Pickett's Charge

• 1. Introduction

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  On the afternoon of the 3rd of July 1863, nearly 12,500 Confederate soldiers began Pickett's Charge. They marched across almost a mile of open ground toward the center of the Union line on Cemetery Ridge. General Robert E. Lee had ordered the attack, hoping to punch through the Union position and claim a war-turning victory in the North. The land gave the attackers almost nowhere to hide, and Union guns and rifles cut their ranks down fast.

  Why would Lee gamble so much on a single frontal assault? What happened when the survivors reached the stone wall on the ridge? And why, more than a century later, does this failed attack still loom so large in American memory of the war? Before the day ended, Lee would be forced to turn his army south, back toward Virginia.

• 2. A Command In Disarray

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  Three Confederate divisions carried the assault forward: George Pickett's, Johnston Pettigrew's, and Isaac Trimble's. They pulled troops from James Longstreet's First Corps and A. P. Hill's Third Corps. Pettigrew's brigades came from Henry Heth's old division, led by Birkett D. Fry, James K. Marshall, Joseph R. Davis, and John M. Brockenbrough. Trimble took over Dorsey Pender's division, with brigades under Alfred M. Scales, temporarily led by William Lee J. Lowrance, and James H. Lane. On the right flank, two brigades from Richard H. Anderson's division, under Cadmus M. Wilcox and David Lang, were assigned to support the attack.

  Winfield S. Hancock commanded the II Corps troops directly in the charge's path. John Gibbon's division held the center, its brigades led by William Harrow, Norman J. Hall, and Alexander S. Webb. On the night of July 2, army commander George Meade told Gibbon he expected Lee to strike that exact sector the next morning. Alexander Hays' division stood to the north. Abner Doubleday's I Corps held the line to the south, including George J. Stannard's 2nd Vermont Brigade and Chapman Biddle's 121st Pennsylvania. Meade ran his headquarters from a small house just behind the II Corps line, owned by the widow Lydia Leister.

  Historians still argue over what Lee was actually aiming at. The copse of trees on Cemetery Ridge has long been treated as the target. That idea traces back to battlefield historian John B. Bachelder's writing in the 1880s, and it was popularized again by the 1993 film Gettysburg. Some Gettysburg National Military Park historians have instead proposed Ziegler's Grove on Cemetery Hill. It is a larger, more visible stand of trees about 300 yards farther north. That theory holds that Lee never abandoned his second-day goal of taking Cemetery Hill and the roads it commanded. In 1863 the copse of trees stood under 10 feet high, visible to only part of the advancing Confederate line.

  A. P. Hill's poor health kept him out of deciding which of his own troops would make the charge. Some of his men had fought only lightly on July 1 and not at all on July 2. Yet troops that had already fought hard on July 1 ended up marching in the assault instead. Command of the whole attack fell to Longstreet, even though Pickett's name attached to it because Lee wanted Pickett's untouched division to lead. With Hill sidelined, Pettigrew's and Trimble's divisions answered to Longstreet as well, leaving Pickett in charge of only 3 of the attack's 11 brigades. Some historians now prefer the name Pickett-Pettigrew-Trimble Assault, to spread the credit, or the blame, more evenly.

  Pickett's men came almost entirely from Virginia. The other two divisions mixed in troops from North Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee, while Wilcox and Lang's supporting brigades were Alabamians and Floridians. J. E. B. Stuart took a cavalry division east that morning. He meant to exploit any Confederate breakthrough by striking the Union rear along the Baltimore Pike. Despite Lee's wish for an early start, arranging the infantry took all morning. Neither Lee's nor Longstreet's headquarters had ordered Pickett's division onto the field by daylight. Historian Jeffrey D. Wert blames the delay on Longstreet, and postbellum Lost Cause writers later used it to argue that Longstreet deliberately sabotaged Lee's plan. At the same time, a seven-hour fight raged for Culp's Hill on the Union's far right. Edward Johnson's attacks there fizzled out just as Longstreet's cannonade opened. Sensing another attack was coming, Meade ordered every straggler and idle unit onto the line.

