The Legend of Pickett’s Charge

Bob Thompson — June 28, 1998

Close your eyes, and you can see the lines of Confederates coming out of the woods. You're standing at the most famous stone wall in America, on Cemetery Ridge in Gettysburg National Military Park, near the point where it juts west a few yards at a right angle before turning back to hug the ridge along the Union front. Before you is an intimidating expanse of open farmland. Across it, three-quarters of a mile away, a sad-eyed Robert E. Lee returns your gaze from astride his great gray horse. Some of the strongest currents of American history came together on this field: the dissonant clash between slavery and the ideal of human equality; the bitter dispute between the states and the federal government over how democracy should be defined; the economic push and pull between the industrializing north and the agrarian south; and most obviously, the secessionist drive that threatened the survival of the young republic.

Historical forces, you might say, converged on Gettysburg like the great armies themselves on July 1, 1863, flooding into town on the Chambersburg Pike and the Emmitsburg Road. And in the end, at about 3 p.m. on the third of July, as the men of Maj. Gen. George E. Pickett's division emerged in long butternut-colored rows from the woods along Seminary Ridge and began their glorious, doomed advance toward the Army of the Potomac's waiting guns, the war's climactic confrontation began. Or did it?

"Gettysburg as turning point is part of the mythology," Carol Reardon says. "I try to stay away from turning point.’” Reardon is a military historian at Pennsylvania State University and the author of a recent book in which she explains why the story we think we know about that fatal summer day is not the same, in ways both small and large, as the story of what actually occurred here. Historical truth, she says, is not the same as memory. Which is a "blank canvas on which you can paint whatever it is you want to see."

Battles may be the most mythologized events in human history -- and the most compelling. To immerse yourself in the story of a battle, especially a close-fought and "decisive" one like Gettysburg, is more than a little like plunging into a fat, evocative novel. It's a kind of alternative universe, an extraordinary landscape brimming with grand themes, nuanced detail, great opportunities seized and lost, and vivid portraits of human beings in stark conflict with one another. To be drawn into such a story seems so natural, in fact, that you rarely stop to question how much is myth and how much is reality. Or to ask yourself precisely why you are so fascinated—by this battlefield in particular, and by battlefields in general.

Carol Reardon first visited Gettysburg in 1963, when she was 11 years old and living with her family in Pittsburgh. "I was so excited I couldn't sleep," she says. "I had my first camera. I had three rolls of film. I took pictures of absolutely everything." They're lousy pictures, she says, but she still has them. Reardon is 5 feet tall, with short red hair and a no-nonsense manner; she'll sink to her ankles in battlefield muck without a word of complaint. She's also one of very few women who've chosen to specialize in military history. "I was a good reader as a kid," she says, by way of explanation. "Most of us who get into this kind of business are."

In third grade, she discovered a Landmark book about Gettysburg by MacKinlay Kantor, "and I devoured that; I can recite parts of it." She read every Gettysburg book in the library, including a much-loved, orange-covered children's biography of Lee. "And I started reading Bruce Catton at a very early age." Catton, who wrote for adults, was one of the great chroniclers of the Civil War. In Glory Road, published in 1952, he recounts the saga of Gettysburg from the Union point of view. There was Lee, marching his splendid army into Pennsylvania to take the heat off war-torn Northern Virginia. There was the much-defeated Army of the Potomac, under its brand-new commander, George Meade, scrambling to head Lee off. There was the bold move by a Union cavalry commander to stake out the high ground on the first day of the battle and trade space and blood for time until the rest of the army could come up to occupy it. There was the intense, ultimately stalemated fighting of the second day, with Lee sending wave after wave of men against the Union left at places with names like "the Peach Orchard" and "Devil's Den."

Then came July 3, with its deafening artillery barrage—"the loudest noise, probably, that had ever been heard on the American continent up to that moment"—setting the stage for Pickett's Charge. In a typically lyrical passage, Catton describes what happened next:

The smoke lifted like a rising curtain, and all of the great amphitheater lay open at last, and the Yankee soldiers could look west all the way to the belt of trees on Seminary Ridge. They were old soldiers and had been in many battles, but what they saw then took their breath away, and whether they had ten minutes or seventy-five years yet to live, they remembered it until they died. There it was, for the last time in this war, perhaps for the last time anywhere, the grand pageantry and color of war in the old style, beautiful and majestic and terrible: fighting men lined up for a mile and a half from flank to flank, slashed red flags overhead, soldiers marching forward elbow to elbow, officers with drawn swords, sunlight gleaming from thousands of musket barrels, lines dressed as if for parade. Up and down the Federal firing line ran a low murmur: “There they are…There comes the infantry!”

