Pickett's horrible charge

Today is July 3rd. In 1863 at Gettysburg Confederate general Robert E. Lee committed one of the most colossal blunders in military history, Pickett's charge. It was directed at the Union position on cemetery ridge and little round top where Joshua Lawrence Chamberlin's 20th Maine had fought a famous engagement the day before. It was through a half mile of open field with no cover at all. Suicide. The logic had been that an artillery barrage on the Union position an hour before would break down the defenses early. Some historians say Robert E. Lee was perhaps a little cocky. Indeed he may have had good reason to be given the fact that he had defeated or at least fought well against the Army of the Potomac many times before. General James Longstreet, one of his closest officers strongly disagrees. As historian Ed Bearss points out he had seen the carnage at Marye's heights in Fredericksburg, Virginia where a year before Union troops under Ambrose Burnside had made a disastrous and suicidal charge against a stone wall there. In fact as Lee's legions had come on the waiting Union troops had chanted 'Fredericksburg,Fredericksburg.' remembering that battle. It certainly must have been a morale booster for an army which had such a bad record at that time the result of poor generalship. Fredericksburg had cost 13,000 casualties and had helped give leverage to a movement to end the war. The units that went on Pickett's charge suffered 60 percent casualties. As they got closer they got hit with canister and grapeshot. Canister is basically a can packed with balls which when fired disperses cutting a wide swath through the enemy ranks. Now imagine several of those going off at the same time. As put in Ken Burns documentary 'Entire regiment's disappeared.' Lee never regained his offensive momentum after that. On July 3rd Vicksburg, Mississippi fell a crucial port of goods and with it the Confederacy's hope of victory. They were effectively cut in two. Parkers Hills a tour guide who I listened to when I went to Vicksburg said that basically after Gettysburg the war could have been over but the south chose to go on. As Shelby Foote says 'Especially that they were not going to get foreign recognition without which we wouldn't have won the first revolution.' England would simply not support a nation built by and maintained by slave labor. The people wouldn't stand for it. Anyhow whenever its a hot day around two o' clock in the afternoon, I think of those soldiers about to make that charge.