American History Hit - America's Deadliest Battle: Gettysburg

Episode Date: July 9, 2026

By July 1863, the American Civil War had reached a critical turning point. As Robert E. Lee led his army into the North, the two sides collided at Gettysburg in the deadliest battle of the war... How did three days of fighting at Gettysburg change the course of the Civil War? And how has the battle been remembered in the American consciousness since?Our guest today is award winning author Garry Adelman. He’s the Chief Historian at the American Battlefield Trust and has been a licensed battlefield guide at Gettysburg for thirty-one years.Edited by Tim Arstall, produced by Tom Delargy. Senior producer is Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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General Robert E. Lee has tallied a series of dramatic victories in the South, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville. The list goes on. With such momentum, he turns his sights north, sending his army across the Potomac River, towards Pennsylvania. It is a bold strategy and a dangerous gambit. Carry the war to union soil, threaten northern cities, erode public support for the conflict, and then win the kind of decisive victory that forces Washington to the negotiating table, where they can secure southern independence. Across the north, anxiety spreads. Farmers flee, militias mobilize, Washington braces for disaster. The Army of the Potomac races to Shadow Lee's movement,

through the rolling countryside. Neither army has any plan to fight at the small crossroads town of Kettysburg, Pennsylvania. But on the morning of July 1st, Confederate soldiers engage with Union cavalry west of the town. Within hours, thousands more men are marching towards the sound of gunfire. What begins as a chance encounter will soon become the largest battle ever fought on the North American continent. A contest that will determine if Lee's dream of a negotiated peace, can become reality, or if the union can somehow turn the tide finally in its favor. I'm Don Wildman, and this is American History Hit.

Our guest today is award-winning author Gary Aedleman. He is the chief historian at the American Battlefield Trust and has been a licensed battlefield guide at Gettysburg National Military Park for the past 31 years. Gary Edelman, thanks for joining us again on American History Hit. Really appreciate it. Super psych to be here. Thank you so much, Don. It's a favorite subject of yours, I know. Let's set the scene in its context. Early summer of 63, where are we in the Civil War?

So you could say we're right in the middle of the Civil War. It started in 1861. It ends in 65. We're into early July of 63. And, you know, things have been up and down for the Union, the north of federal, the United States, fighting against the Confederates, of course, the Southerners, the rebels. There's a lot happening. You know, the U.S. has done very well in the West overall. 100,000 square miles of territory, but not really landing a killing blow anywhere. The U.S. is trying to capture Vicksburg under a guy you've heard of named U.S. Grant. There are other forces moving through Tennessee, trying to move to Chattanooga and then into Georgia, but that hasn't really happened yet either. And then, of course, in the east, there's a losing streak for the North Robert Lee with his Confederate Army. It keeps winning, or at least not losing. And, you know, they're coming off of two big Confederate victories at Fredericksburg in late 1862. Then what many people call Lee's greatest victory in May of 1863 at the Battle of Chancellorsville. So Confederate

tied as high as this battle starts. Yeah, it really is the pivot point, isn't it, that we're facing here? We talk about it a lot on this podcast, how things have led to this point. I mean, obviously, in hindsight, we'll see this this way. But June 1863, the Battle of Chancellorsville really triggers Lee's northern strategy. Or was it new at all? I mean, was this a card that was always in Lee's hand? Well, I mean, he's. He did try, if you're talking about his strategy sort of, you know, I think you're talking about him moving north, taking the war away from Virginia and invading the north. It didn't go so well the first time.

He didn't even make it into, you know, Pennsylvania the first time, which we believe he was trying to. And that culminated in the Battle of Antietam or the Battle of Sharpsburg. He kind of went back. But things are different. He's got an even more successful and larger army in June of 1863. This is the armies near their peaks, the army of the Potomac for the North. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. So they're about as large as they're ever going to be. Lee is at the zenith of his career. He doesn't know this at the time. But of course, he seems to be like right there

at that time. It seems like this is the time to impact the elections of 1864 to take the war into the north, to strengthen the peace movement. So he hadn't done it on the scale. He didn't have so much hope, I think, realistic or reasonable hope as he could have this time when he's got this army on this day or this month in 1863. Yeah, I mean, it's important to remember the duality of this, the motivation here. Not only is there, you know, the military aspect of defeating that other army, but also the pulling of public opinion in the north over to peace, you know, the idea of a negotiated surrender. So often the case, you know, talk about it in World War II. It's always the case that this is a strong impulse. And he's in good shape to do this right now as he marches north.