It is a breathtaking moment indeed, but there are some problems, Reardon says, with the way the scene has come down to us. "Everybody has a Pickett's Charge picture in mind," she says, "of those lines coming out of the woods. As I'll show you on the field, it didn't happen that way."  

But never mind that for now. We're getting ahead of our story.

The storyteller's temptation to make the fate of the nation turn on the actions of individual human beings is almost irresistible. Never mind those impersonal economic and demographic forces that stacked the deck against the Confederacy: What if any of dozens of decisions had been made differently, by any of dozens of different men, in the days leading up to Pickett's Charge? What if rebel cavalry chief J.E.B. Stuart hadn't gone off on his own, galloping whimsically through Maryland and Pennsylvania, just when Lee most needed him to track the movements of the Army of the Potomac? No Stuart joy ride, no battle at Gettysburg, no Pickett's Charge. What if Lt. Gen. Richard S. Ewell, the commander of the Confederate left wing, had pushed a bit harder and occupied Culp's Hill on the evening of the battle's first day? The Federals would have had to give up their dominant position on Cemetery Ridge. No Pickett's Charge. For that matter, what if Ewell hadn't been commanding the Confederate left at all? What if Stonewall Jackson had been there? Old Stonewall would've spanked those Yanks all the way to Baltimore! No Pickett's Charge. And maybe the South would have won its independence after all.

"We have an answer to the What if Stonewall was here' question," Reardon says. "And that is, if Stonewall was here he'd smell very bad, because he's been dead for six weeks." She laughs. "There's a certain level of what-iffing we don't go beyond."  

To walk the field of Gettysburg with Carol Reardon is to sense a healthy tension between the storyteller and the historian in her. She is lucid and convincing when she talks about the way our picture of the third day's fighting has been shaped by ahistorical forces, among them the imprecision of individual memory, the collective need for validation and explanation, and rampant personal and regional rivalries. She is a voice of reason on the "central moment of our history" notion, pointing out that while most people at the time celebrated Gettysburg as a great Northern victory—which was important in itself, because there had been no such Northern victories before—few saw it as the kind of turning point that doomed the South to defeat. Nor does she, today. The capture of Vicksburg, the last Southern stronghold on the Mississippi, "was a far more devastating blow than a tactical defeat up here," she says, because it allowed the Union to accomplish one of its primary strategic goals: opening up the western river system.

Yet she's equally convincing—and perhaps a shade more animated—as she explicates the battle's tangled plot lines and the varied personalities of its generals. She talks about the long-haired, enthusiastic George Pickett, whose name has been immortalized, but who doesn't show up much in battlefield accounts after the charge begins. Chances are he watched most of the fighting from a position a few hundred yards to the rear (which is where he should have been, in order to direct the action). Reardon mentions a shocked Mississippi soldier, "down toward the Peach Orchard, who absolutely swore that Pickett was drunk." She doesn't believe him.

She paints a respectful portrait of the rough-edged, defensive-minded James Longstreet, Lee's most trusted subordinate, who bluntly told his commander in chief that the planned charge could not succeed, who hadn't wanted to fight at Gettysburg in the first place, who had wanted Lee to swing the army into a more advantageous position between the Army of the Potomac and Washington and force the Federals to attack him, and who, when the time came to send Pickett's men into action, couldn't bring himself to speak the order aloud, but only gave a nod. "I'm not a Longstreet apologist; I like to think about myself as a Longstreet realist," Reardon says, noting that a move toward the capital would have left Lee's supply lines dangerously exposed. "But if the alternative is Pickett's Charge, it does seem to make sense." (This Friday, on the charge's 135th anniversary, she'll be at Gettysburg again, as a Longstreet memorial is finally dedicated.) She sings the praises of the widely unsung George Meade, who took command three days before the battle, who didn't have time to assemble his own staff, but who exploited his strong defensive position well and put his faith in the right people—especially Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, one of the newest corps commanders in the army, whom Meade placed in the center of the Union line. She lauds Hancock as well, and a number of his less-heralded subordinates. 

