On the afternoon of July 3, 1863, roughly 12,500 Confederate soldiers stepped from the woods along Seminary Ridge and began walking east across an open Pennsylvania field. Nearly a mile away, Union troops waited along Cemetery Ridge with rifles and artillery aimed at the ground those men were about to cross. Robert E. Lee had ordered the assault, believing it could break the Army of the Potomac.
He did not know that Union commander George Meade had already anticipated an attack on his center. The Union line was ready. Thousands of Confederates would be killed, wounded, or captured before the afternoon ended, and the assault would become known as Pickett’s Charge. Lee had not arrived at Gettysburg intending to destroy his army.
Two days earlier, on July 1, 1863, the armies had converged on the small Pennsylvania town almost by accident. Gettysburg was no great military prize. The roads around it simply drew the opposing forces together as Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia invaded the North. Lee saw an opportunity in the invasion: gather supplies from northern territory, relieve pressure on Virginia, threaten northern cities, and perhaps win a decisive victory on Union soil.
He brought with him confidence. His army had repeatedly defeated larger Union forces, most recently at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. The cost had been enormous, including the loss of Stonewall Jackson, but Lee and his soldiers trusted one another deeply. The fighting on July 1 pushed Union forces back through the streets of Gettysburg to high ground south of town.
Lee had driven the enemy from the battlefield but had not destroyed them. During the night, thousands of Union reinforcements arrived, along with their new commander, George Meade, who had taken charge of the Army of the Potomac only days earlier. By the morning of July 2, the Union Army occupied a defensive line shaped like a fishhook, anchored on Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill, stretching south along Cemetery Ridge to the Round Tops. The position was strong and compact, allowing Meade to shift troops quickly between threatened points.
Lee attacked both ends of the line that day. The fighting spread across Devil’s Den, the Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard, Little Round Top, and Culp’s Hill. Positions changed hands, regiments were shattered, and thousands fell. At Little Round Top, desperate fighting prevented the Union flank from collapsing, but by nightfall the Union line still held.
Before dawn on July 3, fighting resumed around Culp’s Hill, and Union troops drove Confederate forces from the position they had gained there. Lee now had to choose his next move. He could disengage, maneuver, or attack again. The fighting of the previous day had demonstrated the strength of the Union flanks and had forced Meade to shift troops around his line.
Lee concluded that the center might be the weakest point. A massive artillery bombardment followed by a concentrated infantry assault could split the Union position and win the battle. Meade had been thinking as well. On the night of July 2, he met with his senior officers, and they decided to remain at Gettysburg and continue the fight.
Meade anticipated that Lee might strike the center. Across the field, Lieutenant General James Longstreet, who would oversee the main Confederate assault, had serious doubts. The distance was enormous, the ground exposed, and the Union position strong. Longstreet did not believe the attack could succeed, but Lee had made his decision.
The plan called for nearly 150 Confederate cannons to bombard Cemetery Ridge, damaging Union batteries and weakening the infantry positions. Then the infantry would advance. The attack would not be carried out by George Pickett’s division alone. Pickett commanded a division of Virginians, but thousands of other Confederates would advance as well, including troops under James Pettigrew and Isaac Trimble from A.
P. Hill’s corps. Many of those men had already suffered badly in the previous days of fighting. The distance to Cemetery Ridge varied by starting point, but for many it approached a mile.
The Union Army would see them coming. Around 1:00 in the afternoon, Confederate signal guns fired, and the ridge behind the infantry erupted. One of the greatest cannonades of the Civil War had begun. Between 80 and 100 Union guns answered.
Shells screamed overhead, and explosions tore into earth, buildings, equipment, horses, and men. The bombardment was overwhelming for those caught beneath it, but smoke quickly accumulated, and artillerymen in 1863 relied on line of sight and observers. Much of the battlefield disappeared behind drifting smoke. Many Confederate rounds overshot their targets, and the bombardment was not destroying the Union defenses as Lee needed.
Then some Union batteries reduced their fire to conserve ammunition. From across the field, the apparent silence looked encouraging, and Confederate artillery commander Edward Porter Alexander concluded that the moment had arrived. Pickett sought authorization to advance. Longstreet knew what Lee had ordered, and he knew what he believed, but the assault was going forward.
Later accounts would describe Longstreet responding to Pickett’s request with a silent nod. Pickett returned to his command, and the artillery duel began to fade. Thousands of Confederate soldiers stepped from cover. At first, there was something almost orderly about it.
Long lines of men emerged into the open, thousands of bayonets and dozens of battle flags visible above them. They advanced in formation, steadily, deliberately. Then the Union guns opened fire, and the illusion ended. Shell fragments tore through the advancing lines.
