Today marks the beginning of the 155th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. The three days of fighting between Union general George Meade’s Army of the Potomac and Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia resulted in the still-bloodiest battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere. In all, some 52,000 Americans were killed, wounded or wound up missing.
The battle itself pretty much began by accident because a few units of Confederate infantrymen happened to be out looking for shoes and they went into Gettysburg to do it. Though both armies had been searching for each other, they each thought the other side was farther away than they really were.
Soon enough, contact between the opposing forces began in the early morning hours of July 1st. Confederate general Henry Heth’s infantry troops, on the lookout for those shoes, bumped into Union general John Buford’s cavalrymen. Word quickly went out to the main bodies of both armies and within only hours troops were pouring into the battleground from all directions. Their in-gathering would became a titanic clash, and one in which (but for a few small, though vitally crucial, things) a Confederate victory very nearly occurred.
By now, the story of the 20th Maine Regiment’s bayonet charge on the peak of Little Round Top, an action that turned back the nearly victorious 20th Alabama Regiment (and the 4th and 5th Texas), is well-known. It prevented Confederate forces from turning the Union flank and kept them from pouring troops into the Union rear and sweeping them from the field. What’s not so well-known, at least to non-Civil War aficionados, is that the Johnny Rebs had been low on water for some time (they’d sent men back with their empty canteens) and had paused for a 10-minute rest after scaling adjacent Big Round Top. That pause and the lack of water (the morning was in the low-80s) gave the Union time to place troops on Little Round Top, men who had orders to hold it at all costs. No retreat, no surrender, in other words. Every Union soldier, from their leader Joshua Chamberlain on down, fully expected to give their lives for the Union that day.
The third day of the battle marked Pickett’s Charge, a movement across a mile of wide-open ground by 12,000 Confederate troops. The mass movement was, of course, preceded by a rebel artillery barrage. The intent was to kill as many Union troops as possible, tamping down on Union rifle and cannon counter-battery fire, and it should have been more effective, but it wasn’t. The fuses in the cannon shot used by Confederate artillery units came from factories in Selma (AL) and Charleston (SC), and they were of a type Lee’s artillery didn’t normally use. They burned for about an extra second longer, and the cannonballs they were in exploded a little longer after leaving their artillery pieces. This meant most exploded BEHIND Union lines and not among the Billy Yanks, leaving them to deliver consistent fire back at the massed Confederate troops trying to march across that mile of open ground.
Though it was the big things during Gettysburg that gain our attention, it’s indisputable that this signal battle between Union and Confederacy – which marked the true beginning of the end for the South’s cause – hinged on many small, seemingly insignificant (at the time) actions and happenstances. The Battle of Gettysburg is actually full of them, if you know where and what to look for.
A map of the roads leading into Gettysburg is helpful if anyone hasn’t seen one before. Helps illustrate why as you mentioned a battle that started as an acidnet escalated to the level it did.