The Confederates are also hoping to relieve the pressure on Virginia where so much of the war in the east had been fought to bring the fight to Union soil, right? Yeah, there's a little bit. There's kind of a handful of things to it. So you're perfectly right. You know, the Virginia and so much of the South has hosted the Civil War. So far, farmers really never get the foothold that they want on a broad scale. So of course, bring the war to the North while also, you know, feeding the Confederacy as best they can. This is something that was a challenge for them, even in what is seen as an agrarian society. He knows if he threatens northern cities, Harrisburg, Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia. That will freak out the north. I don't think that's his term for it, but that will strengthen a peace movement in itself. Maybe it could even relieve pressure on some of the faraway places like Vicksburg and, you know, in Middle Tennessee.

And finally, you win a major battle on northern soil. You know, that'll even do more to strengthen the peace movement. And it could go really well. I want to continue into reaffirming something you just said. And that is that the previous fall in Lee's first invasion of the North, we could argue about who really won tactically at the Battle of Antietam or the Battle of Sharpsburg. But the winner of the Battle of Antietam strategically is Abraham Lincoln. He used it as enough of a victory to issue the emancipation proclamation. And who knows what might come from the Confederate or the United States government as the result of what might happen in Pennsylvania.

So stakes are high and anything could happen at this point. We know how it came out. Back then, they had no idea. Why Gettysburg? How does this town figure into the situation? Yeah, you know, it's very simple, although popular media and movies have complicated it into a number of myths chiefly that this battle was started over shoes, that there's some sort of a massive shoe factory at Gettysburg. And somebody decided they needed the shoes for the Confederacy, something that's blown out of proportion. I think the U.S. Army is probably as low on shoes as anybody, but not only is there no shoe factory near Gettysburg,

their shoe stores, but we know exactly why they met. And it's all documented in their correspondence and their official reports. They met there because Gettysburg is a road hub. It's tough to pass through South Central Pennsylvania in 1863 without coming through Gettysburg. And the roads led the armies to that point. The North had to guard Baltimore and Washington. And what do you know? They come, the roads to those places come together at Gettysburg. And eight other roads come in and out at Gettysburg. And it's perfectly documentable. The Schumet didn't even start until, you know, a decade and a half or two after the Civil War. And nobody ever talked about it before then.

So it is absolutely the roads and they bumped into each other and it grew into this largest engagement ever fought on the American soil. It's the county seat, I suppose, right? That's the centrality of it. Yes. And I imagine that had a lot to do with it becoming the county seat as well in maybe 1801. So June 3rd leads his army, 75,000 strong north, while the northern army. of the Potomac, the Union, is ordered to keep between the rebel forces and the capital. My God, what a chilling situation, really.

I mean, things have been going so badly and now suddenly they're on the move into the North. And we've done an episode on how vulnerable D.C. really is and was at the beginning, for sure. This has got to be an extraordinary situation that the papers are watching. Everybody's watching, right? Absolutely. And let's just make sure that your listeners know that when they're facing each other in Lee starts, They're at Fredericksburg, Virginia. Look at it on a map, if you're not sure.

But, I mean, the soldiers are marching from what we would call northern Virginia, but looks like central Virginia to me through Virginia, through Maryland, and into Pennsylvania. They're walking. It's not like there's a train taking them up there. And, yes, every moment is tense. You know, the Confederates are going to execute a ride around the Union Army like they had done before. It's not going to go as well this time. But, you know, stakes are high, panics are high. And it's the north is increasingly the political establishment losing confidence in the union commander, the northern commander Joe Hooker, who just got beaten, you know, at the Battle of Chancer'sville.

