The Battle of Gettysburg, 1863: the Confederacy's high tide

For three days in the summer of 1863, a small crossroads town in Pennsylvania held the fate of a divided nation. Gettysburg was the bloodiest battle ever fought in North America³, and it broke the tide of the Confederacy's war. After it, the South never again mounted a serious invasion of the North.

Part of The greatest battles of the Civil War · Before: The Battle of Chancellorsville · Next: The Siege of Vicksburg · Key figures: Joshua Chamberlain, John Buford

The battle from both sides

Two perspectives

Union (North) Confederacy (South)

The Army of the Potomac under George Meade fought Gettysburg on the defensive, holding a fish-hook of high ground, Cemetery Ridge, Culp's Hill and the Round Tops, after the first day's fighting drove it back through the town. On the second day it barely held the flanks, with the stand at Little Round Top becoming famous. On the third it broke the climax of the battle: Pickett's Charge, a mass assault on the centre, was cut apart by artillery and rifle fire and repulsed with terrible loss. The victory, alongside the fall of Vicksburg the next day, marked the turning point of the Civil War and ended the Confederacy's last major invasion of the North.

Robert E. Lee brought the Army of Northern Virginia north hoping a victory on Union soil would break Northern will and win foreign recognition. The first day went well, driving Federal troops through Gettysburg, but the Union rallied onto strong high ground. Lee's attacks on the second day battered the flanks without breaking them. On the third, over the doubts of General Longstreet, he ordered a frontal assault on the Union centre, Pickett's Charge, which was shattered in the open. Lee withdrew to Virginia having lost about a third of his army. The defeat, with Vicksburg, turned the war against the South, and the Confederacy never mounted such an offensive again.

Lee goes north

Fresh from victory at Chancellorsville, the Confederate general Robert E. Lee gambled everything on carrying the war into the North. A win on Union soil, he hoped, might shatter Northern morale⁴ and force a negotiated peace. His Army of Northern Virginia marched into Pennsylvania, with the Union Army of the Potomac, newly under General George Meade, hurrying to intercept it.

Day one: collision

The armies met almost by accident west of the town on 1 July.⁵ The Confederates drove the outnumbered Union troops back through the streets of Gettysburg, but the survivors rallied on the high ground to the south, on Cemetery Hill and along the ridges beyond. That high ground, shaped like a fishhook, would decide everything.

Day two: the flanks

On 2 July Lee hammered both ends of the Union line. The fighting at Little Round Top, the Wheatfield and the Peach Orchard was among the most desperate of the war. On the far left a Maine regiment, out of ammunition, held the hill with a bayonet charge.⁵ Battered and bent, the Union fishhook held.

Day three: Pickett's Charge

Convinced the Union centre must be weak, Lee sent roughly 12,500 men across three-quarters of a mile of open field straight at it. Pickett's Charge walked into a storm of cannon and rifle fire. A few hundred reached the stone wall at the crest, the “high-water mark” of the Confederacy, and were killed or captured there. More than half the attackers were killed, wounded or captured.¹

The retreat

Lee pulled his shattered army back to Virginia through the rain. The three days had cost the two sides together some 50,000 casualties. Meade did not destroy Lee, and the war ground on for nearly two more years, but the Confederacy's best chance to win on the offensive had died on that ridge.

The Address

That November, at the dedication of the soldiers' cemetery, President Abraham Lincoln spoke for barely two minutes.⁶ In 272 words, the Gettysburg Address recast the war as a test of whether a nation “conceived in liberty” could endure, and gave the terrible battle a meaning that outlived everyone who fought it.