On Pickett’s Charge: A UNC Press Civil War Short, Excerpted from Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory

By Amy King

If, as many have argued, the Civil War is the most crucial moment in our national life and Gettysburg its turning point, then the climax of the climax, and a central moment in our nation's history, is Pickett's Charge of 3 July 1863. This Civil War Short presents Carol Reardon's stirring narrative of the charge itself, drawn from Pickett's Charge in History and Memory, which demonstrates that the story of Pickett's Charge told today is really an amalgam of history and memory and that the evolution of that mix tells us much about how we come to understand our nation's past.

UNC Press Civil War Shorts excerpt rousing narratives from distinguished books published by the University of North Carolina Press on the military, political, social, and cultural history of the Civil War era. Produced exclusively in ebook format, they focus on pivotal moments and figures and are intended to provide a concise introduction, stir the imagination, and encourage further exploration of the topic. For in-depth analysis, contextualization, and perspective, we invite readers to consider the original publications from which these works are drawn.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780807836200

Amy King

Aderemi was born to Dr. Aderemi T. Adeyemi and Phyllis A.Mancil. He acquired his AS Degree in Fashion Merchandise fromSan Diego Mesa College. An extension of his earlier passion for graphic design and screen printing t-shirts. His interest in art grow to include applied acrylic painting. Aderemi combined his passions with the computer skills he later acquired. Then in 2013, the indie-authormade a home for his creative works in his publishing endeavors,as he eats and sleeps it. He walks some of the same streetsas did Dr. Seuss, living in San Diego, CA. He says, the publishingprocess always takes him back to when he first introducedhis children's book to the students of Burbank Elementary, partof the San Diego Unified School District, located in Barrio Logan.That's where his primary job was to work with special needs childrenfor nearly two decades. Drawing inspiration from his work with thestudents, he published Lil' Phyllis Loves To Laff.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

HISTORY, MEMORY, AND PICKETT’S CHARGE

Lieutenant Frank A. Haskell, who probably saw and then wrote more about the last great Southern assault on Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg than any other eyewitness on that field, begrudgingly admitted that even his own powers of observation had limitations. After describing to his brother in voluminous detail and colorful prose all he could recall of the stirring events of July 3,1863, he concluded that "a full account of the battle as it was will never, can never be made. Who could sketch the changes, the constant shifting of the bloody panorama? It is not possible. He feared that the great battle’s history, just, comprehensive, complete will never be written. With resignation, he concluded that by-and-by, out of the chaos of trash and falsehood that the news papers hold, out of the disjointed mass of reports, out of the traditions and tales that come down from the field, some eye that never saw the battle will select, and some pen will write what will be named the history."¹

A perceptive pessimist, Haskell understood that two powerful forces frame the way we recall past events: the objectivity of history—the search for truth—and the subjectivity of memory, which shapes perceptions of that truth. He also realized that the tension between those two forces likely foredoomed to failure the efforts of even the most disinterested chronicler intent on recording for posterity what happened on July 3 at Gettysburg. Historians indeed would try to reconstruct what happened that day from snippets of description culled from official reports and hundreds of personal testimonies and weave together from these fragments of individual experience what they hoped would be an accurate and coherent narrative. Even the best scholar, however, could not tell the whole story. The selectivity of the soldiers’ memories had made this impossible. Years after the war, a Michigan veteran challenged his comrades to recall, if you can, any engagement of the war and positively state, of your own knowledge, that you passed through some particular field (a wheat field, for instance) when you were ordered forward to charge the enemy’s position. He knew that if they remembered crossing through a field at all, they likely would not recall its size, shape, or crop cover because, in battle, your horizon range was limited and many little incidents occurred in your immediate vicinity of which you were not cognizant.² Any history of the events of July 3 at Gettysburg, then, must begin with an acknowledgment that traditional research materials for battle studies should be accepted less as objective truth and more, as historian David Thelen suggests, as memories that were authentic for the person at the moment of construction.³ Much of the popular appeal the great charge still holds today results from the triumph of the forces of memory over history.

These memories offer valuable insights of their own. Even if they could not comprehend all they saw or did on July 3, soldiers tried for years to explain it to themselves, their families and friends, and even future generations. To celebrate personal survival or to find greater purpose, solace, or inspiration in what they witnessed, they gave in to the seductive, subjective, even self-indulgent pull of memory, preserving only those moments and events that held special meaning to them. The evocative nature of many of these memories easily captured the uncritical eye of chroniclers who neatly imposed a sense of order upon them and, as Haskell predicted, called it history. He indeed had hit the mark squarely when he suggested that the eye that never saw the battle exercised great power in choosing the memories deemed worthy of perpetuation. As a consequence, we know less about what really happened on July 3 at Gettysburg than history purports to tell us.

Nonetheless, that great discriminating eye anointed this one single event—the great Confederate charge of July 3—as the pivotal episode of the three-day fight. So much changed, or seemed to change, with the repulse of that assault. Victory finally visited the Army of the Potomac, and the Army of Northern Virginia bore the unaccustomed weight of defeat. As time passed and even greater meaning adhered to the repulse of the attack, the charge and its repulse took on a new role as the line of demarcation that ended all doubts about the resolution of the conflict and presaged the fall of the Confederacy, the end of the war, the continuation of the republic. Thus, this one special episode earned unique names that set it apart from every other military maneuver on that bloody field: Pickett’s Charge and, for some, the high water mark of the Rebellion.

