On July 1, 1863, Confederate General Henry Heth marched his division toward Gettysburg expecting little more than a supply-gathering mission. Instead, his men collided with Union cavalry under General John Buford, and by 8 a. m. both sides were firing.
That accidental encounter mushroomed into three days of catastrophic combat that became the bloodiest battle on the American continent. Contrary to one of the most enduring campfire legends of the Civil War, the battle was not fought over shoes. The story that Heth was scouting for a shoe factory comes from a single post-war memoir by a staff officer who wasn’t even present that morning. Most historians now agree that Heth’s division was looking for supplies generally, and that the two armies simply stumbled into each other in the rolling Pennsylvania countryside.
Lee had invaded the North, and Union General George Meade was chasing him. Neither side knew precisely where the other was. That lack of intelligence proved disastrous for the Confederates from the start, largely because of General J. E.
B. Stuart, Lee’s brilliant but vain cavalry commander. Lee had ordered Stuart to screen the army’s advance, but Stuart instead took three brigades, about 4,500 men, on a wide ride around the entire Union Army. He vanished for six days, from June 25 to July 2, leaving Lee marching blind through enemy territory with 70,000 men.
Lee was livid. In his after-battle report, he stated coldly that Stuart’s absence deprived him of cavalry during the first two days of the battle. When Stuart finally arrived on July 2, exhausted and low on ammunition, Lee greeted him with only a formal, “I’m glad you are here. ” Stuart spent the rest of his life defending that ride.
He was killed at Yellow Tavern in May 1864 at age 31, and throughout his remaining months he never stopped trying to justify his decision. By the morning of July 1, Buford’s dismounted troopers were holding off a far larger Confederate force west of town. Armed with breech-loading carbines that fired three times faster than muzzleloaders, they delayed the enemy for two hours before falling back. Union reinforcements arrived under General John Reynolds, one of the best commanders in the Army of the Potomac.
Within just fifteen minutes of his arrival, Reynolds was killed by a sniper’s bullet through the back of the neck, the first high-ranking death of the battle. Command passed to General Abner Doubleday, the man often falsely credited with inventing baseball. He was a solid officer, and under his direction the Union First and Eleventh Corps fought desperately against nearly two-to-one odds. By early afternoon they were being driven back through the streets of Gettysburg, retreating toward a critical piece of ground south of town called Cemetery Hill.
That hill was the key to the entire battlefield. If the Confederates seized it on July 1, the Union Army would have no anchor for its defensive line, and Meade would be forced to retreat or attack uphill. Lee sent his subordinate, General Richard Ewell, a famously cautious order: take Cemetery Hill if practicable. Ewell was a competent commander who had lost his nerve after losing a leg at Second Manassas and, more importantly, losing confidence in himself.
Where his old commander Stonewall Jackson would have stormed the hill within the hour, Ewell hesitated, called a council of war, and let the sun go down without ordering a single regiment to test the defenses. General Jubal Early, commanding a division under Ewell, made the same mistake. His men had pushed the Union forces through town and could see Cemetery Hill barely a thousand yards away, defended by only a handful of dazed soldiers. Early later claimed his men were exhausted and that Union reinforcements were already arriving, but witnesses reported that he never even sent a scout forward.
He simply assumed the attack was impossible. Years afterward, Early wrote that he always regretted not pressing on. That was as close as he ever came to admitting his error. By midnight, the Union had built a defensive line shaped like a fishhook, anchored on Cemetery Hill and running south along Cemetery Ridge, with its curve around two hills called Little Round Top and Big Round Top.
It became one of the strongest positions in North America. The Confederates had won the first day’s fighting, but they had thrown away the victory through hesitation and passive command. Day two brought the most infamous demonstration of individual recklessness in the battle. General Daniel Edgar Sickles was a New York politician who had finagled a general’s commission through connections.
Before the war, he had shot and killed his wife’s lover in broad daylight and was acquitted using the first successful temporary insanity defense in American history. On July 2, he commanded the Union Third Corps on the far left of the fishhook. Meade had given him explicit orders: hold the line from Cemetery Ridge to Little Round Top, connect to the hill, and do not advance. Meade had taken command of the Army of the Potomac just three days earlier and needed his corps commanders to follow instructions.
He rode out to Sickles’s position, looked at the low ridge, and repeated, “Stay here, Dan. Connect to Little Round Top. Do not advance. ” Sickles agreed, then ignored everything his commander had said.
He looked ahead at a peach orchard, a wheat field, and a rocky jumble called Devil’s Den, decided the ground he stood on was too low, and around 3 p. m. marched his entire corps about three-quarters of a mile forward. He left Little Round Top completely undefended except for a signal station.
He created a salient that bulged out of the Union line and could be attacked from three sides. He also created a half-mile gap between his corps and the rest of the army. When Confederate General James Longstreet launched his attack on the Union left flank at 4 p. m.
, he could hardly believe what his scouts reported: Sickles had moved into an exposed salient, and Little Round Top was empty. By all accounts, Longstreet smiled. Fifteen thousand Confederates hit Sickles’s position from three directions. The fighting in the Peach Orchard was savage, with men stabbing each other with bayonets among the blossoms.
The Wheatfield changed hands six times. Devil’s Den became a sniper’s nest. Sickles rode around waving his sword until a cannonball tore through his right leg just below the knee. He was carried off smoking a cigar, and he kept shouting orders as surgeons amputated his leg behind the lines.
He then did something extraordinary: he had the leg preserved and donated to the Army Medical Museum in Washington. He visited it for the rest of his life, and the leg is still on display today at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Maryland. Some historians have argued that Sickles’s advance accidentally helped the Union, because it delayed Longstreet’s attack by about two hours, buying time for reinforcements to reach Little Round Top. But Sickles did not intend to delay anything.
