On the afternoon of July 3, 1863, between 12,000 and 15,000 Confederate soldiers stepped out of the treeline along Seminary Ridge and began walking east across a mile of open Pennsylvania farmland toward the Union center on Cemetery Ridge. By the time the survivors returned, roughly half of them did not walk back. The assault became the single most catastrophic infantry attack in American military history, and it would forever carry the name of George Pickett, one of three division commanders involved. But Pickett was not the only general defined by that afternoon.
James Longstreet, who watched the same disaster unfold, spent the rest of his life insisting he had predicted it. The distance between those two men, and what that distance cost the Confederacy, has never been fully settled by historians. Longstreet did not want the attack to happen. That fact is not disputed.
He told Robert E. Lee the afternoon before that the ground was wrong, that the math was wrong, and that no 15,000 men who ever breathed could take that position by frontal assault. Lee heard him and proceeded anyway. When the order came down, Longstreet was required to send his corps forward.
He could not bring himself to say the words out loud. When a young artillery officer asked for the signal to advance, Longstreet sat on a fence post, looked at the ground, and nodded. He would later write that he had not wanted to speak because he was afraid his voice would break. George Pickett arrived at West Point in 1842 with easy confidence, a well-connected Virginia family, and charm that won over nearly everyone.
He also graduated last in his class of 1846, 59th out of 59. The evidence does not suggest he was stupid, but that the work never particularly interested him. Pickett served with distinction in the Mexican War, most notably at the storming of Chapultepec, where he carried the regimental flag over the wall after the officer ahead of him was shot down. That moment planted a conviction that shaped everything after it: that courage, visible, physical, and forward-moving, was the highest military virtue.
He carried that conviction for the rest of his career, and it would eventually carry about half his division into a wall of federal musketry. Longstreet came out of the same war with different conclusions. He had also fought at Chapultepec and shown bravery under fire, but he was wired to look at the ground before he looked at the objective. Lee gave him the nickname “Old Warhorse,” and it fit.
Not because he was slow, but because he was steady in the way heavy machinery is steady. Longstreet had a gift for logistics unusual in an army that treated supply lines as an afterthought. He had an eye for terrain that bordered on the instinctive. And he had developed a conviction, sharpened through the first two years of fighting, that the tactical offensive against a prepared position was almost always a losing proposition regardless of the courage of the men ordered to conduct it.
The two men were close. Longstreet was a groomsman at Pickett’s wedding. He had pushed for Pickett’s promotion and used his standing with Lee to place Pickett in positions of greater responsibility. He believed in Pickett’s capacity to lead at the regimental and brigade level.
What he was less certain about was Pickett’s capacity for independent tactical judgment at divisional command. That distinction matters. Leading men forward and setting an example under fire is one skill. Reading a battlefield, weighing options, and deciding when to hold rather than advance is a different skill entirely.
Pickett was very good at the first thing. The second seems to have been beyond him. By the time the Army of Northern Virginia crossed into Pennsylvania in the summer of 1863, Pickett was 38 years old and deeply in love with 18-year-old LaSalle Corbell, whom everyone called Sally. He wrote her long romantic letters.
He wore his dark hair in ringlets that fell to his shoulders and were reportedly scented with perfume. He was a man conscious of how he appeared to the world, and particularly conscious of how he would appear to history. Longstreet’s relationship to self-presentation was the opposite. He was blunt to the point of occasional rudeness.
He disagreed with Lee openly, which in the culture of that army was itself an act requiring indifference to popularity. During the Gettysburg campaign, that disagreement became the central fault line of the entire engagement. Longstreet had argued for a strategic offensive combined with a tactical defensive. Move into Pennsylvania, threaten Washington and Baltimore, and then find good ground and let the Army of the Potomac come to you.
Lee wanted to fight. He had won at Chancellorsville in May by being aggressive, and that confidence had its own gravity. After two days of hard fighting at Gettysburg, both flanks of the Union line had been tested and found strong. Lee decided to strike the center.
His reasoning was that the Union army had reinforced both flanks and must therefore have weakened its middle. Longstreet looked at Cemetery Ridge and saw approximately 8,000 federal infantry behind a stone wall with artillery support on both flanks. The artillery bombardment on the afternoon of July 3 lasted roughly two hours and was probably the largest single cannonade of the war. It made tremendous noise and did relatively little material damage.
