After more than 18 months of increasingly intense and bitter fighting, the new year of 1863 brought no prospect of relief for the Union and the Confederacy. With the bloodshed at Shiloh, the Seven Days, Second Manassas, and Antietam still fresh in the memory, the costly defeat at Fredericksburg during December 1862 had come as a terrible shock to the North. and had naturally raised the spirits of the embattled South.
But throughout the land, war weariness was spreading. This was particularly so in the North, where even news of the close victory at Stones River at the beginning of the new year did little to raise public morale. After the slaughter at Fredericksburg, the hospitals of Washington were full to overflowing.
The cost of the war in dollars continued to rise with each passing day, meaning taxes in the Union states had to be increased. Perhaps not surprisingly, Army recruitment dropped off dramatically. These factors, among many others, contributed to the growing disillusionment with the war throughout the North.
Many of the voices that had once cried forward to Richmond were now heard wondering aloud if victory should be won at any price. Despite all this, there was to be no end to the fighting. The fact was that too many lives had already been lost for either side to turn back.
Those who called the shots were determined to forge ahead to win their victory. This was Total War. Trump, Trump, the boys are marching Cheer up comrades, they will come And beneath the starry flag we shall breathe the air again Of the free land in our own beloved home The The strategic situation during the winter of 1863 basically saw most of the major armies staring at each other, very little maneuvering and fighting going on. The Confederacy is running out of money, running out of human resources, and running out of military supplies. The Confederacy must act to end the war as rapidly as possible early in 1863. They're not getting any bigger, they're not getting any stronger, they have to fight the war to a conclusion right away.
Lincoln had had in command of the Western Theater a pack of, I think, incompetent, politically appointed generals. While the man who would become his best general, Ulysses Grant, was sitting there virtually unused, ignored, I think he was being punished for the high cost of Shiloh. 1863 is going to be disastrous for the Confederacy.
Robert E. Lee, at the point, at the beginning, he's going to be drunk somewhat on victory. He's still quite a risk taker, but it is his risk taking that's going to hurt him in the long run. This morning we found ourselves covered with snow that had fallen during the night.
It is too cold to write. How I would like to have one of those on-to-Richmond fellas out here with us in the snow. I can't tell you how many dead I did see.
One thing's for sure, I don't want to see that sight no more. This is the time when Lincoln is confiding privately to his friends, we are on the brink of destruction. Even God is against us, and I cannot see a ray of hope.
Jefferson Davis has a ray of hope still, which is European. recognition of the Confederacy, still. And his greatest headache, like Lincoln's, is domestic opposition to the draft.
The Southern draft exempted one white man from every plantation with more than... 20 slaves, which in effect meant that the bulk of the fighting for the South was being done by poor white men. So here you had the interests of that plantation elite, the planter class going against the interests of Southern unity.
And the cracks were beginning to show. The cold, wet winter months of early 1863 forced a respite from the fighting on both the Union and Confederate armies. Quite apart from the bitter cold, roads turned into a quagmire of mud, making movement almost impossible. And so the troops of the Northern and Southern armies had to hunker down and await the spring sunshine.
Not that the lack of action lessened the pressure or eased the difficulties faced by the soldiers. Huge numbers of men living in cramped conditions with poor sanitation meant only two things, illness and disease. Now it was not Yankee or rebel bullets that were decimating the ranks, but dysentery, diphtheria, measles, and scarlet fever. Well, disease was the great killer of the Civil War.
A lot of the problem was poor sanitation in the camps, men drinking water that was contaminated, men who came from rural areas suddenly thrust together. with men from the cities. These young men from the rural areas had never been exposed to common childhood diseases, and thus they were very susceptible to catching that. A lot of the soldiers themselves didn't understand how to maintain a sanitary campground.
So you would have situations in which regiments camped along a river, and soldiers would throw their refuse into the river, or they would build their latrines. close to the river and waste materials would seep into the water. That means for the troops downstream, The water wasn't as healthy, and it led to certain diseases such as dysentery and cholera and that sort of thing.
Medical provision for sick and wounded men in both armies was rudimentary at best. Germ theory had not yet been discovered. There was little appreciation of the need for hygiene, and field hospitals often did little more than speed the wounded soldiers to their graves.
Their grim reputations spread throughout the ranks of the blue and gray, and there are recorded instances of wounded men refusing to leave the battlefield, preferring to take their chances there rather than face almost certain death at the hands of an army surgeon. When people are hospitalized, they are at the mercy of 19th century traditional heroic medicine. The interventions That were conducted in the 19th century, the amputations, the chunks of your insides that they were prepared to haul out for bizarre reasons. It's shocking.
