Wednesday: Pickett’s Charge

I run a risky game trying to report Civil War facts that whiz by too quickly to grab and hold.  Is that general north or south?  Did 500 or 5,000 die there?  Oh, Jeb Stuart was CAVALRY!  Did the North or the South win that battle?  Okay, so Lee’s strategy was often defensive, and he would succeed by attacking the Northern flanks.    He would go at the flanks, then charge the middle, right?  Especially with Civil War enthusiasts, whose throbbing brains have every factoid DOWN, including those about the private from the 20^th Maine.  They remember and regurgitate, and I’d better get it right. . .but I’m not so sure I will.

As the weather girl, I’m not making my bus-mates happy.  It’s raining as we drive from one Gettysburg monument to the next, but the weather holds  for the deeply quiet, muddy tromp across the field of Pickett’s Charge on July 3.  Pickett’s boss, Longstreet, didn’t want to do it (and barely waved his order to commence), but Lee thought he could break the Union center, having gone at their flanks the day before.  Over half the 14,000 Confederates died who charged following an artillery barrage, and the loss broke the psychological back of the South (Vicksburg also fell that day).  Lee left Pennsylvania after Gettysburg; he hadn’t anticipated the Union numbers resisting him.

We begin where the charge did in the woods among the Confederate soldiers,  now brooded over by the imposing monuments raised by the units that fought here.  The more intrepid among us start across the field.  I collect acorns because it somehow makes me feel hopeful about what can grow from them; it seemed a fitting salute to those soldiers.  We unintrepid get on the bus and wheel over to the Union side, where we watch our bus-mates approach.  They are exposed on a ¾-mile stretch; they have to leap over two rows of split-rail fences, and we Union solders are protected behind a stone wall.  No wonder Pickett's guys got mowed down.  Terrible loss.  Lee's returning soldiers pass in front of him.  "It was all my fault men," he tells them.

In our battle discussions, I am frequently surprised to hear how battles end.  Credits, apparently, don’t roll over the sunset at the end of a fighting day.  Generals don’t give chase to solidify victories; exhausted soldiers can’t go on.  Armies slink away at night.  (How do neighing horses, tramping feet and wagon wheels sneak away?)