Union artillery chief Henry Hunt had ordered his guns to stop returning fire to conserve ammunition for the infantry assault he knew was coming. When the Confederate guns went quiet, the Federal artillerymen ran back to their pieces and waited. Pickett’s division stepped off last. His men were visible in the afternoon light in a way that Union soldiers described in letters with something close to reluctant admiration.
The lines were dressed, the flags were out, and the advance was orderly in the way only very well-trained men moving toward something terrible can be orderly. Pickett himself rode behind his division, and then at some point before the lines reached the Emmitsburg Road, appears to have stopped advancing with them. Exactly where he was and why he was there rather than closer to his men has been debated by historians for 160 years. Pickett said he had positioned himself to direct reinforcements.
Others noted there were no reinforcements to direct. The Confederate lines compressed as they approached the angle, the bend in the Union stone wall that became the focal point of the assault. They were torn apart by converging fire from three directions. A small number of men, perhaps three or four hundred, briefly broke through the Union line at what became known as the high-water mark of the Confederacy.
They were surrounded almost immediately and killed or captured. The assault lasted perhaps 50 minutes from the treeline to the moment the survivors began coming back. More than 6,000 Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured in those 50 minutes. When Pickett came back to where Lee was, Lee told him to prepare his division to repel a potential Union counterattack.
Pickett replied that he had no division. Lee, who rarely showed emotion in the field, told Pickett the charge had been his own fault and that he would take responsibility for it. Pickett blamed Lee. He did not say so publicly in the years immediately following the battle, but in private, among close friends, and in letters, the blame was unambiguous.
He told John Mosby years after the war that Lee had “had my division slaughtered. ” Mosby thought Pickett’s anger was misplaced. The problem with Pickett’s grief was that it existed alongside a consistent unwillingness to examine his own conduct. He had not been close enough to his men during the assault.
He had left the field entirely before it was over. None of this appears in his personal accounting. Longstreet’s accounting was different. He also blamed Lee for ordering the charge over his explicit objection, and he said so in print, which in the postwar South was a far more serious act.
The Lost Cause movement that arose in the decades after Appomattox required Lee to be infallible. Anyone who challenged that infallibility had to be destroyed or discredited. Longstreet was the obvious candidate. He had been Lee’s most visible critic at Gettysburg, and after the war he had joined the Republican Party, worked in the administration of his old friend Ulysses Grant, and taken a position in the New Orleans customs house.
In the theology of the Lost Cause, that made him a traitor twice over. Once for criticizing Lee, and once for collaborating with the men who had beaten them. Jubal Early, who had his own reasons for diverting attention from his own failures at Gettysburg, became the primary architect of the campaign against Longstreet. He argued that Longstreet had delayed his attack on July 2 and that this delay had cost Lee the battle.
The delay argument has been debated by historians ever since. But notably, Early and his allies never seriously engaged with Longstreet’s actual tactical argument: that the frontal assault on July 3 was militarily unsound. They couldn’t, because he was right. Pickett was not made into a villain by the Lost Cause narrative.
He was made into something more useful: a martyr. His charge was transformed from a military catastrophe into a moment of supreme Southern valor. This required ignoring several things, including the question of where Pickett actually was during the charge. Pickett himself was deeply ambivalent about Gettysburg for the rest of his life and avoided most reunion events.
Sally Pickett, who outlived her husband by more than 50 years, became the primary manufacturer of the Pickett legend, writing memoirs and stories that were heavily fictionalized. Her version of George Pickett was a romantic hero out of a story she was telling herself. The actual George Pickett is more complicated. He was brave in the physical sense, genuinely and demonstrably.
He was capable of inspiring personal loyalty. He was also vain, often absent at crucial moments, prone to blaming others for outcomes he had contributed to, and fundamentally unable or unwilling to develop the cold-eyed tactical judgment the war required. After Gettysburg, his division was rebuilt, and he was given independent command in North Carolina, where he conducted operations that were militarily inconsequential and in at least one instance legally questionable. He ordered the execution of Union soldiers captured in North Carolina who had previously served in Confederate units and were considered deserters under Confederate law.
The executions caused an outcry. Grant threatened to hang Pickett after the war, forcing him to spend a year in Canada before the threat was quietly dropped. But the episode that most clearly illustrates the distance between Pickett’s self-conception and his actual conduct happened on April 1, 1865, at a crossroads in Virginia called Five Forks. It happened because George Pickett decided to attend a shad bake.
