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Thank you for this. Southerners who honor their family who were there, always know what day of the week it was back then, and what happened on each day. July 3rd, 1863 was a searing hot Friday. The massive charge on the weakly defended Union center failed terribly at great loss life.

The Army of Northern Virginia left that night in a huge rainstorm, with the wounded they could bear, with a rear guard— to begin to cross the Potomac at Williamsport on the 13th, being attacked as they did, and losing Brig. Gen. Johnston Pettigrew (a scholar who spoke and wrote French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and read Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic and had been a diplomat) to a troopers bullet. To fight for 2 more long years.

William F. Faulkner’s quote on this subject:
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think “This time”. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago....”

Their descendants, in large numbers, loyally fought for the US in all foreign wars— in the ranks of the lovers of Freedom and Independence. Deo Vindice.