So they're looking for new leadership while all this is unfolding. By June 28th, they reached the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. They're going to cross two rivers to get there. Lee receives information from a spy that Union General Meade is, his forces are nearby. And he orders his troops to the county seat and Gettysburg. And that's really what prompts this, isn't it? Yes, what a big day. You know, June 28th is the day they replace Joe Hooker with George Gordon Mead. Lee is spread out all over Pennsylvania, like going from, you know, past York, Pennsylvania to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania up near Harrisburg.

And that's where that Susquehanna really is. He doesn't quite get to the Pennsylvania capital. So it's pretty intense here. But this is the important part, okay? When Lee learns, as you said, that Mead is coming, Lee decides to concentrate his army from the York, Chandersburg and Harrisburg areas. And the roads will bring you to only one place when you concentrate from those three places. It makes perfect sense why they ended up there. In the meantime, you have a strange situation, the Northern Army catching up, the Northern Army coming from the South and the Southern Army coming from the north as it concentrates. And that's when they start meeting north and west of Gettysburg. A small farming community, 2,400 people, but it's on the rise. Gaslighting, six churches, three banks. The railroads come to town. It's an up and coming place. Well, the stage is set. What a drama. And when we come back, we'll see how it all plays out. We're back with Gary Aedelman of the Center for Civil War Photography, discussing the Battle of Gettysburg.

Gary, this will be three days of ferocious combat, famously. So the North and South meeting within the very town limits of Gettysburg. How does this engagement first begin July 1st? So first of all, you should know that on June 26th, on the way to York, Pennsylvania, some Confederates kind of came through towns. So the Pennsylvanians got the Gettysburgians or Gettysburgers got their first taste of it as the Confederates ransomed the town, didn't destroy the place, but got some stuff and then moved on. And then, you know, supposedly the way it works is the day before the battle really starts in force. There are sort of bumping into each other but not with great lethality. The Confederates under the command of a guy named Harry Heath, Johnston Pedigrew are going to sort of spy some union forces over there. They don't think it's the main army of the Potomac.

They think it's just sort of militia maybe at that point. And they're ultimately the next day in the morning going to bump into each other. A cavalry scout from my home state of Illinois will fire the first shot of the Battle of Gettysburg. His name is Marcellus Jones. And then it grows from there. The cavalry starts falling back under the weight of the Confederate infantry, the foot soldiers. And they fall back to now famous places. McPherson's Ridge, Seminary Ridge, Oak Ridge they occupy in places like that.

And nobody had any idea, this massive struggle was going to take place here. Early morning, this is all unplanned, of course. This is a collision unplanned. Early morning, the Confederates march into the town. I'm talking about July 1st. And suddenly it begins. The union initiates with a delaying action until their infantry can show up. But the Confederates bring their own reinforcements in as well.

All this gigantic amounts of army. What are we talking about? How many men are present here? Yeah, I mean, you know, if you ever watch a movie or, show about the Battle of Gettysburg. It usually really discounts the first day, which is July 1st, as the sort of throwaway day that just involves cavalry. No, it's 50,000 soldiers, something like near 28,000 on one side, 18 on another, plus some ancillary forces here. So on its own, it would be the 12th largest battle of the Civil War and probably the sixth, the bloodiest day of the Civil War

with 17,000 casualties out of these 48,000. So you're talking about a real deal fight. To be clear, the Confederates don't reach town until the fighting is over. The, the years. Union, the North, you know, occupying with as many forces as they can, two core of about, you know, nine or ten thousand soldiers, each on average are going to go to places like Oak Ridge, Seminary Ridge, Barlow's, Null, and whatnot, and fight for every inch so that they could occupy, you know, the heights south of town still guarding the roads if they had to. So the Confederates won a huge victory. They occupy the town for the rest of the battle, which is uncomfortable for the north to say

the least. The South experienced this quite a bit, but this was not common. in the North, and the Confederates are going to then lose the initiative if I can drag you on toward the second day. Yeah, sure, second day, July 2nd. What begins as a tentative battle becomes brutal and intentional, fighting, feels more chaotic with fierce fighting taking places in areas like that are now famous names, Little Roundtop, Devil's Den, Wheatfield, etc.