By the spring of 1865, the Army of Northern Virginia was stretched along the Petersburg lines in conditions of near starvation. Five Forks controlled the Southside Railroad, the last major supply line into Petersburg. If Five Forks fell, Petersburg fell. If Petersburg fell, Richmond fell, and the war in Virginia was effectively over.
On the afternoon of April 1, while Sheridan’s forces and a corps of federal infantry under Gouverneur Warren were massing to attack Five Forks, George Pickett was roughly two miles away eating shad at a social gathering hosted by Thomas Rosser, a Confederate cavalry general. Fitz Hugh Lee was also there. The two of them left their commands without informing their subordinates where they were going. Some combination of terrain, the noise of the cooking fires, and what one source described as a peculiar atmospheric condition meant that the sound of the battle did not carry far enough to alert them.
Pickett did not return to his command until his lines had already collapsed. Several thousand of his men had been captured, and the position was gone. The loss of Five Forks directly triggered the fall of Petersburg, the abandonment of Richmond, and the beginning of the last retreat of the Army of Northern Virginia, which ended eight days later at Appomattox. Whether Pickett’s presence would have changed the outcome is genuinely uncertain.
But whether the commanding general of a position Lee had ordered held “at all hazards” should have been two miles away eating fish while his men were under assault is not a question that requires much deliberation. Lee apparently learned of Pickett’s absence during the battle. He did not relieve him formally, but by several accounts he refused to speak to him after Five Forks. At Appomattox, Lee looked at Pickett and asked what he was still doing in the army.
It was one of the most cutting things Lee ever said about any of his generals, and he said it on the last day of the war. Longstreet was at Appomattox too. He had been badly wounded at the Wilderness in May 1864, shot accidentally by his own men in circumstances eerily similar to what had happened to Stonewall Jackson almost exactly a year earlier. When several of Lee’s generals urged continued resistance, Longstreet was among those who argued for surrender.
He told Lee the war was finished, and that prolonging it would only cause further suffering without changing the outcome. What the two men did after the war says as much about them as anything they did during it. Pickett returned to Virginia, tried farming, failed, and went to work for a life insurance company. He died in 1875 at the age of 50.
Sally outlived him by 56 years and spent much of that time constructing the version of George Pickett that would appear in textbooks. Longstreet lived until 1904, long enough to see the full extent of the Lost Cause mythology and what had been done to his reputation. He joined the Catholic Church, married a woman 32 years his junior, served as a United States marshal and commissioner of railroads under Grant, and continued for the rest of his life to write and speak about Gettysburg with a directness that made him few friends in the former Confederate States. The Lost Cause needed heroes who had failed nobly and villains who had failed to support them.
Pickett fit one role, and Longstreet fit the other. The machinery of postwar Southern memory assigned them accordingly, regardless of what the actual record showed. The actual record shows a methodical, honest general who identified a tactical mistake before it was made, was overruled, watched the disaster unfold as he had predicted, and spent the rest of his life saying so. It also shows a vain, self-involved general who was not where he needed to be at two of the most important moments of his command.
After the war, when a reporter asked Pickett who was responsible for the failure of the charge, he said it was obvious. It was that old man’s fault, meaning Lee. When someone asked Longstreet the same question, he said that he had been given a bad assignment and had done his duty, and that the fault belonged to the order itself, not to any man who carried it out. There is more accountability in Longstreet’s answer than in Pickett’s, even though Pickett’s answer is the one that names a specific culprit.
Accountability and blame are not the same thing, and Pickett never quite grasped the difference between them. What Longstreet warned about, through the entire pattern of his command, was this: that courage without judgment is not a military virtue. That the will to advance is only useful if the advance leads somewhere. A general who cannot ask whether the objective is worth the cost before committing his men, who chooses visibility over effectiveness because visibility is what he can control, is not a soldier in any meaningful sense.
George Pickett was brilliant at the thing that gets men killed and insufficient at the thing that keeps them alive. The war handed him enough men and moments to demonstrate both at scale. The charge on July 3 is the most famous example, but Five Forks may be the more revealing one. At Gettysburg, Pickett was given an impossible order and executed it with something like courage, even if from too great a distance.
At Five Forks, there was no impossible order. There was only a position he was supposed to hold, men who were supposed to receive his leadership, and a fish he apparently found more pressing.