Gettysburg, Three Days in July

The armies found each other by accident. On the morning of July first, eighteen sixty-three, Confederate infantry under General Henry Heth was moving toward Gettysburg, in part, by Heth's own later account, to search the town for shoes his men needed, though historians still debate how much that explanation tells the whole story. West of town, Union cavalry under Brigadier General John Buford spotted the approaching column and made a decision that would shape the next three days: he deployed his troopers across the ridgelines and held them.

The fighting that followed drew both armies into a battle neither commander had planned to fight there. By the time the guns fell silent on July third, more than fifty thousand men had been killed, wounded, or captured across three miles of Pennsylvania farmland. The fields south of town, Seminary Ridge, Little Round Top, Devil's Den, the Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard, Cemetery Ridge, became a catalog of violence.

On July third, Confederate General George Pickett led roughly twelve thousand infantry across three quarters of a mile of open ground toward the Union center on Cemetery Ridge. The charge lasted less than an hour. More than half of those men became casualties.

The survivors fell back. The Army of Northern Virginia never mounted a major offensive on Northern soil again. Gettysburg was the largest battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere.

Its three days cost more lives than the entire American Revolution. Within the Confederate command, the debate over what went wrong, who made which decisions, on which morning, at which hour, has never fully stopped. President Lincoln came to Gettysburg four months later, in November of eighteen sixty-three, for the dedication of the new national cemetery.

The ceremony's featured speaker was Edward Everett, a former senator and Harvard president, who spoke for two hours. Lincoln spoke for two minutes. Everett wrote to Lincoln afterward: 'I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.'

The Pennsylvania land here absorbed all of it, the dead, the arguments, the grief, and has been holding it ever since.