Gettysburg: Three Days That Decided the War

Robert E. Lee had not planned to fight at Gettysburg. He had sent a brigade into the town on July first, eighteen sixty-three, looking for shoes, which the Army of Northern Virginia needed badly, and the brigade had collided with Union cavalry instead. By the time darkness fell on July first, the battle had already cost thousands of casualties on both sides, and both armies were feeding reinforcements toward a Pennsylvania farm town with a population of twenty-four hundred people.

What followed over the next two days was the deadliest battle ever fought on American soil. When it ended on the evening of July third, approximately fifty-one thousand men had been killed, wounded, or captured, divided almost evenly between the two armies.

The third day's climax was a frontal assault that has come to be called Pickett's Charge, named for Confederate General George Pickett, one of three division commanders who led the attack. Twelve thousand Confederate soldiers crossed three-quarters of a mile of open farmland on the afternoon of July third against concentrated Union artillery and rifle fire. More than one thousand of them were killed, and thousands more were wounded or captured, in less than an hour.

Lee ordered the retreat. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia would never again attempt an offensive operation on this scale in the Eastern Theater. Gettysburg was not the last battle of the Civil War, but it was the last time the South had a realistic path to winning it outright.

The town of Gettysburg spent the weeks after the battle as a hospital. Twenty-two thousand wounded men needed care. The women of the town, white and Black, nursed the injured, buried the dead, and managed a civilian catastrophe on top of a military one. Gettysburg's Black community, roughly one hundred people, had largely fled before the Confederate advance, knowing that Confederate soldiers had orders to capture any free Black people in Pennsylvania and send them south as enslaved laborers.

Abraham Lincoln came to Gettysburg on November nineteenth, eighteen sixty-three, to dedicate the soldiers' cemetery. He spoke for two minutes. The speech he gave, two hundred seventy-two words, quietly replaced the founding document's framing: the war was no longer about union. It was about the proposition, never yet fulfilled, that all men are created equal.