At 1:00 p.m. on July 3, 1863, 170 Confederate artillery pieces opened fire on Cemetery Ridge. The bombardment lasted two hours and achieved almost nothing of military value. The Union guns largely survived it. The Confederate ammunition supply was critically depleted. And then, because the plan called for it, George Pickett's division and eight other brigades — roughly 12,500 men — stepped out of the tree line on Seminary Ridge and began walking.

They had three-quarters of a mile of open ground to cross. They were walking toward 6,000 Union rifles.

The Decision

Robert E. Lee had won an extraordinary victory on July 2 — his corps commanders had nearly broken the Union flanks at Devil's Den, Little Round Top, the Wheatfield, and Cemetery Hill. But "nearly" was the word that mattered. The Union line had bent and held. Meade's Army of the Potomac remained intact on its ridgeline.

Lee looked at the map and saw what he believed was an opportunity. The center of the Union line had been stripped to reinforce the flanks. A massed assault straight up the middle, coordinated with Jeb Stuart's cavalry circling to the rear, could break the Union army in two.

His corps commander James Longstreet, who would execute the assault, was opposed. He told Lee directly: no 15,000 men who ever lived could take that position. Lee overruled him. Longstreet later wrote that he was unable to give the order to advance — that Pickett had to ask him, and that he simply nodded because he could not speak.

The Charge

The Confederate brigades dressed their lines in the July heat and stepped off. They marched in parade formation — 12,500 men in two ranks, flags snapping, covering nearly a mile of front. Union artillery opened immediately, enfilading the Confederate flanks. Men went down in clumps. The formation compressed toward the center, funneling toward a low stone wall where the Philadelphia Brigade held the line.

A few hundred Confederates under Brigadier General Lewis Armistead reached the wall. Armistead, hat on his sword point to guide his men, climbed over and was shot down on the Union side. The position — later called the High Water Mark of the Confederacy — held for perhaps ten minutes. Then the Union counterattack crushed the penetration.

The survivors streamed back across the field. Lee rode out to meet them and told those who approached him: this was all my fault.

What It Cost

Of the roughly 12,500 men who stepped off Seminary Ridge, approximately 6,500 did not come back unscathed — a casualty rate approaching 50 percent in under an hour of exposure. Pickett's own three brigade commanders were all casualties. Of his 15 regimental commanders, every single one was killed or wounded.

Virginia regiments never recovered their pre-Gettysburg strength for the rest of the war.

What It Meant

Pickett's Charge is often called the high-water mark of the Confederacy — the moment the tide turned. That framing is slightly too neat. The Confederacy would fight effectively for nearly two more years. But the charge exposed the limits of Lee's offensive strategy: the Army of Northern Virginia was consuming its irreplaceable trained officers and veteran soldiers in attacks that, however tactically brilliant in conception, could not succeed against entrenched defenders with repeating rifles and prepared artillery.

The Union Army of the Potomac would never again be in serious danger of destruction. From Cemetery Ridge, the road led south — to the Wilderness, Petersburg, and Appomattox.

Longstreet, who had been right, spent the rest of his life being blamed for the failure by the Lost Cause movement that sought to protect Lee's memory. He died in 1904, still defending himself.