The Battle of Gettysburg began on July 1, 1863. Emboldened by his victory at Chancellorsville,
Confederate General Robert E. Lee had decided to invade the North. In
September of the previous year, he had ventured north into Maryland
where, at Antietam, the bloodiest day of the war occurred. Although the
battle was a draw, Lee’s invasion was turned back, but the next summer
he made another foray northward.
…he can still remember the peaches on the trees across
the field, and the corn being knee high, and how hot it was the day they
fought.
So it ends, this lesser battle of the first day,
Starkly disputed and piecemeal won and lost
By corps-commanders who carried no magic plans
Stowed in their sleeves, but fought and held as they could.
It is past. The board is staked for the greater game
Which is to follow…
John Brown’s Body, by Stephen Vincent Benet. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), 294.
Gettysburg Camp, July 1-2-3, 1913. G.S. Carney, photographer, cJuly 1913. Panoramic Photographs.
Prints & Photographs Division. This photo shows the fifty-year
reunion of the soldiers who fought at the Battle of Gettysburg.William Munroe Graves recalls the stories his fellow veterans told at the seventy-five-year reunion of the Battle of Gettysburg:
Maj.- Gen. O.R. Gillette who was in Davis Brigade, Heaths
Division, the Army of Northern Virginia… told of how… the Army of
Northern Virginia rolled northward… to strike at Harrisburg and
Philadelphia to find shoes for the rebel soldiers bare feet, and food to
fill the knapsacks which were almost empty of parched corn rations. He
remembered how Lee’s war-tired men came out of the valley of the
Shenandoah to meet Meade’s army of the Potomac as it reached out along
the roads that centered like the spokes of a wheel at Gettysburg, and
how they met and fought and forgot they ever needed shoes…
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