Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

“Many had died there, and others were in the last agonies as we passed,” wrote a northern soldier. “Their groans and cries were heart-rending. … The [Page 413] gory corpses lying all about us, in every imaginable attitude, and slain by an inconceivable variety of wounds, were shocking to behold.”25

Shiloh was the first battle on a scale that became commonplace during the next three years. The 20,000 killed and wounded at Shiloh (about equally distributed between the two sides) were nearly double the 12,000 battle casualties at Manassas, Wilson’s Creek, Fort Donelson, and Pea Ridge combined. Gone was the romantic innocence of Rebs and Yanks who had marched off to war in 1861. “I never realized the ‘pomp and circumstance’ of the thing called glorious war until I saw this,” wrote a Tennessee private after the battle. “Men … lying in every conceivable position; the dead … with their eyes wide open, the wounded begging piteously for help. … I seemed … in a sort of daze.” Sherman described “piles of dead soldiers’ mangled bodies … without heads and legs. … The scenes on this field would have cured anybody of war.”27

The capture of New Orleans illustrated the strategic wisdom of Lincoln’s desire to attack several places simultaneously.

Lincoln would rather win the war than an argument; Davis seemed to prefer winning the argument.

Hiring a substitute was the most controversial form of exemption. Rich men could buy their way out of the army whether or not their skills were needed at home. This gave rise to a bitter saying: “A rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.” Some poor men, however, might become rich—if they survived—by selling themselves as substitutes. [Page 432] “Substitute brokers” established a thriving business. Many substitutes deserted as soon as they could, and sold themselves again—and again, and again. One man in Richmond was said to have sold himself thirty times. The price of substitutes rose by late 1863 to as high as $6,000 (the equivalent of $300 in gold, or three years’ wages for a skilled workingman). The abuses of substitution became so obnoxious that Congress abolished the privilege in December 1863.

By the beginning of 1863 it took seven dollars to buy what a dollar had bought two years earlier. This kind of inflation became, in effect, a form of confiscatory taxation whose burden fell most heavily on the poor. It exacerbated class tensions and caused a growing alienation of the white lower classes from the Confederate cause. Wage increases lagged far behind price increases. In 1862 wages for skilled and unskilled workers increased about 55 percent while prices rose 300 percent. Conditions on the small farms where most southern whites lived were little better. Although farm families grew much of what they consumed, the absence of adult males from many of the farms reduced crop yields and caused severe hardship.

This bill seemed to imitate the dubious Confederate example—but with a crucial difference. The U.S. notes were to be legal tender—receivable for all debts public or private except interest on government bonds and customs duties. The exemption of bond interest was intended as an alternative to selling the bonds below par, with the expectation that the payment of 6 percent interest in specie would make the bonds attractive to investors at face value. Customs duties were to be payable in specie to assure sufficient revenue to fund the interest on bonds. In all other transactions individuals, banks, and government itself would be required to accept U.S. notes—soon to be called greenbacks—as lawful money.

The Internal Revenue Act of 1862 taxed almost everything but the air northerners breathed. It imposed sin taxes on liquor, tobacco, and [Page 448] playing cards; luxury taxes on carriages, yachts, billiard tables, jewelry, and other expensive items; taxes on patent medicines and newspaper advertisements; license taxes on almost every conceivable profession or service except the clergy; stamp taxes, taxes on the gross receipts of corporations, banks, insurance companies, and a tax on the dividends or interest they paid to investors; value-added taxes on manufactured goods and processed meats; an inheritance tax; and an income tax. The law also created a Bureau of Internal Revenue, which remained a permanent part of the federal government even though most of these taxes (including the income tax) expired several years after the end of the war. The relationship of the American taxpayer to the government was never again the same.

By its legislation to finance the war, emancipate the slaves, and invest public land in future growth, the 37th Congress did more than any other in history to change the course of national life. As one scholar has aptly written, this Congress drafted “the blueprint for modern America.” It also helped shape what historians Charles and Mary Beard labeled the “Second American Revolution”—that process by which “the capitalists, laborers, and farmers of the North and West drove from power in the national government the planting aristocracy of the South … making vast changes in the arrangement of classes, in the accumulation and distribution of wealth, in the course of industrial development, and in the Constitution inherited from the Fathers.”44

Attired in an old army coat [Page 455] he had worn in the Mexican War and a broken-visored V.M.I. cadet cap, Jackson constantly sucked lemons to palliate his dyspepsia and refused to season his food with pepper because (he said) it made his left leg ache.

