Today we continue to honor an event of 162 years ago, one which did much to save America from an insurrectionist invasion. On a hot July day, in a small crossroads town in Pennsylvania, some 13,000 men trudged up a one-mile ascent of open land with the intent of doing enough damage to our country to preserve the institution of slavery.
At the top of the rise, near a spot immortalized as “the copse
of trees,” a bloodied American army waited, its center containing the Second
Corps of the Army of the Potomac led by Major General John Gibbon and under the
overall command of Major General George Gordon Meade. As mentioned in an
earlier post, General Meade had commanded the army for six days, or the equivalent
today of since last Saturday.
The assault involved three Confederate divisions Pickett's, Pettigrew's,
(formerly Heth's division) and Trimble's (formerly Pender's division).
Up until, and including, this war, battles featured heroic charges
by massed men against unreliable weaponry. Improvements to rifles and artillery
would make such charges insanely horrible to imagine. Defensive warfare would
become the strategy of choice until air power rained destruction far and wide
and mobile tanks replaced horse-drawn warfare.
No, children, neither side had air power back then. The
president was wrong.
Let us pause and imagine the carnage before us after the assault
as the remnants of the insurrectionist army retreated down the hill back to
their beloved general who, despite his masterful attempt at preserving slavery,
would become one of, if not the, most revered, warriors for many Americans,
even some so-called historians.
Because Pickett’s division consisted of mostly Virginian’s,
and because Virginians contributed substantially to writing the immediate
history of our Civil War, the assault, commanded by General John Longstreet,
has come to us in history as “Pickett’s Charge,” a shameful moniker to the
other divisions and a lesson to us that history is a complex affair which can’t
be learned from watching “Gone With The Wind.”
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