This was a time when... People thought there must be a cure for everything, and perhaps the more violent and foul the cure, the more likely it was to work. When you were wounded, you were at a tremendous risk of post-op.
post-operative infection, shock from being operated on without anesthesia or with primitive anesthesia and then afterwards contracting communicable disease in one of the huge unsanitary hospitals that were being run at the time. There were other factors that affected morale among ordinary troops. Sheer boredom was one.
Having little to do gave men time to think about family, hearth, and home. A homesick man was not the best fighting soldier. An army, it is said, marches on its stomach.
Filling the stomachs of Civil War soldiers with the right food, or, in the case of the South, any food at all, was a constant problem. The marching rations of the Northern troops were salt pork, pickled beef, and hard-tack biscuits, and the troops sat down to these less-than-tasty menu items most days while they were on campaign. Although their daily fare was...
somewhat better while they were in camp, at least their bellies were full. The winter months were a time of almost starvation rations for Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee, as southern supply problems really began to bite. The rebels did not have enough food. They did not have, in particular, enough fresh fruit and vegetables to supply their people.
They did not have enough wagons to carry the food. They did not have enough mules to pull the wagons. They had to use horses, which could otherwise...
have been used on farms or for cavalry or artillery to pull supply wagons, whereas the North, by 1863, was going over to an all-mule logistics system. The rebel supply system was not. not up to the task of fighting a modern industrial war.
It is amazing that rebel morale could be supported by other means, because it certainly was not supported by having a hot dinner and a cup of coffee and a cigar, which the Union army could provide. There was a popular southern love song, a real weepy, called Lorena. Very popular amongst the troops.
Went... The years creep slowly by Lorena The snow is on the grass again You know, it went on like... I'll spare you the rest of it. The point is that at one point Robert E. Lee, who knew the value of music and the impact it had on an army, attempted to have this song banned from anywhere within the hearing of his troops because he was a of the desertions that it might cause, because by far the greatest number of southern desertions was caused by the soldiers receiving letters from their sweethearts or their wives, you know, in which the letters would describe destitution on the farms and the starvation of their children. And this increased to epidemic proportions as the war dragged on.
The Northern Army too was riddled with desertions, particularly in the immediate aftermath of Fredericksburg when they were losing something like a hundred men a day to desertion. And this was at the risk of some really horrendous consequences, things which may have been officially... prohibited, but which went on anyway. You could be branded in your forehead with a letter D from a hot iron. You could have your head shaved, be drummed out into the wilderness to fend for yourself.
You could be locked to a ball and chain. And for repeated desertions, you could face the firing squad. I think there were something like 260 executions in the federal ranks throughout the war, and well over half of those were for desertions. After the debacle at Fredericksburg, Lincoln replaced the luckless Burnside with General Joseph Hooker as commander of the Army of the Potomac.
Hooker was yet another colorful character in the story of the Civil War. He was brave and excellent. organizer, but self-serving, vain, and boastful. Hooker set about improving the lot of the Army of the Potomac in part by the simple expedient of increasing rations and ensuring the men were paid.
As a result, there were fewer deserters. Some even rejoined the Army. He was though an outspoken critic of Abraham Lincoln and his appointment can be seen as either a highly magnanimous act by Lincoln or as a sure sign of the president's increasing desperation.
In reality he did not have much of a choice as Burnside had been relieved of his duties at his own request and several of the more capable generals had themselves been relieved or transferred as a result of the Fredericksburg debacle. As the spring of 1863 arrived, the Confederate forces around Fredericksburg prepared themselves for the inevitable federal attack on the heavily defended town. But it was not here that the battle eventually took place.
That came ten miles west of Fredericksburg, at a place called Chancellorsville. Hooker! despite his reputation, was a much better general than tradition has it.
For one thing, he'd fought at several of the major encounters already, and he'd learned that troops making a frontal assault against well-entrenched soldiers was going to lead to massive casualties and not much land gained. And he saw this particularly at Mary's Heights at Fredericksburg. He dismissed Ambrose Burnside, the architect of that plan, as having a brain the size of a hickory nut.
And as he put it, he lost the number of men that he was required to lose, and then he stopped. So what he intended to do at Chancellorsville was draw Lee out from behind his defenses by moving towards Richmond. So if Lee did not come out in the open and fight him, he would have to surrender Richmond, the Confederate capital. In other words, what Hooker was doing was anticipating the moves of Ulysses S. Grant, that is, to force Lee out into the open to fight the much larger Union forces.
