Glad you posted this. Gettysburg was a major big deal. Walked that area and touched deeply. The one I really loved was Longstreet. Have a lot of original bios from that period, including his. Took a leaf from the grave in Maine of Chamberlain. Another amazing man.
Yep. Visited the battlefield 20 years ago and wept when I looked from the Union position at what the Confederates were ordered to do. No army in the world could walk (not charge) a mile in open field against cannon, then, at 50 yards, massed musketry from an entrenched enemy. It was suicide.
Barksdale’s Brigade was part of Longstreet’s corps. They had their own charge the evening before Pickett. Barksdale went through the Peach Orchard and flanked the Union line, only to be repelled by Chamberlain.
“Barksdale’s charge is remembered for its intensity and the distance covered, with some Union observers describing it as the “grandest charge that was ever seen by mortal man”.”
Barksdale was killed, as was my g-grand uncle. Shelby Foote regarded that brigade as the hardest hitting unit in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
Long ago, the year that I visited Gettysburg, I walked along much of the ridge held by the Confederates.
Up in the trunks of several of the trees, were holes where the Union rifle rounds struck. They were black holes, and they seeped a bit of black and slightly leaden “sap.”