Battle of Gettysburg

Fought over three days, 1–3 July 1863, around the small Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg, this was the largest and costliest battle of the American Civil War. George Meade's Union Army of the Potomac threw back Robert E. Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, ending Lee's second invasion of the North. Together with the fall of Vicksburg the next day, it is widely seen as the turning point of the war.

Fresh from his victory at Chancellorsville in early May 1863, Lee decided to carry the war into the North. An invasion would spare war-torn Virginia, feed his army from Northern farms, perhaps ease pressure on besieged Vicksburg and encourage the peace movement in the Union. His army began moving from Fredericksburg on 3 June and advanced through the Shenandoah Valley into Pennsylvania. President Abraham Lincoln replaced the Union commander, Joseph Hooker, with Meade on 28 June, only three days before the armies collided.

On 1 July Confederate troops approaching Gettysburg met Union cavalry under John Buford on the low ridges north-west of the town. Two Union infantry corps came up to support them, but larger Confederate forces attacked from the west and north, broke the Union lines and drove the survivors back through the streets to the hills south of the town.

By 2 July the Union line had taken the shape of a fishhook on the high ground south of the town. In the late afternoon Lee attacked the Union left, setting off fierce fighting at the Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield, Devil's Den and Little Round Top, where the 20th Maine's bayonet charge under Colonel Joshua Chamberlain became one of the war's most famous episodes. Attacks on Culp's Hill and Cemetery Hill on the Union right also failed to break through.

On 3 July, after renewed fighting at Culp's Hill, about 150 to 170 Confederate guns opened what was probably the largest bombardment of the war. Union gunners at first held their fire to save ammunition. At about 3 p.m. between 10,500 and 12,500 Confederate infantry advanced across open fields towards the Union centre on Cemetery Ridge, in the assault named after General George Pickett. Union artillery and rifle fire cut them down, and the attack was repulsed with very heavy losses. Cavalry fought east and south of the town the same day.

On 4 July the armies faced each other in heavy rain while far to the west the Vicksburg garrison surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant. That night Lee began his retreat to Virginia, with a wagon train of wounded some seventeen miles long. Meade, cautious, did not attack, a decision for which he was later criticised. Losses were the highest of any American battle to that date, between 46,000 and 51,000 in all. Union casualties numbered 23,055, of whom 3,155 were killed; Confederate figures are less certain, with estimates of about 23,000 to 28,000. Nearly a third of Lee's generals were killed, wounded or captured. Only one civilian, Jennie Wade, is documented as killed during the battle.

The defeat ended Confederate hopes of a decisive victory on Northern soil. Lincoln refused to let the Confederate vice-president, Alexander Stephens, cross the lines on a possible peace mission, and hopes of European recognition for the Confederate States faded. Many Southerners at first regarded the battle as a setback rather than a disaster, and Lee himself wrote that the campaign had achieved much of what he intended.

On 19 November 1863 Lincoln spoke at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg. His 271-word Gettysburg Address, honouring the dead and recasting the purpose of the war, became one of the most celebrated speeches in American history. The battlefield is now preserved by the National Park Service as Gettysburg National Military Park.

Our 1878 and 1880 maps show the reunited United States in the years after the war.