• 3. The Cannonade's Failure

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  Robert E. Lee wanted one overwhelming cannonade to smash the Union artillery and rattle its infantry before the charge began. Poor artillery leadership and faulty equipment undid that plan from the start. Longstreet's artillery chief, Edward Porter Alexander, effectively ran the barrage in the field. Lee's own artillery chief, William N. Pendleton, mostly got in the way of placing guns from the other two corps. Confederate fire, as a result, was never concentrated enough to do the job.

  Around 1 p.m., hundreds of cannons from both armies opened up in what was likely the largest bombardment of the war. Confederate gunners fielded between 150 and 170 guns strung along a line more than 2 miles long. It started at the Peach Orchard and ran near the Emmitsburg Road. Confederate Brig. Gen. Evander M. Law later described the scene: "The cannonade in the center... presented one of the most magnificent battle-scenes witnessed during the war. Looking up the valley towards Gettysburg, the hills on either side were capped with crowns of flame and smoke, as 300 guns, about equally divided between the two ridges, vomited their iron hail upon each other."

  For all its noise, the barrage did little real damage. Confederate shells often sailed over the Union infantry, partly because faulty fuses delayed detonation, and thick smoke kept gunners from noticing. Union artillery chief Henry J. Hunt had only about 80 guns available for counter-battery fire, limited further by the ground available for placing them. Hunt ordered his own guns to go quiet, to save ammunition. But he had them stop firing slowly, one by one, to trick Alexander into believing whole batteries had been knocked out. Alexander, blinded by smoke, took the bait and reported many Union guns destroyed. Hancock pressed Hunt hard to resume fire and steady his pinned-down infantrymen, but Hunt refused. Even Meade felt the bombardment. Overshot rounds repeatedly struck the Leister house, forcing him to move his staff to Powers Hill. The exchange also drained Union ammunition stocks, leaving too little time to restock before the infantry attack came.

  The day was hot, 87 degrees Fahrenheit by one account, and humid. Confederate troops suffered under the sun and the counter-battery fire while they waited for the order to advance. Union cannoneers who overshot their targets often hit the massed infantry sheltering in the woods of Seminary Ridge. Others hit men crouched in shallow ground just behind Alexander's guns, causing casualties before the charge even began.

  James Longstreet had opposed the charge from the start, certain it would fail, and favored a different plan: swinging around the Union left flank instead. In his memoirs he recalled telling Lee, "General, I have been a soldier all my life. I have been with soldiers engaged in fights by couples, by squads, companies, regiments, divisions, and armies, and should know, as well as any one, what soldiers can do. It is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position."

  Longstreet tried to avoid giving the order himself. He told Colonel Alexander to signal Pickett at the right moment, based on whether the Union guns looked silenced. Alexander had no such confirmation, so he warned Pickett instead that his ammunition was running low: "If you are coming at all, come at once, or I cannot give you proper support, but the enemy's fire has not slackened at all. At least eighteen guns are still firing from the cemetery itself." Pickett turned to Longstreet and asked, "General, shall I advance?" Longstreet later wrote, "The effort to speak the order failed, and I could only indicate it by an affirmative bow."

  Longstreet made one last try to stop the attack. After speaking with Pickett, he checked in again with Alexander. Alexander admitted the Confederate guns were nearly out of ammunition and that not all the Union batteries were confirmed silent. Longstreet ordered Alexander to halt Pickett. Alexander explained that resupplying from the wagon trains would take over an hour, long enough to erase any advantage from the earlier barrage. The infantry went forward anyway, without the artillery support Lee had originally planned. Hunt spent the rest of his life insisting he had a better plan. He wanted to hold his long-range shells until the Confederates lined up for their advance, then unleash every gun at once. He always believed that plan would have stopped the charge before it started and saved many Union lives.

