[Libertarianize the GOP]

ping

[Michael.SF.]

You forgot one:

Quotes from the 1993 movie

Gettysburg

General Pickett (To General Lee): "My men. My men. What have you done to my men?"

[Jeff Head]

Armistead's part in this (in fact, his entire life was the same) was heroic/tragic on that fateful, bloody day...from several perspectives.

From the irony of the South doing the very thing that they had defeated the North doing time and again, from Armistead's acknowledged dislike of the war overall to his steadfast dedication to fighting for Virginina, to Armistead attacking into the teeth of the defenses of his best friend, General Winfield Scott Hancock, whom he fought beside in the Mexican American War. Both were wounded. It was thought Armistead might live...but he died two days later.

Hancock lived to fight on, survive the war, preside over militarily reconstruction in Louisiana and Texas, and narrowly lose the Presideny in 1880 to Garfiled.

My wife and youngest son and I traveled to Gettysburg in 1999 and had these pictures and photos from the scene.

Artists depcition of the fighting at the Bloody Angle.

My ten year old son (now almost eighteen) at a cannon behind the actual bloody angle in 1999.

Artists depiction of Armistead's breakthrough.

Me standing at the spot where Armistead was mortally wounded, at the crest of the wave of the high tide of the confederacy.

[stainlessbanner]

Highwater Mark - Dixie Ping

A video of Pickett's Charge on youtube

[Billthedrill]

You don't really get a sense of what happened there until you stand on the scene and say to yourself "My God, they marched from there to there in the open under an artillery barrage?" I am a great admirer of Lee but I honestly cannot imagine what he was thinking.

It is one of the most painful failures in military history that this lesson was not learned by the European observers, whose successors sent men on equally suicidal advances in the open under both artillery and machine gun fire fully a half-century later in the Somme and elsewhere. Other lessons from the U.S. Civil War were, from the employment of railroads in troop transport to the advantage of repeating firearms. Frontal charges against fixed positions, however - that one wasn't.

[ClearCase_guy]

General Robert E. Lee: "General Pickett, you must look to your division."
General Picket: "General Lee, I have no division."

[Young Werther]

Errol Flynn's portrayl of Gen Custer was considered over the top but...

Per Wikipedia

Possibly Custer's finest hour in the Civil War was just east of Gettysburg on July 3, 1863. In conjunction with Pickett's Charge to the west, Robert E. Lee dispatched Stuart's cavalry on a mission into the rear of the Union Army. Custer encountered the Union cavalry division of David McM. Gregg, directly in the path of Stuart's horsemen. He convinced Gregg to allow him to stay and fight, while his own division was stationed to the south out of the action. At East Cavalry Field, hours of charges and hand-to-hand combat ensued. Custer led a mounted charge of the 1st Michigan Cavalry, breaking the back of the Confederate assault, foiling Lee's plan. Custer's brigade lost 257 men at Gettysburg, the highest loss of any Union cavalry brigade.[4]

[U S Army EOD]

Having played many wargames, both board and computer, I have done Pickett’s charge several times. I always ask myself, “What in the world was Lee thinking about”?

[SunkenCiv]

http://homepage.eircom.net/~odyssey/Quotes/History/Shelby_Foote.html

“Gettysburg was the price the South paid for having Lee. The first day’s fighting was so encouraging, and on the second day’s fighting he came within an inch of doing it. And by that time Longstreet said Lee’s blood was up, and Longstreet said when Lee’s blood was up there was no stopping him... And that was that mistake he made, the mistake of all mistakes. Pickett’s charge was an incredible mistake, and there was scarcely a trained soldier who didn’t know it was a mistake at the time, except possibly Pickett himself, who was very happy he had a chance for glory... William Faulkner, in ‘Intruder in the Dust’, said that for every southern boy, it’s always within his reach to imagine it being one o’clock on an early July day in 1863, the guns are laid, the troops are lined up, the flags are out of their cases and ready to be unfurled, but it hasn’t happened yet. And he can go back in his mind to the time before the war was going to be lost and he can always have that moment for himself.” — Shelby Foote