I mean, what's interesting about this battle, Gary, from my perspective, is that so much is identifiable within a small geographical area. area, right? I mean, that's the unusual aspect of this, that it's all happening in this town. Yeah, it's a big misnomer. So I'm going to agree with you and add a little tweak. So yes, the icons are packed into Gettysburg. You mentioned some of them, the roundtops, Devils Den, the Wheatfield, Peach Orchard, Culp's Hill, Cemetery Ridge, all these places. But in the same sense, the battlefield is 25 square miles. So one of the biggest eye openers when people come to Gettysburg for the first time is they expect to see this fenced in five football fields and think that that's the battlefield. I mean, it takes you, it takes you 23 miles just to drive around the place. So it is huge as battlefields go. But on the south end of the second day's field, the icons are just packed in. Both sides are ready to either defend their homes or to end the civil war in favor of the south.

And, you know, one commander, the second in command for the South, James Longstreet said that July 2nd, despite his lack of success, said it's the best three hours fighting ever done by any troops on any battlefield. This is ferocious fights in terrible places where it was hard to train to fight in places like devil's den. It broke formations. It was the second hottest day of the summer. It was a terrible day for so many people. I'm going to read a little bit from a letter from a union soldier named William B. Southerton of the 75th Ohio Regiment. It was almost impossible to distinguish who were union, who were Confederate, to shoot and not kill our own men. Artillerists fought with ramrods, wielding them like ball bats, fought with rocks.

A tall rebel shoved right at my elbow, a huge rock raised a dash at Major Fox. I jabbed with my bayonet. A burst of fire. The rebel fell shot through the head. The rock crashed upon one of his screaming comrades. My God, this PTSD, you know, being described here, Gettysburg is especially notorious for its close-caughter combat, isn't it? It is indeed. You know, let me say a couple things.

first in context. I want to say the reason the second day happens as it does is because General Mead sends forward someone's he trusts Winfield Scott Hancock to look at the battlefield and decide on his behalf whether or not the army should be ordered up there. Hancock goes up there and sees the high hills that happen to be formed in the shape of a fish hook and said it was the strongest natural position he ever saw. It's going to give the north a bunch of advantages, which is why I say they have the initiative, so to speak, because they can fight defensively on the home turf on the high ground with great fields of fire and shift troops back and forth easily. And yes, those who fought at these terrible places, you know, wrote about it. To paraphrase a few, you know, one guy got, you know, sort of

prostrated by heat exhaustion and he was buried in the recesses of rocks and he could only hear the cries of the combatants, the crash of the shells against the rocks, the screams all blended into one dread chorus. Another one talked about, you know, hearing the enemy officers, cursing off their men by company. Both sides were whipped and all were mad about it. Other people turned into wild beasts under this combat, flailing their wounded limbs around and spraying everybody with blood again and again and again. People tried to explain without success from what everybody else, everybody who was there said, without success to get at the horror of the combat at Gettysburg. Here's another account, Gary, this time from a man named Major Samuel Hurst, 73rd, Ohio.

During the night, we could hear the cries of hundreds of wounded and dying men on the field. It was the most distressful wail I ever listened to. Thousands of sufferers upon the field. Oh, my God. This gives you chills, doesn't it? Hundreds lying between the two skirmish lines who could not be cared for. Through the night were groaning and wailing and crying out in the depths of their suffering and pain. They were the mingled cries of friend and foe.

And they were born to us on the night breeze as a sad, wailing, painful cry for help. Wow, what a scene. And this is repeated, obviously, throughout the Civil War. This isn't unique to Gettysburg, for sure. But it's in a different kind of volume and intensity, I suppose. Let's talk about Pickett's charge. Happens on July 3rd. I'm skipping a lot here.

Final day of fighting, Lee launches an infantry assault with 12,500 men aiming to break through a weak point in the union line at Cemetery Ridge. This is led by a man named Brigadier General, George Pickett, hence the name. Explain this action. Yeah, so just to bring us up to it really quick, like I said, The union line was in the form of a fish hook on July 2nd. Lee is going to make mighty attempts to try to break these flanks of the fish hook, the barb in the eye, you could say. They do not succeed.