Impatient toward weaknesses of the flesh, Jackson had driven his infantry at a killing pace. “He classed all who were weak and weary, who fainted by the wayside, as men wanting in patriotism,” said an officer. “If a man’s face was as white as cotton and his pulse so low you could scarcely feel it, he looked upon him merely as an inefficient soldier and rode off impatiently.” Ewell caught the spirit and ordered his marching columns stripped to the minimum. “We can get along without anything but food and ammunition,” he stated. “The road to glory cannot be followed with much baggage.”2 Although barefoot, blistered, and broken down from marching 160 miles and fighting two battles in two [Page 457] weeks, Jackson’s men no longer called him Tom Fool. Now he was Old Jack, and they were proud to be known as his foot cavalry.

That was precisely what happened. After the battle of Winchester, Jackson had marched to within a few miles of Harper’s Ferry to give the impression that he intended to cross the Potomac. On May 30 his force was nearly twice as far from Strasburg as the converging forces of Frémont and Shields. Nothing but a few cavalry stood in the way of the Union pincers. But a strange lethargy seemed to paralyze the northern commanders. Jackson’s foot cavalry raced southward day and night on May 30 while the bluecoats tarried. The rebels cleared Strasburg on June 1 and slogged southward while Frémont and Shields, finally aroused, nipped at their heels. For the next few days it became a stern chase, with Frémont pursuing Jackson on the Valley pike and Shields trudging southward on a parallel course east of Massanutten Mountain. Ashby’s cavalry burned four bridges to delay Union pursuit. Several rear-guard cavalry fights took place, one of them resulting in the death of Ashby, who had become a romantic hero in the South. Jackson kept pushing his men to the edge of collapse. They won the race to the only undamaged bridge left on the Shenandoah River, at Port Republic near the south end of the Valley where Jackson had launched his epic campaign five weeks earlier. During those weeks Jackson’s own division had marched more than 350 miles (Ewell’s had marched 200 miles) and won three battles. Now they stopped to fight again.

Thus while the battle of Mechanicsville had been a tactical defeat for the South, it turned out to be a strategic victory.

In reality the Army of the Potomac was still in good shape despite the defeat at Gaines’ Mill. But McClellan was a whipped man mentally. After midnight he again wired Stanton: “I have lost this battle because my force was too small. … The Government has not sustained this army. … If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to any other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army.” That McClellan escaped removal from command after sending such a dispatch was owing to an astonished colonel in the telegraph office, who excised the last two sentences before sending the message to Stanton.14

One reason for the high casualties of Civil War battles was the disparity between traditional tactics and modern weapons. The [Page 473] tactical legacy of eighteenth-century and Napoleonic warfare had emphasized close-order formations of soldiers trained to maneuver in concert and fire by volleys. To be sure, some of the citizen-soldiers of the American Revolution fought Indian-style from behind trees or rocks, and the half-trained levée en masse of the French Revolution advanced in loose order like “clouds of skirmishers.” But they did so mainly because they lacked training and discipline; the ideal for Washington’s Continentals and Napoleon’s veterans as well as Frederick’s Prussians and Wellington’s redcoats remained the compact, cohesive columns and lines of automatons who moved and fired with machine-like efficiency.

Rifling a musket increased its range fourfold by imparting a spin to a conical bullet that enabled it literally to bore through the air. This fact had been known for centuries, but before the 1850s only special regiments or one or two companies per regiment were equipped with rifles. These companies were used as skirmishers—that is, they operated in front and on the flanks of the main body, advancing or withdrawing in loose order and shooting at will from long range at enemy targets of opportunity. Given the rifle’s greater range and accuracy, why were not all infantrymen equipped with it? Because a bullet large enough to “take” the rifling was difficult to ram down the barrel. Riflemen sometimes had to pound the ramrod down with a mallet. After a rifle had been fired a few times a residue of powder built up in the grooves and had to be cleaned out before it could be fired again. Since rapid and reliable firing was essential in a battle, the rifle was not practicable for the mass of infantrymen.

