack at Chancellorsville two months earlier, and hit on the flank again, it broke again. The retreat route ran through the streets of the town, the worst possible place for a withdrawing force.
Thousands were captured in alleys and gardens. The First Corps fell back with them. They had numbered about 9,000 that morning; by the time they came down off the ridge, fewer than 3,000 remained. The 24th Michigan lost 363 out of 496 men.
On the Confederate side, the 26th North Carolina, which faced them, lost about 590 out of 800. By four in the afternoon the Union positions west and north of Gettysburg had completely collapsed, and the defeated regiments were streaming through town toward the cemetery on the hill to the south. That was exactly where Buford had wanted them to end up. Lee reached the battlefield that afternoon and saw the Union army falling back and a hill in front of him.
He sent Richard Ewell, whose corps had just driven the Eleventh Corps through town, to take Cemetery Hill if possible, but warned him not to bring on a general engagement. Ewell did not attack. The question of whether he should have is a debate that has run for a hundred and fifty years and cannot be settled. Supporters point to his corps being disordered after a day of hard fighting, Union artillery on the hill, reports of Federals on his flank, and Lee’s explicit instruction not to start a major fight.
Critics believe Jackson would have taken the hill. What is beyond dispute is what the Union army did with the afternoon it was given, and who did it. Meade, miles to the south, learned that Reynolds was dead. He needed someone on the field who could assess the situation and decide whether to fight there at all.
He sent Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, commander of the Second Corps, with written authority to take command of all forces on the battlefield. Oliver Otis Howard, commander of the Eleventh Corps, was on the hill and senior to Hancock by date of rank. Howard mentioned that when Hancock arrived. The two men told slightly different versions of what happened next, not surprising since both wrote about it for the rest of their lives.
Hancock presented the order, said in effect that he was directed to assume command, and went to work arranging the position; Howard cooperated without making an issue of it. Hancock spent the rest of the day deploying units on Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill and along the ridgeline running south, turning a beaten army into a defensive line. Then he sent word to Meade that the position was good and the whole army should be brought there. Meade brought it, and by dawn on July 2 the Army of the Potomac stood in one of the strongest defensive positions in the history of the American army.
Seen from above, the Union line ran from the wooded height of Culp’s Hill on the right, west and around Cemetery Hill, then south along Cemetery Ridge for about two miles, ending at two rocky hills called Little Round Top and Big Round Top. Soldiers called the shape a fishhook. The entire line covered about three miles. The value of the shape was not the view.
It was time. A commander standing at the bend of the hook could move a division from one flank to the other behind the ridge, hidden from the enemy, in under an hour. Lee’s army held an outer line nearly five miles long, and messages from one end to the other had to travel a long route across open ground. His men did not know what interior lines meant.
The Union army used that advantage a dozen times over the next two days, rushing troops to every point that seemed about to give way. On the morning of July 2, James Longstreet argued with Lee over all of this. Longstreet commanded the First Corps and had been Lee’s most reliable subordinate for a year. His proposal was to disengage, move the whole army around the Union left, get between Meade and Washington, and take a strong defensive position that would force the Union army to attack.
Lee refused. He explained later that the enemy was there and that was where he wanted to attack him, because his army had beaten this opponent four times and maneuvering in enemy country without cavalry was a greater risk than attacking a position he could see. Longstreet accepted the decision, but the manner of his acceptance became one of the great controversies of postwar American history, with former Confederate officers accusing him for decades of moving too slowly on July 2. What is documented is that the flank march took most of the day.
It included a countermarch when the column came within view of a Union signal station, and Longstreet’s attack did not begin until after four in the afternoon. By then, the Union left had moved, and it had moved without orders. Major General Daniel Sickles commanded the Third Corps and held the southern end of Cemetery Ridge, where Meade had ordered him to stay. Sickles was a New York politician, the only corps commander in the army with no military education, and had become famous across the country in 1859 for shooting his wife’s lover in a Washington square and being acquitted through the first successful use of the temporary insanity defense in American legal history.
Sickles did not like the low southern end of Cemetery Ridge. He saw slightly higher ground near a peach orchard almost a mile forward, and moved his entire corps there. The move created a salient bulging out from the Union line, exposed on both flanks, unsupported, and far too large a front for 10,000 men. It also left the base of Little Round Top uncovered, with nothing behind it.
One might think someone would have said something. No one did. Not in time. When Meade rode to that part of the field in the late afternoon, he found a whole corps standing where it was not supposed to be.