But as part of these attacks, the confects also moved across what would be called the union center, the future site of Pickett's Charge. And with 12, 1,300 guys got all the way across the field, broke through some of the union line and figured the next day, while they're strong on the flanks, they must be weak in the center. And some of our Georgians just cross this field. It's not getting there. It's staying there is the problem. So how about 10 times as many soldiers doing it across this mile wide plane? Except a few things. A, the Union Commander Mead sort of outguessed Robert E. Lee and guessed where he would attack and told the commander to be ready.

B, when Lee does attack across this field, it's going to take 20 minutes. That's giving General Meade time to put, no joke, 15, 20, 25,000 reinforcements moving from his fish hook line in toward the center. Third, the union line is going to sort of bulge out to put the Confederates at a disadvantage. But nonetheless, 12,500 men in a mile wide line is going to make an impact. And they are going to push all the way right up to the union line where it comes up to a climax where there's this terrible melee, man to man, body to body, red with blood, black with smoke, bathed in sweat. And they literally just fight it out this place called the angle. And might I add that, you know, some of your listeners might say, hey, it shouldn't be called thick as charge. It is true that fewer than half of the Confederate soldiers are pickets, but he was the big force.

He was the only sort of fresh force on the battlefield. So 5,500 of the 12,500 are pickets. And Virginians are simply better at marketing than North Carolinians, which is why we call it pickets charge. Only a small number reach the union lines. This is referred to as the high watermark of the Confederacy and were decisively repulsed. It is a catastrophic defeat for the Confederates, casually rates above 50 percent. Right. Correct. And let me just say that you're perfectly right. If 12,500 attack, maybe six or seven thousand reach the Emmetsburg Road that bisects the position, but only a couple of thousands

are brave or crazy enough to pass that road and go up to that final hill. And of those thousands, we don't think that more than a couple of hundred might have pierced the union line. When they did, the reinforcements begin to arrive. And it's over as quickly as it starts. And it goes from this moment of great Confederate hope, the high watermark, to Robert Lee's greatest defeat by far. He lost 23 battle flags in this attack more than he'd lost into the entire war up to that point combined. The Union troops were chanting Fredericksburg. Fredericksburg to say that they were getting the Southerners back from the wholesale destruction they'd received from then. They were dragging the Confederate flags through the mud, yelling victory.

They finally truly beat Robert Lee. They were excited about it. And Robert Lee met his men and said, all my fault. But the men from Pick's Charge, like you said, in excess of 50% casualties. The Southerners were dealt a blow like they'd never been dealt before. So much of this was due to the strategy that the union had on that hill, wasn't it? You mentioned the fish hook, that ability to have their lines arranged in such a way that they could continually react very decisively or very strategically to different stimuli, I suppose, to different attacks coming, right? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it's sort of this conglomeration of good effects as a result of taking up the fish hook.

Like I said, high ground, defensive, home turf, interior lines that allow you to shift back and forth and then using them. General Mead was very active, shifting troops back and forth throughout the entire battle, especially for a guy who'd only been in command by July 3rd for five days. You tried doing that. So, yes, I mean, it was sort of a set up for success. And as a result, because it was such a Confederate disaster, some of your listeners who have been to Gettysburg, look across that field and say,

what was Lee thinking well. Remember, Robert Lee had driven a whole lot of union forces larger than his away from the field before. He has the mountains to his back. He's an enemy territory. And his goal is to win this thing, not to sort of hang out in the enemy country, you know, cut away from his communications. So had it succeeded, it would have, you know, we would be praising Robert Lee for such a genius of a move. And one last thing, you know, later after the war, he became president of Washington College, now Washington and Lee University. And, you know, know, one of his students mustered up the courage to say, General Lee, this is what you should have done at Gettysburg. And although I fear it might be apocryphal, Lee is said to have leaned back,