Men fell, gaps opened, and the soldiers beside them kept moving. Near the Emmitsburg Road, stout post and rail fences slowed the formation. Men climbed, pushed through, and squeezed over while being hit. Officers struggled to restore order on the other side.
The advance continued, but the fire was changing. Union infantrymen behind stone walls and fence rails poured volley after volley into the approaching lines. Flags fell, and other men lifted them. Officers fell, and others took their places.
The neat lines that had stepped from Seminary Ridge became smaller, broken, and mixed, but they kept moving. Union artillery crews switched to canister, which turned a cannon into an enormous shotgun. At close range, fired into dense infantry, the effect was horrific. Men went down, and the survivors kept coming.
Some Confederate formations had already suffered so heavily that their attack was collapsing. On parts of the field, men stopped, retreated, or surrendered. Union units moved against the flanks of the assault, striking from multiple directions. But toward the center, elements of Pickett’s division were still advancing.
Among them was Brigadier General Lewis Armistead. Before the war, Armistead had served in the United States Army, and one of his closest friends had been Union General Winfield Scott Hancock, who now commanded troops on the very ridge Armistead was approaching. Later accounts would describe Armistead placing his black hat on the tip of his sword so his men could see him. Whatever the exact details, he continued toward the Union line as the Confederate assault was being torn apart.
Brigadier General Richard Garnett was killed, and Brigadier General James Kemper was badly wounded. Pickett’s division was losing its leadership. Still, a portion of the attacking force reached the stone wall. After nearly a mile of open ground, under artillery, rifle fire, fences, and canister, after watching thousands of men fall around them, roughly 200 Confederate soldiers penetrated the Union line near the bend in the wall known as the angle.
For a brief moment, the impossible attack had achieved part of its objective, and close-range fighting erupted. Armistead crossed the wall and pushed into the federal line. For those few moments, the entire battle seemed to balance on a tiny patch of Pennsylvania ground. But the breakthrough was too small.
Other Confederate formations had stalled or collapsed, and Union reinforcements converged on the penetration. The defenders had enough strength to close the breach, and the Confederates did not have enough men at the decisive point to exploit it. Armistead was mortally wounded. His men were overwhelmed.
Some were killed, some retreated, and many surrendered. The brief Confederate foothold disappeared. Later generations would call the area the high water mark of the Confederacy. The survivors of the assault now had to go back.
The distance had not changed, but the field had. Bodies, wounded men, broken rifles, discarded equipment, flags, and blood covered the ground where the attack had crossed. Some wounded Confederates tried to crawl toward their own lines. Others remained where they had fallen.
Union fire continued against the retreating troops. Roughly half of the Confederate force involved in the assault became casualties, around 6,000 men killed, wounded, or captured in less than an hour. Pickett’s division was devastated, and the other Confederate formations involved suffered terribly as well. Union losses connected with repelling the assault numbered well over a thousand.
As survivors returned toward Confederate lines, Lee rode among them, attempting to rally his troops and prepare for the possibility of a Union counterattack. Accounts from the aftermath describe him accepting responsibility for the failure. The attack had not failed because the soldiers refused to advance. They had advanced farther than many might have thought possible, reached the Union line, and some had crossed it.
But courage could not overcome the artillery, terrain, distance, defensive preparation, and firepower waiting on the other side of that field. The Battle of Gettysburg as a whole produced approximately 51,000 casualties over three days, about 23,000 Union and as many as 28,000 Confederate. On July 4, 1863, Lee’s army remained along Seminary Ridge while preparing to withdraw. That night the Confederate retreat began, with a train of wounded stretching for more than fourteen miles.
The invasion of Pennsylvania was over. The war was not, and it would continue for almost two more years, but Gettysburg had demonstrated the limits of Confederate offensive power. Lee did not see the battlefield the way history would later present it. He did not know that the Union center was stronger than he hoped, that Meade had anticipated the attack, that many Union guns remained operational, or that once Confederate troops reached the ridge there were not enough of them in sufficient order to exploit the penetration.
Longstreet’s doubts proved justified. After the war, Gettysburg became the subject of bitter arguments, and Longstreet became a convenient target for those who sought to protect Lee’s reputation. The name Pickett’s Charge itself simplified what actually happened, an assault that involved thousands of soldiers who never served in Pickett’s division. Less than two years after Gettysburg, in April 1865, Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House.
None of that was known on July 3, 1863. To the men behind Seminary Ridge, there was no history book explaining that Gettysburg would become one of the war’s most famous battles. There was only the field, the ridge, the men beside them, and an order. Around 12,500 men went forward.
Thousands fell. About 200 penetrated the Union line at the angle. Then the attack collapsed, and the survivors turned around.
The field swallowed what was left of Lee’s great gamble.