Watching the History Channel, one of the many, many, many, shows about the Civil War mentioned that the Confederates originally were planing to raid a shoe factory there. Was there one? Did they get their shoes?
One of the interesting things about history is that some of the most pivotal events were the result of mistakes, or accidents of fate. The Battle of Gettysburg qualifies as an accident.
Heths division, Army of Northern Virgina, was indeed after shoes, to try and bolster the fighting ability of the severly undersupplied confederates. It was a wharehouse, though, not a factory that was his goal.
On the way there, however, they ran into Bufords cavalry, and what started as a skirmish escalated as more and more units from both side joined in.
So, the battle that marked the beginning of the end for the Confederacy did result as a search for shoes, and no, they never got them.Hey, ya got me curious…
The Confederates occupied the actual town of Gettysburg for two nights, didn’t they? Did they send a few guys out looking for the shoes and never found any, or was the idea forgotten due to the battle?
Or was there a factory at all? South of town behind the Union lines perhaps?
I know for a fact that the Confederates were short on supplies, including shoes (in the film Gettysburg, the Confederates are seen marching without shoes). But I believe that their primary objective was to draw the Union army out into the open and destroy it. Robert E. Lee marched his men with the knowledge that a letter offering peace with the Union had already been drawn up by Jefferson Davis.
Back to your subject though, the Confederates were looking for shoes, but would have taken them from any town they could find.
I’m not even sure that they knew exactly where they were- they didn’t know the name of the hill that they focused the attack of the second day of the battle (it was called Little Round Top). Well, there I go again. As you can probably see, the Civil War is one of the subject that I could go on forever about, that and WWII and The Simpsons.
We must blame them and cause a fuss before somebody thinks of blaming us.
Sheila Broflofski
I’m pretty sure Lee had at least a general idea where he was. Gettysburg was on his left flank; that would make it pretty obvious. Whether or not he had a good cartography of the surrounding area is another question, and I don’t have the Civil War library to answer that one.
We can go on and on, but my question was, why didn’t they get any shoes?
oops… I just noticed Lucretia pointed out it was not a factory but a warehouse. My apologies. No such warehouse existed then?
Hightech, the object of the campaign was to draw the Union out in the open, but they didn’t want the battle to happen at Gettysburg. At the time of Gettysburg, the Confederate army was spread out from hell to breakfast, and the leadership wanted to wait until the army was more concentrated to engage.
While the Confederates would have taken shoes from any town they could have, the purpose of Heths foray into Gettysburg was that there were shoes there, specifically.
Mr. Blue, the warehouse did exsist, but once the battle escalated, the Confederates had more pressing issues than raiding it.