One mile. In July. Wearing wool uniforms and carrying a weapon, ammo, and other equipment. Uphill. :dubious:
Add into that the fact that massed fire is the only way to use muskets, and that since they were advancing over open ground, uphill, with a fence in the middle of the advance, any kind of run would get whatever troops that survived there in no formation at all, unable to break through a pack of Boy Scouts, much less the Union 2nd Division.
(A sad note is that, while most Civil War muskets were rifled, the tactics that were used were those more suitable to smoothbores. Thus, the appalling casualties.)
There is a segment from movie Gettysburg that shows it: filmed on the exact same ground with a similar number of men, most of whom were heavily-armed re-enactors so you know that any deviation from reality by the writer or director was likely to trigger gunplay, and you can get a feel for what happened that day.
Because it’s more dramatic, the camera angles all look like there is just a thin line of Union soldiers facing the Charge. One good push, and you’d think they would break. Of course, the whole frakking Union Army was massed at that point. All the Charge managed to do was erode the front line a bit.
The clip also had the four dumbest soldiers in the world.
“There’s a rebel, take him prisoner! You three help me carry him, even though the battle is going on around us and the rest of the rebels are still marching toward us!”
OKAY, it wasn’t always realistic. I’d’ve bayoneted the Rebel cuss myself, to avoid the paperwork, but we are referring to Noble Yankees Cut Down By Horrid Rebels.
Yep, you start out way over there in the far line of trees and need to get to where the photographer in this picture was standing. While being shot at most of the way.
The more pertinent question is: did no one consider frontal assaults stupid? The answer is yes but unfortunately not enough, thus the appalling casualty rates. To give you an idea of how appalling they were, the Allies had a 5% casualty rate during the D-Day landings in WW II (source). In the Battle of Gettysburg the casualty rate for the North was 24%, the South 33% (source).
The movie Gettysburg is, in many ways, an overwrought and bloated mess. But deeply embedded in it is a profoundly moving and brilliant performance by Jeff Daniels as Chamberlain–easily the best work he’s ever done and alone makes the movie worth seeing.
The bombardment that was supposed to provide support was a disaster due to miscalculations. The Confederate cannons overshot the Union lines or else hit the field between them when adjusted. Had the bombardment worked and opened a gap there would have been a slim chance of success perhaps. Certainly there’s any number of occasions of people with the higher ground being routed anyway. However this was a misfire on all levels.
Many biographers believe that Lee suffered a mild heart attack shortly after Chancellorsville/before Gettysburg. It’s record that he was still heartbroken over the recent death of his daughter Annie the year before (he mentioned this constantly in his letters) and of course he was under major stress all around and add to this he had lost his father-in-law’s enormous estates* and a host of other professional/military/personal matters ranging** just all worked together to severely cloud his usually good judgment. In Longstreet’s memoirs he mentions that grieving over the recent deaths of three fo his own children in one week the year before combined with learning just before they entered Pennsylvania that two more were sick (they recovered) definitely clouded his own judgment and concentration.
*For those who don’t know the story: Lee’s father-in-law, grandson of Martha Washington/adopted son of her husband, was one of the richest men in Virginia and left a huge but hugely complicated estate to Lee’s children. Lee was executor. The estate included several plantations (most famously Arlington) and many thousands of acres, more than 200 slaves, stocks and bonds and cash and real estate in D.C. and Baltimore and shipping interests, etc., and also LOTS AND LOTS of debts ranging from a few dollars to many thousands to various creditors. And… the request that all of his slaves be freed within 5 years of his death.
Lee took a leave of absence from the army to figure out how to honor the will and pay off all the debts and it took him several years. He was doing this when called to active duty to take care of John Brown and when offered the armies of two nations. A glossed over portion of Lee’s life is that while his men were said to have loved him and would “march straight into hell for that old man”, the slaves he controlled detested him; one called him “the meanest man God ever made” and another “the hardest taskmaster in Virginia” and Arlington under his management was at the point of near slave revolt (reported in the New York Tribune long before the war broke out); he was so disliked that many of his slaves, knowing fully well that they were set to be freed within 5 years of Custis’s death, nevertheless ran away rather than work for him and when he redeemed them he ordered them flogged- both males and females.
