Adams County: Three Days That Remade a Nation
Pennsylvania
Adams County, Pennsylvania takes its name from the second President of the United States, John Adams, and was formed from York County in eighteen hundred. For the first six decades of its existence it was a quiet agricultural county in south-central Pennsylvania, known for its orchards, its German-American farms, and the small market town of Gettysburg at its center. Then came July of eighteen sixty-three.
The battle that began on July first and ended on July third produced more than fifty thousand combined casualties , dead, wounded, and missing , making it the deadliest engagement ever fought in American history. General Robert E. Lee had brought the Army of Northern Virginia north into Pennsylvania on a campaign intended to threaten Northern cities, relieve pressure on Virginia, and potentially force a negotiated peace. Union Major General George Meade's Army of the Potomac caught up to him here, among the fields and ridges south of Gettysburg.
On the first day, Confederate forces pushed Union troops through town and onto Cemetery Hill and Culp's Hill south of Gettysburg. On the second day, savage fighting erupted at Little Round Top, the Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard, and Devil's Den as Lee tried to roll up both Union flanks. On the third day, Lee ordered approximately twelve thousand Confederate soldiers across nearly a mile of open ground toward the Union center on Cemetery Ridge. Fewer than half returned. The assault, led in part by General George Pickett, is remembered as the high-water mark of the Confederacy , the moment when the possibility of Southern victory crested and receded for good.
Four months later, on November nineteenth, Abraham Lincoln stood in the new Soldiers' National Cemetery and delivered a two-hundred-seventy-two-word address. He told the crowd that the nation had been conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, and that those who died here had given their lives to test whether such a nation could endure. The landscape of Adams County has carried that weight ever since.