“The sights and smells that assailed us were simply indescribable,” wrote a southern soldier on burial detail, “corpses swollen to twice their original size, some of them actually burst asunder with the pressure of foul gases. … The odors were nauseating and so deadly that in a short time we all sickened and were lying with our mouths close to the ground, most of us vomiting profusely.” Writing home after another battle, a Yank described a field hospital established in farm buildings. “About the building you could see the Hogs belonging to the Farm eating [amputated] arms and other portions of the body.”26

The failure of McClellan’s Peninsula campaign was not alone a military failure; it represented also the downfall of the limited war for limited ends that McClellan favored. From now on the North would fight not to preserve the old Union but to destroy it and build a new one on the ashes.

If McClellan’s campaign had succeeded, the war might have ended. The Union probably would have been restored with minimal destruction in the South. Slavery would have survived in only slightly modified form, at least for a time. By defeating McClellan, Lee assured a prolongation of the war until it destroyed slavery, the Old South, and nearly everything the Confederacy was fighting for.

While northern soldiers had no love for slavery, most of them had no love for slaves either. They fought for Union and against treason; only a minority in 1862 felt any interest in fighting for black freedom. Rare was the soldier who shared the sentiments of a Wisconsin private: “I have no heart in this war if the slaves cannot be free.” More common was the conviction of a New York soldier that “we must first conquer & then its time enough to talk about the dam’d niggers.”

the war could no longer be fought “with elder-stalk squirts, charged with rose water. … This government cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing. Those enemies must understand that they cannot experiment for ten years trying to destroy the government, and if they fail still come back into the Union unhurt.” The demand by border-state slaveowners “that the government shall not strike its open enemies, lest they be struck by accident” had become “the paralysis—the dead palsy—of the government in this whole struggle.”26

“The rebels … could not at the same time throw off the Constitution and invoke its aid. Having made war on the Government, they were subject to the incidents and calamities of war.” The border states “would do nothing” on their own; indeed, perhaps it was not fair to ask them to give up slavery while the rebels retained it. Therefore “the blow must fall first and foremost on [the rebels]. … Decisive and extensive measures must be adopted. … We wanted the army to strike more vigorous blows. The Administration must set an example, and strike at the heart of the rebellion.”28

When I say that they were hungry, I convey no impression of the gaunt starvation that looked from their cavernous eyes. All day they crowded to the doors of our houses, with always the same drawling complaint: “I’ve been a-marchin’ and a-fightin’ for six weeks stiddy, and I ain’t had n-a-r-thin’ to eat ‘cept green apples an’ green cawn, an’ I wish you’d please to gimme a bite to eat.” … I saw the troops march past us every summer for four years, and I know something of the appearance of a marching army, both Union and Southern. There are always stragglers, of course, but never before or after did I see anything comparable to [this]. … That they could march or fight at all seemed incredible.36

on September 13 their non-gambling commander hit the all-time military jackpot. In a field near Frederick two Union soldiers found a copy of Lee’s orders, wrapped around three cigars lost by a careless southern officer, detailing the objectives for the four separate parts of his army. This fantastic luck revealed to McClellan that each part of the enemy army was several miles from any of the others and that the two largest units were twenty or twenty-five miles apart with the Potomac between them. With his whole force McClellan could push through the South Mountain passes and gobble up the pieces of Lee’s army before they could reunite. McClellan recognized his opportunity; to one of his generals he exulted, “Here is a paper with which if I cannot whip ‘Bobbie Lee,’ I will be willing to go home.”40

“In a second the air was full of the hiss of bullets and the hurtle of grape-shot. The mental strain was so great that I saw at that moment the singular effect mentioned, I think, in the life of Goethe on a similar occasion—the whole landscape for an instant turned slightly red.” This psychological state produced a sort of fighting madness in many men, a superadrenalized fury that turned them into mindless killing machines heedless of the normal instinct of self-preservation. This frenzy seems to have prevailed at Antietam on a greater scale than in any previous Civil War battle. “The men are loading and firing with demonaical fury and shouting and laughing hysterically,” wrote a Union officer in the present tense a quarter-century later as if that moment of red-sky madness lived in him yet.43

In this view, the issues of the American Civil War mirrored the issues of class conflict in Britain. The Union stood for popular government, equal rights, and the dignity of labor; the Confederacy stood for aristocracy, privilege, and slavery. Lincoln expressed this theme in his speeches portraying the war as “essentially a People’s contest … a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men … to afford all an unfettered start, and a fair chance in the race of life.”4 British radicals expounded numerous variations on the theme. For a generation they had fought for democratization of British politics and improved conditions for the working class. For them, America was a “beacon of freedom” lighting the path to reform. The leading British radical, John Bright, passionately embraced the Union cause. “There is no country in which men have been so free and prosperous” as the Union states, declared Bright. “The existence of that free country and that free government has a prodigious influence upon freedom in Europe.” Confederates were “the worst foes of freedom that the world has ever seen,” [Page 550] Bright told workingmen.

