The three-day Battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War and one that tipped the scales in favor of the Union, ended 154 years ago on Monday.
The Union fielded 90,000 troops in the battle, and the Confederacy 75,000, according to historian James McPherson. Eleven thousand died, 29,000 more were wounded, and 10,000 were missing or captured.
The hallowed grounds of Gettysburg, as McPherson described them, witnessed nearly 10 times as many casualties as the D-Day invasion in World War II.
There were many engagements over three days of combat — such as Devil's Den, the Slaughter Pen, and the Valley of Death — but some were more consequential to the battle, and therefore the war itself, than others.
Here's how the battle unfolded.
Here is a shot of Gettysburg from Cemetery Hill, which was taken in July 1863. The battle started, some historians say, because both armies were looking for shoes in the town. McPherson says this story cannot be proved or disproved, but whatever the case, it was a "meeting engagement" or "encounter engagement."
The first day of the Battle of Gettysburg was a skirmish compared with the last two days, as troops from both sides were still filing into the area. Still, as night fell, "three thousand dead and dying soldiers and the moans of many of the additional seven or eight thousand wounded" could be seen and heard on the field, McPherson said. Below is a photo of dead Union soldiers after the first day's fighting.
Though the Confederates had not captured the Cemetery and Culp's hills by the end of the day, the prospect of the battle still appeared promising for Robert E. Lee and the Rebel army.
John L. Burns, who is pictured below, is one of the more colorful people to take part in the battle. On the first day of the battle, the 69-year-old Gettysburg resident grabbed his musket and joined the Union ranks, much to the confusion of the Northern officers, when he saw the battle materializing.
He was deployed to the woods and picked off numerous Confederate troops before getting shot in an arm and a leg. When the Confederates found him wounded and wearing civilian clothes, after the Union soldiers had retreated from the area, he told them he was just a lost old man who had gotten caught in the cross fire. This picture, by famed Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, was taken shortly after the battle.
On the second day of the battle, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee sought to capture the two hills known as Little and Big Round Top. The Confederate troops advanced uphill numerous times, but the Union lines held. Below is a shot of dead Southern troops at the foot of Little Round Top, known as the Slaughter Pen.
One of the heroes of Little Round Top was Col. Joshua Chamberlain. He had been ordered to hold the extreme left of the hill with his 20th Maine Regiment and stop the flanking Rebels. His 360 men were outnumbered and low on ammunition when he decided on a daring, yet successful, bayonet charge. In the end, his regiment took 400 prisoners, and the line held.
Chamberlain was awarded the Medal of Honor for his exploits on Little Round Top. An ardent abolitionist and scholar who could read seven languages, Chamberlain was elected governor of Maine in 1866.
The third day of battle, which culminated with Pickett's Charge, proved disastrous for the Confederacy. After an insane barrage of Rebel cannon fire to soften the strongly fortified Union positions, Robert E. Lee sent three divisions, about 13,000 men, across a mile-long open field between the Cemetery and Seminary ridges.
When the Rebels were exposed, the Union artillery atop Little Round Top and Cemetery Ridge opened fire. "We could not help hitting them with every shot," one Union officer said.
The Northern troops, as they were slaughtering the Confederate troops, chanted "Fredericksburg, Fredericksburg," a crushing earlier defeat for the Yankees. Only a few Confederate soldiers reached the Union lines. In less than an hour, 7,000 Rebel soldiers were dead or wounded.
One of the unsung heroes for the North, a man who graduated last in his class at West Point and would later become famous at the Battle of Little Big Horn, was Gen. George Custer. Before Pickett's Charge and during the North and South's dueling artillery barrages, there were numerous cavalry engagements in the field. Custer led several Union regiments, at one point getting his horse shot out from underneath him before jumping onto an empty steed and continuing in the fight.
The commander of the Northern Army of Virginia, Robert E. Lee, and perhaps the best general of the Civil War, made a costly error with Pickett's Charge. Brimming with confidence after Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, he believed himself and his men invincible.
After the three Rebel divisions had retreated from the field, Lee asked General George Pickett to rally his division for a counterattack. Pickett replied, "General Lee, I have no more division now." Lee eventually withdrew his remaining army from Gettysburg, and the Union did not give chase, much to the anger of President Abraham Lincoln.
About 11,000 men were killed during the Battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest of the Civil War. Company F of the 6th North Carolina regiment lost every soldier. One Minnesota regiment lost 82% of its men in five minutes.
"Wounded men were brought into our houses and laid side by side in our halls and first-story rooms," one Gettysburg resident said. "Carpets were so saturated with blood as to be unfit for further use. Walls were bloodstained as well as books that were used for pillows."
Pictured here are three Confederate soldiers taken prisoner after the battle. It is one of the most famous pictures of the Civil War, which was taken by Mathew Brady. "You see exactly how the Confederate soldier was dressed," Southern historian Shelby Foote once said. "You see something in his attitude toward the camera which is revealing of his nature."
President Abraham Lincoln visited the battlefield on November 19, 1863, to dedicate the Gettysburg cemetery. It was here that he would deliver one of the best-known speeches ever given, the 269-word Gettysburg Address. Lincoln is seen in the middle of the photo in the midst of sitting down. The speech was so short that the photographer did not have time to capture him delivering it.
Lincoln's full Gettysburg Address:
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."