The 20 Most Significant Events of the Civil War

by Alan Axelrod

  As for the residents of Gettysburg, they were left after those three days with the massive burden of helping to treat the wounded and bury the dead. More than 104,000 Army of the Potomac soldiers were ready for duty during the battle (about 90,000 were actively engaged). They faced as many as 75,000 Confederates. Of a combined total of some 179,000 men, between 46,000 and 51,000 became casualties. Of these, about 8,000 were corpses bloating in the July sun. Added to the human remains were the carcasses of perhaps 3,000 horses. The Confederates having withdrawn, Union troops and townspeople hurriedly buried the dead in shallow graves. After days of sunshine, the heavens opened up with torrential rains, which washed a great many of the bodies out of their inadequately prepared burial places. The flies swarmed, and pigs, loosed from their damaged enclosures, rooted around the bodies. It was a vision of obscenity permeated by the stench of mass decomposition. Putrefaction and pestilence could not be allowed to stand as the only monument of a great battle. A combination of nausea, propriety, religious belief, patriotism, and fear of epidemic disease moved the people of the town to take matters into their own hands.

  They appealed to Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Gregg Curtin, who appointed a Gettysburg attorney, David Wills, to preside over an interstate commission for the creation of a great military memorial cemetery. Under Wills’s leadership, the commission raised funds from private and individual sources, and seventeen acres were purchased, the federal government agreeing to contribute all necessary coffins. Wills invited the most celebrated orator of the day, Edward Everett, former member of Congress, Massachusetts governor, ambassador to the United Kingdom, senator from Massachusetts, and secretary of state, to appear as the featured speaker at the dedication of the cemetery. Only as the day (November 19, 1863) of that dedication approached did it occur to Wills to invite President Abraham Lincoln to attend. He issued the invitation on November 2, assuming that the heavily burdened chief executive would be unable to accept. Given the last-minute nature of the invitation, surely Lincoln must have been aware that he was an afterthought, but he eagerly accepted nonetheless.

  The president actually harbored some disappointment about the victory at Gettysburg. Having defeated Lee decisively, George Meade, commanding general of the Army of the Potomac, chose not pursue the Army of Northern Virginia as it limped away from the three-day battle. Lincoln felt about this much as he had felt about General McClellan’s failure to pursue Lee after eking out a narrow victory at Antietam, the bloodiest single-day battle in American history. But just as Lincoln made the most he could out of McClellan’s imperfect triumph, using it as a platform from which to launch the Emancipation Proclamation, so he now seized on an opportunity to make the most of Gettysburg. True, Meade had allowed the Army of Northern Virginia to get away, but he had driven it and its legendary commanding general out of the North. Robert E. Lee had done his worst to intimidate the Union, its army, and its people. In this he failed because his invasion failed. Now Lincoln wanted to make certain that all Americans—in the Union and in the Confederacy—understood this, understood the meaning of Gettysburg. In modern parlance, Lincoln saw it as an eminently teachable moment.

  The sudden illness of his youngest son, Tad, almost persuaded Lincoln to remain at home in the White House. His wife, Mary Todd, begged him not to leave her and the boy. Her anxiety, bordering on hysteria, was understandable. The couple’s second son, Edward (Eddie), had died in 1850 at the age of four, most likely the victim of tuberculosis, and their third son, William (Willie), succumbed to the measles as recently as 1862. Tad contracted that disease at the same time, but pulled through, and now he was very ill again. As hard as it must have been for him, Lincoln tore himself away and arrived by train in Gettysburg the night before the dedication. He stayed with the Wills family in their home.

  Legend has it that Lincoln hastily scribbled his speech on an envelope. In fact, he labored over it as a great poet might labor over a poem written for the ages. While he clearly had an acute sense of what was at stake in his message, he never succumbed to a sense of his own self-importance. In 1931, eighty-seven-year-old Sarah A. Myers (called Sallie Cook as a young woman) recalled how she, nineteen in 1863, was living with her widowed mother and her siblings in “our beloved old family homestead,” Cook’s Mill on Possum Creek in the foothills of South Mountain. With her older sister, Elmira, she traveled the eleven miles to Gettysburg to see the dedication and hear the speeches, and, early on the morning of November 19, she was invited into the parlor of the Wills home to meet President Lincoln.

  “I shook [his] hand … He was so tall that he stooped to take my hand, which seemed so small in his. Silently, he smiled down upon me. I then [walked] up to the Cemetery before the President’s procession started and sat upon the rough wooden platform.”

  Lincoln must have been heartened by the size of the throng that had gathered for the dedication, an audience estimated at between 15,000 and 20,000, but he also knew that he was neither the first nor the featured speaker that day. That, of course, was Edward Everett, who delivered a nearly two-hour address of more than 13,000 words, of which the opening sentence alone totaled fifty-two. It was greeted with much applause, which must have been intimidating to the president—especially because he knew his speech was nowhere nearly so long.

  “I was close to the President and heard all of the Address,” Sarah Myers recalled, “but it seemed short.”