By then Longstreet’s artillery had already opened, and it was too late to bring the corps back. That brings the story to a brigadier general with no troops who was riding toward a rocky hill to see what was happening. Gouverneur Kemble Warren was thirty-three, the chief engineer of the Army of the Potomac, and his job that afternoon was to survey the terrain for Meade. He reached the summit of Little Round Top around 3:30 and found nothing there but a small signal party.
From that height he could see the entire southern end of the field, and he realized that the hill he was standing on was the key to the whole Union position, and there was no one on it. He suspected Confederate troops were lurking in the woods below, and he took a specific step to confirm it. He ordered a cannon to fire a shell into the woods to the southwest. When the shell passed overhead, the soldiers in the woods instinctively looked up, and the low afternoon sun caught the metal of their gun barrels and bayonets.
Warren saw Confederate battle lines where there should have been empty ground. He sent staff officers to find troops. He had no authority to order anyone to do anything. What saved the hill was that two officers acted on that request without waiting for permission.
Colonel Strong Vincent, a twenty-six-year-old brigade commander in the Fifth Corps, stopped one of Warren’s messengers and on his own authority brought his four regiments up the southern slope. Behind him came Colonel Patrick O’Rorke of the 140th New York and Lieutenant Charles Hazlett, who dragged an artillery battery up such a steep slope that the gun parts had to be hauled by hand over the rocks. Vincent placed his regiments on the southern slope and put the 20th Maine, about 386 men under Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, at the extreme left with the instruction that it was the end of the Union line and must be held at all costs. What happened afterward on that slope has been told so many times that the actual record has been buried.
Here it is. Chamberlain’s regiment absorbed repeated attacks from Alabama regiments under Colonel William Oates, men who had marched over twenty miles in the heat, sent their water detail away and never saw them return, and fought among broken rocks in the last light of day. When Confederates came around his flank, Chamberlain bent his line back until his regiment was fighting in a V. When ammunition ran out, he ordered a bayonet charge down the hill, and the exhausted attackers broke.
Vincent was shot on the hill and died five days later. O’Rorke was killed leading his regiment over the crest. Hazlett was killed beside his gun. North of Little Round Top, the salient Sickles had created collapsed exactly as the map predicted.
The Wheat Field changed hands perhaps six times and consumed a large part of 20,000 men in a few hours. The Devil’s Den, jumbled boulders at the foot of the Round Tops, saw fighting at point-blank range. In the Peach Orchard, both sides of the salient were crushed at once. Sickles was struck by a shell that shattered his right leg, amputated that evening, and a gap opened in the middle of the Union line where his corps was supposed to be.
Hancock, riding to close the gap, saw a Confederate brigade advancing across the open field with nothing to stop it. At hand he had the First Minnesota, about 262 men. He pointed at the advancing flag and ordered them to take it. They charged a force several times their size and stopped the attack for the few minutes Hancock needed to bring up other regiments.
Of the 262, about 215 were killed or wounded. That is a casualty rate of over eighty percent, among the highest ever suffered by an American unit in a single engagement. At the other end of the fishhook that evening, the fight turned on a decision made two days earlier by a sixty-two-year-old brigadier general whom other officers considered to be wasting his men’s time. George Sears Greene, the oldest general on the field, commanded a brigade on Culp’s Hill.
When his division reached the position, Greene insisted his men build breastworks, logs, dirt, rocks, whatever was at hand, even though in 1863 many officers considered digging entrenchments unmilitary and bad for morale. Greene, who had spent twenty years between army assignments as a civil engineer, insisted anyway and made his brigade commanders do it. At the time the decision seemed minor. It was not.
On the evening of July 2, most of the Twelfth Corps was pulled off Culp’s Hill to shore up the broken left, leaving Greene’s 1,400 men holding a line meant for a division. Ewell’s corps attacked in force in the darkness, and Greene’s brigade held for hours of night fighting, shifting men along the trench line, using regiments sent over from neighboring corps, and never losing the crest. The Confederates took the empty trenches on Greene’s right but could not advance beyond them. If that hill had fallen, the Confederates would have been on the Baltimore Pike behind the Union army, at the base of the fishhook.
On the morning of July 3, Lee’s plan was to renew the attacks on both flanks. The fighting on Culp’s Hill resumed at dawn and ended around eleven when the Confederates were driven out of the captured trenches. What remained was the center. At about one in the afternoon, nearly 150 Confederate guns opened the largest artillery bombardment ever seen on the North American continent.
Its stated purpose was to crush the Union center and silence its guns before the infantry went in. Two things went wrong. First, Confederate fuzes were inconsistently manufactured, so shells meant to burst over the Union line often burst late, sailing past the crest of Cemetery Ridge and landing on the reverse slope, where the reserves, supply wagons, and Meade’s headquarters absorbed repeated hits and were eventually abandoned. But the infantry lying on the forward slope took far fewer casualties than the bombardiers believed.
