The Battle of Gettysburg is still not fully over

This week marks the anniversary of the greatest battle in the United States’ Civil War. That battle, at Gettysburg, was fought from July 1st to 3rd, 1863, and aspects of its legacy are still causing conflict in the United States today.

The battle took place midway through the Civil War – and marked the turning point in that conflict. Up to Gettysburg, the North was losing, unable to end the rebellion of what was called the Confederacy in the southern states. After the battle, the tide turned, albeit slowly, and the North eventually ground the Confederacy down into total defeat in 1865.

The Civil War in the United States was about slavery. The North wanted to end it. The South wanted to keep it. More smoke than you would find on a battlefield is blown around to mask that, but slavery was the issue. When Abraham Lincoln, who was anti-slavery though he had said he would not try to abolish it, was elected President the southern states decided to leave the Union. They argued they had the right to secede: the remaining states – the Union side – called it rebellion. That led to war.

What led to Gettysburg was strategy. Even though the war had gone well for the South from 1861 to the beginning of 1863, the leading Confederate General, Robert E Lee, knew that this was not victory. He knew that the North was more powerful and wealthy than the South and that they would ultimately grind his forces down. So he proposed a bold strategic approach: rather than just defend the South, he advocated invading the North and in so doing force them into making peace. And this was why the Battle of Gettysburg took place in Pennsylvania, a Northern State.

It was a three-day battle, started on the first day – July 1st – when the Confederates literally stumbled into the Union army sent to block their advance. Lee didn’t know what he was facing when the forces made contact because his cavalry, who were the eyes and ears of an army in those days, had gone off on some swagger-filled raiding mission.

And so, quite by accident, the greatest battle of the Civil War took place in the sleepy little hamlet of Gettysburg. On day one, the Confederates failed to take advantage of their early arrival to take the best and highest ground on the field.

By the second day, the full armies were facing one another, but the Union forces held the best positions, and they waited on the defensive. To win a battle when you don’t hold the best position, the classic technique is to try and get around the side of your opponent, and if you do, you can attack them from the rear and ‘sweep’ them off the field. So on that day the Confederates attacked key hills along the left flank of the Union army. One of those hills was known as Little Round Top and it was defended by the 20th Maine Regiment, commanded by Colonel Joshua Chamberlain. The engagement that happened on that hill is one of the most famous of the war. Chamberlain ordered his men to make a downhill bayonet charge. This caused the Confederates to surrender, not realising that Chamberlain had ordered his men to charge with the bayonet because they had no bullets left.

On the third day, July 3rd, the Confederates decided on a new tactic, attacking what General Lee thought was the weakly defended Union position in the centre of the battlefield. He was wrong. Named after the Confederate General who led it, ‘Pickett’s Charge’ – across an open field – was completely repulsed by a strong Union force. And that was that.

On July 4th – the significance of the date lost on no one – the Confederates retreated, heading back South, and that was the end of their strategy of trying to force peace on the North.

While this was a success for the Union army, Lincoln was enraged that his commanding General George Meade did not pursue and destroy the retreating Confederate forces. It convinced Lincoln to replace Meade, which he eventually did by putting General Ulysses S. Grant over him. Grant would not be afraid to advance, and he would do so again and again – despite enormous casualties – until the Confederacy was totally defeated in 1865.

After the war, there was an attempt to ‘heal the wounds’ it had caused. Lincoln was the first to make that move, stating in his second inauguration speech that his post-war policy would be designed "with malice toward none, with charity for all’"

It didn’t work out like that. The Confederacy was defeated and slavery abolished, but civil rights for the freed slaves were thwarted by the southern states for a hundred years and more. The South lost the war on the battlefield, but once the fighting was done it managed to win many political and cultural battles.

One of those was the promotion of the idea that the Confederate military commanders were noble, chivalrous and brilliant generals. Robert E Lee became the centrepiece for this, but many other Generals were talked up into this mystique.

Lee did not support secession, and he made the not unfair point, on resigning from the United States Army, that he did not wish to raise his sword against his home state, Virginia. But nonetheless, he fought for secession as well as for slavery, and in the process broke the oath he had made as a young officer to defend the United States.

You would think this is all history. But the battles and controversies around the United States Civil War are still at the heart of the divisions in this period of the American Republic. The latest example flared up a few weeks ago.

Despite rebelling against the United States, many of the Confederate Generals had United States’ military bases named after them: Fort Lee; Fort Bragg; and many others. Naming bases after Confederate Generals has offended many in the United States, who have seen it as celebrating an ethos which wanted to maintain slavery and white domination. That view is in turn unpopular with many others.

In 2021, Congress passed a law forbidding the naming of bases after anyone who served on the Confederate side. A few weeks ago, President Trump announced that the military would rename bases whose names had been changed as a consequence of that law – restoring the old ones. He got around the flank of that law by naming them after American soldiers who had the same surname as the Confederate Generals. Therefore Fort Lee is now – legally speaking – called after Private Fitz Lee.

It seems the Battle of Gettysburg is not fully over, after all.