Still, she says, "it's Pickett's Charge, it's not Hancock's Defense." And one reason we remember it this way is that people have always assumed—not unreasonably, given his track record—that Gettysburg was Robert E. Lee's to win or lose. Reardon tends to dismiss theories about Lee's poor health affecting his judgment. "But he's not at his best here," she says. He made mistakes throughout the battle, and he made all the big decisions about the charge himself. He picked the wrong objective, the wrong command structure and some of the wrong troops. He didn't do enough to ensure the effectiveness of the artillery bombardment. Worst of all, "he hasn't really considered the question, Okay, we break the line, what next?' " 

"But Robert E. Lee was not stupid," Reardon cautions. On the first day of the battle, he'd seen his troops move out across an open field—not as big as the field of Pickett's Charge, perhaps, but close—and, after a tough fight, drive a strong Union force off the high ground west of town. He had absolute faith in the courage and tenacity of his soldiers. Surely, surely, they could do it one more time.

What Lee was asking those soldiers to do is not possible for most of us to understand; no one who has not been in a battle can ever truly know what one is like. But perhaps the closest you can come is to walk, quite literally, in the footsteps of Lee's men. And as you do this, you must keep one complication of the story line in mind: There were, in reality, not one but two main Confederate charges up Cemetery Ridge on July 3, 1863. George Pickett's division—its numbers estimated at between 4,000 and 6,200 men—formed only the southern half of the attacking force that Lee and Longstreet assembled that day. On the northern half were another whole division, under the command of Brig. Gen. James Johnston Pettigrew, and elements of two more, under Maj. Gen. Isaac R. Trimble. The total Confederate force, which Lee had placed under Longstreet's overall direction, was somewhere between 10,500 and 15,000 men. To complicate matters further, a couple of other brigades were held in reserve on Pickett's right. They would advance, futilely, after the main attack had failed.

As Bruce Catton and many other Gettysburg chroniclers do not make particularly clear, the troops began their advance, not in one long line, but as two distinct commands. And there was, as Reardon reports, a "low finger of ground jutting westward from the area around the Angle"—that sudden jog in the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge—which had the effect of splitting the battlefield in two. "This subtle ripple cut the lines of sight along the lines of command responsibility," she writes, with Pettigrew and Trimble on the north and Pickett on the south. "Only a few soldiers saw much of both clashes."

Oh, and one more thing: It wasn't Pickett's but Pettigrew's brigades, with Trimble's close behind them, that those awed Yanks observed parading out of those woods. Does this matter? Yes, for a couple of reasons. The first is tactical. You can't begin to understand what Lee's soldiers faced—and why they failed—without understanding the differences in the makeup of the two forces and in the terrain they traversed. Pickett's troops, who were all Virginians, were fresh. Unlike the men from North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi who formed the bulk of Pettigrew's and Trimble's units (though there were Virginians among them as well), they had not seen action in the first two days at Gettysburg. By contrast, Pettigrew's and Trimble's ranks were thin and battered; great numbers of seasoned officers and men were missing, and some of the more lightly wounded had been bandaged up and sent out to fight again. In addition, Pettigrew's half of the field was much more exposed than Pickett's.

The men there had to contend with some especially concentrated fire from Union artillery on Cemetery Hill, and once they'd left the woods, there was no protection to speak of. Pickett's route, while hardly a stroll in the park, offered somewhat more cover. The second reason to remember the two wings of the charge is this: Gettysburg turned Pettigrew's and Trimble's men into two-time losers. They got pretty much obliterated by the Yankees, and they got mauled again in the mythmaking after the fact. 

Reardon's book, Pickett's Charge in History and Memory, is in considerable part the story of this second mauling: how the dominant Richmond press began to celebrate a seemingly all-Virginia "Pickett's" Charge; how Northern chroniclers adopted and amplified this spin; how some Virginians, not content simply to ignore the role of their comrades from other states, began accusing them of cowardice and blaming them for the Confederate defeat; and how the North Carolinians and others fought violently—but in vain—to counter these historical assaults. It's an all-too-human spat full of shameful finger-pointing and self-aggrandizing pettiness. And it could scarcely feel more removed from the indisputable heroism that sparked it. 