smiled and said, young man, why didn't you tell me that before the battle? Even a fool like myself can see it all now. And there you have it. It's really only in sports and war that people propose something other than what didn't work and think that we are military or sports geniuses, because of course something else might have gone better. You must reflect on this a lot. The The absolute chaos of this kind of fighting in any of the Civil War battles, the objectivity that we speak of now belies the kind of war it really was, right? Or the kind of combat it really was. It had to have been madness. I just want to register this having to do with Gettysburg especially. Yeah, yeah. I mean, when you see your childhood comrade turned into a pink mist next to you and heads being blown off and people acting in every range of emotion, some people come to life. during battle. You know, by all means, that's where they're supposed to be. That's what they're

good at. But for most people, it is just an absolutely terrifying, focused moment where what's in front of you is what counts and you are trying to kill or be killed. And yet, the moments of humanity, both during battle and immediately after, also stand in stark contrast to the animal-like, you know, machine-like because they drilled so much, you know, fighting that characterizes so many big Civil War battles. July 4th, appropriately, which we should discuss the timing of all of this. The Confederates make the decision to withdraw from the field of battle and return back to Virginia with a severely weakened force. They will never attain the kind of heights they had attained before the Battle of Gettysburg.

This is it. After the break, Gary and I discussed the aftermath of the battle and the lasting legacy of the largest battle ever fought on North American soil. Always a surprising fact. Welcome back. The guns have fallen silent. The smoke is cleared, and we can now take stock of the consequences of Gettysburg. I want to talk about the timing of this. That it was on July 4th.

Was there any intention of that? No intention at all, but let me first compliment you for not saying that Mead let Lee escape. They fought each other all the way back to the Potomac River where Lee took up such a strong position that Lee would get back into Virginia, too. The most interesting timing is not that it's the nation's birthday, of which people were cognizant. and the South viewed sort of their efforts as a second American revolution. They were portraying themselves in the seat of George Washington. July 4th was important to both sides.

But maybe most importantly is that some 1,200 miles away, Vicksburg, Mississippi, the Gibraltar of the South, the key to victory. So Lincoln said, you know, fell to the Union. And U.S. Grant will be accepting the surrender of the Confederates. One of his main surrenders he accepts from the Confederates. Not too many people can claim multiple surrenders on that day as well. So through the pouring rain, Lee and Meade faced each other where Lee is still hoping Mead would attack and he could even the odds. Mead does not oblige him and the war goes on for two more years. So some people, and I mean mainly politicians, criticized George Gordon Mead for not bagging the Confederate Army at Gettysburg or when he was trying to retreat.

You know, you don't bag 50,000 men under Robert Lee. It took 10 months of fighting the guy and outnumbering them four to one for every day to make him surrender. So Mead resigns. Lee resigns, both are rejected. And like I said, the war goes on for two more years. I asked about July 4th because in our episode on Vicksburg, actually that was part of that strategy. But it was the Southern strategy. Let's see if we can get better terms by doing it on the 4th, by surrendering on the 4th, which is such an interesting sideline. I hadn't considered a different kind of battle altogether. If I may, they don't know U.S. Grant well enough.

If they think they're going to get different terms from unconditional surrender grant, they were mistaken. Yeah, exactly. The total numbers of Gettysburg, 51,000 killed, wounded or captured or missing over the three days, 23,000 for the Union, 28,000 for the Confederates. Deadliest Battle of the entire war. By the way, these facts are read off the American Battlefield Trust website, which is such a great resource for a really clear and understandable and accessible story of any of these battles, really,

but certainly for the Gettysburg one. Another quote from another northerner, man named Avery Harris, writes, On the morning of the sixth, we fall in and start right off across the battlefield where still lies the corpses of the men not yet buried and horses also, while our tread puts to flight millions of flies who are gorging themselves upon the decaying flesh and blood. You're welcome, folks. That was a lovely anecdote. But that's the truth of it, that you're talking about a very gory scene.