Second, the Union artillery chief, Brigadier General Henry Hunt, ordered his batteries to slow their fire and then stop, saving ammunition for the coming assault. The Confederates interpreted that silence as their guns having been knocked out. Colonel Edward Porter Alexander, in charge of Longstreet’s artillery, sent a note to Pickett: if the attack was to be made, it must be now, because his ammunition was nearly gone. Longstreet, who believed the attack would fail and had told Lee so that morning, nodded his assent rather than give the order himself.
From the cover of the trees on Seminary Ridge, twelve to thirteen thousand men stepped out and began to cross nearly three-quarters of a mile of open, undulating ground in the July heat toward infantry behind a stone wall and guns on both flanks. They were shelled the entire way. At about 400 yards, Union guns switched to canister. At 200 yards, the infantry opened fire.
The Union line at the point of attack was arranged so that fire came in from three directions. A portion of the attacking force reached the bend in the wall now called the Angle. Brigadier General Lewis Armistead crossed the wall with around two hundred men, put his hand on a Union cannon, and was shot. The battery he reached was commanded by twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Alonzo Cushing, who had already been wounded twice and was holding his own intestines in as he kept his remaining guns firing at the wall.
He was killed there. The United States took 151 years to award him the Medal of Honor. The attack lasted less than an hour. Nearly half the men who crossed the field did not return.
Every regimental commander in Pickett’s division was killed or wounded. All three of the division’s brigadier generals were casualties. The three-day totals were these. Union losses were about 23,000, including over 3,000 dead.
Confederate losses are not precisely known but are estimated between 23,000 and 28,000. In seventy-two hours the two armies lost about 50,000 men around a town of 2,400, every church, barn, and meeting hall filled with wounded, thousands of dead horses on the fields. Lee retreated in the rain on July 4 with a wagon train of wounded seventeen miles long. The Potomac was flooded, and he was trapped on the north bank for a week.
Meade followed cautiously, called councils of war, and did not attack. Lee recrossed into Virginia on the night of July 13. Lincoln sat down and wrote Meade a letter saying the enemy had been within his grasp and the war could have ended, then put it in a drawer and never sent it, noting on the envelope that it was never sent, and it was found among his papers after his death. Now the reckoning, and this reckoning is the reason the story belongs here.
John Buford, who chose the ground, never received proper public recognition for it in his lifetime. He returned to the campaign in Virginia, contracted typhoid fever, and died on December 16, 1863, five months after the battle, at age thirty-seven. His promotion to major general arrived at his deathbed. According to officers present, he understood what it was and said it was too late.
Gouverneur Warren, who found Little Round Top, was promoted to corps command and fought through the rest of the war. On April 1, 1865, at Five Forks, one week before Appomattox, Phil Sheridan relieved him of command of the Fifth Corps on the grounds that he was slow. Warren petitioned for a court of inquiry to clear his name. He petitioned for fourteen years.
The court finally convened in 1879, sat for over a hundred days, and largely exonerated him. Its findings were published in 1882, three months after Warren died. He gave instructions that he was to be buried in civilian clothes without military honors, and so he was. His statue still stands on Little Round Top, placed there by his old comrades in 1888, looking out over the ground he understood.
George Meade, who won the battle, spent the following winter facing an inquiry by the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, where Daniel Sickles and others testified that he had been timid and had planned to retreat. Sickles spent the rest of his long life pressing that campaign in newspapers and Washington, lobbied successfully for recognition of his own actions, and was awarded the Medal of Honor for Gettysburg in 1897, thirty-four years after the battle. Meade remained in command of the Army of the Potomac until Appomattox, where Grant kept his headquarters beside his and made the decisions, and Meade died in 1872 at age fifty-six. The site is now Gettysburg National Military Park, with more than three hundred monuments, more than any other battlefield in the world.
Four and a half months after the war ended, Lincoln came to dedicate the cemetery on the hill Buford had spent his morning trying to protect, and he spoke for about two minutes. The version of Gettysburg that survives in popular memory is the story of a charge across an open field, and that charge gets the attention it deserves. But the fight was not decided in that hour. It was decided on three different afternoons, by three different men, who looked at a hill or a ridge and made a decision without regard for the chain of command or standing orders: this is the important ground.
One of them was dead within five months. Another spent fourteen years petitioning his own army for a hearing and received his answer after death. And the officer who moved his corps to the wrong place, losing 10,000 men, spent the next thirty years being congratulated for it.