Pickett’s Charge holds a secure place in our national imagination, but it rests on the double foundation of both history and memory. The two forces have blended together so seamlessly over the years that we cannot separate them now. Over the years, partisan chroniclers, poets, artists, novelists, visitors, even entrepreneurs, have found special inspiration in the events of July 3 at Gettysburg, often in ways the soldiers themselves could not have foreseen. Memory begins when something in the present stimulates an association, one scholar has suggested.⁴ A certain irony attends the fact that, in a nation that loves a winner, we remember the élan of the defeated Southerners before we recall the gallantry of the victorious Union defenders. The endurance in the nation’s historical consciousness of Pickett’s Charge suggests that it inspired—and still inspires—reflections and emotions that spring from a source far removed from respect for historical truth.

Indeed, as historian James H. McRandle has argued, when popular history sings of events and makes them great, it transcends the realm of record and enters that of myth.⁵ Over the years, Pickett’s Charge has roamed restlessly through both the world of history and the world of myth. It finds an entirely comfortable place in neither realm. We demand much of our past. The most enduring moments that claim places in American public memory—the images that best capture and hold longest the popular interest—possess the ability to bridge past and present. In ever-changing and often contentious ways, these episodes touch on basic values, honored traditions, deep-seated fears, unfulfilled hopes, and unrighted wrongs.⁶

From the time the battle smoke cleared, Pickett’s Charge took on this kind of chameleonlike aspect and, through a variety of carefully constructed nuances, adjusted superbly to satisfy the changing needs of Northerners, Southerners, and, finally, the entire nation. In the immediate postwar years, the gallantry and sacrifice of the Confederate infantry on July 3 gave Southerners some much needed heroes to help ease the pangs of defeat and, in some ways, to validate and represent all that was right about the Lost Cause. As times changed, memories of Pickett’s Charge proved sufficiently flexible to provide the setting for one of the first visible tests of Northern and Southern readiness to bury forever sectional ill will. Northern forces of reaction against quick reconciliation found in Pickett’s Charge a useful emotional touchstone for voicing deep resentment over what they perceived to be the South’s successful efforts to rewrite the war’s history. Veterans from both armies, including many who had not fought at Gettysburg at all, endowed the events of July 3 with great symbolic meaning that celebrated their contributions to the civic life of their nation and raised concerns about rapid postwar social, political, and economic changes that could destroy what they had fought so hard for. Southern veterans’ efforts to secure in the national memory a variety of specific memories of the great charge spawned a particularly vicious literary war that pitted Virginia against North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Tennessee in ways that revealed that state pride ran far more deeply than did any commitment to preserving the truth of history. Virginia won that war and did so decisively by seamlessly blending appeals to history’s objectivity with timeless values of gallantry, heroism, and noble sacrifice that struck chords in the entire nation’s historical imagination. Our current memories of an event called Pickett’s Charge emerge from all these contexts and more, lending credence to a modern scholar’s assertion that the curious refusal of popular history to take cognizance of established facts results less from sheer ignorance than from purposes different from professional historical accounts.⁷

Over the years and in many ways the story of Pickett’s Charge indeed has found itself suspended precariously between the two realms of history and memory. Certainly the golden anniversary ceremonies at Gettysburg in 1913 demanded little adherence to historical fact. As old men in blue shook hands with old men in gray at a weedy stone wall near a clump of trees, most Americans knew in their hearts, if not in their heads, all they needed to know about Pickett’s Charge.

A few days after he survived Pickett’s Charge, Pvt. William H. Jones of the 19th Virginia summed up his entire experience in the awful Battle at gettysburg with the very succinct comment that it was the most awful Battle that I ever have Bin [in] yet.⁸ Nearly a century later, chronicler George Stewart began his story of the day’s events with a far more effusive statement: If we grant—as many would be ready to do—that the Civil War furnishes the great dramatic episode of the history of the United States, and that Gettysburg provides the climax of the war, then the climax of the climax, the central moment of American history, must be Pickett’s Charge.⁹ Between the most awful Battle and the central moment in American history rests strong testimony to the power of memory.

Dramatis Personae

The historical event called Pickett’s Charge rests on a foundation of a few knowns and a few more credible assumptions. The following is the cast of characters—and their generally accepted historical roles—in the military action between Seminary and Cemetery Ridges at Gettysburg on July 3,1863.¹⁰

Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia attacked Maj. Gen. George G. Meade’s Army of the Potomac on July 1, 1863. After two days of bloody fighting and heavy losses, neither army showed any sign of disengaging.

About midnight on July 3, Meade called together his corps commanders for a council of war. After much discussion, he asked three questions: Should we stay or leave the field? If we stay, do we attack or await attack? If we await attack, how long? One by one, the tired officers recorded their votes to stay, await attack, and wait at least one day. As the meeting broke up, Meade told Brig. Gen. John Gibbon that if Lee attacked on July 3, it would be along his front on Cemetery Ridge.¹¹

Lee’s own plans, if he had gotten his way, would have made a liar of Meade. He wanted to launch a coordinated assault against both Union flanks. Lt. Gen. Richard Ewell’s Second Corps would renew its efforts against the Union right on Culp’s Hill, and Lt. Gen. James Longstreet’s First Corps would step off from the area around the Peach Orchard against the Union left.¹² That plan quickly fell apart, however, when at 4:30 A.M. the Union XII Corps opened the day’s fighting with an effort to recapture their lost trenches at the base of Culp’s Hill.

Lee then revisited his options. He deemed