Yet again, the Confederate army was vastly outnumbered. The ratio was nearly two to one. Hooker was confident, not only of victory, but also of annihilating Lee's army.
He wrote, the enemy must either englobe the enemy or annihilate them. gloriously fly or come out from behind his defenses and give us battle upon our own ground, where certain destruction awaits him."But he had underestimated the skills of his opponent. Hooker could not have anticipated two audacious moves by Lee and Stonewall Jackson that flew in the face of all military convention. Firstly, Lee divided his outnumbered army, and secondly, he divided again, allowing Jackson to make his celebrated 14-mile march around the federal positions and put himself in position to attack the Union right flank. Stonewall Jackson's troops virtually strolled right across the front line, the federal front line, and they didn't know anything about it. Nor did they know how meager, how thin was the force that Lee had left behind to defend Fredericksburg. Lee gambled that Hooker would be deceived enough to allow Jackson to complete that 12-mile march and that gamble paid off because when Hooker's spies told him that they'd seen Jackson's forces pulling out initially heading south, well Hooker just thought yeah this is the Confederate retreat that I that I've been predicting so he had no idea of what was gonna come next. The dense forest that surrounds Chancellorsville is known as the Wilderness. This was yet another name that would soon write itself in blood into the folklore of the Civil War. On the evening of May 2nd, while the Union troops were preparing their evening rations, 28,000 Confederate troops suddenly fell upon them from the woods. The terrified Union soldiers turned tail and fled, although eventually they rallied to engage in some of the fiercest and most vicious fighting of the war. In the tangled mass of trees, men fired at each other from point-blank range. It was said that hardly a tree was left unscarred by the gunfire. Only nightfall put an end to the Confederate advance. Tragically for the Confederates, Stonewall Jackson was seriously wounded in the darkness. The following day, May 3rd, more terrible fighting took place. But it was not Hooker and the Union forces that were moving forward to counterattack. The Union commander seemed as paralyzed by uncertainty and lack of confidence as McClellan before him. And he chose to remain on the defensive, despite the fact that Lee's army was now divided into three parts. Even more incredibly, the Union commander threw away the opportunity won by the capture of Mary's Heights at Fredericksburg. Here, the Union's 6th Corps had overwhelmed the troops Lee had left behind to defend the city, and Lee was therefore forced to detail troops to stop the Union threat now heading towards him from Fredericksburg. Lee left 25,000 troops to face Hooker, and brought the rest eastwards to defeat the 6th Corps at a place called Salem's Church. Hooker doesn't have a clear picture of the battlefield from where he is at Chancellorsville Farm. He can't understand what's going on close to him, within a couple of miles of Chancellorsville Farm, because the country is so dense. communications with Fredericksburg where he's got people fighting to try to pin Lee in place on Mary's Heights and once Hooker's injured he is completely dysfunctional for the rest of the day. Hooker is not functioning as the tactical commander at the Battle of Chancellorsville. Hooker had been knocked unconscious by a cannonball that crashed into his headquarters. But later he said it himself, I wasn't hurt by a shell and I wasn't even drunk. I just lost confidence in old Joe Hooker and that's all there is to it. Robert E. Lee had masterminded the greatest tactical masterpiece of the war. 17,000 Union troops had become casualties, and the news of the defeat resounded around the North. My God, my God, what will the country say, said Lincoln when told of the catastrophe. The President knew knives that had been sharpened during the winter months would now be poised to strike. While in the north Lincoln calculated the cost of defeat at Chancellorsville, in the south Lee was finally learning the price of victory. 13,000 troops, nearly a quarter of his army, were dead or wounded, and Lee knew full well that the south, with its limited pool of manpower, simply could not trade losses like these with the north. Sadly for Lee, there was more bad news to come. News that would make the victory at Chancellorsville seem hollow. On May 10th, Stonewall Jackson, Lee's most able and trusted commander in the field, breathed his last. Jackson had been shot the week before, not by a federal bullet, but by shots from a Confederate volley. The great soldier's left arm had been amputated, and at first it appeared that he would recover, but it was not to be. For the South, and for Lee in particular, the loss of Jackson was a savage blow. The great commander knew only too well that the South's mountainous task was now even more difficult without Jackson's bold, adventurous leadership on the front lines. the battlefield. Jackson was a great battlefield commander. Lee was said to have mentioned after he heard that Jackson had his left arm amputated, well he has lost his left arm but I have lost my right arm. And this probably was the case. There are a lot of what-if questions. What if Jackson would have survived? We can't answer that because he didn't survive the pneumonia, which finally took his life. But it certainly was a great loss because there