Gettysburg: Three Days That Turned the Civil War

On the morning of July 1, 1863, a Confederate general sent two brigades toward a small Pennsylvania town, mostly to see what was there. He suspected, if anything, a handful of militia. What he found instead was the beginning of the bloodiest battle in American history, one that would turn on a cavalry officer’s stubborn stand on a low ridge and end, three days later, with a doomed charge across open ground. Nobody planned Gettysburg. It happened because two armies, maneuvering half-blind, bumped into each other — and neither side could afford to walk away.

A General’s Gamble

Robert E. Lee had just won a stunning victory at Chancellorsville in May 1863, and he wanted to press the advantage. Rather than wait for the Union to regroup in war-torn Virginia, he decided on a second invasion of the North — his first, the Maryland campaign of 1862, had ended badly at Antietam. This time the stakes were layered: a northern campaign might ease pressure on the besieged Confederate garrison at Vicksburg, let his 72,000 men feed off rich Pennsylvania farmland instead of stripped Virginia fields, and perhaps even rattle the growing peace movement in the North enough to end the war on Southern terms. If his army could threaten Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Washington itself, so much the better.

Lee reorganized his army after the death of Stonewall Jackson, splitting his forces into three corps under James Longstreet, Richard Ewell, and A.P. Hill — the latter two new to commanding at that scale. His cavalry remained under J.E.B. Stuart. Opposing him was the Army of the Potomac, more than 100,000 strong under Joseph Hooker, who was tasked by Lincoln with staying between Lee’s army and Washington.

The campaign’s first clash came on June 9 at Brandy Station, the largest predominantly cavalry battle of the war. Stuart’s 9,500 troopers were caught off guard by a Union force of similar size but held their ground — an inconclusive fight, but one that proved Union cavalry could now match their Confederate counterparts. By mid-June, Lee’s army was crossing the Potomac into Maryland, and Hooker’s men followed. Lee ordered his troops to treat Northern civilians with restraint, paying for supplies rather than seizing them outright, though his quartermasters often paid with worthless Confederate money. Some towns, like York, were forced to pay indemnities instead. More troublingly, Confederate soldiers seized dozens of Northern Black residents during the invasion — a mix of escaped fugitives and free men — and sent all of them south into slavery under guard.

Then came a decision that would haunt the campaign. Lee let Stuart take three of his best cavalry brigades on a wide ride around the Union army’s flank. The orders were loose enough that blame for what followed falls on both men: Stuart and his cavalry vanished from Lee’s awareness for the most critical days of the approach to Gettysburg, leaving Lee blind to exactly where the Union army was.

Collision Course

On June 28, with his own army scattered and Lee unsure of Union movements, Lincoln lost patience with Hooker and replaced him with Major General George Meade, commander of the V Corps — just three days before the two armies would collide. Meanwhile, Lee’s forces fanned out across a wide arc of Pennsylvania, from Chambersburg to Carlisle, probing toward Harrisburg and the Susquehanna River. A division under Jubal Early even passed through Gettysburg itself on June 26, chasing off a raw Pennsylvania militia regiment, burning rail cars and a covered bridge, before moving on.

On June 30, a Confederate brigade under J. Johnston Pettigrew approached Gettysburg — by one account, looking for shoes — and spotted Union cavalry arriving south of the town under Brigadier General John Buford. Pettigrew pulled back without engaging. When he reported what he’d seen, his superiors, Henry Heth and A.P. Hill, dismissed it as nothing more than militia. Despite Lee’s explicit order to avoid a major engagement until his whole army was concentrated, Hill decided to send a reconnaissance force back toward the town the next morning to find out for certain. That decision, made almost casually, set the battle in motion.

Three Days of Fire

At around 5 a.m. on July 1, two Confederate brigades advanced on Gettysburg and ran straight into Buford’s cavalry division, dug in on low ridges northwest of town. Buford’s men held just long enough for Union infantry to arrive, but two large Confederate corps soon struck from the northwest and north, collapsing the hastily built Union line. Union soldiers retreated through Gettysburg’s streets to the hills south of town — a rough start, but one that bought Meade’s army the high ground it would hold for the rest of the battle.

By July 2, the Union line had taken the shape of a fishhook, anchored on hills and ridges south of Gettysburg. Late in the afternoon, Lee threw a heavy assault at the Union left flank, and the fighting that followed turned a cluster of ordinary places — Little Round Top, the Wheatfield, Devil’s Den, the Peach Orchard — into names soldiers and historians would repeat for generations. At the same time, Confederate pressure on the Union right escalated from probing attacks into full assaults on Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill. The Union lines bent under the weight of it all, and the casualties mounted fast. But they held.

July 3 brought the battle’s defining moment. Fighting resumed at Culp’s Hill, and cavalry clashed to the east and south of town, but the day belonged to Pickett’s Charge. Roughly 12,000 Confederate infantrymen advanced across open ground toward the center of the Union line on Cemetery Ridge. Union rifle and artillery fire tore into the ranks as they came. A small number of Confederates briefly reached the Union position before being driven back at bayonet point. It was the Confederacy’s last real chance to break the Union line, and it failed at enormous cost.

On July 4 — Independence Day — Lee turned his battered army south and began what the record simply calls a torturous retreat from the North. Between the two armies, the three days of fighting had produced between 46,000 and 51,000 casualties, more than in any battle in American history to that point. Meade’s Army of the Potomac had stopped Lee’s invasion and forced his withdrawal, a result widely regarded as the war’s turning point.

Lincoln’s Words on the Field

Months later, on November 19, Abraham Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg for the dedication of the new Gettysburg National Cemetery, built to honor the Union dead. There he delivered a speech of just 271 words that reframed what the war was being fought for. The Gettysburg Address has endured as one of the most famous speeches in American history, spoken on the same ground where, months earlier, thousands of young men had died deciding the war’s direction.

What we still don’t know

Historians still argue over how much blame belongs to Lee and how much to Stuart for the cavalry’s long absence before the battle — the orders Lee gave were vague enough that responsibility is genuinely shared, not clearly assigned. It’s also worth remembering that the battle itself began almost by accident: Hill’s reconnaissance force was sent out against Lee’s own standing order to avoid a general engagement, and neither Hill nor Heth believed, wrongly, that any serious Union force was near the town. Gettysburg’s reputation as the war’s turning point rests on solid ground, but the battle’s opening moves were shaped as much by miscalculation and poor information as by design.

Sources

– This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article Battle of Gettysburg (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gettysburg), by Wikipedia contributors, used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). We rewrote and edited the text. The material adapted from Wikipedia is available under the same licence. Readers wanting primary sources should follow that article’s reference list.