• 4. Across The Emmitsburg Road

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  The advance stepped off at about 2:00 p.m., moving in deliberate marching order rather than an actual run. The men were ready to speed up only within a few hundred yards of the enemy. Pettigrew and Trimble marched on the left, Pickett on the right, nine brigades spread across a front some 1,600 meters wide. Fences slowed the Confederate lines almost immediately, while heavy artillery fire began tearing into them. Freeman McGilvery's hidden guns north of Little Round Top raked the Confederate right. Cemetery Hill artillery hit the left, while the center faced the II Corps cannons and the Union reserve behind them. The ground between the two ridges rolls gently. The advancing troops periodically vanished from the Union gunners' view while covering nearly three quarters of a mile of open fields.

  As the three divisions came on, waiting Union soldiers began shouting "Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!", a jab at the Confederates' own disastrous advance during the 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg. Shell and solid shot gave way to canister and musket fire once the Confederates closed to within 400 yards. Confederate cohesion and morale began to crack at that point. The last real shelter before the Union line lay 300 yards out, in the sunken depression of the Emmitsburg Road. Thousands of Confederates dropped to the ground there and refused to go any farther, many surrendering to Union troops once the fighting ended. More than two-thirds of the original force may never have reached the final charge. By the time it hit the Union line, the mile-long front had shrunk to less than half a mile.

  On the left, Brockenbrough's brigade was torn apart by artillery from Cemetery Hill. It was then hit by a surprise volley from 160 men of the 8th Ohio Infantry, firing in a single line. Already shaken by their losses, Brockenbrough's Virginians panicked and fled back to Seminary Ridge. They crashed through Trimble's division, pulling many of his men along with them. The Ohioans then swung around and flanked Joseph Davis's brigade of Mississippians and North Carolinians on Pettigrew's exposed left. More than 1,600 rounds landed on Pettigrew's men during the assault. This part of the attack never got past the sturdy fence along the Emmitsburg Road. Alexander Hays' division lined up four deep behind 260 yards of stone wall. Riflemen kept up a punishing rotation of musket fire, trading places to reload.

  Trimble's two brigades, following behind Pettigrew's, made little headway of their own. Confused orders from Trimble sent only three and a half of Lane's North Carolina regiments forward at all. Renewed fire from the 8th Ohio and Hays' riflemen stopped most of them well short of the Emmitsburg Road. Scales's brigade, led by William L. J. Lowrance, started at a disadvantage, having already lost nearly two-thirds of its men on July 1. It was driven back, and Lowrance was wounded. Hays rode back and forth behind his own line, shouting "Hurrah! Boys, we're giving them hell!" He had two horses shot from under him, and historian Stephen W. Sears later called his performance "inspiring."

  On the right, Pickett's Virginians crossed the Emmitsburg Road and wheeled left to face northeast. They marched in two lines, led by James L. Kemper on the right and Richard B. Garnett on the left. Lewis Armistead's brigade followed close behind. The wheel exposed their right flank to McGilvery's guns and to Doubleday's division on Cemetery Ridge. Stannard's Vermont Brigade turned to face north and poured fire into the rear of Kemper's men. Around this same moment, Hancock was struck by a bullet. He had stayed visible on horseback throughout the bombardment. The bullet passed through his saddle's pommel, driving wood splinters and a bent nail into his inner right thigh. He refused to leave the field until the fighting was decided.

  Pickett's men pushed through fire from Stannard's brigade, then Harrow's, then Hall's. They reached a low stone wall known as the Angle, which bent 80 yards at a right turn. Alexander Webb's Philadelphia Brigade held that ground. The two surviving guns of Alonzo Cushing's battery stood at the fence, with the 69th and 71st Pennsylvania regiments defending them. Those two guns and 940 men could not match the firepower Hays' division was pouring in from their right.