were no other generals in the Confederate Army, in the Army of Northern Virginia, that displayed Jackson's audacity on the battlefield, his coolness under fire, his fearlessness, his ability to inspire his troops. and to drive his troops against overwhelming odds. While the Battle of Chancellorsville had been a costly humiliation for the North, there was better news from the Deep South. It was there that Union forces under Ulysses S. Grant had outmaneuvered Confederate forces and were about to lay siege to Vicksburg on the Mississippi River. The culmination of a well-planned and bold campaign that made Grant into a northern hero. The North needed heroes as much as victories. And well-executed though the Vicksburg campaign was, Grant could hardly have foreseen the plaudits and press adulation that suddenly came his way. Grant is the first Union general to win a big victory. And when after the prolonged siege of Vicksburg, the fortress on the Mississippi that is so important to uniting the Confederacy east and west across the Mississippi River, once Grant takes this strategic point and opens up the Mississippi to the Union so that they can move freely right down to the Gulf of Mexico. Once Grant does that, he has provided the first victory that the Union has encountered. The siege of Vicksburg was quite horrible for the Confederate defenders and the citizens of Vicksburg itself. That part of Mississippi in the summer is extremely hot. Imagine Confederate defenders in exposed positions, in trenches. And in artillery positions with no shelter. Imagine the terrified citizens of Vicksburg under constant bombardment, not only from Union artillery surrounding Vicksburg, but also from the Union Navy on the Mississippi River. The citizens had to resort to living underground in many cases, where caves were dug in the hills around Vicksburg, and the citizens would live in the caves. pretty soon a food shortage occurred because Vicksburg was totally surrounded and cut off by the Union Army and Union Navy. There were only so many rations in Vicksburg to begin with. Now they had to be shared by the Confederate soldiers and by the citizens themselves. As horses and mules died or were killed from combat, their flesh was stripped and was eaten by the citizens and by the soldiers. In some cases, they had to resort to killing rats and eating rats. All of this combined made the situation quite bad for the Southerners. After the fall of Vicksburg, Lincoln wrote to Grant. He said, my dear General, I don't believe you and I have ever met personally. And then he went on to tell Grant how surprised he'd been by the various steps Grant had taken. You know, I thought you should have done this, but you did that. I thought you should have gone south to get some reinforcements, but you didn't. You turned north. I thought it was a mistake. You brought us victory. And I want to personally acknowledge here that you were right and I was wrong. You know, this was the commander-in-chief sweeping aside all of his glittering top brass and humbling himself to a plain, quiet, mid-ranking general. The spring days of 1863 slowly turned to early summer, and the ever-ambitious Lee looked to build upon the victory at Chancellorsville by staging a second invasion of the North. This time, he planned to outflank Washington and to move against cities to the north of the capital. Just think of the panic that would grip the North, he reasoned, if Confederate forces were seen marching towards a place such as New York. Lee, of course, was an offensive-minded commander who desperately wanted to take the war. or out of Virginia and to strike the enemy on his own ground. His army would then be able to feed on the bounty of the northern land and perhaps win a major victory at the same time. In June 1863 came another significant moment in the story of the Civil War. It happened on June 9th at Brandy Station in Northern Virginia, when two great forces of Federal and Confederate Cavalry clashed in what would be the biggest cavalry battle of the entire war. Up until then, the Southern Cavalrymen had believed themselves to be invincible. They were without doubt superior horsemen, and a myth had grown on each side that nobody could defeat them on the battlefield. They were commanded by James Ewell Brown Stewart, better known to all as Jeb, a dashing, gallant cavalryman, a brave warrior, but a man with a streak of vanity that made him determined to protect and enhance his own great reputation. At Brandy Station, the unthinkable happened. The Federal Cavalry caught the Confederates unaware, and for the first time matched them in battle. The Southern Cavalry were not routed, far from it, for it was the Federals who eventually withdrew across the Rappahannock River to regroup. But they survived an extremely close call. In one day, the myth of Confederate cavalry invincibility was shattered, and Jeb Stuart had suffered a huge blow to his reputation, the restoration of which became a major priority in his life. It would not be long before Lee and the Southern Army had cause to curse Stuart's personal vanity. In the American Civil War, it becomes clear that cavalry is useful for reconnaissance, for raiding, and for protecting lines of communication, and that's about all. Jeb Stuart does not see this. Jeb Stuart... sees cavalry as a romantic extension of cavalry in the past, in the Middle Ages. And he sees cavalry action as a decisive arm. in the American Civil War. And that puts him fundamentally at odds with the changing reality of battle. And that