You can sense the intensity of that heroism at the Tennessee and North Carolina monuments on Seminary Ridge, looking up that gentle, lethal slope toward the stone wall that Pettigrew's men would never reach. "The Rebel line came very near," as Catton puts it, and then "every musket and every cannon in this part of the Yankee line opened at once, and the whole Confederate division disappeared in an immense cloud of smoke and dust. Above this boiling cloud the Union men could see a ghastly debris of guns, knapsacks, blanket rolls, severed human heads, and arms and legs and parts of bodies, tossed into the air by the impact of the shot." (Precise casualty figures for the charge are impossible to come by, Reardon says, in part because so many of Pettigrew's and Trimble's men had been lost in earlier fighting. But it is generally agreed that more than half of the Confederates who set out, on both sides of the field, were killed, wounded or captured.) 

You can sense the heroism from behind the stone wall itself, when you put yourself in the place of the Union troops whose own brave conduct has been overshadowed by the legendary valor of their enemies. And you can sense it as you trace the advance of Pickett's brigades. You've started in a field near the Spangler farm, much farther south than you'd have thought (though no one's exactly sure where the charge began). You're moving at an angle to the Union position, not straight at it like Pettigrew's men. "Look up—can you see your target?" Reardon says. You can't. For a while, you're invisible to your enemy. "Whether we were behind that little ridge or whether we were down in this swale, we're protected from most everything." This doesn't last, of course. Pretty soon you're coming under serious artillery fire, and bloody gaps are starting to appear in your line. Civil War artillery is "the great disorganizer," Reardon says. It's not as horrifically destructive as people assume, at least at long range. But for an infantry unit to be effective, the soldiers must remain in a formation cohesive enough to permit massed fire. "And that's the biggest thing Civil War artillery does: It messes up all those pretty formations."

Right about now, the Union position starts coming into view, and you can see what you're up against. "This is the first time you have gut check." But notice the high ground: "There's a little bit of a ridge there" that offers some protection. Keep walking. Keep walking. Now you're less than a hundred yards from the split-rail fences at the Emmitsburg Road, which more or less parallels the Union line. "So you're moving up, you're getting closer and you're getting closer," and around here somewhere, maybe as you come up to the fences, "somebody up there is going to yell Fire.' " There hasn't been a lot of cheering so far, and there isn't now. You go over the fences. "Now you're taking rifle fire, and they're up there just whaling away at you."

Men are dying to the right and left of you, but you're not yet firing back. And you're going to make one last stop, about 25 yards from the stone wall. Twenty-five yards! You realign. You shoot for the first time. You've started out with three front-line generals. One's dead now, one lies badly wounded. You're getting closer and closer. You hit the wall. Your last remaining general, Lewis Armistead—sword raised, hat on the point—goes over it. Reardon gestures a few yards up the slope. "And there's his marker," she says.

It takes you maybe 20 minutes to walk up the hill, 20 minutes to lose the nasty struggle near the top, and 20 minutes to walk back down again, those of you who are left, to where your much-loved commander in chief will greet you, saying, "It was all my fault."

Why are we fascinated by battles? The question is rather, how could we not be? Just think of that moment when Armistead goes over the wall. It helps if you know a little about him, of course. He's 46, gray-haired, a West Point dropout who once broke a mess hall plate over a classmate's head. He's a widower. A famous story attaches to him, of a prewar army farewell dinner, with some of the group bound south and others north. "Hancock, good-bye; you can never know what this has cost me," are the words supposedly uttered to a friend by Armistead that night. That would be the Hancock who now commands the Union center, and to whom, as Lew Armistead lies dying, he will send a final message of regret.

But it's not necessary that you know these facts or legends. It's sufficient to imagine his moment of decision and to wonder: What would it feel like to march straight at death that way? "War is the romance of history," wrote the pacifist philosopher William James four decades after Gettysburg, "and the possibility of violent death the soul of all romance." It makes no difference that we know war to be irrational and horrible, James says. "The horrors make the fascination"—and we're not willing to give that up. Ask Americans if they would exchange the murderous legacy of the Civil War for a peaceful, alternative resolution of the dispute, he argues, and they wouldn't do it: "Those ancestors, those efforts, those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out."