“I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die,” Lincoln had said, and he meant it. Even after the setback at Second Bull Run, Seward told the French minister that “we will not admit the division of the Union … at any price. … There is no possible compromise.”

On September 22, five days after the battle of Antietam, Lincoln called his cabinet into session. He had made a covenant with God, said the president, that if the army drove the enemy from Maryland he would issue his Emancipation Proclamation. “I think the time has come,” he continued. “I wish it were a better time. I wish that we were in a better condition. The action of the army against the rebels has not been quite what I should have best liked.” Nevertheless, Antietam was a victory and Lincoln intended to warn the rebel states that unless they returned to the Union by January 1 their slaves “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

After January 1, Lincoln told an official of the Interior Department, “the character of the war will be changed. It will be one of subjugation. … The [old] South is to be destroyed and replaced by new propositions and ideas.”28

But a closer look at the results challenges this conclusion. Republicans retained control of seventeen of the nineteen free-state governorships and sixteen of the legislatures. They elected several congressmen in [Page 562] Missouri for the first time, made a net gain of five seats in the Senate, and retained a twenty-five-vote majority in the House after experiencing the smallest net loss of congressional seats in an off-year election in twenty years.

We are now on the brink of destruction. It appears to me that the Almighty is against us.”14 But the president pulled himself together and handled the affair in a manner that ultimately strengthened his leadership. On December 19 he met with a delegation of Republican senators and listened to speeches “attributing to Mr. Seward a lukewarmness in the conduct of the war.” Seward had already offered to resign, but Lincoln did not reveal this. Instead he invited the delegation back next day, when they were surprised to find the whole cabinet (except Seward) on hand.

As the two armies bedded down a few hundred yards from each other, their bands commenced a musical battle as prelude to the real thing next day. Northern musicians blared out “Yankee Doodle” and “Hail Columbia,” and were answered across the way by “Dixie” and “The Bonnie Blue Flag.” One band finally swung into the sentimental strains of “Home Sweet Home”; others picked it up and soon thousands of Yanks and Rebs who tomorrow would kill each other were singing the familiar words together.

“The [Page 586] hen is the wisest of all the animal creation,” Lincoln remarked pointedly, “because she never cackles until the egg is laid.”29

In the end, as a recent scholar has suggested, his predisposition to alcoholism may have made him a better general. His struggle for self-discipline enabled him to understand and discipline others; the humiliation of prewar failures gave him a quiet humility that was conspicuously absent from so many generals with a reputation to protect; because Grant had nowhere to go but up, he could act with more boldness and decision than commanders who dared not risk failure.34

What kind of conscription was this, in which only 7 percent of the men whose names were drawn actually served? The answer: it was not conscription at all, but a clumsy carrot and stick device to stimulate volunteering. The stick was the threat of being drafted and the carrot was a bounty for volunteering. In the end this method worked, for while only 46,000 drafted men served and another 74,000 provided substitutes, some 800,000 men enlisted or re-enlisted voluntarily during the two years after passage of the conscription act. While the social and economic cost of this process was high, Americans seemed willing to pay the price because compulsory service was contrary to the country’s values and traditions. Alexis de Tocqueville’s words a generation earlier were still relevant in 1863: “In America conscription is unknown and men are induced to enlist by bounties. The notions and habits of the people … are so opposed to compulsory recruitment that I do not think it can ever be sanctioned by their laws.”27

Several highly visible traders who defied Grant’s orders were Jews. Grant and other Union generals had frequently complained about Jewish “speculators whose love of gain is greater than their love of country.”61 When Grant’s own father brought three Jewish merchants to Memphis seeking special permits, his son the general lost his temper and on December 17, 1862, issued this order: “The Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department, and also Department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department.” Jewish spokesmen denounced this “enormous outrage” that punished a whole group for the alleged sins of a few. Sensing an issue, House Democrats introduced a resolution, but Republicans tabled it. Lincoln rescinded Grant’s order, explaining through Halleck that while [Page 623] he had no objection to expelling dishonest traders, the order “proscribed a whole class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks.”62 Grant said no more about Jews, but six months later he summed up the frustrations of his efforts to regulate a trade that “is weakening us of at least 33 percent of our force. … I will venture that no honest man has made money in West Tennessee in the last year, whilst many fortunes have been made there during that time.”63