means that on occasion, as he did before Gettysburg, Jeb Stuart will go riding off into the countryside seeking to achieve some sort of decisive effect and ignoring reconnaissance, raiding, and securing lines of communication. By the last week of June, Lee had crossed the Potomac, had arrived in Pennsylvania, and his army was preparing to attack Harrisburg. General Hooker had retained command of the Union forces after the Chancellorsville debacle only because Lincoln was unable to find an obvious replacement. Now, Hooker wanted the large Union garrison at Harper's Ferry to be assigned to the Army of the Potomac. When his request was refused, he gave Lincoln an ultimatum. If his demands were not met, he would resign as commander. It was not exactly with a heavy heart that Lincoln chose to accept Hooker's resignation. The man given the onerous task of stopping Lee's army was General George Meade. Meade was a quick-tempered Pennsylvanian who, through his efforts at Chancellorsville and earlier at Fredericksburg, had proved to the increasingly desperate Lincoln that, unlike his predecessor, he was a man of action, unlikely to be phased by the problems of supply or fears of numerical disadvantage. And now that a major battle on Pennsylvanian soil appeared to be imminent, appointing a native Pennsylvanian to command the Army of the Potomac was surely a wise move. President Lincoln even remarked, Meade will fight well on his own dunghill. And so it proved. It took only a day or two for Meade to mobilize his forces and to begin a march to meet his enemy. Neither Meade nor Lee could possibly have guessed that the most famous and crucial battle of the Civil War was now only hours away. It allegedly came about through want of shoes and provisions. Lured by the prospect of purloining some much-needed footwear from the local stores, a brigade of Confederate infantrymen made their way to a small Pennsylvania market town that would write its name in blood into the pages of American history. Gettysburg. After General Lee's smashing victory in the face of overwhelming odds at the Battle of Chancellorsville. Lee decided perhaps the time was right, once again, for another invasion of Northern Territory. And so he approached President Jefferson Davis and members of his cabinet later in May to gain their approval for such a move. Lee truly believed that to win the war he would have to win a major victory on northern soil to get the northern people to ask Lincoln for negotiated peace. And again there are some who think that Lee wanted to get the combat. out of Virginia, which was his native state. Lee successfully convinced the president that this move northward was the thing to do. And so that sets the stage for the withdrawal of his Army of Northern Virginia away from Fredericksburg for their move west to the Shenandoah Valley. using the mountains to mask their movements, to screen their movements, to move north, down the Shenandoah Valley, moving northward towards the Potomac River and Maryland and Pennsylvania. So it was that on July 1st, 1863, the Confederate forces of A.P. Hill almost stumbled into two brigades of Union cavalry commanded by General John Buford. Buford's men, who had fought with distinction at Brandy Station, were in position some two miles northwest of Gettysburg, and they were vastly outnumbered. However, they were armed with breech-loading carbines that gave them a great advantage in firepower over the muzzle-loaded rifles carried by the Confederate infantry, and the Union men were able to make an effective fighting retreat. General Lee arrived in Gettysburg during the afternoon, accompanied by General James Longstreet, a man upon whom, in the wake of Stonewall Jackson's death, Lee had come to rely. Lee was perturbed to hear the sound of fighting, for he had no idea of the strength or size of the Union forces that faced him. The reason for this was the absence of Jeb Stuart and his cavalry. The cavalry that Lee referred to as the eyes and ears of his army. Lee, clearly irritated that the cavalry had failed to show up, said to his fellow commanders, I cannot think what has become of Stuart. I am in ignorance of what we have in front of us here. What would have been his mood had he known exactly why Stuart and his men were not yet at Gettysburg? Jeb Stuart, the Eisen of the Army of Northern Virginia, was missing in Gettysburg because he went on a circuitous ride around the Union troops. His job most of the time was to go out and disrupt Union supply routes, engage their cavalry, and he had some unclear instructions, or what he thought were unclear instructions, from General Lee. So instead of sending out patrols and reconnoitering the area around Gettysburg and serving as the eyes of the Army, he went on one of his rides around the Army of the Potomac to disrupt their supply routes. He engaged their cavalry and as such. And though he was successful in this mission, he left the Army of Northern Virginia blind. And that had some disastrous results. Lee may have been able to make other decisions on the first day and the second day had he had his cavalry with him to scout out positions and to see where the weaknesses were. The fighting raged on during the afternoon of July 1st, and gradually the Confederate attacks, pressed home by Generals A.P. Hill and Jubal Early, began to bear fruit. By late afternoon, Thousands of troops from the Union 1st and 11th Corps were fleeing through the streets of Gettysburg. They rallied in two positions to the south of the town. One was Cemetery Hill, the