GETTYSBURG – 1993
In 1863, the Northern and Southern forces fight at Gettysburg in
the decisive battle of the American Civil War.
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An examination of the Battle of Gettysberg on both the personal
and strategic level.
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BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG
The Battle of Gettysburg, was fought July 1–3, 1863, in and
around the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It was the battle with
the largest number of casualties in the American Civil
War7 and is often
described as the war’s turning point. Union Maj. Gen. George Gordon
Meade’s Army of the Potomac defeated attacks by Confederate Gen.
Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, ending Lee’s invasion of
the North.
After his success at Chancellorsville in Virginia in May 1863,
Lee led his army through the Shenandoah Valley to begin his second
invasion of the North—the Gettysburg Campaign. With his army in
high spirits, Lee intended to shift the focus of the summer
campaign from war-ravaged northern Virginia and hoped to influence
Northern politicians to give up their prosecution of the war by
penetrating as far as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, or even
Philadelphia. Prodded by President Abraham Lincoln, Maj. Gen.
Joseph Hooker moved his army in pursuit, but was relieved just
three days before the battle and replaced by Meade.
Elements of the two armies initially collided at Gettysburg on
July 1, 1863, as Lee urgently concentrated his forces there, his
objective being to engage the Union army and destroy it. Low ridges
to the northwest of town were defended initially by a Union cavalry
division under Brig. Gen. John Buford, and soon reinforced with two
corps of Union infantry. However, two large Confederate corps
assaulted them from the northwest and north, collapsing the hastily
developed Union lines, sending the defenders retreating through the
streets of town to the hills just to the south.
On the second day of battle, most of both armies had assembled.
The Union line was laid out in a defensive formation resembling a
fishhook. In the late afternoon of July 2, Lee launched a heavy
assault on the Union left flank, and fierce fighting raged at
Little Round Top, the Wheatfield, Devil’s Den, and the Peach
Orchard. On the Union right, demonstrations escalated into
full-scale assaults on Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill. All across
the battlefield, despite significant losses, the Union defenders
held their lines.
On the third day of battle, July 3, fighting resumed on Culp’s
Hill, and cavalry battles raged to the east and south, but the main
event was a dramatic infantry assault by 12,500 Confederates
against the center of the Union line on Cemetery Ridge, known as
Pickett’s Charge. The charge was repulsed by Union rifle and
artillery fire, at great losses to the Confederate army. Lee led
his army on a torturous retreat back to Virginia. Between 46,000
and 51,000 soldiers from both armies were casualties in the
three-day battle. That November, President Lincoln used the
dedication ceremony for the Gettysburg National Cemetery to honor
the fallen Union soldiers and redefine the purpose of the war in
his historic Gettysburg Address.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gettysburg
PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S ADDRESS ON GETTYSBURG
“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that
nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long
endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have
come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place
for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It
is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, 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. The world will little note, nor long
remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did
here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the
unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly
advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great
task remaining before us-that from these honored dead we take
increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full
measure of devotion-that we here highly resolve that these dead
shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have
a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the
people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
President Abraham Lincoln,
Gettysburg,
Pennsylvania
November 19, 1863.
http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/lincoln-gettys…