  It was short, very short—just 272 words—which took all of two minutes to deliver:

  Four score 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.

  Myers, who described herself as a “birthright Quaker,” remembered that an “impressive silence” followed the speech, “like our Menallen Friends Meeting. There was no applause when he stopped speaking.” In fact, Lincoln turned to a companion and remarked, “It is a flat failure and the people are disappointed.” The next day, some of the nation’s newspapers agreed, judging two minutes far too slim a sentimental investment for such a solemn occasion. Others, however, praised the speech, and Everett himself congratulated the president on its “eloquent simplicity & appropriateness,” adding “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.” Indeed, within days of the ceremony, the national press seems to have wakened to the importance as well as the eloquence of Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.” It was published in full or quoted in newspapers across the country.

  * * *

  For Lincoln, the fullest meaning of the victory at Gettysburg was expressed to the living by the dead. Their “last full measure of devotion” was meant to inspire “us the living” to dedicate ourselves to ensuring “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.” Yet the Battle of Gettysburg is also rich with lessons from both the living and the dead. Here are the three most significant.

  Buford Holds the High Ground

  When Henry Heth reported to General Hill the presence of enemy cavalry in Gettysburg on June 31, it occurred to neither man that these horse soldiers were the advance guard of the entire Army of the Potomac. Robert E. Lee did have an inkling, however. General Longstreet had hired Henry Thomas Harrison, a Mississippian by birth and an actor by vocation, to find and spy on any Union military activity nearby. He now reported to Longstreet and Lincoln that the Army of the Potomac was closing in. He could not, however, give Lee an estimate as to numbers.

  Rural Pennsylvania is not where Lee wanted to fight. Nor was his objective to seek out and defeat a major Union Army in a great battle. His aim was merely to raid and to menace, to target Baltimore and perhaps Philadelphia, but, most of all, Washington. His ultimate purpose was to attack and undermine the confidence of the people of the United States. Nevertheless, if a battle was being forced upon him, he was determined to make the very most of it. He meant to win a big victory.

  Lee’s own track record gave him reason for confidence. He had, after all, decisively defeated the Army of the Potomac twice before, at Fredericksburg and at Chancellorsville. Besides, this time he even had the element of surprise on his side. It was a magnificent opportunity, with the stakes of the contest higher than ever. The earlier victories had been won while defending Confederate soil. If Lee could triumph at Gettysburg, in the United States, against an army he had twice bested, he might well bring about the turning point in the war.

  Not everyone agreed with him. Longstreet, his favorite among his subordinates, had counseled against the Northern invasion in the first place, and he now tried to talk him out of seeking a showdown battle at Gettysburg. Not only would the Army of Northern Virginia be outnumbered, it would be put at risk for an objective, Gettysburg, of no special strategic value. Lee countered that Meade’s army was spread out and therefore vulnerable. Gettysburg wasn’t the point. The opportunity to defeat the flagship military force of the Union was. At best, such a victory could bring about peace talks favorable to the Confederacy. At the very least, it would likely cause Lincoln’s defeat when he ran for reelection in 1864. That would bring a Democrat into office, and the Democrats would run on a platform pledge to bring the war to an immediate end. Finally—and this may have been the most critical factor in his decision—Lee believed that General Meade saw the same opportunity he saw, namely an army strung out over a considerable distance and therefore vulnerable. If the Army of Northern Virginia failed to concentrate at Gettysburg, there was every possibility that Meade would attack and defeat the Confederate flagship force in detail.

  Major General John Buford, at the head of a detachment of his Union cavalry brigade in Gettysburg, did not know exactly where the Army of Northern Virginia was, but he knew it was nearby. He was a tough, savvy commander. His prewar experience fighting Native Americans in Texas and the Southwest developed in him coup d’oeil, the power to look at a landscape and see in it all the advantages and disadvantages of a coming battle. What Buford saw at Gettysburg was the high ground—McPherson Ridge, it was called—on the western edge of town. He had detected Heth probing close by, and he assumed that a larger force was on its way. There were just two choices. Buford could hightail it back to the rest of his brigade, or he could stay where he was, in harm’s way, to occupy McPherson Ridge and hold it until more of the Army of the Potomac could get to Gettysburg. Having survived the carnage of Fredericksburg, a place at which the Confederates held the heights, he knew the murderous consequences of giving up high ground to the enemy.

  Buford dismounted his troopers and deployed them along the ridge. Their mission was to hold it until more of the army arrived. That could be hours—even longer. He didn’t know how long it would be, but he knew for certain that his men would be badly outnumbered for however long it was. Nevertheless, he resolved to make the most of his advantages: possession of the high ground and the fact that, as cavalrymen, his troopers carried breech-loading repeating carbines whereas the infantry was armed with muzzle-loading rifle-muskets. His men should be able to fire and reload much faster than the Confederates—at least as long as their limited supply of ammunition held out. It might just buy time enough for reinforcements to arrive.

