View from the top of Little Round Top.
Posted on 07/02/2007 4:21:52 AM PDT by mainepatsfan
1863 : The second day of battle at Gettysburg
General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia attacks General George G. Meade's Army of the Potomac at both Culp's Hill and Little Round Top, but fails to move the Yankees from their positions.
On the north end of the line, or the Union's right flank, Confederates from General Richard Ewell's corps struggled up Culp's Hill, which was steep and heavily wooded, before being turned back by heavy Union fire. But the most significant action was on the south end of the Union line. General James Longstreet's corps launched an attack against the Yankees, but only after a delay that allowed additional Union troops to arrive and position themselves along Cemetery Ridge. Many people later blamed Longstreet for the Confederates' eventual defeat. Still, the Confederates had a chance to destroy the Union left flank when General Daniel Sickles moved his corps, against Meade's orders, from their position on the ridge to open ground around the Peach Orchard. This move separated Sickles' force from the rest of the Union army, and Longstreet attacked. Although the Confederates were able to take the Peach Orchard, they were repulsed by Yankee opposition at Little Round Top. Some of the fiercest fighting took place on this day, and both armies suffered heavy casualties.
Lee's army regrouped that evening and planned for one last assault against the Union center on July 3. That attack, Pickett's charge, would represent the high tide of Confederate fortunes.
View from the top of Little Round Top.
The day the 20th Maine held the extreme left flank for the North — the heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Here’s a link:
http://www.civilwarhome.com/jlchamberlainbio.htm
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." - President Abraham Lincoln
I made it to Gettysburg last summer. I was in awe walking around just seeing the place such a momentous battle took place.
The ground the 20th Maine defended against Law's Alabamans.
The current group of arrogant SOB's that tried to ignore the people and jam that immigration bill through need to have this tattooed on their foreheads..
It sends chills down my spine every time I go there.
On one of my visits I actually saw a bunch of kids with toy guns shooting at each other while inside the battle cemetery. To call it inappropriate would be an understatement.
You’d need to tattoo the words backwards. You know, so the perfumed princes could read it as they were primping in the mirror every five minutes...
In great deeds something abides;
On great fields something stays.
Forms change and pass;
Bodies disappear but spirits linger,
To consecrate ground
For the vision place of the soul.
And reverent men and women from afar,
And generations that know us not
And that we know not of...
Shall come...to ponder and to dream....
And the power of the vision
Shall pass into their souls
Col Joshua Chamberlain - October 3, 1886
Shelby was the best.
Thanks for posting the Address. There’s nothing humorous in it but I can’t help laughing when recalling that Al Gore, that scholar, inventor of the internet, scientist, etc. attributed “of the people, by the people and for the people” to the Constitution.
Bayonets!!!
And the MSM made nothing of it. Now if Bush had made the same mistake of course....
You can read all the books you want but you cannot grasp what it’s like until you actually are standing on the same ground the soldiers were.
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