His father-in-law, who had promised his late wife (a very progressive thinker on terms of race) on her death bed that he would free the slaves when he died, had specifically stated that if the estate needed cash then the lands were to be sold- he even named the order- rather than the slaves go unfreed, and he forbade the selling of any slaves or separating of any families. Lee sued to break the will in order to retain the slaves for more years to pay off the estate debts without selling the land, and he also rented out most of the male slaves to other farmers and planters in Virginia and Maryland which effectively separated every family at Arlington (something that had never been done). He fought this lawsuit even while in the field against the Yankees, but ultimately lost; ironically he was ordered to have every slave freed by January 1, 1863, coincidentally the same day as the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. He managed to “get ‘r’ done” but only at great stress.
**Lee had never had high hopes for the Confederacy’s chance of victory and unlike Davis and others he saw Gettysburg as a last ditch effort to make the north surrender; he knew that if it failed then it was to be a defensive war from then on, and this was much on his mind. The recent death of Jackson, the earlier death of his daughter, the Union’s decision to use black troops (Lee had no love for blacks and not much more for Mexicans, Irish, or other groups who weren’t WASPs from the Mid-Atlantic- even for the times he was a snob), the confiscation of Arlington and other family properties, the estate issues and other matters (perhaps even the fact that his oldest sonwas 31, unmarried, “shy around girls” and nicknamed ‘Bunny’) all were causing him to nearly collapse under the pressure.
A secondary question: if Pickett’s Charge had succeeded or somehow else Lee had won at Gettysburg, what do you think the ultimate outcome would have been?
Personally I think the war might have ended sooner. D.C., among the most unprotected capitol cities in the hemisphere when the war started (surprising considering they’d been burned to the ground 50 years before) had almost overnight become the most fortified, and tens of thousands of rebels marching through Pennsylvania and Maryland would probably have been destroyed by an upswelling of militia and anyone with a gun before they ever got within cannon’s range of D.C… Vicksburg and Tennessee were already damned.
laughing In a way. It is a conceit of some historians, I think including Catton and Shelby Foote, that the historical novels of Walter Scott, full of dashing horsemen and glorious warfare, were rather too popular in the antebellum South and led many hot-blooded young gentlemen to be overeager for war.
Depends on when the Confederates won the battle. If they had pressed through on the first day, cost be damned, and taken the heights before Hancock could arrive, then maybe they could have forced a battle more of their choosing. Maybe. Even then, Meade wouldn’t have to attack. He could play a waiting game that Lee couldn’t.
If they had flanked the Union position on Day 2, and rolled up from the south, then maybe they could’ve broken Meade. At the very least they could have trounced him soundly. Then it would be political, and your scenario might happen. It was a close-run thing, and Sickle’s III Corps was shattered by the days fighting. If Lee had thrown everything he had around the Union left, instead of mucking about with a “demonstration” against Culp’s Hill, things might have been different.
By Day 3 the cause was lost. The assault against the middle of the Union lines was suicidal from the get-go, barrage or not.
I think if Meade was forced from the field, Lee would have faced scorched-earth the likes of which he had ever imagined.
He rarely makes either the best or the worst lists, but he was far more capable than incompetent, certainly a vast improvement over McLellan and Hooker. Lincoln was livid after Gettysburg because, like McLellan and Hooker, he didn’t pursue Lee after the battle, but he had some good reasons. One was that he couldn’t count on support from Hooker and he’d already had the hell blasted out of him at Fredericksburg when he was aggressive without adequate assistance, and though defeated Lee’s army was far from harmless and though victorious Meade’s men had just been hit hard.
to Sampiro) win at Gettysburg.