  Buford deployed his troopers on the morning of July 1. By nine, the fighting had begun. His dismounted cavalry repulsed the first Confederate waves, and McPherson Ridge was still in Union hands when the first elements of Major General John Reynolds’s I Corps, Army of the Potomac, arrived at about 10:30. Better yet, Reynolds conveyed the news that General O. O. Howard was also on the way, with XI Corps.

  But the Confederates were rapidly building superior strength right now. Like John Buford, John Reynolds was a soldier of great courage, gallantry, and energy. No corps commander was more beloved in the entire Union Army. As was his custom, he assumed personal command of the first of his units that got into position. They were the 1,800 “Black Hats” of the already legendary “Iron Brigade.” Leading from the front, Reynolds intended to prevent a Confederate breakthrough, and he formed up the brigade in McPherson’s Woods, just west of the ridge. Before he could lead them out of the woods and against the enemy, however, a Confederate bullet tore into his neck. He fell from his saddle, dead.

  There is no substitute for personal leadership, but there is a downside to dependence on any one commander. The men of the mighty Iron Brigade were stricken by the decapitating blow, and their confusion spread throughout I Corps. By the time Major General Howard appeared with much of his XI Corps, the Gettysburg battlefield was in chaos. He quickly assumed command of both I Corps and XI Corps and scrambled to consolidate the still-outnumbered Union forces, but he was unable to deploy fast enough on the hotly contested McPherson Ridge Buford had fought so hard to hold. At last, Confederate units under generals Robert Rodes, Jubal Early, and A. P. Hill pushed the Federals off the ridge and routed them from every position they held west and the north of town. The Union line of retreat snaked down McPherson Ridge and spilled into the town of Gettysburg, its few lanes soon jammed with troops. Fighting house to house and hand to hand, the Confederates drove the Federals through the town and onto the Baltimore Pike, principal route to the southeast.

  Hearing of Reynold’s death, General Meade sent another beloved commander, Winfield Scott Hancock, to rally and regroup the defense. There was no way that Hancock could snatch victory from the jaws of defeat that first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, but he did restore order to the Army of the Potomac there and, building on the precious time Buford’s stand had bought at the start of the battle, he prevented defeat from becoming complete destruction. True, McPherson Ridge had been lost, but the Union still clung to East Cemetery Hill, Cemetery Ridge, and Culp’s Hill, together forming a high-ground position that ran south then southeast of the town, so that, by nightfall on July 1, the opposing armies occupied ridges and hills southwest and south of town. The Confederate infantry division under Major General William Dorsey Pender, a fierce warrior, was dug in on Seminary Ridge, the southwestern high ground, while Jubal Early’s understrength infantry division was at the southeastern edge of town, menacingly near the northernmost flank of the Union position, Howard’s XI Corps and Abner Doubleday’s I Corps, spread out from northeast to southwest along Cemetery Ridge just below town. About a mile and a half south of these corps were two more Union divisions, holding positions north of two hills, Round Top and Little Round Top. Between Pender’s Confederates and the Union troops under Howard and Doubleday was a mile-wide expanse of open fields and patches of woodland. By any measure, Lee had won the day. But thanks to Buford and then to Howard, he had not yet won the battle.

  Chamberlain holds Little Round Top

  No
one understood better than Robert E. Lee that though the day was won, the battle still hung in the balance. He instructed Major General Richard Stoddart Ewell to exploit what he termed the initial rout of the Union army, adding to his instructions the phrase “if he found it practicable.” No Civil War general was—or is—more universally revered than Lee, and not just for his military genius, but also for his character. It was the character of a gentleman, and Lee led his officers in the manner of a gentleman speaking to other gentlemen. Ewell needed to be told that he had to fight as if the entire war depended on it. Instead, he was given directions without any particular urgency. Lee’s subdued leadership style unwittingly gave the edge, on Day 2, to the Army of the Potomac.

  The position of the Union army at Gettysburg on the morning of July 2, 1863, is often described as an inverted fishhook. The curve of the hook was at the northeastern end, around the top of Cemetery Hill (defended by I Corps). East and slightly south of this was the barb, consisting of most of XI Corps, on Culp’s Hill. The shaft ran southwest along Cemetery Ridge, occupied by II Corps, which had been joined by III Corps on its flank. The shaft’s “tie end” stopped just short of the two hills south of town known as Little Round Top and Round Top. Lee directed Longstreet to attack the shaft all along Cemetery Ridge, ending at the Round Tops. This position was the left flank of the Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg. Lee’s intention was to position his own corps northwest of the fishhook to attack where the curve joined the shaft at Cemetery Hill. He instructed Ewell, whose corps was due north of Cemetery Hill, above the curve of the hook, to swing down swiftly and hit the Union’s right.

  But just how hard he would hit it depended on how he might interpret that phrase “if practicable.” Lee had failed to make absolutely clear the need for all of his commanders to hit the Union line in rapid succession or, even better, simultaneously. Lee needed to break the line, without giving it any time to heal. Break it, and the Army of the Potomac would be unable to maintain possession of Cemetery Ridge and all the other high ground adjacent. Since rapid, orderly withdrawal from high, rugged ground is virtually impossible, the Union army would be set up for a cataclysmic rout.