One northerner who had never lost confidence in eventual victory at Vicksburg was Grant. All of his roundabout routes through canals, bayous, and swamps having failed, he resolved on a bold plan to march his [Page 627] army down the west bank of the Mississippi to a point below Vicksburg while sending the fleet straight past the batteries to rendezvous with the troops downriver. There they could carry the army across the mile-wide water for a dry-ground campaign against this Gibraltar from the southeast. Apparently simple, the plan involved large risks. The gunboat fleet might be destroyed or crippled. Even if it survived to ferry Grant’s soldiers across the river, they would be virtually cut off from their base, for while the ironclads and even some supply transports might get past Vicksburg downriver with the help of a four-knot current, they would be sitting ducks if they tried to go back up again. The army would have to operate deep in enemy territory without a supply line against a force of unknown strength which held interior lines and could be reinforced.

Pemberton finally recognized that Grant had crossed his whole army below Vicksburg. But what to do about it was a puzzle because Grant’s purpose remained unclear. His most logical move would seem to be a drive straight northward toward Vicksburg, keeping his left flank in contact with the river where he might hope to receive additional supplies from transports that ran the batteries. But Grant knew that Joseph Johnston was trying to scrape together an army at Jackson, the state capital forty miles east of Vicksburg. If he ignored Johnston and went after Pemberton, the Yankees might suddenly find another enemy on their right flank. So Grant decided to drive eastward, eliminate the Johnston threat before it became serious and before Pemberton realized what was happening, and then turn back west to attack Vicksburg.

“The bravery of the blacks,” he declared, “completely revolutionized the sentiment of the army with regard to the employment of negro troops. I heard prominent officers who formerly in private had sneered at the idea of negroes fighting express themselves after that as heartily in favor of it.”11 But among the Confederates, Dana added, “the feeling was very different.” Infuriated by the arming of former slaves, southern troops at Milliken’s Bend shouted “no quarter!” and reportedly murdered several captured blacks.

The Fourth of July 1863 was the most memorable Independence Day in American history since that first one four score and seven years earlier. Far away in Pennsylvania the high tide of the Confederacy receded from Gettysburg. Here in Mississippi, white flags sprouted above rebel trenches, the emaciated troops marched out and stacked arms, and a Union division moved into Vicksburg to raise the stars and stripes over the courthouse. “This was the most Glorious Fourth I ever spent,” wrote an Ohio private. But to many southerners the humiliation of surrendering on July 4 added insult to injury. The good behavior of the occupation troops, however, mitigated the insult. Scarcely a taunt escaped their lips as Union soldiers marched into the city; on the contrary, they paid respect to the courage of the defenders and shared rations with them. Indeed, the Yankees did what many Vicksburg citizens had wanted to do for weeks—they broke into the stores of “speculators” who had been holding food for higher prices. As described by a Louisiana sergeant, northern soldiers brought these “luxuries” into the streets “and throwing them down, would shout, ‘here rebs, help yourselves, you are naked [Page 637] and starving and need them.’ What a strange spectacle of war between those who were recently deadly foes.”18

The capture of Vicksburg was the most important northern strategic victory of the war, perhaps meriting Grant’s later assertion that “the fate of the Confederacy was sealed when Vicksburg fell.”

The president remained disquieted by news from Mississippi, however, and called Lee to Richmond for a strategy conference on May 15. This time the Virginian dazzled Davis and Seddon with a proposal to invade Pennsylvania with a reinforced army and inflict a crushing defeat on the Yankees in their own backyard. This would remove the enemy threat on the Rappahannock, take the armies out of war-ravaged Virginia, and enable Lee to feed his troops in the enemy’s country. It would also strengthen Peace Democrats, discredit Republicans, reopen the question of foreign recognition, and perhaps even conquer peace and recognition from the Union government itself.

When Hill’s would-be Crispins approached Gettysburg that morning, however, they found something more than the pickets and militia they had expected. Two brigades of Union cavalry had arrived in town the previous day. Their commander was weather-beaten, battle-wise John Buford, who like Lincoln had been born in Kentucky and raised in Illinois. Buford had noted the strategic importance of this crossroads village flanked by defensible ridges and hills. Expecting the rebels to come this way, he had posted his brigades with their breech-loading carbines on high ground northwest of town.