Is James right? Let's pause to contemplate some of Gettysburg's horrors, for they've hardly been touched on in the story so far. After the battle, as MacKinlay Kantor doesn't shrink to inform his young readers, "a stench you could almost see" rose from the fields. The wounded lay "cooing and wailing, dying in delirium, dying silently." Buzzards set about their work. They had followed the armies to town. Some 10,000 men died at Gettysburg, Reardon says. "Just in this area you can see there were probably 500 graves." She's talking about a few acres between the stone wall and the Emmitsburg Road. "You dig a hole, no more than maybe two-and-a-half feet deep. Roll in the first body, start digging the second hole, fill in the first hole with that dirt." If you recognize a comrade, you'll try to mark his grave somehow, so his relatives can dig him up and cart him home. 

The Confederate dead were not so lucky. On display at Gettysburg is a daguerreotype of a handsome young woman with her dark hair parted in the middle. A Yankee sergeant found it on the field of Pickett's Charge, clasped in the hand of a "noble-looking youth, lying prone upon his back, his eyes wide open and staring towards heaven." The sergeant hoped to find the woman, but never did. 

And there is one more horror we need to consider before accepting Pickett's Charge as "a sacred spiritual possession." Toward the northern end of Hancock's line on Cemetery Ridge stand a small white house and barn. They were the home of a farmer named Abraham Brian, a free black man who fled as the Army of Northern Virginia approached. Most other blacks in the area were on the run as well. "Word was out," says Reardon, that "if you got recaptured, free or not, you were headed south." The Civil War was about a lot of things, but it was as much about slavery as anything. The men assaulting Cemetery Ridge were fighting, at least in part, to preserve an indefensible atrocity. The men defending the ridge were fighting, at least in part, to right an enormous wrong. And in the postwar efforts to heal the nation's wounds, this distinction was too often shunted aside.

Many Union soldiers would resent the glorification of the Confederates' courage in Pickett's Charge and elsewhere on the grounds that their foes had been slaveholders and traitors. And Frederick Douglass undoubtedly spoke for most African Americans when he said, "I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery." Douglass didn't think Pickett's Charge was central to anything. He saw the Emancipation Proclamation, not some failed assault in Pennsylvania, as the pivotal moment of American history. He labored for decades to convert the majority to his view, which is still a convincing one. 

Yet the story of Pickett's Charge remains the irresistible narrative of the war. Like all narrative, it shapes and intensifies human experience—highlighting elements of historical reality that work to this end and marginalizing those that don't—then invites us along for the ride. Small wonder that we are unwilling, as William James understood, to see this "supreme theatre of human strenuousness" closed. Far from dismissing the lure of the battlefield, James argued that we must acknowledge it, and think up substitutes—"the moral equivalent of war"—instead. We are drawn to climaxes, to climactic resolutions, be they mythical or real. We identify with those men, be they officers or common soldiers, who, at or around 3 o'clock on the sweltering afternoon of July 3, 1863, understood that they might have just minutes to live, and we want to believe that what they did in those minutes had meaning. 

No amount of fact-based argument can change this emotional pull.  "What intrigues me," Carol Reardon says, "is how much everybody wanted to claim to have been part of this." She's sitting on the wall now, looking back across the empty field. "Units up and down this line that had no connection to this fight whatsoever are going to claim to have played some role." As for the troops who weren't on the line at all, "they would talk about some of their other battles and say, ‘Well, this was our Pickett's Charge.’”

But the Yankees who fought so hard and well in those other battles, and the Confederates who did the same, and the men who charged and died in the first two days at Gettysburg, and even Pettigrew's and Trimble's men, who came out of the woods on the far side of this very field, behind that nearly imperceptible ridge: They're out of luck. They didn't fight here, inside the angle of this particular stretch of wall, by this particular clump of trees, at what would come to be known, with metaphoric if not historical precision, as "The High Water Mark of the Rebellion."

"This was just one of those moments," Reardon says. "A moment that froze time."

This piece was originally published in The Washington Post Magazine on June 28, 1998 — https://washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/1998/06/28/the-legend-of-picketts-charge/8b9b63a7-5585-401e-93df- 7164aa8fc1f7