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<p>Meade spent the night consolidating the artillery and infantry of the Army of the Potomac upon these heights. The part of the heights known as Cemetery Ridge, which ran southward from Cemetery Hill to the craggy Round Tops, afforded the Federals a good defensive position against the main body of Lee’s army stationed along Seminary Ridge to the westward, and the part of the heights, which ran eastward from Cemetery Hill to Culp’s Hill, offered the Federals a good defensive position against Ewell’s corps stationed in the lowlands to the Northward.
Despite its strength, Meade’s position would have become untenable if the Confederates could have obtained control of any of the hills occupied by the Federals, and this fact is the key to the tactics employed by Lee on the second and third days at Gettysburg.
The battle was resumed in full fury on the afternoon of July 2. In conformity with the orders of their corps commander, Longstreet, to whom Lee has assigned the task of turning Meade’s left, Hood’s division marched around the Union left, overran Devil’s Den, and fought to gain control of Little Round Top; and McLaws’ Division shattered the Federal troops in the Wheat Field and the Peach Orchard and undertook to reach Cemetery Ridge, beyond. As the fighting moved northward, the brigades of Anderson’s division of Hill’s corps attacking en echelon struck at Meade’s center, and one of them, Wright’s Georgians, actually stood for a time on the crest of Cemetery Ridge. As darkness approached, the offensive power of the remnants of these gallant divisions spent itself, and fighting virtually ceased for the day on the Union left.
Lee had expected that Ewell would strike the Union right with his infantry simultaneously with Longstreet’s attempt to turn the Union left. Instead of doing so, however, Ewell delayed such action until dusk. At that time Johnson’s division of Ewell’s corps made an assault on Culp’s Hill, and the Louisiana Tigers and Hoke’s North Carolinians undertook to capture East Cemetery Hill, which adjoined Cemetery Hill.
Although these moves were not adequately supported because of adverse factors, each of them was temporarily a success. Johnson attained a lodgement [sic] on the side of Culp’s Hill which he was able to retain until a late hour of the following morning, and the Louisianians and North Carolinians took and held East Cemetery Hill until they were driven from it by massive counterattacks.
July 3 witnessed the most courageous infantry charge in history – a charge which epitomized the high-water mark of the Confederacy. As the historian Glenn Tucker so well declares in his High Tide at Gettysburg, the charge was “of a type of warfare more akin to chivalry than to the fighting of our present day.”
While the charge is enshrined in history as “Pickett’s charge,” Longstreet commanded the operation, and the 13,000 Confederate soldiers participating in it belonged to Virginia brigades under Pickett; Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia brigades under Pettigrew; North Carolina brigades under Trimble; and Alabama and Florida brigades under Wilcox.
After a preliminary artillery bombardment, these infantrymen marched out of the woods on Seminary Ridge in parade formation and started across the 1400 yards of open ground between that ridge and Cemetery Ridge. As a Union observer asserted, they advanced “as with one soul, in perfect order,… over ridge and slope, through orchard and meadow and cornfield, magnificent, grim, irresistible.”
As they neared their objective on Cemetery Ridge, their ranks were decimated by the fire of scores of Union cannons and thousands of Union rifles. Although men from the commands of Pickett, Pettigrew, and</p>
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