The Battle of Gettysburg, 1863

Lee had carried the war north into Pennsylvania that summer, the Army of Northern Virginia against Meade’s Army of the Potomac, and at a town called Gettysburg the two had fought for two days already. On the third day, the third of July, 1863, Meade’s line stood on Cemetery Ridge south of the town, behind a low stone wall. Lee decided to break its centre, and the men he gave the work to were three divisions under Longstreet, Pickett’s among them. Your histories call it Pickett’s Charge.

They waited two hours before they walked.

The guns opened at one in the afternoon, the largest artillery bombardment ever heard on that continent, and the men who were going to make the attack lay down in the tree line behind their own batteries and were shelled by the Union counter-fire for the length of it. Some of them slept. That is not bravado; men do sleep, under shelling, when they have been awake for days. Others lay and did the sums about the ground in front of them, which was open, and rising, and about three quarters of a mile deep, and had a stone wall at the top of it.

When the guns stopped, they got up and dressed their lines in full view. Twelve thousand of them, in the open, in July heat, taking the time to align properly because that was how it was done. Union officers on the ridge described watching it and finding it beautiful and being unable to stop looking at it, and every one of them had guns loaded with canister.

Then the artillery on Cemetery Ridge and on Little Round Top began, and it did not stop, and it had nearly a mile of range and nothing to obstruct it. The lines came on anyway. They halted at the Emmitsburg Road, under fire, to climb the fences on both sides of it, which took time, and the fences held them there while the guns worked. Whole companies stopped existing at that road.

The right of the attack came apart under enfilade fire. The left came apart under enfilade fire from the other side. The centre kept walking, closing to the middle as the flanks were shot away, until what had set out as a line nearly a mile across arrived at the wall as a wedge a few hundred yards wide.

Lewis Armistead was forty-six and had put his hat on the point of his sword so that his brigade could see where he was. He walked in front. At the low stone wall where the line bends, the place they call the Angle, he got over it with perhaps two hundred and fifty men behind him, put his hand on a Union gun, and was shot down beside it. Every one of those men was killed, wounded or taken inside a few minutes. Men have called that place the high-water mark of the Confederacy ever since, which makes it sound like a tide rather than what it was.

They went back the way they had come, across the same ground, under the same guns, and Lee rode out among them saying it was his fault, and it was.

Of the eleven and a half thousand who made the attack, four thousand eight hundred did not come back from it. Armistead’s brigade alone lost a thousand and fifty-seven men. Armistead himself lived two more days.

I will tell you the thing nobody puts on the monuments. Armistead is remembered because he got over the wall, and the man beside him is not remembered because he did the identical thing at the identical moment and his name was not in a newspaper. There were two hundred and fifty of them over that wall. There is one statue.

I do not work from newspapers. I had all two hundred and fifty, and I had them in the order they arrived.