On the afternoon of July 3, 1863, James Longstreet stood behind his artillery on Seminary Ridge and watched the earth shake. One hundred fifty Confederate cannons had opened fire in a rolling thunder that carried more than thirty miles, blanketing the valley between the ridges in thick gray smoke. On Cemetery Ridge, half a mile away, Union soldiers pressed their faces into the dirt and felt the ground vibrate against their chests. Longstreet was not watching the bombardment with pride.
He was watching it with dread, because he knew what came next. In roughly forty-five minutes, twelve thousand Confederate soldiers would step out of the tree line and walk three-quarters of a mile across open ground directly into massed Union artillery and rifle fire. Approximately half of them would be killed, wounded, or captured. The attack would be remembered as Pickett’s Charge, but the man who had to give the order was not Pickett.
It was Longstreet, and he had spent the last two days telling Robert E. Lee that this would fail. For nearly a century after Gettysburg, Southern writers blamed Longstreet for the defeat, claiming he sulked, dragged his feet, and handed the Union its greatest victory through stubbornness. But the accusation ignored who Longstreet actually was.
He was not a cautious man. At Second Manassas in August 1862, he had launched one of the largest Confederate assaults of the entire war, twenty-eight thousand men crashing into the Union flank and nearly destroying an entire army. At Chickamauga, he split the Union army in half. He was Lee’s attack dog, the hammer of the Army of Northern Virginia.
Lee himself once called him the staff in his right hand. What changed at Gettysburg was not Longstreet’s nerve. It was his mind. The lesson had crystallized at Fredericksburg in December 1862.
Longstreet held the Confederate left behind a stone wall on Marye’s Heights while wave after wave of Union infantry charged across open ground and were cut to pieces. The slaughter was so one-sided that Longstreet reportedly remarked the only thing missing was ammunition to keep firing. After Fredericksburg, he understood the arithmetic of defensive ground: make the enemy come to you and bleed them dry, attack them on their own ground and bleed yourself. Before the army marched north into Pennsylvania, Longstreet believed Lee had agreed to this strategy.
They would take strong ground, force the Union to attack, and then counterattack with the fresh corps. Whether Lee actually made that commitment is still debated, but Longstreet believed it with absolute certainty, and that belief shaped everything that followed. Lee saw the same numbers differently. Since taking command in June 1862, he had attacked at the Seven Days, at Second Manassas, across Maryland at Antietam, and at Chancellorsville.
Each campaign produced staggering casualties, and after each one the Union Army was still there, battered but still fielding more men, more guns, more shoes, more bread. Longstreet saw a pattern of attrition that the Confederacy could not survive. Lee saw a streak of audacity that he believed could still shatter Northern will with one decisive blow. The argument between them was not about tactics.
It was about whether the Confederacy could afford to fight Lee’s war at all. On June 28, three days before the battle, George Gordon Meade was woken in his tent and told he now commanded the Army of the Potomac. He had not sought the job and did not particularly want it, but he moved the army north, spread his corps across the roads of Maryland and southern Pennsylvania, and prepared to bring Lee to battle. On the morning of July 1, Confederate infantry looking for shoes in the small town of Gettysburg collided with Union cavalry under John Buford.
The fighting escalated rapidly, and by early afternoon two full Confederate corps were pushing the Union First and Eleventh Corps back through the town. Lee arrived on the field, saw the Federals reeling, and sent orders to Richard Ewell: take Cemetery Hill, but only if practicable. Ewell, who had inherited Stonewall Jackson’s corps and lost a leg at Second Manassas, chose not to attack. The ambiguity of that order would generate a century of argument.
The high ground south of town, Cemetery Ridge running like a fish hook with the two Round Tops at its southern end, fell into Union hands and became the most expensive piece of real estate in American military history. That evening, Longstreet found Lee and laid out his case. The Union was consolidating on high ground. The Confederate army still had the initiative.
If they disengaged, swung south and east, and placed themselves between Meade and Washington, they could force the Federals to abandon their ridge and attack on ground of Confederate choosing. Lee listened, then pointed toward Cemetery Ridge and said in effect that the enemy was there and he intended to attack him there. It was the most consequential refusal of the war. Lee was not stupid, but he was thinking like Napoleon, and Napoleon had never faced rifled muskets, massed artillery on high ground, and an enemy with twice his industrial capacity.
Longstreet looked at the same ridge and saw a graveyard. On the morning of July 2, Lee ordered Longstreet’s First Corps to attack the Union left. The assault was supposed to begin early. Instead, it did not begin until mid-afternoon.
Hood’s and McLaws’s divisions, roughly fifteen thousand men, had to march through rough, unfamiliar terrain to reach their assault positions. When scouts reported part of the route was visible to Union signal stations, Longstreet ordered a countermarch and rerouted the column through a longer covered path, adding one to two hours. It was militarily sound, and it was the decision his enemies would use for the next century to accuse him of deliberate sabotage. By the time the attack went in around four o’clock, the Union line had grown stronger with every passing hour.
The men crossed fields of waving grain and were cut down like grass by a scythe. At the wheat field, the ground changed hands six times in four hours. At the peach orchard, Confederate troops overran the Union salient but ran into reinforcements. At Devil’s Den, Hood’s Texans fought hand-to-hand among the boulders.