other was Culp's Hill. That first evening of the battle left American history with some of its greatest what-ifs. What if Early had pressed on to attack the Union positions? Surely the Confederates would have won the battle on the very first day. What if Jackson had still been alive and had been leading the attack? Perhaps his legendary boldness would have been the deciding factor. Of course, no one will ever know. All that is certain is that Early declined to attack the federal positions on Cemetery Hill and Culp's Hill, and that, perhaps, the best chance of a Southern victory was lost. If Lee had pressed the attack, if it had been possible for him to concentrate rapidly and press the attack on the first day of Gettysburg, and if he'd been able to overrun the Union there, then the Union would not have chosen to fight him. The Battle of Gettysburg happens because the Union is able, unhindered, to occupy positions on Cemetery Ridge. And if they are not able, unhindered, to do so because, for instance, the rebels had got up Cemetery Ridge first. There would be no reason for Meade to attack Cemetery Ridge. Why? Stupid. Not at all. All Meade's got to do is prepare to fight with Lee somewhere else. July 2nd dawned and the Union troops were now in strong defensive positions on Cemetery Hill, a section of Cemetery Ridge, and also on Culp's Hill, and reinforcements were arriving by the hour. confederate side there was a fundamental disagreement between Lee and Longstreet over strategy. Lee, remembering the rich rewards gained by forcing the pace at Chancellorsville, was determined to go on the offensive. Longstreet though was a more cautious man who believed with some justification that the South usually won its battles by fighting on the defensive. Lee would hear none of Longstreet's plan to withdraw to a defensive position between Gettysburg and Washington. I am going to attack him, he told Longstreet, who returned to his troops full of foreboding. Longstreet's slowness in deploying his men for the attack during the afternoon attracted much criticism after the war. Was he sulking because his advice had been ignored? Some even suggested afterwards that his lack of urgency was an act of insubordination against Lee. Whatever the truth, by the time Longstreet's men were ready to attack their target, the Federal left on Cemetery Ridge. It was no longer there. The Union Third Corps, under the flamboyant Major General Daniel E. Sickles, had taken up a new position in a salient, stretching between two infamous landmarks of the battle, the Peach Orchard and Devil's Den, with his right wing extending up the Emmitsburg Road. Sickles'move placed his men on higher ground, but his decision to change position was made unilaterally. Worse yet, no one in the Army of the Potomac had seemed to notice the tactical importance of a rocky hill known to the locals as Little Round Top. Located to the south of the Union defenses, a Union signal detachment had been using it as a vantage point to send flag signals. If the Confederates could seize that hill, the entire Union position would be threatened. Here was the perfect opportunity for the Confederates to outflank the Union positions and make an attack to its rear. Determined to seize the moment, Longstreet urged a change of tactics on Lee, but the Confederate commander had made up his mind, and he ordered Longstreet to continue with the original plan, which now meant an attack on Sickles'exposed position. At around 4 o'clock, Longstreet's 20,000 men moved forward. The combat that occurs during the afternoon of July 2nd, 1860. is some of the most ferocious that will occur during an entire Civil War. And the fighting is going to revolve around a couple of significant geographical features. One of them is Devil's Den. Well, Devil's Den is going to anchor the left flank of the 3rd Corps defensive line. The center of the 3rd Corps line will be at a place called the Peach Orchard, which is at the intersection of a farm road and a major... thoroughfare called the Emmitsburg Road. The Third Corps line is not supposed to be there. General Sickles moves his corps out without orders, and when General Lee's plan to attack down the Emmitsburg Road is carried out, he's going to run smack dab into the Third Corps where it's not supposed to be. But the Third Corps is isolated, and various units of the Confederate attacking force will smash into the Third Corps line and send it reeling back in retreat. And another area of the battlefield that becomes very famous for the amount of blood spilled there lies between Devil's Den and the Peach Orchard, and that's just simply called the Wheatfield. The fighting that occurs in the Wheatfield is very bloody and very confusing. The best way to describe it is like a whirlpool, where the fighting continuously goes in circles. At one point, Union soldiers are looking to their front and fighting Confederates. At another point, the Confederates are on their left. the Confederates on the right and vice versa. Meanwhile, at Little Round Top on the Federal left flank, a crisis point for the Union had arrived. Luckily for George Meade, he had sent Brigadier General Gouverneur Warren, his chief engineer, to reconnoiter the Union defenses. Warren rode down to Little Round Top in order to survey the positions with his field glasses. And from that vantage point, he spotted Confederate forces getting into position for a flank attack. Warren had previously commanded an infantry brigade, and although he was now only a staff officer, he used his