What about the north? What are the broader consequences of Gettysburg? This is the last time the South will ever launch another. attack above the Mason-Dixon line. Sort of. They're going to do a little cavalry, what we would call little cavalry raid, what at the time was significant in 1864, but agreed. You know, the North won this massive victory, but, you know, people could rightly point out that it really didn't change the strategic situation other than the North having a great

boost of morale. In the immediate aftermath, the war returned back to Virginia where it had been. Sure, the Confederate Army is, you know, suffered a mighty blow, but the North also lost more than 20% of their army. And people might be able to have questioned how big of a deal it was, certainly at the time. And I still think to this day, Vicksburg was much more important and changed the strategic scenario much more. But Gettysburg, for what it prevented, was obviously very important. Imagine the disaster it could have been if Philadelphia and Harrisburg or Baltimore fell, you know, to the Confederates. Who knows? So what I would say, though, is that a few

things conspired to make Gettysburg more important in the public mind. And this started happening right in 1863 and it continues to this day. One, it's the biggest battle, as you mentioned. Two, photographers and correspondents came right away because it's near population centers. So people suddenly cared more about things that happen on their doorstep. So these things proliferated into papers and photographic studios, that solidified the popularity. Then here comes the Gettysburg address in November to make the place even more famous. Plus, by then, it had also become the first preserved Civil War battlefield. This is, of course, near and dear to me and happens to be true. But I worked for the American Battlefield Trust. We preserve land from Civil War War of 1812

and from the American Revolution. And because it was the first Civil War battlefield to be preserved as a park, it gave people a place to go. So they went to Gettysburg and then it became a larger park very quickly. And those things sort of have conspired to make Gettysburg today and 100 years ago, the mecca of Civil War battlefields. Had Lee not taken this course and attacked to the North overplaying his hand, I suppose you could say, could he have constructed another kind of strategy just by staying put in Virginia? No, because they had run out of their resources, right? Yeah. I mean, you know, people can easily say, obviously, something else might have had a chance

of going better. This did not go well for Robert Lee. The war was not away from Virginia for very long. He lost a lot of soldiers. He lost, you know, four generals or something like that. So he, you know, he obviously didn't play it right. Could he have sent a substantial portion of his army to help relieve Vicksburg and prevent that disaster and keep the Confederacy as one instead of cut and two as a result of that? Maybe. Could he have just stayed on the defensive, hoping the union would again bloody itself against his defenses like they did at Fredericksburg? Sure, that might have worked, but none of that would have achieved his ultimate goal. His ultimate goal is to destroy the union forces opposing him. That is the key to allowing him to march on Washington, D.C. or something

like that. So it seems like given how the government and how General Mead and the Army performed at Gettysburg, he didn't have a lot of other great options, but obviously Lee, he shouldn't have done this in retrospect with perfect knowledge of what happened later. I don't know what would have gone better. But what is so different is that in the north, he's playing the military against the public up there. And that's not the case in the South. You don't have that same dynamic going on. It was just such an interesting difference. Any comment on that or not? Yeah. Yeah. You know, I'll say that, you know, both sides are doing it. The South did try to to portray, and Lee did issue orders saying you will not pillage these places. You will not steal. You will pay for things with a government voucher or with Confederate money. Lee didn't think Confederate money would be worthless two years from then. So you could say he's trying to, you know, be the benevolent genteel conqueror, so to speak. But the North is doing a lot of that in the South and trying to muster up the local populace, although it's things like the March to the Sea and the terrors of how the North treated the South that really get the play in popular histories. I would

say that both sides do that with some savvy. It is the combination of Vicksburg and Gettysburg, as you've mentioned. That really is the story here in the bigger sense. News the victory for the Union. It was a massive boost, of course, to public morale. The Philadelphia Inquirer, my paper as a youngster back in New Jersey, ran the headline, Victory Waterloo Eclipsed, indicating the significance of the battle as it was understood there, at least in the media.

No battle in American military history is remembered so profoundly as Gettysburg, bottom line. Why does it occupy such a particular place in the American consciousness, do you think? It's the telling of it, the storytelling, isn't it? I couldn't agree more. And the quote you read wasn't the only one to refer to the battles of old. It was a Gibraltar. It was this. It was that they liked getting into military history a little bit.

