Replies

I don't know about this, Picketts charge was your basic CW frontal charge. Many CW generals tried this before and after Gettysburg. While Lee accepted responsibility for the charge, I don't recall ever reading anything about Lee regretting the charge (as compared to Grant at Cold Harbor), I suspect that Lee didn't want to say anything that would cause his men to loose faith in him as a leader.

Lee really needed to win this battle and I suspect that he gambled that using the sledgehammer approach was his best option. I'm sure he knew that even if sucessfull, it was going to be costly. Longstreet, from everything I have read, wasn't a happy camper, even years after the battle. Pickett on the other hand, wanted to get his name in the history books and saw this as his best chance to achieve that goal.

Tom

The point was that Pickett's Charge was not frontal as it was oblique. Pickett was perpendicular to the Emmittsburg Road and not parallel. The line only straightened and bunched at the copse of trees and the angle because of the fierce flanking fire.

Lee wasn't using the sledgehammer effect. He was applying strategy that had worked in the past. Gettysburg was not to be Fredericksburg. It was to be 2nd Manassas in the planning and the initial moments. Pickett's men could not stand up to the flanking fire and therefore the line disintegrated... the disintegration of the line has become, to historians, Lee's strategy.