The third day!

To see Gettysburg today, in the current era, is to see a place filled with the monuments placed there by both north and south to commemorate their involvement in one of possibly the two most decisive battles ever fought on the north American continent. The other one would arguably be the battle of Yorktown which effectively ended the American revolution.

As a reflection of the fate of winners versus losers, most of the monuments placed at Gettysburg come from the northern participants because the south, with its ruined post war economy, simply didn’t have as many funds to spend on things like commemorations in what they felt was a foreign land--the state of Pennsylvania--throughout the rest of the nineteenth century.

The south not only lost the battle of Gettysburg, they also lost the war during the three days that Robert E. Lee and George Gordon Meade and their armies faced off against one another across the rolling terrain in this east central Pennsylvania town. Lee would probably rather have not fought at this particular spot but the vulgarities of war and the fog of war dictated that this is where the two armies would clash. Lee had lost his good right arm when the confederate corps commander Thomas “Stonewall� Jackson had been killed by a mistaken attack by his own men the May before the battle began in July. Jackson’s replacement made a critical error when he did not take the heights that comprised the hills around the city and left them to the federals who would use them to great advantage as Lee and his loyal army of Northern Virginia tried repeatedly to overcome the gift that had been handed to the federals so early on in the battle’s beginnings.

By the dawn of the third day of the battle of Gettysburg, just one hundred and fifty years ago today, thousands had been sacrificed by both sides of this desperate struggle in places like the Wheat Field, the
Devil’s Den, and the Peach Orchard where blood ran thick in the waters of a stream that ran through a part of the battlefield. July first through third, 1863, were the most desperate times for both north and south as the war hung in the balance over what transpired at Gettysburg. Lee and the southern government had a letter prepared to lay on Abraham Lincoln’s desk demanding that he end the war if the south was successful in their invasion of the north. And, if Meade had lost the battle, that may have been what might have transpired.

Lee simply could not overcome the early disadvantage that his inexperienced field commander had left for him and the third day saw Lee continuing to under estimate both the federal will and the numbers of federal troops lying in wait for him that day. Lee’s battlefield intelligence had not been good and, on the third of July, he was getting ready to pay a high price for both that and his arrogance and confidence in the troops who had followed him so loyally and for so long.

Robert E. Lee decided on the third day of the battle of Gettysburg to launch a grand assault with fifteen thousand men comprising Longstreet’s division against the center of the union line. Lee began his preliminary softening up of that line with an over one hour shelling using over one hundred cannon that comprised his artillery while the federals hunkered down, returned the cannon fire, and endured it all. Some were killed and injured by this barrage but most simply waited to see what was going to happen next. Then there was a silence followed by one of the most remarkable things ever seen in the entirety of military history. Longstreet’s men began to march across a long field in columns and rows toward the federal center. The union artillery started up and began to blow holes in the lines but the confederates continued forward unabated.

When they got within musket range, the federal reply was deafening and decisive. Firing form behind a low wall of stone that bounded the federal side of the battlefield, the confederates were mowed down in a horrible scythe of death that left, at the end, only about one hundred and fifty of them being able to get across the wall at the center where they were either captured or killed. The dead, the dying, and the wounded lay strewn across the field as the stragglers made their way back to the confederate lines where a distraught Robert E. Lee could only utter: My men! My men! After Lee regained his composure, he stood astride of his faithful horse Traveler and told general Pickett to assemble his remaining force in preparation for a counter attack that they thought might come from the federal side. Pickett looked at Lee and simply stated the facts when he said: General Lee. I no longer have a division!

The federal counter attack never came and it would cost general Meade his command of the union army a short time later when Abraham Lincoln found out that he had not vigorously pursued the rebels and brought an early end to the war. But Lincoln was not at Gettysburg that day and he had not seen what those on both sides had seen. They were busy caring for thousands of wounded on both sides and all concerned had had enough of war that day. Lee left the battlefield early on July fifth and slipped back south across the Rappahannock river to meet a date with destiny in April of 1865 at a place called Appomattox courthouse with a short cigar smoking man named Ulysses S. Grant.

And, in late November of 1863, Abraham Lincoln would visit the site of the battle where he would say: “in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.�

Today, reinactors are replicating the battle of Gettysburg to commemorate the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its occurrence. Many have forgotten that for decades after the war’s end, there would be periodic reunions where the actual participants from both sides would gather at the site to exchange pleasantries and memories of what they had participated in that fateful series of days in July of 1863. The encounters were pleasant but the memories were not!

If there was ever a hallowed ground in America, Gettysburg is certainly it. This writer has been there several times and can remember going to the site of Pickett’s charge one early morning and seeing the fog cover the battlefield. As we observed the phenomenon we could almost imagine that it was the smoke that covered the scene in 1863 and hear the gunfire that ruled the day cast against the current silence of the early morning that we saw. It was a place of glory and valor and agony and death such as this continent has never seen before or since. They are all gone now to their rewards, but, as Abraham Lincoln said, “They can never forget what they did here.�

God bless and keep them all!

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.