But I really think it has a lot to do with still. It was on their doorstep. People could go see it and people had easy access to the photographs taken there, which they didn't say for Vicksburg, where 20 pictures were taken during the whole war. at Vicksburg, and you have hundreds at Gettysburg. So it was accessible. And because you had something like Pickett's Charge, you could, thousands of people saw it happening. Whereas a lot of other places fought in the woods, Chickamauga, nobody really could picture the whole thing. And then on top of that, you just have these emerging icons, you know, the bullet-scarred trees on Culp's Hill, the terrible rocks of Devil's Den, you know, the dead bodies between

the lines and the wheat field. And it just, like you said, it told a great story. solidified by the Gettysburg address to put that name into people's heads and therefore people have taken the largest battle to become necessarily the most important something I disagree with. But the twin Gettysburg-Vicksburg victories for the North has to be a major turning point in the Civil War, at least a major. People of Fort Sumter tell me that's a pretty important turning point as well, but it's at least one of the biggest ones. Those photographs are still shocking, which is amazing when you consider all the things that our eyes have seen in our lifetimes. You know, we're just overwhelmed and saturated with the stuff. Can you imagine being someone

in the 1860s and seeing that kind of imagery so sharply drawn the first time in your life? We don't have to imagine. More correspondents wrote about it. I mean, it's been less than a year and sorry to interrupt. They, you know, had seen their first photos of Battlefield dead before Antietam and Matthew Brady's studio showed them. You know, the thought was these, battlefields are glorious. The corpse with the flag draped over his breast looked very different than the bloated corpses that people saw face pressed to the earth far from home. So one, the most famous of these correspondents said, if Mr. Brady has not dragged the bodies to our dooryards, he has done something very like it because they could finally see it. And most of these photos were taken in

3D. And you have more photos of the human carnage taken at Gettysburg than anywhere else, about 44 of the 104 known photos, 20 at Antietam, 44 at Gettysburg. Gettysburg, you know, by far are the most taken there. And they were taken in these places where, you know, with twisted rocks and everything like that to make it memorable in the July heat right when putrefaction had taken hold. You can literally see flies on some of the corpses at Antietam in Gettysburg. So it's just a terrible situation. And like you said, it sticks with you, especially in 3D, and especially that you can go back to the exact spot today and contemplate it for good or for bad. And that's why Battlefield preservation, among the reasons it's important.

Right. You can hold up those pictures and just look at it and know that that was what that moment was. And of course, as you've mentioned, four months after the battle, November 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivers one of the most enduring speeches of all time. The Gettysburg Address, we've done an episode 119 back in 2023. Lincoln spoke of a new birth of freedom, born through the sacrifice of those who fought there and of the hope that the government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth. Yeah, it was an amazing thing to consider and to consider. as our own July 4th comes in 2026, 250 years down the road. What other amazing and profound thing happened on that same day in 1863. Gary Aedleman is one of America's foremost interpreters of the Civil War. He serves as chief historian of the American Battlefield Trust. He's also the vice president of the Center for Civil War Photography. Gary, tell us how listeners should approach, if they're curious about things this July 4th in terms of Gettysburg,

where would you send them? Well, you know, they should go to one of two places. Go to battlefields.org where we have itineraries and everything you need to be able to set up your trip. And when you actually do go to Gettysburg, you can go to NPS.gov slash get G-E-T-T. And the first thing you should do is book a licensed battlefield guide to go in your car with you. It should be the first thing you do when you go. I'm biased because I've been a guide for more than 30 years. And you can reserve one.

Make it the first thing you do. And then you can spend the rest of your time. the next four hours or hopefully the next two or three days, exploring the place in more detail and checking out the stuff that interests you. It's hard to see Gettysburg in just a half a day, but it's doable. So we provide you with additional options when you get there. And you can tour yourself around. You could download American Battle for the Trust or other apps if you'd like.

It's a very easy place to tour, but it's disorienting. And you've got to spend the time to figure it out on your own. I want to do that with you someday, Gary. Thank you very much. We'll see you again. Thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays,

from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great. But you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, please share with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wilde. So grateful for your support. Thanks so much.