Hood himself was wounded early. By twilight, Longstreet’s corps had taken ground but had not broken the Union line. The Union line bent but did not break, and Longstreet had known since morning that it would not. That night, Lee made his decision.
He would attack the center, believing the Union line on Cemetery Ridge had been weakened to reinforce the flanks. Longstreet protested again, urging a flanking move. Lee refused again, and this time there was no ambiguity. At approximately one o’clock on July 3, the Confederate artillery opened.
The bombardment lasted up to two hours, the heaviest of the war to that point, but the Confederate shells were overshooting, sailing over the Union front line and landing in the rear. The infantry positions the attackers would have to cross were largely untouched. On Cemetery Ridge, some Union batteries stopped firing, not because they were destroyed, but to conserve ammunition for the assault they knew was coming. Confederate artillery chief Colonel Alexander sent word to Longstreet that the moment had come.
The attacking force assembled in the tree line. Pickett’s division, about five to six thousand men, the freshest troops on the field, held the center and right. On the left, remnants of Heth’s and Pender’s divisions under Pettigrew and Trimble brought the total to roughly twelve to thirteen thousand men. They formed in long, precise battle lines, dressing their ranks as if on a parade ground.
Pickett, with his long perfumed ringlets and pressed uniform, was magnificent in the way only a man who does not yet understand what is about to happen can be. He rode up to Longstreet and asked whether he should advance. Longstreet could not speak. He lowered his head and nodded.
Twelve thousand men stepped out of the trees and into the sunlight, moving forward at a steady walk across three-quarters of a mile of open rolling farmland. For the first few hundred yards, there was only the sound of their own footsteps. Then the Union artillery opened. Shells exploded in the ranks, tearing holes that closed and reopened.
At four hundred yards, the Union infantry rose up behind a low stone wall and opened fire with canister, tin cans packed with iron balls that shredded the front ranks at close range. A few hundred Confederates, mostly from Armistead’s Brigade, actually reached the Union line and crossed the stone wall at a place that would be called the Angle. Armistead, his hat on the tip of his sword, put his hand on a Union cannon barrel and was shot down moments later. The breach lasted minutes.
Union reserves swarmed in and sealed it. Then the gray line broke, and the survivors turned and stumbled back across fields carpeted with the bodies of their comrades. Of the roughly twelve to thirteen thousand men who stepped off Seminary Ridge, approximately half became casualties in less than an hour. Some units ceased to exist as organized formations.
Pickett’s fresh division came back as scattered groups of stunned, bleeding men. Lee rode forward to meet the survivors. When he told Pickett to rally his division for a possible Union counterattack, Pickett looked at him and said, General, I have no division. Lee rode among the broken men returning across the fields and repeated the same words to every group he met: It is all my fault.
He accepted the blame for the battle. He never accepted the lesson that the strategy had been wrong. Confederate casualties at Gettysburg totaled between twenty-three and twenty-eight thousand, roughly a third of the army Lee had marched into Pennsylvania. Union casualties were comparable, about twenty-three thousand.
Together, in three days of fighting, the two armies produced more than forty-six thousand casualties in a battle neither side had planned to fight. On July 4, as Lee began his retreat in driving rain, the sickly sweet smell of decomposition was already spreading across the fields. The Potomac was flooded, and for days the Army of Northern Virginia was trapped against the river, expecting Meade to attack. He did not.
The army crossed and limped back into Virginia. It was never the same. Every veteran lost at Gettysburg was a hole that could never be filled, and the Confederacy’s pool of fighting-age men was a fraction of the Union’s. After the war, the South needed a story that explained defeat without admitting the cause was flawed or that Lee was fallible.
Into that gap stepped Jubal Early and William Pendleton, former Confederate generals with personal grudges, who attacked Longstreet relentlessly in print and in speeches, accusing him of sulking, deliberate delay, and insubordination. Longstreet made it worse for himself in Southern eyes. He joined the Republican Party, supported Ulysses Grant for president, accepted Reconstruction, served as United States Minister to the Ottoman Empire and as United States Marshal of Georgia, and converted to Catholicism. In the South of the 1870s and 1880s, every one of these choices was seen as betrayal.
The man Lee once called the staff in his right hand became a pariah in his own homeland. Longstreet lived until 1904, long enough to see the South rewrite the war, to see himself cast as the villain, and to watch the myth of Lee’s infallibility harden into something that looked like religion. On April 9, 1865, he had been with Lee at Appomattox when the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered. They shared their last campsite, and then Lee mounted Traveler and rode away.
They never saw each other again. The man who had tried to stop the destruction of Lee’s army, who had begged, argued, and finally could only nod, was erased from the story. It would take a hundred years for history to find him again. Modern historians have systematically dismantled the Lost Cause narrative and restored Longstreet’s reputation.
As one assessment put it, he was as loyal and devoted to his country’s cause as anyone in Confederate gray, and he had no superior as a hard fighter for that cause. The argument he lost at Gettysburg, whether the Confederacy could afford to fight Lee’s war at all, was settled by the arithmetic he had tried to explain. The audacity was a choice, not destiny.
The cost was counted in the men who did not come back from the fields between the ridges.