Battle of Gettysburg Is One

Battle of Gettysburg is one of the most discussed episodes of the U.S. Civil War. The battle, fought for three days in July 1863, took the lives of an estimated 50,000 people and is considered the turning point of the Civil War. This paper covers the important points of this bloody battle.

The battle is also called "The High Water Mark of the Rebellion" according to the National Parks Service. It was the second major thrust into the North by the Confederate Army, led by General Robert E. Lee. When Lee decided to take his army North, and take the war to the Union Army, he was met in the "…crossroads town" of Gettysburg" by the Union Army's leader, Major General George Gordon Meade. Initially the Confederate Army had success and it looked for two days like Lee's strategy would pay off.

However, the battle did not go well for Lee's soldiers on the third day, July 3, and Lee was forced to retreat which in effect was the beginning of the end of the struggle for the South, and the Confederacy's hope for independence from the United States was over.

The motivation for Lee's march against the North was in part based on Lee's victory (with his unit called "Army of Northern Virginia") in May of 1863, in Chancellorsville, Virginia. In that battle Lee took a great risk by splitting his army into two units, and his audacity paid off handsomely as he defeated Union Army Major General Joseph Hooker -- a much larger force than Lee had to work with. So, historians see this victory at Chancellorsville as having given the Confederate Army a huge jolt of confidence, justifying a dramatic move North against the Union Army.

The Battle of Gettysburg can be broken down into three separate phases, according to geologist and historian Peter Doyle. The first phase, on July 1, 1863, was when Lee's troops attacked the Union Army along the Chambersburg Pike, which caused the Union Army to retreat to higher ground. The second phase was about the Confederates trying to take that higher ground from the Union Army. Both days featured fierce fighting and thousands of deaths. Doyle points out that the Union troops had an advantage by retreating to "Little Round Top" and "Big Round Top," hilly areas that had many boulders, some of which the Union troops had piled high enough to be walls.

On that second day while the Union troops were "firmly in place on the high ground," Lee made a decision to attack both Round Tops. Lee's trusted officer, General Longstreet, urged Lee to attacked the rear of the Union position, but Lee went for the hilly locations instead. Because the Union troops had built "breastwork fortifications of diabase boulders" on the hill, that made it tougher to penetrate. The boulders kept the Confederate troops back even though the Union soldiers on top of the hills were far fewer than their opponents trying to scale the hills, according to Doyle.