general's authority to order two brigades from the Union Fifth Corps to move to the defense of Little Round Top. Little Round Top became the crucial arena of the battle for the remainder of the day. It was here that the extreme left flank of the entire Union army came under attack. The man charged with responsibility for defending that vulnerable position was the extraordinary Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, commander of the 20th Maine Infantry. Joshua Chamberlain was in charge of the 20th Maine, and he wasn't a career soldier. Chamberlain was a college professor. He taught... languages and rhetoric at Bowdoin College in Maine. And he and his men were defending the heights to the left of Cemetery Ridge and for two hours they'd stood there pushing back line after line of Confederates who were just knocking them themselves out trying to push their way up the ridge. And eventually Chamberlain's regiment was just had been just chipped away. There were two-thirds of his men. lying dead around him and the rest of them had run out of bullets. And meanwhile the Confederates had regrouped and they were coming at them again. Chamberlain just ordered his men to fix bayonets and charge, screaming their heads off, just, you know, outdo the rebel yell. And the Confederates were stunned. They didn't expect what they got. They didn't expect a charge, a bayonet charge of such audacity and such ferocity. and they dropped their guns, and the Union kept possession of the Heights. Night fell on July 2nd, and it was time to consider what had been gained or lost during a day of furious action. The frenzied Confederate attacks against Culp's Hill and the eastern portion of Cemetery Hill on the Union right flank had met. with only limited success. Only the salient, once occupied by Sickles'men had fallen into their hands. Elsewhere, the Union position remained as it had at the beginning of a dark day of terrible fighting. During the first two days of the battle, almost 35,000 men had been killed or wounded, and there was still no end to the battle in sight. As the bodies of the dead awaited burial and the surgeons of both sides went about their dreadful business, Jeb Stuart finally arrived at the Confederate lines with his cavalry. Lee gave him a frosty reception. July 3rd, and the sun came up on what would prove to be the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg. Lee and Longstreet still could not agree on tactics. Longstreet pleaded to be allowed to outflank the Union army on its extreme left, but again, Lee would not be moved. He correctly believed the Federal lines were at their weakest in the center, and it was there that he intended his forces to make their attack. Longstreet later wrote that he left the meeting with a heavy heart, but he hurried off, albeit with a sense of dread, to organize the artillery bombardment that would precede the assault. Jeb Stuart, no doubt eager to redeem himself in the eyes of Lee, was dispatched to the east of Gettysburg with his cavalry to engage the rear of the Union positions. But his Confederate horsemen were no longer infallible or invincible. Stuart was stopped in his tracks by 5,000 Union cavalrymen in a battle that ensured he was never able to get near enough to influence the main action at Gettysburg itself. It was during this action that a certain George Armstrong Custer, at the head of a brigade of Michigan cavalry, first came to prominence. While the cavalry battle raged, a fresh division of Virginians under General George Pickett, supplemented by men from A.P. Hill's Corps, were preparing themselves for their attack. What must have been their feelings as they saw what awaited them, an advance of nearly three-quarters of a mile across open land to reach the heavily defended Union positions? At 3 o'clock, the thunderous Confederate bombardment lifted. The order came to begin the attack, and one of the most tragic episodes in American military history was about to unfold. This was Longstreet's grand assault, more commonly remembered as Pickett's Charge. What happened was the Confederate artillery opened up to soften up the defenders, and George Gordon Meade ordered the Union cannons to one by one fall silent, make it look as if they'd been knocked out. That way it would convince the Confederates there was no more artillery. left to blast their advancing soldiers. The plan worked. Pickett's men charged up the hill and then the Union artillery opened up, as did the Union soldiers. Frankly, it was a massacre. Nonetheless... by sheer raw courage, some Confederates managed to actually make it to that stone wall and breach the Union defenses very briefly. And then I repulsed. This breaks the back of the Confederate effort at Gettysburg. And in fact, it is called the high tide of the Confederacy because the number of losses at Gettysburg greatly hampers the ability of the Army of Northern Virginia. to operate. It was all my fault. Get together and let us do the best we can towards saving that which has left us. General Lee, I have no division now. The dead lay in the open fields, among the rocks, behind trees and in buildings. They lay in streams, by walls, in hedges, wherever their weakening steps could carry them. Meade wouldn't launch a counterattack because he didn't know how bad- Sadly, Lee's forces had been decimated. I mean, some of his men actually expected the order of a counterattack, and so they launched one themselves against the rebels retreating around Little Round Top. Although they were on the retreat, the rebels turned