By early afternoon some 24,000 Confederates confronted 19,000 bluecoats along a three-mile semicircle west and north of Gettysburg. Neither commanding general had yet reached the field; neither had intended to fight there; but independently of their intentions a battle destined to become the largest and most important of the war had already started.

But Lee could see that so long as the enemy held the high ground south of town, the battle was not over. He knew that the rest of the Army of the Potomac must be hurrying toward Gettysburg; his best chance to clinch the victory was to seize those hills and ridges before they arrived. So Lee gave Ewell discretionary orders to attack Cemetery Hill “if practicable.” Had Jackson still lived, he undoubtedly would have found it practicable. But Ewell was not Jackson. Thinking the enemy [Page 655] position too strong, he did not attack—thereby creating one of the controversial “ifs” of Gettysburg that have echoed down the years.

Not only did it command high ground, but its convex interior lines also allowed troops to be shifted quickly from one point to another while forcing the enemy into concave exterior lines that made communication between right and left wings slow and difficult.

Studying the Union defenses through his field glasses on the evening of July 1 and again next morning, Longstreet concluded that this line was too strong for an attack to succeed. He urged Lee to turn its south flank and get between the Union army and Washington. This would compel Meade to attack the Army of Northern Virginia in its chosen position. Longstreet liked best the tactical defensive; the model he had in mind was Fredericksburg where Yankee divisions had battered themselves to pieces while the Confederates had suffered minimal casualties. Longstreet had not been present at Chancellorsville nor had he arrived at Gettysburg on July 1 until after the whooping rebels had driven the enemy pell-mell through the town. These were the models that Lee had in mind. He had not accomplished the hoped-for “destruction” of the enemy in the Seven Days’ or at Chancellorsville. Gettysburg presented him with a third chance.42 The morale of his veteran troops had never been higher; they would regard such a maneuver as Longstreet suggested as a retreat, Lee thought, and lose their fighting edge. According to a British military observer accompanying the Confederates, the men were eager to attack an enemy “they had beaten so constantly” and for whose fighting capacity they felt “profound contempt.” Lee intended to unleash [Page 656] them. Pointing to Cemetery Hill, he said to Longstreet: “The enemy is there, and I am going to attack him there,” Longstreet replied: “If he is there, it w...

Distressed by the exposed nature of the low ground at the south end of Cemetery Ridge before it thrust upward at Little Round Top, Sickles had moved his two divisions a half-mile forward to occupy slightly higher ground along a road running southwest from Gettysburg. There his troops held a salient with its apex in a peach orchard and its left anchored in a maze of boulders locally called Devil’s Den, just below Little Round Top. Although this gave Sickles high ground to defend, it left his men unconnected to the rest of the Union line and vulnerable to attack on both flanks. When Meade learned what Sickles had done, it was too late to order him back to the original line. Longstreet had launched his attack.

The most desperate struggle occurred on Longstreet’s front, where two Union regiments at separated points of this combat zone, the 20th Maine and the 1st Minnesota, achieved lasting fame by throwing back Confederate attacks that came dangerously close to breakthroughs. Rising above the surrounding countryside, the two Round Tops dominated the south end of Cemetery Ridge. If the rebels had gotten artillery up there, they could have enfiladed the Union left. Sickles’s advance had uncovered these hills. A brigade of Alabamians advanced to seize Little Round Top. Minutes earlier nothing but a Union signal station had stood in their way. But Meade’s chief of engineers, General Gouverneur K. Warren, discovered this appalling situation as enemy troops were approaching. Galloping down the hill, Warren persuaded the 5th Corps commander to send a brigade double-timing to the crest of Little Round Top just in time to meet the charging rebels.

It was the heaviest single-battle toll in the war thus far, but the fighting was not over. Despite stout resistance by the Yankees, Lee believed that his indomitable veterans had almost achieved victory. One more push, he thought, and “those people” would break. Lee seemed unusually excited by the supposed success of the past two days. At the same time, however, he was weakened by a bout with diarrhea and irritated by Stuart’s prolonged absence (Jeb’s tired troopers had finally rejoined the army during the day). In any case, Lee’s judgment was not at its best.