  Two gaps then tore open in the Union line. The 71st Pennsylvania's commander ordered a retreat as the Confederates closed in near the Angle. South of the copse of trees, the 59th New York inexplicably bolted for the rear. That second gap left Captain Andrew Cowan's 1st New York Independent Artillery Battery to face the oncoming Confederates alone. Artillery chief Henry Hunt stood at his side. Cowan fired five guns loaded with double canister at once, and the Confederate line in front of him vanished. The larger gap left by the 71st was more serious. Only a handful of that regiment remained, along with 268 men of the 69th Pennsylvania and Cushing's two guns. Together they had to meet 2,500 to 3,000 men of Garnett's and Armistead's brigades crossing the stone fence. The 69th's Irishmen fought back with rifles, bayonets, and fists. Webb, embarrassed that the 71st had broken, brought the 72nd Pennsylvania forward. The regiment hesitated at first, not yet recognizing Webb as their newly promoted brigadier general. It then moved up and helped seal the gap. Cushing was killed shouting orders to his men, hit by three bullets, the last through his mouth. The Confederates seized his two guns but had no ammunition left to fire them. Union reinforcements then charged straight into the breach.

  The Northern counterattack overwhelmed the Confederates crowded at the wall, and the advance collapsed. Every senior Confederate officer leading the forward units had been killed. With no one left to give the order, the retreat fell apart into chaos. Union officers on horseback scooped up fallen Confederate battle flags and rode back and forth dragging them on the ground to taunt the retreating men. The infantry assault had lasted less than an hour. Wilcox and Lang's supporting attack on Pickett's right never became a factor. It did not reach the Union line until after Pickett's men had already been defeated. McGilvery's guns and the Vermont Brigade broke it up quickly.

• 5. The Toll

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  Union losses came to about 1,500 killed and wounded, while the Confederate casualty rate topped 50 percent. Pickett's division alone suffered 2,655 casualties: 498 killed, 643 wounded, 833 wounded and captured, and 681 captured unwounded. Pettigrew lost an estimated 2,700 men, and Trimble's two brigades lost 885. Wilcox's brigade reported 200 losses and Lang's about 400. In total the attacking force lost 6,555 men, including at least 1,123 killed outright and 4,019 wounded, with Union reports counting 3,750 Confederates taken prisoner.

  Trimble lost a leg in the fighting, one of many senior officers who paid heavily for the charge. Pettigrew took only a minor wound to the hand. Pettigrew later died from a bullet to the abdomen, suffered in a small skirmish during the retreat to Virginia. In Pickett's division, 26 of its 40 field grade officers became casualties, and all three of his brigade commanders fell. Kemper was seriously wounded and captured, then rescued, then captured again during the retreat. Garnett rode his horse into the attack despite an old leg injury, knowing that staying mounted under such fire likely meant death. He was killed alongside Armistead.

  Lewis Armistead was known for leading his men with his hat raised on the tip of his sword. He pushed farther into the Union line than anyone else in the charge. He was mortally wounded near the Angle, at what has since been called the high-water mark of the Confederacy. He died two days later in a Union hospital. The Union officer whose men fatally wounded him was his old friend Winfield Scott Hancock, who was himself severely wounded in the same fight. Following Armistead's dying wishes, Longstreet later delivered his Bible and personal effects to Hancock's wife, Almira. Of the 15 regimental commanders in Pickett's division, 11 had come from the Virginia Military Institute. Every one of them became a casualty, six killed and five wounded.

  Stuart's cavalry, sent to support the infantry from the rear, never got the chance to help. Union cavalry under David McMurtrie Gregg stopped him about 3 miles to the east, at East Cavalry Field.

  As the survivors straggled back along Seminary Ridge, Lee feared a Union counterattack and rode out to rally them. He told the returning men, and Wilcox, that the failure was "all my fault." Pickett was inconsolable for the rest of the day and never forgave Lee for ordering the charge. When Lee asked him to reform his division for the defense, Pickett is said to have answered, "General, I have no division."

• 6. Blame And The Name

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  On July 4, Union commander George Meade chose to hold his ground rather than press a counterattack, since both armies were spent. The two sides observed an informal truce that day to gather their dead and wounded. That same day, Ulysses S. Grant accepted the surrender of Vicksburg along the Mississippi, splitting the Confederacy in two. Historians generally treat these two Union victories together as the war's turning point.