He intended to occupy better ground, and his decision nearly destroyed the Union left flank. The Union survived because of other men, not because of Sickles. He spent the next forty years taking credit for saving the Union line, a claim almost no historian accepts. The men who actually saved the left flank were led by General Gouverneur Warren, Meade’s chief engineer.
Around 3:30 p. m. , Warren climbed Little Round Top and saw Confederate columns massing for an attack. He knew that if the hill fell, the entire Union line would be flanked.
He sent messengers racing for reinforcements. The nearest was Colonel Strong Vincent’s brigade, just 26 years old, who did not wait for orders. He ran his men up the hill, arriving just minutes before the Confederates. Vincent placed the 20th Maine on the far left, under a former college professor named Joshua Chamberlain.
The regiment had 358 men, and if they broke, there was nothing behind them. The Confederates attacked again and again. For ninety minutes the 20th Maine fought with ammunition running low and casualties mounting. Finally, Chamberlain ordered a bayonet charge, not out of grand heroism, but because his men had almost no bullets left.
The charge surprised the exhausted Confederates and captured hundreds of prisoners. The Union left flank held. Chamberlain later received the Medal of Honor. Strong Vincent was killed.
Warren was promoted. And Sickles took credit for a crisis that he himself had caused. By the morning of July 3, both armies had spent two days bleeding into the Pennsylvania soil. Lee had failed on both flanks.
Thousands of Confederate soldiers lay dead in the Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield, and Devil’s Den. Facing retreat or one final gamble, Lee chose to gamble. He decided to launch a massive infantry assault against the center of the Union line on Cemetery Ridge. Lee’s plan was to mass artillery on Seminary Ridge, bombard the Union center for two hours, then send about 12,500 infantry across nearly a mile of open ground.
The plan had fatal flaws. The Union center was the strongest part of the entire fishhook, protected by high ground, fresh troops, and massed artillery. The open ground was a perfect killing field. And the Confederate bombardment largely failed: most of the shells overshot the Union lines and exploded harmlessly in the rear, while the Union artillery, protected by the ridge, tore into the Confederate gun crews.
Longstreet, who advised Lee to instead march around the Union flank toward Washington, knew the charge was madness. He begged Lee to change course. Lee refused. Longstreet later wrote, “I told General Lee that the attack was impossible.
He said it must be done. I saluted and turned away. ” He obeyed an order he knew was suicidal. The attack fell to General George Pickett’s division, which had not yet fought at Gettysburg.
Pickett was a vain, romantic commander with long perfumed hair and tailored uniforms, beloved by his men. At around 2:30 p. m. , the Confederate guns fell silent.
Pickett gave the order, and about 12,500 men stepped off across the open field. Union artillery ripped into them with round shot, exploding shells, and canister. Men fell in windrows. At the Emmitsburg Road, the attackers had to climb a fence while Union riflemen waited behind a stone wall just fifty yards away.
The fence line became a slaughter bench. A few hundred Confederates made it to the stone wall and fought hand-to-hand for about ten minutes. Then more Union soldiers arrived, and the rebels ran out of men. Pickett watched his division break and rode forward to rally survivors, but there was nothing left to rally.
The charge failed with catastrophic losses. Lee later wrote in his official report, “The attempt was a mistake. The loss was heavy. The fault is mine.
” Pickett never forgave him. A famous quote attributed to him holds that Lee had his division slaughtered. The exact wording comes from a memoir written decades later, but the sentiment is historical. Longstreet spent the rest of his life defending his advice against Lee’s decision.
The aftermath of Gettysburg scattered the commanders in very different directions. Stuart was killed in action in May 1864. Ewell was captured in April 1865, a week before the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, and spent his remaining years farming in Tennessee, never speaking publicly about July 1. Early lost his own army in the Shenandoah Valley, then became the chief architect of the Lost Cause myth, rewriting history for decades to make himself look wise.
He died in 1894 still insisting he had nearly won at Gettysburg. Sickles received a Medal of Honor in 1897, thirty-four years after the battle and largely because he lobbied for it. Many veterans were furious. He became a congressman, a diplomat, and a shameless self-promoter, dying in 1914 at age 94 while still insisting that his saliented had saved the Union line.
Pickett spent the rest of the war in disgrace after another disastrous battle at Five Forks in April 1865. He fled to Canada briefly, returned, sold insurance, and died in 1875 at a small funeral. His widow’s romanticized memoir created much of the Pickett legend. Longstreet outlived them all.
He joined the Republican Party, supported Black voting rights, and served as a diplomat and federal official. For that, fellow southerners called him a traitor, and Lost Cause writers turned him into the villain of Gettysburg, the man too slow, too reluctant, too cautious. In reality, he was the one Confederate general who saw the truth and tried to stop the disaster. He died in 1904, still telling anyone who would listen that he had warned Lee not to make that charge.
Lee himself was not an idiot. He was a great man who made a terrible mistake on a hill in Pennsylvania. His arrogance, his refusal to listen to Longstreet, and his blindness to the strength of the Union position cost the Confederacy its best chance at victory. He died in 1870, beloved and haunted, with last words reported as “Strike the tent.
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The greatest failures at Gettysburg were not the mistakes of privates under fire or lieutenants who misread maps. They were the decisions of men with stars on their collars who let vanity, habit, or ego override common sense. Behind every heroic charge was a general who did not have to order it, and behind every gallant stand was a position that did not have to be defended.
The men who followed orders were the ones who bled.