around and wiped them out, but that didn't really help them anyway. Longstreet got hit on the retreat by two federal divisions, and really that was it. The Confederates pulled out. Lee knew that his invasion of the North was over, and he slipped quietly across the Potomac. After the appalling carnage of July 3rd, Robert E. Lee realized that the Battle of Gettysburg could not be won, and he decided to retreat towards Virginia with his bleeding and battered troops. In torrential rain, an ambulance train that stretched for several miles carried more than 10,000 wounded Confederates towards their home state. They left 6,000 dead comrades behind them. Gettysburg was as far north as the rebel army got, and that mark was the closest the rebel army came to defeating the Union army and possibly getting recognition for the Confederate states. After Pickett's Charge, after the Battle of Gettysburg, the rebel army is no longer capable of fighting. the sequence of tactical actions that Robert E. Lee had hoped to fight towards Washington. Five thousand Union troops were also killed during the battle that had been the defining moment of the war thus far. In Washington, the politicians threw up their hands in horror at Meade's failure to follow up the victory with a crushing blow that might have ended the war. Little did they know he was almost out of ammunition. In Richmond, they feared that after Gettysburg, all hope of an independent South might be gone. If the defeat at Gettysburg were not enough, on July 4th, Independence Day, Vicksburg also surrendered. If you look at Gettysburg in combination with the defeat at Vicksburg, you'll see... That the Confederacy is no longer defending itself, it's just trying to survive. With the Union victory at Vicksburg, the Confederacy is split in half. With the Union victory at Gettysburg, one of its major armies has been shattered. Lee limps across the Potomac River to sit in defense and wait for the oncoming battles. Well, Gettysburg showed that the northern forces were not just a bunch of, you know, lily-livered, pasty-faced shopkeepers. You know, it showed that even their college professors could, you know, lead their men to combat southern fury and determination with northern fury and determination. It was certainly Lee's worst defeat, and it was the end of his hopes for invading the north. And so the year 1863 rolled on. In the North, Lincoln had earlier signed the Enrollment Act in an attempt to conscript men between 20 and 45 into the army. And this triggered violent protests, known to history as the Draft Riots, in many northern cities. The worst was in New York, only 10 days after Gettysburg. Here, a demonstration against the Enrollment Act spiraled out of control and turned quickly into a full-scale riot during which several black Americans were lynched. In the South, the shortages got worse and prices continued to soar. Although news of the Confederate victory at Chickamauga Creek in the northwest corner of Georgia near the border of Tennessee came to... to bolster morale. Here, southern troops from Tennessee and Virginia, under the command of Braxton Bragg and James Longstreet, had driven the Union army back to Chattanooga. A tactical error by the northern general Rosecrans could have resulted in a costly disaster for the Union, but swift action, in particular by General George Thomas, prevented the defeat at Chickamauga Creek turning into a complete catastrophe. It was, however, a very welcome victory for the South, but any joy was tempered by news of the casualty figures. 18,000 men had been killed or wounded. The southern pool of manpower was being further drained with each passing week and month. On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln journeyed to the newly created military cemetery Gettysburg. There, during the dedication ceremony, he gave a short two-minute speech that became known as the Gettysburg Address. Some who heard it thought it inadequate for the occasion, but Lincoln's fine words have echoed down the years to provide a powerful rallying cry for democracy, not only in America, but throughout the world. The nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government, of the people, by the people, for the people. Lee had been practically at the gates of Philadelphia, and he'd been beaten back. So there went all Confederate hopes of French or British intervention on the side of the Confederacy. Their supplies are dwindling, their stocks of horse flesh, their human resources, their stocks of weapons and ammunition are all depleting, and the southern economy is beginning to show serious signs of falling apart. And Lee, though he believes he can hold off a union offensive, Grant is going to push the effort even harder. Lee has met his match, someone who's willing to... to take the same risks, someone who's willing to expend the lives necessary to obtain those guns. The end of the year 1863 was quite a contrast to the beginning of 1863. We see the major Union victories at Vicksburg, at Gettysburg. So on the heels of that victory, the Lincoln administration will go into the year 1864 with high hopes. Let's do it. 1864 will be one bloody year. Let us close our game of poker, take our tin cups in our hand, as we all stand by the cook's tendo. As drive monies of hard crackers are handed to each man. And oh, heart attack, come again no more Tis the dying wail of the starving Heart attack, heart attack, come again once more You were old and very wormy, but we pass your failings on Oh, heart attack, come again once more