  Lee himself left almost nothing behind to explain his thinking. He never wrote memoirs, and his after-action report on the battle was brief. Most of the senior officers who led the charge became casualties and never filed their own reports. Pickett's report was reportedly so bitter that Lee ordered him to destroy it, and no copy survives. Years afterward, asked why the charge had failed, Pickett is said to have replied, "I've always thought the Yankees had something to do with it."

  Virginia newspapers were quick to praise Pickett's home-state division as the troops who had advanced the farthest. They used that claim to criticize the performance of soldiers from other states. That press coverage helped fix the name Pickett's Charge in place. Pickett himself resented having his name attached to a defeat, and his military career never fully recovered. North Carolinians in particular have long pushed back, pointing to the collapse of Brockenbrough's Virginians as a real cause of the failure. Writing in 1888, historian W. R. Bond put it bluntly: "No body of troops during the last war made as much reputation on so little fighting."

  Questions also lingered about where Pickett himself was during the fighting. Fifteen of his officers and all three of his brigadier generals became casualties, yet Pickett came through unhurt. That led many to doubt how close he had actually been to the front. The 1993 film Gettysburg shows him watching from the Codori Farm on horseback, though no historical record confirms that. Civil War doctrine called for division and corps commanders to direct the fight from behind their lines. It would not be unusual if Pickett had done exactly that.

• 7. The Lost Cause

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  For generations of Virginians especially, Pickett's Charge became a central symbol of the Lost Cause. That literary and cultural movement romanticized the Confederate defeat. Its supporters praised the bravery of the attacking soldiers and the supposed brilliance of Southern generals like Lee and Pickett. They also dwelled on how tantalizingly close the charge had come to victory. William Faulkner later captured that mythic image in a famous passage. He imagined a Southern boy picturing the moment just before two o'clock. The brigades are already in position, the flags still furled, and Pickett stands waiting, sword in hand. In Faulkner's words, at that moment "it hasn't happened yet."

  Northern veterans pushed back hard against this romanticized version, resenting how it downplayed their own hard fighting in defense of Cemetery Ridge. Non-Virginian Southerners objected too, arguing that the myth centered Virginia's leaders and troops even though North Carolina regiments had suffered greater losses. Despite that early pushback from both regions, the romanticized account came to dominate how Americans remembered the battle. By the battle's 50th anniversary in 1913, it had nonetheless become the standard version of events.

  Casualty records and firsthand accounts have since pulled historians away from most of that framing. Large numbers of Confederate soldiers, the evidence shows, refused to make the final push at all. Instead, they sheltered in the sunken Emmitsburg Road and surrendered once the battle ended. Lee's decision to order the attack is now widely seen as the result of a string of strategic and tactical mistakes. The losses it caused are viewed as unnecessary. One study applying the Lanchester model to the battle reached a striking conclusion. Lee might have taken a foothold on Cemetery Ridge had he sent in several more brigades. But doing so would likely have left him without enough reserves to hold or exploit that ground afterward.

• 8. The Battlefield Today

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  Millions of people visit Gettysburg National Military Park every year, yet very few actually walk the ground Pickett's division crossed. The National Park Service keeps a mowed path running along a fence. It runs from the Virginia Monument on West Confederate Avenue east to the Emmitsburg Road, toward the copse of trees. Pickett's division, however, actually started well south of that path, near the Spangler farm, before wheeling north after crossing the road. That means the current walking trail sits between the two real lines of attack. Trimble's division advanced north of the path, while Pickett's moved up from farther south.

  French artist Paul Philippoteaux painted the charge from the Union defenders' point of view on Cemetery Ridge. He called the massive cyclorama The Battle of Gettysburg. First completed and exhibited in 1883, it remains one of the last surviving cycloramas in the United States. It was restored and moved into the park's new visitor center in September 2008. There, it still lets visitors stand inside the moment the wall was nearly broken.