On the afternoon of July 3, 1863, a single man stood at a wooden fence on Seminary Ridge, gripping the planks until his knuckles turned white. Below him, 12,000 Confederate soldiers were stepping into an open field, advancing toward a stone wall lined with Union artillery. He was the only man in that army who believed the charge was doomed. His name was James Longstreet, General Robert E.
Lee’s most trusted commander, a man his own men called the “Old War Horse. ”
Lee gave the order to advance. Longstreet could not even say the words to confirm it—he merely nodded. Witnesses later called that nod the death warrant of the Confederacy.
It was a moment months in the making, born of a plan Longstreet had fought against, a shadow campaign he had begged Lee to abandon. Two months earlier, in May 1863, Lee had lost Stonewall Jackson, the general he trusted more than any other. Jackson was struck by friendly fire at Chancellorsville and died eight days later. Lee was left without his right arm, and with him, the Confederacy lost its most aggressive fighting instinct.
In that vacuum, Lee turned to Longstreet—steady, cautious, and deeply skeptical of offensive warfare. Together, they began planning what would become the Gettysburg Campaign. But the two men did not agree. Longstreet proposed a bold strategic move: send two divisions west to reinforce the Army of Tennessee, crush Union forces near Nashville, and push into Kentucky, possibly threatening Cincinnati.
He argued this would force Ulysses S. Grant to abandon his siege of Vicksburg and relieve Confederate pressure there entirely. Lee rejected the plan outright. He was determined to invade Pennsylvania, move the war onto Union soil, and force Abraham Lincoln to negotiate.
In the weeks before the army marched, Longstreet wrote a letter to a Confederate senator claiming that if the Confederacy could mobilize 150,000 men across the Potomac, they could force Lincoln to choose between peace and total war. These were not the words of a man who secretly opposed the invasion; they were the words of a man who had convinced himself, at least for a time. But on the march, Longstreet’s doubts returned. Lee ordered Confederate cavalry under J.
E. B. Stuart to screen the army’s movement, but Stuart rode off on a glorified raid around the Union army, leaving Lee blind. For nearly a week, Lee had no idea where the Union Army of the Potomac, now led by George Meade, was positioned.
Longstreet pleaded with Lee to fight a defensive battle, to force the Union to attack fortified positions on Confederate terms. Lee would not listen. He believed that after Chancellorsville, his army was invincible. They clashed again on the morning of July 2.
Lee wanted a direct assault on the Union left flank near Little Round Top. Longstreet argued the ground was impossible and the flank could be turned. Lee overruled him. Longstreet’s attack on the second day failed to secure the high ground, and thousands of Confederates fell without achieving their objective.
That night, Longstreet tried once more. He urged Lee to move south, to pull the army between the Union and Washington, to fight on ground of their choosing. Lee refused again. He was determined to attack the center of the Union line on the third day.
Longstreet knew the mistake it would make. He stood at that fence on Seminary Ridge, knowing that the Confederate artillery had already exhausted its ammunition, knowing the Union position was strongest in the center, and knowing the men marching before him would be slaughtered. When Lee asked if Longstreet was ready to give the order, Longstreet could not speak. He simply nodded.
Pickett’s Charge, as it became known, was broken in under an hour. Over half of the Confederate attackers were killed, wounded, or captured. Lee, seeing the retreating survivors, told his officers that the defeat was entirely his own fault. Longstreet, though, would spend the rest of his life defending his own reputation, even as he criticized the battle that never should have been fought.
In later years, Longstreet became a Republican and endorsed Ulysses Grant for president, a decision that turned him into a traitor in the eyes of many former Confederates. He published a memoir, “Lee and His Generals,” in which he defended his actions at Gettysburg, but he was blamed by other Confederate officers for the loss. He suffered through a string of personal and professional failures after the war, from financial ruin to accusations that he sent his men into a suicidal charge. Even after his death in 1904, his name remained controversial, with veterans on both sides still arguing over what had really happened on that July afternoon.
The only point everyone could agree on was this: had Lee listened to Longstreet on the night of July 2, had he moved south and pulled the Union away from its strong position, the battle of Gettysburg might have ended very differently. Instead, it became the turning point of the Civil War, the moment the Confederacy’s invasion of the North collapsed, and the moment that first failed attack on the second day set the stage for the third.